Prisoner

by Jason Rezaian

  “We decided it would be better if we heard what you wanted to talk to her about.”

  There was absolutely nothing I could respond to that.

  “I’m good. We can get back to court.”

  In the courtroom that day it was more of the same.

  I conceded zero guilt and they took me back to prison.

  “THEY SCREWED UP WITH YOU,” MOHSEN, A GUARD WHO LIFTED WEIGHTS AND WOULD SOMETIMES be my workout buddy, told me at the gym later that afternoon.

  “What do you mean?”

  He was the most normal of the guards. In his early thirties, with a muscular build, he claimed to have been a member of Iran’s national judo team. I didn’t believe him, but I liked him. We joked around a lot. Days that he worked a shift passed a little bit easier.

  “They should have put you on trial right in the beginning like they always do. I don’t understand why they did it like this. They should have brought you to court when you were still scared and they could get you to say anything. You’re not afraid of them anymore.”

  He was only half right.

  “WE HAVE BEEN DOING EVERYTHING WE COULD THINK TO DO IN PURSUIT OF JASON’S RELEASE,” Jay Kennedy, the Washington Post’s general counsel, told the New York Times. “First, we hoped that the fact that he did nothing wrong would lead to his release. Then, our hope was that continuing discussions between the U.S. government and Iranian officials alongside the nuclear talks would produce positive results. So far, they haven’t.

  “And so now, we believe, the time has come to bring a very public, adversarial case against Iran, as the Post and the family and many others continue to pursue Jason’s release through other channels.”

  One of the court clerks, who proved to be reasonable and even sympathetic, told my lawyer that the IRGC was pushing hard to get Salavati to come on television and denounce me before the trial even ended, a sort of spoiler, as if the outcome weren’t clear enough. And he was itching to do it too, but some of his staff convinced him not to. “We told the moron how bad this thing looks already,” the clerk said. “Speaking publicly would only make it worse for him.

  “Tell Jason he’s doing great. Salavati wants to give him a death sentence, but so far Jason hasn’t slipped at all and the IRGC and Salavati haven’t found any reason that he could. But they are desperately looking for one.”

  I came close to saying uncle many times during those months, but when I heard this bit of intel any thought of giving in was obliterated by a will to keep going. I had come too far already.

  For years I’d stayed in Iran when others had left. Some people looked at me and the handful of dual nationals I called friends as masochists, others just thought we were dumb. It was simple, though, for me. I had to see what was going to happen next. That’s the same attitude I took into the closing sessions of the trial. And it didn’t hurt that, although it may not have looked like it from the outside world, by then in some ways I was in the driver’s seat.

  And it showed in their treatment of me.

  By the end of my trial Mirsani had kebab being delivered to us once a week, my phone calls and visits were in place, and no one was threatening me anymore. It was simply a waiting game now, but I knew these bastards were experts at that.

  July 13, 2015

  THIRD TRIAL DATE

  The call and response between Tehran and Washington continued. As the nuclear negotiations neared their climax, so did my trial. That kept me in the news.

  “We regret that Jason’s trial has been closed and his lawyer is barred from discussing the court proceedings,” my brother said. “Jason’s continued detention is as baseless as it is cruel and unjust. We ask the Iranian judiciary to put an end to the delays in his trial, release Jason, and allow him to reunite with his family.”

  “Jason Rezaian’s unjust detention on espionage and other charges trumped up by Iranian authorities has now, almost inconceivably, stretched into nearly a full year,” said Marty Baron, who called on Iranian authorities to “deliver a speedy, fair and impartial judgment in Jason’s case—one that could only result in his acquittal, immediate release and a long-overdue reunion with his family. It is long past time to bring an end to the nightmare.”

  There were other angles to play.

  “He is paying the price of the suspicion, the animosity, and the paranoia between the two countries,” my mom told reporters between trial dates.

  At a press conference marking the historic nuclear deal on July 15, 2015, CBS News’ White House correspondent Major Garrett put Obama on the spot.

  “As you well know, there are four Americans in Iran—three held on trumped-up charges according to your administration, one, whereabouts unknown. Can you tell the country, sir, why you are content, with all of the fanfare around this deal, to leave the conscience of this nation, the strength of this nation, unaccounted for, in relation to these four Americans?”

  Obama was flustered. As much as he had been at any moment during his presidency.

  “I’ve got to give you credit, Major, for how you craft those questions. The notion that I am content, as I celebrate with American citizens languishing in Iranian jails—Major, that’s nonsense. And you should know better. I’ve met with the families of some of those folks. Nobody’s content, and our diplomats and our teams are working diligently to try to get them out.

  “Now, if the question is why we did not tie the negotiations to their release, think about the logic that that creates. Suddenly, Iran realizes, you know what, maybe we can get additional concessions out of the Americans by holding these individuals. And by the way, if we had walked away from the nuclear deal, we’d still be pushing just as hard to get these folks out. That’s why those issues are not connected, but we are working every single day to try to get them out and won’t stop until they’re out and rejoined with their families.”

  Garrett, who covered the entire eight years of the Obama presidency, said it was one of the president’s most uncomfortable and awkward moments.

  None of those moments of public confrontation with officials—American and Iranian—would ever have happened if my brother hadn’t tirelessly and meticulously pushed every button he could, directly and via proxies. He racked up hundreds of thousands of miles, meeting with important people and doing TV and radio hits at all hours of the day. He simply wouldn’t stop. And he stayed on message throughout: “I appreciate all of the efforts being done to bring Jason home, but apparently it’s not enough, because he’s still in prison.”

  And it was working.

  By the end of my trial plans were being hatched. American politicians—Democrat and Republican—expressed their readiness to fly to Tehran to retrieve me. Most of those offers didn’t go anywhere, but one of them—from a former U.S. president—was presented to the Iranian diplomats in New York. They were initially excited. They thought it could work. But when they went home with the offer it was rejected by a higher power.

  “No, thanks,” was the message. “We like what we have in our hand.”

  August 10, 2015

  LAST DAY IN COURT

  In the last session I felt only resignation. This process had started and it had to be completed. That’s the rule. If they don’t adhere to any of the other ones, finishing the trial is the one thing that always happens. It’s part of their efficiency. At least that’s what they say.

  This session was reserved for the prosecution and defense to read their final positions. In this case that meant those who were trying to lock me up summarized the farcical hearsay and slander of the past year and my lawyer used the law to poke holes in those accusations.

  As she reminded Salavati, if there is no crime there cannot be a conviction, which made it his responsibility to acquit me.

  And as Salavati reminded her, “No one will tell me how to do my job.”

  Sitting across the room from my lawyer Leila that day was not Ghotbi, the slimeball prosecutor. He had been replaced by a young, wiry, and uppity mustached female in a bla
ck chador.

  She talked about the many national secrets I’d sold to America, my close relations with Rouhani and the nuclear negotiating team, and my many attempts to take down the Islamic Republic.

  “If these were not acts of espionage to be punished with the most severe sentence possible,” she asked rhetorically, “then what were they?” It didn’t matter to her that the state hadn’t provided anything to back up a single one of these accusations. It was the sort of wild innuendo I’d come to expect, and it was in all likelihood the last time I would be facing my accusers outside the prison walls. I understood: they needed to get their shots in just once more.

  But then she said that I had accepted all the prior testimony and interrogation records in my “last defense”—which is what they call the final session of the pre-trial hearings—nine months earlier, and that’s when I had to object.

  “Excuse me, but I never accepted anything I was forced to say in interrogation. I think that’s why we’re here now, isn’t it?”

  She kept going, livid, squawking like some kind of rabid bird, and I just shook my head and laughed incredulously. What else was I going to do?

  I didn’t try to mask my fears. They were right there with me, front and center, but I had already cried enough. Behind tears of anxiety, once those are all dry, you might find a deep reservoir of indignation. I did. I didn’t really know the way to get there before, but I do now. Pondering in the lonely hours what it was that had changed inside of me, I knew it was that.

  Sure, I’m still optimistic, still hoping for the best. But the force of hypocrites with real power doing whatever they need to in order to maintain their grip, even if that means directing massive resources at a defenseless individual, is a tidal wave that I got trapped under once and survived.

  I was exhausted, but my head was up. I wasn’t even thinking about what the verdict might be. Why waste any more time contemplating the obvious outcome of a meaningless exercise? That’s a satisfaction I shouldn’t give them.

  As the session ended I asked Salavati what was next.

  “I’m required by law to deliver a decision within one week.”

  “Will I be present for that?”

  “You will know what my decision is.”

  “But will I be present?”

  “Yes. You will be brought back for the verdict.”

  “In one week?”

  “Yes. Why do you doubt us so much?” Salavati asked.

  The driver took me by the arm to escort me back to prison.

  “Hopefully it will all be over soon, and you can go back to your life,” he said, depositing me into the back of the ambulance, in a rare moment that I accepted as compassion.

  After a few knockdowns I was still standing and we were getting into the later rounds. That I was still in the detention center and not the general population, that no verdict had been issued, and that they were still irked by my unwillingness to plead guilty were all small victories that made it possible I might win on points.

  12

  Waiting Game

  When a week passed and then two, it became obvious that a verdict in my case was being held back. Although the trial was over, the drama was not.

  My family and the Post continued to press my case. Marking something the Iranian government calls Journalists’ Day, with no trace of irony, my mom showed up at the Unity Hall, Tehran’s most important ceremonial venue.

  Government officials gather there every August to pay tribute to the local press corps and maybe choose a few new ones to arrest. Yegi and I had attended the event the year before. She and Mom had heard Zarif would be giving a speech there. As the ministerial limousines began to show up with their tinted windows, Mom positioned herself near the entrance with a sign: “My Son Is a Journalist, Too. #FREEJASON.”

  She stalked the courtyard throughout the entire event carrying the sign—a protest of one.

  It was one of those developments that I probably wouldn’t have believed if I was just told about it, but later that day I had my usual visitors at Evin.

  “Are you here to wish me a happy Journalists’ Day?” I asked Kazem and Borzou when they arrived at my gate. “If so, where’s my gift? You look empty-handed.”

  “Well, J, we wanted to celebrate with you,” Borzou started sarcastically, “but your mom and BBC ruined it.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  Kazem pulled out an enlarged computer printout of a BBC web page showing my mom carrying the sign.

  “Why is your mother coordinating with the BBC to ruin your life?”

  “Maybe you should ask her,” I said.

  “You know, J, this sort of propaganda against the system is worth two years in prison,” Borzou threatened.

  “So now you’re gonna arrest my seventy-two-year-old mother?”

  “No no, we wouldn’t do that,” Kazem promised. “We’ll just add it to your sentence.”

  Behind the scenes, conversations at the highest levels continued.

  In early September the speaker of Iran’s parliament, Ali Larijani, who happens to be the brother of both the heads of Iran’s judiciary and the laughably titled High Commission on Human Rights, visited the UN for a summit of top MPs from around the world.

  My bosses, Foreign Editor Doug Jehl and Executive Editor Marty Baron, trekked to New York, where they would meet with Larijani to press my case. They were able to schedule a meeting with him as well as attend an event with other reporters where they used the opportunity to ask Larijani a question about my case.

  They then made their way to Larijani’s hotel suite and knocked on the door.

  “The speaker will not be seeing you as you asked your question in the press session,” an assistant explained to them.

  “No, we traveled a great distance to meet with Mr. Larijani privately and we expect that he will honor that commitment,” Marty told the functionary, without flinching.

  They waited. A few moments later the messenger returned.

  “The speaker says he no longer has time for this meeting.”

  “That is completely unacceptable,” Marty replied. “We will wait until he has time.”

  As they waited by the door, the press secretary of Iran’s UN mission, sensing the tension, approached my employers.

  “We at the mission are very saddened by Mr. Jason’s situation. We have met him many times before”—that was true—“and consider him a good friend.” That might have been a stretch.

  Marty reached for his jacket’s lapel, where there was a #FREEJASON pin. He took it off and held it out for the press secretary.

  “If Jason is your friend, I’m sure you will want to wear this in solidarity with him,” Marty said.

  The man whose job it is to help the Islamic Republic shape its message for U.S. media consumption was at a loss for words. He stared for a moment and then walked away.

  Across the Atlantic in Geneva, my brother and David Bowker, a lawyer from the WilmerHale firm, prepared to address the annual meeting of the UN’s Human Rights Council. I had been arbitrarily detained for nearly fourteen months at that point.

  My brother was there to address the body. Hundreds of witnesses gathered to hear his testimony. Among them were Iranian diplomats—intelligence officers, really—who tried to intimidate him by photographing him with telephoto lenses, videotaped his speech, and amateurishly tried to record his private conversations with international leaders.

  But none of it bothered him.

  As he had been since I was arrested, he was undeterred. This was an opportunity to press my case. He had become an expert at that. One of the best advocates for any American ever held in Iran and very possibly in our nation’s history.

  He was relentless, which wasn’t that rare. But he stayed on message and maintained a singular purpose.

  That was on a Tuesday in September, the same day of my weekly meeting with my mom and Yegi.

  It was a typical visit: I complained that I was going crazy, that nothing was being done to sav
e me, and that if more didn’t happen soon I’d be stuck forever. In turn, they assured me—or tried to—that everything that was humanly possible was being done to get me out. Between the three of us we had no concept of what was going on outside of Tehran.

  At the end of our hour together I begrudgingly returned to my cell. They were told to stay longer.

  A group of IRGC henchmen entered the room and started lecturing them at a rising decibel level about how destructive the Washington Post and my brother’s efforts to free me were to my health.

  They led my mom out of the room and put her in a car, where she waited.

  Back in the meeting room several of them continued to intimidate my wife, but by then she knew the drill as well as me: tell them you’ll do what they tell you to do. And then do the opposite.

  One of them handed her a prisoner’s uniform—the same pink pajamas and chador she’d worn during her seventy-two nights of solitary—and ordered her to put it on.

  “Keep stirring up trouble and you will be wearing that for the rest of your life.”

  After two hours of harassment she joined my mom in the car and they were sent home, where her parents were terrified they had been redevoured by Evin.

  All of this was just part of the script of a bad opera gone terribly awry. My captors had forgotten to write the end. Instead they were waiting for the next logical moment to make a splash; I just wasn’t sure whether that would mean a heavy sentence, a big release, or some combination of the two.

  Looking at the calendar, it was obvious what that opportunity would be: the United Nations General Assembly. It’s the moment that world leaders descend on midtown Manhattan to rub elbows and point fingers at each other, and in Iran’s case, when its leaders try to use the mainstream news media to advance their agenda with a wary global public.

  Like clockwork Kazem arrived a week before the start of the UNGA and told me I was to be traded for twenty Iranians being held in U.S. prisons. That sounded like a dumb exaggeration even for these guys, but of course I wanted to believe him.