Jason Rezaian, a Washington Post correspondent, was arrested earlier this year with his wife, Iranian journalist Yeganeh Salehi, also a journalist. Despite international pressure and condemnation regarding his arrest, the Islamic authorities provided scarce information on the charges against him. It was reported on September 23 that Rezaian had been forced to confess, though details of the confession have not been released.
Name: Jason Rezaian
Born: 1976
Occupation: The Washington Post correspondent in Tehran since 2012.
Charges: Espionage; gathering information about internal and foreign Iranian policy for hostile intent; collaborating with enemy governments; owning and collecting classified documents; spreading propaganda against the state.
Reporting in Iran “is like walking a tightrope,” Jason Rezaian told his friends a month before he was arrested. “When you fall down, it is over.”
Born in California to an Iranian father and American mother, Rezaian has dual citizenship. He began his career in journalism at the San Francisco Chronicle, where he wrote a blog entitled “Inside Iran.” Islamic Republic officials later granted him a permit from the Islamic Republic to work in Tehran as a Washington Post correspondent.
Reports indicate that Rezaian was on good terms with President Rouhani and his cabinet. He and his wife Yeganeh Salehi, a reporter for the Dubai-based journal The National, accompanied Rouhani when he traveled abroad on a number of occasions, publishing articles about the trips afterwards.
On July 22, 2014 security forces raided their house, confiscated Rezaian’s notebooks and laptop and arrested him and his wife. Although it was initially reported that two guests were also arrested at Rezaian and Salehi’s residence at the same time, it later emerged that this was not the case. However, two other journalists, an Iranian-American photographer and her husband, were arrested on the same date. Their names are not known.
“Jason Rezaian knew he was being watched,” the New York Times reported on August 7. “A man on a motorcycle had been following him and his wife for weeks, his colleagues said. The tail was so blatant that Mr. Rezaian...had even managed to take a picture of the license plate.”
Salehi was released on October 6. Rezaian remains in detention, and authorities have failed to supply information about the charges he faces. The two unnamed journalists arrested on the same date have been released on bail but no additional information has been made available.
On September 23, IranWire reported that the Revolutionary Guards' Intelligence Unit obtained a forced confession from Jason Rezaian under duress. In a brief conversation, an Iranian security official who withheld his name due to the sensitivity of the case told IranWire that the Guards pushed Rezaian to confess in order to “influence Iran's nuclear negotiations with Western powers, including the United States.”
A hardliner site reported: “After Jason Rezaian was confronted with videos and evidence from intelligence agencies, he admitted he was connected to Western intelligence agencies. He and his wife now live in a safe house in Tehran and enjoy the pool and their favorite foods.”
Sources told the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran that the “top-ranking officials in the Iranian Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches were uninformed regarding the details of the arrests. Iran’s Prosecutor General and Spokesperson for the Iranian Judiciary, Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejei, told reporters on July 25 that he was not informed of the detentions. “I have no information about this case. You must give me time to clarify everything,” he stated in a report published by the Fars News Agency.
While In New York during September’s United Nations General Assembly meeting, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said that he and President Rouhani had tried hard to ensure the couple were well treated, adding that Rezaian faces serious allegations. He did not elaborate on the nature of these allegations.
“The latest interference with the press may well be intended to embarrass [President Rouhani],” wrote Laura Secor in the New Yorker on August 15. “Rouhani’s pursuit of a nuclear accord with six world powers faces fierce opposition from hardliners within the Iranian establishment who would be all too happy to see him fail. Now the president is forced to explain to international interlocutors exactly why his country has abducted a law-abiding Washington Post correspondent on what are recognizably trumped-up charges. Don’t think that Rouhani is in charge, his opponents might be saying to foreign powers; in the end you will need to deal with us...The attacks on domestic journalists serve a similar purpose at home, signaling to Iranians the limits of Rouhani’s reach and the persistence of the security state.”
The official did not elaborate on how the confession would be used or when it would be broadcast. Many Iranian journalists that have been imprisoned and then released have said they were forced to confess on camera to a number of charges including espionage, “acting against the holy Islamic Republic,” and “endangering national security.” Many Revolutionary Guard commanders, assigned by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have expressed their dissatisfaction with President Hassan Rouhani’s government’s approach to negotiations with the West.
Recent reports say that Rezaian is being held in Ward 2-A of Evin Prison. The official that IranWire spoke with clarified that Rezaian and his wife, Yeganeh Salehi, were arrested at their home, and that the other couple arrested were detained at a different location, contrary to previous reports. The official also confirmed a caretaker was killed during the arrest. He worked at the building where the two unnamed arrested journalists lived and not at Rezaian and Salehi’s residence, as previously reported. The caretaker’s family is being pressured not to talk to the media.
For more information, visit Journalism is Not a Crime, documenting cases of jailed journalists in Iran.
This is part of IranWire’s series Crime: Journalism, a portfolio on the legal and political persecution of Iranian journalists and bloggers, published in both Persian and English.
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