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“Throughout the ordeal, I was sure of one thing only,” Paola told me when I explained to her what I felt I had to do. “It was that you knew what you were doing. I still believe that.”

My mother was even stronger in her support. When I called to ask what she thought about me writing about my experiences, she didn’t hesitate. “What’ve you been waiting for?” she said with her characteristic candor. “Of course you should talk about these ashghals, this garbage. They’ve ruined the lives of people inside the country, and they think that they can get away with bullying people outside of the country as well.”

A few weeks after my release, I wrote a cover story for Newsweek entitled “118 Days in Hell.” It was one of the first accounts of postelection brutalities in Iran, but a few months after the article was published, many prisoners said that they’d gone through the same ordeal as I had. After the article, I did a series of television, radio, and print interviews in which I provided more information about my captivity. I was sure to make two points clear: (1) I had made my confessions under duress, and (2) hundreds of innocent prisoners remained inside Iranian jails, enduring the same brutal ordeal I had.

Back in London, with the help of a number of international organizations, I started a campaign calling for the release of my journalist friends and colleagues. More than one hundred journalists had been arrested after the June 2009 presidential election, and since then the Islamic regime has made journalists its prime target in its fight against what it calls “sedition.” To kick off the campaign, I wrote an open letter to Khamenei that was published in the International Herald Tribune and subsequently translated by dozens of Persian websites. “The only accusation against many reporters who are languishing in Iranian jails is that they held a mirror to the actions of the Iranian government,” I wrote. “They did not want to overthrow it. They never took up arms. All of them did their job as peacefully as journalists elsewhere in the world. Many a time my torturer told me that he kicked me to make you happy. He told me, ‘Each time I slap you I can feel that the Master is smiling at me.’ Ayatollah Khamenei, I think you are responsible for what happened to me.”

The Guards reacted immediately. An article in Javan, a newspaper run by the Guards, called me “a natural born criminal who should never have been allowed out of jail,” and Iranian television mocked my media appearances by calling my actions “courage in the comfort of the West.” Rosewater’s cohorts also tried to intimidate me by threatening my family. The Guards instructed my brother-in-law, Mohammad, on the phone, “Tell Maziar that he shouldn’t think we can’t reach him because he is not in Iran. The situation is getting really dangerous now. Anything can happen without advance notice.” The Iranian government has assassinated dozens of dissidents outside Iran, and the threatening calls unsettled me. In the beginning, I thought it best to remain silent, believing that publicizing the threats would only make the situation worse for my mother and Mohammad. But the calls continued for months, so in April 2010, after a particularly menacing call to my family, I decided to break my silence and talk about the threats publicly.

In interviews after the threats, I asked those who made the threats a simple question: “I know that the mighty Revolutionary Guards have agents around the world and can get to me whenever they want. But then what? What do they want to do to me? If they want to kill me, then they’re accepting that they’re part of a terrorist regime, and if they want to kidnap me, then they are admitting that they are a hostage-taking government. I think the brothers in the Revolutionary Guards should be more transparent about their intentions.”

Publicizing the threats made them less frequent. The Islamic regime was still worried about its image in the world, so, according to my sources,