Haleh Came Home

LONDON, Sept. 17, 2007 — -- I don't know about you, but I waste a great deal of energy worrying about things that never happen.

Over the last eight months, I worried constantly about my friend Haleh Esfandiari. She is the Iranian born, American academic who headed the Mideast studies department at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.

While on a brief visit to Tehran to see her mother last December, Haleh was ambushed by masked armed men who seized her passport and other belongings. She was then prevented from flying home, interrogated by intelligence officers every day for up to nine hours a day for four months, and eventually, on May 8, thrown into the notorious Evin prison. She was accused of "endangering the security of Iran." Spying, in other words.

I was haunted by the thought of her lying there in solitary confinement, subjected to God knows what treatment. People have languished in that prison for years. Many have died there.

I was afraid that my dear friend Haleh, who is a grandmother and only weights about 100 pounds, might never make it out alive. I became obsessed by that thought, compounded by a deep sense of guilt that while I was enjoying a free, happy, privileged life in the West, she was incarcerated, cut off from her family and friends and doubtless very frightened at the prospect of being put on trial for espionage. In Iran, that can carry the death penalty.

At the beginning of September, Haleh was suddenly, miraculously, released from Evin prison, after the director of the Woodrow Wilson Center, the former U.S. congressman Lee Hamilton, wrote a personal letter to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Khameni, appealing for her release on humanitarian grounds.

About 10 days later, she was back with her family in Washington. Exhausted and emotionally drained, she nonetheless gave a series of news conferences and interviews. And she took the time for a long chat with me. When she left prison, her weight was down to 80 pounds.

"I haven't dared to weigh myself!" she laughed. "Lets say I'm under 90 pounds now. … You remember I was always tiny."