Then They Came for Me_ A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival - Maziar Bahari [144]
Khamenei had heard my name several times before and had asked his office to look into my case; he wanted to know if there was any advantage in holding me. By September, the Guards had realized that I was not going to be much help to the regime and would never name names. The answer to Khamenei’s office was that I was an espionage suspect, but that my case would be coming to a close very soon. That answer was not good enough for Khamenei’s people.
A few days later, Iranian diplomats asked Guards personnel to make a decision about me as soon as they could. “We’re hearing Bahari’s name everywhere,” one envoy said. “This Bahari has become more of a liability than an asset. Isn’t it about time to let him go?”
At the time, Khamenei had put Hossein Taeb, the commander of the Basij during the postelection crackdown, in charge of the Guards’ intelligence unit, the unit that had arrested me. Once the Guards’ plan to incriminate the reformists through me had failed, Rosewater and his team could not convince Taeb that there was any point in keeping me.
Rosewater and the Boss had to let me go, but they had to find a graceful way to do so. As I’d suspected at the time, my commitment to spy for them upon release was a face-saving measure. That way, Rosewater’s team could claim that they had transformed me during my time in Evin and that my reporting on the opposition was going to benefit the regime.
According to several sources, Rosewater argued against my release until an hour before I was let go. He allegedly tried to convince his superiors that if they allowed him to exert more pressure on me, I would sing like a canary and admit that I was a spy. “I’m not sure what you did to him,” a government source told me, “but he really wanted to hold on to you.” I’m not sure either, and I’m glad that I never found out. But I imagine one of his reasons was to learn more about New Jersey or Thailand!
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Rosewater’s organizational name is Javadi. He was born in 1978 and joined the Guards in 1996. A colonel in the Guards, he comes from a traditional religious family originally from the city of Isfahan; his parents moved to Tehran before he was born. Javadi’s father was, as he told me, a Khomeini follower, and had been imprisoned during the shah’s time. Javadi’s uncle and older brothers are also Guards members. He was among the first generation of Guards to go through the Basirat, or Wisdom, indoctrination courses. Javadi received a master’s degree in political science from Tehran University and had taken several anti-espionage courses. He is usually referred to as Gondeheh, the Big Guy, because of his size, or Char Cheshmi, the Four-Eyed One, because of his thick glasses.
Throughout my interrogation, Javadi told his bosses that he was making good progress with me. Having forced many student activists since 2000 to make false confessions, he has gained a reputation as one of the Guards’ toughest interrogators. Because of this, his bosses trusted him and left him alone with me for long periods of time.
I also learned that Javadi had personally chosen me as the individual who could connect the reformists to the foreign media. According to a Guards member, they first thought of arresting my friend Nazila Fathi, a New York Times reporter, but Rosewater convinced them to arrest me. I was a filmmaker and a journalist, and I worked both in Iran and outside