In 2007, Haleh Esfandiari, the Iranian-American director of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Middle East Program, told Iranian intelligence everything she knew. She was interrogated for almost eight months, nearly four of them inside Tehran’s notorious Evin prison. During that time, she explained the institutional structure of the Wilson Center, identified its board members and described her work organizing conferences. She translated reams of material from the center’s Web site into Farsi. But it was a dialogue of the deaf.
She knew the smirking, ubiquitous bureaucrat assigned to her case as Ja’fari, and his sinister, smooth-talking superior only by a Persian honorific, Hajj Agha. As she recounts in her new memoir, “My Prison, My Home,” these men were certain that Esfandiari, the refined 67-year-old daughter of a high-born Iranian botanist and an Austrian mother, was a central figure in an American plot to topple the Iranian government. Her answers to their questions, they believed, were evasions. What they wanted to understand was the deep structure of the conspiracy. They asked her to tell them about meetings that had never taken place and people she’d never met; they asked her the same questions, in jumbled order, with numbing frequency, hoping to catch her in a lie. She was not cooperating, they told her, and so the interrogations would go on. She could put an end to the intimidation by inventing a story to please them — but only at the cost of incriminating herself and others.
Esfandiari had come to Tehran to spend Christmas with her elderly mother. It took a staged armed robbery, the seizure of her Iranian and American passports, a raid on her mother’s home and several weeks of interrogations at an ersatz “Passport Office” before she fully understood that she was ensnared in two ugly and intractable struggles. One was the Islamic Republic’s nearly 30-year cold war with the United States; the other was its battle with its internal opposition. These two enemies, the Iranian intelligence ministry had come to believe, were linked. The domestic opposition spoke a language of democracy and civil society that resonated suspiciously with the agendas of foundations like the Open Society Institute. The regime’s hardliners associated such foundations with the opposition movements that overthrew autocratic regimes in Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine.
At a time when the Bush administration had made no secret of its desire to forge ties with the Iranian opposition, it was hardly irrational for the unpopular regime to fear that it would come to a similar end. The revolving door between American government and Washington research institutions made it relatively easy for Iranian investigators to draw maps that connected internal opponents to prominent expatriates to the United States government. The president of the Wilson Center was Lee Hamilton, a former congressman: this, to their minds, was evidence that Esfandiari was recruiting fifth columnists at the bidding of the United States government.
Esfandiari and her husband mobilized an army of devoted friends and loyal colleagues as the trap closed around her. They knew people who had served in various ministries during the reformist presidency of Mohammad Khatami, or who had contacts inside the intelligence apparatus, or clout, they hoped, with the hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In a sign of just how serious Esfandiari’s case was, her friends in Iran, presumably under threat, stopped inquiring about her case, dropped contact with her and in one instance even hung up the phone when she called. During her imprisonment, she did not know that she had become an international cause célèbre; her interrogators told her that she had been forgotten in America. (Reading about Esfandiari’s tribulations, the reader may spare a thought for Iran’s young and unknown political prisoners — the journalists, feminists and student activists who do not have powerful friends, American passports or international media attention, and who are often terrorized into confessing to crimes they did not commit.)
Esfandiari recounts in measured, at times chilling, detail her journey into the bowels of the Iranian intelligence apparatus. Neither the fear nor the fury that she undoubtedly felt compromise the clarity of her observations. Ja’fari, though malevolent, is not a cartoon villain but a creature of a certain sweaty banality, constantly interrupting interrogations to take cellphone calls about the teaching job he holds after hours. The prison guards discuss their skin problems and do their laundry at the prison; Esfandiari recalls at least one of them, a pious older woman, with warmth. At Evin, Esfandiari exercises constantly, refuses medicine and food other than what she can get from outside, loses a frightening amount of weight and avoids allowing her belongings to touch the dirty floor. What might look compulsive under ordinary circumstances becomes, in solitary confinement, the means to survival, a stubborn insistence on personal agency even if its sphere is as small as a prison cell, or, smaller still, the body.
With its fractured chapters and frequent subheadings, “My Prison, My Home” sometimes lacks narrative cohesion. Its most revealing passages are those detailing experiences no doubt painful and even boring at the time: the hours wasted testing the obduracy of Ja’fari’s pinched mind, and later, keeping pace with the more sophisticated Hajj Agha, whose face Esfandiari is never allowed to see. Esfandiari writes without literary affectation, to the point of flatness; but in her refusal to aggrandize or feel sorry for herself, there is an unmistakable and persistent dignity.
