Exclusive: American held for 8 years in notorious Iranian prison tells of ordeal

CNN

By Ben Kirby and Claire Calzonetti, CNN

(CNN) — Siamak Namazi, an American who spent eight years wrongfully imprisoned in Iran, has told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour of the “unutterable indignities” he suffered in captivity, in an exclusive television interview, the first since his release.

Namazi previously spoke with Amanpour by phone in March 2023 from inside Iran’s notorious Evin Prison, in what was an unprecedented interview. He was the longest-held Iranian-American prisoner, excluded from three separate deals that freed other detained Americans during the Obama and Trump administrations.

Six months after he spoke with CNN from prison, Namazi was released along with four other Americans, all designated by the United States as wrongfully detained, in a deal between the US and Iran that also saw the unfreezing of around $6 billion of Iranian assets.

One year on from his release, Namazi spoke exclusively to CNN, in an at times emotional interview, about the circumstances of his arrest, the physical abuse and the daily humiliations he was subjected to in detention, why he decided to speak to CNN from behind bars, and life as a free man.

‘The smell of freedom’

On 18 September 2023, Namazi stepped off the plane and onto American soil. At the top of the airplane steps, he paused to breathe in the air. It was, he tells Amanpour, a tribute to what his uncle had told Namazi and his brother Babak when they first immigrated to the United States in 1983.

“Can you smell that?” Namazi’s uncle asked his young nephews. “That is the smell of freedom.” Forty years later, Siamak Namazi emerged into the night air after eight years in prison. “I remembered what he said. And I felt it this time. I felt the smell of freedom.”

Now, he says, “the most dominant feeling that I have is gratitude… particularly (towards) President (Joe) Biden, who made a very difficult choice and struck the deal.” But, that said, he explains it has been “very difficult” to adjust to life outside.

After so long behind bars, he even had to set an alarm to remind himself just to leave the apartment. “I remember once I hadn’t left for three days, and I realized why. I just wasn’t used to doing that.”

Today, he is still putting together the pieces of his life. “It’s an eight-year earthquake that hits your life – and it leaves a lot of destruction.

“But I would say I do feel very free in the US – and I tried to live the freest life I could, even when I was in Evin.”

‘They wanted a death sentence’

Namazi was born in Iran and, after moving to America age 12, he had returned to his country of birth many times. In 2015, he went back for a funeral and felt little reason to worry. It was a period he describes as “the peak of Iran-US relations,” with high-level delegations from both countries in Vienna, Austria, to negotiate what would become the Iran nuclear deal, or JCPOA.

But at the airport, as he tried to leave, he recalls how everything changed. He was approached “by a man in a plain suit who said, ‘Come with me.’” Namazi says he refused and asked for identification. Then, as the man went to get a uniformed official to enforce his demand, Namazi urgently messaged his brother: “Pulling me aside at airport.”

“After that, I was interrogated off site illegally for three months and then I was finally arrested. I was charged formally with cooperating with a hostile state – referring to the United States of America.” It took six years for him to secure his full file and discover exactly what he was accused of.

He says that Iran’s authorities claimed that “for three decades, (Namazi) had been building a network within Iran to infiltrate and topple the Islamic Republic with the cooperation of the hostile US state. Now, I was arrested at 44. So, these guys are pretty much claiming that when I was learning to skateboard with my buddy Dave in White Plains, New York, I was actually subverting the Islamic Republic.”

While today he almost laughs at the absurdity of the “ridiculous” charges he faced, he knows the danger he was in. “They wanted a death sentence for me.”

Namazi was not naïve. He knew that the real reason he was being taken was to function as a bargaining chip for the regime. That, he says, gave him some comfort – but not for long.

“I assumed that because I’m a hostage and I have value, they will not harm me. Unfortunately, that assumption was proven wrong.”

‘Profound effect’

Soon after his arrest, Namazi says, he was “thrown in a solitary cell… the size of a closet.” When facing his interrogators, he says he was told that “unless you cooperate… you are going to be here until your teeth and your hair are the same color. And our methodology of how we’re talking is going to change.”

That, he says, was a clear threat of violence.

In all, Namazi endured around eight months of solitary confinement, along with what he calls “unutterable indignities.” He was blindfolded and beaten, but the worst was the “humiliation,” he says.

“That I’m not comfortable talking about,” he tells Amanpour. “And I mean unutterable – because it had a profound effect on me. I still haven’t even gotten to talking about it fully in therapy.”

Eventually, Namazi’s mother was permitted to visit. The first visit was before he was beaten, but even then, his appearance had changed so much that she didn’t recognize her own son. “I looked like Saddam (Hussein) when they pulled him out of that hole. I had (a) long beard,” he recalls. “I remember her sobbing and I remember trying to make her laugh by telling her, ‘I look like Saddam.’”

After that visit, he says, the beatings began, and lasted for weeks. “It’s much scarier than I could tell you,” Namazi recalls with emotion – particularly as he knew that the Canadian-Iranian photographer Zahra Kazemi had died in similar circumstances in 2003. “I knew how unsafe I was.”

After weeks of this, his mother was permitted to visit again – and this time, Namazi was prepared. He says his guards warned him to say nothing of his mistreatment and flanked him as he entered the room. “Even before sitting, I say, ‘Hi, mom. These guys have been torturing me. I need you to go public on this.’” Recalling the moment today, Namazi is almost overcome by emotion. “I put her through a lot.”

During his eight years of captivity, Namazi saw other prisoners being released in deals between the US and Iran on three separate occasions – despite, he claims, the US government being fully aware of the torture and abuse he was suffering following correspondence between his parents and the State Department.

Feeling abandoned by his government, Namazi decided he faced a choice: he could either be patient and try to stay sane, trusting that the authorities would eventually negotiate a deal that secured his freedom; or he could fight.

“I think part of my reaction to the unutterable indignities was that I have to gain my own respect back for myself. I had to fight them.”

High-risk interview

“I fought every day, every single day,” Namazi says. “I had a program: I’d get up, it was organized, you know, think about how to be a pain in the ass.”

As the years went by, Namazi tried many things, including smuggling out an opinion piece for The New York Times and going on hunger strike. But, he says, “I basically got no love back.” More was needed. So Namazi suggested to his pro bono lawyer in the US, Jared Genser, that perhaps it was time to do an interview.

Twenty-four hours later, he was told by Genser he could speak to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. “I started hyperventilating,” he says, looking back on that moment. This was far bigger than he had intended. “It was a difficult decision,” he says, and he knew the risks – but “desperation” drove him forward.

In the end, Namazi’s calculus was remarkably simple. If he did the interview, he might be beaten up and thrown back in solitary. “I knew I could live (with) that,” he says. But if he chose not to do the interview, and there was no deal to free him, he’d always wonder if it could’ve got him out.

Speaking to Amanpour today, he says, is a little less high-stakes. “It is such a joy to be talking to you and not worrying about someone dragging me to a solitary cell somewhere because of it,” he tells her.

The logistics of his prison interview weren’t complicated. By this point, Namazi was in the “general ward” of the prison, no longer in solitary confinement and with access to a phone and a few numbers he could call. Without telling the prison authorities, he dialed out and was connected with the help of his lawyer through a hopscotch-like system, until he reached a CNN control room.

On the other end of a phone line, his voice was crackly – and at times, overcome by the weight of his emotions. “I think the very fact that I’ve chosen to take this risk and appear on CNN from Evin Prison, it should tell you just how dire my situation has become by this point.” But, he said, “desperate times call for desperate measures.”

As Amanpour brought the phone interview to an end, Namazi made one last request: to address Biden directly, appealing to him “to just do what’s necessary to end this nightmare and bring us home.”

Coming home

This “desperate measure” was one way that Namazi felt he could get attention and try to lend some urgency to the ongoing negotiations.

He sees it as a crucial lesson for anyone in a similar situation: “If you are taken as a hostage, you need to make noise.” This creates more “political value” for a US president to make what otherwise might be a “politically costly” deal to release someone, he believes.

In September 2023, Namazi was finally released along with four fellow dual nationals: Emad Shargi, Morad Tahbaz, and two other prisoners whose identities were not disclosed by officials at the time.

The unfreezing of Iranian assets under the deal prompted intense criticism from former President Donald Trump and his allies – despite Trump having agreed to two prisoner swap deals with Iran during his time in office. Before it was finalized, 26 Senate Republicans wrote to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to argue that it set an “incredibly dangerous precedent.”

But Namazi says he knew that, without a deal, he wasn’t getting out – a point his interrogators made “extremely clear.”

“We have a duty to get out our people from foreign dungeons when they have done nothing,” he adds, and “unfortunately, we have to make distasteful deals to get out our people.”

More importantly, Namazi feels he is more aware than most of the nature of the Iranian regime.

“I’ll tell you something: no one is as angry, no one is as disgusted at the fact that the Islamic Republic, this horrible regime, profited from blighting my life, than me and the other hostages and our families.

“I spent 2,898 days in their dungeon… They have done things that I’m not able to tell my therapist yet, and I still, I can’t even speak about it… I am upset that they profited from this. But what other choice is there? Are you just going let an American rot?”

No debriefing

Safely back in America, Namazi is full of ideas for changing how the US deals with hostage diplomacy. He likens it to “a game of rugby. We need to stop playing political chess with it. It’s different.”

He argues that the West can do far more to deter this sort of hostage-taking, from cracking down on international money-laundering that funds the lavish lifestyles of autocrats and their cronies, to restricting the visas they receive when visiting the United Nations in New York.

And it’s not just an American problem: Evin Prison is “a dystopian United Nations of hostages,” Namazi says, with many countries’ citizens behind bars.

“We can upend this business model very quickly. We have to make it unprofitable,” he says.

Namazi believes he could offer more but says he was not debriefed by the US government on his many interactions with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

He also feels there was a notable lack of support structure once he arrived in the US.

In reflecting on the year since his release, Namazi’s focus returns to Biden.

Emotion in his voice, Namazi tells Amanpour that, eventually, he’d like to meet the man who freed him.

“I would really love to shake President Biden’s hand one day. I really would.”

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Clarification: This story has been updated to clarify the number of days Siamak Namazi spent in Iranian detention.