Haleh Esfandiari

Haleh Esfandiari (born March 3, 1940) is an Iranian-American academic and former Director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. Her areas of expertise include Middle Eastern women's issues, contemporary Iranian intellectual currents and politics, and democratic developments in the Middle East.

She met Bakhash in the early 1960s, when both were reporters at the Iranian newspaper Kayhan.

They have a daughter and two granddaughters.

Before Esfandiari left Iran, she had a career as a journalist and taught at the College of Mass Communication in Tehran.

She was also Deputy Secretary General of the Women's Organization of Iran and she was responsible for several museums and art and cultural centers.

She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Vienna.

She has lived in the United States since 1980, having left Iran with her husband and daughter because of the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

She holds dual U.S.-Iranian citizenship.

Esfandiari is married to Shaul Bakhash, a Jewish Iranian-American professor of history and Persian studies at George Mason University.

In the United States, Esfandiari taught courses on Persian language, contemporary Persian literature and the women's movement in Iran at Princeton University from 1980 to 1994.

She was a fellow at the Wilson Center from 1995 to 1996.

Esfandiari was a fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy in its first year of fellowship program in 1995.

Esfandiari is a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Grant.

She is known to have been close to Faiza (Faezeh) Hashemi Rafsanjani, an Iranian politician and a daughter of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former President of Iran.

She has served as director of the Middle East Program at the Wilson Center since 1997.

She was also involved with the Wilson Center's collaboration with the RAND Corporation's Initiative for Middle Eastern Youth.

Esfandiari is the author of the book Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran's Islamic Revolution (1997).

In 2004, she co-wrote a paper for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy's Policy Watch Special Forum marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Islamic Revolution in Iran.

In April 2005, she contributed a piece for Foreign Policy, titled "Iranian Woman Please Stand Up".

On December 30, 2006, Esfandiari was robbed at knifepoint by three men while on the way to the airport after visiting her ailing 93-year-old mother in Tehran, Iran, whom she had visited approximately twice per year over the past decade.

During this incident, the men threatened to kill her; then they stole her baggage and both her U.S. and Iranian passports.

Consequently, she was not permitted to leave the country.

When she applied for new travel documents, she was instead barred from leaving Iran and interrogated over a period of six weeks by authorities from the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence.

These interrogations, which totaled approximately fifty hours, focused primarily on her work at the Wilson Center.

During this time, she was allowed to return home each day, but "was pressured to make a false confession or to falsely implicate the Wilson Center in activities in which it had no part".

She was detained in solitary confinement at Evin Prison in Tehran, Iran for more than 110 days from May 8 to August 21, 2007.

Esfandiari was born and grew up in Iran.

On January 18, 2007, an interrogator and three other men (one holding a video camera) broke into her mother's apartment and entered Esfandiari's bedroom while she was taking an afternoon nap; they then took her laptop computer and other items.

In early May, she was asked again to confess to having taken part in anti-government activities, which she refused to do.

On May 7, 2007, she was told to report to the Ministry of Intelligence.

Upon her arrival there the next morning, she was taken into custody and driven to Tehran's Evin Prison.

She was one of four dual U.S.-Iranian citizens to be detained by the Iranian government under similar circumstances in 2007, the others being Radio Farda correspondent Parnaz Azima, Ali Shakeri of the Center for Citizen Peacebuilding at the University of California at Irvine, and Kian Tajbakhsh, an Iranian American consultant for the Open Society Institute.

A former FBI agent, Robert Levinson, has been missing in Iran since he disappeared in March 2007.

During her detention at Evin Prison, Esfandiari was allowed to make one- or two-minute telephone calls to her mother most evenings, but was not permitted to have contact with her other family members.

On May 15, 2007, Iranian Judiciary spokesman Ali Reza Jamshidi confirmed that Esfandiari was being investigated for crimes against national security and that her case was being handled by the Intelligence Ministry.

On May 21, 2007, Iran's state TV announced that the government of Iran had charged Esfandiari of seeking to topple that nation's ruling Islamic establishment.

The Ministry of Intelligence said that Esfandiari had admitted during interrogation that her institute was funded by the Soros Foundation.

On May 29, 2007, one day after a rare high-level meeting between Iranian and U.S. officials, Iran announced that its judiciary had brought charges of "endangering national security through propaganda against the system and espionage for foreigners" against Esfandiari.

Esfandiari's book My Prison, My Home: One Woman's Story of Captivity in Iran was published in September 2009.

Since 2011, Esfandiari has been a member of the board of the Peace Research Endowment.