When the Iranian Intelligence Ministry shut Haleh Esfandiari inside Evin Prison (Tehran's version of Abu Ghraib) in May 2007, the authorities probably thought they were going to scare the 67-year-old grandmother to death. They didn't know what they were up against.
Esfandiari spent 105 days in solitary confinement, on top of the four months of grueling interrogations she had already endured. Her jailers wanted information; all they got, she writes with satisfaction in her gripping memoir, "My Prison, My Home," was "universally bad press." By the end, her imprisonment had begun to resemble "The Ransom of Red Chief."
No rational government could have really considered her a security threat. Granted, her page on the Web site of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, where she is the founding director of theMiddle East program, doesn't suggest one of President Ahmadinejad's Facebook friends.
("Expertise: Democratic and political developments in the Middle East; Middle Eastern women's issues; contemporary Iranian intellectual currents and politics.")
But the inquisitors who put her through eight months of hell really thought she could give them the goods. They had convinced themselves that the international conferences she organized for the Wilson Center were part of an American plot to bring a velvet revolution to the Islamic Republic.
Since no one wants to live in a police state, the Iranian government has reason to fear such an upheaval -- as Esfandiari discovered when, on her release, she found herself transformed into a celebrity and a hero. ("If you ran as a candidate for president," one stranger told her, "you would be elected.")
Multicultural Iranian
The daughter of an Austrian mother and an Iranian father, she had grown up comfortably (and multilingually) in the Iran of the Shahs. As a feminist married to a Jew, she thought it prudent to leave after the revolution, but beginning in the '90s she went back regularly to look after her widowed mother (who was 93 when her daughter was hauled off to Evin).
Esfandiari writes with an elegant dryness that serves the book well, since she hardly needs to sensationalize her story. She never broke, though she was certainly intimidated.
Once in a while her anger got the better of her, as when she snapped, "If this country can be destabilized by 20 of its scholars attending conferences, then how does Iran differ from a banana republic, or Afghanistan and the Arab countries you look down on?" In general, though, she answered her interrogators' cracked and often dimwitted questions with patience -- again and again.
Circles of Power
She well understands that her status as an American citizen with connections to the highest circles of power protected her (barely) from the usual torture, forced confession and show trial. Not everyone's trumped-up case stirs international outrage.
Since she has based her work at the Wilson Center largely on the notion that her native and adopted countries ought to be talking to each other, she looks with dismay at intransigence on both sides. She doesn't conceal her impatience with the second Bush administration's axis-of-evil yahooism.
She recalls that when she heard of the "Irbil five," a group of Iranian officials being held incommunicado by the American forces in Iraq, "I thought to myself: No family visits allowed by the Americans? Why is the United States acting like the Islamic Republic?"
"My Prison, My Home: One Woman's Story of Captivity in Iran" is published byEcco (230 pages, $25.99). To buy this book in North America, click here.
(Craig Seligman is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)
To contact the writer on the story: Craig Seligman atcseligman@bloomberg.net.