Few Americans will ever truly know what it’s like to be imprisoned by an adversarial government looking for leverage. “Your life is forever altered,” Jason Rezaian tells me. He spent 544 days in Iran’s notorious Evin prison on false charges of spying. In reality, he had been working in Tehran as a correspondent for The Washington Post. We spoke on a rainy day in Washington, D.C. I wanted to know how you get back a life that was hijacked by a nation state.
Confession: I have often wondered what I would think about if I were sitting on a cold floor in solitary confinement. Maybe that’s not normal. But the thought is not irrational in a world where journalists are now considered fair game to authoritarians, terrorists, and criminals. If ever this fate befell me, would I revisit small moments in my life with regret? Would I be filled with guilt for what my family was going through? Would I fear that some boyfriend might move on too easily — or just fear the sound of my captors’ footsteps?
“I had a very stark choice,” Jason told me. “I could either be a friend to myself or an enemy.” I don’t know where Jason found that wisdom, which people spend years and thousands of dollars in therapy acquiring, and I wish I had asked. But there was already a lot to cover.
Earlier this month, the U.S. conducted its largest prisoner swap since the Cold War. As part of the deal, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, Washington Post contributing columnist and opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza, and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan finally stepped out of their Russian cages.
“I’m rediscovering the simple pleasures of freedom,” Alsu told me in a text message, after spending 10 months in prison on false charges of failing to register as a “foreign agent” and spreading disinformation. “I finally feel safe. And I’m finally with my loving family.”
In the rehabilitation process, what comes first are a battery of medical tests and “re-acclamation with choice,” Jason tells me. That is because imprisonment strips you of the ability to make choices. Medical staff treating former detainees make sure they know they can choose to leave at any time.
Jason was sent to a U.S. military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, after stops and starts to his release in 2016. The group of newly freed hostages went to the Brooke Army Medical Center at Joint Base San Antonio in Texas. From a small, wood medical dispensary under a different name in 1879, it grew bigger and went on to treat soldiers wounded in World War II and combat casualties from Iraq and Afghanistan after Sep. 11th. Today the center has rooftop and ground-level helipads, and the only Level I Trauma Center in the Defense Department.
“Certainly if there's anything that has been identified that is acutely life threatening, that's going to be priority number one,” Col. Elizabeth Markelz, Chief of the Department of Medicine, tells me. “I start building my medical team so that I have the appropriate experts available to consult on the care.” She says Brooke Army Medical Center staff create an initial evaluation before longer term recovery begins. They “know how important it is to be the team that receives these individuals after the trauma that they've experienced.”
And some wounds are deep and invisible. They require SERE psychologists, an acronym that stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape. The specialty stems from surviving Korean POWs and a working group established under President Dwight Eisenhower in 1961, according to a report published by the American Psychological Association. They were first implemented by the Air Force.
By 2003, a time when SERE psychologists were simply treating members of the military — before civilians were poached as a matter of policy — they worked in three phases: a former detainee’s initial receipt and recovery, decompression time to prepare to face the world, and then life maintenance.
Jason told me that on day two of his recovery in Germany, SERE psychologists helped him begin to rewrite his narrative, that often silent story we tell ourselves about our lives. He still speaks with his psychologists, and called one of them when Alsu, Evan, Vladimir, and Paul were released.
For Alsu, healing included a walk on the Brooke Army Medical Center’s grounds. They were peaceful. “For the first time in many months, Alsu was able to walk around unaccompanied and unwatched,” her husband Pavel Butorin told me. She drank clean water again, and ate at Mexican and Thai restaurants in San Antonio.
When they were leaving Texas, an airline representative recognized Alsu at the check-in counter and asked for a photo together. Sometimes when you get back your life, you lose your anonymity. The psychologists prepare detainees for that. Now Alsu, Pavel, and their two daughters are back in their home city of Prague.
“It’s going to take time for her — and for us as a family — to come to terms with everything we’ve experienced, both on this side and on the other,” Pavel tells me. “We’re here to help Alsu rebuild her life, which includes tackling seemingly mundane tasks like renewing her driver’s license, regaining access to her bank accounts, and replacing her payment cards.”
Jason has already regained his bank accounts, reintegrated into society, and taken back his life story. What he wants now is accountability. “I have the benefit of more years than some of those folks in my rear view,” he says. “And I can tell you that the scars and the ways that my life has changed, not by any doing of my own, are deserving of justice.”
He says the Iranian government continues to threaten him. And that more death threats came after an Iranian TV show dramatized his imprisonment. “When we say a propaganda series, in your mind, you think it's a shoddy, sort of two-bit production. In reality, this was the highest budgeted television series in the history of the Islamic Republic.” He says that in the span of 30 episodes, he was depicted as a “superspy.”
The show’s producer happened to be a communications adviser to Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, who met his end in a plane crash this spring. The producer had also traveled to the United Nations General Assembly in New York after the show aired. “This person is guilty of defaming me and putting my life at new risk,” Jason told me. “Why is this guy given a visa to come to the United States? And then the response to that by the law enforcement and legal community is that, you know, ‘These people will fall through the cracks and we don't know who they are.’ I'm here to tell you who they are.”
Jason was heading to Congress to discuss accountability for his Iranian captors and enablers after we spoke. He says he has suggested to the FBI that when detainees come home, they provide composite sketches of their offenders. He wants government resources, even a small amount, dedicated to monitoring their comings and goings.
“We have to do more to not only protect folks like this, but provide consequences for people who are guilty of this kind of abuse and terror. And some justice,” Jason says. “Without it, we're making a mockery of our own judiciary and legal system.”
I asked him what he missed about himself, from before the Iranian government put him behind bars. “I had a carefree attitude towards things like foreign travel, spontaneous interactions,” he says. “And I don't feel comfortable in those kinds of settings anymore.” There are still places to which he can’t safely travel.
But now he has cultivated something new and strong: “I haven't cowered from [Iran’s threats and intimidation] and have used the truly massive platforms available to me to try and make it harder for governments to do this to other people.”
All the innocent hostages and families are always in my prayers. Especially the Israeli hostages who were taken brutally. Many of those are migrant workers from the South East Asia. Hope there will be peace and prosperity for the region. Thank you for the article.