Close to Home: Behind the story of local man on trial in Iran

The heart-breaking plight of Jason Rezaian is not some international abstraction. He is one of our own, with close ties to Sonoma County, particularly Petaluma. On trial in Iran on espionage charges, the young Washington Post reporter will, any day now, either be exonerated or sentenced to as much as 20 years in prison. He has already been in solitary confinement in Iran’s brutal Evin prison for almost a year.

Iran scholars, informed journalists and many others believe the charges against Rezaian to be baseless and arbitrary; that he is a pawn trapped in the middle of a power struggle between Iranian hardliners and reformists over the fate of the ongoing U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations.

To put some of his story in local context, his late father, Iranian-born Taghi Rezaian, had a Persian carpet business on the corner of Petaluma Boulevard and Washington Street where the Seed Bank is now located. It was in his father’s store where I first met Jason and his father and where I engaged them in many conversations about Iran. At the time, beginning about seven years ago, I had been preparing to teach a course for Sonoma State’s Osher Lifelong Learning program called “Demystifying Iran.”

What impressed me about both Jason and his father was their conviction that it would be only a matter of time before the United States and the Islamic Republic would find common ground that would tamp down the 35-year history of distrust and enmity between the two. Both inveighed against any kind of military force or covert operations to destabilize Iran, believing instead that diplomacy and cooperation on economic and political fronts held the best promise of improving the fractured relationship.

Three decades ago, Taghi Rezaian had been so chagrined about the plight of the 52 American hostages who were held for 444 days in Iran at the onset of the Islamic Revolution that when he heard of their release he offered each of them a gift of a free Persian carpet in a gesture of Iranian-American goodwill.

Influenced by his parent’s affection for both the United States and Iran - his mother Mary, is American born - Jason Rezaian developed a penchant for explaining Iran to Americans and vice versa, a reason he drifted toward journalism as a career, writing first for the San Francisco Chronicle and then for the Washington Post’s Iran bureau.

After Taghi Rezaian died in 2010, Jason Rezaian and his mother went to Iran to take up residence for an initially brief period. But then Jason fell in love with and married Yeganeh Salehi, an Iranian journalist. He became a dual U.S.-Iranian citizen and continued his work promoting cross-national understanding between the United States and Iran.

In fact, it was Jason who first persuaded me to visit Iran, assuring me of its safety. In an ironic twist, when I finally visited Iran in 2014, I did so aware that Jason was already imprisoned.

So what happened? Why was Jason Rezaian, the premier goodwill ambassador for constructive Islamic Republic and American relations arrested, detained and charged with passing secrets to the CIA?

Haleh Esfendiari, an Iranian-American scholar at the Woodrow Wilson’s Center’s Middle East program, was similarly arrested in 2007, imprisoned at Evin Prison and subjected to virtually the same interrogation tactics and spy allegations used by Iranian hardliners that Rezaian is currently undergoing. It is her conviction that Rezaian’s plight is a strategic move among hardline factions to shame Iran’s reformist president, Hassan Rouhani, for supporting the nuclear negotiations with the United States.

Sayed Mosavian, now a visiting Iranian scholar at Princeton University, is the highest ranking Iranian to ever reveal the inner workings of the Islamic Republic’s internal power struggles. He concurs with Esfandiari’s view. In his recent book, “The United States and Iran: An Insider’s View on the Failed Past and the Road to Peace,” Mousavian recounts the hardliner pattern of undermining reformist progress in Iran by using a range of methods (some violent) and including the use of dual-national Iranian-Americans as “hostages” to undermine any rapprochement in Iranian-American relations. In their view, trusting the United States is tantamount to an invitation for regime change.

That distrust toward the United States runs deep in Iran. The latest in a series of felt-betrayals was the Bush administration’s rebuff of an Iranian negotiation offer in 2003 that convinced hardliners that regime change was the only goal of the United States.

As Mousavian sees it, only a recognition of mutual grievances and an attitude of mutual forgiveness for past “sins” will disentangle the death-spiral of Iranian-American relations. Jason Rezaian would be among the great many beneficiaries of such a diplomatic effort.

If there’s any justice and hope for such thawed relations, Rezaian needs to be set free.

Donna Brasset-Shearer of Petaluma is a cultural-anthropologist with a background in international relations.