“I heard the door swing shut, then heard the click of the lock as it fell into place.” This is how Esfandiari, the 67-year-old Iranian-American director of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Middle East Program, describes the moment she was incarcerated in Tehran’s Evin prison, in her disturbing account of the paranoia at the heart of President Ahmadinejad’s brutal administration. Her alleged (and fabricated) crime was “endangering national security” through her work organising conferences in Washington DC. Robbed at knifepoint while visiting her mother in Tehran in 2006, Esfandiari had her passport stolen in what turned out to be a state-sanctioned plot to detain her in Iran. Her months of interrogation by apparatchiks of the Iranian intelligence agency, who kept her in a state of constant fear, is overlaid with a history of the collapse of relations between her homeland and her adopted country. The pace quickens during her telling of the 105 days she spent in solitary confinement at Evin, where it was small victories (never looking at the pictures of the Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei that hung on her wall, and maintaining a rigid mental and physical fitness regime despite poor health) that helped her survive. Never sensationalised, Esfandiari’s account of her appalling humiliation and treatment makes distressing but compelling reading.
