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

by Haleh Esfandiari

  I mustered whatever courage and anger I could: “If I intended to escape, I had four months outside prison to do so. I have no intention of running away, because all these charges are fabrications and false, and I will fight them.” Matin-Rassekh must have taken note of my ashen face. “If you cooperate and they are satisfied with your answers, you will be released sooner,” he said before ending the session.

  I only saw Matin-Rassekh once more, a month later, again late at night. I was reading when a guard showed up at my cell door and told me to get ready for a “visitor.” When I expressed annoyance that Matin-Rassekh came at such a late hour, the guard said, “This is not late. Sometimes they summon people at two in the morning.” A few minutes later, I saw his thin silhouette by my door. He asked if I had any complaints, but I didn’t bother to answer. Again I was blindfolded and guided downstairs, to his office.

  Matin-Rassekh shoved a paper in front of me and asked me to sign it. It said, in effect, “I, Haleh Esfandiari, waive the right to have a lawyer.” Inwardly, I felt a little emboldened, a bit triumphant. I had told Shaul that, if arrested, he should proceed immediately with the idea of having Shirin Ebadi as my lawyer. I knew Shaul would do everything to persuade her to take my case. This sheet of paper, I concluded, meant Shirin was now representing me and they wanted her off my case. “If my family decided I need a lawyer, then I need a lawyer. I will not sign this paper,” I said. I took the sheet from Matin-Rassekh and wrote on it: “I waive the right to a lawyer only for the next three days. After that the lawyer hired by my family has the authority to represent me.” If they were fearful of the publicity Shirin Ebadi would create in the international community, I had given them an opening, three days in which to release me. Since the next three days were holidays, when all government offices were closed, it wouldn’t matter if I had legal representation in this short interval.

  Matin-Rassekh moved from behind the desk and sat across from me on an easy chair. I could see he was furious. “I will never let this woman, this Shirin Ebadi, who works for foreigners, see your file.” Matin-Rassekh regained his composure. He said, “Kian Tajbakhsh is wiser than you. He followed our advice and refused a lawyer.” I shot back, “You people are accusing me of plotting to overthrow the regime and expect me not to have a lawyer?”

  Kian Tajbakhsh was the Iranian American academic who was a consultant to George Soros’s Open Society Institute and about whom I had been questioned. He was also being held at Evin. Matin-Rassekh had prepared a single document for both of us and had taken it to Kian first. He showed me Kian’s signature; I had no reason to doubt it was his. Kian had waived his right to legal counsel. I handed the waiver back to him. He understood that the subject was closed. “Do you have any complaints?” he asked. He was going through the motions. His question was a mere formality. “Yes,” I said. “I want to go home.”

  “No one is going to set you free or let you go home,” he replied.

  I turned my back on him, fighting my tears. “Are you done?” I asked.

  His reply, dismissing me, was a hiss of suffused anger. “Yes,” he said.

  The next day, at an interrogation session, I told Ja’fari and Hajj Agha about the nighttime visit. “I don’t want that man swooping down on my cell unannounced like Superman anymore,” I said. Hajj Agha had a long chuckle, savoring the depiction of the magistrate as Superman. I never saw Matin-Rassekh again.

  THE RISE OF THE INTELLIGENCE MINISTRY

  The Ministry of Intelligence and Security, in whose hands I found myself, was heir to the shah’s secret police, SAVAK. The Islamic Republic took over SAVAK’s offices and buildings; it used SAVAK’s files against those it chose to treat as enemies. It even appropriated SAVAK’s name, except that the agency was upgraded to a full ministry. But the Intelligence Ministry was also a creation of the revolution. Its personnel came from within the revolutionary ranks. Its repressive apparatus cast a longer shadow over society; and it used methods, such as the murder of dissidents, rarely practiced by the shah’s secret police.

  When the monarchy was overthrown in February 1979, the revolutionaries turned with fury on the members of the old regime, including cabinet officers, members of the military and police, and, of course, officers and operatives of SAVAK, whose agents had been the interrogators, jailers, and sometimes the torturers of the men who were now in power.

  In the weeks and months immediately following the victory of the Islamic revolution, widespread purges took place in the government, the army, and the security services. Hundreds and eventually thousands of men were brought before hastily convened revolutionary courts and then sent before the firing squads or sentenced to long prison terms. As a result, the shah’s intelligence service unraveled.

  In those chaotic early months, lines between interrogators, revolutionary court judges, and executioners were blurred. Judges were often interrogators and sometimes even executioners. The new rulers were obsessively fearful of counterrevolution, foreign intrigue, spies, and rival factions, yet had little real intelligence to guide them. Willy-nilly, the nucleus of what would become the new secret police emerged: interrogators, investigators, men who made it their business to root out anyone they believed to be plotters, agents of foreigners, or dissidents. This air of improvisation continued through the first year of revolutionary terror and prevailed even in 1981–82, when the men around Khomeini turned against some of the radical left-wing groups and thousands were executed in a second wave of terror.

  However, in 1983, the Majlis, or parliament, passed a law establishing the Ministry of Intelligence and Security, formalizing what until then had been makeshift and improvised. The ministry was given wide powers of information gathering and investigation. It was charged with uncovering conspiracies; espionage; sabotage; coup plans; and incitement to unrest threatening to the political system, security, and territorial integrity of the country. It was permitted to share intelligence with approved foreign intelligence services. All government agencies were required to place their personnel and information at the disposal of the Intelligence Ministry. Provision was made for coordination of intelligence between the ministry, the Revolutionary Guards, and other security agencies. The ministry’s budget was exempted from the regular government audit. The minister was to be a cleric of high rank. While, as a member of the cabinet, the minister was in theory subject to parliamentary oversight, in practice, he became the appointee of the supreme leader and answered to him, not to the Majlis. Thus was born the security apparatus of the Islamic Republic.

  Ali Fallahian, a cleric and the first minister of intelligence, proved to be no slouch in silencing dissent and in the use of extralegal methods. Mistreatment and torture of political prisoners and forced public confessions were, from the beginning, features of the post-revolution repressive apparatus. They became institutionalized once the ministry was in place. In 1983, for example, two leaders of the Tudeh, Iran’s Communist party, were produced on television to confess to high treason, betrayal, belief in an “irrelevant ideology,” “foreign ways of thought,” and serving the Soviet Union’s interests.

  The ministry gained greater freedom of action and expanded its scope of operations in the post-Khomeini period. Abroad, it inserted its agents into Iranian embassies under diplomatic cover and assassinated Iranian opposition figures. In 1989, Abdol-Rahman Qassemlu, leader of Iran’s Democratic Party of Kurdistan (DPK), was lured to a meeting in Vienna with Iranian government emissaries and shot and killed, along with two associates. Three years later, his successor as leader of Iran’s DPK, Sadeq Sharafkandi, was murdered while at dinner with associates at the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin. In March 1996, the German federal prosecutor issued a warrant for the arrest of Minister of Intelligence Fallahian for his alleged role in planning the assassination. In the following year, a German court found one Iranian, the alleged leader, and two Lebanese nationals guilty of killing Sharafkandi and his associates and implicated Iran’s highest officials in the assassination. In a particul
arly grisly killing in 1991, Iranian agents murdered Shapour Bakhtiar, the shah’s last prime minister and leader of an opposition movement, slashing his throat in his own home in a Paris suburb. Other opposition figures were killed in Paris, Geneva, Istanbul, and elsewhere.

  At home, the Intelligence Ministry launched a multipronged attack on intellectuals, writers, and journalists whom it considered liberal, secular, or Western in orientation and who, along with members of the clerical establishment, advocated freedom of expression and criticized the manner in which power was exercised in the Islamic Republic. The ministry undertook an ideological campaign designed to paint Westernized intellectuals and artists as unpatriotic, un-Islamic, a threat to Iran’s national and religious identity, and the willing or unwitting agents of foreigners. It sent out death squads to murder writers, journalists, and academics. It arrested others and subjected them to show trials and prison terms.

  The ideological campaign was spearheaded by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. In a series of statements and speeches he warned against the Western “cultural onslaught” that, he said, was aimed at undermining Iran’s national and Islamic values. The national Iranian television network followed up with the notorious biweekly program titled Hoviyyat, or Identity. Inspired by the Intelligence Ministry, the TV series targeted prominent liberal intellectuals, depicting them as morally corrupt, tools of Western cultural imperialism, and disloyal to Iran and Islam. On the program, the portrait of Benjamin Franklin on the American hundred-dollar bill dissolved into the face of the Iranian intellectual under attack.

  Domestic killings proliferated as well. In November 1994, the well-known writer and satirist Ali Akbar Saidi-Sirjani died while in police custody. He had been arrested on trumped-up charges of spying, homosexuality, and drug use. The body of the translator Ahmad Mir-Alai was found in an Isfahan alley, far from his usual haunts, in October 1995. More deaths followed. The Intelligence Ministry seemed to be running amok. In that same year, the driver of a bus carrying twenty-one writers and intellectuals to a conference in Armenia jumped off the bus, leaving it to roll toward a cliff with its dozing passengers. Miraculously, one of the passengers, who awakened, was able to pull the brake and save the others from death or serious injury.

  In November 1996, the writer and editor of the journal Adineh, Faraj Sarkuhi, “disappeared” before boarding a plane at Tehran Airport to visit his family in Germany. He suddenly reappeared at a press conference seven weeks later with an implausible explanation for his absence. In a letter later smuggled out of the country, Sarkuhi revealed that he had been subjected to interrogation, beatings, and intense psychological intimidation over several weeks. He was made to confess that he had been spying for France and Germany and that he had given his journal an ideological slant dictated by the French and German embassies. He also was forced to confess to illicit relations with several women. So severe was his treatment, Sarkuhi wrote, that he had begged his interrogators to kill him.

  THE KHATAMI PRESIDENCY

  Mohammad Khatami sought to curb such activities by the Intelligence Ministry after he was elected president in 1997. Khatami was Iran’s unexpected president. When he ran as a candidate of the left-wing parties and of the smaller of two clerical associations in Iran, few gave him a chance against the front-runner, Ali Akbar Nateq-Nuri. Nuri was speaker of the outgoing parliament. He was the candidate of the leading clerical association in the country and the majority party in the Majlis. He was endorsed directly or indirectly by the leaders of the Revolutionary Guards, by Friday-prayer leaders in much of the country, by the influential Seminary Teachers of Qom, and, indirectly, by the supreme leader himself, who said that Iranians would not vote for “an American president.”

  But Khatami ran on a platform that emphasized individual freedoms, tolerance for a variety of views, and openness to the outside world. This message resonated powerfully with the electorate, particularly among young people and women. In office, Khatami greatly loosened controls on the press and political activity. Several newspapers were launched, providing a new forum for vigorous discussion of major political issues before the country. New political associations were formed. The country experienced a revival of political life.

  Khatami also took on the Intelligence Ministry, insisting on the removal of the minister, Fallahian; and when a new round of assassinations took place, he succeeded in forcing the ministry to clean house. Its hard-liners, however, simply moved elsewhere, setting up a parallel intelligence operation within the Revolutionary Guards and other institutions. From their new centers, these people continued their harassment of intellectuals and their attempts to repress Khatami’s nascent reform movement. They were not alone in this endeavor. They had allies within the conservative wing of the regime, eager to cripple reform, prevent meaningful change, and crush their political rivals. They enjoyed the support of the supreme leader and the active cooperation of a cluster of pliant courts, judges, and investigating magistrates within the judiciary and the revolutionary courts. The police and security services cooperated, breaking up lectures by reformist intellectuals as well as protests and student demonstrations. Kayhan continued to serve as the mouthpiece of the hard-liners in the intelligence community, and national television provided them with a forum when they needed it.

  Khatami’s first term saw a tug-of-war between the reformers and the hard-liners. The mayor of Tehran, Gholam Hossain Karbaschi, a staunch supporter of the president, was tried on trumped-up charges of corruption, sentenced to a lengthy prison term, and barred from holding public office for ten years. Khatami’s interior minister, Abdollah Nuri, was forced out of office, then tried and imprisoned for the views expressed in his highly popular newspaper, Khordad. A nearly successful assassination attempt left Khatami’s chief political strategist, Sa’id Hajjarian, physically incapacitated and with severely limited powers of speech. Several reformist newspapers were closed down, although the new government’s liberal policy in issuing publishing licenses allowed them to reopen within days under new names. When Tehran University students staged rallies in July 1999 to protest the closure of one of these newspapers, club- and knife-wielding thugs broke up the protests and trashed the university dormitories where the demonstrations had taken place. The police commander and seventeen officers charged and tried for the attack on the dormitories were all acquitted.

  Killings of dissidents resumed in November 1998. The leader of the small Nation of Iran Party, Dariush Foruhar, and his wife, Parvaneh, were found gruesomely murdered in their apartment. In the weeks that followed and in what Iranians called “the serial murders,” half a dozen other political activists and intellectuals were found dead under mysterious circumstances. The chain of killings terrified the intellectual community—as they were intended to. The newly freed press, however, would not let the issue die, and Khatami insisted on an investigation. In the end, the Ministry of Intelligence admitted that its own agents were responsible for the killings but blamed a rogue operation. Sa’id Emami, who for years had been one of Fallahian’s principle deputies, was arrested as the ringleader, along with a number of other Ministry of Intelligence agents. However, Emami was conveniently found dead in the shower of his prison block, allegedly having committed suicide by swallowing a bottle of hair remover, in effect shutting down the “investigation.”

  Khatami’s political party and its allies went on to win a majority in the 2000 parliamentary elections, and many prominent conservative candidates were soundly defeated. Khatami himself comfortably won a second term in 2001. But by then, a full-scale onslaught on the reformist camp was under way. In April 2000, Supreme Leader Khamenei launched a sharp attack on the reformist press, which, he said, had become the “bases of the enemy” and instruments of “enemy agents,” causing “discord and division” among the people and undermining Islamic sanctities. A severe crackdown on the press followed. Fourteen newspapers and weeklies were suspended in April. In a ten-week period, more than twenty publications, constituting virtually t
he entire reformist press, was shut down. Several prominent newspaper editors and journalists were tried and sentenced to multiyear prison terms, on charges of “undermining state security,” “insulting Islam,” and “confusing” public opinion. Among the journalists were Emadeddin Baghi and Akbar Ganji, whose investigative journalism implicated the Intelligence Ministry and unnamed senior officials in the 1998 “serial murders” and other assassinations.

  Judiciary officials also arrested and tried several writers who had participated in a conference on Iran at the Heinrich Böll Institute in Berlin, allegedly for insulting Islamic sanctities and undermining national security in their remarks. In a clear warning to the intellectual community, six of the participants were sentenced to prison terms ranging from four to ten years. In 2003, the Iranian Canadian photographer Zahra Kazemi died while under interrogation at Evin Prison. It was a further indication of the impunity enjoyed by the security services and their judicial accomplices that, parliamentary pressure notwithstanding, no one was ever tried for Kazemi’s death, nor was any serious investigation into the circumstances leading to it ever carried out.

  When Ahmadinejad was elected president in 2005, the repressive apparatus of the state had easily survived Khatami’s attempted reforms and was in full resurgence. The new president further strengthened the hand of the most radical hard-liners. Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi, the newly appointed minister of the interior, had served as deputy minister of intelligence during the “serial murders” and was implicated in the mass execution of dissidents in Evin Prison in 1988. Mohammad Hossein Safar-Harandi, Ahmadinejad’s minister of culture and Islamic guidance, had been the managing editor of Kayhan, the newspaper with the closest links to the security agencies and the bane of liberal intellectuals. His new position gave him considerable say in policy toward the press, book publishing, and the arts. Gholam Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i, the new minister of intelligence, had served as a judge of the revolutionary courts, presiding over the trial of Tehran mayor Karbaschi and the trials of several reformist members of the clergy. The offices he held over the years, including a spell as the judiciary’s representative to the Intelligence Ministry and membership in a high-level intelligence committee, placed him at the nexus of cooperation between the judiciary and the Intelligence Ministry. A principal proponent of the theory that the United States was plotting a “velvet revolution” in Iran, he was now in a position to act on his suspicions.