A THEATER OF THE ABSURD
Ja’fari’s voracious appetite for information—almost all of it already in the public sphere—seemed insatiable. Like some manic agent of the Soviet secret police or the East German Stasi, he was intent on amassing detailed information, no matter how insignificant, on every Iranian I had ever known. Along with his colleagues, he imagined that if he piled up enough information and stitched it together in charts and timelines, he could finally figure out America’s plan for overthrowing the Islamic Republic.
I took Ja’fari’s questions one by one and wrote my replies bent down on the low table in front of me—an exercise that was playing havoc on my back. Ja’fari, in the meantime, swiveled left and right in his chair and fiddled with his cell phone, which seemed to be ringing all the time. In a rare light moment, I told him I felt I was in a doctor’s office. On the phone, he spoke in unexpressive monosyllables. I gathered that in addition to being an interrogator, he was some kind of a teacher, maybe, I thought, in night school. “Yes, we will meet for class,” he would say into the phone. “No, we won’t meet today.” (He later informed me he was a university professor.) Occasionally, he walked out of the room and took a call in the hallway, out of my hearing. At times, he received a text message in English and, bizarrely, asked me to translate it for him. One of his text messages was a quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson; other messages were in a similar vein—a colleague sending him tidbits of American and worldly wisdom.
I became sharply attuned to his methods. He would ask me the same question again and again, sometimes days apart, hoping to catch me in an inconsistency or to wear me down. In order to disorient me, he would jump from topic to topic. One minute he would be detailing my husband’s hostility to the Islamic Republic and his supposed Zionist and AIPAC connections; the next minute he wanted to discuss Lee Hamilton: his political party affiliations, his appointment to head the Wilson Center, and his selection as co-chair of the 9/11 Commission and of the Iraq Study Group.
He repeatedly tried intimidation. “We will keep you in Iran for years,” he threatened. “We can make life difficult for you.” He claimed the Intelligence Ministry was in possession of incriminating documents against me, so sensitive that “we will show them to you in another place,” clearly implying Evin Prison, where “you won’t be free to come and go as you do now.” Repeatedly, he reminded me that no one could help me. “The key is in your hands,” he told me on another occasion. “But on sensitive issues, you don’t cooperate.” Only if I “confess,” he insisted, would I be let go, allowed to go home.
He asked questions that were wildly off the mark but sinister in their implications. “Tell us how the U.S. intends the overthrow the regime,” he repeatedly asked. “How often does Hamilton go to Congress and the State Department to get his orders and pass them on to you?”
His other technique was to quote selectively and out of context and to twist the meaning of what I or others had said or written. One day he triumphantly produced a sentence from the blurb on the back cover of my book Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran’s Islamic Revolution. The sentence read, “She and her informants describe strategies by which women try and sometimes succeed in subverting the state’s agenda.” The words conjured up all kinds of nefarious plots in Ja’fari’s head. “What e-sterategy?” he asked rhetorically, using the Persian pronunciation. “What subversive acts? What did these women want? Ha! To overthrow the regime. This was their agenda, and you encouraged them.”
He produced a 2004 talk I had given at the Washington Institute. He had underlined the last sentence of my remarks, in which I said the invasion of Iraq had “a sobering effect” on many Iranians. I concluded that “most Iranians would prefer talks with the United States over confrontation, on the one hand, or a U.S.-led regime change on the other.” He didn’t understand the structure of the sentence, and it drove him into a paroxysm of accusatory fury. “You are saying people want regime change,” he insisted. We went back and forth, arguing at length. I could not get him to understand the English.
When I was first summoned to the “passport office,” friends assured me I had nothing to worry about; it was the routine hassle of replacing a lost passport. When I was forced to report to the Intelligence Ministry, I was told Ja’fari was finishing up, that while I was clearly being harassed, I would never be arrested. But I now realized Ja’fari was building a case against me, not winding down. I knew I was right to fear the worst, and I relayed my anxieties to Shaul. “They are planning a show trial, confession, and a jail sentence,” I e-mailed him in January. Again in early February I wrote: “You are not aware how they are building a case against me…. My gut feeling is the next step is Evin [Prison], incarceration, and appearing in court.”
Shaul and I still stuck to the strategy of avoiding press coverage, publicity, or any statement about me by the Wilson Center, which we were convinced would backfire, bringing even harsher treatment from the hard-liners, but it was proving difficult. “I had another call from a newspaper today,” Shaul told me on the phone in mid-February. “We cannot keep the story out of the press much longer.”
COPING
Facing a barrage of intimidating questions, day after day and week after week, I developed strategies and mechanisms to cope, to protect myself. This was not an idle exercise on my part. Ja’fari had threatened to put me on trial. As I e-mailed Shaul on February 12, Ja’fari was laying the groundwork for charges against me. Each morning I tried to anticipate the day’s questions. I struggled to recall events going back five, sometimes ten and twenty years, in case Ja’fari asked. I asked my assistant at the Wilson Center for material in anticipation of the new and unreasonable demands Ja’fari was bound to make. Each evening I carefully went over in my mind the course of the day’s interrogation, trying to discern where Ja’fari was headed and what traps he had laid for me, and making sure I had not inadvertently slipped up somewhere.
From the beginning, I decided to provide the information Ja’fari asked for, no matter how routine. I occasionally reminded him that everything he wanted to know was already on the Web. But I did not volunteer information he did not ask for. There was no point in adding grist for his interrogation mill.
I also made it a point never to allow false accusations or inaccurate characterizations of myself or Shaul to go unanswered. On the other hand, I refused to get involved in discussions about my husband’s political views, his writings, or remarks he had made on Iran or Middle East issues. My husband’s views were his own, I insisted. I could only speak for myself. I took a similar position regarding views others had expressed at the Wilson Center.
Ja’fari would underline sentences in the text of remarks I had made or talks others had given at the Wilson Center and ask me to read these, out of context, into the record. I always made sure to copy down the longer passage in which these sentences were embedded in order to provide context, to show there was balance in the presentations. He routinely referred to my replies to his questions as “confessions.” I made it a point in my written responses to correct him and to substitute the word “answer” for “confession.”
I also avoided getting involved with Ja’fari in broader discussions, say, on American policy or—a subject dear to his heart—currently fashionable political theory and analysis. For example, Ja’fari wanted to discuss American policy toward Iran, and invited me to describe the major issues between Iran and the United States. I kept my answers brief. I could not discern his intentions with this line of questioning and, frankly, discussions with him on almost any subject tried my patience.
Ja’fari fancied himself something of an intellectual. He was familiar with some of the theoretical literature on revolutions, the nature of democratic transitions, the durability and vulnerability of autocratic regimes, and the makings of civil society. In the West, this literature, once confined to the university, had gained currency outside academia after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of democratic regimes in the
former Soviet empire. Ja’fari was also familiar with the names of some leading political theorists, such as Crane Brinton and Theda Skocpol on revolution, Francis Fukuyama on the so-called end of history and the emergence of democratic polities, and Michel Foucault on forms of Western hegemony and the hegemonic power of various forms of discourse.
Ja’fari, I assumed, had encountered this literature in university courses, or perhaps in classes at the Intelligence Ministry, or through exchanges with other intelligence services. The Russian intelligence services, with whom Iran’s security agencies were in contact, had theories about the causes of the “velvet revolutions” that were taking place in their former empire. They regarded them as the work of outsiders, specifically of the United States. Iran’s intelligence officers seemed to share these suppositions. Ja’fari often employed a faddish vocabulary that smacked of the university classroom. He may also have been reading Iran’s more serious newspapers and journals, which introduced these thinkers and their ideas to a wider public. He wanted to discuss these ideas and thinkers with me, either to show that he too was a well-read intellectual, or in order to lead the discussion back to the subject of my interrogation: what the United States planned to do in Iran, how I envisioned Iran’s future, how I thought political systems evolve, and where my political preferences and inclinations lay.
I studiously refused to go down this path. I am by nature a practical person. I do not have a theoretical bent. I had not studied the people Ja’fari mentioned. I had no interest in getting involved in a discussion of abstract issues with secret police interrogators; and I did not want Ja’fari and his colleagues to twist something I might say on politics in general into another charge against me. Whenever Ja’fari tried to discuss “ideas,” my ready answer was “I have not read Foucault,” or “I have not read Fukuyama.” I often simply said, “I have no idea what you are talking about.” This proved endlessly frustrating to Ja’fari. In one session, he taunted me with evidence of my supposed inadequacies. Recalling the interrogation he had conducted the previous year of Ramin Jahanbegloo, the Iranian political philosopher who in 2006 had spent four months in Evin Prison, he spat, “We used to ask Mr. Jahanbegloo one question, and he wrote seventy pages. We ask you a question and you hardly write seven lines!”
HIZBOLLYWOOD
Amid the grim and grueling interrogation sessions, I had my moments of amusement. Ja’fari once asked me to tell him all I knew about the two famous “Zionist” foundations, the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. I burst into laughter. Clearly he had no idea that Henry Ford was no friend of the Jews. A fellowship I had been given by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation aroused his suspicions. “Why did General MacArthur give you a fellowship?” he asked, confusing General Douglas MacArthur with the founders of the family foundation that shared a name but nothing else, and seemingly unaware that General Douglas MacArthur had died more than forty years before. He also asked me to tell him about the Council on Foreign Relations, “where American foreign policy is made.” The CFR brings together prominent American academics, journalists, officials, and former officials for a discussion of foreign-policy issues. It is a weighty organization, but it is not a secret sanctum where official U.S. policy is determined. I happened to be a member of the CFR, and for Ja’fari that was proof that I knew of the workings of the small cabal that forged American foreign policy behind closed doors. All I had to do was tell him how it was done.
One morning Ja’fari confronted me with a talk given at the Wilson Center by a Lebanese-American scholar, Marwan Kraidy, titled “Hizbollywood: Hizbollah’s Information War Viewed from Lebanon.” Marwan was making a play on words, combining Hizbollah, the Lebanese Shi’ite opposition group supported by Iran, with Bollywood, the term for the highly successful Indian film industry, based in Mumbai. Marwan wished to illustrate Hizbollah’s skill in employing the media and publicity techniques to win adherents and support for its cause. Humor, however, was not Ja’fari’s strong point. He insisted that “Hizbollywood” was derogatory, designed by the Wilson Center to ridicule Hizbollah. He lectured me for fifteen minutes on Hizbollah’s military successes against the Israeli army. I waited for him to finish, then tried to explain Marwan’s wordplay. Ja’fari dismissed my clarification with a cough, a smirk, and a shrug.
I never made any headway with Ja’fari. How does one persuade a man with Ja’fari’s mind-set that the Ford Foundation, which had given grants to my program, is not part of a “Zionist conspiracy”? How could I convince him that my husband was not an Israeli agent? Wasn’t Shaul, after all, a Jew? I could repeat ad nauseam that the Wilson Center had no secret budget; he remained certain we did. The idea that Congress could fund the Wilson Center’s operating budget and not dictate its policies was alien to his mental universe. To rebut the charge that the Wilson Center was complicit with the U.S. government in trying to undermine the Islamic Republic, I pointed out that Lee Hamilton was coauthor of the Iraq Study Group report. It had recommended engagement and dialogue with Iran, not confrontation, counter to Bush administration policy. Ja’fari dismissed this inconvenient fact with a wave of his hand: “The recommendations are a sham,” he said, “just a ploy to gain a foothold inside Iran.”
HAJJ AGHA
Despairing of getting me to “cooperate,” Ja’fari also tried handing me over to his senior officer, Hajj Agha, who was presumably better qualified to get me to talk. I had two lengthy telephone conversations with Hajj Agha. My first conversation took place during the earliest days of my interrogation at the Intelligence Ministry headquarters. Ja’fari dialed a number on his cell phone and handed the phone to me. “Hajj Agha wants to talk to you,” he said. Hajj Agha had a deep voice and was invariably courteous, although an undertone of threat was implicit in everything he said. In that first conversation, he tried to impress on me the seriousness of my situation and to disabuse me of the idea that anyone could intercede on my behalf. “You have powerful friends in this town,” he said, mentioning the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations, Javad Zarif, who had tried to intercede on my behalf. “Forget about them. They can’t help you. No one can help you.” I felt as if he had slammed shut the door through which one last ray of light had been visible, plunging me into total darkness.
My second telephone conversation with Hajj Agha—he never showed up in person—took place near the very end of the Intelligence Ministry phase of my interrogation. Once again Ja’fari dialed his cell phone and handed it to me. Hajj Agha noted in a matter-of-fact way that he had gone over my answers carefully and was not satisfied with them. He referred again to the American plan to overthrow the Islamic Republic. “Just imagine a puzzle,” he said, using the English word, for which he seemed unable to come up with a satisfactory Persian equivalent. “You have all the pieces in your head. Just put them together and give it to us. Tell us the mechanism, describe the model for us,” as if there was a one-size-fits-all, do-it-yourself kit for bringing about “soft” revolutions. I found the conversation bewildering; I honestly did not understand what Hajj Agha was talking about, and I told him so. “Besides,” I asked Hajj Agha in exasperation, “what does all of this have to do with me?” If there was a “model,” I knew nothing of it; if there was a plan, I was not part of it. He was clearly unhappy with what he regarded as my unhelpful attitude.
He continued on this ominous tack: he invited me to “help” them save Iran from the disruptions America planned for it. “Tell us how to immunize the country from the onslaught of foreign intervention,” he said. This was a line Ja’fari had used three days earlier. “You are the doctor,” Ja’fari said. “How do you cure this?” It was now Hajj Agha’s turn to ask me, more insistently, for suggestions. He wanted to know what I thought about the problems Iran was having with the United States and how best to handle the exchange of scholars and NGOs between the two countries. “You don’t have to answer now,” he said. “Go home and think about it, and put down your thoughts in writing.” Before hanging
up, he repeated what he had said earlier: my responses were not satisfactory. “If you cooperate, I can give you your passport in ten minutes,” he said.
My passport in ten minutes! At least, I thought with grim satisfaction, Hajj Agha has unwittingly admitted that my “stolen” passport is sitting in his desk drawer.
A TAXI DRIVER’S TALE
By the time I left the Intelligence Ministry after this conversation on the evening of February 13, it was dark, and the streets were deserted. A hard rain was falling, and I didn’t have an umbrella. The new “assignment” Hajj Agha had given me was troubling. It meant sitting up again into the late hours. Besides, I hardly knew what to write in response to the “your answers are not satisfactory” mantra. I needed, as always, to find a form of words that allowed me to preserve my integrity and also get me out of the clutches of my interrogators. I feared anything I wrote would only give them new material to use against me. I looked up at the sky; not a single star was visible. Where are the angels? I thought. Who is going to rescue me from these people?
I could not find a cab, not on the street, not at the taxi agency I normally used, not at a second storefront taxi service to which I was directed. All the taxi drivers had gone home, I was told, and wouldn’t return because traffic was bad. As if the fates had conspired against me, I slipped in the pouring rain and bruised my legs and arm. I finally chanced on a cab at a third taxi service. In the taxi, the young man cursed his stupidity when he discovered how far he had to go. I promised him four times the usual fare.
The drive home took two and a half hours in the rain and the hopelessly snarled traffic, as the driver tried one highway, avenue, and side street after another. Eventually he stopped muttering and grumbling under his breath, settled back, and started to talk. For the next ninety minutes, he entertained me with an account of his life and work, his loves and aspirations.
My Prison, My Home: One Woman's Story of Captivity in Iran Page 9