Back from Iran, Elkins Park's Laura Fattal works to get son released

Three weeks after the failed mission to free her son Josh from an Iranian prison, Laura Fattal, of Elkins Park, is relentlessly on message, plotting new strategies and addressing criticisms that he put himself in harm's way.

"Iran says the investigation is ongoing," she said in her first detailed interview since her 48 hours in Tehran. "If it is, please conclude it. Let our kids speak with their lawyer and go to trial. They will more than defend themselves."

Josh Fattal, 28, and his friends Shane Bauer, 27, and Sarah Shourd, 31, were arrested 10 months ago for entering Iran across its mountainous border with northern Iraq. While the three have not been formally arraigned, some Iranian officials have accused them of espionage. The secretary-general of Iran's human-rights council said Friday that they could be charged and tried soon.

Fattal, 57, put a career as an art professor on hold to devote herself to her son's liberation. For more than 10 months, against the backdrop of increasingly strident U.S.-Iranian flare-ups, she has focused unerringly on the welfare of her youngest son, jailed 6,100 miles from Philadelphia by an avowed enemy of America. A less disciplined person might have cracked.

"People tell me, 'Laura, it's going to be a year,' " she said. "But I don't see that. I am really on this one-foot-in-front-of-the-other thing."

The one time she indulged the urge to get ahead of herself was in January, after applying for a visa to Iran, when she began assembling Josh's "clothes for release" - khaki trousers, a blue Oxford shirt, a beige sweater, socks, and underwear.

In the hours before her flight to Tehran, she folded and packed them in plastic bags. Now if only he would need them.

Fattal and the mothers of Bauer and Shourd say their children were on vacation in the relatively safe and scenic part of Iraq called Kurdistan, where they were trekking, not spying. If they entered Iran, it was accidental.

The three met as students at the University of California at Berkeley. Bauer grew up near Minneapolis and is a freelance photojournalist. Shourd, Bauer's fiancée (they got engaged while incarcerated), is a California-raised linguist who taught English in Damascus, Syria, where the couple have lived since 2008. Fattal, a 2000 graduate of Cheltenham High School, is an environmentalist with an interest in developing countries. He had just finished a semester as an overseas teaching fellow with the International Honors Program when he joined his friends in Syria last July.

Seeking a new adventure, they chose Iraqi Kurdistan, drawn by slopes planted with wild pomegranate, walnut and fig trees, and the breathtaking Ahmed Awa waterfall.

As Laura Fattal has pieced it together from news accounts, the trio traveled by bus across Syria into Turkey, then dropped down into northern Iraq, where they holed up at the ramshackle Miwan Hotel in Sulaymaniyah. Provisioned for camping, but armed only with a simple map they printed off the Internet, they set off in a taxi around dusk on July 30 for the trail head they hoped would lead to the waterfall. Within a day, however, after pushing east past the waterfall, they were arrested by border guards and taken to Evin Prison in Tehran.

The three, now widely known as "the American hikers," are at the center of a growing international multimedia campaign by friends, celebrity supporters, and a couple of Nobel laureates.

They also are targets of harsh criticism by people who comment online and in letters to the editor that they acted recklessly in an unstable region. What in the world, say the critics, were these seasoned travelers doing there?

"OK, fine, when the kids come home, ask them, or ask me," Fattal said. "You can be angry that they shouldn't have been there. . . . But the issue is we've got kids in harm's way, and we need to get them out of there."

Negotiations are hampered by the fact that the United States severed diplomatic relations with Iran in 1979, after students seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held most of its staff hostage for more than a year. Since then, Swiss envoys have represented U.S. interests in Iran; Pakistani envoys have represented Iranian interests in the United States.

In January, the three mothers applied for Iranian visas, which were granted May 12 - for "humanitarian" reasons, Iranian officials said.

But on May 18, as they prepared to leave for Iran from New York, they received an unsettling call.

It was the State Department, passing along information from the Swiss. The visas, which were valid for a week, had been limited to two days in apparent retaliation for the U.S.-led push for more U.N. sanctions against Iran because of its nuclear program. Iran says it wants enriched uranium for medical research. The United States suspects it wants it for a bomb.

Curtailing the visas "was shocking and problematic," Fattal recalled. "But I must say, Iran could have canceled the whole thing, and they didn't."

After a layover in Dubai, where the mothers changed into traditional Middle Eastern garb, including headscarves, they arrived in Tehran on the evening of May 19 to face more than 100 news photographers and Iran's state-controlled Press TV.

Iranian authorities shepherded them through passport control, where they were met by their escort, Switzerland's ambassador to Iran, Livia Leu Agosti. She handed them each a red rose, Iran's national flower.

A two-car convoy took them to the posh Esteghlal Hotel, a former Hilton. Agosti rode with her driver and staff in the front car. The mothers followed, accompanied by two Iranian men in plain clothes, who said almost nothing and seemed assigned as both bodyguards and minders.

"We went in assuming there would be no privacy, from the bathroom to the bedroom to the lunchroom," said Fattal. While the mothers found no listening devices in their 15th-floor hotel rooms, they don't doubt they were monitored, Fattal said.

A large suite on the 15th floor, appointed with red-and-gold sofas and a table heaped with bananas and pistachio nuts, was the setting for the reunion with their children, who were brought over from the prison on May 20.

"You see me smiling in a lot of the photos because I am so not scared," Fattal said. "I am so anxious to see Josh. I am so anticipating this fabulous reason I am there."

But the prisoners were not told they were going to see their mothers. They came in wearing new T-shirts and pants. And for all they knew, Fattal said, they were going to court.

On seeing her son for the first time in nearly a year, she threw up her hands, ran to him, and wrapped him in her arms.

"They were all really shaking," Fattal said. "It was such a shock.

"The big photo moment, of course, was when the kids came in. I have blips in my head that don't go away. This was such a happy moment."

The mothers clung to their children for most of the six-hour visit.

In prison, Bauer and Fattal share a cell; Shourd is alone. The three meet outdoors, twice a day for 30 minutes, in a caged yard smaller than a volleyball court.

"Josh said when they see Sarah, one of their main jobs is to let her speak" because she is alone so much, Fattal said.

"They are all a little pasty. And they all have a little bit of, like, shadow under their eyes. All of us noticed this. It could be a mineral deficiency. Or not enough sunlight," she said, but Josh appeared strong from doing push-ups and jogging in place.

Fattal brought him a chocolate bar and a book about American agriculture before processed food, which appealed to the environmentalist in him.

But the "clothes for release" turned out not to be needed, so she left them for safekeeping with Swiss officials.

Day Two at the hotel on May 21 was briefer and bittersweet.

"We did not mince words. We said we want to take the kids home with us. As we got closer to departure we said it more often," Fattal said. "We kept saying, 'We'll be heartbroken if we don't have the kids with us. We'll be devastated if we don't have the kids with us.' "

But their request to meet Iran's top leaders was denied, so the appeals fell on deaf ears.

"The Friday that we left, I am just hoping that turns out to be the hardest moment of my life," said Fattal, whose voice thickened as she described the slow closing of the doors on the elevator that took her son away.

"There I am," she said. "My son is going to Evin Prison, he's going back to Evin Prison from this hotel, and he is saying, 'Don't worry, Mom, I'm OK. Don't worry.' "

Back in Elkins Park now, Laura Fattal has returned to her daily conference calls with the other mothers, the frequent telephone briefings with the State Department, the weekly sessions on Skype with the Iranian lawyer the mothers hired half a year ago but who has not yet been permitted to meet their children.

Fattal is working on ways to keep a spotlight on the case and said she was buoyed when students at Cheltenham High School sent over an embroidered knapsack filled with 309 notes of encouragement for Josh, who turned 28 on June 4. That's one note for each day of captivity from his arrest, on July 31, through his birthday.