In seeking to extract a loved one from the clutches of an authoritarian regime, is it best to follow the advice of the UK Foreign Office and leave it to the discreet professionalism of the diplomatic class, or take a leap into the unknown and go public?
Kim Darroch, the former UK ambassador to Washington, hesitated before agreeing on ITV’s Peston this week that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s husband, Richard Ratcliffe, had probably been right to ignore the Foreign Office advice.
Ratcliffe told the Guardian three years ago that he simply could not discuss the wisdom of his tactics. He had made his decision to go public, it could not be undone, and when his wife was released he might have the privilege to reflect.
More recently, he said he was sure he had been right, and that without the support of the public she would not have been released.
Tulip Siddiq, his MP and a great ally for anyone’s campaign, agreed, but speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme she said the Foreign Office had repeatedly told her and Ratcliffe that “they would have been able to get her out earlier if Richard did not make such a song and dance about it”.
Since history is irreversible, it is impossible to know whether the outcome would have been different if Ratcliffe had taken a different fork in the road and stayed quiet.
Evidence flows both ways. Jimmy Carter, as US president, tried every technique, from disastrously sending in the Marines to unfreezing billions in assets, to secure the release of hostages trapped in the US embassy in Tehran in 1979. The Iranians danced on Carter’s political grave by not sending the hostages home until 20 minutes into the inauguration speech of his successor, Ronald Reagan.
In Britain, some lower-profile British-Iranians have returned home after shorter periods in Iranian jails.
In 2019 authorities forced the Economist journalist Nicolas Pelham to stay for nearly two months in Tehran, although not in jail, and he was extricated by the Foreign Office without any publicity.
The family of the businessman Kamal Foroughi only divulged his arrest in October 2015, four years after it happened. Other dual nationals remain in detention with no access to publicity.
Ana Diamond, arrested in 2016 and released in 2020, said: “There is probably not one formula for success or one size fits all. It feels as if you go halfway, there are more negative repercussions. If you go all in like Richard Ratcliffe, or Jason Rezaian with the backing of his employer, the Washington Post, and you know you can sustain a campaign, then it probably works.”
But others who have been arrested, such as the Australian-British academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert, released in November 2020 after 804 days in Iranian prisons, say the sunlight of publicity can help with the conditions prisoners have to endure.
It is possible that each case is best examined on its merits. The point that Ratcliffe was able to latch on to was the nexus between the decades-old unpaid UK debt to Iran and his wife’s detention, something that was not apparent at the outset but became obvious as public attention grew.
He has also argued that publicity was vital to expose the growing practice of hostage-taking. In his final angry letter to the Foreign Office – written on Friday, unaware of the deals under way – Ratcliffe’s biggest request was for it to call hostage-taking by its name. The weeks ahead will show whether the Foreign Office takes up that call.
