Houshang’s Promise

They do not torture you on consecutive days,” Houshang Bouzari told me. “If you are tortured on successive days, you will die.” He was subjected to various forms of torture on a total of thirteen days over eight months, between June, 1993, and January, 1994 (the same number of days, Bouzari says, that William Sampson was tortured during his imprisonment in Saudi Arabia). On the first day, he was punched in the face. This, he felt at the time, was tolerable: “I think, punches I can take.” The next time they saw him, guards forced him to his knees and pushed his head into the Turkish toilet, a hole in the floor. As he struggled for breath, he had no choice but to ingest the feces swimming there.

He was kept at Evin Prison for forty days, then taken downtown to a secret place everyone had heard of without knowing its exact location. It was called Towhid, meaning “God is One.” “God is with us,” his captors told him upon his arrival there. “He is not with you.”

It was common knowledge that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had been kept there by the Shah: “Everybody knows his cell,” said Bouzari, “number 622 on the third tier, right side, next to the toilet.” Lifting his blindfold while left unguarded for a moment, he realized that he was in the same cell. His tortures and “interrogations” continued. The new prison was dirtier than Evin, and full of bugs. “If [the guards] were in a good mood I would get a shower every fortnight.” He sometimes saw the feet of other prisoners below his own blindfold – never their faces – but he could hear them. “People who were going to be executed would be brave enough to shout out their names.”

His own tortures increased. They hung him by his wrists from the ceiling of his cell and hit the bottoms of his feet with steel cables. This was not always done with malice; once, as he lay stretched and chained on an iron table, he managed to glimpse his tormentor from beneath his blindfold; the man hitting his feet – one of the most painful tortures conceivable and one that would leave him crippled a dozen years later – was calmly eating a banana.

Bouzari was never formally charged with anything. Instead, his interrogators (he calculates there were thirteen to six-teen in total, a figure he arrived at by keeping track of the sounds of different voices and by catching glimpses of their feet) made wild accusations. He was a spy. For whom? An industrial spy. An agent of the West. Ultimately, like nearly all other victims of torture (including Ma-her Arar and William Sampson), Bouzari gave in and signed a false confession, admitting that, yes, he was spying for the Italians.

“A few minutes before,” he says of his arrival at the first prison, “I had a $1.8 billion contract, twenty-eight people on my staff, big oil companies behind me. Then all of a sudden I have nothing. Their first goal was to remove me from the contract so that Mehdi could move in and have it.”

Indeed, one month after Bouzari was snatched from his apartment, in July, 1993, Iran declared the contract he had negotiated with the consortium of five European and Japanese companies void. A new company was quickly formed (as documented in the Iran Gazette) named oiec. President Rafsanjani was its titular head, the Minister of Oil, Gholam-Reza Agha-Zadeh (who is now in the UN’s crosshairs as head of Iran’s atomic-energy ogranization), was the chairman of the board, and Mehdi Hashemi was its managing director. Its main domain of activity, says Bouzari, was “facilitating the South Pars Project and all other offshore projects.”

Bouzari, though, had only one concern: basic survival. Astutely, he figured out that his best strategy was to convince his captors he was worth more alive than dead. (“They knew I had money,” he says.) It worked. His torturers contacted his wife, Fereshteh Yousefi, in Rome, using Saeed, a former employee of Bouzari’s, to make the call. Bouzari had heard Saeed had been kidnapped two months before himself and had been assisting the authorities. Saeed telephoned Fereshteh, informing her for the first time of Houshang’s situation, and asked for $5 million. In a second phone call, Fereshteh was told that Houshang had suffered a heart attack and would die if not taken to hospital, which they would do only when she paid. They then played a tape into the phone of Houshang screaming during one of his torture sessions. Fereshteh paid $3 million, all she could immediately lay her hands on, wiring the money to a Ministry of Intelligence account in the Central Bank of Iran. Ten days later, the torturers took Bouzari to a phone and allowed him to speak to his wife.

They refused, however, to release him. His jailers wanted the full $5 million and over the next six months they worked on him to get it. Bouzari knew the additional $2 million was his bargaining chip and used it to make a deal: if they let him go, he would get the money from Rome and return with it to Tehran.

Finally, on a cold January 22, 1994, dressed only in trousers and a T-shirt, Bouzari was dropped at the side of a busy traffic circle in downtown Tehran. After eight months, he was free. But only sort of. The authorities refused to allow Bouzari to leave for another six months. First he had to pay $250,000 to buy back his passport, then he was watched like a hawk. “They didn’t restrict my movements, but it was a limbo.” On two occasions he obtained an exit visa, went to the airport, bought a ticket, and boarded a plane before guards came to pull him off. Finally, in July, 1994, he succeeded in completing a flight to London, then Rome.