E-mail a friendHaleh Esfandiari
airdate October 27, 2009
A specialist in Middle Eastern women's issues, Iranian American scholar Haleh Esfandiari is the founding director of the Woodrow Wilson Center's Middle East Program. She's the former deputy secretary general of the Women's Organization of Iran and has taught at Princeton and worked in Iran as a journalist. Esfandiari has lived in the U.S. since '80, after leaving Iran with her family in the wake of the Iranian Revolution. In her memoir, My Prison, My Home, she recounts the ordeal of her 105-day incarceration in Tehran's Evin prison.
Dr. Esfandiari explains how the Iranian government thought she was involved with a U.S. plan to overthrow the regime. (2:15)
Full Interview (11:20)
Haleh Esfandiari
Tavis: Haleh Esfandiari is a distinguished Iranian-American scholar and journalist who made news back in 2007 after she was jailed in Iran while on a visit to see her 93-year-old mother. Details of her harrowing story are the subject of her new acclaimed memoir, "My Prison, My Home: One Woman's Story of Captivity in Iran." Haleh Esfandiari, nice to have you on the program.
Haleh Esfandiari: Thank you for having me.
Tavis: I want to start now, and then we'll go back into your story. When I say I want to start now, you have said of late that - and I'm paraphrasing here - you harbor no ill will to your homeland of Iran. There's still a deep and abiding love in your heart for your homeland, never mind what they do to you in this story. How could you still feel that way? Why do you still feel that way?
Esfandiari: I love Iran, and I differentiate between the people of Iran, the country, the mountains, the sky, the rivers and the people who are running the country now. It was the intelligence ministry people; it was the administration of President Ahmadinejad who put me in jail.
When I was freed I spent 10 days before I was allowed to leave the country. Strangers would walk up in the street and look at me and say, "Oh, you are so-and-so," and I would say, "Yes," and they would say, "We are so proud of you." So how can I bear any grudges against what used to be my homeland?
Tavis: Not to cast aspersion on those everyday Iranian people that you're referencing now, but how do you respond to people who say that it is those people who elected Ahmadinejad and put those persons in place who did what they did to you.
Esfandiari: Yes, I know. The majority of the people in the previous elections in 2005 did elect President Ahmadinejad, but they didn't elect President Ahmadinejad because he said I was going to put people in jail and I was going to restrict people's freedom. (Laughter) On the contrary, he ran on a very populist agenda.
His campaign was opening up to the outside world, distributing the wealth among people, democratizing, that was his campaign. But then once he became president he didn't live up to his promises.
Tavis: What do you think of how we are engaging, or not engaging, as it were, Iran right about now, around the nuclear issue? Your assessment of what we're doing right about now with Iran?
Esfandiari: I believe what President Obama is doing is brilliant. We are 30 years too late in engaging Iran and the president's policy has been perfect. They didn't say anything during the elections, but after the elections both the Department of State and the White House came out and condemned the atrocities that were committed in Iran.
But engaging Iran over the nuclear issue does not mean that you're excluding discussing the human right abuse and that's what this administration is doing. I'm thrilled that they are engaging Iran. I'm all for engagement. I came out of prison and in my first press conference in Washington I said we should engage because if we had relations with Iran people like myself and the now four other Americans sitting in jail in Iran would have not been victimized because the two countries don't talk to each other.
Tavis: Tell me about how you went to see your mother, your 93-year-old mother, and found yourself imprisoned by the government of Iran. How'd that happen?
Esfandiari: I had gone back for the last 16 years, then, to Iran regularly, a couple of times a year, because my mother was old and she didn't travel as much, so I'm going to spend Christmas with her in December 2006. On the 30th of December I said goodbye to her and I headed for the airport. Halfway through the airport a car blocked my car and three knife-wielding men jumped out of the car and one came and sat next to me and went through my purse, took my purse. The other one took my suitcase and the third one took my carry-on bag.
The next day when I started going around trying to get my passport because I had lost my passport and all my belongings - I was a paperless person within 30 seconds - I noticed that this was not your usual robbery that happens in a big city. This was the work of the Iranian intelligence ministry.
Then they called me in for interrogation, an interrogation that lasted eight months, of which I spent 105 days in solitary confinement in prison where I was interrogated continuously. The interrogation was intimidating, frightening, they threatened me, they said they will keep me for as long as it takes to unravel the puzzle that they were looking for.
You know, Tavis, there was a sense of paranoia among the intelligence ministry people in Iran that the United States was having a master plan to overthrow the regime. Don't forget, this was under the previous administration, the Bush administration, where there was loose talk constantly on overthrowing the regime or regime change.
Tavis: Give me some sense of what that was like. What were they saying to you, what were they doing to you, how they were treating you. Tell me more about that.
Esfandiari: Both inside and outside prison, they - I was not tortured; I was not touched, even. They always kept our distance. But their tone was intimidating and threatening. In prison I was blindfolded. I was taken with a blindfold, wearing a veil, to a small cell where I was interrogated. And I had to sit and face the wall and answer the question first orally and then in writing.
I really was frightened because I was completely cut off from the rest of the world, so on the one hand I was very scared. On the other hand I was very focused because the tactic was to repeat the same questions over and over again to find the discrepancy. Their argument outside and inside prison was that the United States, being (unintelligible) in Iraq and Afghanistan, is not going to attack Iran militarily.
But it is going to try and overthrow the regime through soft means, and by soft means they meant a velvet revolution like what had happened in the Ukraine and in Georgia. So they had studied the Velvet Revolution very carefully and so they were trying to find out what was the plan of the United States. They thought that I was aware of it. Little did they know that I really neither was interested nor was part of anything.
Tavis: Why did they think that? Why did they think Haleh Esfandiari had information about what they thought was about to go down? Why you?
Esfandiari: Because I was working at the Wilson Center, because they did not understand the nature of how think tanks and even universities and research centers in this country and in the West work.
So they thought just because Lee Hamilton was the president of the Wilson Center and he was a congressman from Indiana for 34 years, therefore - and because we at the Wilson Center were constantly inviting scholars from Iran to come and give a talk and take part in conferences, that we were trying to recruit and put them in touch with the CIA people.
I tried to explain that there is no such thing. We arrange conferences; we have so many different programs at the Wilson Center. We are not into this business.
Tavis: Did it scare you that one, they knew that much about your back story, about your back story, about your life, they were watching, obviously. They know you were there visiting your mother. Did it scare you to know that you were being watched and followed and profiled in that way?
Esfandiari: Of course. Of course. Of course it scared me because I knew they were tapping your telephone at my mother's house, and it was very difficult to work on the Internet because they had slowed the Internet in her house, they were checking my mail, and also I was followed.
Sure, that week I was in Tehran I was followed, but I didn't pay much attention to that. But those four months that I was out of prison, of course they would follow me.
Tavis: Finally, while you were being held were you at all aware of how big an international story this had become? Were you aware that Lee Hamilton and others were working to get you out? How much did you know about what was going on on the outside while you were in the inside?
Esfandiari: I didn't know anything.
Tavis: You knew nothing.
Esfandiari: Except, except, except on one occasion my interrogator asked me, "How do you know Barack Obama?" And I said, "Who?" Can you imagine? Put yourself in prison and somebody asks you -
Tavis: (Laughs) "How do you know Barack Obama?" "I don't."
Esfandiari: And I said, "You mean the senator from Illinois?" He was still running. And they said, "Yes, yes, how do you know him?" And I said, "I went to the Council on Foreign Relations where he spoke once, and that's it." "No, you must know him well. Tell us about the number of times you went to his office and met him." I said, "I promise you, I never met him." I said, "Why do you ask this question?"
Because this was the first time I allowed myself to ask them a question. I said, "Why?" They said, "Well, he spoke on behalf of you." The moment they said that, I said, if then-Senator Obama speaks about me, then there must be something very big going on. (Laughter)
Tavis: And obviously there was, for you and for him. You get out, and he gets in, literally in the White House. It worked out for both of y'all. Her book - it's a powerful story that I've just scratched the surface on in this brief conversation - "My Prison, My Home: One Woman's Story of Captivity in Iran." I'm laughing now but it really is no laughing matter. Haleh Esfandiari, an honor to have you on this program.
Esfandiari: Thank you for having me.
Tavis: My pleasure.
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