This Week
io
Tears
Behind
Bars
A pilot recalls
his ordeal as a
Jew accused of
spying in Iran.
EVELINA SHMUKLER
Special to the Jewish News
Swainsboro, Ga.
mong the 300 pictures
David Rabhan sketched
and painted during his 10
years in prison in Iran,
there is one of Iranian justice.
It is the traditional picture of a
woman, Justice, holding a scale. On
one side sits the defendant; on the
other, the prosecutor's finger tips the
scale over. Justice is not blind.
The sole blindfolded figure is the
defendant, who looks a little like
Rabhan himself. It is not surprising
because, he says, he was blindfolded
every time he left his cell, often to be
quizzed by a secret court about
whether he, an American and a Jew,
was a spy for the U.S. and for Israel.
Last week, as 13 Iranian Jews were
put on trial as Israeli spies, the 73-
year-old Rabhan sat on a high bar
stool in the kitchen of his 2,300-acre
farm, northwest of Savannah, and
talked about his ordeal as a prisoner
of the Iranian Revolution from 1980
to 1990.
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Evelina Shmukler writes for our sister
paper, the Atlanta Jewish Times.
He also recalled his life before Iran
— an Orthodox Jew who served in
the Green Berets and piloted Jimmy
Carter in his successful 1970 race for
Georgia governor. Legend has it that
he inspired Carter's historic inaugural
statement opposing segregation, the
act that catapulted the former peanut
farmer into the national spotlight and
the White House.
And he talked about his new life,
with a multiplicity of business ven-
tures that include catfish farms,
infant formula and breakfast cereal
and an equally intense family life,
with two wives, three children and 14
grandchildren.
He still favors the jumpsuits that
made him a minor local celebrity in
Atlanta in the 1970s.
That was before he faced an
Iranian "justice" process that includ-
ed 7.5 years of waiting in nine differ-
ent Iranian prisons, including
Teheran's notorious Evin, to learn the
charges against him. He was acquit-
ted of the civil charges of financial
misdoings, but convicted of spying
for Israel and America.
He lost, he said, what he counts as
$7.5 million in Iranian investments.
In September of 1990, he said,
they let him go, with a letter of apol-
ogy for a mistaken prosecution.
,
Captive Empathy
He knows what the 13 Iranian Jews
being held in Shiraz must be going
through. They were probably picked
up unexpectedly, Rabhan muses, just
as he was.
The hardest part, Rabhan says, was
being told he would be asked a ques-
tion the following day, and then not
called for four months. It was the
mind games they played with you, he
says.
To survive, he played them back.
He was first imprisoned in the
abandoned summer home of an
Iranian prince — in the room where
the tennis pro used to stay, Rabhan
recalls.
The interrogator's first question,
when he came to see Rabhan after
three weeks, was, "What is your
name?" Rabhan responded sarcastical-
ly, "I've been in here three weeks, and
you don't know my name?"
Food processing led Rabhan to
Iran in 1976. The country, at the
time under the rule of the Shah, was
friendly to U.S. citizens, and Rabhan
moved there to develop a fish protein
concentrate that could be used in
infant formula and other foods. He
opened a number of factories to pro-
duce infant formula in Iran, and by
all accounts, including his own, was a
successful businessman.
It was during a visit to one of his
factories early in 1980, after the
Islamic revolution that put Iran's gov-
ernment into the hands of the
Ayatollah Khomeini and his follow-
ers, that Rabhan was stopped at a
roadblock and arrested.
At first they accused him of civil
charges of violating Iran's financial
laws. Later they changed that to
criminal counts of spying for the
United States and Israel and of
insulting the Koran. They said he was
working on orders from Carter.
He denied it all.
His experience matched that of
thousands of people swept up by the
Islamic revolution. According to Lisa
Hajjar, a professor of sociology at
Morehouse College who has studied
torture in the Middle East, the period
just after the revolution in 1978 saw
a huge increase in the number of
prisoners in Iranian jails. This led to
crowded conditions in the jails and
the growing use of brutality against
potential enemies of the state.
Rabhan spent five years and
eight months in solitary confine-
ment, in a cell about the size of
his shower in his Swainsboro
home. He used to tease his
guards, he says, by calling them to
his cell at about 10 a.m. and
telling them, "I'm not taking any
calls today."
He filled his days with long walks
during exercise periods and with
books, thoughts and his art. He had
three books with him — Gore Vidal's
1886, Umberto Eco's The Name of
the Rose, and a French one whose
name he can't recall. He would read
them over and over, six pages a day.
He also had a copy of the Koran
and read it more than a dozen times,
becoming something of an expert on
the Islamic text. And, he says, laugh-
ing, though he didn't go to jail to
learn Farsi, he did become fluent in
the language.
He also smuggled in pens, pencils
and paints, drawing a series of faces
on a plastic bag — men in typical
Iranian dress from all over the coun-
try — as well as caricatures and
paintings of himself before and after
solitary confinement.
The after picture reveals a bearded
man with haunted eyes. Rabhan used
the bread they gave him to eat as
clay, sculpting tiny figures, including
a full chess set.
He was was hauled before the
Islamic Revolutionary Court, a hid-
den and jury-less "trial" that went off
and on for more than seven years.
None of his days in court were
particularly fair. One of them was
televised, but that didn't help much.
The judge, who also served as the
defense attorney, was preoccupied
with his own hair and clothing,
Rabhan said.
The Mental Games
David Tabhan and his post-solitary
confinement portrait.
Rabhan said the hardest part of his
trials were the mental games: He
would be called in the morning,
spend the day outside the interroga-
tor's room listening to the screams of
others, and then was sent back to his
cell that evening without being ques-
tioned.
"I think they respected people who
didn't cow down, and wail and carry
on," he says. "I didn't cry when I got
beat. I just went back to my cell and
hurt, that's all."
Rabhan said that when he was
finally sentenced — more than seven
years after his arrest — it was a relief
because it meant there was "a light at
the end of the tunnel."
He was supposed to be released in
April 1990, but something went awry
and the actual release didn't come
until September. He said they handed
him a letter of apology and sent him
home to Georgia.
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