“Yeah, just like you’ve been helping me since the beginning? Fuck you,” I told him. Cold, exhausted, and hungry, I was running on fumes, but with the knowledge that the Swiss ambassador, my protecting power, wasn’t giving the go-ahead for takeoff without my mom and wife, my confidence swelled. “I’m not leaving.”
“Let me try to fix it. But this is a big problem,” Kazem said.
My interrogator, my only consistent companion on this terrible ride, left the room. It was now well into the night. I paced the length of the cavernous room until I was light-headed with grogginess. I was nervous. I’d been up for forty hours at that point.
I didn’t know it, but my mom and Yegi were still in the building. They’d had their cell phones taken from them and been locked in a room nearby after we said our goodbyes.
In Vienna, where the nuclear deal was being implemented around that time, something was off. Iran had agreed to shut down key parts of its nuclear program in exchange for much-needed relief from crushing economic sanctions. That’s what the two sides had been negotiating over since well before my arrest.
But the parallel talks over prisoners being held in both countries—a deal that was just as challenging to achieve—wasn’t going so smoothly.
The U.S. had agreed to release several Iranians in American jails, most of whom had been arrested on sanctions-related charges. After much deliberation with a Justice Department that didn’t believe foreign nationals tried and convicted of breaking actual American laws should be swapped for innocent U.S. nationals being held abroad, they’d relented.
One of those Iranians, though, didn’t want to leave prison. He believed he was being held unjustly to begin with and wanted to wait out his sentence to prove a point rather than be pardoned.
Iranian officials couldn’t believe it. “Your law can’t even force someone out of prison?” they wondered. “What good is power if you can’t exercise it?”
Complicating matters even further was the fact that all of them were American citizens, too. Dual nationals, just like me and the others being released in Iran. This wasn’t a “prisoner swap,” it was a release of a bunch of hyphenated Americans, none of whom wanted to return to Iran.
“Just give us one,” Iran’s envoys pleaded. They needed something to show for this portion of the deal. Releasing me had to have a price associated with it. Absent any returning Iranians, they didn’t have that.
The hardline propaganda machine got to work getting ready to spin the story however it could. Another aspect of the historic turning of events was an outstanding American bill. In 1979 the U.S. had seized $400 million that was part of a contract with the deposed shah. Iran had always maintained it was their money and took the U.S. to international court over it. In January 2016 a judgment that would award Iran billions in interest and fines was imminent, so the Obama administration decided to settle the debt to the tune of $1.7 billion.
Knowing full well that the Iranians wouldn’t receive any discernible boost from sanctions relief any time soon and wanting to help their negotiating partners in their efforts to bolster their standing at home, the Obama administration had agreed to pay that money on January 16.
Understanding the potentially ugly optics, Obama made the decision: he wanted it to be the beginning of a new era of interaction.
But something wasn’t right.
John Kerry’s chief of staff, Jon Finer, ran down the tarmac in Vienna to catch a departing Zarif.
“We’ve got a problem,” he told Iran’s foreign minister. “Jason’s wife is missing.”
As ready as Zarif was to put the headache of my imprisonment behind him, the IRGC had another plan: keep my wife as future leverage.
“Figure it out, Javad,” Kerry told Zarif in a harried phone call. “Don’t let implementation day get screwed up.”
Planes sat on runways: empty ones waiting for prisoners to board in the U.S. and Tehran, and one filled with $1.7 billion in cash in Geneva to settle the old debt. The message was clear: if Yegi doesn’t get on the plane we don’t move forward with any of it.
No Yegi, no money.
THE HOURS DRAGGED ON.
I sat and tried to doze, but that didn’t work. At one point Kazem came back. He was holding a tablet device.
“J, if you don’t leave now we have to take you back to Evin. It is already after one in the morning. We only have permission to keep prisoners away until midnight. You know how difficult it is to get out of there. If we take you back it might be ten years before you leave.” I could see he was as tired as I was. By then he was just going through the motions.
He turned on the tablet and opened a browser. It was Fars News’s English site. The main headline was that four Americans had been freed. “Look, J, you’re free. Don’t disappoint everyone.”
“Those guys report fake news all the time.” That was true.
“Okay, wait,” he said.
He pulled up a similar headline on the New York Times website and let me read the opening paragraphs. It was my first interaction with the Internet in a year and a half. I felt clumsy holding the tablet, but I was transfixed as I read the supposed details of our release. All I knew, though, was that I was still in custody.
“I’ll believe it when I see it in the Washington Post,” I told him, feigning disinterest.
He tried to pull it up, but of course the Post had been blocked in Iran since the paper started its campaign for my freedom.
I handed it back to him, unimpressed.
“You must leave now, J.”
“Nah.” I had been around the block enough to know that once it makes the home page of the Times—and probably the Post, too—it’s news. “I’m good.”
He left again and I waited. The room was quiet; a few of my guards napped. Others sipped tea from plastic cups and gazed out at the empty runway.
When Kazem came back it was past four in the morning. Walking up to me, he looked dejected and tired.
“Jason, you won,” he said.
“What do you mean I won?”
“You won. Your wife is going to leave with you,” he conceded. “But neither one of you can ever come back to Iran again.”
I smiled inside. There was nothing else to say. But he kept talking.
“It’s like a chess game. I like to play chess. I’m very competitive, I like to win. But when I lose, I accept it.”
He had a piece of paper with him and he told me I had to sign it. For 543 days I had been in the custody of the intelligence wing of the IRGC and they were being forced, in the final hours, to turn me over to the Ministry of Intelligence.
“Jason, you must write that if anything happens to you that we are not responsible once we give you to them,” he said solemnly, as if I should be scared.
“Where do I sign?”
Their operation, whatever it was, was over. They knew it. There’d be a new project soon enough, but this was the one they’d be telling their grandkids about one day.
“Where is the Koran I bought for you?” Kazem asked.
“I left it for the next guy,” I told him. He was hurt and he deserved it.
THEY TOOK ME THROUGH A SIDE DOOR TO A CEREMONIAL ENTRYWAY. KAZEM, SIAMAK, AND A FEW others were there. I looked at all of them one last time. I stared at Kazem for a long time, until we both smiled. Then I did a crazy thing. I hugged him. Yes, it’s even possible to develop an attachment to your tormentors, and no, asshole, that’s not Stockholm syndrome. It’s called being human.
I felt the layers of anger and resentment fading just a little. As my ordeal took on a life of its own, born out of the narrative of convoluted half-truths and conjured fairy tales that became the story of my imprisonment, I had to remind myself so many times of a very important fact: no matter how much this whole thing was directed at me, it really wasn’t personal.
I knew that the door was closing on my ever physically being in Iran again. At least as long as these guys ran the place. My wife and I had conducted our lives professiona
lly and socially in a way that was completely transparent. We thought that we could keep the door open. That we could come and go. I’d always wanted to show people that it was possible to live between these two countries. But it’s not.
I was loaded into a van, similar to the one that had driven us from our home to prison, but there was no blindfold this time. The driver and the guy who rode shotgun—my new guard, apparently—sat quietly. No one spoke as we drove for just a couple minutes to another part of the airport. They pulled up next to a door and instructed me to go in. It was a sitting room with a half-dozen chairs and two men seated in them: Amir Hekmati and Saeed Abedini. The whole thing began to feel real.
Around dawn, Yegi and my mom were released from their mini detention.
“Thank God Jason has left Iran,” the guards lied to them. “Your family’s ordeal is over.”
They were told to go home and get some rest.
Their cell phones were returned to them and they noticed that they had missed a lot of calls. Dozens of them, in fact, from Ali.
They called him back.
“Where the hell are you two?” he asked.
“We’re going home. Jason is free,” they reported.
“No he’s not. Not yet. Go home and pack your bags and wait for instructions from someone who will mention your favorite dessert. You’re leaving just like I always said you would.” And he hung up.
They were confused, but not any more than we had been by the last year and a half.
A few minutes later the phone rang.
“Mango sticky rice,” the voice said. It was Brett McGurk. Two years earlier Ali had joined Yegi and me on vacation in Thailand, where she discovered that tropical treat, ordering it at every opportunity. She smiled now, knowing things were looking up.
“Wait for a call from the Swiss ambassador,” McGurk told her. “He’ll get you to your flight.”
My mom and Yegi both hurried home and gathered their belongings. My mom had been living in a hotel for months and went to check out. Yegi went home and collected several bags that she’d packed as soon as she was released fifteen months earlier. She said goodbye to her parents, unsure if she’d ever see them again.
By noon we were all reunited at the airport. It was time to go.
16
Freedom Honeymoon
For a year and a half I was separated from the world and made to believe I might never be free again. My life had been turned upside down in every conceivable way, but as I boarded a jet with the internationally accepted symbol of neutrality, the Swiss flag, proudly painted on its exterior, I knew things were starting to look up.
The lone flight attendant, a plump-cheeked woman in her thirties with blond hair, began crying when she saw me. She was Swiss Miss in the flesh and she knew exactly who I was.
“May I hug you?” she asked.
First the Swiss ambassador and now my flight attendant. Turns out that everyone wants to hug an unfairly imprisoned journalist.
At that moment I probably should have realized this story wasn’t over yet.
Almost immediately there were signs that my role would still be a starring one, but now, and for this new audience, my character was not actually the villain but the good guy.
As we sat on the plane waiting to take off, there was final jockeying going on somewhere over things we couldn’t see but would learn about later, keeping us on the runway for an extra nerve-wracking three hours. We weren’t worried anymore, though. If the Islamic Republic wasn’t going to let us leave we wouldn’t have been allowed on the plane in the first place.
My fellow passengers—my wife, my mom, the U.S. marine Amir Hekmati, and the evangelical pastor Saeed Abedini—and I began to feel the contours of our new lives.
My mom turned on her iPad and connected to the plane’s Wi-Fi. She read dozens of emails with messages of congratulations, joy, and love as they poured into her inbox.
From Tehran’s Mehrabad airport in the southern and low-lying part of the city, there is a unique vista of the skyline uninterrupted by buildings in the immediate vicinity. The capital looks so ugly, engulfed in smog. I thought about how much I had loved living there and how I missed feeling its pulse while I was imprisoned within the city limits. I knew I wouldn’t be returning for a very long time. I felt real relief, but also deep loss.
An official from Iran’s Foreign Ministry boarded the plane with a video camera, presumably to provide proof that we were actually all on board. Before stepping off the plane he said in a loud but polite voice, “To the three gentlemen who have been our guests, don’t be tired.” It’s an Iranian colloquialism that is said to someone who either is about to undertake a service or has just completed a task. You would say it to a shopkeeper when entering or to a taxi driver as you got out of their car. It was completely inappropriate in that moment. We all ignored him and he left. With that we were free.
MY MOM KEPT SHARING NEWS REPORTS ABOUT OUR STATUS ON THE WASHINGTON POST’S WEBSITE and read aloud the emails she was receiving from well-wishers around the world.
There were also clothes for us on board: new white T-shirts, pairs of boxer-briefs, jeans, sweaters, and wool beanies. Three of each, and miraculously it all fit.
It’s about a six-hour flight from Tehran to Geneva, but the time evaporated, and by the end of it, having been nourished with veal, chocolate, organic beer, and champagne, I started to feel whole, or at least not hollow, for the first time in many months.
When we were on the runway in Geneva, still on board the Swiss jet, Ambassador Brett McGurk, Obama’s special envoy on the Islamic State, entered the plane. “Jason, I’m Brett McGurk. We met once a couple of years ago.”
“I remember,” I told him matter-of-factly. “You were a character in my interrogations.” He was one of dozens of U.S. officials—some I’d met, some I’d interviewed, and many I’d never even heard of—whom I was questioned about for months.
He put his head down, unsure what to say.
“Someday I’ll tell you about these last twenty-four hours,” he said, struggling to remain professional while holding back his elation at finally seeing the three of us free.
Within days I would begin to learn about the secret negotiations he’d held for many months with Iranian intelligence officers, mostly in Geneva hotel rooms, over our fate. Those talks included the highest direct negotiations between American and IRGC forces in history.
As I stepped off the jet and took my first breaths of free air, crossing the tarmac to get onto a U.S. government plane, I was introduced to several State Department officials.
I was now in U.S. custody. My captors had warned me that if I were ever freed, I would go through a rigorous debriefing and brainwashing by America. I would perhaps even be sent to Guantánamo, they told me.
Looking at these good people, I realized that, while I know my homeland and its security apparatus can be brutal on those who pose a threat—real, perceived, or fabricated—I was now officially out of harm’s way.
On that second plane the opulence of the Swiss ministerial perks—the chocolates and champagne—was replaced by a stripped-down American efficiency that I hadn’t even realized I’d missed in my years of living abroad. I sat in the back row, single seat on either side, of a ten-row plane. Up front were Amir and Saeed.
They were being interviewed by federal agents about Bob Levinson, an FBI man who had gone missing in Iran in 2007. “Tell them I have no idea about the whereabouts or conditions of anyone else in Iran. I was in isolation the whole time,” I announced, but no one was paying attention to me. Everyone was too happy about our freedom to worry about what I had to say.
We were offered food. In accordance with Iranian social protocol, I said that I wasn’t hungry just then. I had just gone through an incredible year-and-a-half-long ordeal that culminated in a couple of historically tense days, and I’d been deprived of so much for so long. I could have eaten anything they put in front of me, but declining an initial invitation had become
habitual.
And in typical American fashion there was no second offer. Welcome home, I thought.
When we landed in Germany I was quickly and unceremoniously separated from my mom and Yegi, and directed aboard a long yellow school bus, where several soldiers in camouflage sat quietly. It felt as though Amir, Saeed, and I were going on a field trip.
A handsome black man, bald and with a goatee, sat down with each of us and gave his pitch. He was the lead SERE (survival, evasion, rescue, escape) psychologist, we were told. We were on our way to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center. We’d be getting the best post-captivity care in the world. Medical and psychological.
And of course, it was all “completely optional.”
It was a snowy Sunday evening in January, so it was hard to know what time it actually was. I’d been awake since dawn the day before and had only slept a few hours per night for the previous ten days. I was running on the pure adrenaline of hope fulfilled.
As the bus approached a compound I could see a large gate, like a toll plaza. It was lit up, but in an exaggerated way. I began to recognize all the accessories of live television reporting: the trucks with their satellites and the lights that can turn the gloomiest winter night into a giant outdoor tanning booth.
At that moment it didn’t occur to me that it was all for us. Americans get released from foreign prisons as pieces in historic and high-profile geopolitical deals and sent to military hospitals all the time, right?
We passed through the gates, entered the sprawling grounds of the facility, and pulled up to a standard hospital entrance. As we stepped down from the bus there were three wheelchairs waiting. It took a second to register that they were for us, too.
“We got some bad intel,” Dr. Carl, the psychologist, admitted a little sheepishly.
Amir, Saeed, and I paused for a moment to consider the chairs, and then walked ourselves into the hospital. We had all just spent significant time in prison, and although we each looked much thinner and older than we did in the pictures that were used in news reports throughout our imprisonments, we all felt pretty good.
Prisoner Page 25
