The reports of another hostage will almost certainly complicate Iran’s recent overtures to the West, discourage foreign business, and undermine further
Next Wednesday, November 4th, is the anniversary of the 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, which led to a mass hostage crisis that dragged on for four hundred and forty-four days. Thirty-six years later, the Iranians are still at it. For more than two weeks, U.S. media, including The New Yorker, have been withholding information—at the request of the family—about yet another American seized in Tehran. The embargo was broken late Thursday with published reports that Iranian security had detained Siamak Namazi, an American businessman of Iranian descent who was once tapped as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.
Namazi was taken to Tehran’s Evin Prison in mid-October, according to friends and colleagues. He is a business strategist, normally based in Dubai, and was visiting his family. His mother’s home was ransacked; his confiscated computer has since been used by an intelligence wing of the Revolutionary Guard to launch cyber-attacks against his contacts. I was among those hacked. So was the State Department.
This latest arrest reflects a power struggle that has been intensifying within Iran since the government agreed to a nuclear deal with the United States and five other major powers, in July. It pits hard-liners in a secretive deep state—an informal network that includes intelligence officials, judicial officials, influential ideologues, and security forces, such as the Revolutionary Guard—against President Hassan Rouhani’s centrist government, which was popularly elected, in 2013. Iran is now beginning a series of serious cutbacks to a program that could have produced a bomb—and greater regional geopolitical leverage—within months.
The nuclear deal marked the most important overture by the Islamic Republic to the outside world since the 1979 revolution, but Tehran’s deep state increasingly appears intent on sabotaging any openings—in diplomacy, commerce, tourism, and culture—that could compromise its power. Veterans of the élite Revolutionary Guard, for example, run many of Iran’s largest companies; they might feel threatened or vulnerable in a more competitive market.
Namazi, a graduate of Tufts University and Rutgers, had long championed better relations between Tehran and Washington. He led a campaign to facilitate the sale to Iran of badly needed American and European medicine, which is permitted under sanctions. “Trade of medical supplies is legal in theory and virtually impossible in practice because Iran cannot pay for the Western medicine it needs,” Namazi wrote in a Times Op-Ed, in 2013. (International banks refused to provide financing.) He returned to Tehran partly to explore potential trade openings in anticipation of international sanctions being lifted.
U.S. officials have taken note of other actions by hard-liners which appear to be conspicuously timed to disrupt the deal. On October 10th, three days before Iran’s parliament voted to formally approve the deal, the Revolutionary Guard test-fired a medium-range ballistic missile that was “inherently capable of delivering a nuclear weapon,” according to Samantha Power, the American Ambassador to the U.N. “This was a clear violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1929,” she said. (Washington is taking the case to the Security Council.) A day later, Iran’s judiciary announced that the Washington Postcorrespondent Jason Rezaian, an American born in California of Iranian descent, had been convicted of treason.
Hard-line politicians face tough parliamentary elections in February, which could test their influence. In May, the leader of one of the conservative coalitions told me in Tehran that their electoral dominance could slip significantly, by as much as twenty-five per cent. The nuclear deal gave President Rouhani a huge bump in popularity; Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, who negotiated the deal, regularly ranks as the most admired Iranian official in public-opinion polls.
What’s at stake now, for both sides, is the future of the revolution—and who controls its course. “This arrest is just to embarrass President Rouhani and Foreign Minister Zarif, and to discourage young Iranians with dual nationality from going to Iran and being a bridge,” Haleh Esfandiari, the former director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars’ Middle East Program, where Namazi was a public-policy scholar, told me this morning. In 2007, she was placed under house arrest for four months in Tehran and then imprisoned at Evin, in solitary confinement, for a hundred and five days.
The reports of another hostage will almost certainly complicate Iran’s recent overtures to the West, discourage foreign business, and undermine further diplomacy. The news broke on the same day that Secretary of State John Kerry was scheduled to meet with Zarif in Vienna. They are part of a new international initiative to resolve Syria’s savage civil war.
The State Department will not discuss Namazi. “We’re aware of a report about the possible arrest of a person who has U.S. citizenship, but we have nothing to say at this time,” the department’s spokesman, John Kirby, said. Kerry did, however, discuss the status of Americans with Zarif during their meeting. Besides Namazi and Rezaian, Iran is also holding a former Marine named Amir Hekmati, of Michigan, and Saeed Abedini, a Christian preacher who had resided in Idaho. All the Americans have been convicted of espionage or various forms of subversion. A fifth American, the former F.B.I. agent Robert Levinson, was last seen on an Iranian island in 2007. Nizar Zakka, a Lebanese businessman with permanent green-card residence in the United States, was also arrested last month. He had been invited by the government to speak at a conference on entrepreneurship.
“Iran has repeatedly said it seeks to rejoin the global community, yet I simply cannot fathom how this is possible if it continues to hold American political prisoners,” Representative Dan Kildee, a Democrat from Michigan, said today. The Hekmati family are his constituents.
In the past four decades, Iran has gone through waves of seizing Americans, beginning with the fifty-two diplomats at the U.S. Embassy in 1979. After four Iranian diplomats disappeared in Lebanon in the early eighties, Iran’s new allies in Hezbollah began nabbing Americans off the streets of Beirut. Dozens were picked up. In the mid-eighties, Iran traded hostages for military equipment, only to pick up more hostages after three were released. One prisoner, Terry Anderson, an Associated Press correspondent, was not released until 1991, after seven years in captivity. During the hard-line rule of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran began arresting Iranian-Americans who came home to visit their families. Some were forced to confess on national television to assorted misdeeds.
President Rouhani’s inability to prevent the latest detentions or to guarantee the safety of the people he has invited to help Iran open up to new markets has undermined his credibility. At the same time, Tehran claims that at least fourteen Iranians are imprisoned in the United States for sanctions violations. Last month, Rouhani suggested that both governments might intervene on “humanitarian” grounds on behalf of prisoners in either country. In an interview with “60 Minutes,” he said, “I don’t particularly like the word ‘exchange,’ but, from a humanitarian perspective, if we can take a step, we must do it. The American side must take its own steps.” His argument is that breaking sanctions is no longer a crime, because now that the world has accepted Iran’s right to a nuclear-energy program many sanctions will be lifted. (Tehran is not pressing for the release of Iranians engaged in other criminal acts.)
So far, Washington is balking at a swap. “We continue to call for the immediate release of Saeed Abedini, Amir Hekmati, and Jason Rezaian, and for Iran to work coöperatively with us to locate Robert Levinson,” Kirby said. “This should be done independent of any other matter. Beyond that, we’re not going to detail all of the efforts we’re making to bring our citizens home.”
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