In late October 1976, when I was arrested as an opponent of the Shah in Iran, Jimmy Carter was still a presidential candidate. "The Committee" where I was initially taken—and where I spent the first six months of my yearlong incarceration—had by then an infamous reputation as an urban inferno, where "Apollo" referred not to the New Frontier of science, but to a new nadir of inhumanity. It was one technique from a long list of tortures—flogging, cigarette burning, crucifixion, sleep deprivation, hook-hanging, needles pushed under fingernails, genital electric shock. A helmet was placed on the head of the tortured victims, creating a powerful reverberation of their primal screams of pain, deafening them with the sounds of their own suffering.
By the time I arrived at the "Committee" much of this machinery of torture had stopped in anxious anticipation of Carter's presidential victory. Occasional beatings by the guards, and threats of execution or life in prison hurled at us by interrogators, were all we got. Cells were three and a half steps by four; no windows, no lights; dates and occasional slogans scratched on the walls were the only signs of past human habitation. The rug bore marks of past festering wounds, powerful reminders of the infamy of those who had inflicted the pain and of the heroism of those had suffered it in silence. There was no soap in the communal bathroom, where you were taken, blindfolded, only two times a day.
And then one day a bar of cheap soap appeared in the bathroom. Torture stopped altogether. In my third night at the "Committee," I was taken to the infirmary with high fever and pneumonia—results of Tehran's unusually cold winter that year and the fact that we were each given two threadbare blankets to be used as pillow, cover and bedding. As my blindfold was lifted by the guard inside the room, I first smelled and then saw a heap of bandages bloodied and stained by the infected wounds of torture victims—a scene worthy of Dante's Ninth Circle of Hell and the last reminder of the torture in the "Committee." We soon had visitors from Amnesty International and the International Red Cross, and within a year, nearly all of the almost four thousand political prisoners were "pardoned" by the Shah.
