Yegi often shakes me awake. “Jason. Are you okay? You were screaming again.”
I think she’s worried that a part of me is broken forever, but that’s not something I’m willing to concede.
“I just got out of prison,” I remind both of us. “We’re going to get through this,” I promise, remembering that I’ve kept all the promises I’ve made to my wife so far, unsure of how I plan to keep this one.
IT WAS TWO P.M. IN WASHINGTON, DC, ON THE AFTERNOON OF THE 2016 WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENTS’ Dinner. We had been back in America for about three months. In a few hours I would be at “Nerd Prom,” sharing a podium with President Obama. A year ago he’d used the same stage to talk about press freedom and spoke of his commitment to getting me out of Iran. Now I was free.
In our hotel room on Fifteenth and L, Yegi was in full hair and makeup mode. My wife wakes up gorgeous, but when she gets going with the products she becomes otherworldly.
“Jason, we need lunch,” she told me in a tone that I knew meant I was to fetch us lunch.
“What do you feel like?” I asked her.
She was so confident of her order that I hadn’t even finished asking.
“Five Guys,” she replied with the smile of a little girl who knows she’s doing something wrong and is trying to preempt discipline with cuteness. I can never say no to that smile. And on this particular occasion, why would I have? I wanted a Five Guys, too.
I exited the hotel onto Fifteenth Street, where there was a cacophony of sound. I’d unwittingly booked us at a place on the same block as the Washington Post’s former newsroom—as it was being demolished.
Walking past it slowly, taking in the scene of crumbling cement and the clanging of proud and resilient steel girders that refused to fall, a voice called from behind me.
“Hey, brother.”
I decided to stop, although I told myself I should keep walking.
I turned around and a tall black man about my age was standing before me, not disheveled but not doing very well either.
“I need a little help,” he started his pitch. “I don’t use, and I work. I ain’t looking for handouts, just some help.”
At this point one of two things usually happens: you either walk away or dig a hand into your pocket.
With only a moment’s contemplation I chose a third path, and almost immediately felt like an asshole.
“I can’t help right now,” I told him, “I just got out of prison.”
“Oh yeah?” He leaned back to size me up. “You, too? How long they did you for?”
“Well, about a year and a half,” I responded.
“Did me for eight years. Just got out Thursday,” he responded knowingly.
All of a sudden I didn’t feel so cool.
“What they got you on?”
“Well, that’s sort of complicated.”
“Oh yeah, why’s that?”
“I was in a foreign prison.”
“Oh, so you was in the service?” He was genuinely interested.
“No, I worked for them,” I said, pointing over to the carcass of the old Post building.
At that point he took a long deep look at me and pondered.
“Hold up. You that guy. You that guy from the news. You Free Jason.” He put an arm around me and shook my hand. “Yo, Malik, Dawood! Get over here. It’s Free Jason.” His two friends made their way over.
“Salaam alaikum,” I greeted them, assuming from their names they must be brothers from the Nation of Islam.
“Wa alaikum assalaam,” one of them responded. “How you doing? Man, we were praying for you.” I’m not sure if he was Malik or Dawood.
“That means a lot to me.” And it did, too.
“Man, what you been through, that’s rough. We were following your story from inside. Everyone was with you.” I found that a little hard to believe, but by this point very little surprised me anymore.
“Listen, guys, it’s been a real pleasure, but I need to get going.”
“No problem, Jason. Hey if you need anything, man, we got you. God bless, brother.”
Only in America, I thought, and kept walking to get those burgers.
Epilogue
Fortunately our lives began to normalize. Somewhat. By the summer of 2016 I could sleep through most nights without any pills and the instances of my name being in the news started to decrease.
Yegi was still virtually stateless but had been issued what is called a travel document, essentially a passport for refugees and others who don’t enjoy diplomatic coverage by their native government.
Once we had that in hand we made plans to meet her parents for a much-needed reunion after our ordeal.
After ten days together we reluctantly parted, they back to Tehran, and Yegi and I to Washington, DC.
It was August 3. When I turned on my phone after landing at Dulles I had several texts and emails asking me for comment or to appear on that evening’s news.
As we deplaned I checked the headlines and there it was: Obama paid 1.7 billion dollars to Iran to release U.S. hostages. That day the Wall Street Journal had run a front-page story that the money that had been given to Iran on the day of my release had been cash. This I knew, as did several other national security reporters who had been working the Iran story. As Ben Rhodes told me the month before, when I interviewed him for this book, “It’s Iran. You can’t write a check or something.”
Everyone knew about the money—Obama had even announced it as part of the details of the nuclear deal’s implementation. But that it was actual cash—paper bills—apparently made it newsworthy again. Although the Obama team wasn’t completely up front about the cash, they weren’t actively trying to hide it, either.
The story took on a life of its own. It was a textbook spin job, weaving something out of virtually nothing. One of the many nonissues that became an essential part of the issueless presidential race of 2016.
The same sorts of idiots who had blamed my arrest on Anthony Bourdain now wanted to know how it felt to know my value. I became the “One-Point-Seven-Billion-Dollar Man.”
The money wasn’t a ransom, but it did offer insight into the Obama administration’s approach to solving problems.
The story of that money is pretty clear: a court in The Hague was going to rule in favor of Iran in a long-standing legal dispute between Tehran and Washington over Iranian money paid to the U.S. for an arms deal that was never completed. Once the revolution ended the U.S. held the money.
The administration understood realities that their Iranian counterparts had either missed or not properly accounted for, most importantly that Iran wouldn’t receive much financial benefit from the lifting of sanctions in the immediate future.
They also knew that the U.S. was going to have to pay a vastly larger amount to settle our debt to Iran when the court ruled against the U.S., which it was set to do.
On the issue of American and Iranian prisoners being freed, we were technically a separate issue: people for people. Me, along with the other Americans released with me, were exchanged for several Iranians imprisoned in the U.S. on sanctions violations charges. It turned out that all of them were also U.S. citizens and none of them wanted to return to Iran.
The Iranians had egg on their faces. The propaganda opportunity that the prisoner swap promised to be fell apart. That was Iran’s fault, probably, but frankly their American negotiating counterparts did not want to see them fail.
Obama saw it as the start of a new day with Iran. An opportunity to build a relationship—not an alliance—toward a working peace in a part of the world that hasn’t known it in generations.
But that was irrelevant to opponents of the deal in Congress and the alt-right media. It was as though I were living in the mirror image of what I had just escaped.
The Iran deal, for better or worse, will go down as Obama’s signature foreign policy maneuver. Deft diplomacy or capitulation? Letting a rogue regime run wild or a calculated move that will defuse
the threat of an old ideological enemy? History will decide, but either way I’m stuck in the middle of this thing, the person most identifiably attached to the story of Obama’s most important foreign policy legacy.
Now that the nuclear deal and Washington’s period of actual engagement with Iran is a relic of the past, it’s easier to judge. As far as I’m concerned, the whole thing was a wash: it got me arrested and it got me released.
I HAVE ALWAYS BELIEVED IN THE PRINCIPLES THAT WERE AT THE HEART OF OBAMA’S OPENINGS with Cuba and Iran—the notion that talking with other nations, even if they’re our adversaries is always preferable. The Obama Doctrine. That’s a large part of why I’m so torn on how my detention was handled. Pragmatism trumped the vitriolic chest pounding that passes as patriotism.
I got out, but maybe I would have been freed sooner if the administration accepted the challenges posed by Republican hawks that freeing Americans should be a prerequisite for any negotiations. They didn’t, and I spent eighteen months in the joint, the plaything of some of the nastiest authoritarian ideologues to roam the earth in many decades.
But a more obstinate approach might have just as easily backfired and I could have remained stuck in Iran until now, just as the other Americans who remain there to this day.
Obama officials admitted as much when I met with them on my first visit back to Washington, which coincided with my fortieth birthday and the Iranian New Year. The latter is an occasion that had become an opportunity for Obama to extend a virtual olive branch to the people of Iran.
Two things became very clear when I met Obama. The first and most important right then was that we were a small group of people just having a personal moment.
Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, and National Security Advisor Susan Rice were all in the room, and all of them, as well as Yegi and I, got a little emotional. They expressed a sense of personal responsibility that frankly I didn’t expect.
Obama made it clear why: the effort exerted by my brother and the Washington Post set the tone for everything that was done on my behalf.
“Your brother made sure we never forgot you,” the president told me. “He kept the pressure on us, so don’t give him a hard time. At least not for a few months.”
John Kerry told me I had a lot to be thankful for, including my beautiful wife, a chorus I hear repeated everywhere I go in this world.
Two days later, now in my forties, Obama’s foreign policy adviser Ben Rhodes apologized for my release taking so long (which was awkward but fulfilling), acknowledging that I was a victim of the nuclear negotiations.
But everyone knew that already. More important was the confirmation of something I had suspected for a long time. “Burma was a dress rehearsal for Cuba, and Cuba was a dress rehearsal for Iran,” Rhodes told me, “although everyone understands that Iran will be much more difficult.”
If only they had been able to get the nuclear deal with Iran done a couple of years sooner we might be looking at a very different world today.
“YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE FILED THAT LAWSUIT. EVERYONE KNOWS YOU WERE INNOCENT. WHY NOT just let it go?”
It was October 2016 and Yegi and I had begun journalism fellowships at Harvard. Just outside of Cambridge in Watertown, Massachusetts, we discovered a solid Iranian takeaway place, and the owner made this very simple observation after recognizing my name from my credit card.
It was the clearest and most concise argument I’d heard against the decision I made to take the government of Iran to court for their imprisoning me.
All the other points that could be made supporting or opposing my decision seem like fluff.
Some say my suing Iran raises the odds that other dual nationals will be taken hostage there. That’s unlikely, because Iran is already picking up many people from a range of nationalities, at least a dozen of them since my release alone. Eighty-year-old Baquer Namazi, a former UNESCO executive who was arrested when he returned to Iran to fight for his son Siamak, who was detained when I was already in Evin. Or Xiyue Wang, a scholar at Princeton University who studied Iranian history and was arrested on espionage charges for scanning documents at the national archives that were over a hundred years old. Or most frustratingly of all, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a dual UK-Iranian national who was arrested while visiting her parents in Iran with her two-year-old daughter, Gabriella. It’s now been nearly three years since she, her little girl, and her husband, Richard, were forced apart.
Each new farcical arrest is a reminder that taking hostages, fifty-two of them in fact, was the signature move of this regime when it first started forty years ago.
Friends and relatives in Iran worry about possible retribution against themselves, but I remind myself, When I was in prison, where the hell were they? Then I remember, They were at home living their lives.
The same thought runs through my mind every time an Iranian, or anyone of any background for that matter, who has never had a day of their lives violently stolen from them tells me that suing the Islamic Republic will somehow have a negative impact on how that country is viewed in the world. After a decade of trying to cover Iran in the most neutral tones, often giving it the benefit of the doubt, I know that nothing is better at sullying its reputation than the Iranian system itself.
Then there are those who say that by pursuing this lawsuit I am attempting, unfairly, to gain Iranian assets or force American taxpayers to pay for my hardship. They say that anyone who goes to Iran should know what they’re getting into and therefore is responsible for what happens to them there.
And I can imagine my interrogators saying, “What about the time I brought him some peanuts? We weren’t that bad.” From the depths of my soul I can say, “I agree. Kinda.” They weren’t that bad.
Of course, they were horrible, but they could have been worse. They were human and that came through sometimes.
But for the less litigiously seasoned among us, when filing a legal complaint it’s not the plaintiff’s job to make the other guy look good.
A strange trait of our species is that we often say the same things. There are two concepts that get repeated so often when I get recognized that I think someone is fucking with me.
Absolutely nothing gets under my skin more. Usually it’s a middle-aged guy, often slightly older than me. He’ll bow his head low, sometimes put an arm around my shoulder, and say in hushed tones, “Did they beat you? Rough you up pretty bad?”
Sometimes I dodge and deflect. Other days I will explain that, no, fortunately I was spared from the actual physical violence.
And the follow-up is invariably, “Good, so they didn’t mistreat you.”
I hear the echoes of my captors in their dumb voices. Isn’t it usually better just to keep your mouth shut?
“No,” I tell them. “Besides my wife and I being abducted from our home at gunpoint, blindfolded, taken to prison and thrown in solitary confinement, interrogated relentlessly for several months, and denied due process; besides my being subjected to a secret closed-door trial while vicious lies were being spread about me by corrupt officials and through the local media, separated from my wife for a year and a half, forced to live in rooms where the light was always on, deprived access to information and the right to defend myself, and having the livelihood I took years to build stolen from me . . .” Then I pause. “Besides all that it was great.”
It’s in those moments that I’m certain I’m doing the right thing.
I’ve tried to let so much of what happened during those 544 days fade out of my day-to-day thoughts, but sometimes I think about those last hours in Evin when Borzou and Kazem were waiting to take me to the airport—while their comrades plotted keeping Yegi in Iran—our conversation turned to the 2016 election.
“While we still have you, explain to us about this Electoral College,” Borzou said.
“Seriously?”
“Yes, it makes no sense to us.”
“It doesn’t make much sense to us either,” I confided, then gave m
y best attempt at a high school civics explanation of our electoral process in Persian.
“But what if you want the popular vote to count and not this silly system? Each state can choose,” Borzou said, “isn’t that what is meant by states’ rights?”
Like so many of their countrymen, they didn’t know anything about American politics other than they were sure that they were much more democratic than their own.
It was a rare opportunity to use one of their favorite responses on them: “That’s not how our American system works.”
“But we want to know who you think will win. Clinton or Trump?” Borzou asked.
I didn’t want to answer. Was it some kind of trick? Did it even matter?
“J thinks Clinton will win,” Kazem announced. It wasn’t the first time he had misspoken for me.
The campaign was just picking up steam. Iran’s state television was covering Clinton and Trump as the obvious nominees.
“No, I don’t think either one of them will win,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Too many people don’t like her, and he’s an idiot,” I said, offering the most concise analysis I could provide.
“Who do you guys think will win?” I asked. I was genuinely curious.
“Our analysis is that Trump will become president,” Borzou announced.
I couldn’t help laughing. “You guys are even dumber than I thought,” by that point it had been many months since I held back any of my contempt for these two. “How did you come to that conclusion?”
“It’s very simple. Trump is the candidate that hates Muslims most,” Borzou explained.
It was my first tiny preview of the future into which I was stepping.
Acknowledgments
A story like this, told from the author’s point of view, may seem to the reader like a solitary endeavor. That’s not the case. This book would have been impossible for me to write—for so many reasons—without the input of the following people and many others.
My employers and colleagues at the Washington Post have been as generous to me in contributing their insights for this book as they were loyal and fierce in their struggle to win my freedom.
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