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

by Haleh Esfandiari

  I didn’t realize at the time that two branches of the Intelligence Ministry were feuding over me, one ready to let me go, the other determined to hold on to me. Only the good news registered with me that morning. I raced home to share it with my mother. I called Shaul and told him, “I think it is over.”

  THE RAID

  On the morning of January 19, I woke up feeling lighthearted. It was a brisk and brilliantly sunny Tehran morning. The usually noisy street was quiet on Friday, the Iranian sabbath. No vans were unloading goods; no impatient drivers pressed down on their car horns; schoolchildren were not clambering down the stairway on their way to school. Even the two noisy young boys in the apartment above ours were mercifully silent.

  I walked to the corner of the street and took a cab to the home of my friend Shideh. We went for a walk in the large garden of her apartment complex. Shideh had made a nazr—a vow Iranians make to themselves to engage in a charitable or religious act if their prayer is answered. Shideh had vowed to give money to a charity when I was reunited with my family. Several friends had made a similar nazr. My mother had promised herself to make a donation to the school for the blind in Isfahan. Another friend had pledged that if I were let go, he would make a pilgrimage to Imamzadeh Saleh, a small shrine in Tajr-ish, in north Tehran.

  Refreshed by the walk, I returned home, and took Mother to a family lunch arranged by a cousin. Naturally, the first question my relatives put to me was “When are you leaving?” I thought I would be gone in a week, but not wanting to jinx things, I noted that it ordinarily takes six months to issue a new passport. “That is what I am told,” I said with a shrug.

  After lunch, Mother, feeling upbeat like me, wanted to walk. The sidewalks were bustling. Shops were crowded. Small cafés were full of young people. Street food vendors were hawking sandwiches, pretzels, pistachios, soft drinks, and fruit juice. Mellat Park, just across the street, was crowded. The park was a favored meeting place for young people and college students during the week, families on weekends, and political demonstrations when they were permitted. It was here that women’s rights demonstrators had been attacked, beaten, and hauled off in police vans earlier in the summer. On this Friday, the morals police, always on the lookout for young girls showing hair beneath their scarves or young men and women fraternizing, were out among the crowds, but they seemed inclined to leave people alone.

  After our stroll, two of my cousins came to the house for coffee. They left around four. I told Mother I would like to take a nap, a rare thing for me to do. An hour later I was startled from my sleep to see three strange men, disheveled and brutish-looking, staring into my bedroom, one of them with a video camera in his hand. “She is sleeping; she is not even dressed,” my petrified mother was saying. One of the men pushed her aside. “Get up,” he said to me. “Put on your chador.”

  I sat up, stunned, clutching my blanket around me. “I don’t have a chador,” I said, “and I need to get dressed.” He threw my raincoat at me. “Wear this.” I told him to close the door. I slipped my raincoat over my nightdress, put on my slippers, and came out of the room. The three men were standing in the living room. My mother was as white as a sheet: “Who are you? What do you want? Why are you here?” she kept asking. Like me, she thought they had come to arrest me. “Cover your hair,” one of them ordered. I was determined not to carry on a conversation with them in my nightdress and raincoat. “I need to get dressed,” I repeated. They exchanged glances, and the man who appeared to lead the team nodded. “Okay.” The commotion had attracted attention. A neighbor and friend of my mother’s stood next to her. The building caretaker stood at the door, anxiously peering in. The three men had insisted the caretaker accompany them to the apartment; they needed him to lead them to the right door and to give them legal cover. When my mother answered the doorbell, one of the men had stuck his foot inside the door to prevent her from closing it.

  I went to my room; picked up a blouse, a pair of trousers, my coverall robe, and a scarf; and got dressed. Back in the living room, the team leader showed me a search warrant. He would not even let me make a copy. “You can only read it,” he said. He made both Mother and me sign it. This done, he dialed a number on his cell phone and mumbled something into it. Within minutes, a smirking Ja’fari was at the door. “I told you it would get worse,” he said.

  Ja’fari took off his shoes by the door and asked which was my room. He hurried in with two of his henchmen. One man opened my closet and took out every scrap of paper I had there, and went through my clothes, including my underwear, and even my shoes. Ja’fari went through the papers, discarding some and keeping others. Among the papers he took was an invitation my parents had received to a reception to mark the coronation of the shah in 1969—nearly forty years earlier. To Ja’fari the invitation was no doubt damning evidence of connections to the royal court. Ja’fari, I noticed, showed no interest in a framed letter from the minister of agriculture of the Islamic Republic honoring my father for his services to the field of Iranian botany. Ja’fari was adept at cherry-picking his evidence.

  Ja’fari also started to put away some clear white wrapping paper I had brought with me from the United States. “Why are you taking that?” I asked. “There’s invisible ink writing on it,” he said. I laughed, despite the gravity of the situation. “It’s wrapping paper,” I said. “It comes in many colors.” Embarrassed, he left the wrapping paper behind.

  Of five or six books I had borrowed from a friend, he took a book on the Iranian revolution by the French scholar Yann Richard, a guide to the city of Tehran I had purchased at a local bookstore, a copy of the literary/political journal, Goft-o-Gou (Dialogue), and an issue of the official gazette that published full transcripts of parliamentary debates and to which I had a subscription. Ja’fari seemed to regard Goft-o-Gou as a subversive journal, even though it is sold at newsstands all over Tehran, and to think it suspicious that one should read the parliamentary debates, which are open to the public and broadcast on radio and television.

  Ja’fari also took my laptop computer and eyed with considerable suspicion the Skype phone attached to it. The phone can be used to make telephone calls over the computer at almost no cost. “Are you sending messages to anyone?” he asked. I explained that it was a computer phone; I used it to call my husband. He took the Skype phone with him too, leaving only the computer mouse on the table. The three men then searched my mother’s study, examined all her German books and the family pictures, and checked the bathroom. The whole operation was filmed by the man wielding the video camera, even while the group leader sat in the living room, incongruously trying to make small talk with my visibly trembling mother.

  Watching these trespassers moving about my mother’s apartment—opening our closets and drawers, pawing through my clothes and belongings, reading our family letters, casting a prowler’s eye over our family pictures—I was swept by conflicting emotions. I was scared, of course; they might cart me off to jail. I feared my mother might at any moment suffer a heart attack. I viscerally felt the violation of my privacy, almost physically, as if I had been raped. I felt a hatred for the men who were doing this to us, with an intensity that astonished me.

  Once they had completed their search, the men drew up a list of the items they were taking from us. They made my mother sign the list and walked out. “You will hear from us soon,” Ja’fari said. During the entire ordeal, the smirk had never once left his face.

  5.

  “THINGS WILL GET WORSE”

  JA’FARI CALLED THE VERY NEXT day, a Saturday, and instructed me to report on Sunday not to the “Petit Trianon” but to the central headquarters of the Intelligence Ministry. The change of venue was deeply disturbing; it signaled a ratcheting up of my interrogation and my case. At the Petit Trianon, there was still the pretense that I was being questioned in the “passport office.” At the Intelligence Ministry’s headquarters, that pretense was abandoned. Friends who knew something about the workings of the intelligence c
ommunity told me that at the senior levels of the Intelligence Ministry, two factions were engaged in a tug-of-war over policy—and over me. The more moderate group argued that holding and interrogating me was of no benefit to the Islamic Republic and would only damage Iran’s image abroad. I should therefore be let go. A hard-line faction believed they had caught the “big fish,” a mastermind in the plot to overthrow the Islamic Republic. The interrogation, therefore, should continue until I talked.

  The moderate faction had prevailed on the previous Wednesday, when I had been told at the “passport office” that my interrogation was over and that I was free to go. But the hard-liners succeeded in overturning that decision. The Friday raid on my mother’s apartment and the change in venue meant that I was now in the hands of the hard-liners and the target of a serious intelligence investigation. Friends and acquaintances who had generously and courageously interceded on my behalf understood perfectly well the meaning of this new phase. Their behavior changed. With one or two exceptions, they began to keep their distance; they could not risk being associated with me. One schoolboy friend of President Ahmadinejad’s who had vouched for me through his contacts in the National Security Council and the Foreign Ministry even received a message from the president: “Tell him to stop beating the drum of the Americans,” he was told. I understood why people stopped calling and wished to avoid me. But this sense of abandonment was especially hard for me to bear. I felt alone, forsaken and without support in my own country.

  AT THE INTELLIGENCE MINISTRY

  The Intelligence Ministry had located itself in the building that used to serve as the headquarters of SAVAK, the secret police under the monarchy. It was a nondescript hulk of a building, off Khajeh Abdol-lah Ansari Avenue, in a lower-middle-class district in the eastern part of the city. I got out from my taxi a few blocks from the building, a practice I followed each day over the next several weeks, whether I came by cab or a friend drove me. I didn’t want the cab service I used to spread the word around my mother’s neighborhood that I was going to the Intelligence Ministry every day. I didn’t want friends who dropped me off to come to the attention of the ministry. Such precautions, I discovered, become second nature when you are entangled with the secret police.

  I had done my best to look inconspicuous. I wore my long, navy raincoat over a black robe and black slacks. A black scarf covered my head. I wore no makeup, not even neutral nail polish. Yet I felt and no doubt looked out of place. I was the only woman in a robe and scarf; all the other women on the street were covered head to toe in chadors. I even walked differently, I realized.

  I arrived early and used my spare thirty minutes to walk around the neighborhood. It was not an affluent part of the city. There was the usual storefront taxi service, a traditional greengrocer, a food store, a small shop selling stationery and household goods—brooms, dustpans, cleaning cloths. The window of the stationery store was dirty; the notebooks, pencils, and pens on display were covered with a thin film of dust. The grocery had not made the transition to the modern-style supermarkets that proliferated in affluent north Tehran. The vegetables and fruits—small tangerines and apples, carrots, potatoes and beans, piles of greens—were of modest quality. Here, there was none of the broccoli, brussels sprouts, and pineapples that pleased the palates of the capital’s wealthier residents. The canned goods were local, not the American or European foods imported or smuggled across the border from Turkey or across the Persian Gulf from Dubai.

  People were going about their morning business: buying bread, queuing up for milk, selecting vegetables, taking a child to school. I felt an uncharacteristic pang of envy at these people doing ordinary things on an ordinary day. Ordinary had disappeared from my life. My days were defined by the demands of interrogators. I could return to my mother’s apartment every night, but I could not go home to Shaul. For a moment my mind drifted to my morning routine in Washington. I would get up at six, and by the time I came downstairs, the aroma of the cappuccino Shaul had prepared for me filled the kitchen. While having my coffee, toast, and feta cheese, I would speak to Mutti on the phone and glance at the headlines in the Washington Post. By seven, Shaul and I were out of the house, Shaul headed for George Mason University and I for the Grosvenor or Bethesda Metro station, from which I took the subway to work. By nine in the morning, I would have already been in the office over an hour reading and writing e-mail, going over my schedule, planning my day.

  I often spent my lunch hour walking briskly on the Washington Mall, and I walked every evening and weekend in our Potomac neighborhood. But today I found myself maneuvering between potholes on the sidewalk in an ugly part of Tehran. All I could see in my dark mood were the shabby apartment buildings on both sides of the road and the joub, or open canal, with its muddy water, in the middle of the street.

  I felt the country I had cherished all my life was no longer mine. I had loved Iran with a passion. I loved its brilliant blue sky and its brown earth. I loved the desert and the sea. Nothing to me was more beautiful than the clear night sky of my ancestral home in Kerman. The great ruins at Persepolis had made me proud; the poverty in Zahedan had made me weep. The beauty of Isfahan’s mosques took my breath away. Yet these horrible people had made me feel alien in my own homeland.

  I WENT UP THE steps of the ministry with considerable trepidation. Will I ever get out of this place? I thought. Will I ever again see Shaul, my daughter, Haleh, and my grandchildren again? I was utterly alone. Suddenly I heard Shaul, my pillar of strength in difficult times, and his familiar, “Pull yourself together, Plums.” I swallowed the lump in my throat and rang the doorbell.

  A voice over the speakerphone asked my name; an automatic buzzer opened the door. I stepped in to find a man behind a glass kiosk next to a metal detector with a conveyor belt. I showed the man the faded copy of my birth certificate I used as ID, placed my bag and book on the belt, and walked through the metal detector. The man muttered that the conveyor belt was not working, and after fiddling with it for a while, he gave up and handed me my bag and book unin-spected. I followed him to a tiny, windowless room; there was a desk and chair for the interrogator and a combination chair and desk, the kind seen in schoolrooms, for the person under interrogation. I could have touched both walls from where I was standing. A friend later described being interrogated at length in this very room, sweating profusely in the heat and under the glare of lights in his face and eyes.

  Ja’fari suddenly walked in, with his ubiquitous laptop, and motioned for me to follow him. He led me to a larger, airier room. The two windows were barred. There was a large desk, behind which Ja’fari sat, and a shabby sofa, which I used. On a low, round table in front of the sofa was a box of biscuits, a pitcher of water, and paper cups. “For you,” Ja’fari said, pointing. The water looked stale and gray; I never drank it. He also pointed to the bathroom in the corridor, which I never used, fearing hidden cameras. I waited for him to begin. In my morbid state of mind, I thought of the Canadian-Iranian journalist, Zahra Kazemi, who had died under interrogation four years earlier in Evin Prison at the hands of these same people. Her case made world headlines. She was hurriedly buried by her killers; her family was denied a request for an autopsy. Will I suffer the same fate? I asked myself.

  EMPTYING ME OF INFORMATION

  The Intelligence Ministry, I learned, conceives of its interrogations as taking place in two stages. The first stage is ta’yyin-e hoviyyat—“establishing identity,” or collecting every bit of information possible about the individual under investigation. The second stage is takhliyyeh-ye ettela’at, a term which in Persian has a much more sinister meaning than “debriefing,” the term from which it presumably derived. It literally means, “emptying of information.” This is what Ja’fari set out to do with me at the Intelligence Ministry’s headquarters. He came armed with new material he had downloaded from the Internet: articles I had written, and talks that people had given at the Wilson Center on Iran’s nuclear program, economy, parliamentary
and presidential elections, foreign policy, relations with Syria and the United States, and support for groups like Hizbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories. He dumped all this material in front of me. He said once again, “We will go over each of these items, one by one.”

  At the “Petit Trianon,” Ja’fari had concentrated primarily on the Wilson Center’s Iran program. Here, he wanted to cover the whole Middle East. Over a period of two or three weeks, he demanded material on all the meetings we had held over four or five years on Israel and the Palestinians, Syria and Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. We had organized a few workshops for Iranian women in Tehran and two or three in provincial capitals. We had organized similar workshops in Amman and Beirut for women from the Arab states. Ja’fari wanted dates, duration, names of participants, names of trainers, sources of funds. We had cosponsored three meetings on Iran with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University; these too became a focus of Ja’fari’s attention, as did a series of meetings we held on the Iran-Iraq war, part of a larger cold war project that was examining the Korean War, the Cuban missile crisis, and other conflicts, using archival material and bringing together some of the original key players.

  Shaul, clear-minded and logical, warned me not to fall into the trap of explaining what organizations other than my own were doing. He also strongly urged me not to do translations for them. “Tell them to do their own homework,” he wrote. But Shaul could not appreciate the relentless pressure I was under in the interrogation room. I was facing the possibility of formal charges, imprisonment, and trial. Ja’fari had a nasty, vengeful streak. I didn’t want to open another door of dispute with him; I was focused on fighting him on more important fronts.