The New Yorker:

Part memoir, part exposé, part cookbook, “The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club” reveals the hidden lives of women dissidents in the Islamic Republic.

By Robin Wright

The Evin House of Detention, in Tehran, is among the world’s most infamous prisons. It was built by Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran, to hold around three hundred political prisoners, including some of the ayatollahs who campaigned against the monarchy. After the 1979 Revolution, Iran’s theocracy expanded the gruesome compound, which includes gallows and an execution yard. It now holds fifteen thousand people.

During reporting trips to Iran, I sometimes stayed nearby, at the former Hilton—renamed the Esteghlal, or the Independence Hotel—in what was an otherwise upscale and leafy neighborhood in the foothills of the Alborz Mountains. I got nervous just driving by Evin. I had friends, including Americans, who were jailed there, usually in Ward 209. It housed political prisoners who were often detained on illusory charges, such as “spreading corruption on earth” and “enmity against God,” or ill-defined offenses like propaganda against the Islamic state. There are solitary-confinement cells without beds or toilets. Across the prison, wards are crammed with wall-to-wall double or triple-decker bunks. Even whispering can be punishable. Ward 209 has been a repository for detainees leveraged as pawns in Iran’s sadistic foreign policy. Journalists, diplomats, academics, businessmen, and environmentalists have been traded in lopsided deals for weaponry and money.

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