Kian Tajbakhsh, an internationally renowned social scientist and urban planner, told Western journalists permitted to visit him at the Evin prison, north of Tehran, that he was being held in solitary confinement but was being well treated.
The scholar was serving as an advisor to the Open Society Institute, part of the George Soros Foundation, when he was detained May 11 for allegedly working on behalf of U.S. intelligence services.
He was the fourth Iranian-American academic to be arrested by Iran and accused of fomenting so-called "color revolutions." The other three were Ali Shakeri, Haleh Esfandiari, who was recently set free, and Nazi Azima.
The Open Society Institute adamantly denied the charges, calling them entirely without merit. In a statement on its Web site, it said that Tajbakhsh's work had focused on public health, humanitarian relief, culture and local government, and had sought to foster better relations between Iran and the outside world.
In July, Iranian television broadcast a documentary program, "In the name of democracy," which showed Tajbakhsh and Esfandiari admitting that U.S. intelligence services were actively involved in undermining the Iranian regime.
The academics said that Western non-governmental organizations (NGOs) were directly responsible for inciting revolutions in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine.
They confessed that when arrested, they had been working "under the control of American political institutions" to organize a so-called "fifth column" in Iran and foment a "velvet revolution."
Esfandiari, who is the director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, in Washington D.C., was released August 21.
Speaking Monday, she said her arrest May 8 remained a mystery to her, and that she endured months of intensive interrogations before finally being let go.
"I think I was taken in because they [the Iranian authorities] thought the United States was no longer able or interested in military intervention in Iran," and that it was now trying to use "people power" to overturn the Iranian government.
