Lindsay Foreman was hunched over the landline in Ward 7 of Tehran’s Evin prison, telling her son Joe that the U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign had started. Warplanes had been circling above the Iranian capital all morning and the rumble of explosions had sent prisoners scurrying beneath their metal-framed bunks.
“It’s begun,” said the British mother of two, arrested a year ago on a motorcycle trip with her husband for espionage charges she denies.
Then a bomb blast ripped through the windows of her prison, home to dissidents, a Nobel Prize winner and at least three Americans Iran holds hostage as bargaining chips.
“S—, s—…. What was that?” Lindsay asked, screams echoing in the gray-tiled hallway. The line cut.
In another corner of the prison, Ahmadreza Djalali, an Iranian-Swedish doctor, was calling his wife. The Harvard fellow was a scholar on treating disaster zone victims, but had been sentenced to death by a revolutionary court in Tehran for espionage charges he denied.
Airstrikes had blown out windows in Ward 4 and plaster was falling from the ceiling, he told her. Dozens of regular prison officers had fled and been replaced by hard-line Revolutionary Guards. The single food store, where prisoners could supplement meager rations of chicken gristle and rice, had closed, and some of the most outspoken opponents of Iran’s theocratic regime were growing hungry in their cells, surviving on stale bread and polluted water.
“The situation feels like chaos,” Djalali said to her.
Iran’s repressive regime has some 200,000 prisoners, including political dissidents, would-be reformists, recent protesters, civilians who ran afoul of religious codes and a handful of American and European hostages. They are held in a network of prisons, including the notorious Evin, as well as secretive detention centers within security and intelligence complexes. Many are the leaders of a nebulous protest movement that President Trump has urged to rise up and topple a regime in power for almost half a century.
So far, the war in Iran has put them in even graver danger.
Nearby airstrikes have shaken Evin, followed by toxic smoke and oily acid rain that blanketed Tehran after airstrikes destroyed fuel depots in the city. Inmates take shelter at the buzz of drones sweeping overhead.
At least seven security facilities that house detention centers have been hit in airstrikes, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of satellite images.
Another two prisons—Evin and Marivan in western Iran—have been partly damaged by strikes on nearby infrastructure.
Evin in particular is a symbol of both the Islamic Republic’s repressive present and a more hopeful future. Families of political prisoners there and in other jails described their loved ones as stuck between an embattled regime that regularly threatens them with execution—and the bombardments of the U.S.-Israeli air campaign they hope will free them, yet fear may ultimately harm them.
Last June, Israeli jets dropped at least six bombs that struck the compound’s cell blocks, visitor center, medical clinic and front gate. The IDF said it struck “the notorious Evin Prison” because intelligence operations including counterespionage were carried out there. “The strike was carried out in a precise manner to mitigate harm to civilians imprisoned within the prison to the greatest extent possible,” the IDF said in a statement.
The latest strikes have sowed panic and more psychological stress among the prison population. Dozens of inmates from Evin’s highest-security section 209, run by the Revolutionary Guard’s intelligence agency, were moved, without warning, to undisclosed facilities elsewhere. Their families don’t know where they are and worry they could be used as human shields, or worse.
In recent days, the Israel Defense Forces have taken to social media to warn residents living near the prison that they should evacuate. “Your presence in this area puts your life at risk,” one post said.
The Journal provided coordinates of the detention locations struck in the air campaign to both the Defense Department and the Israel Defense Forces. The Defense Department declined to comment. “U.S. forces do not target civilians, unlike Iran,” a Defense official said.
The U.S. government won’t confirm how many of Iran’s prisoners are Americans being held as hostages, but the Foley Foundation, an advocacy organization for the unjustly detained, said there are about six and warned they now face “unprecedented danger” because of the airstrikes.
At least three of them are in Evin, as of the most recent information available, including Kamran Hekmati, a 61-year-old grandfather from Long Island suffering from bladder cancer, and Reza Valizadeh, a 49-year-old journalist from Washington, D.C. who was arrested visiting his elderly parents. Both men are listed as wrongfully detained by the U.S. government and are kept in the same building, Ward 4, the wing for high-value political prisoners, along with Craig Foreman, Lindsay’s husband. The large number of dual Iranian-American nationals in Iran makes it likely there are other U.S. citizens unjustly detained, a U.S. official said.
Before the war, the job of attending to American prisoners fell to Switzerland—Swiss diplomats have represented Washington in Iran since Jimmy Carter’s final months as president. But on March 3, the Swiss ambassador and the last five Swiss embassy workers still in the country fled for their safety, slipping out over a land border.
“They will return to Tehran as soon as the situation allows,” the Swiss Foreign Ministry said.
Detention network
In the months before the war began, Iran—facing its largest demonstrations since the 1979 revolution—arrested an estimated 50,000 people, stuffing them into prisons, police stations and jails so crowded that the regime converted warehouses and sports halls into a burgeoning network of detention black sites. In nighttime raids, security forces blindfolded activists, students, doctors, journalists and their relatives and escorted them into detention, often without providing any information on their whereabouts.
After the war began on Feb. 28, as Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu encouraged Iranians to go into the streets, at least 500 more were arrested.
Detainees are generally taken to secretive holding centers housed in Ministry of Intelligence and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps buildings, as well as police stations. They are often held there for months before being transferred to prisons like Evin. Prisoners are also transferred to these detention centers for interrogation during their sentences.
The Journal analyzed satellite imagery of dozens of prisons, intelligence and military compounds known to hold detainees and found at least seven sites across four cities that have been damaged by airstrikes from the start of the war through early March, when U.S.-based satellite companies began restricting the release of new imagery from the region.
The Israel Defense Forces reviewed the coordinates of those airstrikes, and confirmed that it had conducted them to degrade Iran’s military capabilities. It said in a statement the sites are “part of the Iranian regime’s security apparatus and have been responsible for carrying out terrorist activities for years.” The IDF said it wasn’t aware of any airstrikes in the vicinity of prisons.
A prison in Marivan, in western Iran’s Kurdistan province, was damaged when an airstrike hit a police station next to it, according to satellite imagery, verified social-media video and reports from human-rights organizations. Iranian human-rights groups offered differing accounts over whether its prisoners had been released or transferred to other sites one day before the strike—or shortly after.
Inmates detained inside security complexes in nearby Sanandaj, the provincial capital, were less lucky: Several people detained inside the compounds were injured and hospitalized when airstrikes heavily damaged the Ministry of Intelligence compound and the IRGC Shahramfar military base, according to Hengaw, an Iranian Kurdish human-rights organization based in Norway. Hengaw says political prisoners have been held at these sites. It couldn’t be learned whether any prisoners were killed.
The Journal couldn’t determine whether prisoners were at the other detention centers at the time of the strikes. Prisoners are frequently transferred between facilities, and secrecy around detentions, compounded by the continuing nationwide internet shutdown, have made it difficult for family members and monitoring groups to find out where detainees are held.
The targeting clearly shows a strategy to degrade the regime’s apparatus of repression, but risks harming the very prisoners it is intended to empower, analysts said.
Infamous prisons
A sprawling, white-walled complex of squat cell blocks in the foothills of the Alborz Mountains in north Tehran, Evin was built in the last decade of the Shah, staffed by guards and interrogators from the CIA-trained SAVAK secret police. During the Iran hostage crisis, William Daugherty, a newly minted case officer in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, was kept there, in a 4-foot-wide cell lit 24 hours by a dim, dangling bulb.
Iran’s new revolutionary leaders eventually closed some of the Shah’s most infamous jails and other sites where the Shah’s agents dealt out beatings, electric shock treatment and mock executions. But the new regime quickly replicated the same punishments at Evin.
At the end of the 1980s, as Iran reeled from a near-decade of war with Saddam Hussein, the prison was a main site for the execution of thousands of leftist dissidents, ordered by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini. His successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, entrenched Evin as the Islamic Republic’s storehouse for dissidents and accused spies.
Khamenei’s second son, Mojtaba, first rose to prominence by orchestrating a crackdown that sent thousands of protesters to Evin for alleging that the 2009 presidential election was rigged—the so-called Green Revolution. Subsequent rounds of protests delivered new crops of activists into its walls.
Siamak Namazi, an Iranian-American businessman, spent eight years in Evin prison before being released in a 2023 prisoner swap. He recalled a drab maze of run-down buildings inside a vast wooded compound whose tedious daily rhythms moved to the whims of wardens that rewarded the cooperative and punished the defiant. At night, bedbugs nibbled at the 312 people laying like sardines on the floor of Namazi’s section of Ward 4. “If you wake up and you don’t have a plan for your day, depression sets in very quickly,” he said.
He spent some time in section 209, run by the Ministry of Intelligence. Inmates there were kept in solitary confinement, their human interactions limited to hourslong interrogations and mealtimes, when trays were shunted through shutters at the base of metal cell doors. Revolutionary Guard interrogators used psychological and physical torture to extract confessions from dissidents and foreigners arrested on “national security” charges.
Prisoners released into the numbered cell blocks were packed into overcrowded cells, starting their day with a head count and cooking meals together in shared kitchens. The ordinary staff—duty officers in blue shirts, or medics in scrubs—could be kindhearted and seemed disengaged from the revolutionary ideals of their government, former prisoners say. Some drove for a ride-share app in the evenings, to make ends meet in a country of widespread deprivation.
Prisoners were allowed to slowly build up the paltry offerings of its libraries. If you were looking for a book in Evin, went a prison joke, you’d be more likely to find the author.
The routine was shattered last June by the bombs dropped by Israel at Evin’s front gate. Iran said 79 people were killed by the strikes, including five female social workers and 13 young men doing mandatory national service as prison guards or administrators. One bomb struck the visitors’ entrance. Inmates dug through rubble to excavate their own jailers, said relatives of current prisoners. Hours later, the prison staff escorted them at gunpoint back to their cells.
Recent reports of explosions near Evin and another prison in Zanjan province prompted the Narges Foundation, run by the family of jailed Iranian human-rights activist Narges Mohammadi, to warn that “those held behind bars solely for exercising their right to free speech now face an even greater threat to their lives.” Mohammadi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, has been held in Evin.
“These military strikes place the lives of thousands of prisoners at grave risk,” her foundation added.
Hostage diplomacy
Last week, Lindsay Foreman’s son Joe was in Washington, lobbying the State Department’s office for hostage affairs to spotlight his mom’s case. The quiet community of hostage advocates in the U.S. have been calling and meeting current and former U.S. officials to push for the Trump administration to prioritize the fates of American and other foreign prisoners.
“If Iran wants an off-ramp from this conflict, the release of American citizens must be part of that path,” said Rep. Tom Suozzi (D., N.Y.).
Iranian exiles are pushing for the release of the dissidents arrested during the deadly crackdown that preceded the war. In January, Iran executed thousands of regime opponents—some estimates range into the tens of thousands. On Wednesday, Iran executed a Swedish-Iranian citizen accused of spying for Israel.
Members of Congress and ambassadors say privately they are worried the issue has fallen through the cracks. Families of American hostages have been nervous to speak out, fearful their loved ones would be targets for reprisals.
Roger Carstens, former special envoy for hostage affairs during both the first Trump and the Biden administration, said the administration should look at the hostage issue as one that could open up room for peace talks. “Trump has spelled out his war aims. Trump has told us the four things he wants to do. Let’s add a fifth: Free all Americans in Evin prison,” said Carstens, who helped negotiate a 2023 Iran prisoner swap.
“Is anyone working this?” he added. “I would assume so.”
For now, the prisoners inside Evin and throughout the country are enduring a dystopian paradox—cut off from information about the war and yet seeing and hearing its effects reverberating outside the compound walls. The complex recently went dark shortly after midday after U.S. and Israeli strikes on nearby oil facilities turned the sky black. On a washing line outside, prisoners’ laundry was coated in black ash.
