Iran has, for decades, used what critics call hostage diplomacy, a policy of detaining foreigners and dual nationals to leverage them for prisoner swaps and the release of frozen funds. After the 12-day war with Israel and the United States, Iran is once again targeting Americans.
At least four Iranian Americans — two men and two women — are in Iranian custody, according to human rights groups, lawyers and Hostage Aid Worldwide, a non-profit organisation that was founded by former hostages to aid families and that is in touch with the current detainees’ friends and families.
Three of the Americans are in jail, and one has been barred from leaving the country, they said.
The detentions are likely to increase the tense political climate between Tehran and Washington after the United States joined Israel’s attack on Iran and bombarded and severely damaged three of its nuclear sites in June.
Nuclear negotiations with Washington have not resumed since the war in June, but Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said this past week in an interview with local news media that he and the US special envoy, Steve Witkoff, have been communicating directly through text messages.
US president Donald Trump has said that he would not tolerate countries’ wrongful detention of Americans and that their release is a top priority for his administration. Mr Witkoff’s office did not respond to a question on whether the detention of dual American citizens was brought up in communications with Mr Araghchi.
The US state department has said that it is “closely tracking” reports of Americans being detained in Iran. “For privacy, safety and operational reasons, we do not get into the details of our internal or diplomatic discussions on reported US detainees,” it said in a statement Monday. “We call on Iran to immediately release all unjustly detained individuals in Iran.”
Iran’s mission to the United Nations declined to comment on the detentions. Iran’s ministry of intelligence said in a statement on Monday that it had arrested at least 20 people who were working as spies or operatives for Israel in cities across Iran.
The four detained Iranian Americans had all lived in the US and had travelled to Iran to visit family, according to the rights groups. The families of three of the Americans have asked that their names not be published for fear it could make their situations worse.
Two of the four were arrested by security agents in the immediate aftermath of Israel’s attacks on Iran in June, according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) and Hengaw, an independent rights groups based outside Iran.
One is a 70-year-old Jewish father and grandfather from New York who has a jewellery business. He is being questioned about a trip to Israel, according to the rights groups and the man’s colleagues and friends.
The other is a woman from California who was held in the notorious Evin prison. But her whereabouts is now unclear after Israel attacked Evin in June and the prison was evacuated, according to rights groups and Kylie Moore-Gilbert, an Australian British scholar who was imprisoned in Iran for two years and released in 2020.
Iran is also holding another Iranian American woman, who was first imprisoned and prevented from leaving the country in December 2024. She is currently out of prison, but her Iranian and American passports were confiscated, according to her US-based lawyer who asked not to be named to discuss sensitive information.
The woman works for a US technology company and runs a charity for underprivileged children in Iran. But after the recent war, the Iranian judiciary elevated her case and charged her with espionage, according to her lawyer – a serious crime that can carry many years in prison and even the death penalty.
At least one other Iranian American citizen, journalist Reza Valizadeh, is imprisoned in Iran. He is a former employee of Radio Farda, the Persian-language news outlet that is part of the State Department-funded Radio Free Europe. Radio Farda has said in a statement that he was arrested in October 2024 while visiting family in Iran. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison on charges of “collaborating with a hostile government.”
Two senior Iranian officials who asked not to be identified because they were not authorised to speak publicly confirmed that Iran had recently detained two dual American citizens – the New York man and the California woman. They said it was part of a wider crackdown focused on finding a network of operatives linked to Israel and United States.
The crackdown comes as Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian has encouraged Iranians in the diaspora to return to Iran. He said recently that he would speak with the ministries of intelligence and judiciary to facilitate those returns, according to local news reports.
“We have to create a framework so that Iranians living abroad can come to Iran without fear,” Mr Pezeshkian said.
But Ali Vaez, the Iran director for the International Crisis Group, said recently: “The Iranian government has a sordid history of cracking down domestically following intelligence failures and seizing foreign nationals as a cynical form of leverage. And at a time when Tehran and the Trump administration are already at loggerheads over nuclear diplomacy, the arrests could add another significant area of contention.”
The US state department issued a new warning after the war, telling Americans not to travel to Iran “under any circumstances”. In a statement in English and Persian, it says that Americans, including Iranian Americans, “have been wrongfully detained – taken hostage – by the Iranian government for months, and years. The threat of detention is even greater today.”
The news of the Americans’ detentions has rattled the Iranian American community, including several people previously detained in Iran. Many of them are often the first point of contact for families who find themselves navigating the frightening ordeal of having a loved one arrested in Iran.
Siamak Namazi, an Iranian American businessperson who was held for eight years in Iran before being released as part of a US-Iran deal in 2023, said that since the war with Israel, the number of Americans detained in Iran has grown.
“Some cases are public; others remain under wraps, often due to poor advice that silence is safer,” he said. “Securing their release must be a core US priority in any future diplomatic engagement with Tehran,” added Namazi, who is on the board of Hostage Aid Worldwide.
In New York’s tight-knit Jewish Iranian circles, news of one member’s detention spread quickly and brought anxiety. Iran has arrested at least five Jewish Iranians in its postwar crackdown and has summoned 35 more for questioning, according to Skylar Thompson, deputy director of HRANA.
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