Staff members took us up to the third floor of the hospital, to a section where some kind of security clearance was required to enter. In every other way, though, it looked like a section of a typical American hospital. The only difference was that we were the only patients there. Each of us was given our own room, far down the hall from one another.
Soon a doctor came and gave me the most cursory checkup. “We have reason to believe that at least one of you may have been exposed to tuberculosis while in captivity, so we’re going to go ahead and give you a routine TB test. Once we do that, though, we’re gonna have to keep you here until the results come back.”
“Whatever,” I told him, just thankful to be dealing with someone who spoke English the way I do.
A nurse came and swabbed an oversized Q-tip under my arm.
“How long is it going to take to get the results?” I asked.
“Probably three to five days,” the doctor responded.
That sounded like total bullshit to me, but I wasn’t ready to rock any boats yet.
After a high-stress, high-sweat forty-eight hours, I took a shower. A nurse had given me a kit of American grooming products: Head and Shoulders shampoo, Right Guard deodorant, a Mach3 razor, and some Barbasol women’s shaving cream, because they were out of the men’s.
The water didn’t get that hot, but it had good pressure.
I took my time cleaning up. I could do whatever I wanted now, but I realized I was still in a sort of captivity. I could do whatever I wanted in that room.
I wanted some food. I poked my head into the hallway and asked a nurse what was possible that late on a Sunday night. She brought a menu. Hospital food. I ordered a grilled cheese—probably served with a tiny tub of pudding or applesauce, I guessed—and chicken noodle soup.
I lay down on the adjustable bed. It wasn’t very comfortable and I was wound up. “Would it be possible to get something to help me sleep tonight?” I asked the nurse.
“I’ll ask the doctor when his shift starts,” she responded dutifully. Chain of command.
Next to the bed was a bulky TV coming out of the wall on a moveable metal arm. I adjusted it to face the bed and turned it on. There was static, but it was watchable, and best of all, after over a year of only Iranian state television, everything on the screen was in American English.
It was Fox News and the reporter looked very cold. I turned up the volume. She was live on location in Germany, where some Americans had just arrived and were receiving much-needed medical care. And then the pictures of my fellow ex-cons and me appeared on the screen.
“Little is known about their conditions, but they are free after their long ordeals, getting the medical attention they so desperately need.”
I had to laugh a little. I wasn’t completely free yet and I wasn’t actually getting much medical attention. But I was riveted, and I kept watching. How could I stop?
The nurse finally did get me a sleeping pill, and when it kicked in I was out.
EVENTUALLY, I WAS ALLOWED TO SEE MARTY AND DOUG, MY BOSSES FROM THE POST. WE SAT IN a small meeting room in some other wing of the hospital. It was so soothing to know that I was being supported by my employers and that they didn’t want anything from me.
Later I was able to see my brother, Ali. It was my first contact with him since a phone call the day before I was arrested. He had done so much to get me out, some of which, I’m certain, he’ll never share.
But thankfully, true to all I know about him, he didn’t feel the need to cry or hug me. I threw an arm around him anyway.
“Hey, Jason,” he said when he saw me, and it was right then that I realized that not everything in the world had changed.
By day three Yegi and I were sleeping in the same bed for the first time in a year and a half.
That felt like a victory.
ALL THE WHILE THE REPORTERS WAITED OUTSIDE THE BASE’S GATES NO MORE THAN A COUPLE OF hundred yards away from me. I started to feel bad for them in that cold, but really they seemed so far away.
Soon the talk turned to how to deal with them. “Just tell them I’m not coming outside for now,” I told Ali, thinking that would magically get them to go home.
“Jason, they’re not going to leave until you leave,” was the unwanted response I kept getting.
On our second day there Amir, the marine, had gone out to address the reporters with his relatives and congressman. When I saw the footage of that I knew I was nowhere close to ready to interact with the media. I recognized the look in his eyes and the struggle not just to find words, but to trust that they were the right ones. Maybe that’s just projection, but I put myself in his shoes and knew that I was not going to even consider going on TV for a while.
“Why don’t we just make a statement?” I asked at some point.
That was apparently what everyone on my team wanted to hear. That group consisted of my brother, Doug Jehl, and Bob Kimmitt, the lawyer the Washington Post had hired to represent my family and me in international courts as they fought to hold the Islamic Republic accountable for its illegal—by international standards and its own laws—detention of me.
“I’ll write something up and you guys can edit it?” I suggested.
It took me a couple of hours to actually sit down and write, but I did it and delivered it to my editor, just like old times. In it I thanked the world for its support, promised to tell my story, but asked for time to wrap my head around what had just happened to me. Us.
They liked it, but I felt like something was missing. I needed to personalize it a little.
“Let’s add that I’m looking forward to seeing the new Star Wars movie and watching some Golden State Warriors games.” Doug nodded that that was a good idea. An hour later it was online.
I should have said I wanted so much more, because I probably would have been given all of it.
Before the end of the day I had been invited to have a private screening of Star Wars and to watch a Warriors game, courtside. The lesson was clear: go to foreign prison, get out, and then get cool stuff.
How nice it would have been if great invitations and gifts were all I got . . .
AT THAT POINT, THOUGH, THE FREEDOM HONEYMOON WAS STILL IN ITS EARLIEST MOMENTS. THERE were no headaches or tough decisions. No one had expectations. Or maybe they did, but I just couldn’t see them yet. So much had been taken from me, and I was starting to get some of it back. And that felt good.
I wanted some jeans. None of my clothes Yegi had so lovingly packed for the day I’d finally be free came even close to fitting.
Dr. Carl and an employee of the hospital took me to shop at the local PX.
A PX, for civilians, is a place where military personnel abroad can go to be American. I imagine them in the most far-flung corners of the world, wherever American soldiers are based. Picture your local mall, with all the same shops, a food court with a Pizza Hut and a Popeyes, a multiplex, and plenty of parking, because it’s in the middle of nowhere.
We walked in and for the first time I felt the warmth of America: so many fellow citizens from so many different backgrounds spending their hard-earned paychecks on stuff they didn’t need and food that would kill them. I knew this place. It was what I’d moved away from seven years earlier. It was home.
“Let’s just get in and out,” I told Dr. Carl, invoking my longtime rule for going to the mall. I needed some Levi’s, maybe two pairs, and a belt. I let myself be guided to where I instinctively knew men’s jeans must live.
“JEFF BEZOS WOULD LIKE TO COME PICK YOU AND YOUR FAMILY UP WITH HIS JET IF THAT WOULD be all right with you,” Bob Kimmitt told me when I returned from my shopping expedition. After serving in the army, earning a Purple Heart and other military honors, Kimmitt had became U.S. ambassador to Germany, and later Deputy Secretary of the Treasury in George W. Bush’s cabinet. At that point I just knew him as my lawyer, Bob. I had been out of prison and back with my family for four days.
“We want that, right?” I asked my t
eam.
“Yeah, Jason,” my smart-ass brother replied. “It beats Lufthansa.”
The plan was that he would arrive, we’d all have a nice dinner together, and we’d fly out the next morning.
The only problem was that he wasn’t automatically cleared to enter the base—though it was assumed that that could be worked out—and Yegi couldn’t leave the base, because she had no passport.
Since we couldn’t go off base, Jeff Bezos graciously came to us. And we ate takeout schnitzel and drank beer at the base’s Fisher House, part of a network of facilities where the families of servicemen and women receiving medical care can stay free of charge.
From the moment he arrived on the base Jeff was completely engaged with us, immersing himself in the situation, even attending a session with the psychological team, where, for nearly an hour, we discussed many of the symptoms of post-captivity.
At dinner that night Yegi and I recounted some of the ordeals we’d endured over the past year and a half and we laughed. Jeff Bezos has an incredible, booming laugh.
We went to bed early that night. The next morning he came in a shuttle bus to take us to a landing strip half an hour away. Not even Jeff Bezos could land his plane in Landstuhl. I will always be humbled by all the effort he went through to get me home, and the amount of time he personally spent to make sure I actually got there.
Friends and colleagues had asked for my opinion when Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013. I didn’t know enough about him then to have one. Now here we were sitting across from each other on his jet, which was festooned with streamers and #freejason posters and stocked with guacamole and burritos—“Freedom Burritos,” we joked—made on board, because he had heard I liked them. They were delicious. You can have just about anything on a private jet with a little advance notice, I learned.
We were flying first from an airstrip in central Germany to Bangor, Maine, the frozen northeasternmost international airport in the continental United States. Looking down from thirty thousand feet I could feel the cold below, as we passed above icy rivers and snowcapped pine forests.
Bangor was chosen as an easy entry point that wouldn’t have much traffic that time of year. As it turned out we were the only passengers that late Friday morning. After landing we were met by a massive Homeland Security officer with red hair and a bushy beard to match. If he’d removed his uniform he could easily have passed for a Hells Angel.
“Welcome to Bangor, Jason. We’re very happy to see you here,” he said in the local accent, giving me a big bear hug of a welcome. “You screw with one of us, you screw with all of us.”
He led us toward the arrival hall to officially process our entry into America, but for me that happened when I knelt down and kissed the frozen runway. My brother had made me do it, and he took a picture.
Once we were inside, Bob and two of the officers took a nervous and passport-less Yegi to an immigration window. The rest of us—my mom, my brother, my boss, Jeff Bezos, and I—waited.
It didn’t take long. After less than three minutes Yegi returned with tears in her eyes.
“What’s wrong?” I asked her, worried that something was amiss.
“I’m so happy about how well my new country is already treating me, and so ashamed for how badly my own country did,” she said through sobs.
There was nothing more to say.
In an empty and frozen New England airport arrival hall hearts melted. Jeff Bezos and my family had a moment. We were all in this together. The big redheaded Homeland Security guy gulped and his eyes moistened.
We’d been on the ground for less than half an hour. It was my first time in Maine. I had now visited my forty-sixth U.S. state.
Although Yegi didn’t have any documents proving her identity, our new friends at Maine’s border control issued her a handwritten paper I-94 visa with her status listed as “humanitarian parole.” Usually that slip of paper without a photo would be affixed inside a passport. For the time being, though, that was her only acceptable form of ID.
GIVEN ALL THE PLANES I’VE BEEN ON, “TURBULENT” IS THE BEST WAY I CAN DESCRIBE MY TIME as a freed man; it’s been a mixed bag of ups and downs that often feels as unfamiliar to me as my time in prison did. The difference being that after such dark times I am filled with irrational hope about the future.
But that’s probably because I don’t watch cable news.
We met President Obama, twice; hung out with Bette Midler—a wonderful lady; and were fitted for expensive party clothes that we didn’t have to pay for. Which is all great, but interspersed with all those encounters with high-ranking government officials, celebrities, and billionaires have been countless hours of bureaucratic hoop jumping, dozens of flight segments, and so many of the other aspects of a life in America that none of us love.
In April 2016 Yegi and I celebrated an uncommon milestone: we had finally spent more days of our marriage together in freedom than we had separated by Evin’s high brick walls. That happened on the eve of our third wedding anniversary.
We have to remind ourselves that we are still relative newlyweds, trying to navigate a life in a new environment with very different circumstances than the ones we knew when we were detained on July 22, 2014.
We spent our anniversary as we did so many other days during the first months of our marriage: filling out forms. Although we had completed the entire immigration process for Yegi to become a U.S. permanent resident before we were arrested, we had to start from scratch when we arrived. All of those completed and approved applications had expired.
Anyone who has done any time as a journalist in an authoritarian Middle Eastern country like Iran or as a recent immigrant to the United States, or the spouse of one, will tell you that completing paperwork is one of the defining tasks of both pursuits.
I’m still staring at a stack of papers. Many of them I can just shred, but others require my attention. Some even call for immediate action. If I don’t respond what’s the worst they can do to me? I wonder.
I haven’t done my taxes for the last three years. Apparently they can’t be filed without the taxpayer’s actual signature. I’ve got several bills in collection that never got paid, because I was in prison. These are things, I’ve learned, that don’t just magically fix themselves.
And I’ve already been summoned for jury duty. Like most people, though, I got out of it.
My mornings start early. It’s a good time for thinking. Plotting, as everyone else sleeps. Most of those thoughts, unless they get typed, will fade into nothing. My mind—my memory and focus—is still mush.
Mornings feel good, probably because the solitude doesn’t feel forced anymore and there are naturally far fewer distractions. That feeling of focus that comes from having so few options is probably the only thing I miss about prison. It’s the one time of day when I don’t feel I’m a total mess. Everything begins to unravel with the rising sun.
Yegi and I misplace things. We get agitated about it. I’m pretty sure it’s temporary. She’s a perfectionist and gets angry at us. We’ve aged. Neither of us trusts anyone anymore. But we trust each other. We’ve been through too much together not to.
I become confused in crowded places. I don’t like talking on the phone. I get recognized when I least expect it, by people who I still can’t believe know who I am.
It’s never as comfortable as I make it look.
Soon after my return to California I went to the local DMV to renew my expired driver’s license.
As I waited in line, a woman in her fifties and wearing sunglasses inside sidled up beside me.
“Are you Jason?” she asked in a hushed tone.
“Yeah,” I replied, equally muted.
“I followed your case. You’ve been through a lot,” she told me.
“This is true,” I agreed, and nodded.
“Everyone, this is Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post reporter who was in prison in Iran and was just released,” she called out to the crowd, as if that
were necessary or appropriate.
Right there, at eight A.M. on a Tuesday, I got a standing ovation in a place where that sort of thing isn’t supposed to happen. I still had to wait in line just like everyone else, though.
“Jason, it is so good to see you,” strangers tell me as they ignore all our unwritten rules about appropriate personal space and hug me.
“Well, thanks,” I tell them. “It’s really good to be seen.” Everyone loves that. The truth is I’m really not sure what else to say.
The low-level anxiety that rang constantly in my head during my time in captivity has not gone away completely, but it’s dissipated, returning with headaches in places I’ve never had them before whenever I try to do too much. There is too much to do, although very little of it actually gets done.
After a year and a half during which nearly all of my experience of transportation consisted of literally walking in circles, I am now behind the wheel again. Thankfully I’m experiencing less car sickness than I did during my first few weeks out in the world. That said, I’ve already been in an accident. My oldest friends will tell you that was to be expected, prison or not.
Any fear of flying that I used to have has been replaced with wonder: I am actually free to go places again. It helped that for a brief time—way too short, in fact—when all Yegi had as ID was that I-94 visa and couldn’t board commercial flights, we continued to be ferried around the U.S. by private jet. Thanks again, Jeff Bezos.
With the help of our congressman’s office and the Department of Homeland Security we’ve solved that problem, and we now get to ride coach, invariably sitting in middle rows on opposite sides of commercial airplanes, just like every other American who books tickets last minute and doesn’t have any frequent-flier status.
Months after my release I still haven’t shaken all the paranoia. I get tired early and can’t stay asleep. When I was locked up I dreamed of being free. Now that I am out the only dreams that I have are nightmares that I’m back in prison.
Prisoner Page 26
