Our Middle East correspondent was detained by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards in July 2019. Read his astonishing account of seven weeks trapped in the country From 1843mag
was paying my bill at the hotel when they came. There were seven of them, stiff and formal in plain-clothes. “Mr Pelham?” asked the shortest one and presented me with a hand-written document in Farsi. “It’s been signed by a judge,” he said. “It entitles us to detain you for 48 hours.” He paused to allow the information to register on my face. “It might be less,” he added. “We just need you to answer a few questions.
I asked to go to the toilet. Like a child, I wanted to escape the tension in the room. I needed to calm myself by breathing deeply. That day, in a taxi back to my hotel, I had flicked through my emails and read that a number of travellers, including a French-Iranian academic from Sciences Po in Paris, had recently been detained in Iran on the pretext of violating state security. And now here I was.
The short man asked me about my family, my education, the countries I’d visited and the languages I spoke. I told them Arabic, French and, after a pause, Hebrew. I was sure that this wasn’t news to them. They wanted to know how many times I had been to Israel. And Palestine, I added, to emphasise my impartiality. A radio crackled with static.
The pace reached a frog march. Two men in front, two behind, past the plastic barricades separating check-in from the departure-hall entrance, past the x-ray machines and outside to the car drop-off. “Perhaps they know a shortcut,” I thought. An older, more battered car awaited us. I had been downgraded.
A Dickensian character awaited me, pale, short and slightly hunched. The hair on his head sprouted in clumps; his face and hands were covered in warts. He asked me to empty my pockets. I surrendered my belt and, more reluctantly, my glasses. He led me down a corridor, unlocked the last door on the left and signalled that I should enter. It was a large cell, perhaps 20 square metres, with a thin mat on the floor. He pointed to a pile of musty brown blankets folded in a corner.
I had gone to report on the impact of American-imposed sanctions. Some news stories were claiming that Tehran was on the brink of collapse, but I saw few signs of it. There was no panic buying. The city looked cleaner and more modern than on my visit three years before. It has the best underground in the Middle East, with locally made trains. Parks and museums were abundant and well-tended, pavements were scrubbed and the city’s many flower-beds immaculately maintained.
The sun was already high when I woke on my first morning in detention. It was a scorching day but a half-hearted air-conditioner dulled some of the heat. No sooner had I stood up than my jailer unbolted the door to bring me a metal tray with thin naan bread, yogurt and water. He handed it to me and pointed across the corridor to the latrines. A shower spout hung over the hole in the ground but I couldn’t see any towels or soap. The cold water was refreshing.
My mind spun all sorts of fantasies. I drew up a cost-benefit analysis of my circumstances. If word of my capture got out, it could damage my chance of early release but boost sales of an update to my book. My jailer, who until now had communicated entirely in grunts, might teach me Farsi. The spartan diet might help me lose weight.
My experience in solitary had lasted, I guessed, less than 12 hours. What a pale imitation of a political prisoner I was. My captors wore no identifying uniforms, but on the second day the doctor told me that he was an officer in the intelligence arm of the Revolutionary Guards. Iran’s security agencies are many tentacled. In 1979 the new Islamic Republic retained much of the existing state apparatus, including the army and a good part of the bureaucracy, but it added another tier to keep existing institutions in check, and the parallel systems have competed ever since.
In the days that followed, there were always three men present to watch me; each shift lasted 24 hours. Being crammed with my guards into a small flat, spending our days in close proximity in-shirts and underpants, was a surprisingly intimate experience. Over time much of the guards’ suspicion dissolved and they seemed to be concerned less that I might try to escape than that others could break in.
My interrogators visited each morning, but by the third day the mood had lightened. I was allowed to sleep in my room with the door open. The doctor explained that he needed to continue his enquiries, but in the meantime I would be transferred to a more comfortable hotel. I was not allowed to do any journalism but was permitted to roam the city, so long as I kept Ali notified of my movements and any meetings.
Despite Iran’s pious reputation, Tehran may well be the least religious capital in the Middle East. Clerics dominate the news headlines and play the communal elders in soap operas, but I never saw them on the street, except on billboards. Unlike most Muslim countries, the call to prayer is almost inaudible. There has been a rampant campaign to build new mosques, yet more people flock to art galleries on Fridays than religious services.
Many restrictions have peculiar quirks. A female actor may not show her own hair on stage, but is allowed to wear a wig that makes her look ravishing. She can sing but not perform a solo. And she can dance, but not in public. One evening I stumbled on a crowd clapping to the jig of a violinist. They had formed a circle around a pair of male dancers who were sensually gyrating and rotating their wrists. People were cheering them on when the park lights suddenly cut out. Blackouts are rare in the city, so the presumption was that the authorities had pulled the plug after a tip-off or noticed the gathering on a camera. Boos erupted from the darkness.
It was liberating to have the run of Tehran, without minders, deadlines or chores. But of course, I wasn’t truly free. I policed myself on behalf of the regime, becoming my own jailer and censor, aware that any lapse could have consequences. Sometimes I tried to speak over colleagues or relatives who were saying things that I feared might enrage my captors. I felt the presence of hundreds of electronic eyes. The friendliest faces who greeted me might be informers. And I could not leave Iran.
On August 15th the British government released the Iranian ship. But the Guards were digging in. Although the Iranian tanker was sailing again it couldn’t offload its cargo. Under American pressure, Mediterranean ports repeatedly turned it away. I feared either that the Revolutionary Guards thought they could use my presence to negotiate some kind of deal, or that I was becoming a pawn in the internal rivalry within the Iranian government.
Over my hotel breakfast one morning I read in the paper that Iran had sentenced an Iranian who worked for the British Council to ten years in prison for espionage. The regime intended to make Britain pay heavily for seizing its ship. As the stand-off over the tanker’s cargo intensified, I felt that I was being used to relay their muscle-flexing back to London through the phone the Guards had given me. Peculiarly I had become both hostage and intermediary.
For ten nights in Muharram these passion plays were performed with growing fervour. Even an irreverent man who taught me Farsi, who devoted much of his spare time to picking up waitresses in cafés, said Muharram was the one religious occasion he observed. The streets were lined with, stalls offering tea and dates and decorated with tragic representations of the battlefield using decapitated toy soldiers. At one, I came across a camel being readied for sacrifice.
Half of my mother’s family had been well-to-do cotton merchants from Alexandria’s Jewish community, the other half were among the first wave of Zionist migrants to Palestine in the early 1880s. Their history encompassed the process of rupture that has made the modern Middle East so combustible, and had led me to study Arabic and Hebrew at university in a vain attempt to overcome the dislocation of the past.
I didn’t go. I had a Farsi class until 1pm. And I was still worried about the consequences. I continued my search for a new pair of glasses, and found myself at a different open door on the other side of the street. I climbed two flights of stairs, passed a huge painted menorah and entered another synagogue. A rabbi was addressing an all-male audience. I edged forwards. A man with a bushy beard as long as an ayatollah’s ambled over with melon, cake and a smile. He introduced himself as Daniel.
Though the sense of community, even family, added to the surreal nature of my captivity, it also felt comforting. By rare coincidence the first service of, the penitential prayers recited for a month in the run up to the High Holidays, began on the first day of the solemn month of Muharram. The synagogues were packed. At 1am Iran’s largest synagogue still teemed with families. At 2am the congregation swayed in prayer for Israel and its people.
The immigration office was full of people lining up at glass-fronted counters to get their paperwork sorted before the Iranian weekend. I asked for Colonel Aroubi and was ushered into a side office. Procedures needed to be followed, the colonel insisted. He wanted to issue an exit visa, but since I had overstayed, he needed the approval of those who had sponsored my reporting trip. He seemed either unaware or unimpressed that my long visit was down to the Revolutionary Guards detaining me.
After 40 minutes of interrogation, they disappeared. Ten minutes later they were back with embarrassed smiles. One awkward matter needed resolving. Because I had overstayed my visa, I needed to pay a fine of 4m toman, about $200.I called Ali and asked him to clear the fine.The intelligence officers apologised again but remained insistent. There were regulations. They couldn’t foot the bill for a mistake of the Guards.But I was out of funds.
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