Not so in Iran -- and that could be good news for the three American hikers who, after four months of detention in Tehran's notorious Evin Prison, have now been accused of spying. Though several westerners have died or disappeared after being placed in Iranian custody in recent years, an explicit charge of espionage often seems to be the accusation of choice for a paranoid government out for more than a conviction.
Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki announced Monday that the Americans, Shane Bauer, 27, Josh Fattal, 27, and Sarah Shourd, 31, will be tried for espionage. The three were hiking in Iraqi Kurdistan on July 31 when they crossed the border into Iran and were picked up by border guards.
freethehikers.org / AP
Three American hikers -- from left, Joshua Fattal, Shane Bauer and Sarah Shourd -- have been detained since July and were charged with espionage on Monday.
"The Iranians do tend to accuse every foreigner they catch of being a foreign agent," Iason Athanasiadis, a British-Greek journalist imprisoned in Tehran this summer, said in an interview with the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Since the Iranian presidential elections in June unleashed mass protests in Tehran, the government has cracked down on foreigners, journalists and reformists, who have accused the government of rigging the elections in favor of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Athanasiadis had been reporting on the elections for the Washington Times. He was picked up in the airport as he was leaving the country and taken to Evin prison.
"The charge was very clear from the beginning; it was espionage," Athanasiadis said. "They were like, 'Well we have very good evidence, but we're going to give it to you in our own good time.'"
The evidence turned out to be a picture of him from 2005, talking to a member of the British embassy at an international conference, and text messages that he says he did not send.
Athanasiadis was held for 20 days in solitary confinement before he was released in July.
Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi was sentenced in April to eight years in prison for espionage. She was arrested at her home in January by four men from the Intelligence Ministry.
"My interrogators claimed that I was spying for the U.S., and however much I told them that I was not -- that I was simply writing a book and doing interviews for a book, which I hoped to use to show English speakers around the world a more balanced and complete picture of Iranian society -- however much I told them this, they told me I was lying and that I was a U.S. spy," Saberi said in an an interview on NPR after her release in May.
Saberi's arrest and trial elicited so much international attention and pressure, she says, that at a certain point she became more of a liability inside the prison than outside for her captors.
"I can guess, perhaps, that if the hard-liners had their way, I would still be in prison today, especially the hard-liners in the judiciary and in the Intelligence Ministry," Saberi said in the NPR interview. "But the people you could maybe call more pragmatists, they seemed to reach the conclusion that it was more costly to keep me, amid all this international pressure, instead of to release me."
Maziar Bahari, a Canadian-Iranian journalist with Newsweek, similarly credits the more rational actors within the government for his release.
"There remain players within the system who can make rational decisions about Iran's international interests; if there weren't, I would still be in jail," he wrote in an account of his imprisonment.
Bahari was accused of spying not just for a single country, but for the U.S., England, Israel and Newsweek. He was subjected to four months of brutal interrogation sessions at Evin Prison in which he was beaten and ordered to confess, before being released in October.
Not all foreign prisoners of Iran are so lucky. Zahra Kazemi, a Canadian-Iranian photojournalist, was beaten to death while in custody in 2003. Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent, disappeared in 2007 while visiting Iran's Kish Island; Sen. Bill Nelson, who represents Levinson's home state of Florida, believes he is being held in a secret prison. And Columbia University scholar Kian Tajbakhsh, detained in the demonstrations after contested elections in June, was convicted of espionage and other charges in October and sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Since their arrest, the detained hikers have drawn enormous media coverage. In September, Ahmadinejad said in an interview with The Associated Press that he would press for leniency in their case.
Monday's announcement moves Bauer, Fattal and Shourd one step closer to trial. American officials worry that they are being held as a bargaining chip as the Iranian government petitions for the release of 11 Iranians allegedly being held by the U.S.
If past experience offers any signal of what is to come, the espionage charge may yet yield to continued pressure for the hikers' release. But the regime's apparent insecurity makes any prediction difficult.
