[R-G] Lawyer Says Reporter Had Iran Document

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/world/middleeast/14iran.html>
May 14, 2009
Lawyer Says Reporter Had Iran Document
By NAZILA FATHI

TEHRAN — The case against Roxana Saberi, the Iranian-American
journalist who was convicted here on charges of spying and then
released this week on appeal, was based on her possession of a
classified document and on trips she made to Israel, one of her
lawyers said in an interview on Wednesday.

The document, a 2003 report on the planned United States invasion of
Iraq, was prepared by a research organization affiliated with the
office of the Iranian president at the time, Mohammad Khatami, the
lawyer, Saleh Nikbakht, said.

He said that Ms. Saberi found the article on a desk in the offices of
the Expediency Council, a group of senior figures who advise the
supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. She worked there as
a translator, putting English-language articles on its Web site.

The Interior Ministry interrogators who questioned Ms. Saberi thought
that the article was confidential or secret at the time she obtained
it, Mr. Nikbakht said, but it was actually only classified, which is
not as restricted. In the intervening years, he said, it was
declassified. He said the interrogators’ suspicions were also raised
by Ms. Saberi’s possession of some internal papers from a conservative
political party as well as by the trips to Israel.

Ms. Saberi, 32, was arrested in January for buying wine, an act that
is illegal in Iran, and was later charged with working without press
credentials, which were revoked in 2006. In April she was convicted on
charges of spying for Washington and sentenced to eight years in
prison.

She had been living and working in Iran since 2003, reporting on a
variety of issues for news organizations, including National Public
Radio and the British Broadcasting Corporation. While she did travel
to Iraq in the early years of the war, she does not seem to have
reported on the American invasion for the BBC.

An NPR spokeswoman, Dana Davis Rehm, said Ms. Saberi did not cover the
American invasion of Iraq for the network, or do background work for
it on that subject. “We are completely confident that the documents
Roxana possessed are not relevant to her work for NPR,” Ms. Rehm said.
She said Ms. Saberi did not travel to Israel on behalf of NPR.

Mr. Nikbakht said that Ms. Saberi made two trips to Israel in 2006,
using her Iranian passport to get as far as Syria or Lebanon and then
her American passport to go to Israel. Iranians are not permitted to
travel to Israel. It was those trips that first caught the attention
of the Intelligence Ministry, he said.

“You have to put yourself in the mind-set of the intelligence people,”
Mr. Nikbakht said. “When they put all this together they came up with
the charges against her. She traveled to Israel and they became
suspicious that she was taking confidential documents for the
Americans.”

Mr. Nikbakht said that he and another lawyer, Abdolsamad Khoramshahi,
secured her release by arguing that the documents were not classified
or confidential, and that Iran and the United States were not at war.
Therefore, he contended, the charges against her could not amount to
spying.

Ms. Saberi’s arrest followed President Obama’s overture to Iran, the
first from an American president since the 1979 Islamic Revolution and
the taking of American hostages at the United States Embassy. American
officials, including Mr. Obama, had dismissed the charges against her
as politically motivated and urged her release.

Political commentators here said her release reflected a consensus
among the Iranian authorities about sending a signal to the United
States that a thaw in relations might be possible. “The court played a
role in her release,” said Alireza Rajaee, a political analyst in
Tehran. “But we cannot deny the hard-liners’ willingness to let her
go.”

During her appeal, Ms. Saberi admitted copying the article on the Iraq
invasion and said that an “admirer” at the conservative political
party had provided her with the party’s internal papers. No charges
were brought against her for possessing those papers.

“We argued that none of the documents were secret or confidential
because they did not bear the title,” Mr. Nikbakht said. “Ms. Saberi
also said she had never used any of them.” He said she had told the
court that she was collecting the information for her book on “the
nature of power in Iran,” and that she had traveled to Israel to look
for a job.

Mr. Nikbakht said that Ms. Saberi had told the judges she was so
terrified after her arrest that she made up a story, hoping it would
help her get out of jail. “She told them that a former U.S. official
had proposed to her to work for the C.I.A. during one of her trips to
Washington, but she said she did not take it seriously,” Mr. Nikbakht
said.

While the court dismissed the spying charges, it did give Ms. Saberi a
suspended two-year sentence and barred her from practicing journalism
in Iran for five years.

She met briefly in Tehran with reporters on Tuesday and said she had
no immediate plans.

Mark Landler contributed reporting from Washington.