-The Washington Post correspondent
in Iran, Jason Rezaian,
was arrested, pulled from his home,
and placed in Iran's worst prison.
-Jason has been imprisoned in Tehran
for nothing more than writing about the hopes
and fears of the Iranian people.
We will not rest until we bring him home to his family.
-Breaking news on the American reporter.
Jason Rezaian has been convicted.
-The newsroom covered this as much as we could,
the way that we would cover any other story,
but we, as an organization, needed to speak up.
Who else was going to speak up for Jason, if not us?
-It was a Wednesday morning in the newsroom in July 2014.
I'd walked out of our morning 9:30 meeting
and was greeted halfway across the floor
by a foreign-desk administrator
who had a worried look on her face.
She said, "We've just gotten the call and Jason's been detained."
-I found out about Jason being arrested the same way
most everyone else here did:
I read about it in the newspaper.
-The first question is "Why? Why was Jason detained?"
There was nothing in what he'd written
that could've raised alarm.
There's kind of a script that we follow when this happens.
You look in the file drawer, and there's a piece of paper
that says, "In case of emergency, call X."
In this case, X was Jason's brother, Ali Rezaian.
What you don't do immediately is make a big, public fuss.
-Foreign correspondents can be detained for reasons
that are mysterious or totally unwarranted, of course.
Typically, in those instances,
they get released within a short period of time.
So, our hope was that, if we kind of played it cool
and just sort of made inquiries, that this would resolve itself.
We didn't know what the charges were.
We had no idea who, exactly, had arrested him.
-It wasn't until 24 hours
that we issued a public statement.
-In some ways, Iran is a democracy
with an elected president
and a normal parliament and government.
But Iran is really controlled by an unelected supreme leader
and by powerful security forces,
the most powerful of which is the Revolutionary Guard.
That was the institution that held Jason
and that's an institution really accountable to no one,
except for the supreme leader.
Evin prison, in Iran, is notorious.
What exactly happens in Evin, no one really knows,
but it was a place that sort of had that sense of foreboding.
-We were doing everything we could to get the message
to both sides.
We had greater access, of course,
to the elected officials.
-We occasionally would have the chance to talk with Javad Zarif,
who is the foreign minister of Iran.
-We weren't entirely clear whether the president
and the foreign minister could exert pressure,
even if they wanted to, and it wasn't clear to us
that they did want to and so it was very complicated.
-Iran doesn't recognize dual citizenship officially and,
because of that, when we inquired about Jason,
Iran's response was, "He's an Iranian citizen.
Butt out. He's one of ours."
-Well, there's no established playbook
for something like this, but we knew one thing
and that was that we had to keep Jason's plight in the forefront.
We just wanted to make ourselves a royal pain.
That they could not get away from this,
that this would be an issue
that would stick with them forever.
-We struggled with when we oughta become advocates.
It's not something that comes naturally, and Marty
was really the leader in that,
telling the newsroom that it was okay to be an advocate
when the cause was the freedom of a fellow journalist.
-I think that we owe that to the individuals
and we owe that to our profession.
-I reached out to the White House
chief of staff, Denis McDonough.
I remember sending him an email, saying,
"I won't ask you this often,
but I need to meet with you immediately
concerning a Washington Post journalist, Jason Rezaian."
Denis responded immediately.
It was the first of a number of meetings
we had at the White House.
In the government, with so many things
coming across the president's desk,
we wanted to make sure that Jason Rezaian's release
remained a top priority.
When a foreign leader would come to The Washington Post,
or elsewhere in Washington, we would reach out to them.
We'd brief them on Jason's situation
and ask for their support in raising it with the Iranians
at any opportunity they had,
and I think that pressure was helpful
in getting Jason eventually released.
-We worked with an outside lawyer named Bob Kimmitt.
-Bob Kimmitt had done this before
and had worked on securing the release of a Newsweek reporter.
Because he had prior experience,
he did help set up a framework for us.
You know, we worked very closely with Ali, Jason's brother.
He put his life on hold to do everything he could
to get Jason out of Iran.
-As Jason's boss, my job was to work as hard
as I could to get him released.
At the same time, we're a newspaper
and we need to cover the story of Jason's arrest.
What we did was for me
to separate myself from that news coverage.
-Doug, Fred, Marty, anyone who was involved in any of the talks
or these efforts, they became a part of the story.
They could've been news sources, but, in fact,
they would not tell me a lot of things.
I would be doing reporting.
We tried to pretty much stick with the facts
and play it straight,
to cover it the way we would anyone.
If there was any outrage to be expressed,
that would come in statements from Marty
or statements from Doug,
but it would not come from reporters.
-Normally, we like to just stay in the journalistic mode
and cover what's happening,
but, here, we were in the center of the news.
We, as an organization, needed to speak up.
I mean, who else was going to speak up for Jason, if not us?
-He's innocent. He's an accredited journalist.
-I ask you to free my son, Jason Rezaian.
-And he has now been detained in Evin prison for 315 days.
-Tonight, Jason is in prison in Iran for the crime
of practicing journalism.
-His incarceration, his trial,
the conditions of his imprisonment,
has been a disgraceful violation of human rights.
-About six weeks after Jason had been detained,
his wife, Yegi, was released and we began to think
that things were moving in the right direction.
We hoped that Jason would be next
and, not long after that, got real signals
that this was gonna be tied up with the nuclear negotiations.
-Well, the United States has not had relations with Iran
since the revolution
and the taking of the American hostages at the embassy in 1979,
and relations have just gone from bad to worse since then.
We had been holding some of their money
that the shah had paid as a downpayment,
intending to purchase weapons from us.
It was really only sort of in the last two years
before the nuclear deal
came about that they openly started having talks.
-We all look forward to...
-The nuclear negotiations were ongoing at the time, and it was our belief
that Jason's detention had been sort of folded up into that
and that he was a chip that they were holding
while they negotiated with the U.S. and other countries.
-The trial would start. There'd be like a day of trial
and, then, we'd hear nothing for four or five weeks.
And then the second day of trial and then a month,
and then the third day of trial.
And so part of the challenge was even knowing what was going on.
We thought that they were slow-rolling the trial
because of the Iran talks.
-The State Department gave no indications
that they were this closely tied together.
-We knew that he wasn't going to get anything close
to due process, as we understand that in the United States.
And so that was very concerning, to know that, you know,
we could work as hard as we possibly could on
a criminal defense and, at the end of the day,
we didn't believe it was gonna be a fair proceeding.
-There was no transparency about what was happening here.
There was no real due process.
The Iranian government had not put forward any evidence
that he had done anything wrong.
It wasn't a trial. It was a farce.
-At around 140 days, Jason was charged with espionage
and that raised immediate red flags for us.
-It did seem to take away any possibility that
he would be sort of released somewhat quickly and quietly.
-As you well know, there are four Americans in Iran,
three held on trumped-up charges,
according to your administration;
one, whereabouts unknown.
Can you tell the country, sir, why you are content,
with all the fanfare around this deal,
to leave the conscience of this nation,
the strength of this nation, unaccounted for,
in relation to these four Americans?
-Major, that's nonsense. And you should know better.
I've met with the families of some of those folks.
Nobody's content.
-We knew from talking to Ali and the family's decision
to speak about his conditions,
that, a few months in, he was not in good shape.
We really did not know the full extent
of the psychological abuse
he had to go through, both he and Yegi,
until months after they came back.
Jason and his family,
they jointly filed a federal lawsuit against Iran.
In the sometimes dry language,
they described some of those conditions.
-The real power in Iran is the supreme leader,
Ali Khamenei.
There are a close group of people surrounding Khamenei,
including Ali Larijani, the speaker of parliament.
He was someone who, in some ways,
was a shortcut to the inner sanctum.
-Larijani was going to be speaking in New York.
-And Marty and I made an effort to get to New York to see him.
We were promised a meeting.
-We saw that as an opportunity to discuss Jason's situation.
-We were told, "Well, there's no need for a meeting, Mr. Baron."
-And so, we raised a strong protest.
-The back-and-forth went on for a long time.
Ultimately, the Iranians relented.
We were able to make our case to the highest level
Iranian official we'd been able to meet.
-And, within about five, 10 minutes, I think,
it was indicated that we were done, and we left the room.
-I was in a staff meeting, about five minutes into it.
I look at my phone and I've got an email
from a State Department official, saying, "Call me."
This person says to me,
"Jason's going to be getting on a plane.
He's going to be released.
We need to get to Geneva."
So I hung up the phone.
I went looking for Doug.
Didn't see him anywhere around.
I sent him an email, saying, "Where the hell are you?"
So that left Marty and Marty was having the daily budget meeting
and I mouthed the words.
I said, "I need to talk to you, now."
-So I went out of that meeting.
It looked like a matter of some urgency.
-And I told him, "Jason is going to be released.
I'm going to Geneva tonight.
I don't have any more details now, but it's imminent".
And I had to pack and get to the airport.
-Doug got on a plane. I got on a subsequent plane.
-I went to the hotel and called a State Department official
who was there, and the official said,
"Okay, this is how it's going to play out.
Secretary Kerry, Javad Zarif, and Federica Mogherini of the E.U.
are going to sign the nuclear deal.
Immediately after that, Secretary Kerry
is going to sign papers
that will lift all the U.S. sanctions against Iran.
At about the same time, a plane will take off from Tehran.
It will have Jason and Yegi.
They will be among five American citizens who will be flown out.
At about the same time,
the United States will be releasing seven Iranians.
As soon as the plane is out of Iranian airspace,
we are going to reimpose sanctions
for ballistic missiles testing
and we are going to settle a court suit
in the International Court.
It involves payments from the shah's era,
a downpayment he made on some weapons,
and so we owe them $400 million of their money, plus $1.3 billion in interest.
And that's all going to happen over the span
of about three hours."
And I sat there like with my jaw open.
I started thinking, you know, "What is going to be my lede?
Oh, my god.
Any one of these things is a huge story."
And then, I took a deep breath and I start thinking,
"It's over. It's almost over.
Jason's going to be released,"
and I started getting all teary-eyed.
-On the day of his release, things were complicated.
We heard that the Revolutionary Guard
and the elected government were at odds
and they were even playing games where the Revolutionary Guard
were trying to foil this deal to embarrass the government.
-Those last few hours were really unnerving.
Yegi was missing.
We didn't know what could possibly have happened.
-We didn't know where they were, and the State Department
wasn't sure where they were.
The U.S. government was calling the Swiss.
The hours sort of kept getting pushed back
because they couldn't find Yegi.
-There was pressure because this deal
was coming together for the plane to depart.
-And there were times when the question in the air was,
"Should this plane leave, carrying Jason
and the two others, and leave Yegi behind?"
-Jason made it clear he was not going to leave
his wife in Tehran.
-Jason Rezaian, Washington Post journalist,
freed after a year and a half.
-Help welcome home, I hope, soon.
-Welcome home.
-Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post correspondent
who has spent the last 18...
-These journalists remind us why we fight so hard.
-Jason is free.
-We've achieved this historic progress through diplomacy,
without resorting to another war in the Middle East.
I want to also point out that,
by working with Iran on this nuclear deal,
we were better able to address other issues.
Several Americans, unjustly detained by Iran,
are finally coming home.
Jason Rezaian is coming home.
-Hey, pal.
-Probably a week or so after Jason got back,
he came to The Post.
-He walked in the building, and it was a hero's welcome.
-I think everyone was just on the verge of tears
the whole time. And Jason stood up...
-My Iranian interrogators told me that The Washington Post
did not exist, that no one knew of my plight,
and that the United States government
would not lift a finger for my release.
Today, I'm here in this room with the very people
who helped prove the Iranians wrong.
-We want people to know
that we're not gonna leave you out there.
If something happens to you as a journalist,
we're gonna be unrelenting until you're back,
and I can't say how proud I am of the job
the Washington Post newsroom did.
-And Kerry got up and, talking about the principle
of leaving no man behind.
-In the military, as you all know,
and in other dangerous callings,
the most sacred pledge that you can make
is to never leave a buddy behind.
Like most pledges, it's a lot easier to say than to do.
-It was very bittersweet, I think,
because there were Americans left behind.
-In the end, I think press freedom lost, in this case.
Jason was released as part of a bargain.
Iran got what it wanted in Jason being freed.
-This is a very dangerous time for journalists.
Some in the United States, but mostly, overseas.
Not even for Americans, as much as for
a lot of foreign reporters.
And the only shield that we have
is to speak up and to speak loudly.
-It's a reminder that, in most countries,
there is no press freedom.
I think it should cause us to really value
what we have here in this country.
If there's any lesson to be drawn from this terrible thing
that happened to Jason and his wife, it's that,
you know, these reporters are out in the field,
trying to be eyewitnesses on behalf of the American public,
and at times their lives can be at risk.