Haleh Esfandiari, the Iranian-American academic held for four months in solitary confinement in the political wing of Iran‘s infamous Evin prison, said in Washington on Monday that she was able to endure by sticking to a rigorous daily exercise regimen and blocking out anything that reminded her of home.
On the three occasions when the prison dinner was an Iranian dish called adas pollo — a mixture of rice, lentils and raisins that is the favorite of her two young granddaughters back in Washington — she said she refused to even look at it, for example.
“Once in prison I decided I was not going to fall apart,” said Ms. Esfandiari, the director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a research institute in the capital, noting that she now weighs about 80 pounds — down from about 100 pounds when she was first imprisoned. “To maintain my mental and physical well-being, I imposed a strict discipline on myself.”
Ms. Esfandiari, 67, looking vibrant in a dark suit, bright orange scarf and gold leaf brooch, spoke about her ordeal during an hourlong news conference at the Wilson Center and in a separate telephone interview with The New York Times.
It remained a mystery to her, she said, why she was imprisoned on May 8 after enduring months of interrogation by Iranian intelligence agents. She was prevented from leaving Iran last December after a weeklong visit to her 93-year-old mother.
During her first questioning, when she was asked about Washington trying to foment a “inqilab makhmali,” or “velvet revolution,” she said she had to ask what the term meant.
“I think I was taken in because they thought the United States was no longer able or interested in military intervention in Iran,” she said, and that the Iranians were convinced that Washington had instead focused on the kind of “people power” protests that overturned governments in Georgia and Ukraine. Her Iranian interrogators seemed to believe that conferences and seminars organized by research centers and foundations would ignite the initial spark, she said.
Ms. Esfandiari described herself as both angry and dejected at times, but now mostly disappointed that her efforts to get the two sides to talk were viewed with suspicion. She still supports such dialogue, she said.
Debate on whether to engage the Iranians has been raging anew in Washington in recent months, and the arrests of Ms. Esfandiari and three other Iranian-Americans have increased tensions.
Ms. Esfandiari was released from prison on Aug. 21 after Lee H. Hamilton, the former Democratic congressman who directs the Wilson Center, received a response to an appeal he had addressed to the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Ms. Esfandiari credits his intervention with her release. She left Iran early on Sept. 3.
Another Iranian-American formerly barred from leaving Iran, Parnaz Azima, a reporter for Radio Farda, a United States-financed station based in Europe, was also permitted to leave last week.
Two additional Iranian-Americans jailed since May remain behind bars. They are Kian Tajbakhsh, an urban planner with ties to the Open Society Institute financed by George Soros, and Ali Shakeri, with the Center for Citizen Peacebuilding at the University of California, Irvine.
Ms. Esfandiari said she had no contact with the other jailed Iranian-Americans in prison, although one day when she noticed an interrogator carrying a stack of English books she guessed that they belonged to Mr. Tajbakhsh and asked the man to find out if she could borrow them. That got her a steady supply of novels ranging from Dostoyevsky to the mystery writer Georges Simenon.
Other than that, her room came with a Koran, and she decided to read it through. One female guard had been studying Islamic thought, so whenever Ms. Esfandiari needed further explanation she would talk with the guard — her only human contact outside of her interrogators.
She was never harmed, nor did she fear being harmed, she said, and she had a relatively tolerable room with two windows that let in lots of daylight. She would do 30 minutes of stretching daily, and pace for several hours in her room or in a small courtyard open to the sky. The food was not bad, and she could supplement it with grocery orders placed with a guard, she said.
Ms. Esfandiari said she spoke freely for an hour about the Wilson Center’s work for a documentary that appeared on state-run television in July. The final product, which she said she had not seen, was composed of snippets that made the seminars and conferences she spoke about seem like part of a grand conspiracy. The main reaction she got from her television appearance was horror from childhood friends that she had outed them by confessing to being 67, she joked.
Her detention is likely to have a chilling effect on Iranian academics attending such conferences in the near future, she said, although she added that because her Middle East department had the whole region to worry about she could concentrate on other issues. She has gone back to work and has scheduled brief medical checkups for minor problems, like a skin rash.
Iranian officials had accused Ms. Esfandiari of trying to undermine national security, and she was freed only after posting the deed to her mother’s apartment as bail. She said she was never told she would face trial and did not expect to, and was so elated to be free at the moment that she did not want to contemplate never seeing her mother again.
When she arrived in Washington on Thursday, she was happily reunited with her two granddaughters, ages 6 and 4, who had been told only that she was away taking care of her mother. The first thing they asked was for adas pollo, and Ms. Esfandiari arose before dawn on Friday to make it.
