It is June 2019, and the room has no windows. The prisoner still wears the clothes that had been put on the previous day in the early hours of the morning, in a hotel in Dubai, where he was passing before going to Iran. But already they took his watch, his electronic devices. His ordinary life leaves him, piece by piece, in the hands of eager and anonymous guards. These do not show hatred, do not use excessive violence. Their work has just started.
They must transform the French researcher Roland Marchal, 64, into a captive. Then, for reasons that are still entirely beyond the prisoner's control, create a new identity for him. In the opaque depths of the Islamic Republic of Iran, some have been tasked with passing Roland Marchal as a spy. They will work on it tirelessly. "We will have to tell us the truth", warns an agent in rough and abrupt French. The prisoner will quickly learn that, in matters of truth, the diplomatic, political and judicial machinery into which he has just been carried knows his own laws.
A few hours earlier, he was thinking of starting a few days' vacation in Iran with his partner, the Franco-Iranian anthropologist Fariba Adelkhah. At Imam-Khomeyni international airport, arriving at the level of controls, it is a habit, Mr. Marchal had called his friend: “The phone was ringing in the air. " He still doesn't know, but Mme Adelkhah has just been arrested. The intelligence service that decided to attack the two French people knows that the researcher is about to join her. Six men in civilian clothes picked him up shortly after his plane landed. We take her to the room without windows. His belongings are searched, his passwords claimed and noted.
"They seemed certain that I was not at all what I claimed to be … The questions they asked me gave me the impression that they saw me as a character from the Bureau of legends. I learned later that some of my jailers had seen this series. "
The first interrogation will begin. We try to make him believe that his release is only due to one thing: his " cooperation " with the men who just kidnapped him. But what do we really want from him? Mr. Marchal still doesn't know.
Accused of collusion with a foreign state
After months of fruitless negotiations and attempts, Mr. Marchal was released on March 20 and repatriated to France. Far from Tehran, from a Parisian apartment which he describes as peaceful and sunny, on the edge of a boulevard deserted by confinement, he told the story of his detention to World. His memories lift a corner of the veil on the functioning of a regime in which some consider the hostage taking as the pursuit of diplomacy by other means …
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