Evin Prison

Her work took her across Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Middle East, including the Palestinian authorities, Iraq, and Afghanistan, always with a focus on civilians living under systems of power that sought to erase them.

In June 2003, Kazemi returned to Iran to document the families of political prisoners gathered outside Evin Prison in Tehran.

Not as a clandestine act, but standing in public doing the work journalists have done for generations, bearing witness.

What followed is no longer in dispute.

After emigrating to the U.S., Nouri visited Iran in the last days of the Shah's regime to visit an ill relative.

While there, Nouri was arrested, sentenced to solitary confinement in the infamous Evin Prison of the Shah's secret police, SAVAK.

Nouri has been an organizing member of peace delegations to Iran both in the fall of 2024 as well as in the spring-summer of 2026.

During those delegations, she has been a supporter of a school of Afghan children, refugees from the U.S. war on Afghanistan.

I was a little surprised, quite frankly, towards the end of your work where you talk about the regret that some of the MI6 officers had at the outcome of this operation, at just the sort of mass slaughter of Iranian communists.

And you also tell some very moving stories of one of their ringleaders who is just horribly tortured at Evin Prison and, you know, forced denunciations on TV, the sort of Cold War script of, "We have broken you down completely, and you will recite our lines for us." But I was a little surprised that the orchestrators of this plot in the West showed remorse.

What did they expect was going to happen exactly here?

Well, [laughs] this is a good question.

He was a former Iranian political prisoner.

He was held in Evin prison for six years A huge chunk of that in solitary.

And he talks at length about his experience inside Evin Prison, what it was like in there, how he survived, his experience in prison and his arrest and all of that and his final release.

release is all recounted in a new book that he has released just in recent weeks.

It's called Green Parrot.

A guard knocks on the door.

They're like, "Okay, now you're going to a car." So get in the car, drive off, and I, like, look up, and it's just, like, another institutional-looking building, and it's, it's Evin Prison.

We knew they were in Evin Prison, but you know, that's one of the worst places in the world to be.

I had horrible nightmares [laughs] about what was going on there.

I had terrible, uh, images of what Evin Prison is like because that is what it's like.

I didn't have to make anything up.

Iran is seriously considering putting these students, former students on trial.

One thing that the revolutionaries learned in 1979 is that the way to keep outsiders at bay is to take hostages.

Uh, he led the global-- coordinated, led the global coalition against ISIS.

Uh, under President Obama, he also led secret talks with Iran to free several American hostages held in Iran's notorious Evin Prison and received the James Foley Freedom Award for hostage diplomacy.

He is currently a global affairs analyst for CNN, a distinguished fellow at Harvard's Belfer Center and at the Atlantic Council.

He is most recently, and this is our topic today, the author of Brink: Inside the Race to Free the October 7 Hostages.

And in recent weeks, she's suffered two suspected heart attacks inside Zanjan Prison in northern Iran.

She was transferred to Zanjan Prison earlier this year from the notorious Evin Prison, moved away from her legal team in Tehran, away from scrutiny, away from anyone positioned to intervene or help her.

She's not in a hospital receiving care.

She is in a cell.