LANDSTUHL, Germany — Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post reporter who was freed Saturday after almost 18 months of incarceration in an Iranian prison, met with Post editors Monday for the first time since his release and said he was “feeling good” physically as he recovers in a U.S. military hospital here.
Washington Post executive editor Martin Baron and foreign editor Douglas Jehl said Mr. Rezaian “looked good” during their two-hour meeting in a conference room at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center near the Ramstein Air Base.
Mr. Rezaian, 39, was freed Saturday from Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison. He was flown out of Iran on Sunday along with two other freed Iranian Americans as part of a prisoner deal with Iran linked to the implementation of a landmark nuclear agreement.
Mr. Baron and Mr. Jehl said Monday evening that the face-to-face meeting so soon after Mr. Rezaian’s return was an encouraging sign. Doctors and psychiatrists at the hospital are still assessing Mr. Rezaian’s health after the ordeal, and the recovery process in similar cases can take months or years.
“I want people to know that physically I’m feeling good,” said Mr. Rezaian, wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt and blue jeans provided to him on board the Swiss plane that flew the released prisoners to freedom. “I know people are eager to hear from me, but I want to process this for some time.‘‘
Also released in the deal were former Marine Amir Hekmati, 32, of Flint, Mich., and Christian pastor Saeed Abedini, 35, of Boise, Idaho. Accompanying Mr. Rezaian on the flight were his wife, Yeganeh Salehi, and Iranian, and his mother, Mary Rezaian. A fourth Iranian American released as part of the arrangement, Nosratollah Khosravi-Roodsari, opted to remain in Iran — although it seemed nobody in Iran knew he had been arrested and nobody seemed to know any more about him. An American student who was freed separately, Matthew Trevithick, 30, flew out Saturday on his own.
Rev. Abedini had been imprisoned since July 2012 for organizing home churches. Mr. Hekmati spent more than four years behind bars on spying charges following his arrest in August 2011 during a visit to see his grandmother.
The historic nuclear accord with Iran dropped economic sanctions against the country and returned tens of billions of dollars in frozen assets in exchange for restrictions and tighter safeguards on Iran’s nuclear program.
Members of Mr. Hekmati’s family and the congressman from their district, Rep. Daniel Kildee, D-Mich., met with Mr. Hekmati at the U.S. military hospital for about 15 minutes Monday, the family announced.
On Monday, Mr. Rezaian described months of extraordinarily limited human interaction, and said that at one point he spent 49 days in solitary confinement. Later, he was put in a 15-by-20-foot room with three cots and no mattresses. For exercise, he said, he would walk for up to five hours every day around an 8-by-8-foot concrete courtyard.
Mr. Rezaian also talked about some of the conditions of his detention, which Mr. Baron and Mr. Jehl said they could discuss only partially. For most of his time in prison, Mr. Rezaian said he was being held by Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guard, a military force aligned with hard-liners in the government that answers to Iran’s supreme leader and acts independently of the presidency.
Even when Mr. Rezaian was brought to hospitals, twice for eye infections and once for a groin infection as his health suffered in prison, they were facilities run by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
There were concerns that Mr. Rezaian could be used as a bargaining chip by hard-liners in the Iranian government who wanted to derail talks over the nuclear deal. It was only in the final hours of his incarceration that Mr. Rezaian said he was transferred to the Ministry of Intelligence, a body more closely allied with President Hassan Rouhani.
Even once the nuclear deal had been announced, Mr. Rezaian’s own departure from Iran was “touch and go until the last minute.” The plane was delayed for hours, and U.S. officials were privately concerned that the deal had gone bad. Those hours, Mr. Rezaian said, were “hugely stressful.”
The Iranian authorities held the wife and mother of Mr. Rezaian without telephones for hours in a separate room at a Tehran airport Sunday before finally agreeing under American pressure to let them leave
“I was not handed over to the Swiss until I was actually on the plane,” he said. Switzerland represents U.S. interests in Iran in the absence of diplomatic relations between Tehran and Washington.
When the plane finally took off, the passengers — including Mr. Rezaian, the other released Iranian Americans, and Mr. Rezaian’s wife and mother — burst into applause. When they left Iranian airspace, the passengers applauded again.
Later on Monday, Mr. Rezaian was permitted to leave the hospital for several hours to meet at a nearby guest house with his brother, Ali Rezaian, along with his wife, mother and his visiting congressman, Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif.
“I want to thank my family, especially the efforts of my brother Ali, and my wife in Iran and my mother everywhere she was,” Mr. Rezaian said. “They have been incredible. I also want to thank everybody at The Post and my colleagues in other media as well, as well as everybody in the U.S. government who played an important role in my release.‘‘
Once the Americans had left Iran, the Obama administration announced new sanctions related to participation in Iran’s ballistic missile program. The sanctions, which applied to 11 people and companies, were issued under U.S. restrictions that remain in place despite the lifting Saturday of international sanctions linked to Iran’s nuclear program.
The Treasury Department said the new sanctions apply to, among others, the Mabrooka Trading Co., based in the United Arab Emirates, and its networks there and in China. It said they have used front companies to deceive foreign suppliers about the true end-users of “sensitive goods for missile proliferation.”
The Iranian government and military said Monday that the new sanctionsshow continued U.S. hostility toward Iran and vowed defiantly to further develop Iran’s missile program.
Iran’s defense minister, Revolutionary Guard Brig. Gen. Hossein Dehghan, accused Washington of demonstrating “hatred toward the Iranian nation” with its “useless attempts to weaken Iran’s defense power.” He said Iran’s missile industries “are fully home-made” and impervious to sanctions, the semiofficial Fars News Agency reported.
Gen. Dehghan said Iran would expand its program by “unveiling new missile achievements soon.”
The Iranian Foreign Ministry said in a statement: “Iran’s missile program has not been designed for carrying nuclear weapons at all, and therefore it doesn’t violate any international rule.”
Separately, Mr. Rouhani, the Iranian president, pledged to the visiting chief of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency that Iran would “never” pursue nuclear weapons, even without the intensified safeguards imposed by the newly implemented nuclear deal.
“We will be committed to the fact that our nuclear program is peaceful and will never deviate to weapons,” he told Yukiya Amano, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in a meeting in Tehran, the Mehr News Agency reported.
In Landstuhl, Rep. Robert Pittenger, R-N.C., who arrived Monday as part of a welcoming delegation for Rev. Abedini, said he joined in campaigning for Rev. Abedini’s freedom after hearing Rev. Abedini’s wife, Naghmeh, speak at a church in Charlotte about the case. Ms. Abedini is expected to arrive today, he said.
Mr. Pittenger said by telephone from the hospital grounds that he had not seen Rev. Abedini but that he had been briefed that all the freed hostages were “generally speaking, in pretty good condition.”
“Physically, at least,” he added.
Mr. Pittenger said doctors would test for communicable diseases to see if any of the patients needed to be isolated, followed by “longer-term evaluations and analyses with the doctors and psychiatrists.”
“Particularly with Saeed, it was three and a half years in that kind of condition,” he said. “It’s going to have an emotional impact of a serious nature.”
There are no estimates on when the men may be discharged from the hospital.
“I’m told that when people come here, they spend from five to 10 days,” Pittenger said. “It can be shorter, but having been in isolation, and mental torture for three and a half years, I don’t think they’re going to jump out of here real quick,” he said.
In a telephone call with the Post’s editors before they were able to meet Monday, Mr. Rezaian said that isolation was the most difficult part of his time in prison. Still, snippets of information had made it back to him, among them that his Christmas greetings conveyed via his mother from prison had “made the rounds and reached everybody, which is what I intended.”
He also said that he found escape in the novels that he was allowed to read while in prison facing trial for spying.
Mr. Rezaian’s health was reported to have suffered from poor conditions at the prison and a lack of medicine for his high blood pressure. Family members earlier this year said that he had lost weight and suffered from back pain, and chronic infections.
He told the editors that his health had improved in the past several months.
Evin Prison, where Mr. Rezaian was held, has been used for decades by both Iran’s Islamic revolutionary government and the monarchy it overthrew in 1979 to incarcerate - and, human rights groups say, abuse - political prisoners. Mr. Rezaian was tried in secret there last year on charges including espionage and sentenced to an unspecified prison term.
Months of negotiations resulted in the release of the four Iranian-Americans from prison in exchange for seven Iranians held in the U.S., six of them also dual nationals.
And rapid-fire diplomacy managed to get 10 U.S. Navy sailors and their boats released from Iranian custody in less than 24 hours last week — an unthinkably quick turnaround compared to past cases where foreigners found themselves in Iranian territory.
The U.S. military released new details on Monday about how 10 Navy sailors were taken captive briefly by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in the Persian Gulf last week, but it remains unclear how the sailors first ended up in Iranian territorial waters before their capture.
The sailors were detained Jan. 12 off Farsi Island as they were traveling in two riverine command boats from Kuwait to Bahrain, U.S. military officials said. The island is home to a closely guarded Iranian military base. The sailors were released the following morning.
A defense official said that the boats veered into Iranian waters first, and then one of them experienced a mechanical problem.
In a statement released Monday, U.S. military officials reiterated that that sailors are in good condition. The only equipment apparently taken from the boats are two digital SIM cards that were in two satellite phones, U.S. military officials said.
U.S. Central Command officials said that the riverine command boats, or RCBs, departed at 9:23 a.m. local time with a planned path down the middle of the Persian Gulf that would not touch through territorial waters of any country other than Kuwait and Bahrain. The boats were expected to receive additional fuel alongside the Coast Guard cutter Monomoy in international waters around 2 p.m.
At about a 2:10 p.m., Navy officials received a report that the sailors were being approached by the Iranians. By 2:29 p.m., it became hard to reach the U.S. boats, and by 2:45 U.S. Naval Central Command (NAVCENT) was notified that the U.S. military had completely lost communications with the sailors, according to a timeline of events released Monday.
“Immediately, NAVCENT initiated an intensive search and rescue operation using both air and naval assets including aircraft from USS Harry S. Truman and the U.S. Air Force, and U.S. Coast Guard, U.K. Royal Navy and U.S. Navy surface vessels,” according to the statement released Monday.
There were two aircraft carrier strike groups nearby at the time, U.S. military officials said. The aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman’s group was 45 miles southeast of Farsi Island, and the French Charles de Gaulle strike group was 40 miles north of the island. Combined, they operate dozens of planes and helicopters.
“NAVCENT attempted to contact Iranian military units operating near Farsi Island by broadcasting information regarding their search and rescue effort over marine radio, and separately notified Iranian coast guard units via telephone about the search for their personnel,” the statement released Monday said. “At 6:15 p.m. (GMT), U.S. Navy cruiser USS Anzio received a communication from the Iranians that the RCB Sailors were in Iranian custody and were ‘safe and healthy.‘”
The Navy’s initial operational reports show that while on the mission, the boats deviated from their planned course on the way to refueling -- something Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter and other U.S. officials have previously called a “navigation error.” The U.S. military said Monday that a Navy investigation “will determine what caused the change in courses why the RCBs entered into Iranian territorial waters in the vicinity of Farsi Island,” but it did not provide any reason for the time being.
“At some point one RCB had indications of a mechanical issue in a diesel engine which caused the crews to stop the RCBs and begin troubleshooting,” the U.S. military said Monday. “As the RCBs travel together, the second RCB also stopped. This stop occurred in Iranian territorial waters, although it’s not clear the crew was aware of their exact location. While the RCBs were stopped and the crew was attempting to evaluate the mechanical issue, Iranian boats approached the vessels.”
Two Iranian craft carrying armed troops initially approached the U.S. boats, followed by two more. No shots were exchanged, but some Iranians boarded the U.S. craft while others watched over them while wielding mounted machine guns, according to the U.S. military.
“At gunpoint, the RCBs were escorted to a small port facility on Farsi Island where the U.S. Sailors disembarked and were detained for approximately 15 hours,” the U.S. military said. “At this point there are no indications that the Sailors were physically harmed during their detainment. The Navy command investigation will focus on the Sailors’ treatment while in Iranian custody, including any interrogation by Iranian personnel. All indications are that the RCB crews were detained by Iranian military personnel operating from Farsi Island.”
The sailors were released the following day in the same two boats, and later taken ashore by U.S. aircraft aboard the cruiser USS Anzio and the USS Harry S. Truman, military officials said. U.S. official have previously said that they were sent to Qatar for debriefing and a well-being check, while the boats were taken to their original destination in Bahrain by other U.S. sailors.
The New York Times and Associated Press contributed.
First Published: January 19, 2016, 5:10 a.m.
