Esfandiari’s My Prison, My Home Book Release

In 2007 the Woodrow Wilson Center’s (WCC) Middle East program director, Haleh Esfandiari, was detained in her home country of Iran during a yearly visit to her mother. The Iranian government considered Esfandiari a threat that could entice a regime-changing velvet revolution and held her as a political prisoner—first under house arrest for four months, and then for four months in solitary confinement at the infamous Evin prison. Introducing her at the Sept. 14 launching of her memoir, My Prison My Home: One Woman’s Story of Captivity in Iran, at the WWC in Washington, DC, deputy director Michael Van Dusen stated, “We want to hear the story of what happened over there.”

Esfandiari, a journalist in pre-revolution Iran, as well as the deputy secretary general of the Women’s Organization of Iran, also held many positions in the arts and Iranian cultural institutions. She began the discussion of her book by declaring, “I was made unwelcome in my native land.” Her imprisonment, she added, must be understood within the context of Iranian politics and the history of U.S.-Iranian relations.

Esfandiari recalled May 8, 2007 as a “tremendous spring day in Iran” when, after months of interrogation, she was summoned to the Intelligence Ministry, presented with an arrest warrant, “humiliating[ly]” blindfolded, stripped of her possessions and booked into Evin prison. Her interrogator, a man whose face she never saw who referred to himself as “Hajj Agha,” told the prisoner that the Intelligence Ministry was not satisfied and wanted to unravel her involvement with a U.S. conspiracy for regime change. Sometimes interrogations would last more than eight hours, Esfandiari recounted. She ultimately was charged with “endangering the security of the country [Iran],” “threatened with a formal trial,” “accused of being a Zionist spy,” and prodded for a confession.

Esfandiari characterized the interrogation technique used on her in prison as trying to wear her down and “catch [her] in a discrepancy.” “Cut off” from the outside world, she was told by Hajj Agha that “no one on the outside cares about you.” Her interrogator would push her to discuss theories of revolution and the ideas of Michel Foucault and Francis Fukayama, for example, which she “had no desire” to do. “I had to avoid giving into despair,” Esfandiari recalled, and each night she would play back in her mind the day’s interrogation and anticipate the next day’s questions. She would feel “soiled, somehow dirtied by the experience,” she said, and try “to wash off the taint of the interview” in the shower. She devised a work-out regimen with two water bottles as weights and pilates, and also wrote “two books in [her] head, editing them and moving around chapters.”

After 105 days in Evin, she was granted a visit by her mother. It was then that Esfandiari, weighing only 85 pounds, was told not to give up hope and was informed of the worldwide efforts being organized for her release. Nevertheless, she said, “the loneliness becomes overwhelming” and Esfandiari resolved to go on a hunger strike, thinking, “they will either let me go or let me die.”

Convinced that “paranoia prevails in this Intelligence Ministry,” Esfandiari explained that American think tanks, research centers and institutes were viewed as “lur[ing] and recruit[ing] Iranian academics and journalists to bring about a velvet revolution.” Ultimately, she noted, it is “individuals [who are] caught in between the rivalry between the U.S. and Iran.”

When interrogator Hajj Agha finally told her she was free, Esfandiari recalled, “for a brief moment, I thought that this was a cruel joke.” It was 10 more days before her passport was issued, but on Sept. 2, 2007 she sat aboard a plane on an Iranian runway, saying, “So long Iran, not good-bye.”

—Nina Hamedani