Last September, when Iran’s uranium enrichment plant buried inside a mountain near the holy city of Qum was revealed, the episode cast light on a wider pattern: Over the past decade, Iran has quietly hidden an increasingly large part of its atomic complex in networks of tunnels and bunkers across the country.
In doing so, American government and private experts say, Iran has achieved a double purpose. Not only has it shielded its infrastructure from military attack in warrens of dense rock, but it has further obscured the scale and nature of its notoriously opaque nuclear effort. The discovery of the Qum plant only heightened fears about other undeclared sites.
Now, with the passing of President Obama’s year-end deadline for diplomatic progress, that cloak of invisibility has emerged as something of a stealth weapon, complicating the West’s military and geopolitical calculus.
The Obama administration says it is hoping to take advantage of domestic political unrest and disarray in Iran’s nuclear program to press for a regimen of strong and immediate new sanctions. But a crucial factor behind that push for nonmilitary solutions, some analysts say, is Iran’s tunneling — what Tehran calls its strategy of “passive defense.”
Indeed, Secretary of DefenseRobert M. Gates has repeatedly discounted the possibility of a military strike, saying that it would only slow Iran’s nuclear ambitions by one to three years while driving the program further underground.
Some analysts say that Israel, which has taken the hardest line on Iran, may be especially hampered, given its less formidable military and intelligence abilities.
“It complicates your targeting,” said Richard L. Russell, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst now at the National Defense University. “We’re used to facilities being above ground. Underground, it becomes literally a black hole. You can’t be sure what’s taking place.”
Even the Israelis concede that solid rock can render bombs useless. Late last month, the Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, told Parliament that the Qum plant was “located in bunkers that cannot be destroyed through a conventional attack.”
Heavily mountainous Iran has a long history of tunneling toward civilian as well as military ends, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has played a recurring role — first as a transportation engineer and founder of the Iranian Tunneling Association and now as the nation’s president.
There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of big tunnels in Iran, according to American government and private experts, and the lines separating their uses can be fuzzy. Companies owned by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps of Iran, for example, build civilian as well as military tunnels.
No one in the West knows how much, or exactly what part, of Iran’s nuclear program lies hidden. Still, evidence of the downward atomic push is clear to the inquisitive.
Google Earth, for instance, shows that the original hub of the nuclear complex at Isfahan consists of scores of easily observed — and easy to attack — buildings. But government analysts say that in recent years Iran has honeycombed the nearby mountains with tunnels. Satellite photos show six entrances.
Iranian officials say years of veiled bombing threats prompted their country to exercise its “sovereign right” to protect its nuclear facilities by hiding them underground. That was their argument when they announced plans in November to build 10 uranium enrichment plants. Despite the improbability and bluster of the claim, Iran’s tunneling history gave it a measure of credibility.
“They will be scattered in the mountains,” the chief of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, Ali Akbar Salehi, told Iran’s Press TV. “We will be using the passive defense so that we don’t need to have active defense, which is very expensive.”
Mr. Gates, along with other Western officials, has dismissed that line of argument as cover for a covert arms program.
“If they wanted it for peaceful purposes,” he said of the Qum plant on CNN, “there’s no reason to put it so deep underground, no reason to be deceptive about it, keep it a secret for a protracted period of time.”
Iran denies that its nuclear efforts are for military purposes and insists that it wants to unlock the atom strictly for peaceful aims, like making electricity. It says it wants to build many enrichment plants to fuel up to 20 nuclear power plants, a plan many economists question because Iran ranks second globally in oil and natural gas reserves.
Ploy or not, any expansion seems unlikely to zoom ahead. After a decade of construction, Iran’s main enrichment plant, at Natanz, operates at a tiny fraction of its capacity. The Qum plant is only half built. Nuclear experts say the new plants, if attempted, may not materialize for years or decades. Even so, they note that tunnels would be the easiest part of the plan and may get dug relatively soon.
Despite the questions about whether the West can credibly threaten to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, analysts insist that the United States, Israel and their allies will never rule out that option. The Pentagon, in fact, is racing to develop a powerful new tunnel-busting bomb.
“Deeply buried targets have been a problem forever,” said Greg Duckworth, a civilian scientist who recently led a Pentagon research effort to pinpoint enemy tunnels. “And it’s getting worse.”
A Tunnel Expert
Mr. Ahmadinejad began professional life as a transportation engineer with close ties to the Revolutionary Guards and an abiding interest in tunnels.
He helped found the Iranian Tunneling Association in 1998, according to the group’s Web site. That year, the Tehran subway began a major expansion, and Iran, in secret, accelerated its nuclear program.
In early 2004, while mayor of Tehran, Mr. Ahmadinejad served as chairman of the Sixth Iranian Tunneling Conference. He praised the leaders of ancient Persia for creating networks of subterranean waterways and called for the creation of new “tunnels” between the government, universities and professional groups.
“I ask God to help us all,” he said in a paper. Such tunneling conferences, held regularly in Tehran, draw global manufacturers of tunnel-boring machines — giant devices as big as locomotives that dig quickly through rocky strata. Terratec, an Australian maker, noted early last year that Iran had recently become “one of the most active markets in the world.”
Many of the companies keep offices in Tehran. Herrenknecht, a German firm considered the market leader, lists three. Engineers say Iran has hundreds of miles of civilian tunneling projects under way, including subways in Tehran, Isfahan, and Shiraz, highway tunnels across the country and water tunnels to irrigate the dry interior.
By all accounts, the seeds of the downward military shift were planted during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, when Iraq hit Tehran and other Iranian cities with waves of missiles. Constructing shelters, bunkers and tunnels became a patriotic duty.
An Opposition Watchdog
In 2002, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, an opposition group, revealed that Iran was building a secret underground nuclear plant at Natanz that turned out to be for enriching uranium. Enrichment plants can make fuel for reactors or, with a little more effort, atom bombs.
Satellite photos showed the Iranians burying two cavernous halls roughly half the size of the Pentagon. Estimates put the thickness of overhead rock, dirt and concrete at 30 feet — enough to frustrate bombs but not to guarantee the plant’s survival.
The disclosure of Natanz set off the West’s confrontation with Iran. Two years later, the International Atomic Energy Agency found to its surprise that Iran was tunneling in the mountains by the Isfahan site, where uranium is readied for enrichment. “Iran failed to report to the agency in a timely manner,” an I.A.E.A. paper said in diplomatic understatement.
Then, in late 2005, the Iranian opposition group held news conferences in Paris and London to announce that its spies had learned that Iran was digging tunnels for missile and atomic work at 14 sites, including an underground complex near Qum. The government, one council official said, was building the tunnels to conceal “its pursuit of nuclear weapons.” The council further charged that Mr. Ahmadinejad and the tunneling association were providing civilian cover for military work and acquisitions.
The council’s assertions got little notice. Some Western experts saw them as overstated. Some questioned the council’s objectivity because it sought the government’s overthrow. Perhaps the biggest impediment was a suspicion of defectors at a time when the American invasion of Iraq was proving to be based in part on Iraqi dissidents’ false claims about Saddam Hussein’s unconventional weapons.
United Nations atomic inspectors did check out a few of the tunnels at Isfahan, but not at Qum because the plant was on a military base and thus off limits for inspection without strong evidence of suspicious activity.
Frank Pabian, a senior adviser on nuclear nonproliferation at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, strongly disagreed. “They’re right 90 percent of the time,” he said of the council’s disclosures about Iran’s clandestine sites. “That doesn’t mean they’re perfect, but 90 percent is a pretty good record.”
In 2007, the council announced that Iran was tunneling in the mountains near Natanz, the sprawling enrichment site. Satellite photos confirmed that.
And Qum became a vindication, though belatedly, in late September, when President Obama, flanked by the leaders of France and Britain, identified “a covert uranium enrichment facility” being constructed there.
Military Warrens
In December, the opposition group capitalized on its new stature to issue a report on Iranian military tunneling. It said Iran had dug tunnels and bunkers for research facilities, ammunition storage, military headquarters and command and control centers. “A group of factories” in the mountains east of Tehran, it said, specialize in “the manufacturing of nuclear warheads.”
Over all, the report raised to 19, from 14, the number of locations where it said tunnels — often multiple tunnels — were hiding military bases and work on arms.
American war planners see Iran’s tunnels — whatever their exact number and contents — as a serious test of military abilities. Most say there is no easy way to wipe out a nuclear program that has been well hidden, widely dispersed and deeply buried.
Among the difficulties, military experts say, are decoy tunnels and false entrances, the identification of which requires good intelligence. The experts add that Iran’s announcement about new enrichment plants may simply produce a blur of activity meant to confuse Western war planners.
David A. Kay, a nuclear specialist who led the fruitless search for unconventional arms in Iraq, said the hiding of a plant or two among the rocky labyrinths could pose a particular challenge for Israel. “They have limited intelligence for targeting,” Dr. Kay said, adding that the United States was better equipped to map out Iran’s nuclear terrain.
Raymond Tanter, an Iran expert at Georgetown University who served in the Reagan White House, agreed. “So far, the tunneling has not succeeded to the point that the American technology couldn’t get to it,” he contended. “But it makes Israel’s options more problematic, because they have less of a military edge.”
Doubts notwithstanding, the Obama administration has been careful to leave the military option on the table, and the Pentagon is racing to develop a deadly tunnel weapon.
The device — 20 feet long and called the Massive Ordnance Penetrator — began as a 2004 recommendation from the Defense Science Board, a high-level advisory group to the Pentagon.
“A deep underground tunnel facility in a rock geology poses a significant challenge,” the board wrote. “Several thousand pounds of high explosives coupled to the tunnel are needed to blow down blast doors and propagate a lethal air blast.”
The bomb carries tons of explosives and is considered 10 times more powerful than its predecessor. It underwent preliminary testing in 2007, and its first deployments are expected next summer. Its carrier is to be the B-2 stealth bomber.
Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, told reporters in October that budget problems had delayed the weapon but that it was now back on track. Military officials deny having a specific target in mind. Still, Mr. Whitman added, war planners consider it “an important capability.”
Extraordinary events in Iran over the past six months have brought us images, voices, and narratives until recently unimaginable; they reveal, among other things, how little we understand about quotidian life in that country since the revolution. In the United States, we are nevertheless aware, with a dark tremor, of Tehran's notorious Evin Prison, the black hole of the hard-liners' repressive system. Emblematic of the regime, it is a site of torture and interrogation, of isolation, and of emotional as well as physical violence. It is a prison for the breaking of souls.
Prominent intellectuals, politicians, activists, and journalists have vanished into its maw. Many, like the Canadian-Iranian photographer Zahra Kazemi, who died in 2003 after being brutally beaten, or the twenty-nine Iranian prisoners executed in July 2008, have not survived to speak of their ordeals there. Many others remain incarcerated, among them scores of reformists arrested during the summer's demonstrations and, in particular, the Iranian-American scholar Kian Tajbakhsh, originally arrested in 2007 at the same time as Haleh Esfandiari, and recently shockingly condemned, at a show trial, to at least twelve years in prison.
In this company, Haleh Esfandiari, the Iranian-American director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., is one of the lucky ones. An apparently unlikely candidate for arrest—a sixty-seven-year-old grandmother at the time of her imprisonment in 2007, Esfandiari was in Iran to visit her ninety-three-year-old mother—she was sucked into the surreal vortex of the nation's Intelligence Ministry, interrogated for months, and held in solitary confinement for four months. Her release was apparently the direct result of an exchange of letters between Lee Hamilton, her employer and the director of the Wilson Center, and the office of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei; although Esfandiari's husband, the historian Shaul Bakhash, along with many others (including the editors of The New York Review) campaigned tirelessly for her freedom, both in the United States and around the world. As she makes clear, it is impossible to know exactly what confluence of events led her captors to set her free: so much of their understanding of the world and of her role in it remained opaque to the last.
In the wake of her experience, Esfandiari has written a memoir of considerable delicacy and sophistication. My Prison, My Home is, primarily, an account of her annus horribilis, from the initial staged "robbery" when she was on her way to Tehran airport on December 30, 2006, that left her conveniently without a passport and unable to leave the country, through her lockup and eventual liberation almost eight months later. But Esfandiari also provides us with a lucid, concise history of Iran through the twentieth century and into the first years of the twenty-first, and with it an outline of her own remarkable life across continents and cultures. She is restrained in her telling—the book is filled with vivid details and facts, rather than emotional outpouring—a decision for which her narrative is only the more powerful; but her position as someone who fully understands both America and Iran affords her the opportunity to elucidate, for American readers, some of the apparent mysteries of her native culture.
In order for us to make sense of her imprisonment, we need to grasp both its historical background and Esfandiari's own particular life story. (This assertion may seem painfully rudimentary, but facts that are common knowledge to any Iranian, such as the people's abiding resentment of the 1953 CIA-backed coup that restored the Shah to power, seem frequently to have eluded our nation's policymakers.)
Cosmopolitan and intellectual, Esfandiari's own upbringing reminds the reader of Iran as the West once knew it. She is the older child of an Iranian botanist, himself the descendant of regional governors and politicians from the eastern city of Kerman, and of an Austrian mother. Her parents met at university in Vienna before the war. Raised between her mother's German-style home and her grandmother's traditional Iranian household, Esfandiari, like her parents, attended university in Vienna:
While I stayed clear of the student movement,...my time in Vienna had a huge hand in shaping my intellectual development and my love for Western culture.
Having completed her doctorate, she returned to Iran in 1964 at the age of twenty-four.
Esfandiari lays out the vital information of her nation's history alongside her own. The pivotal power struggle in the early 1950s between the Shah and his prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, who sought to nationalize the Iranian oil industry, took place when Haleh was only a child, but
even as an eleven-year-old I was caught up in these currents, as were the rest of the students at the normally staid Jeanne d'Arc [a Catholic girls' school run by French nuns]. We had all become politicized and wanted the British out.
Unfortunately, the CIA did not agree with the schoolgirls. (The importance of the Jeanne d'Arc school in educating the young women of Iran's future elite in pre-revolutionary times is evident: a quick glance at contact information for alumnae shows them to be predominantly working professionals, with most of them living in the diaspora.) The Esfandiari household's relation to the Mossadegh uprising was complicated, moreover, because "the family was divided.... Mossadegh, the aristocrat who had emerged as a defender of the masses, was a close relative."
Esfandiari explains the increasing difficulties of the Shah's regime during the course of the 1960s and 1970s—although she does not provide the sort of lavish detail about his infamous material excesses that can be found in Ryszard Kapus´cin´ski's Shah of Shahs (1985) or Christopher de Bellaigue's riveting In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs (2005)—and she makes these problems concrete in relation to her own life. Her first career upon returning to Iran was as a journalist. She translated and wrote for the nation's largest daily newspaper, Kayhan, where she met her future husband, Shaul Bakhash, while they were both covering a visit to Iran by the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie. (That Bakhash is Jewish and she a Muslim was, at the time of their marriage in 1965, "highly unusual," but by no means scandalous: her conservative Muslim grandmother blessed their union.) After leaving Tehran for several years so that Bakhash could pursue his academic career at Harvard and Oxford, the couple returned in 1972.
Although she went back to Kayhan, Esfandiari found that she could not stay there long: "Increasingly the shah and the government showed less tolerance for even the mildest criticism, and the grip on the media of the emboldened Information Ministry grew tighter." When Prime Minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda's protégé, Amir Taheri, was appointed editor of the paper, Esfandiari quit, and went to work for the Women's Organization of Iran (WOI), a women's rights group founded in 1966.
In a moving aside—and one that feels particularly significant, given the growing influence of women in the current Iranian reform movement and their heightened presence on the streets during last summer's demonstrations, as was noted in the anonymous "Letter from Tehran" published in The New Yorker in early October—Esfandiari comments on her work with WOI, which lasted until 1975:
After the revolution, the clerics sought to undo as many of our accomplishments as they could.... But I believe the WOI played a role in making a new generation of women conscious of their rights, and these women were determined not to be relegated to second-class status again. For these reasons, my three years at the WOI remain among the most rewarding of my working life. I became, and remain, an unrepentant feminist.
From there, Esfandiari went on to the Shahbanou Farah Foundation, a cultural organization set up by and named after the Shah's third wife (herself a graduate of the Jeanne d'Arc school), through which she oversaw museums and cultural centers. From this vantage, she watched the Shah's Iran crumbling around her:
By 1977, for example, Tehran's "poetry nights" at the German-sponsored Goethe Institute had taken on a decidedly political color. Large gatherings listened while poets read from works praising liberty and criticizing oppression. Lawyers and intellectuals addressed open letters to the prime minister and the shah calling for the reinstitution of basic freedoms and the release of political prisoners.
In this setting, Esfandiari explains, the popular appeal of Khomeini—who had publicly and volubly denounced the Shah since the early 1960s, and had lived in exile in Turkey, Iraq, and France—gained inexorable momentum. While the Shah's opponents were politically diverse, ranging from Communists to intellectuals to civil servants, "Khomeini's clerical lieutenants came to dominate the movement, and Khomeini emerged as its undisputed leader." During 1978, demonstrations grew exponentially in size and force, and Esfandiari writes that "the regime, hammered by strikes, shutdowns, demonstrations, and violence on the streets, was in a hopeless situation."
While Esfandiari is clear about some sources of the unrest, she does not dwell on the people's grievances against the Shah. It is enlightening to read Kapus´cin´ski's account of life in the Shah's last years of rule, written at the time of the revolution, and to note how familiar the Pahlavi regime's methods sound to any of us reading the newspapers today:
More than a hundred thousand young Iranians were studying in Europe and America.... Today more Iranian doctors practice in San Francisco or Hamburg than in Tebriz or Meshed. They did not return even for the generous salaries the Shah offered. They feared Savak [the Shah's secret police, comparable to the contemporary Intelligence Ministry].... An Iranian at home could not read the books of the country's best writers (because they came out only abroad), could not see the films of its outstanding directors (because they were not allowed to be shown in Iran), could not listen to the voices of its intellectuals (because they were condemned to silence).
For Esfandiari and Bakhash, with a small daughter at the time, the upheaval of the revolution was too uncertain: Esfandiari took their daughter to London in early December 1978 for two weeks, to "wait things out."
In fact, however, she would not return home for many years. Khomeini returned to Iran in February 1979 and within ten days the Shah's monarchy collapsed. Now "armed revolutionary committees roamed the streets. Every day, grisly pictures appeared in the Tehran papers of executed members of the old regime—many I had known personally or had covered as a journalist." Bakhash had been offered a visiting professorship at Princeton, and the family moved to the United States, where they have lived since. Esfandiari taught Persian at Princeton until 1992. She then wrote her first book, Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran's Islamic Revolution (1997), with the support of fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson Center, and was asked by Robert Litwak, then the Wilson Center's director of the Division for International Studies, to start a Middle East program there, where she still works.
Esfandiari first returned to Iran in 1992, encouraged by the more liberal climate fostered by the relatively pragmatic President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and his then minister of culture, Mohammad Khatami. After her father's death in 1995, she visited more frequently, to help care for her aging mother. She says of the late 1990s and early 2000s:
These were years when the possibility of fundamental change seemed real and when Iranians believed, for a brief moment, that they could take charge of their own lives and government. It was not to be, and it was heartbreaking to me to witness the snuffing out of so much promise and hope.
Following the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005, however, the tenor of society changed so much that "I made it a point on these trips to stay away from even mildly 'political' people." Unfortunately, her efforts were insufficient to protect her from the roving eye of the Intelligence Ministry, "heir to the Shah's secret police, SAVAK," although far more murderous even than they, and responsible for the deaths of thousands of dissenters.
This institution defined Esfandiari's existence from December 30, 2006, when she was to have returned home to Washington, D.C., until September 2007, when she finally did; and her interactions with its emissaries make for astounding reading. The experience was absurd, horrendous, and disturbingly banal: in a final, blackly comic flourish, her principal interrogator, Mr. Ja'fari, presented her, on the eve of her departure, with a gift: "a large, beautiful inlaid box" containing a leather-bound volume of the poetry of Hafez, Iran's famed fourteenth-century poet: "I examined this curious gift, turning over and over in my mind its intended meaning. It was truly bizarre. The Intelligence Ministry was sending a message: 'No hard feelings. Let's be friends.'" As she says of them, "It's the way we play the game," and there is, about the surreal dance of her eight months in their hands, the quality of a game—destructive, potentially lethal, but a game nevertheless.
The Intelligence Ministry existed for Esfandiari primarily in the form of two men: her chief interrogator, Ja'fari, and his superior, Hajj Agha. Ja'fari she first met in early January 2007 at an interrogation center in a "house...modeled after the Petit Trianon," where he questioned her for long hours at a time, over a fortnight:
He was in his mid-thirties, of medium height, with a bit of stubble on his face. He wore an open-necked shirt beneath a modified safari jacket. A smirk never left his face. His manner alternated between solicitous official...and faceless bureaucrat.
Hajj Agha, the more gracious and apparently accommodating of the two men, with whom she had more dealings once she was imprisoned in early May 2007, emerges in spite of his urbanity as the more sinister: his name is honorific rather than personal ("Hajj" refers to one who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca; "Agha" is a title for a military officer), so he is, in fact, nameless; and as Esfandiari was not permitted to see his face, and forced to face the wall, he remains, hideously, a cipher.
Ja'fari's line of questioning was, from the outset, clear: "He imagined that the Wilson Center was an agency of the American government, that we were implicated in some nefarious plot against the Islamic Republic, and that we routinely held secret meetings to plan strategy to this end." Esfandiari marvels, "How does one persuade a man with Ja'fari's mind-set that the Ford Foundation...is not part of a 'Zionist conspiracy'? How could I convince him that my husband was not an Israeli agent?"
More specifically, Esfandiari came to realize that Ja'fari and the Intelligence Ministry feared "that the Wilson Center was part of a conspiracy to bring about a velvet revolution...in Iran":
It was the National Endowment for Democracy and the Open Society Institute (OSI) that earned Ja'fari's most intense scrutiny. The OSI was part of the Soros Foundations.... [It] had been active in newly independent countries of the former Soviet Union.... In these countries, mass popular movements led by intellectuals and opposition parties had succeeded in bringing down Soviet-style governments. These movements became known as "velvet revolutions" or "rainbow revolutions" because of their peaceful, nonviolent nature and because protesters had adopted a particular identifying color—orange in the Ukraine, rose in Georgia, for example. In the twisted mind of Ja'fari and his colleagues, the Soros Foundations had caused these velvet revolutions, and since George Soros was a Jew, a shadowy, Jewish conspiracy hovered in the wings.
The wildness of this paranoia is of course all the more intriguing because it is not, in some details, so very far from reality: orange in the Ukraine, rose in Georgia, and green in Iran? This year's thwarted presidential candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi may not have sought to provoke a "velvet revolution," but in their passionate cries for democratic reform, his supporters were not far from doing so, and their resistance, albeit less visibly, continues. While it is madness to blame the United States and Britain for supposedly coordinating and manipulating this discontent, Ja'fari is not wrong to be alarmed, or wrong to imagine that the West would wish for the reformists' success.
Nevertheless, to appreciate that a faction of the Iranian Intelligence Ministry (because it becomes clear, during Esfandiari's ordeal, that there are bickering factions behind the scrim: "one ready to let me go, the other determined to hold on to me") would seriously believe that the OSI was responsible for the revolutions in former Soviet countries, and intent on a similar strategy in Iran, is already to grasp the strange, novelistic, mutual incomprehensions that exist between Iran and the United States: we could not have imagined that they could genuinely imagine that. Suddenly, with Esfandiari's explanation, Tehran's apparently lunatic assertions about Western involvement in the events of June of this year take on a new tenor: it is vital that we understand that this is not mere rhetorical flourish. At least some portion of the Iranian establishment may believe, or believe they have to believe, these statements to be true.
Esfandiari's interrogations changed in nature, intensity, and locale. She was called upon to answer questions in writing, to provide documents and information pertaining to her work and life, and to speak on camera in a filmed "interview" that was broadcast nationally, along with those of two other prisoners: the political philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo (who had already been released, and who described the broadcast as "a page out of Stalinist Russia and George Orwell's 1984 ") and the social scientist and urban planner Kian Tajbakhsh. But the focus of the discussions never changed.
The questioning did, however, cease for a time: after the "Petit Trianon" interrogations and before Esfandiari's arrest, there were "eleven weeks of silence. It was a period of anxious waiting, which I tried to fill in various ways.... I spent my days in a figurative crouch...waiting for the blow to fall." This hiatus, during which she did not know what her fate might be, was nothing short of psychological torture:
My entanglement with the Intelligence Ministry meant I would never again feel safe in Iran, even at home. I could no longer carry out an unguarded conversation over the telephone. I believed the intelligence people were reading my e-mail. My nerves were always on edge.... I hated being cooped up in the apartment, but I was uncomfortable going out....
Mutti and I became increasingly isolated. The small group of academic "insiders" who had generously tried to help me began to disappear from my life....
I could no longer see the beauty of the landscape I had always loved. I saw only the gray ugliness of the streets, the piles of uncollected garbage, the potholes, the dirty water in the canals, the smog and the snarled traffic.
In this period, Esfandiari came to realize that while she "had always thought of my dual Iranian-American nationality as an accurate reflection of the two worlds and two cultures between which I shuttled," the reality was different: "My adopted country and the country of my birth were engaged in a dangerous, undeclared war; and I, and many others like me, were caught in their cross fire." The Americans' support for Saddam Hussein during the eight-year Iran–Iraq war; the Iranian funding of Hezbollah; the bombings in Lebanon in 1983 and the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996; the George W. Bush administration's "democracy promotion" program, "a policy of promoting regime change by trying to give money to dissidents"—all of this history played into the fate of a single woman on a visit to her aged, widowed mother in Tehran.
Finally, on May 2, 2007, Ja'fari announced that Esfandiari was being arrested and taken to Evin, to solitary confinement, where she would spend the next four months. Her vivid account of this experience, from her initial blindfolding upon entering the prison, provides us with a wholly unsensational picture both of her treatment and of her own psychological resistance. We learn what her cell looked like, how she slept and washed, what she ate, how she did her laundry, how the interrogations were conducted, what the guards were like—in short, all the details that enable us to imagine the imprisonment clearly. Esfandiari tells of her considerable weight loss, of her resistance to the prison doctors, and of the skin complaint that she worried might be cancer.
Inevitably, the mental toll of her incarceration is less readily communicable, but here, too, Esfandiari provides pragmatic explanations of her decisions and thoughts: "From the first day, I decided that if I were to avoid succumbing to despair, I had to impose a strict discipline on myself.... I knew I had to be mentally strong, keep my wits about me, remain focused on the interrogations," a decision that meant she would not dwell on her family and friends, and would instead devote much of her time to doing exercises to remain physically strong and fit. "While I exercised, I composed two books—not on paper but in my head. One was a biography of my paternal grandmother.... The other book was a children's story for my granddaughters." Eventually, she was allowed to borrow books from Kian Tajbakhsh, also in Evin at the time (although she did not meet him: "I never once spoke to another inmate").
Only once does Esfandiari speak of breaking down, following her one visit from her mother: not wanting her captors to see her vulnerability, she asked to take a shower: "In the shower, I let go of myself and cried copiously. I cried for what I had done to my mother. Instead of the calm, happy old age she deserved, she was experiencing a living hell." Even small moments of kindness in the prison proved hard to bear: when one of the guards, Hajj Khanum, brought her a flower, "a tiny rose, the size of my middle finger," or when another she had nicknamed Sunny Face brought in a rice dish that Esfandiari had taught her to cook, she was all but overcome.
Through these women guards, a number of whom were distinctly sympathetic to her plight, Esfandiari brings us a portrait of women's lives in contemporary Iran rather different from that of Azar Nafisi's lively literature students in her memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003):
They seemed all to come from the same working-class or lower-middle-class background. They were all religious, prayed regularly, and observed a strict form of the hijab. They were raised in traditional homes, but their lives were in flux. All had finished secondary school; one had been to university; one had trained at a seminary and another aspired to do so. They had learned to care about their looks, their clothes, their weight, and their health. At least one aspired to go to America.
In her isolation, Esfandiari was almost wholly unaware of the extensive efforts underway to secure her release, including interventions from European governments. She did not know how long she might remain in isolation and was leery of all promising indications—such as Hajj Agha's question in June: "How do you know Obama?"
She fought back with rage and defiance—"I knew I must not let them break me"—and with her insistence, even when it was most difficult, on retaining perspective:
Outside prison, Ja'fari's and Hajj Agha's repeated references to "the triangle," "plots," and "conspiracies" seemed outlandish, even amusing. In solitary confinement, under interrogation, cut off from the outside world, accused of the most serious crimes against the state, I found these endlessly repeated assertions sin- ister: part of a world of secret cabals, plotters, and conspiracies in which I was supposedly involved without being aware of it. I had to be careful not to lose my grip on reality or to succumb to Hajj Agha's deceptive view of the world.
This, of course, is the struggle for any prisoner in such a situation; but it is also the struggle for the Iranian people at large: How not to succumb to the regime's view of the world? Theirs is a society of constant contradictions, of mirrors and masks, of both authority and a theater of authority, to which they must subscribe. They, too, are terrorized by prolonged uncertainty, never knowing the limits of what is allowed—can women show their hair in public this month without fear of arrest? Can weddings allow dancing in private homes this year, or will the morals police break down the door? Can the press question the regime this week, or will the newspapers be shut down? Can you demonstrate freely today, or might you be arrested, tortured, and killed?
For Esfandiari, even in her darkest hour, there was always the American knowledge of the actuality of "reality as it might be": it hovered almost in sight, a passport and a plane journey away. Whether, before Lee Hamilton's letter to Khamenei apparently led to her release, this knowledge made the ordeal more or less endurable is hard to say. But as an Iranian, she was also always aware of the ironies of her native society; she could be at once fully in the world and yet not of it, and this may have been her salvation. She knew that her guards, for the most part, were not her enemies; and while shocked, she was perhaps not surprised when Ja'fari and "the boys," his colleagues at the Intelligence Ministry, presented her with the gift of a book of poetry at the end of her time in Evin. Perhaps they thought that, in spite of the horrors they had inflicted upon her, the greatness of the poet Hafez was something on which they could all agree.
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Iranian authorities continued arresting hundreds of opposition members and accused the United States and Britain on Tuesday of orchestrating the violent demonstrations that rocked the capital and other cities on Sunday.
The sister of Nobel peace laureateShirin Ebadi was detained on Monday night, according to opposition Web sites quoted by news agencies.
A spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry said countries including the United States and Britain had miscalculated in criticizing the government’s response to the demonstrations, which the government said left at least eight people dead in Tehran. The opposition counted five more deaths in other cities.
“Some Western countries are supporting this sort of activities,” said the spokesman, Ramin Mehmanparast, according to The Associated Press. “This is intervention in our internal affairs. We strongly condemn it.”
He said the British ambassador to Iran would be summoned for discussions.
The British government said its ambassador, Simon Gass, would respond “robustly” to any criticism and would reiterate calls for Iran to respect the rights of its citizens.
The speaker of Iran’s Parliament, Ali Larijani, rebuked American and British officials for their “disgraceful comments” about the demonstrations, according to the state-run PressTV. The criticisms of Iran’s action were “disgustingly vivid that they clarify where this movement stands when it comes to destroying religious and revolutionary values,” he said.
Iranian authorities arrested at least a dozen opposition figures on Monday, including former Foreign Minister Ibrahim Yazdi, the human rights activist Emad Baghi and three top aides to the former presidential candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi, Iranian news sites reported.
All told, more than 1,500 people have been arrested nationwide since Sunday, including 1,110 in Tehran and 400 in the central Iranian city of Isfahan, the pro-opposition Jaras Web site reported.
In Hawaii, where he is on vacation, Mr. Obama condemned the violence against protesters and called for the release of those “unjustly detained.”
“For months, the Iranian people have sought nothing more than to exercise their universal rights,” Mr. Obama told reporters. “Each time they have done so, they have been met with the iron fist of brutality, even on solemn occasions and holy days.”
He added that the protests in Iran had nothing to do with the United States or other foreign countries. “It’s about the Iranian people, and their aspirations for justice, and a better life for themselves,” he said. “And the decision of Iran’s leaders to govern through fear and tyranny will not succeed in making those aspirations go away.”
The streets of Tehran were largely quiet on Monday and early Tuesday, as citizens absorbed the shock of Sunday’s violence. Thirteen people were reported to have been killed and many more wounded in street battles in cities across the country between security forces and protesters, who fought back more fiercely than ever before. The government said Monday that eight people had been killed in Tehran, and opposition Web sites catalogued five deaths in other cities.
The government said that it was holding the bodies of five protesters, including a nephew of Mr. Moussavi, the state-run IRNA news agency reported, in what appeared to be an attempt to prevent funerals that could turn into more demonstrations. The bodies were being held pending autopsies.
The authorities’ use of deadly force on the Ashura holiday drew a fierce rebuke on Monday from the opposition cleric and reformist candidate Mehdi Karroubi, who noted that even the shah had honored the holiday’s ban on violence.
“What has happened to this religious system that it orders the killing of innocent people during the holy day of Ashura?” Mr. Karroubi said in a statement, according to the Jaras Web site.
Mr. Karroubi, a fierce critic of the government, was attacked Sunday by plainclothes security officers, and other attackers later smashed the front windshield of his car, the Sahamnews Web site reported.
Government supporters blamed opposition members for the violence and called for their prosecution. The Revolutionary Guards issued a statement calling violence by the protesters a “horrible insult to Ashura” and called for “firm punishment of those behind this obvious insult,” the semiofficial Fars news agency reported.
Large groups of police officers stood guard in several central Tehran squares on Monday morning, witnesses said. At least three subway stations were closed, apparently to prevent any further gatherings.
Still, there were reports of continuing scattered protests on Monday in Tehran’s Haft-e-Tir square and other areas, Jaras reported.
The police fired tear gas to disperse a group of mourners who gathered outside the Tehran hospital where the body of Mr. Moussavi’s nephew, Ali Moussavi, had been held, the Nowrooz Web site reported. A prominent opposition figure with ties to the Moussavi family said Ali Moussavi had been killed by assassins.
Family members said Mr. Moussavi’s body disappeared from the hospital overnight, and on Monday IRNA reported that his body and four others were being held while investigations were carried out.
A 27-year-old journalist who was reporting on the street clashes on Sunday was reported missing. The reporter, Redha al-Basha, who was working for Dubai TV, has not been heard from, according to a statement issued by Dubai TV. Mr. Basha was last seen surrounded by security forces in Tehran, witnesses said.
The group Human Rights Activists in Iran said that the 1,100 people arrested in Tehran were being held in Evin Prison, the Gooya Web site reported.
Among those arrested in Isfahan was the son of a senior cleric, Ayatollah Jalaleddin Taheri. Ayatollah Taheri is the former Isfahan representative of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and his son Muhammad is married to the granddaughter of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the father of Iran’s 1979 revolution.
Ayatollah Taheri tried last week to lead a memorial service for the dissident cleric Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who died Dec. 20. The arrest of his son was viewed as an effort by the authorities to pressure the ayatollah.
Nazila Fathi contributed reporting from Toronto, and Peter Baker from Honolulu.
Mr Mousavi's nephew, Seyed Ali Mousavi, was among those killed on Sunday.
State media said authorities were doing forensic tests on his and four other bodies, preventing the rapid burials that are usual under Islamic tradition.
The bodies had been "retained in order to complete forensic and police examinations and find more leads on this suspicious incident", the Irna news agency reported.
The Mousavi family had said earlier that Seyed Ali's body had been taken without their permission from the hospital where it was being held.
RECENT UNREST IN IRAN
19 Dec: Influential dissident cleric Grand Ayatollah Hoseyn Ali Montazeri dies aged 87
21 Dec: Tens of thousands attend his funeral in Qom; reports of clashes between opposition supporters and security forces
22 Dec: Further confrontations reported in Qom
23 Dec: More clashes reported in city of Isfahan as memorial is held
24 Dec: Iran reportedly bans further memorial services for Montazeri except in his birthplace and Qom
26 Dec: Clashes reported in central and northern Tehran
27 Dec: At least eight dead following anti-government protests in Tehran; 300 reported arrested
Opposition sources said the body had been taken by government agents in order to prevent his funeral becoming a rallying point for more protests.
An opposition website, Norooz, said police had fired tear gas on Monday to disperse a group of Mousavi supporters who were demonstrating outside the hospital.
According to Mr Mousavi's website, Seyed Ali Mousavi was shot in the back on Sunday as security forces fired on demonstrators in Tehran.
Intermittent protests in Iran following President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's controversial re-election in June have represented the biggest challenge to the government since the 1979 Islamic revolution.
Foreign media face severe restrictions in Iran, making reports hard to verify.
BBC Tehran correspondent Jon Leyne, reporting from London, says the government's immediate response to the latest confrontation has been to arrest senior opposition figures, as it did after protests against the disputed presidential elections in June.
The authorities are blaming troublemakers for the violence, our correspondent says, with the police denying that security forces are responsible for any deaths and suggesting that protesters may have shot each other.
The majority hardline block in the Iranian parliament called on "security and judiciary authorities to firmly deal with those who mock Ashura", referring to the Shia Muslim festival that reached its climax on Sunday.
But members of the opposition believe Seyed Ali Mousavi was deliberately targeted by the government in an attempt to intimidate Mir Hossein Mousavi.
Our correspondent adds that the government will be doing itself no favours if it has taken his body because this would outrage religious conservatives, as well as the opposition.
'Shameless act'
Among those reported arrested on Monday were opposition politician Ebrahim Yazdi, a foreign minister after the 1979 revolution and now leader of the Freedom Movement of Iran, his nephew, Lily Tavasoli.
Mr Yazdi's son Khalil, who lives in the US, told the BBC's World Today programme he believed the Iranian authorities wanted to close down all opposition groups.
"It is a shameless and irresponsible act," he said.
"Any opposition now, they want to shut [it] down. We're going down a one-way street that's now going downhill."
The Parlemannews website reported that three aides to Mir Hossein Mousavi had been arrested.
It also named two aides to reformist former President Mohammad Khatami as being among those rounded up by the authorities.
Mousavi Tebrizi, a senior cleric from the holy city of Qom who is close to Mr Mousavi, is also reported to have been arrested, as is human-rights campaigner and journalist Emeddin Baghi.
International condemnation
After Sunday's clashes, police fired tear gas to disperse crowds of demonstrators in various parts of Tehran overnight, according to reports.
On Monday, state-owned English-language Press TV said eight people had died. Earlier, Persian state television had reported at least 15 people killed.
The official death toll for Sunday's confrontation is the highest since June, and police said about 300 people had been detained.
Unconfirmed reports, later denied by a local prosecutor, said four people also died in protests in the north-western city of Tabriz. Clashes were also reported in Isfahan and Najafabad in central Iran and Shiraz in the south.
Moderate cleric Mehdi Karoubi, who came fourth in last June's election, criticised Iran's rulers for Sunday's violence, an opposition website reported.
The US, the UK, France, Germany and Canada have all condemned the violence.
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said it was "particularly disturbing to hear accounts of the lack of restraint by the security forces" on a day of religious commemoration and reflection.
In a strongly-worded statement, German Chancellor Angela Merkel criticised the "unacceptable actions of the security forces" and urged Tehran to respect civil rights.
Iranian security forces have been on alert since influential dissident cleric Grand Ayatollah Hoseyn Ali Montazeri died a week ago aged 87.
His funeral attracted tens of thousands of pro-reform supporters, many of whom shouted anti-government slogans.
By Thomas Erdbrink Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, December 27, 2009; 2:57 PM
TEHRAN -- Security forces opened fire at crowds demonstrating against the government in the capital on Sunday, killing at least five people, including the nephew of opposition political leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, witnesses and Web sites linked to the opposition said.
"Ali Mousavi, 32, was shot in the heart at the Enghelab square. He became a martyr," the Rah-e Sabz Website reported.
In the heaviest clashes in months, fierce battles erupted as tens of thousands of demonstrators tried to gather on a main Tehran avenue, with people setting up roadblocks and throwing stones at members of special forces under the command of the Revolutionary Guard Corps. They in turn threw dozens of teargas and stun grenades, but failed in pushing back crowds, who shouted slogans against the government, witnesses reported.
A witness reported seeing at least four people shot in the central Vali-e Asr Square. "I saw a riot cop opening fire, using a handgun," the witness said. "A girl was hit in the shoulders, three other men in their stomachs and legs. It was total chaos."
Fights were also reported in the cities of Isfahan and Najafabad in central Iran.
The protests coincided with Ashura, one of the most intense religious holidays for Shiite Muslims. The slogans were mainly aimed at the top leaders of the Islamic republic, a further sign that the opposition movement against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's disputed June election victory is turning against the leadership of the country.
At the Yadegar overpass, protesters shouted slogans such as "Death to the dictator" and "long live Mousavi." They fought running battles with security forces until a car filled with members of the paramilitary Basij brigade drove at high speed though the makeshift barriers of stones and sandbags that the protesters had erected.
About a dozen members of the Revolutionary Guards fired paintball bullets, teargas and stun grenades. When reinforcements arrived, they managed to push back the hundreds of protesters gathered at the crossing.
Similar scenes could be seen at several crossings of the central Azadi and Enghelab streets, witnesses reported. Large clouds of black bellowing smoke rose up as people honked their cars in protests.
"This is a month of blood. The dictator will fall," people shouted, referring to the mourning month of Muharram. Young men erected a flag symbolizing the struggle of the Shiite's third Imam Hussein, whose death was commemorated Sunday.
On Saturday, security forces clad in black clashed with protesters in northern Tehran after a speech by opposition leader and former president Mohammad Khatami. After the police intervened, thousands of protesters fanned out through the area.
The roads were clogged with cars, many honking their horns in support of the protesters. About 50 armed government supporters attacked a building used as an office by the household of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic republic, according to witnesses and the Parlemannews Web site, which is critical of the government.
"There are so many people on the streets, I am amazed," a member of the riot police said to his colleagues as he rested on his motorcycle in a north Tehran square. Two women in traditional black chadors flashed victory signs to passing cars, egging them on to honk in support of the opposition.
Earlier, hundreds of police officers supported by dozens of members of the elite Revolutionary Guard Corps and the paramilitary Basij force clashed with small groups of protesters along Enghelab (Revolution) Street, one of the capital's main thoroughfares, at times beating people in an effort to disperse them.
The protests, which followed anti-government demonstrations in other Iranian cities in recent days, come as Iran observes the 10 days of Muharram, a mourning period for Imam Hussein, the Shiite saint whose death in the 7th century sealed the rift between Sunni and Shiite Muslims over the succession of the prophet Muhammad. On Sunday, Shiites worldwide commemorate the day of his death during Ashura.
Special Correspondent Kay Armin Serjoie contributed to this report.
The opposition hoped for a massive day of demonstrations, and they have managed that beyond their expectations.
Despite attempts by the security forces to disperse them, the protesters eventually took over a large section of central Tehran, leaving the police watching from the sidelines. And there are similar reports from across the country.
For much of the morning there was a series of violent confrontations.
Witnesses described how opposition supporters attacked the police with their bare hands, and the police eventually opened fire directly on the crowd.
The size of the demonstrations, and the death of a number of protesters, could dramatically change the nature and the intensity of the confrontation.
But neither side has a clear strategy of what to do next. The opposition is leaderless. The government is still pretending there are just a handful of troublemakers.
From day to day, it is not clear how the crisis will develop.
The security forces clearly have to tread a fine line between not appearing weak but also not provoking opposition protesters, says Siavash Ardalan of BBC Persian TV.
Police helicopters were seen flying over central Tehran as clouds of black smoke billowed into the sky, reports said.
On the ground, the security forces clashed with protesters trying to reach central Enghelab Square, witnesses said.
Protesters were chanting, "This is the month of blood", and calling for the downfall of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, according to opposition websites.
At the same time, crowds of pro-government demonstrators marched on Enghelab Street to voice support for Ayatollah Khamenei, witnesses said.
Protests were also reported in the cities of Isfahan and nearby Najafabad.
The French foreign ministry said it condemned the "arbitrary arrests and the violent actions committed against simple protesters who came to defend their right to freedom of expression and their desire for democracy."
The French government has continued to lobby the Iranian authorities to release a French university lecturer who was charged with spying during the election. Clotilde Reiss remains in Tehran, and last appeared in court on 23 December.
Disputed election
Tensions have risen in Iran since influential dissident cleric Grand Ayatollah Hoseyn Ali Montazeri died a week ago aged 87.
Supporters of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi have sought to use Shia religious festivals this weekend to show continued defiance of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government.
There were chaotic scenes as forces and protesters clashed
Denied the right to protest, the opposition chose the highly significant festival of Ashura when millions of Iranians traditionally go onto the streets for ceremonies and parades, BBC Tehran correspondent Jon Leyne says.
The festival mourns the 7th Century death of Imam Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad.
Iranian television had live coverage of the Ashura ceremonies, including those in Tehran attended by President Ahmadinejad.
Mr Mousavi came second in the June election, and anger at the result saw mass protests in Tehran and other cities that led to thousands of arrests and some deaths.
Mr Mousavi has said the poll, that returned Mr Ahmadinejad to power, was fraudulent.
WASHINGTON — A teenage daughter of Osama bin Laden, who has lived with at least five of her siblings in a guarded compound in Iran since 2001, took refuge last month in the Saudi Embassy in Tehran, and family members are trying to arrange for a large number of relatives to leave Iran for Saudi Arabia or Syria, one of Mr. bin Laden’s sons said in a telephone interview on Wednesday.
The son, Omar bin Laden, broke with his father, the leader of Al Qaeda, before the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and on the Pentagon and now lives in Qatar and Saudi Arabia. He said that his sister Iman, 19, walked away during a shopping trip in Tehran about a month ago and made her way to the Saudi Embassy, hoping to be reunited with her mother, who lives in Syria.
Omar bin Laden and his wife, Zaina, who is British, said in the interview that at least six of Osama bin Laden’s children and one of his wives live in a comfortable compound in Tehran with other relatives, for a total of about 30 family members there. The couple denied that their relatives were under house arrest, as has been widely reported, but acknowledged that Iranian security personnel accompanied them when they left the compound.
In addition to Iman bin Laden, they identified Mr. bin Laden’s children living in the Tehran compound as Osman, Mohammed, Fatima, Hazma and Bakr.
The status of another son, Saad, remained uncertain. American officials said last summer that they believed that Saad bin Laden had traveled from Iran to Pakistan and had been killed by an American missile fired from a drone. Omar and Zaina bin Laden said Saad was still in the Tehran compound when the missile attack was said to have occurred, but they said that they did not know where he was now or whether he was still alive.
The presence of some of Osama bin Laden’s family in Iran was previously known, but the report of Iman’s seeking refuge in the Saudi Embassy added to the picture of their ambiguous status in Tehran. By several accounts, the bin Laden relatives left Afghanistan shortly before the 9/11 attacks, and were detained in Iran as they tried to get home to Saudi Arabia.
In Iran, whose relations with Saudi Arabia are tense, the relatives appear to be not exactly prisoners, but not quite guests. Omar and Zaina bin Laden said the bin Ladens in Tehran had been treated well but had no official documents to permit them to leave the country.
Steve Coll, author of “The bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century,” said the news from Tehran “provides the first open evidence of the circumstances under which bin Laden family members have been living in Iran” and “confirms that the Iranians have attempted to keep them under some kind of control.”
But Omar bin Laden, 28, who recently published a memoir with his mother, “Growing Up bin Laden,” said none of the bin Ladens in Tehran had been involved in Al Qaeda. Speaking of his siblings now in Tehran, he said, “They are all younger than me and they had nothing to do with 9/11 or any kind of terrorism.”
In a statement announcing financial sanctions in January against Saad bin Laden and three people accused of being Qaeda operatives in Iran, the Treasury Department said that he had been “involved in managing the terrorist organization from Iran.” But an American intelligence official said Wednesday that Saad bin Laden played a minor role in the organization.
Omar and Zaina bin Laden said they had spoken with Osman, 26, and he had told them he believed that Iran would eventually permit the family members to leave the country. They said the 30 relatives in Tehran included about 11 grandchildren, born since the family fled Afghanistan.
“People are beginning to realize these children are innocent victims of 9/11,” Zaina bin Laden said.
Robert F. Worth contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon.
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