Today, Explained - Iran’s hostage industrial complex

Episode Date: October 18, 2021

Iran is entering its fifth decade of taking hostages. One who made it out tells his story. Today’s show was produced by Victoria Chamberlin, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Paul Mounsey, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained  Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Every once in a while. Depends. When you say ex-con, they probably want to go, what'd you do? And then what do you say? I didn't do anything. Like everybody else in Shawshank, I was innocent, right? Like Andy Dufresne before him, Jason Rezaian didn't do it, but it didn't really matter because he was in Iran. And if you're an American or an Englishman or Australian in Iran, if you're from some country that doesn't have a good relationship with Iran, which is a lot of them, you might just find yourself behind bars there for no reason. On the show today, we're going to figure out why

exactly that is and whether anyone wants to change it. And we're going to start with Jason Rezaian's story. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. My mom was from Illinois. My dad was from Iran. And, you know, as their life progressed, they would travel back and forth to Iran a lot. I was born in 1976. The revolution happened in 1979. The hostage crisis and all of those things that came after really colored my childhood in a lot of ways. And you juxtapose that with the fact that not only was my dad from Iran, but he had a large Iranian family who started to go to Iran, and it was probably, you know, the 40th-something country that I had visited. And it happened to be one of the craziest.

Just so different, you know? It wasn't like anywhere else I'd been. I made that first trip in 2001, several months before 9-11, returned home, went back again the next year, and started filing stories. I'd studied creative writing in college, and some of my professors who were journalists had introduced me to various editors at different publications.

So I'd just start randomly, you know, pitching pieces or sending finished manuscripts to editors. And little by little, they started getting picked up. And I moved to Tehran in 2009. And from the time that I moved there, you know, I never wanted for work after that. There was always an opportunity for me to publish my stories. As a freelancer, I would write about everything. I was looking for stories of real people. So, you know, I wrote about art and culture, wrote about sports, I wrote about food, but I also wrote about the news.

I wrote about poverty, wrote about drug addiction. And then, you know, as I moved more into mainstream day-to-day reporting for The Washington Post, I was able to bring some of those threads with me into my reporting as I reported on bigger geopolitical stories, which inherently, when you're The Washington Post correspondent in a country like that, you have different access than you do as a freelancer. And as an American-born journalist operating in Iran, are you at all nervous publishing stories about politics? Hell yeah. You know, you have to watch your back and, you know, there are certain procedures and permissions that you have to get to do this work.

And if you're smart and wise, you don't work without those permissions. So I always followed the rules and applied and waited until I received my accreditation before I would start working. And it was something that would have to be re-upped every few months. And the day that my wife and I were arrested, we were actually both given one-year extensions by the ministry that handles press credentials of our press passes. So, you know, somebody was fine with me working in Iran. Tell me about the day you got arrested. We were at home. I had been covering the latest round of nuclear negotiations in Vienna earlier that week. I had come back. We were preparing to travel to the United States. My wife and I had of months, kind of a long break. She was going to get her green card, which we had done all of that paperwork from afar. She'd had her interviews at the consulate in the

UAE. Everything was all set and we were preparing to go to a surprise birthday party for my mother-in-law. We got dressed, we left our apartment, got in the elevator to go down, uh, into the, uh, the building's garage. And when the door opened of the elevator, there were several guys there with guns pointed right at me. Um, they took us back into our apartment, ransacked the place. Uh, I'm not sure what they were looking for and I don't think they really found it, but they took our computers, took our laptops, took all of our forms of identification, paraded us through the courtyard of our apartment buildings in front of our neighbors, handcuffed us, blindfolded us, threw us in the back of a van, and took us to Avine Prison, where I would spend the next 544 days. I lived several seasons in Avine Prison, and the first one was, I would say the hardest one because I was in solitary confinement. I spent seven weeks in solitary in a cell that was about four feet by eight feet with fluorescent lighting on 24 hours a day, only being taken out to be interrogated

or for 20 minutes of blindfolded fresh air every afternoon. So that's not a very good existence, right? There's nothing to while away the time. You're not given books. You're not given the opportunity to communicate with anybody. So you're really trapped with your thoughts. So that was incredibly hard. And it was during that time that I really started to think of myself, okay, if you're going to get through this, you need to take it easy on yourself

and be as kind and friendly to yourself as possible. So I spent as much time as I could kind of recounting positive memories and good things that had happened in the past, and planning for the future. Because it's very easy to go down rabbit holes that are scary, distressing, and you can cause yourself a lot of torment if you're not careful. I made a commitment to try and find something to laugh about every day. And I think about things that I did when I was a kid and think about sweet memories with my wife and family vacations that I'd taken with my folks and baseball games that I'd gone to and trips that I'd taken and everything else that you can fill your time with.

Fortunately, after 49 days, I was given the opportunity to come out of solitary confinement. I didn't know why. And they put me in a larger cell, but that had a courtyard connected to it, which allowed me the opportunity to be out of doors for the daylight hours. And Sean, I got to tell you, I mean, if you've been in solitary confinement for an afternoon, you know, if all of a sudden you're let out of solitary confinement and given the opportunity to spend time under the blue sky, even if there are massive brick walls that are topped in barbed wire surrounding you, it is a major step up. And it kind of allows me to come out of this phase of feeling like a caged animal and feel more like just a caged person. And, you know, gave me an opportunity to

think about things in a more constructive ways. And their party line is that you're not really a journalist, but that you're a spy. Do they ever produce any proof? I clicked on something that I shouldn't have, and they were able to access my email. So they were living in my Gmail account for a few days before my arrest. So that meant that they were able to access my emails. So they were living in my Gmail account for a few days before my arrest. So that meant that they were rifling through things and printing emails out and they were, you know, reading emails in a language that was not their native one and seizing on things that seemed suspicious. So in one email, for example,

I had apologized to somebody for going radio silent. And the email printout comes back to me with that section highlighted in green. Why did you go radio silent? Radio silent is only a term that spies use. I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about? At the time and now in retrospect, I didn't do anything wrong to get myself into this situation. You know, they're going to concoct whatever they wanted to out of whatever they could. And, you know, it would all stick in their shitty judicial system. But in the court of public opinion and in the real world, nobody was buying it. And I guess this has gone on forever, but maybe lucky for you, there's these nuclear talks going on between the Obama administration and Iran.

And they strike a deal, arrange for a prisoner swap, and you're finally released after 544 days. How does that feel? The challenges of new freedom are unique and strange and nothing that someone can be prepared for, especially when your ordeal has been so highly publicized and politicized. I'm happy they're coming home. My problem is this. Number one, they should never have been hostages in the first place. None of them did anything wrong.

And number two, I think that Iran very deliberately seized them because they know that under a Barack Obama, you can trade Americans for people you want back. So, you know, I came out to a lot of fanfare among my colleagues in the media, but there were all sorts of people in Washington who hated this deal. People will die. Americans will die. Israelis will die.

Europeans will die. Let's rise up and tell every elected official in Washington, stop this deal. And would have liked nothing more than to see no deal between the U.S. and Iran. Which, oh, by the way, if there was no deal, I might still be sitting in prison now almost six years later. So, you know, it's very jarring to come back to that and to live in Washington, D.C. now for the first time in my life as someone who is closely associated with a very contentious political issue. And now that you're back in the States, in D.C. specifically, I suppose,

what have you learned about what exactly happened to you, about how you ended up in prison for more than a year? So I had a lot of conversations with people in the administration at the time. A lot of doors were open to me. And I, you know, I pushed those doors open and sat down and asked a lot of questions. And one of the things that officials in the Obama administration kept saying to me was, Jason, you know, we deal with Americans who were wrongly detained in different countries all the time. This case, your case, was particularly egregious. We knew that there was nothing about your work or your presence in Iran that was in any way dangerous to Iran's national security.

You were very upfront about the work that you were doing, and this was a clear-cut case of an American being taken hostage as leverage against us. They would say to me sometimes that, had you actually been a spy, it would be really less complicated for us to deal with it. We do this all the time in different parts of the world. We trade people back and forth pretty regularly. But when it comes down to trying to free innocent Americans from other countries in exchange for people who have broken laws in the United States, oftentimes who are convicted felons, it gets kind of complicated. These are precedents that the Justice Department does not want to set. I've learned more about this than I ever thought that I would, and in the process learned that Support for Today Explained comes from Aura.

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BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. The special report that we planned to bring you tonight was about domestic politics,

the battle among the Democrats. But we think the crisis in Iran is more about domestic politics, the battle among the Democrats. But we think the crisis in Iran is more urgent right now than the campaign here at home. Some 60 Americans are now beginning their sixth day of captivity inside the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. It's Friday morning there now. But throughout this night in Washington, officials will continue their search for some way to negotiate the hostages' freedom. That search was not successful today. Though Jason Rezaian is out now in the world talking about his experience as an Iran hostage, there's nothing particularly new about his experience. Iran has been at it a while. So we reached out to Nagar Murtazavi to find out

more about this practice. I'm a journalist and political analyst and host of the Iran podcast. So Negar, when does Iran start holding foreigners hostage as a foreign policy strategy? This really began from the 1979 revolution. We've all heard about the hostage crisis at the beginning of the inception of the Islamic Republic, a group of students taking over the U.S. embassy and literally taking American diplomats hostage, asking the United States to return the Shah of Iran. It was very publicly acknowledged by the Iranian side. It was that group of students and then later supported by the state, basically. And since those times, it's slowly evolved into

a, I would say, manufactured judicial process. So the Iranians no longer call these people hostages. Their process is no longer climbing over a wall and taking over an embassy, you know, publicly acknowledging, blindfolding people, parading them in front of the cameras, they put them through a judicial process, and they what they call security crimes, and hold them for crimes of espionage, of colluding against the state, propaganda against the state, collaborating with adversary governments. And to this day, it's basically continued. Iran is accused of using four prisoners to extract political and financial concessions from Washington. Secretary of State Antony Blinken assured the Sharjahs and the families of the three

other American prisoners held by Iran that their return is a priority. There are a number of foreign nationals as well as dual nationals who the Iranian security forces are more paranoid about and see as the bigger threats to the country. And they're essentially held as bargaining chips for Iran to take concessions from some of these Western countries or more adversarial states. Which is to say this practice didn't end with Jason's release. There are still hostages being held captive in Iran right now. Why does Iran keep doing this? One layer is that the Iranian hardliners think of themselves as this weaker country when it comes to these

bigger powers like the United States, like the United Kingdom, they feel like these countries are using the international system to their benefit, international law to their benefit, when it comes to this UK debt to Iran, the US blocking Iran's assets abroad, U.S. sanctions and things like that. And they go around and use what I consider an inhumane method of taking these dual nationals basically as hostages, they call them prisoners, but as hostages to sort of compensate for what they see themselves weak in dealing with these countries. There's another layer of paranoia added to this. There's some factions within the Iranian state actually do believe that some of these dual nationals,

people like myself, I've been living in exile in fear of the security forces. I'll probably be arrested if I go back to the country. And I haven't been in a decade. They do think that these dual nationals, people like myself, Jason Rezaian, Nazani Zahari, are actually spies and agents of these adversarial governments coming to the country to sort of gather intelligence or foment unrest and things like that. So you're saying there's a genuine belief on the part of the Iranian government that people like you and Jason, who in this country we would just call journalists, over there could be spies? It's a combination. So there's the paranoia

coming together with that sort of muscle flexing against these larger, as they see, imperialist powers. And at some point they see that it works, you know, even if they realize when they catch someone and they put them through days and hours on interrogation and they find nothing, then they think we might as well, you know, hold this person and get some concessions from whatever other government they have a nationality over. And specifically in the case of dual nationals,

people like myself, Iranian American, Iranian Canadian, Iranian British, these people are the ones who are bridges between these two countries. Iran and the United States don't have diplomatic relations. It's very difficult for Iranians to travel to the US, for Americans to travel to Iran. And it's people like myself who go back and forth. They have family ties in both countries, and they essentially serve as a bridge. And part of the Iranian political system, especially the more hardline factions, they don't like that. They don't want to see that.

Is the Iranian government ever right? Does it ever take someone who might be a journalist or a teacher or an aid worker who ends up really being a spy? It's a very unknown situation. One thing I can say is that yes, these adversarial governments do send agents and spies into Iran because you see, for example, the Israelis conduct assassinations, they conduct espionage and these kind of missions in Iran successfully. So they have to do it with the help of intelligence gathering, it could be within Iranian ranks.

In the government, there is probably agents within the government, but it seems like they're not catching the right ones, at least not fully, because these missions are conducted successfully, and then you see journalists or a teacher or academics basically staying in prison while the real agents are roaming around. So maybe they do sometimes catch agents,

but they're not very successful in stopping these sabotages and assassinations that go on in the country. And that's actually something that the population, part of the political elite, is really vocal and critical about the security forces, that it seems like you're holding all these people, but they're the wrong ones because we see these sabotages,

terrorist attacks and assassinations continuing on Iranian soil. And what does the Iranian government say in response? The United States does this to Iranians too. We have to take hostages to except for the case of the U.S. diplomats at the beginning and the hostage crisis where it was publicly acknowledged. This is very different. And they try to put them through the judicial system to sort of make it look like, oh, these are held for legitimate reasons according to our law and to our national security and all of that. And let's see the United States is doing the same to our citizens when it comes to the Iranian viewpoint.

So I would say people who are held in the U.S. for violation of U.S. sanctions, I wouldn't call them hostages per se. Yes, they violated the law, but the sanctions are not entirely justified. It's a foreign policy tool that the U.S. is using, the maximum pressure that's used by the Trump administration. No responsible government should subsidize Iran's bloodlust. As long as Iran's menacing behavior continues, sanctions will not be lifted. They will be tightened. And now the Biden administration is sort of continuing that. Will the U.S. lift sanctions first in order to get Iran back to the negotiating table?

No. And ordinary Iranian Americans, people like myself, are basically financial behaviors are criminalized for us as Iranian Americans. That's not criminalized for a Turkish American or for a Pakistani American, let's say, anybody else from the region. And it is because of that political fight between the two countries. So it's a complex issue with so many layers. But at the end of the day, the way Iranians look at that is that your sanctions are unjustified and you're holding people in jail for violating what's unjustified. And we're sort of doing the same thing and we want to exchange these people. It's not what the entire picture is, but that's definitely one argument that the Iranians are making when they allude to the prisoner exchange. And this back and forth between the two countries

is now a few years into its fifth decade. Will it ever end? Or are we just going to hear stories like Jason's forever? I think at the end of the day, it's not only about the U.S. holding Iranians as prisoners, it's also about U.S.-Iran political animosity and tension. We're going to see one form of another until these political fights actually stop. Nagar Mortazavi is a political analyst based in Washington, D.C. Thank you. If you want a much more detailed account, it's called 544 Days.

If you want an abbreviated account, you came to the right place. Our episode today was produced by Victoria Chamberlain. It's Today Explained. Thank you.