Tales from Tehran

Roxana Saberi--the American freelance journalist in Iran recently sentenced to eight years in prison on charges of espionage--worked for years as a reporter in Iran. Now the young woman is freeze-framed in a strange and frightening bit of Iranian diplomatic theater as a character useful to a regime seeking to engage with the United States.

Saberi, who worked for NPR and the BBC among other agencies, lost her press credentials in Iran in 2006 for reasons never really made clear to me. I imagine comparisons could be made to the riddle of reasons given after her arrest a few weeks ago.

Saberi was said to be taken in for buying alcohol, a forbidden purchase in the Islamic Republic. Then it was said that Saberi, who has dual U.S. and Iranian citizenship, was being held for working without press credentials -- a surprising turn since authorities were aware for some time of her status. Next came the charges and conviction: The young writer was an American spy. Confused? Well, welcome to Iran.

It might be helpful to know the difficulties that any Westerner encounters in trying to enter Iran as a journalist. I met Saberi once or perhaps twice in 2006 during visits to Iran as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. Contact was initiated by me and was routine: On any foreign reporting trip, I stop to have coffee or dinner with smart local reporters.

Saberi was matter-of-fact when we met. Friendly and pleasant, she had chosen a rough road, trying to make a career in very hard place to report. She mentioned that she was having trouble getting her credentials renewed. As a fellow American--and one also bound to work in a headscarf, long pants and knee-skimming overcoat to fit government demands on women--I could understand that she would.

Iran was allowing some U.S. journalists in the country to report but I found gaining a journalist visa, even a temporary one, was an arduous process of repeated phone calls, multiple emails and faxes and unending requests for (often already-submitted) documents.

I never knew when or why a visa would be issued. It could take months. It might be ready in days. (I haven't been issued one for a couple years now--and no, I don't know the reason--so I cannot attest to the process now.) To report from Iran few years ago, I had to first file a written request to the Iranian mission to the United Nations, a letter or email including passport information and personal data such as my parents' names and country of residence.

That letter--and a letter from an editor at the paper--then had to be tracked by me with innumerable phone calls to the government's foreign press department. Many journalists, including myself, ended up relying on well-connected, for-profit translation services in Tehran to help push the visa through. I was usually told that the holdup was related to intelligence clearance and somehow these translation services--now, think about that--could smooth the way.

If the visa was suddenly issued, I had to drop everything and hurry to Iran before the visa ran out. When I landed in Iran, I already owed the translation service a couple hundred dollars for what in theory was a cost-free visa. I also would be fingerprinted, every finger pressed into dark-blue ink and recorded on paper, before leaving the airport.

Within days of my arrival, cash flow became a major consideration. I would need a visa extension to get a few more days or even another whole week of reporting time. That would cost. I was, of course, bound to work with the same translation agency to get that extension, a firm that was already charging $150 a day for a translator who may or may not be very good. Those translators were, of course, on the government's watch list. They would have to file or give oral reports on any given reporter. Tips for translators were no small consideration.

To be sure, I could and did send the official translator home so I could, on my own, meet with English-speaking analysts and even people on the street. I often ended up paying other English speakers, on the side, to help me with private interviews.

None of those people, of course, were foolish enough to think that this American journalist was not on somebody's radar. Hotels that catered to foreigners--and time-zone-challenged journalists who needed 24-hour internet--were equipped with closed-circuit cameras in their lobbies and on every floor. Everyone who crossed the threshold of these hotels knew they were caught on tape.

The regime has access to all phone lines, websites, closed-circuit videos and whatever reports or insinuations that neighbors or acquaintances or translators might make. People all along the line know the vulnerabilities. As Saberi's sad arrest shows, the system can manipulate anyone's reality at any time.