Prisoner: My 544 Days in an Iranian Prison by Jason Rezaian

Author:Jason Rezaian
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-11-28T00:00:00+00:00

I PONDERED THOSE DAYS NOW, KNOWING THAT IF I COULD SURVIVE THEM, I COULD GET THROUGH this. But I was feeling hopeless.

For months, from where I sat it had appeared as though nothing was happening. My case seemed to be in a state of suspension and it was just life in the cell all the time. I had no contact with the outside world. It had been weeks since the Christmas surprise and my loneliness was becoming unbearable. At least I could still work out, walk in circles in our tiny yard, and read. I poured myself into those three activities to fill each day.

One afternoon in the dead of winter, Yadoallah came back from his daily phone call with his family with a massive grin on his face. “I’ve got good news for you, J,” he said, throwing an arm around my shoulders.

“What is it?” I had to know. In Evin good news was rare.

“Obama talked about you in a speech,” he said, as if he were announcing my imminent release. It was late January so it was possible that he’d mentioned me in the State of the Union address, but that seemed an unlikely moment for a president negotiating a game-changing deal with my captors to insert me into the national dialogue. Still, I liked the idea of that.

“Where? What did he say?” I demanded.

“I just know he talked about you and that means you’re getting out,” he told me, doing his best, as he always did, to focus on the positive.

Somewhere inside I knew he was probably right, but I was finding it hard to believe there was any progress being made toward my release. I couldn’t see a single sign of it. It wasn’t long, though, until I started to catch glimpses of the cumulative efforts around getting me out.

My name was growing into the latest chorus in the antagonistic call and response between Tehran and Washington that has defined relations between these two countries—my two countries—for most of my life. I was now a living centerpiece in a struggle that I had spent years, through my explanatory writing, seeking to defuse.

Any time someone in the U.S. called for my release there was an equally weighted damnation of me in the Iranian state press.

As those flashes grew I began to steel myself for confrontation. The verdict in the courtroom was already a lost cause. I knew that. But that wasn’t the front I needed to worry about.

My battle was for global public opinion, and I had been winning that one since soon after my arrest, as the drama of the epic nuclear deal played out, shining a spotlight on my case, offering a very sober reminder of why a deal that left me and other Americans in prison might not accomplish what it was supposed to in returning Iran to a sense of international normalcy.

A new acceptance of Iran in the American consciousness as anything but a rogue nation never actually happened, and one ingredient of

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