My Prison, My Home: One Woman's Story of Captivity in Iran

by Haleh Esfandiari

  When the oil industry was taken over and the British driven out, all these facilities were seized by the Iranian government. When we arrived in Abadan, we were assigned a house in the upscale Braim district.

  Abadan had a different feel to it than Tehran or Karaj. I associated Tehran with the mountains and the plains that ran south and east to the Kavir Desert. The air was hot and dry in the summer, crisp and cold in winter. There was no hint of the sea, no touch of dampness in the air. Abadan, by contrast, was built on the Shatt al-Arab, the border river between Iran and Iraq, and abutted the Persian Gulf. It was a port city. There were palm and banana trees as well as lush bougainvilleas. The local people were dark-complexioned, seafaring. Most spoke Arabic and Persian with a pronounced Arabic accent.

  But for a curious child, Abadan meant a recovery of freedom. Our house had a large garden surrounded by hedges. My parents joined the Boat Club, with its clubhouse on the riverbank built to resemble a boat, and the Golestan Club, within walking distance of the house. I could check out all the books I wanted from the club library. Mother didn’t read Persian, and Father was too busy to notice. At the age of thirteen I read Victor Hugo, Anatole France, Albert Camus, John Steinbeck, and Ernest Hemingway in translation, as well as a great many Persian novels. It was in Abadan that I developed my love for literature.

  Despite the long British presence, there were no bilingual schools in Abadan, and I attended the local Persian elementary school. I walked into the schoolyard on my first day and saw students crowded around a little boy, perhaps eight years old, lying on his back with his legs in the air. The assistant principal was caning the soles of his bare feet. I was horrified. Jeanne d’Arc had been strict, but punishment had meant sitting alone in a corner or being banished from the classroom.

  Yet the oil company itself retained a strong British feel to it. Senior Iranian staff who had worked for the AIOC and studied in England often spoke English to one another. They sent their children to English boarding schools. At the card table, my parents’ new bridge partners referred to clubs, hearts, diamonds, and spades, rather than trèfle, coeur, carré, and pique, the French terms common among their friends in Tehran. Mutti arranged for me to take English lessons with a private tutor.

  Since the summers in Abadan were very hot and humid, we would come to Tehran for a month, staying two weeks with my grandmother and two weeks with our extended family in villages in Arak, some two hundred miles northwest of Tehran. We rode donkeys and picked and ate fruits straight from the trees, and cucumbers from the long, straight rows of the cucumber beds. We wandered for hours in the fields and watched the villagers swinging their scythes and harvesting the wheat.

  But politics intruded on our idyllic life in Arak and roiled the lives and opinions of our usually apolitical family. The British were determined to undo the oil industry’s nationalization, which had meant the loss of a valuable asset as well as a challenge to their imperial authority. They feared a precedent that would threaten their other holdings (indeed, President Nasser of Egypt would nationalize the Suez Canal five years later). In retaliation for the nationalization of the AIOC, the British had frozen Iran’s sterling assets, had successfully imposed a boycott on the sale of Iranian oil, and although we didn’t know it then, were secretly plotting to overthrow Mossadegh and persuade the United States to join them in the scheme. As a result of the oil boycott and assets freeze, the economy was suffering, business was slow, and imports had dwindled. Mossadegh was also locked in a struggle with the shah over power and constitutional authority; things seemed unstable as demonstrators took over the streets.

  In the evenings, my relatives heatedly debated the situation. The family was divided, some loyal to Mossadegh and others to the shah; some enthusiastic about oil nationalization, others worried about the direction in which Mossadegh was taking the country: “He is allowing the left and the Communists too much power.” “No, he is the only politician who dared stand up to the British and defend Iran’s honor.” “Yes, but he is leading the country into anarchy.” So went the arguments, back and forth. I remember a younger cousin, an ardent supporter of Mossadegh, accusing his aunts and uncles of caring more about their villages than about Iran. For the two branches of the family, the Bayats and the Esfandiaris, the issues were especially fraught. Mossadegh, the aristocrat who had emerged as a defender of the masses, was a close relative. His mother, Najm al-Saltaneh, a lion of a woman, was the second wife of my great-grandfather Vakil ol-Molk-e Dovvom and the grandmother of many Bayats. Mossadegh’s son, Gholam Hossein, and his wife, Malekeh, were close friends of my mother and father.

  The family was proud that once again one of their own was now prime minister; and they both admired and were awed by Mossadegh’s crafty political maneuvering and the oratorical skills that turned him into a popular hero. But Mossadegh, irascible and headstrong, had also released radical forces. Workers were organizing and demanding higher wages. Talk of land reform was threatening to large landowners, including the Bayats and the Esfandiaris. The Tudeh, or Communist, Party was rising in popularity and influence. The endless political turmoil, strikes, and street demonstrations made members of the family nervous. Vigilante violence hit close to home. Brigadier General Mohammad Afshartous, Mossadegh’s police chief, who was kidnapped and murdered, had married into the Bayat family. Worried by the rising radicalism and violence, the Bayats sent a family delegation to visit Mossadegh and to beg him to curb the disorder. He heard them out but did nothing to assuage their anxieties.

  Mossadegh was also challenging the shah’s authority, asserting the primacy of parliament and his prerogatives as prime minister. In July 1952, Mossadegh resigned when both he and the shah claimed the right to name the minister of war. After two days of pro-Mossadegh rioting, the shah stood down, and Mossadegh returned to office in triumph, more powerful than before. Members of the family were torn: they felt instinctive loyalty to their famous relative; some found attractive the idea championed by Mossadegh that authority should rest with the parliament and that the shah should reign and not rule. But they also feared for the stability of the throne and the long-term stability of the country; and Mossadegh’s seeming radicalism made them uneasy.

  Affairs between Mossadegh and the shah, and Mossadegh and the British, came to a head in August 1953. Early that year, the British government succeeded in persuading the incoming Eisenhower administration to join their plan to overthrow Mossadegh. The CIA and Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) went to work. A reluctant shah was brought on board. Royalist officers in the army were won over; newspaper editors, members of parliament, and politicians were paid off; the cooperation of political operators who could mobilize the street crowds was secured.

  The plot was set in motion in August, and after two days of seesaw battles on the streets, the royalist forces finally prevailed. The shah, who had left the country for Rome when the plot initially appeared to have failed, returned to Iran to reclaim his throne. During that turbulent week, I happened to have gone with my parents to the Caspian city of Rasht. We arrived at the very height of the crisis and saw the statue of the shah, which had dominated the main city square, lying on the ground, smashed to pieces. It had been pulled down from its pedestal by anti-royalist crowds. A few days later, after royalist forces had prevailed, someone had put the broken-off head of the shah’s statue back on its pedestal. There was the shah, albeit somewhat reduced in stature, gazing across the square again.

  These momentous national events left the family with mixed feelings. They were devastated to see Mossadegh’s home ransacked, and the prime minister put on trial and jailed. But they were relieved that the threat of upheaval had been averted, and that Mossadegh’s immediate family had not been harassed. When we gathered in Arak during the summer of the following year, all talk of politics had come to an end and, at least to a child, life had returned to its normal, lazy rhythm.

  3.

  A CAREER INTERRUPTED

  I WOULD NOT COME
INTO contact with such fierce political loyalties again until I attended university—in Vienna, at my mother’s insistence—five years later. Many of my fellow Iranian students were active in the opposition movement against the shah. The principal student organization, the Confederation of Iranian Students, was left of center rather than revolutionary, dedicated to the memory of Mossadegh and loyal to his political party, the National Front. But more radical currents, some Marxist, some Islamic, were already stirring among the students, and two decades of authoritarian rule in Iran would turn a future generation of students into outright revolutionaries.

  While I stayed clear of the student movement (my father having instilled in me both patriotism and caution about getting mixed up in politics), my time in Vienna had a huge hand in shaping my intellectual development and my love for Western culture. I studied journalism, philosophy, and art history, but I also attended poetry readings and literary debates. I heard Sviatoslav Richter play the piano and Yehudi Menuhin play the violin; I even heard a young and yet unknown Zubin Mehta conducting a student orchestra. I spent a summer in London improving my English, and traveled to East Berlin, Munich, Rome, Venice, Paris, and Geneva. Even if I wasn’t fully conscious of it at the time, it was during these years that I came to appreciate the value of freedom of thought and expression, the right to travel and explore, and freedom from authoritarianism.

  HOME, AGAIN

  I returned to Tehran in the summer of 1964 and was hired by the publisher of Kayhan, the largest daily newspaper in the country. Since I knew French, English, and German as well as Persian, I was assigned to the foreign news desk. When the publisher, Dr. Mostafa Mesbahzadeh, known to everyone as “Doktor,” introduced me to my colleagues on the foreign news desk, I was met with skeptical stares. The foreign news veterans were all men in their early fifties, educated, but from modest backgrounds. Most of them, I later learned, were former Communists or had dabbled in left-wing ideologies popular among students and the new educated middle class in the postwar period. They had spent time in prison after the overthrow of Mossadegh, and some of them had been tortured. Times had changed, but they remained attached to their radical political beliefs.

  I was twenty-four, the only woman on the foreign news desk, one of the very few in the entire newsroom. I was also from the wrong social class in their eyes, with a well-known family name and family members in senior positions in the civil service. These “enlightened radicals” clearly did not think a woman capable of doing their weighty work, and they were not comfortable having a woman in their midst. “Does this zaifeh—this weak one—understand anything?” an older reporter once sneered, using a traditional and derogatory term for women. With me around, the men had to watch their language and stop exchanging crude jokes and accounts of their escapades. The toilet in the building was for men only, meaning I simply could not go to the bathroom all day. At five-thirty in the morning, my colleagues would breakfast on a dish of sheep’s brains and sheep’s feet—a delicacy in Iran, but one whose sight and smell nauseated me. One or two of the men even topped off their breakfast with a glass of vodka. But my foreign language and translating skills were good, I was speedy, and gradually the men came to accept me. For a brief period, I even became the foreign news editor, and by the end of my decade at the paper, the environment had changed so dramatically that women were even given their own bathroom.

  Kayhan was an afternoon paper, and except for major stories, the foreign news pages were put to bed relatively early. I arrived at work at five-thirty in the morning and worked until two-thirty in the afternoon. Depending on the volume of news, I sometimes stayed through the afternoons and evenings, as well.

  The newspaper had no foreign correspondents of its own and relied on the wire agencies Reuters, the Associated Press, United Press International, and Agence France-Presse. We were still in the age of teleprinters, and dispatches came rattling through on long perforated sheets of paper. Every half hour someone would walk in with rolls of dispatches and give them to the translators. At noon, the mail boy would bring in newspapers flown in from Europe—the Herald Tribune, the London Times, the Financial Times, Le Monde, Figaro. In August 1968, when Russian tanks invaded Czechoslovakia, I remember huddling around the teleprinters as the dispatches rolled off the machines. Earlier that year, the new Czech leader, Alexander Dub ek, had sought to loosen the hold of Soviet-style communism over the country. He had freed up the press, allowed non-Communist political parties to operate, and decentralized the economy. The “Prague Spring” seemed, for a moment, to herald a wave of change across the Soviet bloc. But what the Czechs welcomed the Russians feared, and that morning the news coming across the teleprinters was grim. More than 200,000 Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops had fanned across the country. Dubček and his colleagues as well as Czech activists and intellectuals had been arrested. The Prague Spring was being snuffed out. Even my leftist colleagues were hard put to justify the invasion.

  The staff of the foreign news desk served principally as translators. The editor selected the stories he wanted to run, and we translated them in longhand. They were then typed and edited, headlines were written, and the type was set.

  Just before the presses rolled at noon, the censor from the government’s information office would show up with a list of stories that we were not allowed to run. The censor, Mahram Ali Khan, had held the job since the 1930s, and each day he went from newspaper office to newspaper office with the censor’s list. He checked all the pages and read all the major stories. Sometimes he ordered the removal of a name or a paragraph, sometimes a whole story. We were not allowed, for example, to report student demonstrations in other countries, lest our own university students get ideas. We were not allowed to repeat criticism of the shah from abroad. Fortunately, Mahram Ali Khan had a sense of humor. One day, before I joined Kayhan, the journalists took advantage of Mahram Ali Khan’s visit to the men’s room, locked him in, and pretended they could not open the door. They quietly reinserted the stories he had removed and went to press before they let him out.

  Within six months, the publisher, Dr. Mesbahzadeh, decided I would be more useful as a reporter than as a translator. I began to cover visits to Iran by ministers, officials, and foreign heads of state. I also reported on trips abroad by the shah and other high officials. Shaul, who would become my husband a year later, worked for the English-language newspaper of the Kayhan publishing house.

  We ran across each other in the newsroom but really “met” when both of us were covering the visit to Iran of Ethiopia’s emperor, Haile Selassie, who granted us an exclusive interview. At the end of the interview, after thanks and good-byes, I simply turned around and walked out, realizing only too late from the startled looks of Haile Selassie’s courtiers that I had committed a faux pas. You were not supposed to turn your back on the emperor. I met Haile Selassie once more in the late 1960s, when I covered the shah’s trip to Addis Ababa. The emperor recognized me. “I am indebted to you,” I said. “I met my future husband when interviewing you.”

  “Well, and are you happy with your husband?” he asked with a twinkle in his eye.

  I had taken to Shaul immediately. He was already a prominent journalist, covering all the major stories for his newspaper and writing for the Financial Times and the Economist. He had a sharp intellect, fierce integrity as a journalist, and was infectiously enthusiastic about newspaper work. Covering stories with him was always an adventure. We were both interested in Iranian politics; we both loved literature. When we first met, he was deeply into the German playwright Ber-tolt Brecht, and he soon presented me with several of Brecht’s plays in the original German, which would not have been easy to locate in Tehran’s bookstores. He had studied in America and opened up to me a whole new world of American history, literature, and politics.

  The decision to marry was not an easy one. We came from two different communities, and marriages between Jews and Muslims were extremely rare, virtually unheard of, in our two societies. Both Shaul
’s family and mine were deeply unhappy. We were breaking all sorts of taboos, and, looking back, I am amazed at our audacity. But we were young and determined, and once we were married, I was warmly accepted into Shaul’s family and Shaul into mine. Shaul and Mutti grew especially close to each other.

  Two years into our marriage, in 1966, Shaul decided he would like to return to Harvard, where he had gone to college, to study for an MA in Middle Eastern studies. He was covering the Middle East and wanted to study the region more seriously. Besides, he was unhappy with the creeping censorship of the press. We spent two years in Cambridge, basically exchanging our comfortable life as professional journalists for the more cramped circumstances of graduate students. Shaul’s scholarship hardly covered our expenses, especially once our daughter, Haleh, arrived.

  Shaul received his MA in 1968, but student life continued for the next three years as Shaul pursued his PhD, in Iranian history, at Oxford University in England. I taught Persian while he completed his doctorate.

  We returned to Iran and to our newspaper jobs in 1972. The Kayhan organization was enjoying a period of considerable success and expansion. Kayhan continued to be more “liberal” than Tehran’s other large-circulation daily, Ettela’at, but it was no longer the bold and risk-taking newspaper I had joined nearly a decade earlier. The weight of censorship had grown heavier, and the freedom to write and publish more restricted. Mesbahzadeh’s own liberal preferences remained in place, and as the publisher, he was always admirably protective of his editors and reporters. Pressured to fire journalists who had stepped on the censors’ toes, he continued to pay their salaries and brought them back to the newsroom at the first opportunity. He kept jobs open for colleagues who went to jail, took care of their families, and reemployed them once they were released. He allowed reporters who were banned by the shah’s secret police, SAVAK (the Persian acronym for Organization for State Security and Intelligence), to write for Kayhan under assumed names.