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

15 July 2009

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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

Back in Evin, my interrogator was about to reveal to me ‘definitive proof’ that I was a spy. He handed me a printout of a colour image as if he were dispensing a death sentence. The colour picture showed a younger me in a crowded conference hall chatting with a tall man I recognised as the press attaché at the British embassy.

There was a pregnant silence. Although facing the wall, I felt several pairs of eyes scrutinising me for a reaction. ‘You want to know why a journalist in Iran on a British passport would be chatting at a conference with the press attaché of the British embassy?’ I asked.

Later, another interrogator would ask me in a voice full of innuendo whether I had read Death Plus Ten Years, the memoirs of an Englishman called Roger Cooper convicted of spying in post-revolutionary Iran. Apparently its Persian language translation was a favourite in the Intelligence Ministry coffee room.

‘Just from reading it you can sense that he had a negah-e etelaati (intelligence viewpoint),’ my interrogator said. I promised to read it upon my release.

Later, when we had departed the land of baseless accusation for the land of convivial chat, I asked my interrogator whether he thought England’s role in his country had changed over the past 200 years. ‘I don’t see fundamental change,’ said my interrogator. ‘Before they used to send in their spies directly. Now they achieve their agendas through “civil society”.’

I was released a few days later. The spying charges had not stuck. Yet I was certain that my interrogators had convinced themselves that even my release was part of some dastardly British plot.

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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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