On Dec. 30, 2006, Iranian scholar and journalist Haleh Esfandiari was on her way to the airport in Tehran when she was robbed. Three men with long knives threatened to kill her, stole her luggage, and took her Iranian and American passports. Esfandiari had been visiting her elderly mother, and was headed back to her home in Potomac where she'd lived since leaving Iran following the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
Esfandiari assumed she had been the victim of an ordinary heist until she tried to apply for a new passport. Suddenly she found herself at the mercy of Iran's intimidating Intelligence Ministry, the remnants of the Shah's secret police, and realized she wasn't going home any time soon.
Instead of providing her with travel documents, ministry officials ordered the 67-year-old grandmother of two to report to their offices for what turned out to be eight-hour interrogations that lasted for several weeks. They wanted to know everything about her work as the head of the Middle East Program for the Woodrow Wilson Center research tank. They requested dirt on its president, former Congressman Lee Hamilton; her husband, a Jewish Iranian professor; and George Soros, whom they believed was funding a "velvet revolution" in Iran. Ministry officials were convinced she was part of a vicious American plot bent on regime change in Iran. In reality, she brought prominent Iranian scholars and journalists to the US to speak about life in Iran, hoping to form intellectual alliances between the two countries.
After five months of questions and waiting, Esfandiari was arrested for "endangering national security" — and told she'd spending three months in solitary confinement at the dreaded Evin Prison, where political dissidents were sometimes never heard from again.
While she endured the rigors of prison life — and was forced to give a false confession on state run television — her husband and Hamilton sought her freedom. At first they worked back channels, but a full-scale campaign eventually was launched. Hamilton wrote directly to President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and the Iranian Ambassador to the UN; both presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama made formal requests for her safety; then Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice demanded her release, as did a host of US government officials. Eventually Hamilton wrote directly to Ayotallah Khamenei and received a rare reply, stating that the situation would be resolved. A few days later, Esfandiari was released on $333,000 bail.
Esfandiari's Kafkaesque tale of entrapment and imprisonment gives readers a shocking lesson in the horrors of Iran's government. And her refusal to break under strict confinement and false charges without breaking is inspiring and powerful.