I 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.”
He gave me a choice. Either I could be questioned in the hotel or in their car on the way to the airport. “You might even make the plane,” he said. Almost automatically, I asked to see a lawyer or a diplomatic representative. He flicked his wrist, indicating that this was unnecessary. “All we want to know is a little bit more about your trip. There’s no need to delay or complicate things.”
It was 7.30pm. My plane left in four hours and the airport was over an hour’s drive from Tehran. The officials ushered me into a small office in the hotel and crowded around my chair.
“Your mobile phone and laptop, please.”
I pointed to the bag lying against the opposite wall.
“Are there more?”
I took a second phone out of my pocket.
The shortest man was in charge. He wore a dark, oversized jacket and trousers. His wavy hair was greasy and his face was lined. He bobbed up and down on a chair and patted my knee, though it was unclear whether he meant to reassure or threaten me.
The guards rifled through my books and notes. They held up a piece of paper with jottings on it from a previous trip and asked me to explain what I had written. I tried to hide my alarm when I saw that my eight-year-old son had stencilled large Hebrew letters on the back. How could I have brought that with me? I asked myself. But if they noticed the Hebrew, they said nothing.
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 largest of the men walked closely behind me as we descended to the basement toilet. He gesticulated for me to leave the door open.
After I returned upstairs, I was led to the reception desk to finish paying my bill. Two black saloons were waiting outside and I was directed into the rear one. Guards wedged me in on either side and we pulled off.
The interrogation began as we drove. If anything, the officials’ interest in me was flattering rather than scary. After decades of being the interviewer, I had been promoted to being the interviewee. No one had ever found me so interesting before.
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.
I was relieved when we arrived at the airport to be reunited with my bags. Just under two hours had elapsed by this point. But instead of checking in, I was taken to an office at the back of the airport hall with a big glass window overlooking the departure lounge. Polystyrene containers filled with half-chewed chicken bones and pellets of saffron rice lay on chairs lining the walls.
The status of those who had taken me was becoming evident – they had the run of the state’s vital infrastructure. A tall, bulky man, more suave than the others, was introduced to me as “the doctor”. He looked weary and irritated.
“Your phone password, please,” said the short man.
I told him that I always used my thumb print.
A hint of impatience followed almost immediately.
“There isn’t much time, if you want to catch your plane.”
I made a show of racking my brain and offered several phone passcodes, none of which worked. I had an app on my phone, which many foreign correspondents use, that notified my editors of my location every 20 minutes, in order to detect any unusual activity. I wondered if they had picked up anything.
“One last chance,” said the doctor.
This time, the code worked.
“You’re not co-operating,” he said with a frown. “It’s not a game. There’s not much time.”
I heard the last call for the Doha flight. “We’re going,” I was told. I was shocked at how easy it had all been and wondered where my ticket was. The short man escorted me away with his entourage. I could see the departure gate to the left of the check-in counters. We turned right.
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.
As we sped off, a blindfold was put on me. If I lifted my head slightly, I could just about make out my feet. After 15 minutes of chaotic driving, I was helped out of the car and led across the threshold of a building. When the mask was removed, I found myself in another office. I made a number of attempts to ask why I was being held. Each question was met with an order.
“Speak in Farsi,” I kept being told. “You know Farsi, don’t you?”
I insisted, apologetically, that I didn’t.
“Do you know the Koran?” asked one gruff guard, whom I would later come to know as Ali.
“Give me refuge in God from the accursed Satan,” I replied, quoting the liturgical Arabic phrase that precedes the recitation of the sacred text. He seemed amused.
“You’re taking hostages,” I said. “Why are you doing this?”
“Wait,” he replied (this turned out to be his favourite word).
Other guards brought in kebabs in polystyrene boxes.
“I don’t eat meat,” I said huffily.
As a substitute, I was offered coarse digestives and tea in a thin plastic cup that was too hot to hold. I was torn between anxiety and the need to get these people on side. I rejected the food. But the next time Ali handed me tea, I accepted.
The doctor entered the room and asked me to write down everything I’d done in Iran, day by day, meeting by meeting. Whatever I wrote, he would ask for more details. Finally, about nine hours after I was taken, I was led outside again. The guards told me to look up. A Qatar Airways plane loomed above us, ready for its dawn flight. It turned out that we had never left the airport. The last passengers were boarding. I felt a flicker of hope, but then I saw the guards smirking. A car was waiting on the tarmac. They opened the door and ushered me in.
The warm glow of dawn was breaking over the mountains to the north of Tehran. The guard told me I was being taken to a place that was a grade above a prison. He handed me a blindfold with an apologetic smile but allowed me to leave a slightly larger gap beneath my eyes and hold on to the seat in front. From glimpses of the chevrons I could see that the driver was zig-zagging in and out of the hard shoulder. “You’re supposed to detain me, not kill me,” I quipped. It earned a laugh but we didn’t slow down. We were clearly driving back to town and I tried to work out our route. Eventually we descended a steep ramp and stopped. I shuffled up two steps and, once inside, my mask was removed.
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. As I walked over to them, I heard the door clang behind me and the bolt pulled sharply across. Through a high window I could see the early morning light. I undressed and fell asleep.
Even in good times, Iran has a complicated, and at times paranoid, government. Elected parliamentarians give a veneer of democracy but power ultimately resides with the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the regime’s most powerful security force, answers directly to him. Rival arms of the state, including the security forces, jostle for influence. And the rules are unclear. Many regard Western journalists, particularly those asking awkward questions, as spies. Minders are ever present, with tape-recorders in hand to intimidate interviewees.
And this was a bad time in relations with the West. In April 2019 America declared the Revolutionary Guards to be a terrorist organisation. It had tightened sanctions, preventing Iran from trading in dollars or selling its oil.
I had been waiting for a journalist’s visa for three years when the Iranian authorities unexpectedly granted me one on July 1st 2019. On previous visits to Iran I had either been part of a large press pack covering elections, or with other colleagues from The Economist. I knew that the Iranian authorities were particularly suspicious of journalists who have been to Israel or are Jewish. I ticked both boxes. So I was apprehensive about my first solo trip.
Three days before I left for Iran, British marines impounded one of Iran’s largest oil tankers as it passed through the Straits of Gibraltar, suspecting it of breaking European sanctions by carrying oil to Syria. Iranian officials I knew assured me that I’d be safe. But the timing of the visa seemed odd. During the week I spent reporting, few of the meetings I requested materialised and those that did peddled the government line that Britain had committed an act of piracy. My hotel, once a favourite with foreign journalists, was dark and empty. But when I went to Friday prayers and tried to cover a rally supporting the strict enforcement of the hijab, I was turned away for being a British national. Iran was not in a welcoming mood.
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.
America’s sanctions had hurt people, of course. Average monthly salaries were worth less than a pair of imported shoes. I saw people sleeping rough or hawking junk on the streets. One former university lecturer I met had been reduced to busking. But few people went hungry and there seemed to be a joie de vivre among many of those I talked to. Cafés, theatres and music halls were packed. An earlier bout of sanctions had forced Tehran’s Symphony Orchestra to disband but I wangled a ticket for the opening night of the reconstituted Philharmonic.
Some canny operators even found ways to profit from sanctions. When Google and Apple dropped Iran from their services, local clones emerged. Snapp!, a ride-hailing app, claims to have more users in Tehran than Uber has in London. Shortages of certain goods, particularly medicines, have led to a proliferation of homeopathic shops around town.
Some Iranians I spoke to argued for tighter sanctions to bring down the regime or force it to resort to diplomacy. Even supposed loyalists privately said they hoped that a further squeeze in oil revenues might push the government into changing course. Others lacked the patience to wait. My government-appointed minder, who accompanied me throughout my week reporting, had surfed dating sites until she had found an Algerian-French student willing to marry her and send her a visa to France. She was half my age but habitually behaved like a Victorian nanny, taking my arm as we crossed a road. When I was arrested at the hotel, she sat at a coffee table in the lobby, writing a statement and refused to make eye contact.
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.
How had the guard known I was awake? Without my glasses, the high ceiling was blurry but I could make out the eye of a camera over the door. Previous occupants had scratched tallies on the wall in groups of five, suggesting that I might be here for a while. I paced the cell and tried to enlarge it by imagining that each wall was the boundary of a field back home in Gloucestershire. The bedside wall ran through the pastures to the hedgerow, which stretched along the wall with the door. I turned and walked through the woods, along the edge of the sheep field and back to my bed.
The countryside stroll helped me to expand my perspective. It was Monday morning in Britain but I couldn’t be certain that anyone there would have registered that I was missing. My wife would be getting our children ready for school, waiting to hear from me. She was heading off to Paris to research her latest book and I had promised to be back in time to take over. I was letting her down again. Perhaps my colleagues were also starting to worry.
The experience wasn’t entirely unfamiliar. I had spent several short spells in prison. I had been held for hours in northern Yemen in 1997 where I’d been trying to report, and endured a long weekend in a cell in 1999, at the crossing point between Gibraltar and Spain, accused of smuggling goods into Spain (in fact I was trying to furnish my flat in Morocco). Hostage-taking had become horrifyingly familiar when I was a correspondent in Iraq. I knew that, with natural light and a large cell, my conditions here were pretty good.
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.
I launched into my exercise routine to ward off sciatica, which ended with bent knees and prostrations, forehead to the floor. The bolt shot open and my jailer peered in. Had he thought I’d converted so quickly? Or that I was having a heart attack? Sub be-kheir (good morning), I assured him and he replied in kind. I had elicited his first words.
Over the next few hours I exercised my toilet rights frequently. The knock on the door allowed me to control the timing of our encounters, which gave me a semblance of control. The guard seemed pleased to be relieved of the boredom, and on each occasion he would grunt a new phrase – khosh bakhtam (nice to meet you), asr be-kheir (good afternoon) – and take a fraction longer to lock me in again. “Would you like more,” he asked, pointing at the water jug as if encouraging me to increase the frequency of my toilet visits.
On my second day, as dusk glowed, my jailer brought a blindfold and led me awkwardly along a corridor. When he took the mask off, I found myself in a room that was divided down the middle with a one-way mirror that I couldn’t see through. The doctor was waiting. He took a cursory glance at me and then disappeared. I heard someone entering the room on the other side and the squeak of chair legs. A shadow introduced himself as my translator.
“It’s my job to sound aggressive. Try to understand,” he said apologetically, before the doctor returned. The translator had looked me up online and wanted to know how he could buy my books. He sounded a little too friendly, which made me worry about where all this might be heading.
The doctor appeared again. He moved behind my chair and put his hands on my shoulders. “We need you to co-operate,” he said.
I replied that I had nothing to hide. He continued in Farsi, but the translator did not translate.
“What’s he saying?” I asked the mirror. The Farsi continued.
“Reply in Farsi,” the translator ordered.
“But I don’t speak Farsi,” I protested.
“We know you speak Farsi.”
I apologised. “I would love to learn,” I said, and suggested we talk in Arabic.
The doctor relented and continued in broken English embellished by the translator. He told me that I would be transferred to a more comfortable location while they carried out their investigations and questioned me further. This was a favour, he said, but the decision could be reversed if I didn’t co-operate, a threat that soon became recurrent. He hoped he could spare me from prosecution in court.
My experience in solitary had lasted, I guessed, less than 12 hours. What a pale imitation of a political prisoner I was.
They took me to my new home, a shabby flat on the top floor of what seemed to be a hotel fallen on hard times. There were two sofas, an armchair, a rectangular glass coffee table and a TV that stood against the wall. Faded orange curtains covered windows that stretched along one side of the room. A wooden kitchenette occupied a corner. Two bedrooms led off from the other side and the guards gestured for me to rest in one of them. When I closed the door, they opened it again. That night I was made to bring a mattress into the sitting room and the guards left the lights on while they watched over me until dawn.
On my first evening in the flat the doctor, his assistant Ali, and another translator turned up and stayed late into the night. Again I asked to contact my embassy and a lawyer. That was a thorny path, they advised. It might lead to a lengthy court case, or incarceration in the notorious Evin prison. “You know what happens in Evin,” the doctor said.