But on the morning of my release, Matin-Rassekh called my mother himself. She couldn’t understand what he was saying and quickly summoned Farhad, who called the prosecutor back. Matin-Rassekh was now all sweetness and light. Mother and Farhad should come to the prosecutor’s office right away with the deed to my mother’s apartment, he said. “She can take her daughter home by five this afternoon.” Mutti and Farhad hurried to Matin-Rassekh’s office with the deed. He had set bail at 300 million tomans, or around $375,000, more than ten times the bail set by the first magistrate I had seen and before Matin-Rassekh took charge of my case. Mother put up her apartment in lien for this amount. After signing the papers and before leaving the office, Mutti, in her usual courteous way, walked back to Matin-Rassekh’s desk and thanked him for releasing me. I wondered if he was ashamed to look my mother in the face. Then I realized shame was not a sentiment a man like Matin-Rassekh often experienced.
PARADISE REGAINED
We walked into Mother’s beautiful apartment. It was spotless, and full of sweets and flowers. I walked from room to room, taking in her paintings, her Augarten china, her carpets. I sat in each of the armchairs, I ran my fingers over the kitchen countertops, luxuriating in the feeling of the familiar, of the ordinary. I telephoned Shaul and Haleh, and Hayedeh called before I could call her. I also spoke to Lee Hamilton. I told each of them how elated I was to be out of Evin Prison, but that I didn’t know if and when I could leave for home. I urged them to continue working for my departure. I was certain our phone was still tapped, so even at this moment when I wanted to say, and ask, much more, I had to choose my words carefully.
I spent a long time in the shower. I had to cleanse myself of Evin and its smell. I wanted to wash away the loneliness and anxiety. After the bath, I changed into fresh clothes. For the first time in 105 days, I wore an ironed pair of pants and an ironed T-shirt. It was a sensational feeling. I drank tea from a real china cup served on a silver tray. I wiped my mouth with a cloth napkin, not a piece of paper. Friends and family had heard of my release and began calling. Soon the telephone rang constantly. Flowers arrived—so many that the apartment reminded me of the Karaj botanical garden in the spring.
The doorbell rang, and to my dismay, I saw on the closed-circuit TV Ja’fari downstairs. He had called earlier. “Don’t worry, I won’t come upstairs. I just want to bring you your medicine,” he said. For some inexplicable reason, he insisted on delivering the medicine prescribed by the prison doctors, which I had never used at Evin. I dressed in a white robe and put a white scarf over my head and went downstairs. If they snatch me and shove me into a car, I thought, neighbors will see me more easily in the dark. Ja’fari was in a hurry to go home to his family. “I’ve never seen you smile so much as you did this afternoon,” he said. Ja’fari made my skin crawl even when he tried to be friendly. The smirk seemed permanently etched into his face, and I couldn’t erase from my memory the pleasure he had taken in tormenting me. He reached into the trunk of his car and handed me a bag of medications and left. The bag went straight into the garbage bin.
Friends came by and Mother asked me if she could invite a few to stay for dinner. I agreed. Mother laid out a beautiful table, with a fine tablecloth and her best china. She had ordered an excellent meal of rice and leg of lamb from a neighborhood restaurant. For the first time in three months, I broke with my meatless diet and ate a bite of succulent lamb.
That night I slept in a real bed, between real sheets, in a real nightgown. I laid down my head on a real pillow. It felt like paradise.
THE TSUNAMI
On the day after my release, a friend handed me a CD that her daughter had put together. “This will interest you,” she said. It was a collection of the many hundreds of news stories about me that had appeared during my incarceration. The CD included links to Web sites that had been dedicated to me and had campaigned for my release. That night I slipped the CD into a borrowed laptop and encountered, with growing astonishment, the huge media coverage and public interest my case had generated. There were letters from prominent scholars and intellectuals to Iran’s leaders, public statements by politicians calling for my release, petitions on my behalf signed by thousands of people, and interventions by human-rights organizations, women’s groups, and NGOs. From Baghdad to Brazil, from Paris to Pakistan and Tokyo, people had written about me and acted on my behalf.
In prison, I was unaware of any of this. I had never been allowed to telephone Shaul, and my mother never mentioned this sort of news on the phone since we knew our brief calls were monitored. In moments of despair, I even thought I had been forgotten. But I had not been. The tsunami Shaul had promised had occurred, and many had contributed to it. Shaul, Haleh, Hayedeh, and the Wilson Center staff later helped me piece together the larger picture. This press coverage and international attention, I realized, were important parts of the story behind my release.
Just before my incarceration, Shaul had concluded that silence and quiet diplomacy were doing us little good. Four months had passed, and I was still stuck in Iran. He had arranged to meet with Lee Hamilton and Wilson Center deputy directory Mike Van Dusen on May 8 to urge that we go public and discuss the best way of doing so. As it happened, I was arrested early on the morning of May 8, and by the time Shaul and the Wilson Center people met, I was already in Evin Prison.
Later that morning, Lee Hamilton had issued a statement expressing his dismay. He had addressed a hastily summoned press conference and had firmly rejected any suggestion I was engaged in illegal activities. “Iran is trying to turn a scholar into a spy,” he said. My arrest was widely reported that day, and press interest and coverage of my ordeal remained strong for almost the entire 105 days of my incarceration. The story of a sixty-seven-year-old grandmother held in solitary confinement in a notorious prison simply for having organized conferences on Iranian and Middle Eastern issues was in itself compelling. The Iranian government fueled press attention by the extraordinary allegations it made against me. As Shaul put it to me, “Every time we thought the story was dying, the Iranian government did or said something outrageous to reignite interest in your case.”
Within a week of my incarceration, the spokesperson for the judiciary, Ali Reza Jamshidi, announced that I was being investigated for “crimes against national security.” Two weeks later, he said I was accused by the Intelligence Ministry of espionage, activities against national security, and propaganda against the Islamic Republic. The Intelligence Ministry accused me of “seeking to topple the Islamic regime” and claimed my interrogation had allowed them to uncover “networks” and expose “subversives.” These accusations, if formalized as charges in an indictment, carried the death sentence. On May 12 Kayhan published its vicious attacks on me, and then, eight days later, on Shaul, accusing us both of being Zionist spies, and agents of Israel and the CIA. In July, national Iranian television aired the program In the Name of Democracy. Each of these events generated a spate of press reports.
My incarceration also evoked memories of the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran in 1979, when American diplomats were taken hostage; journalists were quick to draw parallels. Robin Wright, the Washington Post diplomatic correspondent, wrote that “the United States has not faced such tension over Americans held in Iran since the 1979–1981 hostage crisis, when 52 Americans were held for 444 days.” Other journalists and commentators speculated that the Iranians intended to swap me for the “Irbil five.” In March, a naval patrol of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards had arrested fifteen British sailors and marines in the Persian Gulf, claiming they were in Iranian territorial waters. The sailors, unofficially accused of trespassing and pressured to make “confessions,” were released twelve days later; but the incident was useful for keeping my ordeal in the spotlight. Shaul cited the British affair in a number of interviews to insist that if Iran could show consideration for British sailors by releasing them, it could show the same consideration for its own countrymen.
Shaul, Haleh,
and the Wilson Center also actively refuted the allegations Iranian officials made against me, either directly or by implication and innuendo. They spoke to the press whenever Iran’s judiciary or security services issued statements about me; they undermined the conclusions that the Ministry of Intelligence wished to draw from the In the Name of Democracy broadcast. Shaul pointedly addressed each of the falsehoods in the Kayhan article.
Shaul was particularly anxious to prevent a show trial and to discredit such a trial even before it had begun. He could not think of a major political trial under the Islamic Republic in which the accused was found innocent. Rather, a trial was synonymous with a finding of guilt. Judging by the manipulation of my remarks in the television “interview,” he feared they would produce a “confession” in court. In a June 27 op-ed in the New York Times, he warned that a trial based on false confessions seemed imminent. “No one, in Iran or elsewhere, believes these coerced statements,” he wrote. “They only make the regime look inhumane.”
My lawyer, Shirin Ebadi, generated considerable press coverage as well. When Shaul first spoke to her by telephone, she had stressed the impossible obstacles the Iranian judiciary placed before lawyers in political cases. “Don’t think we can do anything, but we can make noise,” she told him. The judicial authorities and intelligence services loathed her; she was outspoken and unafraid, yet since she was a Nobel laureate, they did not dare arrest or silence her.
Shirin was right about the judicial system; it allowed the accused very little recourse to a fair hearing or even legal representation. Matin-Rassekh refused to allow Shirin to meet with me in Evin Prison, refused to allow her to see the file on my case, and refused even to specify the charges against me. Essentially, he barred her from representing or defending me. He also refused to meet with her, and when she was finally able to speak with him by telephone on July 4, he told her in effect that “Haleh Esfandiari does not need a lawyer.” But, true to her word, Shirin did make a lot of noise. She announced to the press that I was being denied my legal rights and challenged the accusations against me. On visits to Europe and the United States, she used press conferences and speeches to publicize my case. The media tracked the ongoing story.
My arrest and incarceration earned Iran universally bad press. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Tribune published editorials strongly critical of Iran. Newspapers in Paris, Madrid, and Brazil joined the fray. In the New York Times, Thomas Friedman wrote, “This Iranian regime is afraid of its shadow. How do I know? It recently arrested a 67-year-old grandmother, whom it accused of trying to bring down the regime by organizing academic conferences!” Robin Wright wrote an eye-catching profile of me for the Washington Post’s Style section. Glamour magazine featured my daughter Haleh in a column, “A Daughter’s Nightmare.” The Today Show interviewed her. I never thought I would be mentioned in the pages of the French fashion magazine Elle. Yet I was.
This made holding me increasingly costly for the Iranian government, and it raised doubts in the minds of some officials about the Intelligence Ministry’s attempt to construct, on my slight frame, a case of subversion and espionage.
Shaul at times detected these doubts. For example, when listing the accusations against me on May 21 (espionage, actions against the security of the state), the judiciary spokesperson seemed to distance the judiciary from these accusations by describing the Ministry of Intelligence as the “complainant” in the case and implying these were still accusations, not formal charges. As late as August 6, the judiciary’s spokesperson said no criminal charges or indictment had yet been brought against me.
Even the Intelligence Ministry seemed at times to be of two minds about me. In June, a ministry official told the press that Tajbakhsh and I “have accepted that they have carried out some activities, but they say their aim was to help,” officially suggesting that we were unwitting rather than active participants seeking to topple the Islamic regime.
In prison, I had dismissed the remark of National Security Adviser Larijani that “we don’t want to keep her” as mere talk. Shaul, carefully monitoring each official statement, saw signs that some elements in the regime were beginning to back off. Factions in the government seemed to be debating what to do with me. Larijani, in Europe as Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, found to his annoyance that he repeatedly had to answer questions about me when speaking to the press.
Moreover, while the Intelligence Ministry expected some American and international disapproval when they arrested me—Hajj Agha told me as much—they were unprepared for the deluge of prominent international figures who interceded on my behalf, producing an international effort that spanned Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.
Javier Solana, the EU foreign minister, referred to my incarceration on at least two occasions with the Iranians. As part of the EU dialogue with Iran on human-rights issues, the European ambassadors in Tehran formally raised my case and that of several other dual nationals with the Iranian Foreign Ministry twice, in written demarches presented in late June and early August. The Austrian ambassador in Tehran, Michael Postl, was particularly persistent in pursuing my case with the supreme leader’s foreign policy adviser.
Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution and former deputy secretary of state, spoke about me to Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe when he met with him in Tokyo in May, and Abe’s foreign minister spoke to his Iranian counterpart. Martin Indyk, head of the Saban Center at Brookings and a former assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs, raised my case with the foreign minister of Oman.
The New York Times Paris bureau chief Elaine Sciolino found herself sitting next to Sidney Blumenthal, a prominent journalist and writer and a former aide to President Bill Clinton, on a flight to Paris. She told him about me and he, in turn, spoke to French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner and urged him to speak to the Iranians. The Iraqi deputy prime minister Barham Salih spoke about me to Iranian officials on a visit to Iran during the late summer. Another friend arranged for an approach to the Turkish foreign minister Abdullah Gul. My friend Barbara Slavin, then of USA Today, repeatedly pressed high-level contacts in Iran to do something to get me released. Bush administration deputy undersecretary of state Nicholas Burns raised my case with the Indian foreign minister, who spoke to his Iranian counterpart.
In the end, diplomats from as many as twenty governments around the globe spoke to the Iranian Foreign Ministry. It is reasonable to assume that the supreme leader was informed of at least some of these interventions.
Lee Hamilton also reached out directly to Iranian officials. In February, he wrote a letter to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, urging his intervention in the case, but received no reply or acknowledgment. In May he wrote to the speaker of the Iranian parliament, Gholam Ali Haddad-Adel, and to former president Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani. Again, he heard nothing. It was only after he wrote to the Iranian leader, setting in motion his August 7 trip to New York, that there was concrete movement in my case.
AN INTERNATIONAL CIVIL SOCIETY
On the day of my arrest, my Iraqi friend Zainab Al-Suwaij, the president of the American Islamic Congress, told her husband, “I have to do something for Haleh.” Two days later, she and her colleagues at the AIC launched the Free Haleh Web site. The Web site rapidly became a principal source for news about me and efforts on my behalf, registering thousands of hits each week. It also started a petition drive calling for my immediate release, which eventually collected nearly 11,500 signatures, from all across the world and especially from Muslim countries, including Iran.
Free Haleh was the most prominent volunteer effort on my behalf, but it was only one of many such initiatives. Through the Internet, an international civil society had come into being, ready to be mobilized in cases like mine. Some of my former students at Princeton got together, located their colleagues all over the world, and signed a letter to the Iranian leader, calling for my release and pointing out that th
ey had learned to love Iran, the Persian language, and Iranian literature in my classes. Middle East scholars, joined by other prominent intellectuals, addressed a letter calling for my release to Khamenei that was published in the New York Review of Books in June.
Iraqi and Arab women for whom I had organized workshops signed petitions and contacted their own governments on my behalf. A Syrian friend accosted an astonished Mohammad Javad Larijani, Ali Larijani’s brother and a prominent Iranian official himself, at the Davos World Economic Forum. Why, she demanded, was I in jail? At the initiative of Haleh’s father-in-law, John Warden Sr., the New York Bar Association produced a detailed legal brief describing the ways in which the Iranian government had violated the Iranian constitution, its own laws, and Iran’s international commitments in incarcerating me and denying me legal representation.
The Nobel Women’s Initiative, which brings together women winners of Nobel prizes, also wrote to the Iranian government; my close friend Mahnaz Afkhami from the Women’s Learning Partnership circulated petitions calling for my release to the thousands of women on her organization’s mailing list, as did Nayereh Towhidi, who was involved with several women’s and scholarly associations. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch issued statements; they were among the more than twenty-five nongovernmental organizations to do so. A rabbi in Brazil learned about my case through the efforts of my cousin Goli and urged all 3,000 people on his e-mail list to sign a petition initiated by the Women of Washington, an organization she helped run. I learned that prayers were said for me in synagogues and churches in many places in America. Clare Wolfowitz was instrumental in having a video made of my story in readiness for circulation on the Web. Professors Juan Cole from the University of Michigan and Chibli Mallat from Saint-Joseph University in Beirut and the University of Utah turned down invitations to go to conferences in Iran as long as I was in prison.
My Prison, My Home: One Woman's Story of Captivity in Iran Page 22