Yesterday, students gathered to hear the story of an intellectual’s struggle to prove her innocence. Haleh Esfandiari, Middle East program director at the Wilson Center, a Washington, D.C. think tank, spent 105 days in Evin Prison after she was seized during a 2006 visit to her mother in Iran.
Esfandiarai said she was driving with her mother late on the evening of Dec. 30, 2006, when a car approached and drove her vehicle to the side of the road. “We had to stop, and within seconds three men carrying three large knives jumped out of the car,” she said. “I thought it was a robbery in the middle of the night. In a very sort of innocent way I said, ‘I’m traveling tonight, please leave my passport, but take everything else.’”
At first she assumed that this was a run-of-the-mill robbery, but in the ensuing days she began to suspect that it was anything but. “Within two or three days I figured out that this was not your normal robbery,” she said.
The men who had accosted her had taken her passport, and as she dealt with the bureaucratic headache of replacing it, she realized that she had become a person of interest to the Iranian Intelligence Ministry. “The kind of questions he put to me had nothing to do with issuing a passport,” Esfandiari said of the man she spoke to about her passport.
“He wanted to find out what my job was at the Winston Center, what my husband was doing, what my grandchildren, aged six and eight, what were their names.”
Days later, she was told to report to the Intelligence Ministry. Her options were limited, Esfandiari said; people had disappeared into the halls of the Ministry and not returned, but she had no real chance of escape should she decide to flee.
“I went to the Intelligence Ministry, and that was the beginning of eight months of interrogation,” she said.
Esfandiari said that she first became frightened when her interrogators mentioned the phrase “soft revolution,” invoking a theory of revolutionary action that favors peaceful reformation over bloodshed. “When they mentioned the phrase soft revolution to me I became terribly afraid because I knew that they could charge me with overthrowing the regime,” she said.
The Iranian Intelligence Ministry, she said, had convinced the authorities that American intellectuals were working with Iranian scholars and academics to foster such a revolution in Iran.
“Their argument was that you people, meaning the Winston Center, where I worked, and other think tanks … invite Iranian scholars, policy makers, Iranian journalists, to try and recruit them by introducing them to the idea of soft revolution and then send them back to Iran,” she said. “And very soon you will have groups there that are trying to undermine and overthrow the regime.”
Interrogation began immediately, Esfandiari said, but she had promised herself not to give in to despair. She read and exercised to occupy herself, as well as working on a book that she did not write down, for fear that it would be used as material in her interrogations. “I wrote in my head a children’s book for my grandchildren, a biography of my paternal grandmother, an extraordinary woman,” she said. “It was an amazing exercise for me. The last book I was reading while I was in prison was Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene.”
She said that she owed her eventual freedom to many people, but that those most dear to her were her former students at Princeton, who had written a letter to the Iranian government expressing how much she had done for them. “I owe my freedom to a great number of people, some I know and some I do not. To this day strangers come up to me and say, ‘You are Haleh,’ and I say, ‘Yes,’ and they say, ‘We prayed for you.’”
