Very few people can look Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe in the eye and say, “I know exactly how you feel.” Jason Rezaian is one of them. Like her, Rezaian was held hostage by Iran on trumped-up charges of spying. Last week he was one of the first people Zaghari-Ratcliffe called after her release.
“I’ve had contact with Richard for almost six years, and Nazanin for the better part of two years, and with both of them in the same place the day after she was released,” he says via Zoom from his home in Washington DC. “It was one of the most heart-warming and life-affirming opportunities that my wife and I have had in a long time. The opportunity to hear both of their voices together was something special.”
How did she seem? “Thankful. Happy. Relieved. And these are all feelings that I know very well. But I also know that this family has suffered an incredibly cruel and unfair fate, and part of that cruelty and injustice is that they’re now tasked with putting their lives back together. And no one can do that for them.”
The best thing that those around her can do, he says, is give her space and not be offended if she doesn’t call. Everybody wants to throw you a party, but what Rezaian craved was normality. “Everybody wants to fête you, treat you like some kind of hero. I just wanted to be treated like myself. I wanted my friends and relatives to be able to sit across the table and have a pint with me, or go for a walk, or say, ‘Let’s go watch a baseball game.’ ”
Today, when he speaks to former hostages, he tries to avoid offering vague, open-ended help. Instead, he advises to be specific: ask if they’re going to be at home on Wednesday night, so you can drop off dinner. Someone saying, “I’m here if you need anything” may have been well meant, but was of little use to someone suffering from trauma. “I didn’t know what I wanted. I didn’t know what I needed.”
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Rezaian, a dual Iranian-US citizen, was the Tehran bureau chief for The Washington Post when he was arrested in July 2014 with his Iranian wife and fellow journalist Yeganeh Salehi. They were taken to Evin prison, and while his wife was released on bail after two months, Jason Rezaian spent his first 49 days in solitary confinement.
He has written that the experience was the hardest thing he has endured, telling National Public Radio (NPR) that “solitary confinement is torture. Was I physically attacked, violently abused in a physical way? No. There is a level of stress that one cannot comprehend if they haven’t been put through this sort of situation. It is one of the worst things that you can do to a human being.”
Convicted of spying in a secret, sham trial, he was jailed for 544 days. He told NPR that he was interrogated two or three times a day, but “they weren’t really accusing me of anything actual. They were picking apart emails and communications I had with friends and relatives, and ostensibly saying that ‘by using this terminology it’s clear that you’re a spy’.” Today he says, “I learnt very early on that while inside Evin prison in section 2A, which is where the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] keeps its hostages, you do what you are told.”
He was eventually released in January 2016. Three months later, in April, Zaghari-Ratcliffe was arrested at Tehran airport while trying to board a flight home with her baby daughter, Gabriella, after a trip to see her parents. Soon after that Rezaian started to help and advise first Richard Ratcliffe, and later Nazanin, on how to cope. “This experience is incredibly unique and not a lot of people can relate to it,” he says. “To the best of my ability, I’ve tried to be there for others and their families when they’re going through this. I don’t talk about it very much because there’s a lot of sensitivity around these cases, but I get a lot of phone calls from people whose loved ones are being held somewhere in the world.”
He says that since Zaghari-Ratcliffe was arrested he and Richard have had a unique relationship: “He came to my family and me in search of advice, which we provided. But then I think we become more like allies in a common fight. First and foremost to free Nazanin, but also to do what we can to combat state hostage taking.
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With Nazanin, rather than advising her on coping, which I think she is very adept at already, it was about commiserating. To be someone she could speak to who understands first-hand some of what she was experiencing, but also to assure her that it would end and that there was a life on the other side.”
The day of release isn’t the end of the trauma, he says; it’s the start of another one. His final 36 hours in Evin were some of the most trying as negotiations went right up to the wire, as they did with Zaghari-Ratcliffe. There are competing factions within Iran, he explains, and the people talking to members of our government are not the same people holding the prison keys. His jailers told him for ten days that his release was imminent. Then again, they had said that before. “They’d also told me that my execution was imminent, so you never know what to believe. I was excited, but trying to steel myself for a let-down.”
He thinks that for most newly released hostages sleep is probably the biggest challenge. For two years he’d wake up screaming from a recurring nightmare: his main interrogator telling him that the deal to get him out had fallen through, and who knew when he might get out now?
The second challenge was choice. “To go from having all choice taken from you, all agency stolen, then handed right back to you — it can be dizzying. And then, what are you going to do with the rest of your life?”
In hindsight he wishes that he and his wife had disappeared somewhere remote for a while. Instead, he was so busy trying to put his life back together, and everyone around him had been so busy campaigning for his release, that “it’s very difficult to plan for what comes after”.
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Plenty of people, maybe even he thought it was business as usual. Close friends and family fell broadly into two camps: those who worried they wouldn’t know him any more and those who assumed he was fine. The reality was somewhere in the middle. Even now there are people to whom he was close whom he still hasn’t spoken to. Not because he doesn’t want to, but because some part of his brain is traumatised.
“So many people told my wife and I in the first months, ‘You guys are so normal, so put together.’ Actually, no. We were just really good actors. There’s a bit of defiance. Really getting on with your life and continuing is the best victory, [but] a lot of people are unable to move on from this. It’s just a fact of life.”
Rezaian was flown from Iran to a military hospital on a US army base in Germany and offered therapy with a government psychologist for as long as he needed it. Ultimately, he found therapy helpful, but many people, himself included, are reluctant to commit to regular sessions straight away. “Why not? Because it’s a routine. There’s a thousand things you have to do to bring your life back up to speed and sitting down for an hour every week isn’t necessarily everybody’s first order of business.”
Over the coming months, he contacted the psychologist sporadically, mostly to ask if what he felt was normal. He also spoke to David Rohde, a New York Times journalist who was kidnapped by the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2008. “You start to feel like you’re the only person that’s ever been through this. Why am I not happier? Why can’t I sleep? Why are things so difficult? The first thing he told me was that you need to figure out a way to sleep and if that means medication, do that. Not sleeping will destroy you.”
Rezaian lives with his wife and young child in Washington DC and works as an opinion writer for The Washington Post. He thinks he’s pretty much back to normal, but “it was a long and trying ordeal to get back to some semblance of normalcy”. He gets anxious in public settings, and has gone from being a chatty, communicative, intrepid guy who travelled the world to someone who has difficulty trusting others and hates speaking on the phone; “I can’t account for it. I just don’t.”
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He worries about safety and has to know exactly how he’s getting from A to B, whom he’s going to see and where he’s going to stay. Sometimes it’s overwhelming. He hasn’t had therapy for almost a year, but thinks he’ll go back at some point. “Some things,” he says, “just don’t get undone. Although I’ve gotten very far back to where I was, there is maintenance involved.”
He has executive-produced for the Post a documentary, Bring Them Home, about an American family fighting to free a husband and father from prison in Iran. He also hosts a podcast, 544 days, about his experiences and has written a compelling book about his experiences called Prisoner.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe was held for six years, but Rezaian says that how well someone recovers isn’t necessarily linked to how long they were in jail. “I know people who have been held for much shorter periods of time [than me] who have had a harder time reintegrating. There can be an abruptness to being taken and held in solitary confinement for, let’s say, a week, and threatened with execution and interrogated relentlessly and told that your loved ones are dead. And then to very abruptly be let back out on the street to fend for yourself?”
As for Zaghari-Ratcliffe and her husband, “They know that they have a friend and support in me and my wife, and I hope that it’s as sweet a transition as is humanly possible.”
Prisoner: My 544 Days in an Iranian Prison ― Solitary Confinement, a Sham Trial, High-Stakes Diplomacy, and the Extraordinary Efforts It Took to Get Me Outis out now. Listen to 544 Days at spotify.link/544Days
