In the Tehran jail, I was the ‘Great British Spy’

Iason Athanasiadis

18 July 2009

Iason Athanasiadis was arrested after writing a piece for The Spectator on the Iranian demonstrations. He learned from his interrogators how deep is the historic hatred of the British

‘We have told the Greek ambassador that the reason we are holding you has nothing to do with Greece, which we respect as an old civilisation,’ my interrogator announced. ‘Even if it is now in the EU,’ he added, unable to resist a little dig.

‘No, the reason you are here is because of the role you have played as a spy for England.’ Jasoos-e Inglis. English spy. By this time I had heard those words repeated over and over again. At the sound of the word ‘jasoos’ my body stiffened involuntarily inside my prison uniform into a defensive position: crossed hands and legs. I knew better now than to laugh.

During my first day in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison the words ‘English spy’ had seemed comic. I was arrested trying to leave the country, soon after filing a piece for the Spectator, a description of the troubled streets of Tehran. I was just past passport control, almost within sight of the plane, when I was stopped by two men and dragged, kicking, to a car. But though the arrest had shaken me, I was sure, initially, that my innocence would soon be established.

Even when the prosecuting judge had announced that my charge was espionage, I had grinned. ‘Why are you smiling?’ he asked me, surprised. ‘Because you Iranians call every foreigner you arrest a spy,’ I said. ‘But what does it say about your country and your civilisation if you treat anyone who cares enough to travel here or even learn your language as a criminal?’

‘Once bitten, twice shy,’ was my interrogator’s retort. It is true that Britain’s foreign policy has not been kind to Iran. But I’m half Greek and no great fan of British foreign policy. I still expected that my interrogators would read some of my articles written over five years of living in or visiting Iran and realise that I have often addressed this point. But the trouble with paranoiacs is that they process reality not through available information but through the gaps in available knowledge, the Rumsfeldian ‘known unknowables’ lurking out of sight behind the curtain.

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Maximilian

July 16th, 2009 1:36pm Report this comment

a satire on the Iranian tendency to blame everyday occurrences on supernatural elements or outside forces:

A tendency evidently shared by other nations within the Iranian sphere of influence. A father caught his teenage daughter doing something she shouldn’t have been doing (we’re not told exactly what) and her excuse was that she’d been handed a stick of chewing gum laced with an aphrodisiac. Not only the father believed her but the local police chief did as well. Guess whose secret service turned out to be the guilty party fomenting a dastardly plot. Not the British, in this case, but . . . (Hint: it happened in the Gaza Strip).

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3746017,00.html

Dean Miller

July 16th, 2009 2:57pm Report this comment

This is the best of what Iason has said and written since his release. When do we get a show of the photos he took from his iris-implanted digital camera with cranial satellite uplink antennae?
Next chapter in the saga: the dusky Greek dragged to the Tower in London, interrogated for pro-Iranian sympathies.

Knocke

July 22nd, 2009 1:11pm Report this comment

A young woman from France, Clotilde Reiss, has been held in that prison since July 1st, on suspicion – no charge yet – of espionage. She taught French at an Iranian university, poor soul.

Facebook has a group about her with some 26,000 members: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=102797937379

Is France also now a member of the family of The Big Satan?

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