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

by Haleh Esfandiari

  Clerical and other opposition leaders called for massive protest rallies on December 10 and 11, to coincide with the days of religious mourning. The government banned the marches, and fear of violence and bloodshed was widespread. Shaul and I decided that, as a precaution, I should take our daughter Haleh to London for two weeks and wait things out. I left Tehran for London in early December. The exodus of the middle class had already begun, and the airport was jammed with Iranians and foreigners leaving the country. Panic was in the air. Still, I did not feel I was leaving Iran for good.

  In London I waited anxiously for news. The regime, hammered by strikes, shutdowns, demonstrations, and violence on the streets, was in a hopeless situation. Shaul and I spoke on the phone; repeatedly we postponed my return, our mood wildly gyrating between unrealistic hopes that things would calm down and mounting evidence that the regime was near collapse. My two-week stay stretched into three, then four and five weeks. The shah left Iran on January 16, never to come back; Khomeini returned to Iran on February 1, 1979, greeted by a crowd of more than a million. Ten days later, with the army having declared its “neutrality,” people in Tehran rose up and overran government ministries, military barracks, police stations, and the radio and TV broadcasting centers. The monarchy had collapsed; an Islamic republic had taken its place.

  Revolutions such as Iran’s are huge upheavals in the life of nations, overturning not only governments and institutions but the lives of every individual and family caught in the vortex. Both Shaul and I were deeply rooted in Iran. Everything we had built over a lifetime was there. On the other hand, the country was in turmoil. Armed revolutionary committees roamed the streets. Every day, grisly pictures appeared in the Tehran papers of executed members of the old regime—many I had known personally or had covered as a journalist. Farrokhrou Parsa, the first woman cabinet minister in Iran and a former minister of education, was charged with “prostituting young girls,” placed in a sack, and executed by firing squad. Prime Minister Hoveyda, a friend of my parents whom I had known as a child, was given a summary trial and shot—in the middle of the night, on the rooftop or backstairs of a prison, it was reported. The Kayhan Organization, where Shaul worked, had been seized by the revolutionary government. Shaul had been offered a one-year visiting professorship at Princeton; reluctantly we decided that he would accept. Without admitting it to ourselves, we had decided to leave Iran.

  Shaul joined us in London in January 1980. He had managed to salvage a few of our belongings; but everything else—our home, property, careers, friends, family, the feel of the familiar—we left behind.

  AMERICA

  Shaul left London for Princeton in late January, and I followed in July, after Haleh finished school. Princeton was a quiet university town, very different from Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Princeton campus was self-contained, and university life did not spill out into the small town very much. There were few coffee shops and fewer bookstores.

  We lived for a year in a tiny two-story town house owned by the university, amid rented furniture and an assorted collection of dishes, cutlery, and kitchen appliances loaned by friends. Shaul had a one-year contract, but we had no certainty of employment beyond that. The news out of Iran was uniformly grim. Disorder continued on the streets, on university campuses, and in government offices. I worried about my parents in Tehran, yet I felt helpless to do anything for them.

  During my first week at Princeton I met Janina Issawi, whose husband, Charles, was a professor. Janina knew what it meant to be an exile. Polish by birth, she and her family had been rounded up by the Soviet army in World War II and sent to labor camps in Russia. Somehow, the family made it overland to Iran, then to Lebanon, where she studied at the American University of Beirut and met her future husband.

  “Get yourself a house; put down some roots,” she told me, an easier proposition for Shaul than for myself, since he had attended boarding school outside of New York City as a teenager, as well as doing both his undergraduate and graduate work at Harvard. Except for the eighteen months I spent in Cambridge in the mid-1960s, when I was preoccupied with a new baby, I did not know America. I had to get used to its sky, soil, and rhythms, to hearing English rather than Persian spoken around me. I had to start a new career. Yet I vowed to follow Janina’s sensible advice. We registered Haleh in school. We made a down payment on a house outside Princeton, got ourselves a secondhand car, planted our garden, and asked friends over. We began to put down roots, even though a bit of replanting from time to time proved inevitable.

  Shaul taught at Princeton for two years and held fellowships at various research institutes for three, spending a year in North Carolina and another in Washington, D.C. This meant separation and long commutes. I started teaching Persian at the university, initially for only a couple of hours a week. Soon I was carrying a full teaching load. It was very satisfying work. I was eager to share my love of Persian language and literature with the students, and I formed strong bonds with many of them.

  In 1985, Shaul was offered a professorship at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, not far from Washington. We moved again and purchased a house in Potomac, Maryland; but for the next few years I continued to teach at Princeton, and Shaul and I took turns commuting between Princeton and the Washington area.

  In 1992, my teaching came to an end. I used two back-to-back fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson Center to write my book Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran’s Islamic Revolution. Based on interviews, the book profiled a number of Iranian women and the strategies by which they coped with the revolutionary upheaval in Iran. At the end of my Wilson Center fellowship, Robert Litwak, who directed the Division for International Studies, asked me to join his team on a part-time basis to start a small project on the Middle East. I plunged into my new task with energy. We began very modestly, but within a few years, the Middle East Program was one of the most active in the Washington area. We organized seminars, lectures, and conferences and invited speakers and participants from the Middle East, including Iran. I was pleased to be fostering dialogue between Iranians and Americans. I never imagined, in my wildest dreams, that such work could be construed as subversive by the country of my birth.

  But as Ja’fari’s summons on that January morning reminded me, this was precisely the prospect I faced as I prepared for another round of interrogations at the Intelligence Ministry.

  4.

  THE INTERROGATION

  MR. JA’FARI HAD GIVEN ME an address in affluent north Tehran, off Africa Avenue. I realized when I stepped out of my taxi that this was a building I knew, even though I had never been inside. Before the revolution, it had been the home of a member of one of Iran’s leading industrial families. The house had been modeled after the Petit Trianon, the eighteenth-century palace Louis XV had built for his mistress Madame de Pompadour at Versailles, outside Paris. Expropriated by the new regime after the Islamic Revolution, it had been used for a time as a rehabilitation center for prostitutes. Rooms where the family had lived, raised children, and entertained their well-heeled guests were now a Ministry of Intelligence interrogation center. The walls around the garden were topped by barbed wire, naked and jagged against the blue Tehran sky.

  The Intelligence Ministry has houses like these—anonymous, tucked away in residential areas—scattered about Tehran. The ministry, friends told me, even has rooms and suites in hotels, to keep an eye on foreign visitors and fellow Iranians. It was not uncommon, they said, to be summoned to a hotel for questioning.

  I went not to the main gate of the “Petit Trianon” but, as instructed, to a side door, which had perhaps served as the servants’ entrance in the old days. A small sign by the door said only Passport Office—the kind of circumlocution beloved by the Intelligence Ministry, as if they wished to hide from Iranians and even from themselves the nature of their reprehensible business. Ministry of Intelligence offices in various government buildings were called “the
President’s Bureaus.” My interrogator, Ja’fari, referred to himself and was known to others as the karshenas, “the specialist.” His superior didn’t have a name at all and was known simply as Hajj Agha, an honorific for a man who had performed the pilgrimage to Mecca.

  I rang the bell. The door was opened by remote control. A young soldier in a glass cubicle set aside the book he was reading, took down my name and other particulars, carefully noted the time of my arrival, and pressed another buzzer to open a door to my right. I hardly knew what to anticipate.

  I walked into a large, windowless waiting room. It was furnished with easy chairs and a sofa. In one corner a TV was broadcasting a program on some Iranian province; unread newspapers sat on a coffee table by the sofa. A man I took to be the receptionist sat behind a desk, on a slightly raised platform facing the door. To his right, a closed door led to what turned out to be a series of interrogation rooms. I went up to the receptionist (I realized only later he, too, was a senior intelligence officer) and gave Ja’fari’s name. He was untypically polite, even standing as I walked in the room. “Why does Mr. Ja’fari want to see you?” he asked. I explained what had happened to me on the night of December 30. He listened very carefully. “Everything will be okay,” he said. “But please answer the questions they will ask you truthfully.” I nodded.

  He invited me to have a seat. I chose the brown sofa closest to the exit, despite knowing that the door was locked, and that I would leave only when they decided to let me go. I recalled the Persian saying: “Your coming is in your hands, but your leaving is in the hands of God.” In my case, leaving was in the hands of the Intelligence Ministry’s agents.

  The room was warm. I removed my raincoat and sat in the black robe I was wearing over my pants and T-shirt. As usual, I was early, nervous that Tehran’s chaotic traffic would make me miss my appointment. I spent a desultory half hour waiting for Ja’fari, unable to concentrate enough to read the day’s headlines. The door opened, and a woman wrapped in a chador walked in. She went straight to the receptionist and in a loud voice said, “When will you let go of my brother? You have held him long enough. I have not seen him since you took him in. What are you doing to him?” My heart sank. The building, I thought, must have its own detention facility. I had heard reports that the Intelligence Ministry, the Revolutionary Guards, the Basij paramilitary forces, and shadowy vigilante groups maintained their own detention centers all over the city.

  The door opened again to let in a young man who seemed familiar with the place, as if he had been here on numerous occasions. He was soon summoned inside by a middle-aged man in a dark suit, sandals, and no tie. Through the now-open door behind the receptionist’s desk, I caught a glimpse of Ja’fari, carrying his laptop case on his shoulder, moving toward an interrogation room. My turn had come. The man behind the desk called my name, “Khanum Esfandiari”—Ms. Esfandiari—and directed me to the room Ja’fari now occupied.

  MR. JA’FARI

  I walked in through the open door and heard Ja’fari’s unmistakable voice: “Salaam”—Good morning. His salaam was curt, elided to one syllable. He was sitting behind a long desk; his laptop was already open before him and he was removing papers from an attaché case, which sat on the floor next to his chair. He asked me to tell him again what had happened on the night of the robbery. He had heard my account before and was probably trying to catch me in inconsistencies. Instead, I saw an opening. “I am very disturbed,” I said. “I need my passport. I want to rejoin my family.” Since I was a resident abroad, I insisted, they should be able to issue me a new passport in a few days. I also asked his help in retrieving my belongings. “The men who robbed me were rude; they threatened me. How can such a thing happen on the road to the airport?” I had by now reluctantly concluded that agents of the Intelligence Ministry had staged the “robbery.” Ja’fari’s summons had hardened my gnawing suspicion into certainty. I wanted Ja’fari to know that I suspected the truth.

  Ja’fari was unmoved. “Where you live is of no importance. We don’t have first- and second-class citizens in the Islamic Republic.” The law, he noted, says an Iranian has to wait six months to replace a lost or stolen passport. “That is how long it will take.” As to my belongings, he referred me, as he had done before, to the agahi, the detective branch of the national police. I felt certain that Ja’fari and his colleagues had already combed through my belongings, dividing my clothes and knickknacks among their wives.

  With the formalities over, Ja’fari began to question me in detail about my career in Iran before the revolution, including my years with Kayhan (this once relatively liberal newspaper had become the organ of the most hard-line elements in the Islamic Republic and a mouthpiece for the security services), with the Women’s Organization of Iran, and with the Shahbanou Farah Foundation.

  Ja’fari questioned me about each of these activities, but I sensed he was going through the motions. “Skip that,” he would bark about any parts of my career that he couldn’t use against me. Naturally he focused on the fact that the honorary head of the WOI had been Princess Ashraf, the shah’s twin sister, and that the queen herself had been the moving force behind the foundation for which I later worked. “Oh, so you worked for the royal court,” Ja’fari remarked with his usual smirk. He tried to link my work for women’s rights before the revolution thirty-five years earlier with the current women’s movement in Iran—a movement to which the intelligence services were hostile. The previous summer a number of prominent female activists had been arrested during a demonstration demanding broader rights for women. They had been charged and were awaiting trial.

  It was four in the afternoon by the time Ja’fari was finished with my employment history. I returned to my mother’s and called Shaul. The line was very bad; I suspected they were already tapping the phone. Access to e-mail and the Internet was also erratic, probably for the same reason. I spent an uneasy night and reported again the next morning, as instructed, to the “Petit Trianon.”

  “CONSPIRACIES”

  Except for the receptionist, the waiting room was empty. Ja’fari showed up late, as he had done the previous day—an act of deliberate discourtesy designed to upset me and to underline that he was in control. After we settled down, Ja’fari leaned back in his chair and said, “Let’s talk about Markaz-e Wilson—the Wilson Center.”

  I reminded him I had taught Persian language and literature at Princeton before I came to the Wilson Center. “We know about that,” he said with a dismissive wave of his hand. He cared little for my ten years at Princeton. He wanted to know everything about the Wilson Center: the composition of its board of directors; the names, responsibilities and backgrounds of the director, the deputy directors, and the heads of the programs; the budget and the organizational structure. He even made me draw an organizational chart. “Who are these people?” he demanded. “Write everything you know about them.”

  I knew little about the earlier careers of my colleagues at the Wilson Center other than what I picked up casually from conversation. As to the Wilson Center director, Lee Hamilton, he impressed me with his leadership style. Invariably courteous and considerate, he exercised authority quietly but firmly. Yet he had an easy relationship with his staff. He lunched with us in the Wilson Center dining room almost every day, making sure to move around the tables to chat with many different groups of people. His door was always open, but I had little need to see him often because he delegated well and gave his program directors considerable autonomy. While we could count on his unstinting support, I learned that he did not suffer fools or substandard work. I came to admire his excellent judgment and his willingness to speak his mind, even if this ran against conventional wisdom. These qualities were amply evident in The 9/11 Commission Report and in The Iraq Study Group Report, both of which he coauthored and which examined the U.S. handling of domestic security after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and of the Iraqi occupation after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

  But as I told Ja’
fari, as to Hamilton’s earlier career, I knew only what I had read in the papers: He had been a congressman for many years and had chaired the House International Relations Committee. He had been appointed president and director of the Wilson Center after retiring from Congress. When I wrote down that bit of information, Ja’fari’s eyes lit up. He leaned back in his chair as he always did when he imagined he had reached a turning point in the interrogation. “Well, first the Congress, and now the Wilson Center,” he said, as if he had led me to concede a point of great significance. The “revolving door” between the U.S. government and Washington think tanks and research centers was one of Ja’fari’s obsessions—proof that the administration shaped and directed the policies of these institutions. The appointment of Hamilton to head the Wilson Center after he left Congress confirmed his suspicion. “Appointed by whom?” he asked me belligerently.

  Motioning to the amateurish organizational chart I had drawn, I wondered what possible interest it was to him that David Biette was head of the Canada Institute, or that Blair Ruble was the head of the Kennan Institute. But Ja’fari focused on the names. “Is he Jewish?” he asked. “Is she Jewish?” I said I did not know. “Can’t you tell by the name?” he persisted, as if I were denying the obvious. My answer was still no.