Jason Rezaian and Yeganeh Salehi: a young couple entangled in web of Iranian politics

Jason Rezaian and Yeganeh Salehi, who wrote stories which shed light on Iranian society for American and Arabian Gulf readers, flew out of Iran on Sunday, 18 months after Iranian security agents raided the couple’s apartment and arrested both of them.

Jason Rezaian and his wife Yeganeh Salehi flew out of Iran on Sunday 18 months after they were arrested in Tehran. EPA/STRINGER

New York // The last article Jason Rezaian wrote before he was arrested was about a baseball league in Tehran.

It was a typical subject for his reportage of Iran, which captured stories of shared humanity in a country that has been an enemy of the West and deeply mistrusted in much of the Middle East for nearly 40 years.

His wife, Yeganeh Salehi, 31, an Iranian journalist who reported for The National, also had an eye for stories that shed light on Iranian society for readers in the Arabian Gulf who may have associated Iran primarily with its rulers rather than its people.

It therefore came as a surprise to many, both in Iran and around the world, when Iranian security agents raided the couple’s apartment on July 22, 2014, and arrested both of them.

Salehi was released on bail 10 weeks later but her husband spent 543 days in Tehran’s Evin prison – the longest detention of any western journalist in Iran.

The couple were reunited when Rezaian was freed on Saturday. Yesterday, with Rezaian’s mother Mary, who has been in Iran since her son was arrested, they boarded a Swiss air force plane that landed in Geneva last night. They were expected to fly later to a US air base in Germany.

After months apart, it would be understandable if the couple were determined not to be separated again. Yesterday’s flight was delayed for just that reason.

“We wanted to make sure that Jason was able to travel with his wife and mother, so it took extra time to make sure they were located and on that plane,” a senior US official said. “We felt, obviously, very strongly that the Rezaian family had the right to leave together.”

Jason Rezaian moved in 2008 from California to Iran, the country of his father’s birth, to become a freelance journalist. Uniquely positioned to portray and explain the country to readers in the US, in 2012 Rezaian earned one of the top correspondent positions in a country with few western journalists, as the Washington Post’s bureau chief.

He married Salehi in 2013, and the two settled into a shared life of journalism.

When the couple were arrested, both the Washington Post and The National tried to find out why, and senior US government officials called for Rezaian’s immediate release. But the opaque internal politics of Iran’s ruling elites meant that there could be any number of reasons, from an attempt by the supreme leader to gain leverage over American nuclear negotiators, to jockeying between hardliners and reformists, or even an attempt at a straight trade for Iranians imprisoned by the US.

Rezaian was also a dual citizen, but Iran does not recognise US dual citizenship, and the deputy foreign minister called it an “internal matter”.

Rezaian’s increasingly distressed family was not able to contact him, and growing public calls for his release were met only with more empty statements, including one by Iran’s foreign minister Mohammad Zarif that September, that Iran “has no obligation to explain to the United States why it is detaining one of its own citizens”.

On October 5, Salehi was released on bail without the charges against her being made public or known to her. She was also forbidden from consulting a lawyer. Salehi was forced to remain silent, give up her livelihood and isolate herself from anyone but the closest family.

“She lives in constant fear of punishment for any misstep in her daily life” and is unable to interact with many of her friends, Jason’s brother Ali, who became a spokesman for the family, said last year.

Finally, in early December, after five months of interrogations lasting 10 hours a day, a deteriorating health condition and time spent in solitary confinement, Rezaian was summoned to court to hear the charges against him. He was allowed no legal representation, only a translator.

The family feared the worst when the case was assigned in February to Branch 15 of the Revolutionary Court, where national security and political cases are tried.

Worse still, the judge, Abolghassem Salavati, had presided over high-profile cases involving government critics, liberal protesters and minorities, and had handed out harsh sentences including long prison terms, whippings and the death penalty.

It was not until April that Rezaian was allowed to employ a lawyer, Leila Ahsan. He was not allowed his first choice, the lawyer who had represented three American hikers who had been detained and then exchanged for Iranian prisoners held by Washington.

While Ms Ahsan is barred from discussing the trial, she said the indictment contained the broad outline of four vague charges – spying, working with enemy governments, collecting sensitive information and “conducting propaganda against the establishment”. The serious charges could have brought a lengthy prison term.

The main pieces of evidence were a job application Rezaian submitted to the Obama administration in 2008 that referred to his “familiarity with Iran and wide cross-section of Iranian society”. The administration did not employ him.

At the time, Ali Rezaian told The National that the other “evidence” was a US visa application that the couple submitted for Salehi at the US consulate in Dubai. The application requested expedited service, and listed the treatment of journalists in Iran as a justification for the request. This may have accounted for the charge of “conducting propaganda”. A copy of the application was probably found on one of the couple’s confiscated computers.

The Washington Post described the charges as a sham, and Barack Obama said that month that “we will not rest until we bring Jason Rezaian home to his family, safe and sound”.

US secretary of state John Kerry, who was leading negotiations over Iran’s nuclear programme, said his team brought up the issue of Rezaian and three other detained Americans during every round of talks, but US officials did not want to link the issues.

No one but a tiny group of administration officials knew at the time that at the end of 2014, a parallel set of negotiations had been established in Switzerland to resolve the detentions.

Brett McGurk, the senior US diplomat who is the envoy to the anti-ISIL coalition, led the US team that included FBI, justice department and intelligence officials.

As those top-secret talks evolved, so did Rezaian’s closed-door trial, and after four court hearings he was convicted in August 2015.

The sentence, however, was never made public and was not even disclosed to Ms Ahsan. There was speculation that the success of the nuclear talks the month before may hold promise for the conviction to be overturned.

In fact, the talks over the fate of the detained Americans began to accelerate after the nuclear accord was struck and an exchange was worked out that resulted in six Iranian-Americans and one Iranian convicted of violating sanctions being freed before the announcement of the implementation of the nuclear deal and lifting of most sanctions on Iran.

“It became apparent in the last two or three weeks that just as Iran was nearing completion of its work with respect to implementation day, we were also nearing a potential agreement around the American citizens,” a senior administration official said. “So essentially the timing converged.”

The talks nearly broke down over new US sanctions on Iran for its ballistic missile tests, when Mr Zarif threatened to cancel the prisoner swap – a stark illustration of what the US hoped to avoid in linking the two issues. The White House agreed to delay the sanctions and the exchange went ahead.

The status of the secret charges against Salehi is not known. Nor is it known if she settles in the US, whether she would be allowed to travel back to Iran to see her family.