Held hostage in Iran for over 220 days, Bernard Phelan endured harsh conditions and witnessed executions, ultimately being released in May 2023 after diplomatic efforts.
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00:00Bernard Phelan was told he would die in prison by a judge in Iran after he was falsely accused
00:13of spying against the regime. The dual Irish-French national was released in May 2023, but not
00:20after he spent time with the notorious Satan's Block at Mashhad prison. For the Europe Conversation,
00:25I catch up with him and ask him about this traumatic time.
00:30Bernard Phelan, thanks very much for coming into the Europe Conversation. In your book
00:35you describe unimaginable cruelty in Iran, in the prisons and so on, and we'll get to
00:40that. Particularly the name of your book, You Will Die in Prison, which is what a judge
00:44said to you when he gave you six and a half years' time. Let's start from the start though.
00:50You are a Paris-based travel consultant. You have both French and Irish dual nationality.
00:56It was my fifth visit to Iran, and I'd been there since about three weeks earlier. I'd
01:02crossed the border from Turkey with my friend and customer, his nickname is Mike, and we'd
01:10been travelling across northern Iran exploring a project for the Silk Road by train. And
01:21I knew Iran pretty well at this stage. And we arrived in Mashhad, the second city of
01:27Iran, the holy city. And we had spent the night at his dad's flat, and the next day
01:36had lunch in the centre, went home, came back to take photographs of the mosque and lit
01:42up at night. Two guys walked up to us and said, follow us. Put out a card, plainclothes,
01:50went to sit on a wall, asked for our passports, and that's where it all started. So they
01:56were police, they were undercover, and they asked you for your passports. So it's a sort
02:02of a delicate area because it's near a very important mosque, a religious site, so maybe
02:05your interpretation at the time is this is a sort of a minor issue. I thought my pal
02:12had a big Canon camera, a big lens, and there are not many foreign tourists in Mashhad.
02:18And I just think it attracted attention. I think they started off with, you know, this
02:23is just inquiring, and then when they realised they had a French national on their hands,
02:29this sounds like this looks interesting. And the Iranians have a shopping list of hostages,
02:37and I was just the wrong person, wrong place, wrong time.
02:39Because you said in the book, you know, that they want French, Belgian, Swedish hostages
02:44because the Iranians have lots of prisoners in those countries, so they could do a swap.
02:48Exactly.
02:49Let's just go back to even, you know, that evening, when they decided to say, we want
02:53to check a few things here. What was the process of then getting to a prison? When we actually
02:59told you're in serious trouble here, we're going to accuse you of something, and then
03:03you ended up getting six and a half years.
03:05Well, from the first time I was interrogated, we went to a prayer room near the mosque,
03:10and that went on for two or three hours of questioning, why you were in Iran, what did
03:13you see, have you seen protests, did you take part in protests, etc. And then I was
03:18transferred to, put in a car, blindfolded, handcuffs, and taken to an interrogation centre,
03:29and put in the first cell, there was another guy in the cell, then taken out, I couldn't
03:32get to say hello to him, taken to another cell, there were two guys, and I asked them
03:37why they were there, and they held up their fists, they were protesters. And then they
03:40were taken out, and that night, lying on the floor with a blanket, because there was
03:47no bed, I heard the door opening of another cell, and somebody had been beaten, and I
03:51knew I was in trouble, this is a serious, serious situation. And then I was taken to
03:56another interrogation centre, that's where the interrogation, solitary confinement was,
04:03where every day I'd be taken out, blindfolded, handcuffed to a room to be interrogated by
04:08the Iranians, that went on for nearly a month.
04:11You're a gay man, you've got your husband, Roland Bonello, in Paris, and you're living
04:16with HIV, so anyone would imagine that would make life for you extremely difficult in a
04:23country that bans homosexuality?
04:25No, I mean, it sort of surprised everybody, I mean, I'd been to Iran twice with Roland,
04:31and there was never a problem in a hotel asking for a double room, nobody would bat an eyelid.
04:36People are extremely tolerant, I mean, I know how they treat Iranian gay community,
04:41it's horrible, they hang them, unspeakable torture for them, but the fact that you need
04:49a hostage in good health, I knew nothing was going to happen to me physically, there was
04:53going to be no torture, they wouldn't beat me up.
04:55But wasn't it that the response wasn't too shocking though to you, when you said you
05:00were gay, or Roland was your husband, for example, they said to you, why don't you have
05:05any children?
05:06I was flabbergasted.
05:07You say Roland, you're married, who are you married to, Roland Bonello, that's a man's
05:13name, have you any children?
05:15I said, no.
05:16Why did you not adopt children?
05:18It was a strange conversation to have in a country like that.
05:22And again, you were sentenced to six and a half years, tell us about what the judge had
05:26said to you.
05:27The first judge when I met, when I was taken to the court, Revolutionary Court, dressed
05:33in prison striped uniforms, handcuffs, shackles on your feet, climbing three floors of stairs,
05:38very sore in the ankles, brought in front of the judge, he asked me to sign papers,
05:43I refused.
05:44I said, would you sign a paper in English or in Persian or in Irish or in French?
05:49He just looked at me.
05:50They brought in a guard, tried to get him to persuade me to sign, I said, no, I'm not
05:55signing.
05:56It was essentially a confession.
05:57Yeah.
05:58I don't know what it was.
05:59And I said, I'm not signing that.
06:00I crossed my arms like that.
06:01And the judge said, go out.
06:04And just as I was getting up, I said, you will die in prison.
06:08And then the main court case, they started saying, you know, you've been sending information
06:13to foreigners, to the Guardian, et cetera.
06:16Because I'd written an article long years ago in the Guardian as a competition about
06:21travel, about Iran and how nice Iran was.
06:24It's a great holiday destination.
06:26And they were saying I was sending information to the Guardian.
06:29It's crazy.
06:30What did it feel like when a judge in Iran is sentencing you on false charges, telling
06:37you you're going to die in prison?
06:40It's a horrible shock.
06:41I thought that I would not survive physically.
06:45Because Benjamin had been there for three and a half years.
06:48And I'd just been there for almost six months then.
06:51I said, I'm not going to make this.
06:53I just can't see myself living here, you know, for six years.
06:58I'll be here for another two years.
06:59My dad was 97 at the time.
07:02He was in good health.
07:04I might never see him again.
07:06If he died, would my family tell me?
07:08I don't know.
07:09It's a horrible, horrible situation.
07:12Here in Europe, you know, a prisoner knows when he's going to get out.
07:16He's been condemned for five years, 10 years, six months.
07:18We don't know when we're going to get out.
07:20There were political prisoners in there who'd been condemned for two or three years.
07:24They're still there five years later.
07:26You don't know.
07:27Because your block in Mshad Prison was called Satan's Block.
07:31Exactly.
07:32Which is where people who were condemned to death were.
07:35And one of the things that you mentioned, which I just found really heartbreaking,
07:39was that you had to listen to the men crying.
07:43They were about to be executed, or you're feeling they're going to be executed.
07:48Yeah, the next morning, any prisoner in our prison who were going to be executed
07:52were brought to our block the night before.
07:54And then, you know, during evening time when we were cooking,
07:57you'd hear them crying in their cell with their shoes in front of the door.
08:01That was heart-rending, just the idea that somebody,
08:05you're beside somebody who's going to be hung the next day after prayers.
08:10It's really strange.
08:12I mean, they don't execute during Ramadan.
08:14So after Ramadan ended, there was just a continuous stream of men in that cell.
08:21I mean, Iran is number two after China in terms of executions.
08:25That level of psychological cruelty on those people is just an added torture.
08:30Yeah, absolutely.
08:31So from a diplomatic point of view, were you given any hope from the French and the Irish?
08:36Did they work together?
08:38What sort of level of detail were you given along the way to say, Bernard, there's hope?
08:43We weren't given, all the time they were saying, we're negotiating, we're negotiating,
08:47we're talking to the Iranians, we're talking to the Iranians.
08:50Please don't make any noise.
08:52Don't upset things, which is obviously what you shouldn't do.
08:55We need to tell the world the Iranians are doing this to European citizens.
09:00As Roland said once, the fear has to change camp.
09:05Tell the Iranians they're badly treating us.
09:08Tell them we're in solitary confinement.
09:10Tell them.
09:11Everybody diplomats were saying, particularly the French,
09:13say, no, don't say anything, don't say anything, don't say anything.
09:16I just couldn't put up with any more of that.
09:18When I met Sonia McGuinness, the Irish ambassador to Iran based in Ankara,
09:23I saw her on the 1st of May.
09:25I'll never forget that meeting.
09:28I walked into the room and she rushed up to me and hugged me.
09:31I could see the guard was aghast.
09:33Men and women cannot touch each other unless they're married or daughters or something like that.
09:38Sonia was a very feminine woman.
09:43She dressed very well.
09:45We sat down and were talking.
09:47I told Sonia, I said, I can't take any more of this.
09:49She ended up, thankfully, not there for six and a half years, 222 days,
09:53which is 222 days too much.
09:56Apparently there was an attempt to get us out in April, which had failed.
10:01I don't know the background to that.
10:04I never found out.
10:06I remember on the 11th of May, Benjamin and I were called down to security,
10:11which was a regular event to get books or to get clothes that had been sent or for some other reason.
10:17We went downstairs. There was nobody in the corridor.
10:20The phones had been totally taken off the wall.
10:23Nothing, silence.
10:25This is really strange.
10:26We went into Mr. Zhehadi's office, the head of security.
10:29Nobody there.
10:30There was always three or four people.
10:32I told him to sit down.
10:33He said, you're going to be released today.
10:35I said, but first you must sign a letter, write a letter in English or French,
10:39and not attack the prison or the Iranian state for mistreatment.
10:42Without even talking to each other, we both said no simultaneously.
10:46He said, go back up to your cells.
10:49I went back up.
10:51But there was a strange atmosphere in the block.
10:54Something was going to happen that day.
10:56An hour later, the prison worker came back and said, take your stuff, you're going.
10:59Well, anyway, you're out now.
11:01You were released in May 2023 and thankfully got to see your dad,
11:05who unfortunately passed at the end of October.
11:08But at least you had some time with him over a year and you got to see him again.
11:13It was very emotional.
11:15He was so happy to see me.
11:17I didn't realise how much he'd been involved in getting me out and speaking for me.
11:26The video with him in front of the Iranian embassy in Dublin,
11:30the individual, extremely moving when he speaks about his son,
11:34because I'd already lost my other brother to illness a long time ago.
11:38The idea for him to lose another son was just heart-rendering.
11:43It was such a wonderful moment to see him and be able to touch him.
11:49Bernard Phelan, thank you very much for joining us on The Europe Conversation.