I closed my eyes under the blindfold.
“But, sir, please tell me, what have I done wrong? I said what you asked me to say.”
“I’m the one who asks the questions,” he yelled, beating my legs with the belt.
Rosewater grabbed my hair, jerking my neck violently. “Get up,” he ordered. But I couldn’t. My legs were numb and my shoulders were throbbing. He practically had to pull me from the chair by my hair. “Go back to your cell and think about what happened tonight,” Rosewater told me. He punched the back of my head, and I winced. “I haven’t even started yet. This will happen to you every day if you don’t cooperate with us.”
As a guard led me back to my cell, I tried to figure out what had happened. This wasn’t the plan. This wasn’t what we had agreed to. I had said what Haj Agha had told me to say. Why weren’t they letting me go?
“It’s time for morning prayers,” said the guard, whose shoes I did not recognize. “Do you want to use the restroom and do your ablution?”
Of course, I thought. The only reason Rosewater stopped beating me was because he had to prepare to pray. The rage I felt at his hypocrisy frightened me.
“No, I don’t,” I said. “But I need two migraine pills. I need them right away.”
The guard locked me in my cell and went to get the painkillers. I pulled down my trousers and looked at my legs. They were so bruised, they looked nearly black.
· · ·
A few hours later, I paced the cell—back and forth, as quickly as I could—waiting for what was going to happen next. Rosewater wanted names, but what names? Reporters? Politicians? Friends? The noise of the air-conditioning unit was so loud, I had trouble staying focused on my thoughts.
I remembered Maryam telling me about the time they took her to the torture room and beat her without reason. “It was toward the end of my sentence,” she said. “I think they just wanted to teach me a lesson before releasing me so I would never forget what prison was like.” I tried to convince myself that Rosewater was doing the same.
But a voice inside me suspected otherwise: that they’d never had any intention of keeping to our agreement. What had happened last night was, I somehow knew, just the beginning. But how far would they go? I’d heard too many stories, and I couldn’t block the horrifying thoughts from my mind: Fingernails pulled out. Electric shocks to the testicles. “The first thing he did with the pliers was squeeze my earlobe,” my father would say. “If you think that’s painful, just wait. Nothing hurts more than when they use those pliers to pull out your nails. The man who tortured me pulled out each of the nails on my right hand slowly, one by one. He told me that he had all the time in the world.” My father related this story many times throughout my life. As a child, I would study his hand, trying to picture it disfigured. I was in awe of him. How could he resist such pain? I didn’t know if I had his strength, but remembering my father’s words gave me hope: “They thought that by exerting maximum pressure, they could force me to reveal all the information I had about my comrades. But I never did.”
The metal slots of the other cell doors started to open and close, startling me. It was time for breakfast. I had always looked forward to the click-clack sound of the slots opening and closing. This meant it was time to eat and, especially, for tea. But that morning, the sounds of metal against metal made the panic I felt more intense. I waited for the lower slot to open and my breakfast to appear, but it didn’t. Instead, Blue-Eyed Seyyed opened the door. For some reason, he was the only guard who didn’t mind showing his face to the prisoners. He placed a blindfold on the floor along with my food and poured me a cup of tea. “Have your breakfast as soon as you can. Your specialist wants to see you right away,” he said as he closed the door. “I’ll be back in ten minutes.”
I stared at my nails as I held the cup of tea. Would I still have them at the end of the day? I felt Maryam sitting in the corner of my cell, watching me. Dropping to the floor, I started to do push-ups. What if they pull my nails and lash my feet, how many push-ups will I be able to do then? I thought.
“None,” Maryam answered. She had told me about a friend of hers in prison who’d lost her toe after a bad beating. “She had lied to them about her husband’s whereabouts, and when the prison guards found out, they punished her by lashing her feet for almost an hour,” Maryam had related with tears in her eyes. She’d said that when they brought the woman back to their shared cell, the soles of her feet were so badly damaged that she couldn’t walk for days.
The thought of Maryam getting knocked around by an animal like Rosewater brought forth the tears that I’d been holding back since the beating. As I did my push-ups, I watched the carpet under my face grow dark with my tears. “Maryam joon, I will be strong,” I said. “But how will I survive this? How much worse will it get?”
“Who are you talking to?” Blue-Eyed Seyyed was standing at the door to my cell. I ignored him, sat up, and took a sip of tea. “Come on, it’s time to go,” he ordered.
Rosewater didn’t say anything when Blue-Eyed Seyyed handed me to him. He silently took my arm, as if leading a lamb to the slaughter. I could sense his anger in the force of his breaths and his grip on my flesh. He sat me in the chair in the interrogation room and removed my blindfold. From this corner of the room, all I could see was the badly painted white cement wall in front of me. Rosewater tapped me gently on the shoulder. “Maziar, you have a choice here. You can be my friend or my prisoner,” he said. His tone had changed. It was as if we had entered a new phase of our relationship and now that he had beaten me, he felt more comfortable with me. “Do you understand me, Maziar?” Rosewater asked as he circled around me, marking his territory, dragging his slippers on the floor like a common thug.
I hope he’s not going to urinate on me, I thought. “Yes, sir,” I said.
“Friend or prisoner?” he repeated.
“I’m sorry,” I said quietly. “Maybe I don’t understand.”
As he placed a blank piece of paper on the chair’s writing arm, he said: “This is friend.” He then moved back and suddenly slapped my right cheek with all his might. It sent a shock down my spine, and I felt dizzy. “And that is prisoner,” he added calmly. “Mr. Maziar, you can choose to rot here by repeating your koseh she’r, your bullshit.” He took a deep breath, as if to calm himself. “Write your answers clearly and honestly. Did my slap hurt you?” he asked gently.
I didn’t reply. I sat in the chair with my legs crossed, trying to think of a way to reason with him, to ask him what had changed. Rosewater kicked my feet. One of my slippers flew across the room. “Never cross your legs in front of me, you little spy.” He then grabbed my hair and forced me out of the chair. “Go pick up your slipper,” he yelled, making me crawl across the floor to retrieve it.
After I took my seat again, he sat in a chair behind me. I could hear him writing something. For several minutes, he sat silently, writing. As much as his beatings and screaming were upsetting, this erratic behavior worried me even more.
I finally heard him pull his chair closer to mine. He then calmly placed a few pieces of paper in front of me. On them, he had written the names of six prominent pro-reform politicians—Mehdi Hashemi, Mohammad Khatami, Mehdi Karroubi, Mir Hossein Mousavi, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, and Grand Ayatollah Youssef Sanei—and the same question next to each of them: Explain the nature of your relationship with this person.
As on the first day of interrogations, I could see that the questions were supposed to place me in a certain scenario. I took the top off the ballpoint pen and had started to write when Rosewater hit me in the neck. “Give me the papers,” he said. “Before you start to write koseh she’r, Maziar, I have to make one thing clear.” He slapped the back of my head. “We know that you’re working for an enemy agency and that your job is to connect various reformist politicians with the Western powers.” He spoke with more confidence than I had heard from him before. “We know that you’ve been working as an agent of a f
oreign intelligence agency since you arrived in Iran and have had, at least, two missions: to put the reformist elements in Iran in touch with foreign embassies and to incite a velvet revolution in Iran.”
I was dumbfounded. He’d delivered these ideas the same way a narrator might recount the plot of a film or a play. The leaders of the Islamic regime had clearly already written their story about their opponents, and somehow I had been named as a major character.
“We know that you’ve been in touch with each of these elements, and have been a conduit between them and foreigners. If you’re honest with us and tell us the truth, we will let you go tomorrow. I personally guarantee that, Maziar.” He breathed into my ear. “But if you think we’re a bunch of idiots and believe you can fool us, I personally guarantee that I will stand you on a chair, put a noose around your neck, and kick the chair from under your feet. I will make sure that your body rots while it hangs, and I will put your remains in a garbage bag and throw it at your mother.”
I raised my head and looked him in the eye. For the first time since I’d seen him, I didn’t feel anger toward him. Instead, I felt pity. Rosewater was simply a foot soldier for Khamenei, there to help back up his story: that, as Khamenei had said repeatedly after the election, the green movement was not a popular uprising but a foreign plot concocted by the enemies of Islam. Rosewater was not important to the regime. He was simply a man whose ideology had led him to become the person who met my stare: a vicious ideologue who believed his path to heaven was lined with all the innocent people he’d beaten.
He punched my forehead, bringing stars to my eyes. “Put your head down!” he bellowed, punching my head again. “Didn’t I tell you that while you’re here you should always keep your head down?” He stepped away for a second and then said, “You’re very lucky, Maziar.” As a migraine began building, I found it hard to make sense of his words. It felt as if the pain were dripping down the inside of my body from my head.
“Can I have some water, please?” I asked him.
“Of course,” he said and poured me a paper cup of water. “Do you think we’re like you Americans in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo who torture people by keeping them thirsty? We have something called ra’fateh Islami”—Islamic kindness—“in this prison. Something you Americans have never heard of.” He genuinely believed that calling someone an American was an insult, and always said the word with a sneer.
Rosewater sat down on the chair behind me again. When he stood up and placed another sheet of paper on my chair’s writing arm, he was breathing very heavily.
He’d made a diagram, a big circle with a smaller circle inside it. The names of the six people he had mentioned were on the periphery of the inner circle. Rosewater explained that the circle as a whole represented the Islamic system. The smaller circle indicated the minority of people who’d been fooled into supporting the reformists, thereby interfering with the wishes of the majority of the people who supported the system. “This line that creates this little circle in the middle of the big ocean of the Islamic system is the dust and dirt that eventually will be thrown out of the ocean by the big waves of people,” Rosewater explained with the pride of a bad junior poet who thought his idiotic metaphor made sense.
“Do you mean the six people you mentioned are the obstacles between the Islamic system and the people?” I asked, trying to make his point clear.
“Ahsant. Bravo! So you are not as stupid as I thought. That is why I said you’re lucky. Our system has chosen to bestow its kindness upon you.”
“The problem, sir, is that I really don’t know any of these men that well, and I haven’t put any of them in touch with anyone.” My voice was faint with the pain of my migraine. I cleared my throat and tried again, hoping to hide from him how much I was suffering. “In fact, I’ve always avoided foreign embassies in order to avoid getting myself into situations such as this. I know the rules, sir, and I’ve always obeyed them—”
Rosewater didn’t let me finish. Instead, he began to slap me once again on my legs. “Nemidooni? Na? You don’t know anything? Is that right?” As quickly as he’d started beating my legs, he stopped. “Well, listen,” he said abruptly. “How about I get you some tea and dates so we can have a friendly conversation.”
It was hard to make sense of his actions, but when he left the room, I savored the few minutes I had alone. When he returned, I could smell the fresh tea.
“Mr. Bahari, you’re an intellectual and knowledgeable person, so surely you know who the dirtiest family in this country is, correct?” I knew he meant the family of former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, whose name had become synonymous with financial corruption since the beginning of the revolution. There were rumors that the family had a monopoly on everything from oil tankers to pistachios to shrimp.
Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Ali Khamenei had been friends since 1957, when they were young clerics in Qom. Both joined Khomeini’s movement in the early 1960s. Rafsanjani was always known as one of the smartest and most diplomatic of Khomeini’s acolytes. When Khomeini died in 1989, Rafsanjani lobbied for Ali Khamenei to become the supreme leader. Rafsanjani became president. With Khamenei’s support, Rafsanjani asked the parliament to dissolve the duties of the prime minister and merge them into those of the president. Rafsanjani wanted to amass enough power to effectively be the leader of the country, and manipulate the supreme leader, but Ali Khamenei outmaneuvered Rafsanjani.
Rafsanjani started diplomatic rapprochement and tried to open the Iranian market to the rest of the world. In a country with endemic corruption and cronyism, Rafsanjani’s reforms created a new class of nouveaux riches, while leaving millions of Iranians, including many war veterans, poorer. At the same time, Rafsanjani had little respect for democracy and human rights. Many political activists were imprisoned and tortured during his presidency, and dozens of writers and intellectuals were assassinated by government agents. While Rafsanjani’s economic policies alienated poor and devout Iranians, his cultural policies angered the reformists. This led to the landslide election of the reformist Mohammad Khatami, who promised equality and freedom, in 1997.
Rafsanjani’s mistakes suited Khamenei just fine. Khamenei allied himself with the most ideological members of the Islamic government, including many commanders of the Revolutionary Guards, and tried to marginalize Rafsanjani. While Rafsanjani insisted on the necessity of economic development and political moderation, Khamenei reminded people of the ideological goals of the revolution. The two men’s lifestyles contrasted sharply as well. While Rafsanjani’s daughter became an outspoken member of the parliament and his sons became rich businessmen, Khamenei famously ordered his six children (four sons and two daughters) not to take part in politics or economic activities in order to avoid any rumors of nepotism or financial corruption. Khamenei’s supporters grew to despise what they perceived as Rafsanjani’s revisionism and decadence, and to revere Khamenei’s simple lifestyle and his ideological zeal.
Yet Rafsanjani remained an influential figure in Iranian politics. By the time of the presidential election in June 2009, many religious figures and politicians who rejected Khamenei’s tyrannical rule had allied themselves with the more moderate Rafsanjani, who was supporting Mousavi. Even many former Guards commanders who found the radicalism of the new generation of the Guards dangerous supported Rafsanjani. Because of Rafsanjani’s prominence, Khamenei and the new generation of the Guards didn’t attack him directly. Instead, after the 2009 election, they tried to incriminate his son, Mehdi Hashemi.
Rosewater answered the question about the dirtiest family himself. “It is, of course, the Hashemi Rafsanjani family,” he said. “Our holy Islamic system wants to give you a chance to reveal what you know of this dirty family, Maziar. We know that you were in contact with Mehdi Hashemi. We know that you were active in his circle. We just want you to give us one example of when and how you put this dirty element in touch with foreign agencies.”
“But, sir—” Rosewater slammed the
back of his right hand against my mouth. I tasted blood, and spit it into the empty cup.
“Be quiet and listen,” he said. “Remember: you and I are going to be friends.” He then reminded me of the Newsweek interview I had done with Mohammad Khatami, who many saw as the spiritual leader of the green movement, a month before the election. During his tenure as president of the Islamic Republic, from 1997 to 2005, and even after leaving office, Khatami was regarded as the most important reformist figure in Iran. During his presidency, Khatami spoke to Ali Khamenei on the phone on a daily basis, as the supreme leader criticized almost all of Khatami’s decisions.
In 2009, four years after his term as president came to an end, he was still popular among many young Iranians, and Khamenei rightly thought that if Khatami became president again, he would try to rally the youth against him. According to my friend Amir, Khatami had wanted to run for president again in 2009 but the supreme leader had explicitly warned him against doing so. When Khatami had not paid attention to Khamenei’s warnings, the supreme leader’s office had sent threatening messages to Khatami that if he continued his campaign, he could be assassinated and his advisers could be harmed.
“We would like you to tell us how and why the agency told you to interview Khatami,” Rosewater explained.
I was exasperated. “But which agency, sir?” I asked.
Rosewater slowly approached me. “What’s in this cup?” he asked.
“Blood,” I answered.
“Do you think I cannot make you bleed more?” I didn’t answer. “Answer me. I asked you: DO YOU THINK I CANNOT MAKE YOU BLEED MORE?!” he screamed.
“Yes, sir,” I conceded. “You can.”
“So do what I’m telling you to do.” He tapped gently on my shoulder. “The Koran says: the hypocrites are even worse than the infidels. We have a chief hypocrite in this country, and that is Khatami. You brought up the dirty idea of vote rigging with Khatami one month before the election, Mr. Bahari,” Rosewater said. Khamenei had called the reformists’ claim that the election was fraudulent “a great sin.” I could see that my having reported on the possibility of election fraud infuriated Rosewater. “This is very interesting, since at the time, no one else was talking about the possibility.” This wasn’t true, of course. Since Ahmadinejad’s first presidential election, in 2005, the idea that he would rig the 2009 vote had been widely discussed. I wanted to remind Rosewater of this, but I remained quiet. “We simply want you to tell us how the agency came up with the rumor of vote rigging, and how you guided Khatami to answer your question about vote rigging,” Rosewater said.
Then They Came for Me: A Family’s Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival Page 19