Wrong Place, Wrong Time

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Taken

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Why are autocratic authorities, fr= om China to Russia to Iran, imprisoning more and more foreign citizens? Jason Rezaian on an emerging global hostage crisis.

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Sean Nangle / The Signal

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No American had been arres= ted on charges of espionage in Russia since the Cold War—unt= il The Wall Street Journal’s reporter Evan Gershkovich was just less = than two months ago. The charges are baseless; in fact, they had nothing to= do with Gershkovich, apart from him being a high-profile American reportin= g from Russia in the middle of its indirect standoff with the United States= over the war in Ukraine. But they’re not unusual. In recent years, i= t’s become increasingly common for autocratic governments to use arbi= trary detention—effectively, hostage-taking—as a way to exert p= ressure on rival governments. This is a tactic once associated almost exclu= sively with terrorists. A decade ago, only China and Iran had started appro= priating it. But over the past year, 19 states have used it against the U.S= . alone. What’s going on?

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Jason Rezaian is = an Iranian-American journalist and a columnist for The Washington Post. In = 2014, while working as the Post’s bureau chief in Tehran, Rezaian and= his wife, Yeganeh Salehi, were arrested by Iranian police. Salehi was late= r freed, while Rezaian was indicted on charges of spying, collaborating wit= h hostile governments, and propaganda against the Iranian establishment. He= was released in January 2016 after 544 days in prison. For Rezaian, the ev= ents that led from his initial detention to his ultimate use as a hostage w= ere in some ways peculiar to the internal dynamics of the Iranian regime at= the time. But the tactic has proven so effective that autocrats around the= world are using it more and more. As the incentives get stronger, Rezaian = says, the U.S. and other affected countries are in a race to figure out how= to counter them.

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This article is part of a series in partnership with the Human Rights Foundation. Rezaian will be a speaker at the Oslo Freedom Forum in June.

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J.J. Gould: When = you were first arrested, how much of a surprise was it that this was happen= ing to you?
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Jason Rezaian: Th= ere were times in the five years when I was living in Iran—and even i= n the years before, when I’d go to Iran for weeks or months at a time= to report from there—when I was nervous about it.
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Of course, I’d seen other jo= urnalists arrested. Being a foreign-national or dual-national journalist in= Iran always seemed to lead to prison—for a while; and then they&rsqu= o;d get out after a few weeks, or a month, or a couple of months. So my lif= e in Iran was always a calculated risk.
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But the truth is, when I was arres= ted, Iran was about a year into the reformist government of Hassan Rouhani;= nuclear negotiations between Iran and the U.S. and other world powers seem= ed to be going well; and it looked as though the Iranian regime wanted to e= ase tensions and get itself out from under the economic sanctions it had be= en subject to. In that sense, it was a surprising time to be arrested.
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It was a time when more journalist= s had been let back into Iran, after years when almost no one had. Journali= sts I’d known before 2009, and hadn’t seen in the country since= , started returning; different news networks started returning; Anthony Bou= rdain even brought his show to Iran. He interviewed me and my wife for it. = 60 Minutes came to town. I helped them out with that—just a = few weeks before I was taken into custody.
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When it happened, it was evident t= hat the intelligence wing of the Revolutionary Guard Corps was behind it. B= ut what was surprising was less the arrest itself and more the reality it t= ook me into.
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I’d always understood that t= here was a fractured quality to Iran’s internal political dynamics. B= ut I’d also figured that the regime was ultimately like a school of f= ish, swimming in unison, guided by the decisions of the Supreme Leader&mdas= h;that it was ultimately unified from the top down. As it turns out, it was= n’t that simple. Yes, the Supreme Leader is the decider. But the real= ity is, there are all sorts of groups and individuals under him vying for t= heir own agendas—just like anywhere else.
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I’m not sure people see that= very clearly from the outside. And for better or worse, I got to see it fr= om the inside. I got to see that the only thing all these different interes= ts within the regime have in common—from the most insular to the most= outward-looking, the most hardline to the most reform-minded—is the = goal of preserving and perpetuating the Islamic Republic. That’s it. = Beyond this, they have very different views about how to achieve it.
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Gould: So what in= terests ended up driving things in your case?
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Rezaian: I couldn= ’t really see that at first, myself. I didn’t know what was hap= pening. I didn’t have a day in court until 10 months after my arrest.= For seven weeks of that, I was in solitary confinement. My wife was in sol= itary confinement. Neither of us had any idea where the other was. They put= you through the wringer. I was in interrogation rooms for many hours a day= . They alternately told me that I’ll be executed imminently, or that = I’ll be released tomorrow, or that I’ll spend the rest of my li= fe in prison. They told me there’d been news reports that I’d d= ied in a car accident—so, you know, no one’s coming to get you.= It’s all intended to confuse you, to disconnect you from reality. An= d it works.

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But if you look at what happened o= ver this whole year-and-a-half ordeal, you can see that every one of the mo= ments when I was dragged into an Iranian court, or when an Iranian politici= an stated publicly that I needed to be executed, or when Iran’s forei= gn minister at the time, Javad Zarif, traveled to Europe or the U.S. and wa= s asked about my case and gave some bullshit answer—every one of thos= e moments corresponded with a moment in Iran’s quest to get to the nu= clear deal it was negotiating. So in a way, I was a hostage in a very liter= al sense, but I was also a form of indirect leverage in those negotiations:= We’ve got an American journalist, don’t forget.

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Now, if you heard Zarif’s re= sponses to questions about me, you might have thought he was on my side. Bu= t if you looked carefully, every time Zarif talked about me, he dug a sligh= tly deeper hole around me. It was a negotiating tactic. He’s played t= he same game many times with many different hostages—me, Nazanin Zagh= ari-Ratcliffe, the Iranian-British dual citizen imprisoned from 2016 throug= h last year, others—and while the cases are different in some ways, y= ou can see the playbook: Well, this is a good person but, you know, the= y got involved in some things they shouldn’t have gotten involved in.= I can’t give you the details, because it’s a matter of nationa= l security, but the crime they’re accused of is very serious&mda= sh;this kind of nonsense.

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It became clear to me that someone= like Zarif can say whatever he wants about being opposed to hardline eleme= nts within the Islamic Republic, but at the end of the day, they’re a= ll working together toward a common goal. And he’s never going to be = on my side.

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Sean Nangle / The Signal

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More from Jason Rezaian a= t The Signal:

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“People ask me all t= he time, don’t these kinds of deals just incentivize more ho= stage-taking? My answer is no—and that this is actually the wrong que= stion. The answer is no, because the reason why China or Russia or Iran kee= p taking hostages is that there’s nothing deterring them. So the real= question is, what can we do to deter autocratic governments from pulling s= tunts like this in the first place? Because as of now, there’s litera= lly nothing standing in the way—nothing to make the Chinese Communist= Party, or Putin’s apparatus, or the intelligence services of Iran&rs= quo;s Revolutionary Guard think twice.”

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“When I think back t= o my interrogators, I remember how they knew they were pullin= g a fast one and getting away with it. They knew that, because the rule of = law is so normal in a country like the U.S., when people here read headline= s about an American being accused of something there, they read it with a s= ort of tacit assumption that there must be something to the charge—ev= en if it’s not clear what that would be.”

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“I think the U.S. is= getting wiser and more street-smart about these cases, and it&rsq= uo;s better that it does now rather than later, because the number of = cases is rising exponentially. There are 50-something of them right now. Wh= en I was jailed in Iran, there were four or five of us around the world. Ot= her countries weren’t doing this. Now it’s spreading like a vir= us.”

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The Signal explores urg= ent questions in current events around the world—to support it and fo= r full access:

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