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JEB SHARP: Haleh Esfandiari knows something about the way the Iranian government works. The Iranian scholar and journalist has lived in the United States since 1979. But in 2007, she endured four months in solitary confinement in Iran’s notorious Evin prison. That’s where Iranian authorities hold many political dissidents. Esfandiari had been in Tehran to visit her elderly mother when authorities began to interrogate her about her work at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. She has a new book out about her experience called “My Prison, My Home.” It chronicle the months of interrogation and subsequent incarceration she endured in 2007.
HALEH ESFANDIARI: I stayed sane by not thinking about my family. That was crucial for me. I decided to have a very strict regimen in prison. I insisted on being woken up at six. I went to sleep at eleven o’clock at night and if I was not interrogated, I spent my time pacing up and down the cell and doing a lot of exercise. After my interrogation, I would always go over what we discussed during the day because the interrogation took sometimes eight to nine hours so that was part of my daily exercise of thinking what we discussed and what are they going to ask me the next day.
SHARP: How did you stay sane in terms of your interactions? You were under extreme duress, you felt menace from your interrogator who’s named Javari, whether that’s his real name or not.
ESFANDIARI: It was intimidating. They were threatening. They brought a lot of pressure on me. They thought I was privy to a lot of information which I was not. They thought I knew what the United States wanted to do in Iran. But I always kept my calm except on one or two occasions. I never showed my despair to them. I never showed my fear to them and I never cried in front of them.
SHARP: Why do you think you in particular were targeted by the authorities?
ESFANDIARI: I was everything they disliked. I was a woman, I was Iranian American working for the think tank in Washington. I had written on Iran and I used to go to Iran a couple of times a year, visiting my ninety three year old mother. So I think I was the perfect suspicious person for them because the majority of universities and research centers and think tanks in Iran are somehow connected to the government and they thought that if they arrest me, they will find out what the United States is planning to do in Iran, how to overthrow the regime. Everything they suspected that might lead to a velvet revolution, I was the embodiment of all these things so they decided to go after me.
SHARP: Now much has happened since you returned home after your ordeal, including this year’s contested elections and the amazing series of demonstrations that followed. There’s been a crackdown since then and many Iranians have been rounded up for interrogation and imprisonment and I just wonder what it’s been like for you to watch that drama play out from here in the US?
ESFANDIARI: It has been terrible because I thought once I was released and the other Iranian American was taken in, Mikian Dajbach was released, that the file of the Velvet Revolution, which we were accused of being part of it, would be forever closed but now they have arrested the leaders of the Reformist Movement and are accusing them of working for foreign governments and fermenting self-revolution so it’s shocking to me.
SHARP: The Iranian regime as you’ve said, tried to paint your academic work as a cover for a plot to overthrow the Iranian regime, something you say is a paranoid fantasy. But after going through what you went through under the current regime, do you feel differently about regime change? Are you radicalized?
ESFANDIARI: I think if there is going to be a change in Iran, it’s going to happen from within. Civil society, NGO’s, women’s organizations, the students were active way before the United States showed any interest in supporting a number of civil society and NGO’s so any change will come from within and any interference from abroad will just undermine the work of these civil society groups. But, having said that, this doesn’t mean that one should not speak out against the rest, the mock trial, conditions in the prisons, the rape, killing that has taken place since the presidential election on June 12.
SHARP: It’s been two years since you were able to return home to your husband and your daughter and your grandchildren and I just wonder what this time since has been like, how you’re changed, what you most feel today sitting here, thinking about it and watching everything that’s happening that’s still so dramatic.
ESFANDIARI: I really appreciate being free. I appreciate being home. I appreciate being back at my job but I miss not going back to Iran. My mother passed away three months ago. I was not able to go and be with her so this is the feeling I have but I’m an optimist you know. I still hope that Iran will get out of this current crisis it has gotten itself in and we will see a better times for Iran.
SHARP: Well, scholar Haleh Esfandiari’s new memoir is “My Prison, My Home.” Thank you so much for coming to speak to us.
ESFANDIARI: Thank you for having me.
