Interview: Iranian dissident Maziar Bahari

The reporter — jailed, beaten and shamed as a western spy — has chronicled his experience on film

Maziar Bahari never forgets what drove his interrogators crazy.

His polite manner. His reporter’s instinct to explain why the street protests that followed the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad interested his editors at Newsweek. His taste for Leonard Cohen and Anton Chekhov. His bafflement when asked what he knew of sexual delights in New Jersey, or why he, a Muslim, would have a woman’s phone number — in this case Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi’s — on his mobile. All that, plus a few jokes that he put together with a reporter for Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, spurred his “specialists” to beat Bahari bloody-blue in the darkness of Tehran’s Evin prison.

Click here to read the story on the Financial Times' website