Iranian interrogators thought Daily Show’s Jason Jones was a spy
A bizarre tidbit from Terry Gross’s interview last week with recently released Iranian-American Newsweek correspondent Maziar Bahari: "On the first day when they arrested me, they told me that they knew I was working for four different intelligence agencies: the CIA, Mossad, MI6 and Newsweek. When I asked them what was their evidence, they said, ...
A bizarre tidbit from Terry Gross's interview last week with recently released Iranian-American Newsweek correspondent Maziar Bahari:
A bizarre tidbit from Terry Gross’s interview last week with recently released Iranian-American Newsweek correspondent Maziar Bahari:
"On the first day when they arrested me, they told me that they knew I was working for four different intelligence agencies: the CIA, Mossad, MI6 and Newsweek. When I asked them what was their evidence, they said, ‘We don’t have to give you any evidence. We’re going to give it to the courts.’ So my guess … is that, in the absence of any evidence to prove that I was a spy, they were just desperate to find any evidence to prove I was a spy. And I’m sure that someone in the U.S. who filmed The Daily Show — that sketch with Jason Jones and me — and sent it to them and said that this is this guy, who said that Iran and America, they have a lot in common. And he’s talking to a spy. And I have to also mention that also a couple of days before that, I met with Jason Jones and his producer in a hotel where I was editing a documentary, and I gave them a list of people they could talk with — and I was being followed by the Revolutionary Guards at that time. So I think they put all of this different, circumstantial evidence together, and they said, ‘Well, if Jason Jones looks like a spy, if this guy gives different names to people, then he must be a spy.’ It was so emblematic of this paranoid thinking that they had that it didn’t even allow them to listen to the laugh track on The Daily Show. So they said, ‘Well, why did you talk to this spy? If he says that he’s a spy, if he looks like a spy, then he must be a spy.’ And they were really upset that I said, ‘Iran and the United States had a lot in common.’ "
If you missed it, here was Bahari’s contribution to Jones’s work of espionage:
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Jason Jones: Behind the Veil – Persians of Interest | ||||
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Joshua Keating was an associate editor at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @joshuakeating
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