THE INSIDE STORY
Roger Cooper reveals
the secrets of how to survive five years in an Iranian jail
IF YOU are pulled in off the street and thrown into an unheated cell in winter, your clothes and even your watch re- moved, as happened to me in Teheran in 1985, your first thoughts tend towards keeping warm and wondering what the time is. You quickly adjust to your prison `uniform', in my case khaki trousers and a cotton jacket. The trousers were made, long before, for a man with minuscule legs and a vast girth, impossible to keep up and cold below the knees, while the metal- buttoned jacket was uncomfortable to sleep in and far from warm. I solved the time problem by the angle of sunlight on an outside wall. After lights out the bars of the cell cast two sets of hateful shadows on the walls, pockmarked with scratched mes- sages and squashed mosquitoes, in case I forgot where I was.
My subconscious was desperately trying to do just that, and for the first few months my graphic technicolour dreams featured mirth and parties, good food and convivial- ity. Later, reality intruded and whenever I dreamed of familiar people and places the programme would often end with my returning to jail because my 'leave' was up. To keep warm I started on-the-spot jog- ging and body exercises, and was pleasant- ly pleased to see pounds of flab disappear- ing. There was a rota for cleaning the latrines, but I began to volunteer for this in order to get out of the cell more. I was taken to the washing area blindfolded three times a day for four minutes with a quick shower once a week, but after cleaning I could claim an extra shower. As I had expected, one could find useful goodies in the garbage can, which the guards also used: a newspaper, a pair of just-serviceable socks, a not quite empty tube of toothpaste.
My first prison was a barracks for milit- ary police trainees. They certainly liked to practise on us and were needlessly harsh and spiteful, perhaps venting their griev- ances at the square-bashing they were undergoing.
Between interrogations, always blind- folded and accompanied by slaps and punches when I refused to confess to being a British spy, I tried to find ways of amusing myself without books. I made a backgammon set with dice of bread, and evolved a maths system based on Roman numerals but with an apple pip for zero. Orange pips were units, plum stones were fives, and tens and hundreds were position- al. This enabled me to calculate all the prime numbers up to 5,000, which I re- corded in dead space where the door opened and could speculate on the anoma- lies in their occurrence.
More practically, I kept track of meals and guards, a habit I kept up until I was freed, so that after a time the personnel would sometimes ask me when they were next on duty or what we would have for supper. I spent a lot of time practising and evolving the rules of Flicket, a game played with plumstones and a blindfold with elaborate scoring rules and tactical possibi- lities. It is the one game in life I've really excelled at, possibly because I had no competition, but I think even when it sweeps the world, and young Peles are emerging from the slums of Rio to earn Olympic glory with perfect rounds, I will always be a good club-class player.
During most of my time in jail chess was haram (religiously unacceptable), but the Imam (Ayatollah Khomeini) had second thoughts and it is now permitted — along with boxing, I was sorry to hear. Chess sets are anyway cumbersome to make and use clandestinely, so I concentrated on bridge once I had made a miniature pack of cards. Rubber bridge was not a great success, but I played a lot of hands duplicate-style, in different contracts, and with different de- fences.
For 18 months I had no books at all, though I did manage to liberate one or two while left unguarded in an interrogation room. I cannot imagine who in Evin had owned a French dictionary of sociology, an Enid Blyton in German, and a manual of chemistry in Bulgarian, but they were better than nothing. Later I was allowed to request some books, Desert Island Discs style, and inevitably asked for the Bible, Chaucer, Shakespeare, 'and if it doesn't sound too presumptuous', to quote the old joke, 'a blank exercise book'.
They say there's a quotation in
Shakespeare for every situation, and with the Bard's complete works to hand I soon found two relevant passages in The Win- ter's Tale to describe my situation, which I was not allowed to discuss when my brother visited me. So in separate letters to my parents I sent 'coded' messages, prais- ing Hermione's speech beginning, 'Since what I am to say, . . .' and Leontes". . . though I with death and with/Reward did threaten and encourage him,' to let them know what was happening to me. Unfortu- nately neither of them looked up the references, so my efforts were wasted.
Before my 'literate' period I developed a wide range of mental games and exercises such as palindromes and anagrams. My inspirations here were the famous 'Flit on, cheering angel' (Florence Nightingale) and I had some reasonable successes with the names of friends, colleagues and public figures, now lost — though three were quoted in The Spectator last week by John Simpson.
Although not conventionally musical, I did find I missed music badly and tried to compensate for this with the `Evin Song Book', all the songs I could remember beyond the first line or two, a pitifully small number. I would sing these quietly when a friendly guard was on duty. This gave me an idea for an anthology of songs, which I hope to develop now I'm free. My grandfather was the Irish poet Alfred Perceval Graves, whose 'Father O'Flynn', first published in The Spectator over 100 years ago, is something of a national anthem, so perhaps some hereditary talent and song-writing ability has been lying dormant all these years. Anyway, to my surprise I would often wake up with the most marvellous tunes in my head, some- times even accompanied by rudimentary lyrics. Since I do not know musical nota- tion, many of these got lost, but one or two have survived through repetition and I hope to present my old army unit, embar- rassingly the Intelligence Corps, with a regimental ditty I composed (refrain: 'The Unsung Corps, the Corps that really knows the score. The Corps that no-one's heard of is the Corps that won the War.')
I soon realised that the mysterious joke factories people assume exist somewhere must, of course, be prisons. I found a huge supply of shaggy-dog stories and Irish jokes, even cartoons, although I can't draw, welling to the surface, especially in the dark early days. Clearly some kind of Freudian defence mechanism was at work. One serious party game for gourmets I thought up was to make lists of ten favourite foods (fruit, fish, chicken recipes etc). The rule is, if there could be only ten of each category left in the world, which would you choose? After hours of anguish I would usually end up with the common workaday species, apples rather than man- goes, and, oddly enough, the ones I often saw in jail (imagine a world without potatoes, onions and rice).
It was over 40 years since I had last studied mathematics formally (for the old School Certificate) although, as a journal- ist writing on economics and a marketing manager in the oil industry, I always had to be reasonably numerate. I began by trying to remember how to solve quadratic equa- tions and prove Pythagoras's theorem, which took days and consumed many sheets of precious paper (purloined from my interrogators or recycled orange wrap- pings). Before I could reconstruct the classic solution for the square of the hypotenuse proposition I found two solu- tions of my own, though I am not quite sure they were both valid. Once I got my calculator back I could explore numbers. I found myself fascinated by recurring de- cimals, especially reciprocals and their multiples. I noticed that if you divide 1 by 7 and 2 by 7 the digits 28571 occur in both, and it soon became clear that the decimal series were really circles of digits totalling one less than the denominator (so 6 digits when 7 is the denominator). Then I disco- vered that these circles are in fact geomet- ric progressions, for which I discovered a formula. There were many other interest- ing anomalies and curiosities. One party trick I evolved was to be able to convert a decimal series back into a vulgar fraction. For example, if you divide 101 by 103 you get a decimal series (0.9805825 . . .) It goes on for 102 digits before repeating.
The trick is to turn that back into the two numbers. When I at last got some maths books I did find a cumbersome method using quite advanced algebra. I worked out a terribly simple way, using an ordinary pocket calculator. In case any Spectator readers wish to solve this problem them-
selves I won't give my solution here. `Answers please on a postcard', as they say, and I will offer my solution in a future issue.
For almost three years I was totally deprived of contact with other prisoners, and for most of that time had no access to news of any kind. So when I did get my first newspapers, especially non-Persian ones, there was a lot I could not under- stand. I had no idea what 'the Chernobyl factor' was or who the Princess Royal and Fergy were, and I'm still not sure what Mrs Thatcher said at Bruges. My interrogators realised belatedly that this was a mistake, as it meant the political analysis I wrote for them was often out of date. I should explain here that, throughout my inter- rogation and even after it had formally ended, I felt it useful to try to explain to the Iranians how Britain, and the West in general, actually worked. Their ideas were often totally at odds with reality: for example, many Iranians believe that the Queen secretly appoints the American president; the officials of the Ministry of Information, as Iran's counter-espionage organisation is misleadingly called, have some equally bizarre ideas. Britain is seen as a sly neo-colonialist, 'an old fox' more skilled in politics than the Americans or Russians, and therefore potentially more dangerous.
In the past year or so I've even had regular copies of The Spectator, the Week- End Financial Times, the Economist and Chatham House's monthly journal, so I'm far less of a Rip Van Winkle than I would have been had I been released earlier.
Nevertheless, I'm still suffering from severe culture shock. The electronic re- volution passed me completely by in Evin, where I could not even switch a light on for five years, and in London I'm a real country cousin. I find telephones and electric kettles difficult to use, could not get out of the street door of my flat this morning and feel quite disoriented in the underground. Already I'm beginning to adapt to the new routines, use a knife and fork, eat at a table and sleep in a bed, although I haven't quite got the courage to drive a car or ride a bicycle yet. Friends are naturally asking me what my plans are.
Whatever I do decide I am sure it will include supporting Prisoners Abroad the main charity for British prisoners throughout the world, which sends books and magazines, arranges visits and pen- pals and provides desperately needed legal and other advice — and working to im- prove relations between Iran and the West. Some people are surprised at this and expect me to be bitter at my experience.
Considering I have spent most of my working life in or connected with Iran, I am not going to allow a little thing like five years of wrongful imprisonment to poison my love for a unique country and civilisa- tion; and I think there is still much I can do to bridge the understanding gap between Iran and us (it's mutual). This is not the place for a detailed analysis of where Iran is going or the prognosis for Irano-British relations, but clearly these are questions I shall be trying to answer. Above all I shall do what I can to help secure the release of the hostages in Lebanon and the one Commonwealth and three Western prison- ers I left behind in Evin, including another Briton nobody seems to be aware of, and whom I was never allowed to meet.