Through the Looking Glass [incl. Haleh Esfandiari]

The first in a series of new books by former detainees lifts the veil on the secretive and often bizarre world of the Iranian Intelligence Services.

It was not quite my second day in Tehran’s Evin Prison when a jailer hauled me into an office before a tall thin man with sparkling black eyes, white socks, and the Iranian bureaucrat’s obligatory trimmed beard and collarless white shirt.

Introducing himself as the prosecutor of my case and assuming a dramatic air, he announced against me the most popular charge leveled against foreigners in Iran: espionage.

“But don’t worry,” he advised smoothly and with a twinkle in his eyes. “Like Roxana, you’ll get out soon and then write a book that has a million-copy print run.”

Iran’s judicial fraternity is clearly more media-savvy than the West gives them credit for. Roxana Saberi is the journalist who spent four months in an Iranian prison, was found guilty in an Iranian court of possessing classified documents but was released from her eight-year sentence after a global outcry over her plight.

She is now writing a memoir of her time in Iran, part of a crop of prison literature that the security crackdown of the past four years of the Ahmadinejad presidency has generated.

‘My Prison, My Home,’ another memoir of Iranian prisons, precedes Saberi’s offering which is set for publication early next year. Its author is Haleh Esfandiari, a soft-spoken but tenacious former journalist who currently directs the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Middle East program in Washington D.C.

Esfandiari was detained in Iran on one of her frequent visits to see her mother. She was questioned for several weeks by a disconcerting duo of men. One was a permanent interrogator called Ja’fari and another man referred to as Hajj Agha, a religious honorific, she never saw. Hajj Agha would be phoned and was “invariably courteous, although an undertone of threat was implicit in everything he said.”

Esfandiari was accused of orchestrating a velvet revolution in Iran on behalf of her employer, the Woodrow Wilson Center. In their minds, the think tank was acting as a deniable front for the American government.

“You’re talking about the surface things, the superficialities,” they insisted when she protests innocence. “We want to know about the core, the kernel, the hidden layers. Tell us about the hidden layers. With alarm, I began to see the shape of Ja’fari’s fantasies and the case he was trying to build against me,” Esfandiari writes.

She describes her time shuttling back and forth from her mother’s home to an Intelligence Ministry interrogation cell and her eventual incarceration there. “He imagined that the Wilson Center was an agency of the American government, that we were implicated in some plot against the Islamic Republic, and that we routinely held meetings to plan strategy to this end.”

Esfandiari was one of a number of Iranian academics educated or resident in the West, such as philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo and urban planner Kian Tajbakhsh, who were arrested from 2006 onwards and accused of acting as vessels of Western influence agitating for a soft overthrow of the Islamic Republic.

“Just imagine a puzzle,” Hajj Agha told Esfandiari, using the English word, for which he seemed unable to come up with a satisfactory Persian equivalent. “You have all the pieces in your head. Just put them together and give it to us. Tell us the mechanism, describe the model for us,” as if there were a one-size-fits-all, do-it-yourself kit for bringing about soft revolutions.

The interrogators appeared well versed in Western political theory and bandied about the names of specialists such as Crane Brinton and Theda Skocpol who have expounded on revolution. Francis Fukuyama and Michael Foucault were also favorites of the Iranian Intelligence Service.

When I was in an Iranian prison, my own interrogators had a similar tendency to digress from purely intelligence-related questioning into debates on ‘westoxification,’ neo-liberalism, and their perception of non-violent movements as Trojan Horses for Western influence. While waiting in the corridor to be processed through the prison bureaucracy, she saw Persian-language Shiite eschatological tracts or thick tomes refuting Saudi Arabia’s variant of Wahhabi Sunnism.

Esfandiari’s interrogators also appear to have been inspired by her predecessor in Evin, Ramin Jahanbegloo. The Iranian-Canadian political theorist and student of Isiah Berlin was so talkative, Esfandiari writes, that he may well have inspired the Iranian authorities to arrest her in the first place.

Unlike the British sailors that were arrested in Iran in 2007 or the three American hikers that are currently imprisoned in Evin Prison, Esfandiari is an Iranian who grew up there and perfectly comprehends both sides of the debate. In one of the book’s most engaging sections, she lays out the “simple, even compelling, but ultimately mad logic” that drove her interrogators’ reasoning.

“The United States wanted regime change in Iran; American officials had repeatedly said so. Congress had allocated funds for this purpose and the administration, no doubt had additional secret funds at its disposal. These funds were given to think tanks and foundations, such as the National Endowment for Democracy, whose mission was to advance democratization - in effect, regime change - in specifically targeted countries.

“The think tanks and foundations were run by former high administration officials who often returned to government service through a constantly revolving door. It was hardly far-fetched to conclude that these men - part of a governing elite - pursued the same policy goals in think tanks as they did in the government, and that the Iranian scholars - many of them unqualified - whom they identified and selected for fellowships and conference participation were selected not at random but as part of a larger scheme.”

Of course, just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. The Bush Administration hardly hid its distaste for the Islamic Republic through its eight years in power. It voted through a democracy-promotion budget attacked by critics as regime change in disguise. Covert operations and overflies by military aircraft continued inside and over Iran.

And Western and Israeli intelligence continues to run operations aiming to destabilize Iran’s nuclear program and target its scientists either for defection or assassination. But where, in her interrogators’ eyes, did Esfandiari fit into all this? In her job, she organized international conferences that brought together decision-makers and academics. If some of these became forums where intelligence organizations could recruit from both sides, can that really be considered culpability? Was the suspicion of facilitating an academic forum in which such contacts might occur worth putting a woman in her sixties through a year of anguish?

The relentlessly gloomy narrative is illuminated by flashes of humor. During a televised confession, Esfandiari’s interrogator sharply gestures for her to adjust her headscarf. Even after she’s pulled it well over her hair in Islamically-appropriate fashion, his hand signals don’t stop until she realizes that he is asking her to pull it back, exposing her hair, rather than forward.

“Here I was, accused of endangering state security, yet my interrogator wanted to make sure that I looked ‘modern’ and, like the young women in Tehran, casual in the way I wore my Islamic dress,” Esfandiari reflects.

In what she describes as a “theater of the absurd,” Esfandiari is anointed the “doctor” by her interrogators who can heal her country of imperialist influences. Back in the cell, her female guards consult her on what color clothes to wear outside prison and how to get rid of persistent acne.

One of her guards walks around the prison corridors wearing a vibrating belt in an effort to develop a flat tummy but, upon viewing an exhibition of a museum of crimes perpetrated by the Shah’s torturers, sobers up and comments that “someday they will put our pictures in this museum.”

Yet even following her release, Esfandiari was still not immune to Iran’s surreal touch. Months after finally being released from prison, she received an invite to a dinner of expat Iranians in New York to mark President Ahmadinejad’s visit.

“The irony was overwhelming. The very government that a year earlier had branded me a spy, an agent of Mossad and the CIA, an enabler of soft revolution, and a threat to national security was inviting me to appear in the same room with the Iranian president and perhaps engage with him in idle chatter as he circulated among his guests,” Esfandiari writes.

But that is Iran for you. After three weeks in prison, my interrogators asked how I felt about what should have been “a 48-hour affair stretching to three weeks due to events in the country,” I said that, after three years of living there, I had learned to suspend normal expectations upon entering Iran. “I know I am entering the very special Iranian time zone,” I smirked.

They were not pleased with my answer. But for me, Esfandiari, Saberi, and others, we weren’t exactly pleased with our jailers either.

See more on this Topic
George Washington University’s Failure to Remove MESA from Its Middle East Studies Program Shows a Continued Tolerance for the Promotion of Terrorism
One Columbia Professor Touted in a Federal Grant Application Gave a Talk Called ‘On Zionism and Jewish Supremacy’