WASHINGTON -- At her lowest moments during more than three months in solitary confinement in Iran’s most notorious prison, Haleh Esfandiari wondered if anyone remembered her or if she had been swallowed without the world noticing.
But the Iranian-American academic, accused of trying to foment an overthrow of Iran’s hardline government, pushed those fears out of her mind, instead filling her days with exercise in her small cell, reading, and the conviction that her family and colleagues would not let her case fade.
“Of course there was despair, but I am a very strong person. I decided to make the best of the condition that I was in from the very beginning,” she told The Associated Press on Saturday.
Esfandiari, 67, returned to her home in suburban Potomac, Md., this past week after spending 105 days in Evin Prison in Tehran.
Her release came after Lee Hamilton, director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars where Esfandiari works, made a direct appeal to Iran’s powerful Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It is unclear if that communication led to Esfandiari’s release, but Khamenei replied in August that he was pleased with Hamilton’s message.
The Wilson Center and Esfandiari’s family had repeatedly called on Iran to let her go and strongly denied Iranian claims that Esfandiari and three other Iranian-Americans attempted to create a “soft” revolution by opening the country up to the West.
Esfandiari said she was generally treated well during her detention but sometimes found it hard to keep her spirits up.
“I didn’t know at all what was going on outside,” she said. “Sometimes you feel that maybe nobody is doing anything for you, maybe you are abandoned, maybe you are forgotten. But that was not the case.”
During her frequent interrogations, Esfandiari tried to convince her jailers that her work was not subversive.
At the Wilson Center, Esfandiari is head of the Middle East program. Her work includes arranging conferences and helping women in the Middle East get involved in the political process. But Iranian judiciary officials appeared to believe that the Wilson Center, along with other foreign think tanks, was much more political than it actually is, she said.
“I tried to explain how these think tanks like the Wilson Center work,” she said. “Whether or not I convinced them, I am not sure, but at least I did my best.”
Esfandiari said she did not object when she was videotaped speaking about her work, footage that was later edited into a national broadcast in Iran that was billed as her “confession.” She has not seen the tape but said her statements were not self-incriminating.
“There was nothing I was going to hide or confess,” she said.
Esfandiari’s ordeal began last December during her annual Christmas visit to her 93-year-old mother in Tehran. On her way to the airport for her flight home, she was robbed of her passport.
When she went to apply for another passport, Iranian authorities began a series of lengthy interrogations and barred her from leaving Iran. Esfandiari was allowed to stay at her mother’s apartment until May, when she was taken to Evin Prison, where Iran holds political prisoners.
Of the three Iranian-Americans accused with her, two remain in prison: Kian Tajbakhsh, an urban planning consultant with the Soros Foundation’s Open Society Institute, and Ali Shakeri, a founding board member of the Center for Citizen Peacebuilding at the University of California, Irvine. The third, journalist Parnaz Azima, was not imprisoned and her passport was returned this past week.
Esfandiari has been reunited with her husband, sister, daughter and two young granddaughters. She plans to return to the Wilson Center on Monday, after spending time at home.
“I am glad it is over, I am delighted to be home and am thankful to everyone who kept my case alive,” she said.
