After Iran selected a more moderate president last year, Cecilia Sala, Italian journalistshe thought that perhaps something had changed in the land she was covering from afar.
Iran rejected her request for a journalist’s visa for two years, but granted it to her after the election. Colleagues and friends told her that Iran’s new government appeared more open to foreign journalists as it sought to mend relations with Europe.
Ms Sala, 29, has not traveled to Iran since 2021, before she uprising led by women and girls, they demanded an end to clerical rule. So she took a plane to Tehran, the capital.
“I wanted to see with my own eyes what had changed,” she said in an interview recently in Rome.
Instead, she gained first-hand experience of what hasn’t changed.
On December 19, while she was preparing an episode of the Italian podcast she hosts every day, two agents from the intelligence wing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps came to her hotel room in Tehran. When she tried to grab her phone, she said, one of them threw it across the room.
They blindfolded her, Ms. Sala said, and took her to the notorious Evin prison, where most of Iran’s political prisoners are held and some are tortured.
At one point, when she asked what she was accused of, she was told, she says, that she had committed “many illegal acts in multiple places.”
Iran used retention of foreign and dual citizens as the cornerstone of its foreign policy for almost five decades, since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The prisoners – journalists, businessmen, aid workers, diplomats, tourists – are actually hostages that Tehran uses with other countries to exchange prisoners and release frozen funds.
Mrs. Sala feared from the beginning that she was being taken as a hostage for exchange.
She said she had read that Italy had arrested an Iranian engineer three days earlier at the request of the United States. engineer, Mohammad Abedini Najafabadi, he was wanted for his alleged role in supplying Iran with a drone that was used in an attack that killed three American soldiers in Jordan.
“I was trapped in a game much bigger than myself,” she said.
Ms. Sala said she worried that she could remain in prison for years if the United States insisted on Mr. Abedini’s extradition, with her release contingent on a decision by incoming US President Donald J. Trump.
In Evin, the guards gave Ms. Sala a prison uniform, she said – a gray tracksuit, a blue shirt and pants, a blue hijab and a long covering known as a chador. They took away her glasses, without which she is almost blind.
Her cell had two blankets and no mattress or pillow. The light was on all the time, she said, and she couldn’t sleep.
It wasn’t until several days later, when she carefully inspected the bright yellow walls of her cell inch by inch, that she noticed a bloodstain, parallel tracks, she said, perhaps left by a previous prisoner marking the days, and the word “freedom” in Farsi.
She was blindfolded during hours of near-daily interrogations in which she sat facing a wall, she said.
Her interrogator spoke flawless English, she said, and made it clear he knew Italy well by asking her if she preferred Roman or Neapolitan pizza crust.
She was allowed to speak occasionally to her parents and boyfriend in Italy, she said, and when her mother told reporters there about her daughter’s conditions in prison, an interrogator told Ms. Sala that her remarks would result in Iran detaining her for much longer.
“Their game is to give you hope and then use your hope to break you,” Ms Sala said.
Through the narrow opening in the door of her cell, she heard, she said, crying, vomiting, footsteps and pounding that sounded like someone running and banging their head against the door.
“I thought that I would also end up like this if they didn’t take me out,” said Mrs. Sala. She was afraid that if they kept her for a long time, she said: “I would come back as an animal, not as a person.”
On January 8, Ms. Sala was on a plane home, and shortly thereafter, Italy released Mr. Abedini. Mrs. Sala was released in part with Elon Musk’s help, two Iranian officials said. “I played a small part,” Mr. Musk later wrote on X.
Ms. Sala said she can’t wait to get back to work.
“I’m in a hurry to get back to journalism,” she said. “To tell someone else’s story.”
Her plight resonated far and wide, especially among journalists who want to travel to Iran.
“Obviously I’m not going back to Iran,” Ms Sala said. “At least as long as the Islamic Republic exists.”
Farnaz Fassihi contributed reporting from New York.
