For most of the years that I was based in Iran as a correspondent for Time magazine, my working life approximated a clumsy script for a television spy drama. I was regularly obliged to meet with intelligence agents who monitored my writing and hectored me to disclose the identities of sources. These interrogation sessions usually took place in empty apartments across Tehran, places where no one could have heard me scream, and always with stern warnings that nobody could know they were taking place.
I got used to seeing an unidentified number flashing on my cellphone, picking up a call from a voice that would not identify itself. I got used to my assigned agent’s macabre jokes, to being followed and sometimes threatened. As he revealed things about my life only those close to me would know, I grew to distrust many of my friends, and felt tainted by his role in my life. But for me, working in Iran involved such an association.
As a child of Iranian exiles living in California, I grew up hearing that the Islamic Republic was merciless. So when I first traveled back to Iran — where I held dual citizenship — to work in 1999, I expected some level of scrutiny. At first, watching the Western reporters around me operating relatively freely, I imagined the challenges would be tolerable.
Only at the very end of my time there did I realize I had been in the hands of the “good guys.” Since I left in 2007, the Islamic Republic’s intelligence apparatus has grown steadily, in tandem with the political establishment’s own increasing fragmentation. Factions within the judiciary and the Revolutionary Guards who often work at cross-purposes with the government have developed their own intelligence bodies that operate with impunity, a deep state that is determined to sabotage détente with the United States and to undermine the pragmatic forces that signed July’s nuclear deal to end Iran’s isolation.
Journalists have always been in their cross hairs, especially Iranian-American journalists, who are viewed as spies and, in recent years, as useful pawns projecting the image that Iran is still very much in the business of hostage taking.
Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post reporter who has been held in jail for nearly 15 months, is the latest victim of this continuing and complex pattern. He was recently convicted of espionage in a secret trial and only heard of this development, according to his brother, watching the evening news in prison.
Jason is also from Northern California, and the last time I saw him in San Francisco, he was planning his move to Tehran with great excitement. Despite his months of interrogation, I can imagine him sitting in his cell, wondering exactly what he did wrong, apart from trying to explain Iran to the world. For the deep state, the journalism itself scarcely matters. The scrupulous objectivity and transparency that marked Jason’s work from Tehran have never been enough to persuade Iran’s intelligence forces that Iranian-Americans are not a security threat.
Their fears are not really about security. During my time in Iran, my agents came to know me with bruising intimacy. They were the ones who approved the renewal of my press card, and of course they monitored my phone calls and emails. Often they complained that we Americans were too prone to conflating elite Iranians with the rest of the country. I told them once, exasperated: “Most Americans view Iranians as a nation of hostage-taking anti-Semites living under Shariah law. Knowing that some like to go skiing makes us seem human.” I remember that day, because my agent put down his pen and seemed to acknowledge the point.
But the part of the deep state that has imprisoned Jason does not bother itself with such subtleties. This is not the old-school intelligence apparatus that was trying to familiarize itself with how Iranian-Americans journalists functioned. Those who are detaining Jason have an ideological vision of Iran’s future that requires continued isolation.
They worry, correctly, that President Hassan Rouhani and his allies are working to open Iran up to the world. And that this opening will gradually erode support internally, among the government itself, for Iran’s aggressive posture in the region and its severe restrictions at home. They see how media coverage of Iran has shifted in recent months, how once routine images of black-chador-clad women and Shiite militias have given way to fashion spreads and profiles of tech start-ups. For them, this is a nightmare in the making, and they know that imprisoning Iranian-Americans is a quick way to stop it.
The pragmatists around Mr. Rouhani privately appreciate the work of Iranian-American journalists. They recognize that we are the ones best positioned to report on our homeland, because we have built-in sympathies, greater historical context and the language skills to document, with more granular nuance, how Iran is changing. For much of the 2000s, when Iran largely refused to allow any American correspondents to be based in the country, America primarily read about Iran through the work of a handful of such dual-national reporters, myself included.
We bore witness to the story of Iran changing around us, but the cost for many of us, in the end, was high. This newspaper’s Tehran reporter, Nazila Fathi, had to leave Iran in the aftermath of the 2009 election unrest, told that snipers had been given her photograph and orders to shoot. Others have endured smear campaigns in the hard-line press, and like Jason, imprisonment.
Sometimes I find myself missing the old days. I would happily sit through those interrogations again, because I see them now for what they were — a chance for a deeply suspicious state to understand how journalism really works, and to see up close why it does not have to be a threat.
Azadeh Moaveni is a lecturer in journalism at Kingston University and the author, most recently, of Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran.