Iran Holds Aid Worker Silva Harotonian on Espionage Charges

Journalist Roxana Saberi is breathing easier these days, back in the United States after spending four months in Iran's notorious Evin prison on charges of spying for the United States. Saberi's was a cause célèbre, but Evin is home to numerous political prisoners, arrested for crimes against the regime both real and imagined.

One of Saberi's former cellmates, who has thus far escaped international attention, is Silva Harotonian. She's being held on espionage charges that—like Saberi's—the State Department in Washington asserts are without merit. Harotonian is an Iranian citizen, but her family in Los Angeles is hoping that Saberi's release could also help free her. A last-ditch appeal filed by defense lawyers has yet to be ruled on.

While drinking a cup of tea in her mother's Tehran apartment last June, Harotonian was arrested and charged with fomenting a "Velvet Revolution" against the Iranian government. The 34-year-old was convicted in January and sentenced to three years in prison, where family members say she is in poor and worsening health. They say she is a well-intentioned aid worker wrongly accused. "She never even read the news or followed politics. She just wanted to do something good for her country," says her cousin, Klara Moradkhan, who lives in Los Angeles.

At the time of her arrest, Harotonian was working for the International Research and Exchanges Board, a Washington-based organization that for four decades has facilitated exchange programs around the globe. The group receives some funding from the U.S. State Department, and U.S. officials insist that IREX and its employees were not involved in anything either illegal or nefarious.

Unlike Saberi, an Iranian-American who was born in the United States, Harotonian is an Iranian citizen of Armenian descent, although her mother and cousins are naturalized U.S. citizens. Harotonian applied for a U.S. green card in 2001, it had not been issued when she was arrested.

Harotonian had been arranging travel for Iranian medical workers who were to attend a conference in the United States about maternal and child health education. She worked out of the IREX office in Armenia and had traveled to Tehran on three previous occasions for projects before being arrested last summer. A similar conference had gone off without a hitch, and IREX had made no secret of its work in Iran, says the group's president, W. Robert Pearson. Sitting in his Washington office and sporting a postage-stamp-sized freesilva.org pin on his lapel, Pearson says that it's the first time that an IREX employee has been accused of spying. "Whatever the misunderstanding, we'd like to know what happened so that we can help to clear it up," he says.

Because the case involves Iran detaining one of its own citizens, U.S. officials have little leverage to act on Harotonian's behalf. Indeed, some of her backers quietly worry that too much support from Washington could backfire in a case where the defendant is trying to prove she wasn't working for the U.S. government. Even as they await the ruling on the final appeal, supporters are campaigning for leniency.