Aadel Collection
118 Days, 12 Hours, 54 Minutes
11/23/2009
118 Days, 12 Hours, 54 Minutes I Prin...
I ‘ PRINT THIS
118 Days, 12 Hours, 54 Minutes
On June 21, reporter Maziar Bahari was rousted out of bed and taken to Tehran's notorious Evin
prison—accused of being a spy for the CIA, M16, Mossad...and NEWSWEEK. This is the story of his
captivity—and of an Iran whose rampant paranoia underpins an ever more fractured regime.
By Maziar Bahari I NEV/SWEEK
Riblished Nov 21, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Nov 30, 2009
Evin Prison, June 21, 2009 (around 10 a.m.)
The interrogator sat me in a wooden chair. It had a writing arm, like the chair I'd had in primary school. He
ordered me to look down, even though I was already blindfolded: “Never look up, Mr. Bahari. While you are
here—and we don't know how long you're going to be here—never look up.” All I could see from under the
blindfold was the interrogator's black leather slippers. They worried me. He had settled in for a long session.
(Article continued below...)
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“Mr. Bahari, you're an agent of foreign intelligence
organizations,” he began. I had gotten a look at him
when he and his men had dragged me out of bed and
arrested me a few hours earlier. He was heavyset—I
later learned that the guards called him “the big
guy”—taller and wider than me, with a massive head.
His skin was dark, like someone from southern Iran.
He wore thick glasses. But I would know him now
only by his voice, his breath, and the rosewater
perfume used by men who piously do their ablutions
several times a day before prayers, but rarely shower.
I could see Mr. Rosewater's slippers right in front of
my foot. He was towering over me.
“Could you let me know which ones?” I mumbled.
“Speak louder!” he shouted. He bent toward me, his face an inch away from mine. I could feel his breath on
my skin. “What did you say?”
“I was wondering if you could be kind enough to let me know which organizations,” I repeated.
“CIA, MIÔ, Mossad, and NEWSWEEK” He listed the names one by one, in a low but assured voice.
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I was struck by Mr. Rosewater's confidence. I did not know then exactly which branch of the fractured
Iranian government he worked for. When I was arrested, hundreds of thousands of protesters had been
filling the streets of Tehran for a week, outraged over the disputed reelection of Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad. There had been violence. The club-wielding militias known as Basij had inflicted much of it on
the marchers, women as well as men. But some of the protesters had fought back too. Ayatollah Au
Khamenei, Iran's Supreme Leader, had decreed that the protests stop, but nobody at that point was sure they
would. At least, nobody outside Evin Prison was sure. Mr. Rosewater was another mafler.
I would later discover that I had been picked up by the intelligence division of the Islamic Revolutionary
Guard Corps, or IRGC. Before the June election, this unit of the Guards was litUe known; whenever
journalists and intellectuals ran afoul of the authorities they were usually questioned by the official Ministry
of Intelligence. But the IRGC, which reports directly to Khamenei, had been growing dramatically more
powerful. Many suspect that the Guards rigged the election. Certainly they led the crackdown that followed.
IRGC intel is now responsible for Iran's internal security, which means that its rampaging paranoias have
suffused the regime. There remain players within the system who can make rational decisions about Iran's
international interests; if there weren't, I would still be in jail. But the Guards are exacerbating the Islamic
Republic's worst instincts, its insecurity and deep suspiciousness. As world powers try to engage Tehran to
mitigate the threat of its nuclear program, it's critical that they understand this mindset and the role the
IRGC now plays within the Iranian system. I learned all too much about both while in the Guards' hands.
Everything was an education inside Evin—from the questions Mr. Rosewater asked, to what answers made
him beat me, to physical details. Now, for instance, I studied his slippers and light-gray socks. In Iran, low-
ranking functionaries often wear shabby plastic sandals, and they have holes in their socks. That first day I
was hoping Mr. Rosewater was only a junior agent, a flunky trying to make himself sound important. I was
hoping to find a hole in his socks. But there wasn't one. His slippers looked as if they had been polished.
Mr. Rosewater was to be my nemesis for 118 days, 12 hours, and 54 minutes. He never told me his name. I
saw his face only twice. The first time was when he led the team that arrested me. “This prison can be the
end of the line for you if you don't cooperate” were his welcoming words. The second and last time was after
I was freed—and warned by him never to speak of what had happened to me in jail. If I disobeyed, he said, I
would be hunted down. “We can put people in a bag no mafler where in the world they are,” he said
menacingly. “No one can escape from us.”
I did not believe him. I do not believe him. But the doubt lingers, which is what he wanted—what the regime
he serves wants from all of us, in fact. They are masters of uncertainty, instilling it among their enemies,
their subjects, their friends, perhaps even themselves.
If he could, Mr. Rosewater would threaten me for the rest of my life. But 118 days was enough. I do not
want to be his captive any longer.
Vali Mr Avenue, June 21, 2009 (a few minutes before 8 a.m.)
Four of them came for me. They told my mother they had a lefler for me, then showed her something
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resembling a warrant and followed her inside. She woke me gently. “Dear, there are four gentlemen here
from...the prosecutor's office? I don't know. They say they want to take you away.” Her tone was even. My
father had been jailed repeatedly in the 19505 for fighting against the shah's regime. She knew what to say.
The men adhered to a strange code of etiquette. They took off their shoes when they entered the apartment,
and later, while searching my room, they declined my mother's offer of tea. They told me later that they did
not like to impose on the families of those they arrested. One even apologized to my mother for using a
Kleenex to wipe away his sweat while going through my personal belongings. The possibility that they might
be arresting an innocent man, however, did not seem to trouble them. Early in the revolution Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini had issued a decree: “Keeping the [ Islamic] system alive is the most important task of a
Muslim.” In their minds they were simply carrying out their religious duty.
Three of the men had bland looks, like accountants. Mr. Rosewater was clearly the boss. He wore a brown
suit and a white shirt. When he entered my room he sized me up like prey. I could see a revolver under his
jacket, but the way he stared at me made it clear he preferred to use his gaze as his weapon, to pin me down
with it. I was going to be watched like that until I broke. “Don't worry,” he told my mother with a smile as
they led me away. “He's going to be our guest.”
There were five cars waiting outside, all unmarked. No one wore uniforms or showed badges. As we drove
off I asked one of my captors if we were heading to Evin Prison. “Maybe we are. Maybe we are not,” he said.
Then I was ordered to take off my glasses and don my blindfold. I took a last look around. We were on
Kurdistan Highway driving north. We were definitely going to Evin.
Built in the late 196os, during the reign of the shah, as a high-security jail for political prisoners, Evin Prison
soon became synonymous with pulled fingernails and broken bones. Its early residents were mostly
communists and Islamists. After the 1979 revolution, the Islamists put their captors as well as many of their
former leftist cellmates behind bars. They used some of the same techniques as their predecessors, but more
efficiently. Many of those who had withstood the shah's torturers broke within days under the new
management.
“Welcome to Abu Ghraib, Guantânamo, or whatever it is you Americans build,” a guard said to me after we
arrived. He spoke with an Azerbaijani accent, and sounded older. “I'm not American, my brother,” I said
with a smile. ‘You work for them, so you're one of them,” he said. “But don't worry. It's not a bad place
here.” The old man handed me off to a guard in another building. I was taken to my cell.
I once interviewed a former Islamic guerrilla who had become a government minister. The problem with
the shah's secret police, he said, was that they thought they could break a prisoner's will through physical
pressure, but often that just hardened the victim's resolve. “What our brothers after the revolution have
masterminded is how to break a man's soul without using much violence against his body.” As I stepped into
my cell I wondered how violent was “without much violence.”
I took off the blindfold.
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The Quran says that one of the worst punishments Allah inflicts upon sinners is to make their graves
smaller. My 20-square-foot cell was like a tomb. The walls were made of faux marble. They were off-white,
and the texture of the stone reminded me of an old man's pale, transparent skin. You could see grayish-blue
veins. The walls were clean, even spotless, except for some defiant aphorisms and Persian poetry in small,
crabbed handwriting. Three sentences were written larger than others: “My God, have mercy on me,” “My
God, I repent,” and “Please help me, God.”
London, November 2009
My wife, Paola, is breast-feeding our 2-week-old daughter, Marianna, on the couch. The little girl is enjoying
every drop of milk. No Madonna and child were ever more beautiful. We are listening to one of the songs
that kept playing in my head in Evin, that helped me tune out what was happening and find some peace
inside myself—”Hey, Thafs No Way to Say Goodbye,” by Leonard Cohen:
I loved you in the morning,
Our kisses deep and warm,
Your hair upon the pillow
Like a sleepy golden storm.
8.aharl with his newborn daughter
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Those lines became Paola for me, part of a whole musical refuge of lyrics and melodies. Of such stuff is
survival made. Thank you, Mr. Cohen.
Evin Prison, June 22, 2009 (around 4 a.m.)
A guard woke me and told me that after morning prayers I would meet again with my “specialist,” which is
what the prison guards were told to call the interrogators. This would be my third session in 24 hours.
When Mr. Rosewater came into the interrogation room I could hear him yawning. He asked if I wanted half
of the peeled-and-salted cucumber he was eating. When I declined, he was insulted. “What? Do you think
that interrogators don't wash their hands?” I said OK, and I ate.
Mr. Rosewater wanted me to tell him about a dinner I'd attended with eight other journalists and
photographers at a friend's house in Tehran in April, several weeks before the election. ‘ You are part of a
very American network, Mr. Bahari,” he said, as if summing up his case in a courtroom. “Let me correct
myself: you are in charge of a secret American network, a group that includes those who came to that
dinner party.”
“It was just a dinner,” I murmured.
‘Yes. A very American dinner. It could have happened in...New Jersey, or someplace like that.” He paused.
‘Your own New Jersey in Tehran.”
The strangeness of the accusation was unsetUing. New Jersey?
‘You've been to New Jersey, haven't you, Mr. Bahari?” The thought seemed to infuriate him, and I was
struck by the feeling that for some reason he might have wanted, secretly, to go to New Jersey himself. The
worst thing that can happen in any encounter with Islamic Republic officials is for them to think that you're
looking down on them.
“It's not a particularly nice place,” I said, trying to sound conversational.
“I don't care. But it is as god'ess as what you wanted to create in this country.”
“I'm sorry. I don't understand.”
‘You were planning to eradicate the pure religion of Muhammad in this country and replace it with
‘American' Islam. A New Jersey Islam.” He was building his case, and my responses were irrelevant. “Tell
me,” he said, “did any of the women at the dinner party have their veils on?”
“No.”
“Then don't tell me that you didn't have a secret American network. A New Jersey network.”
I was born in Tehran and lived there the first 19 years of my life, before going to Canada and Britain for my
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studies and to begin my career as a journalist and documentary filmmaker. I returned in 1998, making
movies and reporting for NEWSWEEK. But until my imprisonment I had never frilly appreciated the
corrosive suspicion that is rotting the Islamic Republic from within. The Guards see real enemies all around
them—reformists within the country, hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops outside. Even worse are the
shadows—supposed agents of Britain, the United States, and Israel—upon whom they impose their own
fearful logic and their reinvented history. Only Muslims, only they, are victims.
As it happens, I may be the only Iranian or even Muslim filmmaker who has ever made a film about the
Holocaust (The Voyage of the Saint Louis, in 1994). Mr. Rosewater was offended by the very idea and
worked hard to connect me to what he called Jewish and Zionist “elements.” In his lexicon, Jewish persons
were rare. There were only “elements.”
I don't know if Mr. Rosewater had ever seen a Jewish person in his life. I think not. He had never been to
New Jersey either. But he believed that he knew everything there was to know about such people and such
places, and his faith in his facts was unshakable.
Evin Prison, June 26, 2009 (after evening prayers)
Mr. Rosewater was not alone. I could hear someone else in the room, another interrogator. He was
complaining about my wriflen answers to questions about different individuals. When he came closer I saw
he had shiny, polished black shoes on. His trousers were neatly ironed and creased. “Mr. Bahari, your
answers are very general. We hope that you can give us more detailed answers,” he said. He sounded more
mild-mannered than my normal tormentor. He was the good cop today, the voice of reason.
“I just write what I know, sir. And if I give you more details, that means I'm lying.”
“Well,” said Mr. Rosewater, who had been fairly quiet up to this point, “we have interesting video footage of
you. That may persuade you to be more cooperative.” I could not imagine what that might be. Something
personal? Something that might compromise my friends? But...I reminded myself I had done nothing
wrong.
I saw the flicker of a laptop monitor under my blindfold. Then I heard someone speaking. It was a recording
of another prisoner's confession. “It's not that one,” said the second interrogator. “It's the one marked ‘Spy in
coffee shop.' “Mr. Rosewater fumbled with the computer. The other man stepped in to change the DVD. And
then I heard the voice of Jon Stewart on The Daily Show.
Only a few weeks earlier, hundreds of foreign reporters had been allowed into the country in the run-up to
the election. Among them was Jason Jones, a “correspondent” for Stewart's satirical news program. Jason
interviewed me in a Tehran coffee shop, pretending to be a thick-skulled American. He dressed like some
character out of a B movie about mercenaries in the Middle East—with a checkered Palestinian kaffiyeh
around his neck and dark sunglasses. The “interview” was very short. Jason asked me why Iran was evil. I
answered that Iran was not evil. I added that, as a matter of fact, Iran and America shared many enemies
and interests in common. But the interrogators weren't interested in what I was saying. They were fixated
on Jason.
“Why is this American dressed like a spy, Mr. Bahari?” asked the new man.
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“He is pretending to be a spy. It's part of a comedy show,” I answered.
“Tell the truth!” Mr. Rosewater shouted. “What is so funny about sitting in a coffee shop with a kaffiyeh and
sunglasses?”
“It's just a joke. Nothing serious. It's stupid.” I was getting worried. “I hope you are not suggesting that he is
a real spy.”
“Can you tell us why an American journalist pretending to be a spy has chosen you to interview?” asked the
man with the creases. “We know from your contacts and background that you told them who to interview
for their program.” The other Iranians interviewed in Jason's report—a former vice president and a former
foreign minister—had been ar-rested a week before me as part of the IRGC's sweeping crackdown. “It's just
comedy,” I said, feeling weak.
“Do you think it's also funny that you say Iran and America have a lot in common?” Mr. Rosewater asked,
declaring that he was losing patience with me. He took my left ear in his hand and started to squeeze it as if
he were wringing out a lemon. Then he whispered into it. “This kind of behavior will not help you. Many
people have rolled in this prison. You can be one of them.”
London, November 2009
The morning of my “confession,” I woke up humming “The Partisan,” a Leonard Cohen tune about World
War II re-sistance fighters:
When they poured across the border
I was cautioned to surrender,
This l could not do;
I took my gun and vanished.
The thought of resisting had crossed my mind, too. But why? I was a journalist, not a freedom fighter.
Political prisoners in Iran were forced to make false confessions all the time. I'd always known they had been
coerced, and had sympathized with the victims. Surely others would feel similarly about me. But even now,
months later, the experience gnaws at me. My father spent four years in prison under the shah without
asking for mercy. What would he think of his son apologizing to the Supreme Leader after eight days?
Evin Prison, June 29, 2009 (after midnight)
I was deep asleep when a guard opened the door to my cell. “Get up! Specialist time!” Mr. Rosewater did not
say hello as usual. He dragged me away from the prison guard. “The fun is over!” he said. He pushed me
several times so hard that I almost fell on the ground. He then grabbed my arm and started to drag me
along rapidly. He was breathing heavily and kept on repeating, “Islamic kindness is over. You little spy, we
will show you what we can do with you. You're going to see what we are capable of” He shoved me into a
room. There seemed to be several people in it, whispering among themselves. The smell of sweat and
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rosewater was strong.
All of a sudden the room erupted in a cacophony of greetings. Everyone wanted to say hello to someone they
called “Haj Agha.” The nickname literally means someone who has been to Mecca for pilgrimage, but
among Iranian officials it signifies seniority. Someone took my hand and put it in Haj Agha's hand.
“Salaam, Mr. Bahari,” he said. “Do you know why you are here?” His voice sounded familiar, like that of a
well-known regime propagandist who has a show on Iranian TV. He definitely did not want to be
recognized, and told me to keep my eyes completely covered.
He turned aside and asked someone, “Is the car here yet?” Then he addressed me again. “Mr. Bahari, you're
suspected of espionage. You have been in contact with a number of known spies.” He named a few of my
friends, mostly Iranian artists and intellectuals in exile. A car was coming to take me to a counterespionage
unit, he said. There I would be interrogated more than 15 hours a day and subjected to “every tactic” until I
talked. The investigation would take “between four and six years.” I could be sentenced to death.
Haj Agha made sure to say the word “death” as if he were talking about a cup of tea. In fact, he immediately
said, “Would you like a cup of tea?”
“Thank you,” I said. I could barely get out the words. I was lost in thoughts about my mother, about Paola,
about our unborn child. How could I have put them in this situation? I was a bad son, I thought, a bad
husband, a bad father.
“Unless,” said Haj Agha, pausing one more time. “Unless you would be interested in a deal, Mr. Bahari.”
Soon after my arrest, in addition to accusing me of working for various spy agencies, Mr. Rosewater had
insisted that I'd “masterminded the coverage of the election by the agents of the Western media in Iran.”
This played to a familiar fear. Ayatollah Khamenei liked to warn Iranians about a “cultural NATO” as
threatening as the military one—a network of journalists, activists, scholars, and lawyers who supposed'y
sought to undermine the Islamic Republic from within. Anyone on the streets of Tehran in June would have
known just how spontaneous—even leaderless—the post-election protests had been. But Khamenei and the
Guards clearly believed, or at least wanted Iranians to believe, that they had been orchestrated by foreigners.
They called the plot a “velvet revolution” or a “soft overthrow.” ‘You are worse than any saboteur or killer,”
Mr. Rosewater had raged on that first day. “Those criminals destroy an object or a person. You destroy
minds and provoke people against the Leader.”
In Persian there is a very poetic word, jafaa, that refers to all the wrongs you do to those who love you.
According to Mr. Rosewater, I was guilty of jafaa against Khamenei. Now I was to repent.
The next morning I was brought to Haj Agha's office. Cameras had been set up on tripods. Mr. Rosewater
sat behind a curtain and fed questions to reporters from three state-run media outlets. “Give your answers as
clearly and articulately as you can—of course, in your own words,” Haj Agha instructed me. I was to explain
how a velvet revolution was staged—by foreigners and corrupt elites, using the Western media—and how
only the wisdom and munificence of the Supreme Leader had thwarted this latest attempt.
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I tried to keep my answers as vague as possible, with what I hoped would come across as ironic detachment.
(A source in the old Intelligence Ministry told me later that my soliloquy was “a case study in saying
nothing.”) Inside I seethed as one of the “reporters” joked with Mr. Rose-water and tried to help him devise
tougher questions for me.
Evin Prison, July 4, 2009 (a few hours after noon prayers)
After the “confession,” Haj Agha had promised, I would be freed soon. But the next time I saw the burly Mr.
Rosewater, he closed the door to the interrogation room and for the first time started to beat me.
Some police manuals, even in the West, say that hitting a prisoner with a closed fist constitutes assault, but
an open-handed slap does not. Perhaps Mr. Rosewater had read such a guide. His meaty palms slapped me
hard across the back of my neck and shoulders. “I thought we had an understanding, sir!” I protested as I
tried to protect my body.
“Move your hands, you lithe spy!” he screamed. “Understanding? What stupid understandings could we have
with a spy like you?”
The beatings would continue from that moment until late September. Mr. Rosewater didn't beat me while
asking me questions. He beat me before or after, simply to show he was in control. He pretended not to enjoy
it. At one point he told me he beat me mainly because he was angry. “What you have done, Mazi, makes my
blood boil. I don't want to raise my hand against you, but what do you suggest I do with someone who has
insulted the Leader?” He claimed his own father had been a political prisoner before the 1979 revolution, and
the shah's torturers had pulled out his toenails so brutally that he still couldn't walk properly. I should feel
lucky, Mr. Rosewater implied.
I did not. Once or twice a year I am felled by devastating migraines. Mr. Rosewater knew that, from the
medication I'd brought with me to Evin, and he took particular pleasure in pounding the back of my head.
What I hated most, though, was when he called me “Mazi.” Only my close friends and family call me Mazi.
The nickname is familiar, affectionate. In his voice it sounded obscene. “I'm really sorry, Mazi, that your
days are numbered,” Mr. Rosewater would tell me. The next time I saw him, he promised, I'd be standing on
a chair with a noose around my neck. He would personally kick the chair out from under me. I would not
know the date of my execution in advance. But, he assured me, it would take place after morning prayers,
around 4 a.m.
Weirdly, after long interrogation sessions Mr. Rosewater would sometimes start to open up. He would appear
to grow weary of screaming and hitting me, kicking me, whipping me with his belt, and he would start
rambling like a drunk confessing to the bartender after last call. “Many of my friends have had to divorce
their wives,” he told me one night. “We have to work late shifts. We have to travel without much notice, and
the job puts a lot of psychological pressure on us. Not many women accept that. I adore my wife. I kiss her
hands and feet for understanding me and puffing up with my job.”
One night about a week before the holy month of Ramadan began, his cell phone rang. It was Mrs.
Rosewater. “Hello, dear,” he said. “How are you?” He had his hand on my neck. “How is the honeycomb?”
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She must have been preparing food for the holidays. He moved his hand toward my ear and started to
squeeze it. “I know, it's lovely, isn't it? It's much better than the one we had last year...I'm glad your mother
liked it, too. How is she, by the way.. .Well, darling, he is a doctor; he knows what he is talking about...Wait a
second.” He hit the back of my skull as hard as he could and yelled, “Didn't I tell you to write down the
damned answers?” He pushed my head down toward the chair's writing tablet. I started to write again. He
continued talking with his wife. “I don't know how long I'll be here tonight. I may just sleep here. Don't wait
for me for dinner.” He came toward me again. With a crack, his belt hit the writing arm of the desk. “Write!”
he roared.
London, November 2009
Any bruises had faded by the time I arrived in London, but Paola was shocked by how thin I was. One of the
first things Mr. Rosewater had promised me was that he would send my skeleton home. He was right. I lost
25 pounds in prison.
I quickly realized that to cope with the interrogations I needed to be both physically and mentally fit. I
probably exercised five hours a day in my tiny cell. I did 500 sit-ups and 6o push-ups. I did yoga. I lay on
my back, kicked my legs up in the air, and bicycled.
For a while I was allowed to walk in the prison courtyard for 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in
the afternoon. They put six or seven of us next to each other, and we strolled back and forth with our
blindfolds on. The guards called it hava khori—literally, getting fresh air. That was the only time I could see
the sky, by raising my head and squinting from under my blindfold. At first I didn't know how one could
walk blindfolded. But I quickly memorized the number of paces between the walls of the courtyard. I even
started to jog.
My true refuge, though, was music. Once, after a particularly brutal beating, I swallowed three migraine
pills and passed out. Two women came to me in a dream. They had kind faces; in fact, they reminded me of
my sister Maryam, who had died of leukemia in February.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Sisters of mercy,” they answered.
They touched my forehead gently to soothe the pain. In the dream I smiled and heard Leonard Cohen
singing his song of the same name:
Oh the sisters of mercy, they are not departed or gone.
They were waiting for me when I thought that I just can't go on.
And they brought me their comfort and later they brought me this song.
I woke humming those words, free of pain. From that moment Leonard Cohen became the guardian of my
universe. He was the secret that Mr. Rosewater could never discover.
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Revolutionary Courthouse, Aug. 1, 2009 (before noon)
I was blindfolded as we drove. Mr. Rosewater hadn't told me where we were going, but he had told me my
role. “Mazi, you can be a great service to yourself and the country today,” he'd said at one of the predawn
interrogation sessions he had begun to conduct ever since threatening me with the noose. He slapped the
back of my head. ‘ You want to be free, don't you?”
“Yes,” I said quietly.
“So, all you have to do is repeat what Haj Agha taught you about velvet revolutions, in a press conference.”
He smacked my legs until they stung. “But this time we need names. We need to know who are the agents of
the velvet revolution. We need names, Mazi. No names means the noose. Understood?”
Waiting at the courthouse that morning, I had no idea that in another room more than 100 bedraggled
prisoners—many of them leading reformist figures and former government ministers—were sitting in the
dock as a prosecutor read out a long, outlandish account of their roles in the supposed velvet revolution. Two
of them—former vice president Mohammad Au Abtahi, and former deputy interior minister Mohammad
Atrianfar—were later brought out to “confess” their roles to state-media reporters.
My turn came after lunch. We ate chicken kebabs and drank dough, a savory yogurt drink similar to lassi.
Mr. Rosewater gave me his drink, saying he had to watch out for his blood pressure. “Names, Mazi, names,”
he reminded me.
Again I didn't provide any. Of course I knew several reformist politicians—any veteran Iranian journalist
would have. Many of them, in fact, had also been leading revolutionaries; over time they had decided that
the system they'd helped put into place could survive only if it was modernized. That was heresy to the new
generation of Guard commanders. These hardliners emerged after the Iran-Iraq War convinced that Iran
had no friends abroad, only enemies—and was saddled with a corrupt, impious leadership. In their view the
old guard needed to be purged from the system as thoroughly as the shah's cronies had been.
It was clear that Mr. Rosewater wanted me to implicate these reformists, to link them to my media bosses in
the West. Next to me on a dais sat another prisoner: Klan Tajbaksh, an Iranian-American scholar who
worked for the Open Society Institute, run by George Soros, a particular bogeyman of the Guards. The fact
that the government had licensed both of us to do our jobs only confirmed the Guards' suspicions about the
Iranian establishment. “Those who gave you permission are even guiltier than you are,” Mr. Rosewater said
to me once.
When we finished, I knew what awaited me back at Evin. In the interrogation room Mr. Rosewater beat me
without saying a word. He didn't have to explain.
Evin Prison, August 2009
Day after day, hour after endless hour, the interrogations went on, growing surreal in their outlines of
nefarious conspiracy, then circling back to more concrete maflers, like the names and professions and
opinions and connections of anyone I knew or might know. Early on, Mr. Rosewater had demanded my e-
mail and Facebook passwords, so he had a very long list of contacts to grill me about, one by one. What did I
know about this journalist's links to foreign organizations or governments? What was that one's take on
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events in Iran? And, if they were women, had I had sex with them?
This last subject occupied Mr. Rosewater for several weeks. He was a young man, perhaps in his mid-3os.
Sometimes, I think, he used sex as a way to humiliate me. But he also seemed genuinely curious about
someone who had spent so much time in the West. Once he asked me how I knew one lady friend:
“We met at a party,” I said.
“A sex party?”
I was taken aback. “I don't know what a sex party is,” I said hesitantly. “I've never been to one.”
‘Yeah, right,” he said sarcastically. He was convinced that any party where women went unveiled had to be
depraved. His professors, he said, had taught him about free love in the West. ‘ You can't tell me that you
can't just take any woman's hand in the Champs-Elysées and have sex with her.” He drew out the syllables
in “Champs-Elysées,” the way he had with “New Jersey.”
Such nonsense was draining. But at least the questions represented human contact. Other times Mr.
Rosewater would order the guards to lock me in my cell for days. By the time they dragged me out, hollow-
eyed, I looked forward to his questions. Twice I seriously considered suicide by breaking my glasses and
slifling my wrists with the shards. I wondered how long it would take to bleed to death.
Evin Prison, Sept. 17, 2009 (around 9 a.m.)
“It's very strange that no one has said anything about you yet,” Mr. Rosewater told me one day. “Don't you
have any friends or relatives?” I thought he was bluffing but couldn't know for sure. The prisoner's worst
nightmare is the thought of being forgotten. Then, one morning in September, the friendliest of the prison
guards—a man with whom I exchanged obscene jokes—opened my cell door and said, “Mr. Hillary Clinton,
you can go have hava khori now.”
I was mystified. “Why ‘Hillary Clinton'?” I asked him. “She talked about you last night,” he said, referring to
comments the U.S. secretary of state had made to her Canadian counterpart. I was ecstatic. This meant
there was international pressure to free me. I wanted to hug the guard. Instead I told him one of the
funniest and most obscene jokes I knew.
Early on I'd had conversations in my head with friends and colleagues, in which I made suggestions about
how to go about getting me released. As time went on these seemed ever more futile. But in September, I
began to see signs that the Guards were under pressure to free me. First they allowed me to call my mother,
then to share an jftar dinner with her during Ramadan. Then they let me call Paola—to warn her to stop
giving interviews. (Bless her, she knew that the message meant she should do more.) Mr. Rosewater began
claiming he wanted to free me before our baby was born at the end of October, a key part of the publicity
campaign on my behalf. Eleven days before my release, I was moved out of solitary confinement and into a
cell with four leading reformists, including Atrianfar. We had TV.
One disenchanted Iranian official told me recently that the Guards blocked my release for weeks; Mr.
Rosewater was among the loudest calling for me to be tried swiftly and harshly. I doubt he ever cared about
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the multilayered pressure campaign that NEWSWEEK and others had put together on my behalf—the
editorials and petitions, the diplomatic démarches, the quiet personal efforts of world leaders. But there were
Iranian officials who also disagreed with my detention. Soon after the election they might have been too
hesitant or too powerless to do much. But by September, with Iran on the verge of nuclear talks, they could
make the case that I had become a distraction. “You were more of a liability than an asset in jail,” the
disenchanted official told me.
I still don't know what finally broke the deadlock. A few years from now, after the Guards have consolidated
their position, I'm not sure anything would.
London, November 2009
I am nervous but exhilarated as I type out the words on my laptop:
Don't contact me anymore. I have never spied for anyone. I am not going to start by spying for you.
I send the e-mail to the address Mr. Rosewater gave me. In the days leading up to my release from Evin he
had forced me to sign documents saying I would “cooperate with the brothers in the Revolutionary Guards”
once outside the country. He'd given me a list of names to report on, including most of my Iranian friends in
London and other Western cities. He'd given me the e-mail address to use.
The night before I left the country, he asked to meet me at a hotel in downtown Tehran. His glare was just
as menacing as on the day he arrested me. When the waiter told him our tea would be delayed, that the
water needed time to boil, Mr. Rosewater shot him a spine-chilling look. The tea was ready within minutes.
We made awkward small talk. He had brought a colleague with him, an older man whose voice I had heard
occasionally during interrogations. “We hope to have constructive cooperation with you in the future,” the
man said soothingly. I smiled and nodded politely. Mr. Rosewater was more blunt as he reminded me that
the Guards could find me anywhere in the world. “Remember the bag, Mr. Bahari. Remember the bag” were
his last words.
I'm remembering something else instead. In my dream, when the two sisters of mercy came to my aid, it
was comforting to think that one of them was Maryam, my own beloved sister. At the time I wondered who
the other could be. Now, holding my newborn daughter in my arms, I know. Her name is Marianna
Maryam Bahari.
Find this article at
http://www .newsweek .com/id/223862
© 2009
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