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

by Haleh Esfandiari

  Around noon, Ja’fari asked if I wanted lunch. I declined. I didn’t much feel like eating. He shrugged, gathered up his papers, and walked out, closing the door behind him. He left a few notes on his desk, perhaps to test whether I would sneak a look. I didn’t. I was sure they had a hidden camera in the room.

  Ja’fari continued his questioning in the afternoon. “We know all about the obvious stuff,” he said. “Now write down the hidden agenda. Tell us about the meetings you had behind closed doors in Hamilton’s office.” I told him I knew of no hidden agenda, and that I had never been at a single private meeting with Chairman Hamilton. He didn’t believe a word I said. “You’re talking about the surface things, the superficialities,” he insisted “We want to know about the core, the kernel, the hidden layers. Tell us about the hidden layers.” With alarm, I began to see the shape of Ja’fari’s fantasies and the case he was trying to build against me. He imagined that the Wilson Center was an agency of the American government, that we were implicated in some nefarious plot against the Islamic Republic, and that we routinely held secret meetings to plan strategy to this end. His references to secret meetings and hidden agendas were absurd, but the implications for me were menacing.

  At four in the afternoon, after repeatedly accusing me of being uncooperative, Ja’fari called it a day. He made me sign the bottom of each of his interrogation sheets and each of my answers. As I was getting ready to leave, he said ominously, “Your answers are not satisfactory. The interrogation will continue every day for the rest of the week.” I collected my coat and the book I had brought with me and walked out. I was drained and exhausted from seven hours of interrogation, the tension, and the tedious back-and-forth. My hand ached from hours of writing; the cramped position in which I had to sit and write had taken its toll on my back. The receptionist allowed me to use his phone to call my mother. I wanted her to know I was leaving in case I met with another “accident” on my way home.

  Outside, there was snow on the ground, and the sky was gray and bleak. The gathering twilight mirrored my inner gloom. I stopped at a friend’s house. I needed to rest, to compose myself, lest my mother sense my anxiety, and to take stock of my predicament. The interrogation was taking a frightening turn. I was being entangled in a web of the Intelligence Ministry’s making and I could not see my way out.

  “SMOOTH AND HORRIBLE”

  From my mother’s apartment, I e-mailed Shaul about the interrogation. “It was smooth and horrible,” I wrote, thinking of Ja’fari’s style, which managed to be both slick and sinister at the same time. “If they don’t put a stop to this now, I am stuck.” Over the next several days I bombarded Shaul with similar messages. I insisted Shaul, or someone, conjure up a powerful official to order Ja’fari to stop and the Intelligence Ministry to let me go. I was being unrealistic; the Intelligence Ministry was not often answerable to others, but I was desperate enough to clutch at straws. “Another day has passed and I feel drained and lost,” I e-mailed Shaul on January 9. “I see myself in that horrible place,” I wrote, picturing Evin Prison. Two days later, again referring to Ja’fari, I wrote, “Either one stops him now or he plans to keep me for months—yes, for months.”

  Shaul had learned from a friend with good contacts in Iran that I had fallen into the hands of counterintelligence, one of the most hard-line units in the security apparatus. “No one,” he was told, “can tell these people to lay off.” It was urgent that we stop Ja’fari before they had fabricated a serious case against me, yet our friends and acquaintances in Tehran were academics: university professors, researchers, members of think tanks. We had met them at conferences in the United States. They had given talks at the Wilson Center and other Washington institutions, spent time at American universities, or taken part in Track II Diplomacy—meetings between nongovernment Iranians and Americans. They had little influence and no power, but they knew people in the government who we hoped might in turn know people in the security services. They could vouch for me and the Wilson Center, explain the nature of my work.

  At the same time, Shaul and I decided that, at this stage, we would keep my plight out of the American and foreign press. Friends who supposedly knew how these things worked in Iran almost invariably advised us to try to resolve my problem with the Intelligence Ministry quietly. Not unreasonably, we feared that an outcry abroad would only make the Intelligence Ministry more stubborn and determined to “prove” I was being interrogated with good reason.

  While Shaul placed calls in Washington, I telephoned Nasser, a good friend and a Tehran university professor, and described the worrisome direction the interrogation was taking. “These people don’t understand the nature of my work,” I told him. I hoped his contacts could explain to the Intelligence Ministry that the Wilson Center was a nonpartisan think tank, not an arm of the U.S. government. On the contrary, as hostility toward Iran was widespread in official circles in the United States, and proponents of overthrowing the Iranian regime became plentiful, the Wilson Center at least provided a forum where a variety of views on Iran could be heard, including the views of scholars, civil society activists, and journalists from the Islamic Republic. “Tell them that,” I said. I called Mostafa, a researcher at an Iranian think tank who had once visited the Wilson Center, and urged him to see what he could do. We were also hoping that Javad Zarif, the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations in New York, who was acquainted with me and the Wilson Center, would weigh in with the authorities in Tehran.

  Virtually everyone we spoke to, including Nasser, came back from their inquiries with the same message: they could do nothing to help. The interrogation had to take its course. “Tell them the truth,” they advised me pointlessly, as if I had any intention of doing otherwise, certain that once the Intelligence Ministry had completed their inquiries, I would be released. They believed nothing untoward would happen to a visiting scholar with an American passport. But they were not with me in the room with Ja’fari. They could not see the menace in his eyes or sense his almost palpable intent to harm me.

  In the two weeks following my initial encounter with Ja’fari, I returned nearly every day for interrogation at the “Petit Trianon.” These sessions could last nine or ten hours; occasionally Ja’fari stopped after three or four. The daily routine was always the same. I would report at nine a.m. Ja’fari—usually late—would begin with a few oral questions and answers; he would then require me to respond to his extensive questions in writing. The process was tedious and tiring. Ja’fari would hand me a loose sheaf of papers. On top of each page, the words “Interrogation Sheet” and a file number appeared in Persian. I entered my name and the date on each page. Ja’fari would write down his question; I would write down my cryptic reply. Ja’fari would read each answer, write down another question, and hand the sheet of paper back to me. By the end of each day, we managed to fill pages and pages of questions and answers. Each day, I was required to sign every page. While I wrote, Ja’fari fiddled with his cell phone or with the tape recorder that he sometimes brought with him; he sipped at the tea which the tea boy brought him several times a day. Sometimes, he stepped outside briefly to take a call on his cell phone.

  At noon, he would break for lunch. I refused to have anything. The tea boy—actually an old man—was distraught that day after day I did not eat. One day, he brought me two tangerines. “For the sake of your forebears, for the sake of your children, eat,” he said. “You’re wasting away.” I took the two tangerines because I did not want to break his heart, but I was too tense to eat. While Ja’fari lunched, I remained alone in the interrogation room, mentally going over the ground we had covered, revisiting the questions and answers, anxious lest he pick on a stray fact or an innocent remark and use it to accuse me of some subversive activity. In preparation for Ja’fari’s next barrage of questions, I tried to recall events, meetings, and discussions stretching back nearly ten years.

  In this environment of menace, threat, and intimidation, Ja’fari continued to grill
me on the Wilson Center and the activities of my Middle East Program. He had Googled the Wilson Center, and he had also Googled me and Shaul and a few other people who had spoken at the Wilson Center. He would often arrive in the morning with downloaded information, which he then expected me to explain to him. For example, on my third day at the “Petit Trianon,” he plunked down several invitations to meetings we had e-mailed to our list of participants. He then demanded a description of each meeting, the reason for the choice of topic, the identity of the speakers, and the content of the talks. “We will go over every single meeting your program held,” he told me, and I envisioned—accurately as it turned out—days and days of interrogation regarding meetings at the Wilson Center going back many years, whose details I could not possibly remember.

  Except for the earliest years of the Middle East Program, all the information about our programs was readily available on the Web. But due to laziness, inability to navigate our Web site, or inadequate English, Ja’fari and his colleagues did not do their homework. It was left to me to provide him with lists of our meetings, initially on Iran and later on several other countries, with summaries of talks delivered at these meetings, and with a great deal of other material, all of it in the public domain and readily available on the Wilson Center Web site.

  Shaul and I established a workable but ridiculously time-consuming routine. I would get home at night and call or e-mail Shaul, explaining Ja’fari’s requests. He would contact my Wilson Center assistant, Azucena Rodriguez, who would compile the information and e-mail it either directly to me or to Shaul. Slow Internet connections and a bad telephone line meant agonizingly erratic transmissions. Since Ja’fari’s English was inadequate, I would spend hours translating this material into Persian. In the morning, after only a few hours’ sleep, I handed the material to Ja’fari, who would use it for a new barrage of questions. I was thus forced to facilitate my own agony.

  There was virtually nothing that didn’t feed Ja’fari’s insatiably suspicious mind-set or that he couldn’t fit into his conspiracy theory about the Wilson Center’s involvement in a plot aimed at the Islamic Republic. To Ja’fari, a meeting at the Wilson Center to analyze the results of Iran’s parliamentary elections or to discuss the aspirations of the younger generation in Iran—the everyday subject of numerous newspaper articles—was evidence of an attempt to understand the Islamic Republic with the motive to undermine it. From a long lecture on Iran’s economy, he would zero in on a few sentences critical of Iran’s economic policy, highlight them, and then instruct me to read these sentences, and only these sentences, into the interrogation record. Despite the mass of information I produced, Ja’fari continued to insist I was not revealing everything. When I suggested he check our Web site himself, he replied that there were closed meetings not reflected on the Web site.

  “YOU CAN’T FOOL ME”

  The fact that the Middle East Program was, at its inception, called the Middle East Project, and that I was first designated a “consultant,” caused me endless problems. To Ja’fari “consultant” had sinister implications, and “project” implied an elaborate plan, entrusted to me and designed to subvert the Iranian government. He pronounced “project” as perozheh, Persianizing the French form of the word. He would lean back in his chair and narrow his eyes and say, “Now tell me, how were you going to piyadeh—implement—this perozheh?” The explanation was simple. The Middle East Program initially was very small, had no staff aside from myself, and did not qualify as a full program. It was designated a “project” because no one knew what else to call it, but to Ja’fari’s conspiratorial mind, simple explanations did not wash.

  Grinning as if to say, “You can’t fool me,” he proceeded to provide me with his version of the “facts.” “Let me tell you,” he said, “you were recruited, not hired. You were given the assignment because they wanted you to focus on Iran. If they didn’t have a plan for Iran, why did they choose you, an Iranian woman, to run this perozheh?” I was insulted by his suggestion that I was hired not because I was qualified but out of ulterior motives, as if no Iranian, particularly a woman, merited such an appointment; but Ja’fari cut me short. “What did they instruct you to do when they hired you?” he asked. Despite myself, I burst out laughing, recalling that I was hired part-time, on a meager budget, and initially asked to organize just one meeting a month. My laughter upset him. “What did Hamilton instruct you to do when he hired you?” he persisted. He was disappointed to learn I was hired not by Hamilton but by his predecessor, Charles Blitzer. “Mr. Hamilton inherited me,” I told a deflated Ja’fari.

  He was also convinced that I had a close relationship with AIPAC, the strongly pro-Israel research and lobbying organization, and that I traveled frequently to Israel. I had no connection to AIPAC and had never been to Israel, but Ja’fari refused to believe me. “Check my American passport. You will see I have never traveled to Israel,” I told him. Ja’fari had a ready reply for that inconvenient fact as well. The Israelis, he said, issue visas to “their agents” on separate pieces of paper. This was one of the few times I allowed myself to show the seething anger I felt toward Ja’fari. He was implying I was a spy. “Don’t you ever accuse me of being an agent of Israel or any other foreign country,” I snapped. Ja’fari was taken aback, but this did not prevent him from reverting to similar charges later in the interrogation. “You are married to a Zionist,” he told me on one occasion, referring to my Jewish husband. “You work for the Zionists.”

  Ja’fari hammered away at a perceived connection between the Wilson Center and the CIA. “Who are these men in uniform who come to your meetings?” he asked, I assumed in reference to some photo he’d come across online. “Who are the CIA people? Who comes from the State Department and the Defense Department?” Except in a general sense, I really had no idea who came to our meetings. Our meetings are public; our e-mail list is extensive. As to Ja’fari’s CIA preoccupation, I tried humor. “Even if CIA people attend our meetings, they don’t give me their names and particulars. You haven’t told me your real name; and I still don’t know where you work.” Ja’fari was not amused. In what he considered another “gotcha!” moment, he produced an invitation to a conference sponsored jointly by my program and the program Judith Yaphe ran at the National Defense University (NDU). Judith, Ja’fari discovered through Google, had worked as a senior analyst on the Middle East and the Persian Gulf at the CIA; but she had quit over a decade ago to join the NDU. To Ja’fari, she was still CIA. Besides, National Defense University was a name calculated to feed Ja’fari’s conspiracy theories.

  Ja’fari was interested in the other institutions with which we had cooperated, including the Hoover Institution at Stanford and the Center for International Studies at M.I.T. But it was the National Endowment for Democracy and the Open Society Institute (OSI) that earned Ja’fari’s most intense scrutiny. The OSI was part of the Soros Foundations, founded by the philanthropist George Soros, and dedicated to promoting open societies throughout the world. The foundation had been active in newly independent countries of the former Soviet Union, including Ukraine, Georgia, and Kazakhstan. In these countries, mass popular movements led by intellectuals and opposition parties had succeeded in bringing down Soviet-style governments. These movements became known as “velvet revolutions” or “rainbow revolutions” because of their peaceful, nonviolent nature and because protesters had adopted a particular identifying color—orange in the Ukraine, rose in Georgia, for example. In the twisted mind of Ja’fari and his colleagues, the Soros Foundations had caused these velvet revolutions, and since George Soros was a Jew, a shadowy, Jewish conspiracy hovered in the wings. Because the OSI had funded some of my programs on Iran, it followed that the Wilson Center was part of a conspiracy to bring about a velvet revolution—a “soft overthrow,” as Ja’fari sometimes put it—in Iran as well.

  Such was the web in which Ja’fari was trying to entrap me. Initially, I was bewildered by Ja’fari’s references to “velvet revol
utions” and “soft overthrows.” The terms were not familiar to me in Persian, and I had not followed closely the upheavals in Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, which preoccupied Ja’fari. But with a sense of mounting panic, I grasped the thrust of Ja’fari’s thinking. He pressed me to confess falsely that I was part of the conspiracy. When I refused, Ja’fari tried to intimidate me. “Khanum Doktor Esfandiari,” he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm as he addressed me with my full title in Persian. “For twenty years you have come and gone and plotted. This is now finished. We will keep you here. We will take you before a judge.”

  The prospects were terrifying. “They are planning a show trial, a ‘confession,’ and a jail sentence,” I e-mailed Shaul on January 13. Over the telephone, Shaul tried to reassure me. “They won’t dare put you on trial,” he said, but I wasn’t convinced. Ja’fari tried another, even more sinister tack. He offered to leave me alone if I implicated the Wilson Center. “They want me to say the center is part of a network for soft overthrow [but that] I didn’t know and was fooled,” I said in e-mails to Shaul two days later. “I won’t say that…. I refuse to go down this line.” Shaul was in full agreement with me. “You must never take that road,” he said.

  The next day, after a particularly unsatisfactory session for Ja’fari, his parting words were ominous: “We are not satisfied with your replies. Things will get worse for you.”

  The next morning, Wednesday, January 17, when I reported at the “Petit Trianon” as usual, there was no sign of Ja’fari. It was the “receptionist”—who I now concluded was actually in charge—who met and spoke to me. “We called your mother’s apartment to tell you not to come in, but you had already left,” he said. “The interrogation is over. Go back home. Go to the passport office and get your passport.” I could barely suppress the sense of relief, the excitement, that was welling up inside me. Yet Ja’fari’s parting words still echoed in my head. “But the interrogator didn’t say anything to me about this,” I said. He paused very briefly. Perhaps I only imagined the hint of surprise in his face. “That is not a problem,” the man said. “Don’t hurry. Don’t contact them. Go have some fun, visit your friends, and wait for their call.”