Categories: OLD Media Moves

When an Iranian prison guard asked for WSJ’s Seib’s business card

Wall Street Journal executive Washington editor Gerald Seib talked about when he was kidnapped and imprisoned for four days on suspicion of espionage by Iranian officials while covering the Iran–Iraq War in 1987.

“Nothing compares to my unscheduled stay in a foreign prison,” said Seib, who has covered presidents and Federal Reserve chairmen.

After returning to Tehran, Iranian officials withheld his passport. Then, a vehicle pulled up alongside his car in a hotel parking lot, and four men in military camouflage grabbed him and put him in their car and took him to a prison, where he was accused of spying.

“I spent most of the time in an interrogation room and one night in a hotly lit cell,” said Seib. After four days, they released him, but not before one of the guards asked for a memento, said Seib.

“Can I have your business card?” the guard asked. “If I come to America, I would like to call you.”

Seib said he gave the guard his business card, but he never heard from him.

Listen to Seib’s conversation here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.