Behdad Esfahbod, a computer programming specialist, was arrested by the Information Protection Organization of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) while he was visiting Iran in January 2020.

Esfahbod was eventually released from IRGC custody on bail after which he left Iran. Five months after leaving Iran, he published a post online in which he revealed that IRGC agents had made a proposition that he work for them as a spy. After this disclosure, he was interviewed by various media outlets such as BBC Persian, IranWire and Radio Farda. 

Behdad Esfahbod now lives in the United States.

Travel to Iran

On January 7, 2020, Behdad Esfahbod travelled to Iran to visit his family and attend his grandfather's funeral. Esfahbod’s arrival in Iran coincided with the Iranian missile strike on the Ain al-Assad Military Base in Iraq – launched in retaliation to the US airstrike which killed the IRGC Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani – and just before the downing of Ukrainian International Airlines Flight 752 by the IRGC over Tehran.

When he arrived in Iran, Esfahbod went to his hometown of Sari to attend his grandfather's funeral. He also posted a number of photos on his Instagram account that showed he was in Iran. Security agents learnt of his presence inside Iran through the Instagram posts.

Later, after Esfahbod's detainment and release, he told BBC Persian that intelligence agents from the IRGC were already following him on Instagram because of his connections with activists outside Iran.

On January 15, 2020, Behdad Esfahbod was arrested by four agents from the Intelligence Organization of the IRGC after he had met with some friends in Tehran. According to Esfahbod, at the time of his arrest, the plainclothes agents confronted him and presented a court order with the logo of the IRGC's Intelligence Organization. Esfahbod told BBC Persian that the court order said he had been charged with “committing actions against national security” and “collaborating with dissident groups.”

After his arrest, officers took Esfahbod to his sister's house where they confiscated his passports, personal belongings and personal computer and blindfolded him. 

He was then taken to Evin Prison and held in Section 1A of the facility. Esfahbod later told IranWire: “When I learnt that we had been taken to Evin Prison, I was happy. Because I knew that if we went somewhere else, there could be other dangers lurking.” He also told IranWire that he had been blindfolded throughout his detention – even when he was in the prison yard. 

Access to Personal Information

Esfahbod was detained and interrogated for a week. During this period, his interrogators accessed Esfahbod's Google account, including his email, text messages, photos, and contacts, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts.

Esfahbod also reported that one of his interrogators said it had taken ‌two days to download 300GB of personal information and photos covering a period of 15 years.

Charges

At the time of his arrest, Behdad Esfahbod was shown the charge sheet detailing the charges against, him including “collaborating with dissident groups” and “committing actions against national security.”

Esfahbod spoke to IranWire about his charges, saying: “Most of the IRGC interrogators are sensitive to Iranians who work specifically in the field of filtering and censorship. I think they have focused on this issue since the internet was cut off during the protests last autumn. They thought it would definitely be complicated to work with them.”

While the interrogators checked his direct and private messages, they asked Esfahbod to provide information about all the people he had contacted. He told IranWire: “There were usually three interrogators. Two of them were searching for my information, and one of them was asking questions and giving me sheets of paper to write explanations.”

Esfahbod also told BBC Persian that the interrogators from the Intelligence Organization of the IRGC were more sensitive. “In the group that worked in the field of internet censorship, most of the 19 founders of the organisation [IRGC internet censorship] were my friends. The interrogators told me, you’re working with this group.”

Threats

Over the course of the two-week trip that Behdad Esfabod took to Iran, he was forced to spend about a week in detention.

In an interview with Radio Farda, Esfahbod said he had been threatened by his interrogators, who said: “Your brother is in America, you are here, the plane [the downed Ukrainian Airlines Flight 752], human error. Think about these things.”

Esfahbod told the media that his interpretation of the IRGC interrogator's threat was: “It means that if we want, we can make you out to have been the American spy involved in the incident and the victim of a fictitious case."

Spying Proposition 

Esfahbod also spoke to IranWire about how his captors asked him to spy for Iran.

He said that, on his last day in detention, “One of the interrogators said to me ‘Now you’re not working in that field anymore, but you did work there before. Now you must go to court and the judge will rule on your case. He may issue a sentence of a couple months [of imprisonment] but he could also sentence you to two years or even ten years imprisonment.' The interrogator said that because he liked Esfahbod and because he wanted to help him, he would lift his travel ban and would take care of his case. The interrogator told him that he could come and go in Iran whenever necessary, but that he should maintain contact with his former friends and inform the interrogator about them.”

According to what Esfahbod told IranWire, the interrogator also told him: “Keep up the same relationships, talk with them, go eat dinner with them, drink alcohol with them ... and tell us who and where they are going. Who said what, what did they do and so on.”

Esfahbod had said that he promised he would help so that he could get away from his interrogators. But he emphasized that he decided not to work as a spy for them.

He was eventually released on a bail of a billion tomans. Esfahbod was forced to surrender the deed to a house in Tehran, which he and his sister jointly own and in which his sister lives, as collateral. The house was valued at two billion tomans. 

Departure from Iran

Behdad Esfahbod left Iran on January 25, 2020, initially travelling to Lisbon, Portugal. He spoke to IranWire about his travels, saying: “I stayed in Lisbon for a month because I was not feeling well. I was afraid to enter the United States and to be questioned at the border.”

His family had already told his partner in the United States and his colleagues at Facebook, where he worked, about his detention in Iran. Esfahbod also said that the Canadian government was aware of the situation. Esfahbod said that US agents specializing in the IRGC interviewed him at the US border for two or three hours and then released him without any difficulty.

Esfahbod resigned from his position at Facebook soon after returning home. He said that what happened to him in Iran caused him to lose his focus with his work.

Five months after returning home from Iran, in June 2020, Esfahbod began to receive messages from agents in Iran via his social media accounts. Iranian agents also contact his sister asking her to tell Esfahbod to not leave their messages unanswered. Esfahbod's sister said she conveyed their message but could not force her brother to do anything.

Esfahbod did not respond to any of these messages from Iranian security agents.

Disclosure

On August 17, 2020, Behadad Esfahbod published a post on the Medium website, in which he recounted everything that happened during and after his trip to Iran. In this post, written in English, he said that he had decided to break his silence even if it cost him dearly. He said he did not know what the Iranian security officers would do next – but that he thought it was right to speak of what happened to him in Iran. He also spoke to various media outlets and told his story in both Persian and English.

A court summons in Iran was issued against him soon after he published his Medium post. The summons required Esfahbod to report to the Prosecutor's Office within five days to present his final defense.

Academic Biography 

Behdad Esfahbod, a computer programmer, is one of the most well-known Iranian figures in computer science. He was born in 1982 in Sari. Esfahbod received a Bachelor's degree in computer science from Sharif University of Technology, which he completed in three years, and a Master's degree from the University of Toronto. He has worked for technology companies including Google and Facebook. 

Esfahbod's projects in Persian typography brought him wide attention in Iranian technology circles. One of his better-known projects, Harf Bazm, made it possible to read Persian characters on a range of digital devices. He worked at Facebook from 2019 but resigned five months after returning to the US from his detention in Iran.