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

by Haleh Esfandiari

  It was such men who now had me in their gun sights.

  “WE KNOW HOW TO HANDLE YOU”

  My daily routine varied little over my first weeks in Evin. The bell on the iron door separating the men’s block from the women’s block rang, echoing through our corridor and indicating a visitor was at the door. A minute later, one of the guards came to my cell door and told me to put on my chador and prepare for interrogation. At the door of the cell block, she told me to put on my blindfold. Ja’fari was waiting on the other side of the curtain.

  He led the way to the interrogation room, calling out instructions in a monotonous loud voice, as I followed in my blindfold: “turn left,” “turn right,” “go straight,” “watch out for the stairs.” He wanted to avoid an accident. Terrified I would fall, I tried to fix the route in my memory: one floor down, then left, down a second flight of stairs, across a narrow corridor crowded with men, left into a short corridor, and into the first room on the right. I discovered that if I pushed up slightly on my blindfold, I could see Ja’fari’s gray socks and sandals and follow his footsteps.

  The interrogation room was very small, with just enough space for a school-type chair-and-desk, at which I sat, and a larger desk with a cushioned chair for Hajj Agha or Ja’fari. One more chair and a coatrack stood in a corner. The walls were bare. No light came from the window near the ceiling. I assumed we were in a basement.

  The interview on my first day did not go well. Ja’fari started off by berating me for having been uncooperative and for withholding information. “We know how to handle you,” he said. “We will get every bit of information out of you. You will stay here as long as it is necessary.” He pointed to the pile of papers in front of him. He had my SAVAK files, he said, plus more recent reports. “We have a roomful of information about you.”

  Ja’fari again asked me to describe my past career and work in Iran: at the newspaper Kayhan, at the Women’s Organization of Iran, and at the Shahbanou Farah Foundation—ground we had covered in detail in the pre-Evin interrogations. By now I was familiar with his tactics. He wanted to catch me in a discrepancy. He wanted to wear me down. Repetition of this kind, I learned to my surprise, is in its own way disorienting. You tire of repeating the same stories. You actually want to have something new to say. You have to remind yourself not to stray from the facts.

  Ja’fari’s bullying led me, in turn, to defiance. We spent the afternoon in a frustrating back-and-forth. Ja’fari wanted to know about my colleagues at Kayhan. I wrote down the names of several colleagues—every one already dead. He was furious. “Don’t you know anyone who is alive?” he asked sarcastically. He asked me with whom we socialized in America. “We work such long hours, we don’t have time to socialize,” I replied. Surprisingly, he let it go. He introduced a woman whose name I did not recognize and wanted to know how well I knew her. Ja’fari identified her as a member of the Israeli embassy in Tehran before the revolution. He claimed I had met her on a number of occasions, but I had not. We continued this barren exchange for a while, with Ja’fari insisting I knew the woman and me not having the vaguest notion whom he was talking about. The subject of Israel led Ja’fari to again make the assertion that Shaul was a Zionist. I retorted, as before, that “I don’t answer any questions about my husband.”

  Ja’fari then handed me a sheet of paper and said, “Write everything you know about him.”

  Astonished, I asked, “About whom? About my husband?”

  “Yes,” he said, in a mocking tone and with narrowed eyes, “Perofessor Bakhash,” adding an extra vowel to “professor,” since Iranians find it difficult to pronounce two consonants together. I took the paper and pen and deliberately wrote only a few lines about Shaul’s career as an author and a university professor. By late afternoon I was tired, angry, and anxious at the bad turn the interrogation had taken. Ja’fari seemed to have tired of the interrogation, too. He offered me his cell phone: “Call your mother but don’t speak long,” he said. I called Mutti. I managed again to convey, without ever using the word, that I needed a lawyer.

  I put on my blindfold and followed Ja’fari back up the stairs and through the corridors to ward 209. “Stop!” he yelled at one point. I had almost banged my head on an overhead railing.

  Back in my cell, I practiced taking steps while wearing my blindfold. I taught myself to wear the blindfold so that I could see my feet and the ground in front of me. After that, I could follow Ja’fari quite easily; I don’t think he ever realized how much I could see.

  IN THE HANDS OF HAJJ AGHA

  When Hajj Agha took charge of the interrogation, as he increasingly did at Evin, I would have to sit facing the wall. I was not allowed to see him. “Under no condition are you to turn around,” Ja’fari warned me.

  I soon realized I was up against an interrogator very different from Ja’fari. Hajj Agha was almost always courteous—a small mercy, perhaps, but important in an environment of uncertainty and fear. Even if he was only playacting, at least he got things done. At our first session I complained that it was uncomfortable to eat and read sitting cross-legged on the ground. I was given a small desk. He saw to it that Mutti could bring me clothes, although she was never allowed to bring me medications and, except for two occasions, never food.

  Unlike Ja’fari, who often lied to me, Hajj Agha almost always kept his word. He let me know by way of the guards if he could not make it to an interrogation for which he told me to prepare. He apologized if he made a promise he could not keep. When I complained I couldn’t sleep with the lights on, he promised to take care of the problem, then apologized after he learned that the “lights on” prison rule could not be waived. With Hajj Agha I could sometimes make small talk, or even try a bit of humor; such exchanges were unthinkable with Ja’fari. Hajj Agha was also a more astute interrogator, aware that a gentler tone might yield better results than Ja’fari’s battering-ram approach. It wasn’t exactly a “good cop-bad cop” routine; I simply faced two different men, different in character, sophistication, and experience.

  None of this meant that Hajj Agha was any less threatening than Ja’fari. He accused me of endangering state security. He sought to intimidate me. He tried to wear me down by going over the same material again and again, jumping without warning from subject to subject, throwing out unexpected questions and outlandish accusations. He, too, resorted to the bluff: “Tell us about the meeting the three of you—Hamilton, Soros, and yourself—had to discuss Iran,” he said, as if a meeting that had never occurred was a well-known fact. Even more than Ja’fari, Hajj Agha elaborated repeatedly on the “plan” for the overthrow of the Islamic Republic of which he claimed I was a part.

  Day by day, I could discern no logical progression, no overarching organization, to Hajj Agha’s line of questioning. However, after several weeks, Hajj Agha appeared to me to be focused on three goals: to build the case against me personally, to nail down what he believed to be the American “plan” for Iran, and to lay out and have me endorse his characterization of the confrontation between Iran and the United States and the role each was playing on the world stage.

  Hajj Agha began his first interrogation session on a conciliatory note. The aghayun—the gentlemen—and the dustan—our friends—he said, referring to his superiors, were not satisfied with my answers. I was parsimonious with words, I wasn’t forthcoming; I hadn’t told them anything they did not already know. He cited the example of the more talkative Ramin Jahanbegloo, whom they had imprisoned and interrogated the previous year on similar charges.

  They had many documents, Hajj Agha said, proving my complicity in plans to overthrow the regime—documents so confidential, they could not show them to me outside of prison. He returned to this theme again and again. “This is a serious matter,” he said to me on one occasion. “You tried to help the enemy overthrow the Islamic Republic.”

  “By organizing conferences?” I asked him. I would have loved to catch the expression on his face, but all I could see was the
dirty wall before me.

  I gathered that the “roomful of documents” and “evidence” consisted of the pre-revolution SAVAK files; reports sent to Tehran by the Intelligence Ministry’s own spooks in Washington, D.C.; and what they had gleaned from their interrogation of Ramin Jahanbegloo. I knew Jahanbegloo well and respected his intellect and his work and had invited him to speak at the Wilson Center. In the interrogation transcripts which Ja’fari showed me, Jahanbegloo had been coerced into depicting me as a major player on the Washington scene and as the link between scholars, think tanks, and American government officials. I was adamant during my interrogation in rejecting this false characterization. The SAVAK files were thirty years old and obsolete. At Kayhan we had all known the middle-aged journalist who doubled as SAVAK’s khabar-chin, the derogatory Persian term for a hack informer. I was certain there was nothing even remotely incriminating in them, or in the misinformation from the Intelligence Ministry’s informers in Washington. This could easily be refuted, even though facts and logic did not exactly reign supreme in the interrogation room.

  I was determined to remain composed during these interrogations, and to answer calmly, even when provoked. Yet there were rough days. One morning when Hajj Agha accused me for the umpteenth time of endangering national security, my pent-up anger came spilling out.

  I was not endangering Iran’s national security by organizing meetings and inviting university professors, intellectuals, and members of NGOs from Iran to speak, I shot back at Hajj Agha in a deliberately angry tone. They loved their country. They opposed outside interference in Iran’s internal affairs and had criticized the allocation of money by Congress and the State Department to encourage regime change in Iran. They believed that the United States had made no effort to understand Iran’s vital security needs in the region.

  The Iranian government, I pointed out, is seen abroad as autocratic and repressive, Iran itself thought to be a country of hostage takers and terrorists. I showed Iranians who were moderate and reasonable to an American audience, men and women who could explain the rationale behind some of Iran’s foreign policies. Surely, I said, it makes more sense to have an Iranian scholar analyze the results of Iranian elections or the Iranian economy than to have an outsider who has never been to the country do so.

  “If this country can be destabilized by twenty of its scholars attending conferences, then how does Iran differ from a banana republic, or Afghanistan and the Arab countries you look down on?” I asked.

  Both Ja’fari and Hajj Agha were taken aback. They had never seen me talk at such great length or so angrily. After a moment’s silence, Hajj Agha recovered: “Well,” he said sarcastically, “you no doubt expect us to apologize and thank you for all you have done. Maybe we should award you the first prize at the Fajr Festival for the services you rendered to the Islamic Republic.” His sarcasm fell somewhat flat when I had to ask what the Fajr Festival prize was. (It is awarded to the best film at the annual film festival.)

  But Hajj Agha persisted with another tack. “Let’s accept that you were drawn into this plot to overthrow the regime unknowingly. Let’s assume you did not know what the real aim of the Wilson Center, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Soros Foundation was. You were snared into this chain of plots and plans simply because you were working for the Wilson Center; and you innocently became a tool in their hands. They used you to implement their sinister plans for undermining the regime.”

  I refused to go down that road, either. What plots? What plans? I demanded. Programs on other regions of the world at the Wilson Center and at hundreds of institutions around the United States were doing exactly what I was doing on the Middle East. In no other country was a single program director arrested. “You have a fixation with Iranians who work abroad and are successful at what they do,” I told him. The Islamic Republic harrassed Iranians but gave foreign scholars the red carpet treatment. “Morgh-e ham-say’e ghazeh,” I told him, using the Persian expression, The neighbor’s hen looks like a goose. So we went, back and forth.

  THE KAYHAN EPISODE

  Five or six days after my incarceration, Ja’fari and Hajj Agha showed me a fresh copy of Kayhan. A boldface headline above a lengthy story read: “Investigative Report by Kayhan: Who is Haleh Esfandiari?” I skimmed the article rapidly and with mounting panic. It was a vicious concoction of false accusations, distortions, and blatant fabrications.

  Claiming “documentary evidence,” it accused Shaul and me of working for the Israel spy service, Mossad. It claimed that I had converted to Judaism (an act considered apostasy in Islam and punishable by death) and that I had fled to Israel after the revolution and lived there for two years.

  The article went on to allege that I ran the “Iranian department” for the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC, on whose behalf I had organized a conference on Iran and invited President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert. There was a great deal more in the same vein. There was information in the article, even though patently false, that could only have come from the security agencies. The article was making a case for charges of treason against me.

  In the interrogation room I sat facing the wall as I read. I threw the paper back at Hajj Agha and Ja’fari: “I refuse to read such filth,” I asserted. “If I am free one day, I will take Kayhan to court.” Hajj Agha could see how upset I was and tried to calm me down. “Forget the article,” he said. “We just wanted you to see the adverse environment we have to deal with.” Having instigated, or possibly authored, the article, these men were now trying to pose as my protectors. I was having none of it. “This is your work,” I said, addressing Ja’fari.

  A few days after this incident, I was walking on the larger of two rooftop terraces available to the inmates when I saw another copy of Kayhan, neatly propped against the wall. Even at a distance I could make out the big black headline: “Mossad and CIA Network Uncovered.” Cut off from any news of the outside world, I would normally have seized the chance to read a newspaper. But this was obviously a clumsily contrived ruse designed to frighten and intimidate me. Perhaps I was mentioned in the article. Perhaps they wanted to implicate me in a CIA-Mossad plot or drag me into a discussion of these security services. Perhaps they thought reports of spy rings uncovered and spies arrested would lead me to “confess.” I continued walking, passing the newspaper every time I circled the terrace, but I pretended never to have seen it.

  At that afternoon’s interrogation, Hajj Agha asked me if I was pleased with my new access to the larger terrace for my daily walk. I thanked him for making the arrangement. “Did you see anything interesting on your walk?” he prodded.

  “Oh, there was a newspaper there, but I didn’t have my glasses and couldn’t even read the headline,” I said. I may have imagined his sigh of disappointment, but we all understood that they had tried a ploy, and failed.

  I later learned that, for Shaul, the Kayhan article, with its accusations of espionage, was particularly alarming. Since the newspaper was the organ of a hard-line faction in the Intelligence Ministry, Shaul feared that this article was laying the foundation for the Intelligence Ministry’s formal charges against me. Few of those victimized by Kayhan liked to tangle with it because it was so vicious in its tactics. But Shaul knew our hope lay in confronting Kayhan head-on.

  In an open letter, he refuted point by point each of the falsehoods in Kayhan’s article. He kept his rebuttal brief, factual, and unemotional. Kayhan, of course, never published Shaul’s open letter. But it was reported on Persian-language Web sites and one or two Iranian newspapers, by the Voice of America and the BBC, and by newspapers in the United States. After the rebuttal, Kayhan did not cease printing brief, snide remarks about me, but the newspaper’s large-scale attacks against me stopped, even as it continued to publish such libels against others. Perhaps Shaul’s pointed replies and his exposure of Kayhan’s sloppy reporting, distortions, and inaccuracies had had an effect. Perhaps the Intelligence Ministry itself had seco
nd thoughts about the wisdom of engaging in such blatant falsehood and anti-Semitism. In any case, Hajj Agha showed up in Evin Prison a few days after the publication of the article and said to me: “Such things are over and done with.”

  A COMPELLING BUT MAD LOGIC

  Outside prison, Ja’fari’s and Hajj Agha’s repeated references to “the triangle,” “plots,” and “conspiracies” seemed outlandish, even amusing. In solitary confinement, under interrogation, cut off from the outside world, accused of the most serious crimes against the state, I found these endlessly repeated assertions sinister: part of a world of secret cabals, plotters, and conspiracies in which I was supposedly involved without being aware of it. I had to be careful not to lose my grip on reality or to succumb to Hajj Agha’s deceptive view of the world.

  There was a simple, even compelling, but ultimately mad logic to Hajj Agha’s theory. It went this way: The United States wanted regime change in Iran; American officials had repeatedly said so. Congress had allocated funds for this purpose and the administration, no doubt, had additional, secret funds at its disposal. These funds were given to think tanks and foundations, such as the National Endowment for Democracy, whose mission was to advance democratization—in effect, regime change—in targeted countries. The think tanks and foundations were run by former high administration officials who often returned to government service through a constantly revolving door. It was hardly far-fetched to conclude that these men—part of a governing elite—pursued the same policy goals in thinks tanks as they did in the government, and that the Iranian scholars—many of them unqualified—whom they identified and selected for fellowships and conference participation were selected not at random but as part of a larger scheme.