Timeline: U.S. Scholar Charged in Iran

The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars issued the following timeline of events in the case of Haleh Esfandiari, the scholar being held by Iran:

One Dec. 21, 2006, Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and a dual Iranian-American national, traveled from Washington, D.C., to Tehran, Iran, to visit her 93-year old mother for one week.

On Dec. 30, 2006, on her way to the airport to catch a flight back to Washington, the taxi in which Dr. Esfandiari was riding was stopped by three masked, knife-wielding men. They threatened to kill her, and they took away all of her belongings, including her Iranian and American passports.

On Jan. 3, when applying for replacement Iranian travel documents at the passport office, Dr. Esfandiari was invited to an "interview" by a man from Iran's Ministry of Intelligence.

Beginning on Jan. 4, she was subjected to a series of interrogations that stretched out over the next six weeks, sometimes continuing for as many as four days a week, and sometimes stretching across seven and eight hours in a single day. Dr. Esfandiari went home every evening, but the interrogations were unpleasant and not free from intimidation and threat.

The questioning focused almost entirely on the activities and programs of the Middle East Program at the Wilson Center. Dr. Esfandiari answered all questions fully; when she could not remember details of programs stretching back five and even eight years, the staff at the Wilson Center provided her all the information requested. As a public organization, all Wilson Center activities are on the public record. Repeatedly during the interrogation, she was pressured to make a false confession or to falsely implicate the Wilson Center in activities in which it had no part, but she refused.

On Friday, Jan. 15, in the third week of interrogations, Dr. Esfandiari was told (misleadingly as it turned out) the questioning was over. On Jan. 18, the interrogator and three other men showed up at Dr. Esfandiari's mother's apartment. Dr. Esfandiari was taking a nap and was startled to wake up and see the door to her bedroom open, her privacy violated, and three strange men, one of them wielding a video-camera, staring into her bedroom.

On Feb. 14, the lengthy interrogations stopped.

On Feb. 17, Haleh received one threatening phone call, and then she did not hear anything from her interrogators for 10 weeks.

On Feb. 20, Lee Hamilton, president and director of the Wilson Center, wrote to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad asking that Dr. Esfandiari be allowed to travel. However, President Ahmadinejad did not reply to the letter.

At the end of April or early May, she was telephoned once again and invited to "cooperate." In effect, she was being asked to make a confession. She refused to make the false statements.