Stories of an extraordinary world
by Leila Mohamed and Biodun Iginla, The Economist Intelligence Unit News Analysts, Tehran
In
July 2019 Nicolas Pelham, The Economist’s Middle East correspondent,
received a rare journalist’s visa to Iran. On the day he was due to fly
home, he was detained
This piece is from 1843, our sister magazine of ideas, lifestyle and culture
I WAS PAYING
my bill at the hotel when they came. There were seven of them, stiff
and formal in plain-clothes. “Mr Pelham?” asked the shortest one and
presented me with a hand-written document in Farsi. “It’s been signed by
a judge,” he said. “It entitles us to detain you for 48 hours.” He
paused to allow the information to register on my face. “It might be
less,” he added. “We just need you to answer a few questions.”
He
gave me a choice. Either I could be questioned in the hotel or in their
car on the way to the airport. “You might even make the plane,” he
said. Almost automatically, I asked to see a lawyer or a diplomatic
representative. He flicked his wrist, indicating that this was
unnecessary. “All we want to know is a little bit more about your trip.
There’s no need to delay or complicate things.”
It
was 7.30pm. My plane left in four hours and the airport was over an
hour’s drive from Tehran. The officials ushered me into a small office
in the hotel and crowded around my chair.
“Your mobile phone and laptop, please.”
I pointed to the bag lying against the opposite wall.
“Are there more?”
I took a second phone out of my pocket.
The
shortest man was in charge. He wore a dark, oversized jacket and
trousers. His wavy hair was greasy and his face was lined. He bobbed up
and down on a chair and patted my knee, though it was unclear whether he
meant to reassure or threaten me.
The
guards rifled through my books and notes. They held up a piece of paper
with jottings on it from a previous trip and asked me to explain what I
had written. I tried to hide my alarm when I saw that my eight-year-old
son had stencilled large Hebrew letters on the back. How could I have
brought that with me? I asked myself. But if they noticed the Hebrew,
they said nothing.
I
asked to go to the toilet. Like a child, I wanted to escape the tension
in the room. I needed to calm myself by breathing deeply. That day, in a
taxi back to my hotel, I had flicked through my emails and read that a
number of travellers, including a French-Iranian academic from Sciences
Po in Paris, had recently been detained in Iran on the pretext of
violating state security. And now here I was.
The
largest of the men walked closely behind me as we descended to the
basement toilet. He gesticulated for me to leave the door open.
After
I returned upstairs, I was led to the reception desk to finish paying
my bill. Two black saloons were waiting outside and I was directed into
the rear one. Guards wedged me in on either side and we pulled off.
The
interrogation began as we drove. If anything, the officials’ interest
in me was flattering rather than scary. After decades of being the
interviewer, I had been promoted to being the interviewee. No one had
ever found me so interesting before.
The
short man asked me about my family, my education, the countries I’d
visited and the languages I spoke. I told them Arabic, French and, after
a pause, Hebrew. I was sure that this wasn’t news to them. They wanted
to know how many times I had been to Israel. And Palestine, I added, to
emphasise my impartiality. A radio crackled with static.
I
was relieved when we arrived at the airport to be reunited with my
bags. Just under two hours had elapsed by this point. But instead of
checking in, I was taken to an office at the back of the airport hall
with a big glass window overlooking the departure lounge. Polystyrene
containers filled with half-chewed chicken bones and pellets of saffron
rice lay on chairs lining the walls.
The
status of those who had taken me was becoming evident – they had the
run of the state’s vital infrastructure. A tall, bulky man, more suave
than the others, was introduced to me as “the doctor”. He looked weary
and irritated.
“Your phone password, please,” said the short man.
I told him that I always used my thumb print.
A hint of impatience followed almost immediately.
“There isn’t much time, if you want to catch your plane.”
I
made a show of racking my brain and offered several phone passcodes,
none of which worked. I had an app on my phone, which many foreign
correspondents use, that notified my editors of my location every 20
minutes, in order to detect any unusual activity. I wondered if they had
picked up anything.
“One last chance,” said the doctor.
This time, the code worked.
“You’re not co-operating,” he said with a frown. “It’s not a game. There’s not much time.”
I
heard the last call for the Doha flight. “We’re going,” I was told. I
was shocked at how easy it had all been and wondered where my ticket
was. The short man escorted me away with his entourage. I could see the
departure gate to the left of the check-in counters. We turned right.
The
pace reached a frog march. Two men in front, two behind, past the
plastic barricades separating check-in from the departure-hall entrance,
past the X-ray machines and outside to the car drop-off. “Perhaps they
know a shortcut,” I thought. An older, more battered car awaited us. I
had been downgraded.
As we sped off, a
blindfold was put on me. If I lifted my head slightly, I could just
about make out my feet. After 15 minutes of chaotic driving, I was
helped out of the car and led across the threshold of a building. When
the mask was removed, I found myself in another office. I made a number
of attempts to ask why I was being held. Each question was met with an
order.
“Speak in Farsi,” I kept being told. “You know Farsi, don’t you?”
I insisted, apologetically, that I didn’t.
“Do you know the Koran?” asked one gruff guard, whom I would later come to know as Ali.
“Give
me refuge in God from the accursed Satan,” I replied, quoting the
liturgical Arabic phrase that precedes the recitation of the sacred
text. He seemed amused.
“You’re taking hostages,” I said. “Why are you doing this?”
“Wait,” he replied (this turned out to be his favourite word). Other guards brought in kebabs in polystyrene boxes.
“I don’t eat meat,” I said huffily.
As
a substitute, I was offered coarse digestives and tea in a thin plastic
cup that was too hot to hold. I was torn between anxiety and the need
to get these people on side. I rejected the food. But the next time Ali
handed me tea, I accepted.
The doctor
entered the room and asked me to write down everything I’d done in Iran,
day by day, meeting by meeting. Whatever I wrote, he would ask for more
details. Finally, about nine hours after I was taken, I was led outside
again. The guards told me to look up. A Qatar Airways plane loomed
above us, ready for its dawn flight. It turned out that we had never
left the airport. The last passengers were boarding. I felt a flicker of
hope, but then I saw the guards smirking. A car was waiting on the
tarmac. They opened the door and ushered me in.
The
warm glow of dawn was breaking over the mountains to the north of
Tehran. The guard told me I was being taken to a place that was a grade
above a prison. He handed me a blindfold with an apologetic smile but
allowed me to leave a slightly larger gap beneath my eyes and hold on to
the seat in front. From glimpses of the chevrons I could see that the
driver was zig-zagging in and out of the hard shoulder. “You’re supposed
to detain me, not kill me,” I quipped. It earned a laugh but we didn’t
slow down. We were clearly driving back to town and I tried to work out
our route. Eventually we descended a steep ramp and stopped. I shuffled
up two steps and, once inside, my mask was removed.
A
Dickensian character awaited me, pale, short and slightly hunched. The
hair on his head sprouted in clumps; his face and hands were covered in
warts. He asked me to empty my pockets. I surrendered my belt and, more
reluctantly, my glasses. He led me down a corridor, unlocked the last
door on the left and signalled that I should enter. It was a large cell,
perhaps 20 square metres, with a thin mat on the floor. He pointed to a
pile of musty brown blankets folded in a corner. As I walked over to
them, I heard the door clang behind me and the bolt pulled sharply
across. Through a high window I could see the early morning light. I
undressed and fell asleep.
EVEN IN GOOD
times, Iran has a complicated, and at times paranoid, government.
Elected parliamentarians give a veneer of democracy but power ultimately
resides with the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Islamic
Revolutionary Guard Corps, the regime’s most powerful security force,
answers directly to him. Rival arms of the state, including the security
forces, jostle for influence. And the rules are unclear. Many regard
Western journalists, particularly those asking awkward questions, as
spies. Minders are ever present, with tape-recorders in hand to
intimidate interviewees.
And this was a
bad time in relations with the West. In April 2019 America declared the
Revolutionary Guards to be a terrorist organisation. It had tightened
sanctions, preventing Iran from trading in dollars or selling its oil.
I
had been waiting for a journalist’s visa for three years when the
Iranian authorities unexpectedly granted me one on July 1st 2019. On
previous visits to Iran I had either been part of a large press pack
covering elections, or with other colleagues from The Economist.
I knew that the Iranian authorities were particularly suspicious of
journalists who have been to Israel or are Jewish. I ticked both boxes.
So I was apprehensive about my first solo trip.
Three
days before I left for Iran, British marines impounded one of Iran’s
largest oil tankers as it passed through the Straits of Gibraltar,
suspecting it of breaking European sanctions by carrying oil to Syria.
Iranian officials I knew assured me that I’d be safe. But the timing of
the visa seemed odd. During the week I spent reporting, few of the
meetings I requested materialised and those that did peddled the
government line that Britain had committed an act of piracy. My hotel,
once a favourite with foreign journalists, was dark and empty. But when I
went to Friday prayers and tried to cover a rally supporting the strict
enforcement of the hijab, I was turned away for being a British
national. Iran was not in a welcoming mood.
I
had gone to report on the impact of American-imposed sanctions. Some
news stories were claiming that Tehran was on the brink of collapse, but
I saw few signs of it. There was no panic buying. The city looked
cleaner and more modern than on my visit three years before. It has the
best underground in the Middle East, with locally made trains. Parks and
museums were abundant and well-tended, pavements were scrubbed and the
city’s many flower-beds immaculately maintained.
America’s
sanctions had hurt people, of course. Average monthly salaries were
worth less than a pair of imported shoes. I saw people sleeping rough or
hawking junk on the streets. One former university lecturer I met had
been reduced to busking. But few people went hungry and there seemed to
be a joie de vivre among many of those I talked to. Cafés, theatres and
music halls were packed. An earlier bout of sanctions had forced
Tehran’s Symphony Orchestra to disband but I wangled a ticket for the
opening night of the reconstituted Philharmonic.
Some
canny operators even found ways to profit from sanctions. When Google
and Apple dropped Iran from their services, local clones emerged.
Snapp!, a ride-hailing app, claims to have more users in Tehran than
Uber has in London. Shortages of certain goods, particularly medicines,
have led to a proliferation of homeopathic shops around town.
Some
Iranians I spoke to argued for tighter sanctions to bring down the
regime or force it to resort to diplomacy. Even supposed loyalists
privately said they hoped that a further squeeze in oil revenues might
push the government into changing course. Others lacked the patience to
wait. My government-appointed minder, who accompanied me throughout my
week reporting, had surfed dating sites until she had found an
Algerian-French student willing to marry her and send her a visa to
France. She was half my age but habitually behaved like a Victorian
nanny, taking my arm as we crossed a road. When I was arrested at the
hotel, she sat at a coffee table in the lobby, writing a statement and
refused to make eye contact.
The sun
was already high when I woke on my first morning in detention. It was a
scorching day but a half-hearted air-conditioner dulled some of the
heat. No sooner had I stood up than my jailer unbolted the door to bring
me a metal tray with thin naan bread, yogurt and water. He handed it to
me and pointed across the corridor to the latrines. A shower spout hung
over the hole in the ground but I couldn’t see any towels or soap. The
cold water was refreshing.
How had the
guard known I was awake? Without my glasses, the high ceiling was blurry
but I could make out the eye of a camera over the door. Previous
occupants had scratched tallies on the wall in groups of five,
suggesting that I might be here for a while. I paced the cell and tried
to enlarge it by imagining that each wall was the boundary of a field
back home in Gloucestershire. The bedside wall ran through the pastures
to the hedgerow, which stretched along the wall with the door. I turned
and walked through the woods, along the edge of the sheep field and back
to my bed.
The countryside stroll
helped me to expand my perspective. It was Monday morning in Britain but
I couldn’t be certain that anyone there would have registered that I
was missing. My wife would be getting our children ready for school,
waiting to hear from me. She was heading off to Paris to research her
latest book and I had promised to be back in time to take over. I was
letting her down again. Perhaps my colleagues were also starting to
worry.
The
experience wasn’t entirely unfamiliar. I had spent several short spells
in prison. I had been held for hours in northern Yemen in 1997 where
I’d been trying to report, and endured a long weekend in a cell in 1999,
at the crossing point between Gibraltar and Spain, accused of smuggling
goods into Spain (in fact I was trying to furnish my flat in Morocco).
Hostage-taking had become horrifyingly familiar when I was a
correspondent in Iraq. I knew that, with natural light and a large cell,
my conditions here were pretty good.
My
mind spun all sorts of fantasies. I drew up a cost-benefit analysis of
my circumstances. If word of my capture got out, it could damage my
chance of early release but boost sales of an update to my book. My
jailer, who until now had communicated entirely in grunts, might teach
me Farsi. The spartan diet might help me lose weight.
I
launched into my exercise routine to ward off sciatica, which ended
with bent knees and prostrations, forehead to the floor. The bolt shot
open and my jailer peered in. Had he thought I’d converted so quickly?
Or that I was having a heart attack? Sub be-kheir (good morning), I assured him and he replied in kind. I had elicited his first words.
Over
the next few hours I exercised my toilet rights frequently. The knock
on the door allowed me to control the timing of our encounters, which
gave me a semblance of control. The guard seemed pleased to be relieved
of the boredom, and on each occasion he would grunt a new phrase – khosh bakhtam (nice to meet you), asr be-kheir
(good afternoon) – and take a fraction longer to lock me in again.
“Would you like more,” he asked, pointing at the water jug as if
encouraging me to increase the frequency of my toilet visits.
ON MY SECOND
day, as dusk glowed, my jailer brought a blindfold and led me awkwardly
along a corridor. When he took the mask off, I found myself in a room
that was divided down the middle with a one-way mirror that I couldn’t
see through. The doctor was waiting. He took a cursory glance at me and
then disappeared. I heard someone entering the room on the other side
and the squeak of chair legs. A shadow introduced himself as my
translator.
“It’s my job to sound
aggressive. Try to understand,” he said apologetically, before the
doctor returned. The translator had looked me up online and wanted to
know how he could buy my books. He sounded a little too friendly, which
made me worry about where all this might be heading.
The doctor appeared again. He moved behind my chair and put his hands on my shoulders. “We need you to co-operate,” he said.
I replied that I had nothing to hide. He continued in Farsi, but the translator did not translate.
“What’s he saying?” I asked the mirror. The Farsi continued.
“Reply in Farsi,” the translator ordered.
“But I don’t speak Farsi,” I protested.
“We know you speak Farsi.”
I apologised. “I would love to learn,” I said, and suggested we talk in Arabic.
The
doctor relented and continued in broken English embellished by the
translator. He told me that I would be transferred to a more comfortable
location while they carried out their investigations and questioned me
further. This was a favour, he said, but the decision could be reversed
if I didn’t co-operate, a threat that soon became recurrent. He hoped he
could spare me from prosecution in court.
My experience in solitary had lasted, I guessed, less than 12 hours. What a pale imitation of a political prisoner I was.
They
took me to my new home, a shabby flat on the top floor of what seemed
to be a hotel fallen on hard times. There were two sofas, an armchair, a
rectangular glass coffee table and a TV that stood against the wall.
Faded orange curtains covered windows that stretched along one side of
the room. A wooden kitchenette occupied a corner. Two bedrooms led off
from the other side and the guards gestured for me to rest in one of
them. When I closed the door, they opened it again. That night I was
made to bring a mattress into the sitting room and the guards left the
lights on while they watched over me until dawn.
On
my first evening in the flat the doctor, his assistant Ali, and another
translator turned up and stayed late into the night. Again I asked to
contact my embassy and a lawyer. That was a thorny path, they advised.
It might lead to a lengthy court case, or incarceration in the notorious
Evin prison. “You know what happens in Evin,” the doctor said.
When
I had arrived in Tehran I had dined with an economist who had recently
emerged from a month in what alumni call Evin University, 21 days of it
in solitary confinement. The torture, he told me, was psychological
rather than physical. He insisted he was unharmed, but his hair had
turned white since I had seen him three years earlier.
My
captors wore no identifying uniforms, but on the second day the doctor
told me that he was an officer in the intelligence arm of the
Revolutionary Guards. Iran’s security agencies are many tentacled. In
1979 the new Islamic Republic retained much of the existing state
apparatus, including the army and a good part of the bureaucracy, but it
added another tier to keep existing institutions in check, and the
parallel systems have competed ever since. The government’s own
intelligence ministry would be unlikely to detain a Western journalist
whose entry it had approved. My accusers were from its more powerful
rival.
From the first months of the
1979 revolution, when the Revolutionary Guards took 52 people hostage in
the American embassy, the Corps has had a record of detaining
foreigners. In the 1980s Hizbullah, Iran’s Lebanese proxy, imprisoned
Western envoys, teachers and journalists. Iran itself had started making
arrests again. Many of these detainees were dual nationals, including
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian who has been held since
2016. But some of them had no Iranian citizenship. The threat being made
against me was clearly a real one.
It
was a surprise when the doctor said that I could dictate a message to
my wife, which his men would send from my phone. The brief text was a
testimony of my devotion and guilt, combined with a cry for help that
might be bland enough for them to relay.
“Darling
Lipika so sorry not to make it back in time for your trip tomorrow .i
have been held since last night in Tehran and am being questioned. I
have not been hurt and so far am being well looked after, i will contact
you tomorrow morning . Don’t worry , it will be ok . Love you to the
end of the earth nico.”
In the days
that followed, there were always three men present to watch me; each
shift lasted 24 hours. Being crammed with my guards into a small flat,
spending our days in close proximity in T-shirts and underpants, was a
surprisingly intimate experience. Over time much of the guards’
suspicion dissolved and they seemed to be concerned less that I might
try to escape than that others could break in. Were they fearing a
Hollywood-style hostage rescue by Western goons, I wondered, or a rival
arm of Iran’s intelligence services seeking to grab their latest asset?
They left the key to the apartment temptingly in the lock. But a knock
on our door sent them into paroxysms of activity, even when it was just
the arrival of a takeaway meal. They would draw their pistols from their
back pockets and brace themselves behind the heavy cupboard that they
had wedged against the door. One guard angled the cupboard back a few
inches, the other cocked his pistol and extended his arm. Then they
would open the door just wide enough to instruct the delivery man to
leave the food outside. Only when they heard the lift descend would they
retrieve it.
One guard assumed the
role of language teacher. I pointed at objects, he said the relevant
word in Farsi and we practised pronouncing it together. We had just
moved onto phrases when he left. Another insisted we exercise together,
so we sat on the floor facing each other, intertwining our legs to
perform sit-ups. After a day he suggested we dance to Iranian love
songs, which he played on his mobile phone. He pirouetted around the
room, rotating his hands and gyrating his pelvis. The rest of us made a
pretence of joining in, largely to encourage him, and then stepped back
to enjoy the spectacle. Each time I felt that I had developed a rapport
with a guard, he would be replaced.
Over
the course of several days the men spent most of their time glued to
phone-screens, watching Bollywood films, or American or Chinese schlock
full of street fights, which they accessed through virtual private
networks to evade the censorship they were supposed to enforce. They
ordered kebabs, pizzas and watermelon and never cleared up. Each
morning, I would wash their plates, scrape the leftover watermelon
rinds, pizza crusts and kebab gristle into the bin and make tea. I would
sigh audibly, like a father despairing of his unruly kids. “Thank you,”
they apologised.
I scoured the flat
for signs of where in Tehran we might be. The only marks on the crockery
read “Made in China”. The takeaways came from a Tehran chain. Whenever I
thought the guards were asleep or absorbed on their phones, I would
peek through the gap between the curtains. We were six storeys up, and
the narrow street was lined with tall plane trees whose tips reached the
floor below. The street sloped upwards to the right, but not steeply,
so I guessed we were in the lower reaches of northern Tehran. In a city
of 15m people that wasn’t much help. I got excited when I found “Hotel
Johnson” written on a faded, cream-coloured hairdryer. (Later I
discovered that this was simply the name of a brand.)
My
interrogators visited each morning, but by the third day the mood had
lightened. I was allowed to sleep in my room with the door open. The
doctor explained that he needed to continue his enquiries, but in the
meantime I would be transferred to a more comfortable hotel. I was not
allowed to do any journalism but was permitted to roam the city, so long
as I kept Ali notified of my movements and any meetings. As a
journalist I had a minder to monitor my every move and conversation, yet
now I would be able to wander around freely.
The
guards gave me back my belongings an hour later. My phones, laptop and
notebooks were missing, but my son’s Hebrew stencil was still there. The
devices would be returned, Ali promised. In the meantime he would
arrange a substitute smartphone.
I
shook hands with my captors. I may even have said “see you again”. I
donned the blindfold like an expert and was led out of the apartment and
into the lift. Once we were back on the main road the mask was removed.
This might have been an evening drive with old friends. Twenty minutes
later we arrived at the Simorgh hotel, where I had stayed on previous
trips, in the ritzy north of Tehran. The doctor was waiting to check me
in: $50 a night, he said. Feel free to make international calls. The
Revolutionary Guards would pick up the tab.
I HESITATED BEFORE
stepping beyond the lobby of the hotel. My first trip was to the
laundrette 50 metres up the road. As the owner started chatting to me, I
realised that I had interviewed his brother in my first week in the
country. I asked him to pass on my good wishes and dared myself on to
the bookshop a little farther uphill and then into the sculpture park
beyond. I wondered about treating myself to a decent meal, but I didn’t
feel like eating alone. And I didn’t know what the limits imposed on me
actually were. My first foray lasted for barely half an hour.
After
that, each time I went out I would venture a little farther before
returning to the haven of the hotel. I knew several people who lived
nearby, but avoided contacting them. At one point I ran into someone I
had interviewed only days before (he had taken me to see a Farsi version
of “Waiting for Godot”). He looked shocked to see me, knowing that I’d
been planning to leave shortly, but I brushed off his questions.
Self-censorship ranks as one of an authoritarian regime’s strongest
tools, and I was complicit.
Despite
Iran’s pious reputation, Tehran may well be the least religious capital
in the Middle East. Clerics dominate the news headlines and play the
communal elders in soap operas, but I never saw them on the street,
except on billboards. Unlike most Muslim countries, the call to prayer
is almost inaudible. There has been a rampant campaign to build new
mosques, yet more people flock to art galleries on Fridays than
religious services. With the exception, perhaps, of Tel Aviv, I had
visited nowhere in the Middle East where people read as voraciously as
Tehran. “The Handmaid’s Tale”, Margaret Atwood’s dystopian fable of
women enslaved to a theocratic caste, is a particular favourite, the
owner of one bookstore told me.
The
more I delved into city life the more colourful I found it. I met a
raver who’d been partying in Los Angeles and Paris but, he said,
“nothing compares to Iran”. Plastic surgeons were so accomplished that
an English porn star supposedly chose to get her nose job done in
Tehran.
Life in Iran has always swung
both ways. Nothing goes and everything goes. Alcohol is banned but home
delivery is faster for wine than for pizza. A portrait of Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini, who founded the Islamic Republic and ranted against
music, hangs over the stage in concert halls across the country,
glowering at thrilled audiences. The palpable sense that you might
become a target only adds to the abandon with which some people live.
The
space for veil-free living had grown since I last visited. In the
safety of their homes, women often removed their head coverings when
chatting over the internet. Darkened cinema halls offered respite from
the morality police who enforce discipline. In cafés women let their
scarves fall languorously. The more brazen simply walked uncovered in
the streets, risking ten years in prison. And, in an unusual inversion
of rebellion, ties have made a reappearance some 40 years after
Ayatollah Khomeini denounced them as a symbol of British imperialism.
(The conductor at the Philharmonic wore a bright-red one.)
Many
restrictions have peculiar quirks. A female actor may not show her own
hair on stage, but is allowed to wear a wig that makes her look
ravishing. She can sing but not perform a solo. And she can dance, but
not in public.
I found myself drawn to
the exuberant side of the capital’s life. The listing of plays in
Tehran was almost as long as London’s West End and I devoured them.
Directors are adept at finding ways to evade the censors. A striking
number of plays and films I saw were set in prisons – a commentary on
the Iranian condition – but under bygone regimes. Opera was taboo, but a
performance one evening in the red-cushioned opera house of the former
shah, which was billed as Kurdish folk music, included Verdi. Beneath a
vast glittering chandelier the audience threw bouquets of flowers at the
Iranian singer, who is acclaimed in both Rome and Berlin; for an
encore, she finally dared to sing a solo.
The
most extraordinary performance I went to in these strange weeks was a
production of “The Sound of Music”. I thought initially that the
audience’s enthusiasm was testament to Tehran’s thirst for Americana,
but the tale of 1930s Austria was remarkably apt for Iran today. The
nunnery looked oddly like a women’s madrassa in Qom, the country’s
religious centre, and the audience seemed thrilled by a female rebel
challenging the stifling atmosphere. They sang along when she escaped to
the hills and sighed when, pricked by pangs of conscience, she kept
returning. The finale was given an Iranian twist. In the original, Maria
and her charges escape from the Nazis to freedom. Here, instead, they
traipsed across the stage as voiceless refugees dragging battered
suitcases, a caustic reminder of the fate of those who flee their
homeland. Instead of the family singing the last song, a triumphant
phalanx of clergy and Hitler Youth did so. A giant Nazi flag filled the
backdrop.
Of course not everyone got
away with pushing at the strictures. In my first week in Tehran the
authorities pulled a production of Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” – the play is
about suicide, which is forbidden in Islam – and another about poor
women reduced to hawking to feed their families. Cafés that hosted live
bands risked closure until they had paid off fines. Women without
head-coverings who were spotted on one of Tehran’s many surveillance
cameras received police summons by text. But the morality police, who
drove around town in new green-and-white vans, seemed too stretched to
suppress every challenge.
One evening I
stumbled on a crowd clapping to the jig of a violinist. They had formed
a circle around a pair of male dancers who were sensually gyrating and
rotating their wrists. People were cheering them on when the park lights
suddenly cut out. Blackouts are rare in the city, so the presumption
was that the authorities had pulled the plug after a tip-off or noticed
the gathering on a camera. Boos erupted from the darkness. Someone
shouted “Pahlavi”, appealing for help from the long-deceased shah. A
minute later an electricity generator began to roar.
Though
my afternoons and evenings had become more pleasant, on most mornings
the Guards would question me, often for hours. It was more informal than
in the early days. They would come to the hotel, invite me for coffee
and we would drive through the traffic while they probed me on
everything from my views on Israel and Palestine to sanctions and even
Brexit.
Sometimes they would run out
of questions and conversation began to flow in the other direction. The
doctor confided in me of his fatigue. He slept for only an hour each
night, he said: as well as being an intelligence officer, he was an
academic and wrote a newspaper column.
As
time went on, the Guards’ visits grew rarer and shorter. “You miss me,
don’t you,” joked Ali when I called to ask where he was. But I had other
handlers too: my wife and a tight circle of colleagues in London who
grew ever more engaged through WhatsApp and phone calls. Initially they
presumed that I was bored and they needed to boost my morale. One sent
me breathing exercises and others challenged me to athletic feats of
swimming and running. Sometimes I resented their interruptions. I felt
as if I’d been given a key to a secret garden and was repeatedly being
hauled back. My colleagues worried that my explorations were putting me
in danger. I found their attention both comforting and burdensome. I
felt pressure to make them feel I was worth supporting, but struggled to
make my conversation sparkle and to convey my enthusiasm for a speedy
return.
It was liberating to have the
run of Tehran, without minders, deadlines or chores. But of course, I
wasn’t truly free. I policed myself on behalf of the regime, becoming my
own jailer and censor, aware that any lapse could have consequences.
Sometimes I tried to speak over colleagues or relatives who were saying
things that I feared might enrage my captors. I felt the presence of
hundreds of electronic eyes. The friendliest faces who greeted me might
be informers. And I could not leave Iran. It is an odd experience to
know that you can be caught out at any time. But this was the way of
Tehran. Some avenues open up, others close. Everyone feels like a
captive. There are those who say that it is all a grand plan of the
ayatollahs to keep people on edge.
On
the tenth evening of my captivity, the doctor came to my hotel, smiling.
Their investigations had concluded that I was indeed a reporter. I was
free to leave the following Tuesday, in five days’ time. All that
remained was to complete the paperwork for my exit visa. He hoped I
would come back to the country and would stay in touch. Ali asked me to
send him a picture of the Emirates Stadium, where Arsenal Football Club
plays. I would be home in time for a family camping holiday and could
see my father, who was ill and getting worse. I would relieve my
anguished colleagues. I was finally able to acknowledge the fate I was
being spared. On a whim I could have been locked up for months, perhaps
years.
But when I asked Ali whether
the office in London should book a flight for me, he told me to wait. I
struggled to deal with the anticipation of my family and colleagues as
well as my own. I went shopping for presents. I bought my wife a
handcrafted ring, a silver thorn that spread out over several fingers,
and a painting of a sleeping woman that I half-suspected the authorities
might seize on my departure.
UNTIL NOW
I’d felt that my answers to the interrogations mattered, that the
Revolutionary Guards were keeping me because they were genuinely
suspicious about my activities. In a system where every foreigner – and
many Iranians – were considered spies until proven innocent, I hoped to
reassure them and clear the way for more regular reporting trips to
Iran. As my exit visa failed to materialise, my naivety dawned on me. I
was caught in a political game involving high-seas tankers and
international diplomacy that far exceeded my ability to influence it. On
July 19th, two weeks after the British government seized an Iranian oil
tanker, the Iranians impounded a British-flagged tanker, for allegedly
breaking maritime rules.
The day of my
supposed departure came and went, and so did the doctor. Though he was
my captor, he had also become a reassuring figure to me. Without him I
grew agitated and anxious. There was silence from my handlers, and my
case seemed to be in limbo. Weeks passed.
On
August 15th the British government released the Iranian ship. But the
Guards were digging in. Although the Iranian tanker was sailing again it
couldn’t offload its cargo. Under American pressure, Mediterranean
ports repeatedly turned it away. I feared either that the Revolutionary
Guards thought they could use my presence to negotiate some kind of
deal, or that I was becoming a pawn in the internal rivalry within the
Iranian government. I was beginning to see at first hand the glaring
tensions between the two arms of the state. My hotel seemed increasingly
nervous about hosting an over-stayer without a passport. In an attempt
to evict me one evening, they cut the lights and blamed an unfixable
electrical fault. The following morning the Guards arrived to transfer
me to another location. En route we were chased by two motorbikes and
careened up and down the alleyways of northern Tehran. Only when we
pulled into a cul-de-sac did the Guards succeed in shaking them off.
Once
I was settled in another hotel, Ali resurfaced with a less
sophisticated set of interrogators, also from the Revolutionary Guards;
these included the short man who had first detained me. The questioning
became both more formal and more threatening. And instead of meeting in
Ali’s dusty car, I was summoned to a small block of flats near
Revolution Square in the city centre.
A
new interrogator – toad-like and clad in leather – told me that the
Guards had found incriminating material on my laptop that touched on
matters of national security: he had found a note from a conversation
I’d had with a government flunkie about smuggling rings connected to the
offspring of senior Iranian officials. This proved, he said, that I had
crossed the line from journalism to espionage. They were reopening the
case.
Ali’s smile had vanished. He
unsettled me by passing notes or whispering in the ear of his superior.
The new interrogator demanded information about an Iranian journalist
whose name he had found on my computer, and accused me of bribing him.
Notes he had discovered on Iran’s spiralling brain drain confirmed, to
his mind, that I was seeking to undermine national morale. He asked me
who I had been trying to recruit. Again he raised the spectre of being
tried in court for spying.
Over my
hotel breakfast one morning I read in the paper that Iran had sentenced
an Iranian who worked for the British Council to ten years in prison for
espionage. The regime intended to make Britain pay heavily for seizing
its ship. As the stand-off over the tanker’s cargo intensified, I felt
that I was being used to relay their muscle-flexing back to London
through the phone the Guards had given me. Peculiarly I had become both
hostage and intermediary.
DESPITE A MONTH
in the company of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, I realised how little I
understood the world view they were paid to protect. I wasn’t even sure
how genuinely religious many of those I had met were. When we drove
about town, Ali talked of his student days, his young family and his
passion for British football. Ideology rarely came up. Within the
parameters set by the vice squads, Tehran’s dominant culture was
defiantly secular. Iran called itself a theocracy, yet religion felt
frustratingly hard to locate and the truly religious seemed sidelined,
like a minority.
As August reached its
finale, I finally saw popular religion explode onto the streets.
Muharram, the first month of the Islamic calendar, was approaching. At
this time the death of Hussein Ibn Ali, grandson of Muhammad, is
remembered. Commemorations culminated in Ashura, on the tenth of the
month, when Hussein was martyred. For Shia Muslims, who dominate Iran,
this is the most important rite of the calendar. Municipal workers
festooned roads with bunting and flags and erected hundreds of stages
across the city to re-enact the tragedy.
On
the first of Muharram a solemn quiet fell over the city. From the flats
behind Tehran University, which the night before had blared with dance
music, I could now make out the faintest thump of chest-beating and the
jangle of chains. I followed the sound down a passage, which was decked
in black cloth and pictures of young martyrs killed in Iran’s wars, then
descended several steps into a small vault hung with black flags and
illuminated by a single red bulb.
I
might have mistaken it for an S&M dungeon. In an odd way, it was
one. I could see a room filled with shadows. Men sat cross-legged or
crouched on their knees in a semicircle around a small dais from which
the chief mourner rhythmically intoned laments into the microphone. The
silhouettes beat their chests, gently with one fist at first, and then
more vigorously with two, as the chief mourner gained volume and pace:
“O you, mathloum, you, oppressed.” He began to hyperventilate. A
few mourners had stripped down to the waist. They shook their heads and
slammed both hands onto their skulls. The mourner chanted Hussein’s
name over and over hypnotically: “Husseyei, eeyei, eeyein,”
in time to a recording of what sounded like flagellation chains.
Finally, the story came to the point where the imam was slain. Then the
strip lights came on, ending the reverie. Relieved by the catharsis of
crying, a group of twenty-somethings spilled out onto the street in fits
of giggles.
Though there are
government-authorised Husseiniyas, this was not one of them. I had
assumed that the clientele were zealots but those I spoke to afterwards
turned out to be computer programmers, internet marketers and trainee
lawyers. Some had been out partying the night before.
For
ten nights in Muharram these passion plays were performed with growing
fervour. Even an irreverent man who taught me Farsi, who devoted much of
his spare time to picking up waitresses in cafés, said Muharram was the
one religious occasion he observed. The streets were lined with mokebs,
stalls offering tea and dates and decorated with tragic representations
of the battlefield using decapitated toy soldiers. At one mokeb,
I came across a camel being readied for sacrifice. Many of these rites
drew on ancient folklore rather than Muslim practice, akin to the
celebration of Easter in the West. Since its inception the clerical
regime had sought – and failed – to purify Iran of its non-Islamic
elements.
Amid
the honeycomb of alleyways that make up Old Tehran, I visited an old
garage that had been hung with black sheets to convert it into an
informal Husseiniya, beyond the scope of the government’s authority.
Again the mourners sobbed as they prayed. Afterwards, I stayed behind
chatting over sweet lemon tea. “You feel a direct connection between
people and God here,” a 40-year-old programme manager told me. He had
stopped going to government mosques altogether, he said. Like some other
pious Iranians I met, he feared that politics had sullied their
religion rather than elevating it.
Early
one morning, I went to hear Alireza Panahian, a preacher who is
considered the intellectual lodestar of the Revolutionary Guards. He is
known for his clarity, directness and harsh views on liberals and
clean-shaven civil servants: in 2009 he had called for candidates who
stood in the presidential election against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a fellow
hardliner, to be eliminated.
I arrived
late for his 7.30am sermon in a modern Husseiniya whose concrete bulk,
seven-storeys high, soared over old Tehran. The vast ground-level arena
was already full. Panahian preached from a cushioned, teak throne
beneath a vast chandelier while his acolytes crowded around him on the
floor. He projected so much power, I got the feeling that if he’d read
from a phone directory his disciples would still have sobbed. “Are you a
servant of God or of man?” he said, scanning the crowd for suspects.
“Choose between the tyranny of westernisation and God.” After he’d left a
woman in a black chador took me aside. I steeled myself for an
ideological harangue. Instead, she held up a plastic bag of bread and a
plastic container of beans that the Husseiniya distributed after the
sermon. “That’s why we came,” she said. “If you ask about the contents
of the sermon, no one can tell you. If you ask about the contents of
breakfast, they’ll all remember.”
MY INTERACTION WITH
London was now constant and I felt like I was living a parallel
existence. I had been shaken by the latest twist in my interrogations
and felt the need for solace. Though Ali, my interrogator, had
repeatedly said I was free to visit Tehran’s synagogues. I wondered
whether this might be a trap. It was possible that the Iranians even
thought I was an Israeli spy. My colleagues in London warned me –
obliquely but clearly – not to explore Tehran’s Jewish community. And
still I was drawn to it.
Half of my
mother’s family had been well-to-do cotton merchants from Alexandria’s
Jewish community, the other half were among the first wave of Zionist
migrants to Palestine in the early 1880s. Their history encompassed the
process of rupture that has made the modern Middle East so combustible,
and had led me to study Arabic and Hebrew at university in a vain
attempt to overcome the dislocation of the past.
I
tried to make time to search for vestiges of that lost pluralist world
whenever I was in the region. Yet in Tehran, I dithered. I spent hours
perusing glasses in the lower end of Palestine Street, where almost
every shop was an optician, plucking up the courage to venture farther
on. This was an area where a large number of Jews lived and, as I
browsed, I wondered which of the high walls along the street might hide a
synagogue.
One Friday evening, about
five weeks into my captivity, I was walking back from Palestine Street
to my hotel. Twilight had turned to dusk. I saw three men wearing black
felt skull-caps talking by a bench. I still hadn’t chosen a new pair of
glasses and I doubted my eyes. Nowhere between the Jordan river and
Bombay had I seen Jews display their religion so openly, particularly in
Iran, Israel’s inveterate enemy.
An
iron gate across the road stood ajar. I peered in through the gap. I
walked up the steps of the building and into a hall decorated with
Hebrew script. I could see the rostrum from which prayers are led, and
the ark that contains the Torah scrolls. People looked at my bulging
pockets with suspicion. In their eyes I must either have been a bad Jew
for carrying on the Sabbath, or no Jew at all. They mouthed Hebrew
greetings and I replied, as if uttering a password. They invited me back
for the morning service the next day, as long as I didn’t bring
anything with me.
I didn’t go. I had a
Farsi class until 1pm. And I was still worried about the consequences. I
continued my search for a new pair of glasses, and found myself at a
different open door on the other side of the street. I climbed two
flights of stairs, passed a huge painted menorah and entered another
synagogue. A rabbi was addressing an all-male audience. I edged
forwards. A man with a bushy beard as long as an ayatollah’s ambled over
with melon, cake and a smile. He introduced himself as Daniel.
Over
the next three weeks Daniel welcomed me into the largest and most
vibrant Jewish community in the Muslim world. Since the ayatollahs
toppled the shah, Iran’s Jewish population has shrunk from 80,000 to
around a tenth of that number. The ayatollahs have largely kept the
remaining Jews safe, but they have also confiscated some of their
property, particularly that of those who have left the country. Tensions
between Iran’s Jews and the regime ebb and rise depending on the
country’s relationship with Israel. But over time the Islamic Republic
seems to have grown more at ease with the community.
Iran has 22 mikva’ot
– pools for ritual immersion. Many of Tehran’s dozen active synagogues
are vast and packed with worshippers. The synagogue where Daniel
worshipped held four different morning services each day, he told me, as
though encouraging me to sign up.
There
was a Jewish café, two kosher restaurants and a maternity hospital
funded by the Jewish community in the south of Tehran, where less than
5% of those born were Jewish. A Jewish sports centre was also under
construction. Daniel often texted me first thing in the morning to find
out whether I was coming for shacharit, the morning service,
and later on to check if I was still on for maariv, the evening one. He
would invite me for dinner in a heaving, cavernous kosher restaurant in
the basement of the synagogue where we had met. Farsi greetings were
spliced with Hebrew and Yiddish: “Shalom bashid”.
I
went to one of the six weddings that a nearby synagogue was hosting
over the following fortnight. The women glittered in sequins and wore
towering stilettos, looming over the men. There was barely a veil in
sight. Each table had several transparent plastic bottles of a spirit
that aspired to be schnapps. After the starters the wedding hall
transformed into a disco. Young and old jived to Farsi and Hebrew
tracks. Strobes flashed. Fireworks flared. The Islamic Republic seemed a
world away.
The community knew how to
protect itself. Israel’s atrocities in Gaza in 2008 were still denounced
on the Jewish Committee’s English-language website. The interior of
each synagogue was decorated with Jewish symbols, but the high exterior
walls were unadorned and the doors almost shut, even on the Sabbath.
Daniel and his sons walked home in their skull-caps, but they kept their
eyes to the ground, avoiding contact with strangers.
Though
the sense of community, even family, added to the surreal nature of my
captivity, it also felt comforting. By rare coincidence the first
service of selichot, the penitential prayers recited for a
month in the run up to the High Holidays, began on the first day of the
solemn month of Muharram. The synagogues were packed. At 1am Iran’s
largest synagogue still teemed with families. At 2am the congregation
swayed in prayer for Israel and its people. The communal chest-beating
was gentler than in the Husseiniya, but more ardent than in Western
congregations. Women walked up to the ark and kissed the smooth Isfahani
tiles painted with menorahs and stars of David, acting like Shia
pilgrims at their shrines. People milled around on the street outside
chatting. I must have recited my prayers for forgiveness with
conviction. Daniel smiled as he swayed next to me, as if he knew he had
won.
I HAD BEEN
captive for about six weeks when Ali called and told me to meet him on
Vanak Square in uptown Tehran. He was in his car, late as always, and
drove me to a park. It felt like old times. We walked towards the
pedestrian bridge that connects two of Tehran’s northern hills and he
apologised. The situation had gone on too long, he said. The Guards knew
that my father was ill. Of course, he wanted me to see my family. But
his superiors still had their doubts about me, he said. Though he hoped
to convince them otherwise, he strongly doubted that the paperwork would
be sorted out anytime soon.
Ali was
merely doing a job. I should have known better than to feel deceived.
Still, as August turned into September, my perspective began to shift.
My interest in Iran waned for the first time. The cafés all seemed the
same. I was running out of museums to visit. The Guards wouldn’t help
when a university turned me away from a Farsi course because I could not
produce my passport. I missed the party my wife and I had long planned
for our son’s ninth birthday. I retreated to my room for much of the day
and spent the evenings alone.
My mood
swung according to the headlines in the Iranian papers each morning.
“Iran not seeking confrontation, Zarif says in message to Johnson”
spelled a good day. “Majlis [the parliament] moves to retake oil money
from UK” left me overcast.
The walk in
the park clearly hadn’t resolved matters. Soon after, Ali called to
summon me back to the interrogation room south of Revolution Square and
then, just as I was about to enter, my mobile pinged. It was a message
from Ali: “Do not enter.” It offered no further clarification.
Three
days later, on September 4th, I was having my usual breakfast of dates
and yogurt at the hotel when I got another text from Ali telling me that
my exit visa was at the foreign immigration office downtown. “Go at
once and ask for Colonel Aroubi,” he said.
“But my passport?” I questioned.
“It’s with the hotel,” he replied, as though it was obvious.
I
had been asking for weeks for my documents. Now, I went over to the
receptionist whom I saw each morning. He disappeared into a room at the
back before emerging, clutching a familiar, tattered red passport, so
worn that you could no longer make out the words “Great Britain” on the
front. He handed it over. Perhaps it had been there all the time.
The
immigration office was full of people lining up at glass-fronted
counters to get their paperwork sorted before the Iranian weekend. I
asked for Colonel Aroubi and was ushered into a side office. Procedures
needed to be followed, the colonel insisted. He wanted to issue an exit
visa, but since I had overstayed, he needed the approval of those who
had sponsored my reporting trip. He seemed either unaware or unimpressed
that my long visit was down to the Revolutionary Guards detaining me.
“But I already have official approval to leave,” I protested.
“From
whom?” he asked. There was no reply when I called Ali. The Guards, it
seemed, did not want to admit that they had held me. It was now 11am and
the visa office would close in three hours. “You’d better hurry to your
sponsor if you want it today,” the colonel advised.
Formally
my sponsor had been the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, which
vets visas for foreign journalists. I got a taxi through town to its
office. Just as I was about to enter the door to the foreign-media
department, Ali phoned. “Please wait,” he said. He clearly didn’t want
me to deal with a ministry that was a rival power centre to the Guards. I
sat on the street outside. Another hour passed. At last Ali called back
with instructions to return to the immigration office.
It
was now almost 2pm. I completed the paperwork and the head of personnel
offered me tea, biscuits and chocolates from the glass bowl on his
desk. I declined and handed over my passport so that he could get on
with completing the formalities. But he was in a talkative mood and
seemed in no rush. The prospect of leaving that day was slipping away.
He
took a call and left the office. A few minutes later two men in black
entered and introduced themselves as officers from another branch of
intelligence. They apologised profusely for the difficulties I had faced
and blamed the Guards for the inconvenience. They hoped that I had been
well treated and expressed outrage that the Guards had made me pay my
own hotel bill. They assured me that they’d been working strenuously for
weeks to fix matters. My ordeal was over, they said. But could they
just ask a few questions first?
After
40 minutes of interrogation, they disappeared. Ten minutes later they
were back with embarrassed smiles. One awkward matter needed resolving.
Because I had overstayed my visa, I needed to pay a fine of 4m toman,
about $200.
“Of course, the Guards should be paying since the delay was of their making,” they said.
I called Ali and asked him to clear the fine.
“No way,” he replied. “Can’t they waive it?”
The
intelligence officers apologised again but remained insistent. There
were regulations. They couldn’t foot the bill for a mistake of the
Guards.
“I’ll settle it,” I said.
But
I was out of funds. Iranian banks were about to shut for the weekend so
no one in London could send me cash. There was the very real prospect
that my departure might be postponed for want of $200. I begged the
official to issue the visa and guarantee the cost for two hours while I
tried to secure the money. They hesitated, then relented. When it was
finally issued, my exit visa was horribly smudged. I managed to make out
that I had three more days left.
Money
that my office in London had wired a few days earlier arrived just in
time. I reached a money-changer as he was closing and he promised to
transfer the requisite funds to the immigration police the following
day. Then I headed to my hotel to pick up my bags and pay the bill. It
was Muharram 5th, the most important night before Ashura. I looked out
of the window and thought wistfully of the processions I was missing. I
considered staying for the three days I’d been granted. In the end, I
didn’t even stop for dinner.
At the
airport I forgot both my ticket and passport at the desk. Perhaps I was
subconsciously trying to delay the inevitable. Ali was waiting for me on
the far side of security, lounging in an armchair, smiling. He told me
he was glad it was all over and showered me with apologies. I asked him
if I could return to Tehran. “I hope so,” he said. He told me not to
forget the Arsenal photo. “Let’s meet again soon, if not in Iran, then
in Europe or Iraq.”
“Come for an
Arsenal game,” I said, as affectionately as I could. We shook hands. He
may even have touched me on my shoulder, before walking away. Then I
remembered my notebooks and ran after him. He promised to return them.
As he set off again, I remembered my Kindle and dashed off in pursuit
once more. Did I really find it so hard to leave him? We shook hands a
third time.
This
time I watched him walk away for good. In the departure lounge, alone, I
listened to businessmen discussing the mediocre offerings in the
airport shops. I scanned the upper level to locate the glass-panelled
office in which I had been held when I was first arrested, but I
couldn’t find it. I wondered if the doctor was looking down. The Qatar
Airways flight was parked on the tarmac just as it had been seven weeks
earlier. But this time I was level with the gangway that led to it. I
produced my passport and ticket, and walked onto the plane.
The
air hostess led me to my seat. I wondered if my experience showed on my
face, but it turned out that my office had bought me a business-class
ticket and this, apparently, was standard treatment. The aeroplane door
seemed to be taking too long to shut and I half expected Ali to walk
down the gangway with his fellow Guards, smiling, saying that he just
had a couple more questions. Even when the plane began to taxi I looked
out of the window to make sure that his car wasn’t flagging the aircraft
to a halt. Only when the flight map on my seat-back screen showed the
plane nosing out of Iranian airspace did I begin to breathe normally.
The air hostess appeared with a glass of champagne. I sent a celebratory
selfie over Wi-Fi, saluting the office. Another photo pinged back by
return. The editors in London were also toasting my safe release.
I REMAINED ON
Tehran time for weeks after I returned. I would wake at 4am and head to
my desk to write, relieved to be able to express myself without fear of
leaving a trail for a minder. The intelligence-ministry officials kept
calling to inquire about the transfer of the $200, which eventually
reached them. But there was silence from Ali. He never dropped off my
notebooks at the embassy. And I have yet to send the Arsenal picture.
To
the few people who knew what had happened, my wife spoke of her summer
of anguish. I felt pressure to show how fearful my captivity had been.
“Traumatised hostage”, a friend kept calling me. But I didn’t feel like
that. I just wanted to share my photographs of swinging Tehran: the
music, the weddings and the warm joyful nights out.
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