by Shane Bauer
“Wait,” he says, and looks away.
We have never been told anything about our trial by anyone in Iran. If it weren’t for our families’ letters, we wouldn’t have known it was coming. We don’t know how the Iranian judicial system works, or anything about Iranian law. And our lawyer seems afraid to make eye contact.
The judge enters. Josh and I make to rise, but stop ourselves once we see that no one else does. Something about this man’s presence gives me a slight sense of relief. I’ve read accounts of the trials held against members of the shah’s government in the early days of the revolution. They left me with images of courtrooms presided over by spindly, severe mullahs who sentence one person after another to death before jeering crowds. This judge, however, is wearing a white reticulated turtleneck sweater and gives off an aura of calm. His jowls have a studious droopiness to them and they are lightly coated with whiskers. His hair is short, black, and neatly combed. He sits down his heavy frame and peers evenly over his papers. Small portraits of Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei flank him on the wall behind. A poster hanging on the front of his bench reads “Branch 15 of the Islamic Revolutionary Court.”
A man enters, sits at the judge’s left, and opens the Quran. He reads from Surat Al-Ma’ida—a chapter that stresses the importance of being equitable in judgment—in a beautiful rolling elocution.
When he closes the book, the sparse crowd chants in unison, “Allahooma salle alaa Muhammad va aale Muhammad,” calling on God to bless Muhammad and his progeny.
The judge, in monotone, reads us our charges of espionage and illegal entry and warns us to be respectful of the court. “Is Sarah Shourd present?” he asks our lawyer, as if he doesn’t know. “Since she is not present, she will be tried in absentia,” he says. He then instructs the prosecutor to give his opening speech.
Suddenly this short, quiet man breathes fire. He shouts and thrusts his finger into the air, but I don’t know what he is saying. Our lawyer jumps up and starts complaining. The interpreter is jotting into his notebook. What the hell is going on? The interpreter leans toward Josh and me and says, “The prosecutor says on the twenty-eighth of August, you three went to Baghdad to meet with the CIA. Now your lawyer is objecting.”
“Why are you lying?” Shafii is saying to the prosecutor. “They were in prison on the twenty-eighth of August!”
“I didn’t say August, I said août,” the prosecutor counters.
“Août is August!” Shafii spits. The judge tells him to sit down.
Josh and I look at each other. They are saying we went to Baghdad? Josh’s face doesn’t show fear or anger, but a look of understanding, like he is acknowledging that we now know which of our make-believe court scenarios have turned out to be true. A long-standing question has finally been settled—they aren’t going to bother spinning the events of our real lives into something that can make us look like spies. They are simply going to rattle off their own story. I’m not nervous, oddly, and I don’t think Josh is either. This fiction is the air we have been breathing for a year and a half. And no matter what they say now, I still believe this trial is going to do us good. Josh and I have always believed we’d need to go to trial before they would ever release us. We just need to watch them play out their show and try not to piss off the judge.
The prosecutor continues. He aims his speech not at the judge, the one he is ostensibly presenting his argument to, but at us. He looks in our direction the entire time, delivering his sermon like a fire-and-brimstone preacher behind a pulpit. “After receiving their mission from the CIA at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, they went on a mission to the north of Iraq to prepare a report from Iran’s borderline regions,” he shouts. “After their arrest by the Iranian border police, the head of Iraq’s Kurdish police confirmed their cooperation with the CIA.”
At this point Shafii jumps out of his seat again and interjects. “How do you have this information on the Kurdish police?” he asks sharply. “Do you work with them?”
The prosecutor, his face now reddening in anger, says, “The Islamic Republic of Iran has police in Kurdistan who spoke to the Kurdish police, and they told them the three Americans were spies for the United States! After the three got their mission in Baghdad, they met with another intelligence official in Kurdistan. Then the Kurdish police helped them with their mission! And the Kurdish police found in the area where they were arrested a map, books, and special documents that they were carrying!”
It is true that we hid a bag of stuff we were tired of carrying shortly before we were arrested. In it was The Shia Revival by Ali Nasr, a blanket, a tin of olives, and a bottle of whisky we planned to drink around the fire with Shon that evening. I’m glad they don’t know about the whisky. The only thing that could qualify as “special documents” was Josh’s journal with a goat face on the cover.
Josh and I lean in toward the translator as the prosecutor continues. “Our investigation revealed that the Kurdish police told the three that they were nearing the Iranian border, but they ignored the police. Everything I have stated was admitted by the three in their interrogations. They admitted to entering illegally. They admitted that their country sends them around the world and pays their expenses to spy for the U.S. and their allies. The fact that they lived in a neighborhood with Palestinian refugees is just one example of this.”
Now I am angry—what the fuck is he talking about?—but my anger has a calm face. I have spent a year and a half preparing for this. In the last couple weeks, Josh and I have been grilling each other with every possible question we could imagine we might be asked.
“Furthermore!” the prosecutor shouts. “The testimonies of the three during their interrogations contained inconsistencies, which is proof that they were making up stories.”
He ends his diatribe, nods to the judge, and takes his seat. Everyone I can see—the prosecutor, our lawyer, the judge, Josh—all of them are expressionless.
Our lawyer gets up and presents a packet of documents to the judge, which he says includes Sarah’s defense.
“What is this?” the judge says, obviously annoyed.
“This is evidence of my clients’ innocence I would like to present to the court.”
“You submitted your documents earlier and now you want us to read all of this? You think I have time to read all this?” He flips through the papers momentarily, then sets them aside.
Then he asks us to introduce ourselves. He hands a piece of paper to the translator, who writes the question in English and hands it to me. The paper says exactly what the judge said: “Please introduce yourself.” As in interrogation, I write in detail. I write what happened at the border, I write about my work, I write about my education, and I write about my life in the Middle East. Josh and I assume this is the only defense that matters. He needs to show he is critical of Israel, since we expect he will be branded an Israeli spy. And both of us need to show we are free thinking Americans who criticize our own government. Our best chance in court is to make them look like fools for imprisoning us.
When I am finished writing, the judge tells me to stand up and verbally state what I just wrote. I start reading from the paper, but he stops me and tells me to put it down. “Just summarize it,” he says.
I recite as much as I can remember. The judge looks bored. As far as I know, the only individuals who can understand what I am saying are Josh, the translator, and our lawyer. “I’ve never had any contact with U.S. intelligence services in Iraq or in America,” I say. “I am a journalist, and my purpose in my work is to expose and investigate the wrongdoings of my government, especially in the Middle East.” As Josh and I practiced, I make sure to highlight my investigative articles on a U.S.-backed death squad in Iraq and military corruption.
The judge then reads me my charges again and asks whether I plead guilty or not. I ask him if I can speak to my lawyer first.
He shakes his head. “Just like anywhere else in the world, the court doesn’t allow for that,” he says. He is
smirking. “But rest assured that your rights are protected. You can take as much time as you need to answer the questions.”
When the judge asks Josh to introduce himself, he also stands up to give a verbal answer after he writes. He says, “I came to the Middle East about one week before I was arrested in Iran. After I finished getting my bachelor’s degree at UC Berkeley in 2004, I worked as an educator. I was an educator in Oakland in 2005. I moved to Oregon. I was an educator on the environment . . .” The judge tells him that is plenty and motions for him to sit.
We both realize what is happening at the same moment. Our verbal answers are only for TV. They just need enough for Press TV to grab.
The questions continue for both of us: Why did you spy on Iran? Did you meet with the CIA in Baghdad? Why did you come to our border after being warned not to? Why did you carry such a sophisticated camera?
As I write, the courtroom is utterly silent. For an hour, no one coughs. Every stir in a chair is heard. The silence adds to the purely bureaucratic feel to everything. At some point, the judge calls someone to the bench, hands him his keys, and asks him to move his car for him. He must have expected this to be over by now and didn’t pay enough for parking.
At 2 p.m., the judge tells us we are done for the day. Our trial can’t go any further without Sarah here, he says. He can’t say when we will be back, but he assures us we will meet with our lawyer in the prison before the next hearing. Something about his self-assurance and his concern leads me to believe him.
As everyone gets up to leave, Shafii approaches us, but our guards intervene and try to rush us away. Shafii sticks his open hand into the air dramatically and turns to the judge. “May I shake my clients’ hands? May I please be allowed to shake the hands of my clients?” The judge nods. With everyone in the room watching us, we shake hands. “Please tell Sarah I love her,” I say three times. Then they pull us away.
83. Sarah
I’ve been awake all night, sitting on the couch in my friend’s apartment, waiting for news of the trial. I sit with my laptop on my knees, sifting e-mails, texts, and Facebook messages. People from all around the world are sending prayers, songs, and pictures of candles they’ve lit to help them keep vigil on this night. As the sun rises, I can’t believe we’ve heard nothing from Iran. No news reports, no phone calls from Salem, our lawyer, or the Swiss.
Soon, the house I’m staying at in Oakland starts filling up with dozens of people and dishes of hot food. My friends, family, and I huddle together on and around the couch and try to enjoy one another’s company. Everyone wants to believe this trial will be the last hurdle. We read a poem by William Wordsworth, “Character of the Happy Warrior,” passing it around from person to person. Shane and Josh had this one memorized; they used to recite it together, taking turns passing it back and forth like we’re doing now.
. . . More skillful in self-knowledge, even more pure—
As tempted more; more able to endure,
As more exposed to suffering and distress;
Thence, also, more alive to tenderness . . .
Finally, the phone rings and Cindy tells me our lawyer’s going to be on the line in twenty minutes. She just got off the phone with Ambassador Leu Agosti, who waited outside the courtroom along with thirty reporters for six hours, without being allowed inside.
For a year and a half, our lawyer, Masoud Shafii, has been systematically barred from defending us. He’s never even been allowed to meet privately with his clients. But one thing the Iranian government can’t stop our lawyer from doing is engaging the media. “The charge of espionage is irrelevant,” he says in several interviews leading up to this session. “Sarah, Shane, and Josh do not fit the profile of spies.” As for illegal entry, he continues, “there is no evidence of guilt in this respect either. Yet, if the court should decide they crossed the border, accidentally, then the time they have already served should be more than enough for this minor offense.” Mr. Shafii is being more than generous. In fact, Afghanis and Pakistanis are arrested for trying to enter Iran illegally all the time. They’re simply held overnight, perhaps charged a small fine, and sent back home.
The surprising thing is that Mr. Shafii insists on adhering so closely to the truth. In political cases like ours, it’s common for Iranian lawyers to say their clients are guilty when they are not. They hope that if they play along, the government will eventually grow tired and release their clients; they also want to avoid ending up in prison themselves. Sometimes, this works, but, as in Zahra’s case, there’s no guarantee.
I tell everyone that I’m going to have to cut our vigil short, and I settle down for what I suspect will be a very long call. “Hello, dear families,” our translator, Pari, begins. “Mr. Shafii is about to get on the line. He told me to tell you he is sorry to have kept you waiting, but he was exhausted after the court session and he feared he wouldn’t speak coherently. He went home to take a nap and is now ready to answer all your questions.”
Pari is one of the many miracles of our campaign. She and I became best friends instantly when we met in first grade in Los Angeles. I was a transplant from Chicago and she was the daughter of asylum seekers from Tehran. I taught her bad American habits like putting ketchup on eggs and even pulling down our pants when no one was looking and sticking our butts out to “moon” the sun. She taught me that people from faraway countries could be different and wonderful. Pari and I spent years of our childhood at each other’s houses, then later lost contact in our teens. When she saw my face on TV in July 2009, she immediately tracked my mom down and offered to help.
Our lawyer’s cheerful Farsi comes on the line. “How are you all? Did you sleep?”
Calls with our lawyer always begin with an elaborate exchange called ta’arof in Farsi, a form of communication marked by exaggerated kindness, generosity, and humility. For the first fifteen or twenty minutes, our lawyer deftly uses the art of ta’arof with each family member, inquiring about his health, making jokes, and disarming each of us with flattery.
“Alex,” Shafii says, addressing Josh’s brother, “I have been thinking of you and all the e-mails you have been writing me. I think you are an extremely good son, the very best, and when your brother, Josh, is freed, perhaps you will continue to make your mother proud by becoming the president of the United States.”
“Oh, Shafii, you are too kind,” Alex demurs. “I really don’t think I’ll want anything to do with politics once my brother is freed, but I hope you will come through with your promise to help me find a good, Iranian wife.”
“Of course, Alex, of course. With all that hair on your handsome head, it will be easy. Speaking of handsome, where is Al? Are you there?”
“Yes, Shafii, I’m here,” Shane’s dad answers.
“How are you, Handsome Al?”
“Still handsome.” Al laughs. “How are you, Mr. Shafii?”
Even in prison, certain guards, like Ehsan and Maryam, were the perfect embodiment of ta’arof. Once, I complimented Maryam’s gold bracelets and she took them off to make as if to give them to me. When I took them out of her outstretched hand, she was shocked—in her cultural code it was my duty to refuse. Sheepishly, she told me she had to have the bracelets back or she would get in trouble—but when I was free, she would be happy to give them to me.
There’s also a political dimension to ta’arof. Centuries of repression have led Iranians to use the verbal flattery as a way of passing information discreetly and indirectly. For instance, I began to notice Shafii’s habit of repeating the same thing three or four times throughout the call (“The judge should know I work within the law”). At first, I thought he was just wordy and liked to hear himself talk. After talking to Pari, I realize the repetition, folded into flowery language and silly jokes, was intended for extra emphasis. The one thing I can never discern, though, is when this coded language is for our benefit and when it’s intended for the Iranian government agents we assume are listening on the line.
By
the time he’s given individual attention to each of the eight to ten family members, we’ve all stopped squirming in our seats and surrendered to the ritual. As time-consuming as ta’arof may feel through an American lens, it has grown on us. Each one of us comes out feeling respected and seen. For eighteen months, our lawyer’s been the main personal connection the families have had to Iran, so these calls are about much more than business—he’s our link to Josh and Shane.
“Okay, now, that is enough ta’arofing,” Shafii cuts in, laughing. “Let’s get down to our legal business. I know you must have many questions about the trial.”
Masoud is sorry to break the news that he wasn’t allowed to meet with Shane and Josh in private. He tells us they both were allowed to speak in their defense, but unfortunately no ruling was made, nor was a date for the next session announced.
When I finally get off the phone, I feel shooting pains in my legs and lower back. I realize I’ve been sitting on this couch for almost twenty-four continuous hours, yet I know little more than I did yesterday. I open my laptop and begin searching the web for news. After about fifteen minutes of reading empty news reports (“The two American hikers were tried today in Tehran”), a video suddenly pops up on BBC. Slowly, I draw in my breath and press Play.
The clip begins with footage of Shane and Josh walking into court, passing rows and rows of empty seats as they make their way down a narrow aisle. Josh’s face looks strained but focused, ready to face whatever comes. Shane looks thinner than when I last saw him, but very much like himself, determined and resolute.
As I watch them walk through the empty courtroom, my eyes are drawn to the foot and a half of space between their bodies. It’s a space just large enough for me to squeeze into. I’ve been waiting a year and a half for this moment. I prepared with Shane and Josh during the precious time we had together in hava khori. Now, sitting on this couch eight thousand miles away, I’m happy that no one else is around so I can allow myself one brief second of honest emotion. I should be there, I think. That space between them is meant for me. Despite all my work on the outside, I feel ashamed to be sitting here in comfort, out of harm’s way. I’m ashamed I wasn’t able to prevent this.