My Prison, My Home: One Woman's Story of Captivity in Iran Read online

  We headed downtown to the ministry through the chaotic traffic. Hundreds of cars—some of them the expensive BMWs, Mercedes-Benzes, and Audis of Tehran’s newly rich class, but mostly older cars, belching smoke from their tailpipes—competed with buses, motorcycles, cyclists, and pedestrians for the same space. Traffic lights changed color dutifully but went largely unheeded. Cars crept into blocked intersections, bringing traffic to a standstill. People shouted at one another, and occasional fistfights broke out between exasperated drivers. Policemen stood by, refusing to get involved, not even pretending to direct the traffic.

  The passport bureau at the ministry was in a large, airy room. Five male clerks, in sweaters over open-necked shirts, with stubble on their cheeks, sat behind five desks. They shuffled about in slipper-like sandals, open at the back. Stubble and slippers, I came to learn over the coming weeks and months, were the hallmarks of the Islamic Republic. The outward scruffiness mirrored an inner reality: unhurried, sloppy in dress and in the performance of their duties, these men demanded as little of themselves as the bureaucracy demanded of them.

  One of the clerks was expecting us. My countless phone calls to Shaul had borne fruit. Shaul had called a friend, Hadi, a professor of politics at the University of Tehran, who was currently a visiting scholar at the Wilson Center. Hadi had good contacts at the Iranian Interests Section in Washington, D.C., the office that handled Iranian consular affairs in the absence of full diplomatic relations between the two countries.

  The clerk had in hand a fax from the interests section certifying that my stolen Iranian passport had been issued in Washington and providing the relevant passport details. The Foreign Ministry could now provide the authorization letter I needed. The clerk ordered tea and got down to work. By the time we were done with the formalities and the passport bureau chief had affixed his signature to the documents, it was past one o’clock in the afternoon—too late to get to the main passport office, which was already closed. But at least we had the name of the director, and that would give us an entrée the next day. “You’ll have your new passport in two or three days,” the clerk told me. I was elated.

  Back at my mother’s place, I called my travel agent and reserved a flight for Wednesday, three days away. I telephoned Shaul and told him to expect me. Many people had called my mother when they learned of the robbery, one of whom had even heard that I had been robbed, beaten, and hospitalized. A couple of close friends came by that evening. Like me, they had no reason to suspect anything other than that I had simply been the unfortunate victim of a robbery. They shook their heads in sympathy, remarked on the growing insecurity in the city, commiserated on the loss of my passports and papers, and assured me that it would all be behind me in a few days. Only my childhood friend Ferry and his wife were skeptical. “This was no ordinary robbery,” Ferry’s wife said. “It seems political to us.” “Nonsense,” I responded. “It was a robbery, pure and simple.”

  THE PASSPORT OFFICE

  The next day, a Sunday, we went to the passport office on Sattar Khan Avenue in west Tehran. Farhad and I entered separately through the men’s and women’s checkpoints, divided by the usual tatty curtain. The female guard on my side of the curtain conducted a superficial search of my purse and let me through. She was friendly and smiling. In the first decade after the revolution, smiles on the faces of mid-level civil servants were rare, deemed a sign of frivolousness, unseemly in an Islamic state. Thanks to President Khatami, who was elected on a reformist platform in 1997 and spent two four-year terms fighting the hard-liners, the scowls of government officials were no longer de rigueur. (Tehran’s wits referred to Khatami as Seyyed-e Khandan, the smiling cleric, a play on words in Persian that denoted both his sunny visage and his relative ineffectiveness.) During Khatami’s presidency, university students—men and women—mixed more freely; women fought for and secured more freedom in matters of dress; color returned to clothing on the streets; young girls moved about the city with hair showing beneath their headscarves, their nails polished, a touch of lipstick on their lips. I realized how miraculous it was, two years into Ahmadinejad’s far more restrictive presidency, that in a government office I was still encountering a smiling face.

  Farhad and I headed straight for the director’s office, past the queues of people waiting to hand in or pick up forms. We ended up in a large room, where, we were told, the final approval for a new passport would be issued. On the wall, as in all government offices, were pictures of the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini; the current supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei; and President Ahmadinejad. Three women, one in a black chador, two wearing the ample scarf known as a maghna’eh—which covers the forehead, hair, and ears; fits tightly under the chin; then drapes over the shoulders and upper back and chest—sat behind desks. The lone man in the room, obviously in charge, sat at his own desk, at some distance from the women. We carried our growing file from desk to desk. There was more signing, registering, paper shuffling, and waiting. Finally, the man in charge called my name and handed me two letters. I was to take one back to the Foreign Ministry and one to “the President’s Bureau.” Each of these two offices, in turn, had to give me letters approving my application for a new passport. “Once you get these letters, you should expect to wait at least two weeks before your passport can be issued,” he said.

  I was shattered. I had been told it would only take three days. But far more important, I knew that “the President’s Bureau” was a euphemism for the Ministry of Intelligence and Security. I was familiar with the ministry’s fearsome reputation. It was responsible for internal security, and was the regime’s political watchdog, its secret police. It harassed intellectuals, journalists, and even the mildest of dissidents; it made arrests. It had been responsible for disappearances, even assassinations. Still, I convinced myself this merely meant more forms and interviews and, certainly, more delays.

  I was directed to see a Mr. Torabi in the same building. Farhad and I went downstairs, found the office marked President’s Bureau, entered rooms which turned out to be quite well furnished, and asked for Mr. Torabi. I do not know if this was his real name or a fictitious one, as was often the case with Intelligence Ministry officials I later encountered. Mr. Torabi was not there. When I went in the following day, he was not there, either. “You just missed him. He won’t be back till Wednesday,” I was told. I felt that I was being sent after black beans, as the Persian expression goes—being given the runaround.

  At home, I canceled my airline reservation and once again telephoned Shaul. “There will be a two-week delay,” I told him. “We have to find someone who can expedite things.” In Iran, contacts—and money—are crucial in situations like mine. Shaul promised to make phone calls. Over the next four months, I would make, cancel, and remake these same airline reservations several times, each one a marker on the barometer of my rising, and then dashed, hopes.

  A BLEAK NEW YEAR’S EVE

  I had expected to spend New Year’s Eve with my husband and our family in Washington; I was now spending it with Mutti in Tehran. My mother loves festive occasions: birthdays, Christmas, New Year’s, the Iranian new year festival, Nowruz. As a child I learned to love these chances to bring people together, to enjoy the company of family and friends, to laugh and tell stories, and, like Mutti, I was punctilious about observing them. In our household, failure to telephone a relative on a birthday or to mark a celebration was a serious matter. Shaul often teased me about the importance I attached to such gestures. Although Mother and I decided to stay home, I wanted to make New Year’s Eve as joyful for her as possible.

  I walked to the fancy new grocery store a block from my mother’s apartment and bought salmon and caviar. We set the table with a beautiful tablecloth and Mother’s best Rosenthal china, which she kept in a special cupboard in her apartment. Dinner, however, turned out to be a somber affair. Unease hovered over the table. Both my mother and I sensed that the normal order of our lives had been interrupted
. Just how very deeply it had been disrupted, neither of us even dimly understood.

  The next day I went with Kami to take care of my cell phone, which was now in the hands of my assailants. In Iran, you can buy a cell phone at a variety of stores, but a number has to be purchased from the government phone company. The number is encoded on a chip that is installed in the phone. I had to cancel my old cell phone number and purchase a new one. At the telephone company office, I handed over a batch of documents to a clerk: my “deed” of ownership, the barely legible Xerox copy of my birth certificate as proof of identity, and the police report, duly notarized by the revolutionary magistrate’s court, attesting that my cell phone had been stolen. But here, too, bureaucracy was alive and well. They could cancel my old telephone number, I was told, but they could issue me a new number only if I produced a picture ID—the original, not a Xerox copy. I repeated the obvious: my ID card had been stolen; it would be months before I could obtain a new one. The clerk shrugged. It was not his concern. I’ll be home in two weeks, anyway, I told myself as I left empty-handed.

  Finally, on Wednesday, I saw Torabi, the man in the Intelligence Ministry’s “President’s Bureau,” having called the day before to make sure he would be there. He went over the robbery with me again and asked me a few more questions. “Why don’t you step outside and wait for my colleague, Mr. Ja’fari. He wants to talk to you,” he said. I waited in the reception room. After about half an hour, the door behind me opened and a man asked me to come in.

  Ja’fari was sitting at a table behind a laptop. He was in his mid-thirties, of medium height, with a bit of stubble on his face. He wore an open-necked shirt beneath a modified safari jacket. A smirk never left his face. His manner alternated between solicitous official—“Tell me again about the robbery”—and faceless bureaucrat—“Date of birth? Identity card number?” He appeared to be reading the questions from his laptop. At first he asked questions and simply nodded at my answers. Then he handed me a sheaf of blank paper, repeated the same questions and posed many others in writing, and instructed me to write down my replies.

  Yet, still, I was only slightly uneasy: the attention of the Intelligence Ministry was never welcome, but I had been assured by friends that clearance by the ministry for lost passport applications was routine. Asking for my responses in writing cast the interview in a more serious light, but most of the information was ordinary enough: name, family name, husband’s name, children, employer, salary. A few of the questions seemed unnecessarily intrusive: occupation and employer of husband, daughter, son-in-law, sister, brother. Ja’fari seemed overly interested in the details of my Wilson Center salary: amount, deductions for federal and state taxes and for Social Security and retirement, the biweekly method of payment. Concerned lest my salary, when converted into Iranian, rials seem to him exorbitant, I made all this as convoluted as possible. (Later, on the day of my release, when I saw Ja’fari’s shiny, silver-gray Peugeot, I concluded that I need not have worried. The Intelligence Ministry took very good care of its own.)

  I found it odd that Ja’fari wanted the names and ages of my granddaughters, as well as a list of the people I saw regularly in Washington. I came to understand only much later that, in the style of the now-defunct East German secret police, the Stasi, the Iranian secret police collected masses of information, no matter how insignificant or useless, on everyone who happened to attract their attention. As with the Stasi, such information contributed nothing to national security, but fat dossiers were regarded as proof of “thoroughness” and helped inflate the self-regard of the intelligence officers. When Ja’fari asked me if I was married to a Jew, an alarm bell should have gone off, but it didn’t. I failed to catch the implied menace in the question. He has never met a Muslim woman who married a Jew, I thought. Trying to strike a friendly tone, I even offered to show Ja’fari around if he ever came to Washington. Notwithstanding a very few friends’ skeptical attitudes, I still believed I was the victim of an ordinary robbery and this was routine clearance before a new passport could be issued.

  Ja’fari ended the interview around noon. I went home, never expecting to see him again. I assumed that my passport would be issued in a few days. But when I picked up the phone in my mother’s apartment the next day, it was Ja’fari at the other end of the line. He instructed me to appear Saturday morning, this time at an Intelligence Ministry office. Mr. Ja’fari, which may or may not have been his real name, was to become my constant but unwelcome “companion” in the weeks and months ahead—an unshakable and controlling presence throughout a terrifying interrogation that would stretch out over the next eight months, nearly four of them spent in solitary confinement at Evin Prison.

  2.

  AN IRANIAN CHILDHOOD

  I WAS BORN MARCH 3, 1940, in Tehran. My mother is Viennese and my father is from Kerman, in eastern Iran. Father came from an old established landed family, many of whose members also served in the government. My paternal great-grandfather, Vakil ol-Molk-e-Dovvom, was the governor of Kerman in the 1870s, and my grandfather Raf’at Dowleh was vice governor of the province before becoming a member of parliament. My paternal grandmother came from a clerical family; her brother was the highest-ranking cleric in Kerman. On the European side, my maternal grandfather, who died in World War I, owned a hotel in Marienbad, in Czechoslovakia, and my mother’s older brother was a cloth merchant in Prague.

  For the first six years of my life I lived in Karaj, twenty-five miles from Tehran, where my father was a professor of botany at the College of Agriculture.

  My father couldn’t have chosen a better place than Karaj to ease his Austrian bride into Iran, which in the 1930s remained traditional and offered few amenities. The college was a small, closed community, with a river and beautifully landscaped wooded areas. The faculty lived either in two-story houses or bungalows separated by hedges. In the summer, the gardeners sprinkled water over the college’s unpaved streets to help settle the dust and cool the air.

  By the time I was born, Mother had spent two years in Iran. She had thrown herself wholeheartedly into the culture and customs of her adopted country. But she ran a European household, and we spoke German at home and followed European customs. The stories she told were of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Cinderella, and Hansel and Gretel. I learned Persian stories from my nanny, who doubled as cook and housekeeper.

  I loved the garden for its small streams, square ponds, flower beds, rose gardens and old trees, especially the catalpa, poplar, pine, and plane trees. With my nanny in tow, I would play hopscotch in the walkways of the garden and games of hide-and-seek with other children. This was paradise, I thought; but every time I said as much to my nanny, she would scold me, take me by the hand, and make me rinse my mouth to wash away my “blasphemous” words.

  It didn’t take long for my outgoing mother to make friends with a number of the professors and their families. The members of the faculty were mostly European-educated and could converse with her in German or in French. Mother had an affinity for those who spoke her native language.

  The Schricker family, headed by Hans Shricker, an Austrian forestry specialist, lived next door to us and their eldest son, Adalbert, married my father’s sister, Touran. Mother had lost both her parents at a relatively young age and was raised by her sisters in Vienna. The Schrickers became her surrogate parents. Mr. Schricker, a skilled carpenter, built a bassinet when my mother was pregnant with me, and once I was born, Mrs. Schricker showed Mother how to bathe a newborn, and how to diaper and dress me. Under Mrs. Schricker’s tutelage, Mother sewed and knitted clothes for me, since ready-made children’s clothing was a rarity in those days. Mrs. Schricker—warm, loving, practical, and down-to-earth—eased the pain of living away from home.

  Unlike traditional Persian homes, our garden didn’t have a wall around it, but pine trees served to shield it from the street. We had a large living room and a dining room, several bedrooms, and a bathroom with a bathtub and a Persian-style toilet, bas
ically a basin sunk in the floor.

  In the evenings Mother and Father would sit in the living room and listen to the radio, while I would play in a corner with my toys. My parents’ friends, especially the Schrickers, would come over to listen to the European news broadcasts. Hitler had invaded Russia in June 1941, and one flank of the German’s three-pronged attack was aimed at the oilfields of the Caucasus on Iran’s border. In Karaj they all worried that the German army would overrun the Caucasus and advance into Iran.

  The Allies were already concerned about German influence in Iran. Once Hitler invaded Russia, they desperately needed Iran’s overland routes to supply the hard-pressed Russian army. Unable to persuade a proud and stubborn Reza Shah—the military officer who seized power in 1921, sent the Qajar dynasty packing, and founded a new dynasty in 1925—to abandon Iran’s state of neutrality and join the Allied cause, Russia and Britain invaded Iran in August 1941, the Russians from the north, the British from the south. When Russian troops appeared at Karaj, Father remained at his teaching post in the College of Agriculture, but he sent Mother and me to Tehran, to my grandparents’ house. I was happy to be reunited with my older stepbrother, Siamack, who was going to school in Tehran and already living with my grandmother.

  MY GRANDPARENTS

  By the time I was born, my grandparents were living near the University of Tehran. They had moved to Tehran from Kerman when my grandfather was elected to parliament.