Jason Rezaian is an Iranian-American journalist and a columnist for The Washington Post. In 2014, while working as the Post’s bureau chief in Tehran, Rezaian and his wife, Yeganeh Salehi, were arrested by Iranian police. Salehi was later freed, while Rezaian was indicted on charges of spying, collaborating with hostile governments, and propaganda against the Iranian establishment. He was released in January 2016 after 544 days in prison. For Rezaian, the events that led from his initial detention to his ultimate use as a hostage were in some ways peculiar to the internal dynamics of the Iranian regime at the time. But the tactic has proven so effective that autocrats around the world are using it more and more. As the incentives get stronger, Rezaian says, the U.S. and other affected countries are in a race to figure out how to counter them.

J.J. Gould: When you were first arrested, how much of a surprise was it that this was happening to you?

Jason Rezaian: There were times in the five years when I was living in Iran—and even in the years before, when I’d go to Iran for weeks or months at a time to report from there—when I was nervous about it.

Of course, I’d seen other journalists arrested. Being a foreign-national or dual-national journalist in Iran always seemed to lead to prison—for a while; and then they’d get out after a few weeks, or a month, or a couple of months. So my life in Iran was always a calculated risk.

But the truth is, when I was arrested, Iran was about a year into the reformist government of Hassan Rouhani; nuclear negotiations between Iran and the U.S. and other world powers seemed to be going well; and it looked as though the Iranian regime wanted to ease tensions and get itself out from under the economic sanctions it had been subject to. In that sense, it was a surprising time to be arrested.

It was a time when more journalists had been let back into Iran, after years when almost no one had. Journalists I’d known before 2009, and hadn’t seen in the country since, started returning; different news networks started returning; Anthony Bourdain even brought his show to Iran. He interviewed me and my wife for it. 60 Minutes came to town. I helped them out with that—just a few weeks before I was taken into custody.

When it happened, it was evident that the intelligence wing of the Revolutionary Guard Corps was behind it. But what was surprising was less the arrest itself and more the reality it took me into.

I’d always understood that there was a fractured quality to Iran’s internal political dynamics. But I’d also figured that the regime was ultimately like a school of fish, swimming in unison, guided by the decisions of the Supreme Leader—that it was ultimately unified from the top down. As it turns out, it wasn’t that simple. Yes, the Supreme Leader is the decider. But the reality is, there are all sorts of groups and individuals under him vying for their own agendas—just like anywhere else.

I’m not sure people see that very clearly from the outside. And for better or worse, I got to see it from the inside. I got to see that the only thing all these different interests within the regime have in common—from the most insular to the most outward-looking, the most hardline to the most reform-minded—is the goal of preserving and perpetuating the Islamic Republic. That’s it. Beyond this, they have very different views about how to achieve it.

Gould: So what interests ended up driving things in your case?

But if you look at what happened over this whole year-and-a-half ordeal, you can see that every one of the moments when I was dragged into an Iranian court, or when an Iranian politician stated publicly that I needed to be executed, or when Iran’s foreign minister at the time, Javad Zarif, traveled to Europe or the U.S. and was asked about my case and gave some bullshit answer—every one of those moments corresponded with a moment in Iran’s quest to get to the nuclear deal it was negotiating. So in a way, I was a hostage in a very literal sense, but I was also a form of indirect leverage in those negotiations: We’ve got an American journalist, don’t forget.

Now, if you heard Zarif’s responses to questions about me, you might have thought he was on my side. But if you looked carefully, every time Zarif talked about me, he dug a slightly deeper hole around me. It was a negotiating tactic. He’s played the same game many times with many different hostages—me, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the Iranian-British dual citizen imprisoned from 2016 through last year, others—and while the cases are different in some ways, you can see the playbook: Well, this is a good person but, you know, they got involved in some things they shouldn’t have gotten involved in. I can’t give you the details, because it’s a matter of national security, but the crime they’re accused of is very serious—this kind of nonsense.

It became clear to me that someone like Zarif can say whatever he wants about being opposed to hardline elements within the Islamic Republic, but at the end of the day, they’re all working together toward a common goal. And he’s never going to be on my side.

“People ask me all the time, don’t these kinds of deals just incentivize more hostage-taking? My answer is no—and that this is actually the wrong question. The answer is no, because the reason why China or Russia or Iran keep taking hostages is that there’s nothing deterring them. So the real question is, what can we do to deter autocratic governments from pulling stunts like this in the first place? Because as of now, there’s literally nothing standing in the way—nothing to make the Chinese Communist Party, or Putin’s apparatus, or the intelligence services of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard think twice.”

“When I think back to my interrogators, I remember how they knew they were pulling a fast one and getting away with it. They knew that, because the rule of law is so normal in a country like the U.S., when people here read headlines about an American being accused of something there, they read it with a sort of tacit assumption that there must be something to the charge—even if it’s not clear what that would be.”

“I think the U.S. is getting wiser and more street-smart about these cases, and it’s better that it does now rather than later, because the number of cases is rising exponentially. There are 50-something of them right now. When I was jailed in Iran, there were four or five of us around the world. Other countries weren’t doing this. Now it’s spreading like a virus.”