Case of Roxana Saberi

Summary: Roxana Saberi became the latest in a string of American journalists or scholars arrested in Iran and later released. Saberi, a freelance journalist who worked occasionally for the BBC and National Public Radio, was initially arrested for buying a bottle of wine, an outlawed substance in Iran. Those charges were later expanded to espionage, and after a one-day secret trial in April 2009, she was sentenced to eight years in prison. After intervention by President Mohammad Ahmadinejad, an appeals court in May reduced her sentence to two years and suspended it; she was released a few hours later. Her detention and subsequent release coincided with President Obama's efforts to thaw the long freeze in US-Iranian relations. They may have reflected differing voices inside Iran's ruling establishment over whether to accept Obama's overtures.

Roxana Saberi is an American-born child of an Iranian-born father with dual American-Iranian citizenship. Having grown up in Fargo, North Dakota, where she won the Miss North Dakota beauty contest, Saberi moved to Tehran in 2003 and practiced as a freelance journalist. Among her clients were the BBC and National Public Radio.

In January 2009, she was arrested on the charge of buying wine. Under Iran's strict fundamentalist Islamist laws, both the wine and the purchase of the wine are illegal. That charge was later amended to practicing journalism without a license after her journalist license was revoked in 2006. On the eve of her trial in April, the charges were expanded to include espionage for the United States.

On April 13, 2009, she was tried for espionage in a trial in the Islamic Revolutionary Court-long regarded as a draconian enforcer of the Islamist rule established by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979-that lasted one day, behind closed doors. Prosecutors charged that Saberi had obtained classified information and handed it to the United States government. She denied any wrongdoing, and the United States insisted she was not an agent of the US government. At the end of her one-day trial, she was found guilty, and five days later, on April 18, she was sentenced to eight years in prison. After her conviction, Saberi went on a hunger strike and was hospitalized after about two weeks.

Subsequently, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wrote a letter to judicial authorities asking that Ms. Saberi be given her "full rights" of appeal. Ahmadinejad had intervened in a court case for the first time since becoming president.

On May 11, 2009, an appeals court reduced Saberi's sentence to two years and suspended it. She was freed the same day.

After her release, Saberi's lawyer told the New York Times in an interview that the espionage charge was based on her possession of an Iranian government "classified" document from 2003 about the pending US invasion of Iraq, and on two trips to Israel made by Saberi in 2006 to look for a job. The lawyer said Saberi found the document in the offices of the Expediency Council, which advises the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, where Saberi worked as a translator putting records onto an English-language website. Saberi also possessed documents from a conservative political party, the lawyer said. Iranians are not allowed to visit Israel; to do so, her lawyer said, Saberi used her Iranian passport to get as far as Syria or Lebanon and then used her American passport to enter Israel. Saberi's lawyer said they based her defense on "none of the documents were secret or confidential because they did not bear the title" and that since the US and Iran were not at war, it was impossible for her to "spy."

Saberi's arrest, trial, imprisonment, and freedom from the outset were viewed as an element in the more significant issue of US-Iranian relations, which had been in a deep freeze since the seizure of the American embassy in 1979. The case of a thirty-one-year-old freelance journalist was almost universally viewed as the center of a delicate diplomatic and political ballet involving international relations and domestic Iranian politics.

• Domestic politics. President Ahmadinejad, a former mayor of Tehran who was first elected president in 2005, had long practiced a hard-line confrontational role vis-à-vis the United States. In 2009, he faced a challenge from reformers in elections scheduled for June. Some analysts suggested that his unprecedented intervention in Saberi's case was intended to signal to Iranian voters that Ahmadinejad was not committed to a hard-line stance vis-à-vis the United States but was open to the series of diplomatic overtures extended by President Barack Obama (see section on International Relations below). Largely unanswered in the days immediately following Saberi's release was the role, if any, of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in the case—either in the appeals court decision or Ahmadinejad's letter to the court.

At the same time, a website sponsored by the conservative Tabnak organization demanded to know "how come, after a few angry remarks from Obama and [US secretary of state] Hillary Clinton-expressed after their diplomatic smiles-Roxana Saberi turned from being a spy to a free citizen, while Iranian diplomats are still held in Iraq?" The latter referred to five Iranians arrested by US forces in Iraq in January 2007. Iran has insisted the five were diplomats deserving of immunity; the United States urges the five were members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard sent to Iraq as spies and provocateurs under diplomatic cover.

• International Relations. Saberi's arrest and subsequent prosecution coincided with the inauguration and first weeks of President Obama's administration, who promised to reverse almost three decades of US policy and negotiate with the Islamist government in Tehran during his presidential campaign. Obama issued a videotaped statement on March 20, 2009, coinciding with the Iranian festival of Nowruz (translated as "New Day"), appealing to Iran's leaders to pursue "constructive ties among the United States, Iran, and the international community." The statement was posted on the White House website and on YouTube (which is blocked in Iran) and also broadcast in Iran from surrounding countries.

In the immediate aftermath of Saberi's release from prison, spokespeople for the US government welcomed the decision but denied there was any implicit quid pro quo. However, many analysts strongly suggested that the Iranian government, for international and domestic political reasons, was simultaneously eager to make a positive gesture to the Obama administration and avoid seeming overly harsh in its treatment of Saberi.

Saberi returned to the United States where she resumed her career as a journalist. Beginning in 2018, Saberi began reporting and producing for CBS News in London. In 2024, Roxana Saberi remained in the employ of CBS News and was based out of Chicago.

Precedents

• Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars-and like Saberi, a dual Iranian-American national-was arrested in Tehran on May 8, 2007, after being held under house arrest since the previous December. She was initially detained while replacing her passport and travel visas, which were stolen en route to the airport after visiting her elderly mother. Esfandiari was questioned about the activities of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Iran, with the implication that these activities might involve espionage. She was allowed to leave Iran on September 2, 2007.
• Parnaz Azima is also a dual US-Iranian citizen and a correspondent for Radio Farda (a US government-funded Farsi-language radio station broadcasting from Washington, D.C., and Prague founded in 2002). Azima's passport was seized when she arrived in Tehran in January 2007 (like Esfandiari, to see her ailing mother), and she was subjected to prolonged questioning. In March 2007, she was sentenced to a year in prison for endangering Iran's national security by promoting anti-revolutionary propaganda. At the end of August 2007, she was released on $333,000 bail secured by the deed to her mother's apartment and twelve days later left the country.
• Robert A. Levinson, a former FBI agent, disappeared in March 2007 after flying to Kish Island, an Iranian island in the Persian Gulf, on a business trip for his private security firm. He has not been heard from since. The Iranian government has denied any knowledge of his whereabouts.
• In 1999, Iran arrested thirteen Iranian Jews and accused them of being spies for Israel. The arrests followed efforts by President Mohammad Khatami to thaw diplomatic relations with the West. Ten of the thirteen were convicted in July 2000 (all but one had pleaded guilty), and three were found not guilty. The Jerusalem Post reported in August 2000 that the Israeli government had admitted the accused were spies. The ten men convicted were sentenced to jail terms of up to thirteen years; the sentences were later reduced to terms of two to six years. Three of the men were pardoned by Khamenei in October 2002, and the last of them was released from prison by April 2003.

The Jason Rezaian Affair

Saberi's detention was a harbinger of similar actions the Iranian government would take on American journalists. Probably the most notable of these was the detention of Iranian-American journalist Jason Rezaian for more than a year. Rezaian was the Washington Post's bureau chief in Tehran when he was arrested by Iranian government officials on July 22, 2014. Rezaian was incarcerated in a detention facility while charges were brought against him, a process the Iranians delayed for almost nine months. In May 2014, Rezaian was convicted by the Iranian government in a trial that lasted less than one day. He would remain incarcerated until January 16, 2016.

Bibliography

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Morello, Carol, et. al. "Plane Leaves Iran with Post Reporter, Other Americans in Swap." Washington Post, 17 Jan. 2016,

www.washingtonpost.com/world/iran-releases-post-correspondent-jason-rezaian-iranian-reports-say/2016/01/16/e8ee7858-ba38-11e5-829c-26ffb874a18d‗story.html. Accessed 4 Sept. 2024.

"Roxana Saberi on Her Imprisonment in Iran." NPR, 28 May 2009, www.npr.org/2009/05/28/104612989/roxana-saberi-on-her-imprisonment-in-iran. Accessed 28 Sept. 2023.

"Roxana Saberi." CBS News, 2024, www.cbsnews.com/team/roxana-saberi. Accessed 4 Sept. 2024.

Saberi, Roxana. Between Two Worlds: My Life and Captivity in Iran. New York, Harper, 2010.