Roger Cooper, British journalist jailed for five years in Iran whose sense of mischief kept him sane

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03-06-2025

​Roger Cooper, who has died aged 90, was a British journalist and businessman who was arrested as a spy on a visit to Iran in December 1985 and spent more than five years in prison, under sentence of death.
For most of that time he was incarcerated in the infamous Evin Prison in Tehran, often in solitary confinement. Nevertheless, he did not court sympathy when he was finally released: 'I can say that anyone who, like me, was educated in an English public school and served in the ranks of the British Army is quite at home in a Third World prison.'​
As with the incarceration of Terry Waite and his fellow British hostages in Lebanon over the same period, Cooper's plight became a cause célèbre, with frequent rumblings in the press about the outrageous detention of a British citizen in Iran on apparently non-existent evidence.
It was Cooper's misfortune, however, that Mrs Thatcher's government had little room for manoeuvre in lobbying for his release. British-Iranian diplomatic relations had been at a low ebb following the Revolution of 1979 and then, just as they were improving, were further marred by the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989.
Cooper had lived in Iran on and off for 20 years until the Revolution. He was working as sales and marketing manager of McDermott International, a US marine construction company, when he flew to Tehran in 1985 hoping to secure a contract for an oil pipeline. On December 7 he had just left his hotel in a taxi when it was cut up by a BMW Coupé: two men emerged and forced him to get in.
'What happened next seemed a blend of the Keystone Cops and the Theatre of the Absurd,' Cooper recalled. One of the men started berating the other for forgetting to bring a blindfold, until Cooper obligingly suggested that they could procure a bandage from a pharmacy and directed the men, unfamiliar with the local area, to the nearest one.
Once blindfolded, he was transported to a prison and interrogated by a man who 'wore a close-fitting white mask over his face, with slits for the eyes… It is an image that has stayed with me ever since, regularly haunting my dreams and occurring in flashbacks during waking hours.'
The man told Cooper: 'We know all about your espionage career in Iran, both before and after the Revolution. We know the outline, but there are some details which are very important to us… If you do not co-operate, you will stay here until you do, or until you die.'
Cooper protested his innocence over the course of several weeks of interrogation, his captor insisting on remaining anonymous: 'If you ever see my face, even by accident, or even try to see it, I will push this pen in one of your ears and out of the other,' he declared on one occasion, waggling his ballpoint in Cooper's ear to underline his point. Cooper was blindfolded whenever he left his cell, even to walk a few yards to the toilet, which he was permitted to use only three times a day ('unless it's an emergency,' he was told, 'and we don't like emergencies').
In February 1987 Cooper was transferred to the notorious political prison in Evin, 10 miles from Tehran. 'Shouting and cries of pain are often heard,' Cooper recalled, 'only partly drowned out by religious chants and prayer ceremonies played endlessly on a tape recorder in the corridor.'
He was ordered to provide his captors with a detailed run-down on key figures in British intelligence; having no knowledge of the subject, he invented a cast of personnel based on characters in the works of Evelyn Waugh, including a Secret Service legend called Colonel Dick Hooker, inspired by Waugh's Brigadier Ritchie-Hook. He amused himself in his cell by composing a poem: 'Brigadier Ritchie-Hook/ Is a character in a book./ My Colonel Dick Hooker/ Should have won me the Booker.'
Cooper was told that he would be released if he agreed to share his insights in a television broadcast: 'This is going to be the most interesting programme on television for a long time,' his interrogator told him after the recording. 'You were very good.' The deal was abandoned, however, after his captors came across a report on the broadcast in The Guardian, pointing out that Cooper had been blatantly spoofing.
In October 1987 Cooper was taken to the prison courtroom and tried. The judge, who spent most of the trial reading the newspaper, told him: 'As regards the verdict, that is obvious from the start, but it has to be typed out and that can take time.' Cooper was not informed of the outcome of the trial, but his father wrote to him to say that he had read in The Daily Telegraph that he was to be sentenced to death.
Having formed a friendship with the prison governor, Cooper eventually prevailed on him to provide details and was told that he had received two sentences: death and 10 years' imprisonment. 'I asked him, 'Which comes first?' He looked puzzled for a moment, then said, 'Ah, I see, yes, a good question. I will recommend that they keep you here for 10 years and then hang you.' I replied: 'Please don't make it the other way round.''
Nevertheless, Cooper was eventually released in April 1991, and in 1994 he published a memoir, Death and Ten Years. 'Like him, his book is eccentric and erudite and very funny,' noted the BBC's John Simpson, an old friend of Cooper's, in the Telegraph. 'But its chief value is as a manual to show how a terrifying experience can be overcome triumphantly… Roger Cooper was not a man whom threats or violence could break. His interrogators had all the power, and he had all the character. Character won.'
John Roger Sutherland Cooper was born in London on January 29 1935, the son of James Cooper and his wife Rosaleen, née Graves, who were both doctors. Rosaleen was the sister of the poet and novelist Robert Graves; as Roger recalled, 'Uncle Robert had a good baritone voice, at its best, I thought, singing slightly bawdy songs… to the embarrassment of my rather old-fashioned mother.' Robert Graves would die, by macabre coincidence, on the day his nephew was arrested in Iran in 1985.
Roger grew up in Devon and won scholarships to Clifton College and to St John's College, Oxford, where he read modern languages. In 1956 he travelled to Budapest to observe the Hungarian Revolution, and returned with three fellow undergraduates the following year to deliver supplies of penicillin. He experienced his first taste of a foreign prison when they were arrested on espionage charges and held for two weeks.
On their release they were interviewed for the BBC by Woodrow Wyatt, who rebuked them for having been 'larking about', and Roger was subsequently sent down from Oxford. He secured a BA in English, French and classical Persian literature as an external student of London University.
His gift for languages saw him assigned to the Russian interpreter's course during his National Service with the Army. After training as a journalist at the Toronto bureau of United Press, in 1958 he decided to pursue a long-held fascination with Persian culture and travelled to Iran.
He lived there on and off for two decades while working variously as a journalist, teacher and interpreter. In 1960 he married an Iranian woman, Guity Habibian, and converted to Islam; they had a daughter, but were divorced in 1965.
Some of Cooper's articles for The New Statesman on human rights abuses earned him unwelcome attention from Savak, the secret police, but the Shah admired his eloquence sufficiently to hire him as a speechwriter. Cooper secured the final press interview with the Shah before the Revolution forced his exile in 1979.
Cooper decided that he too was better off out of Iran after the Revolution, but made frequent return visits in the 1980s in his new role as a consultant, using his knowledge of the Middle East to aid international firms keen to do business in the region.
Following his arrest in 1985, he found his time in solitary confinement in his two-by-three-metre cell rather restful, and was annoyed when the British government successfully lobbied for him to be spared this psychological ordeal and housed with the other prisoners. He became proficient at Persian crosswords: 'the guards would always call, 'Cooper, what's 10 across?''
On more than one occasion a guard summarily told him that it was time for his death sentence to be enacted, released the safety catch on his revolver and pulled the trigger – with the gun being empty. But Cooper refused to be cowed by such sadistic pranks and enjoyed teasing the guards.
His calculator was taken away and examined after one of the guards suggested that it might contain a secret radio transmitter; after it was returned, Cooper would periodically shout into it: 'Hello! Hello! Mrs Thatcher? Hello? I have a message. Jaffar is on duty in prison today.'
After nearly five and a half years, Cooper's incarceration came to an abrupt end: on April 2 1991 he was driven to the airport and told his sentence had been suspended. David Reddaway, the British chargé d'affaires in Tehran, who had worked tirelessly to secure his release, met him there and lent him a tie to face the press; they then flew together to Heathrow.
There was some suggestion that Cooper was freed in exchange for the release of Mehrdad Kowkabi, an Iranian student on remand after being accused of setting fire to a London bookshop selling Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. Cooper himself thought he had benefited from the advent in Iran of the comparatively liberal President Rafsanjani: 'The Iran which has set me free is not the same as the Iran that arrested me. Today's Iran is far more humanitarian.'
Living in Britain once more, Cooper resume​d work as a journalist, writing a regular 'Rip Van Winkle' column for the Telegraph in which he mused on changes in British life that had occurred in his long absence. He was also in demand as a forthright reviewer of memoirs by other prisoners and hostages. Criticising Terry Waite's Taken on Trust as being 'almost totally deficient' in humour, he observed that Waite 'might have survived his ordeal better if he had found something to laugh at – if only at himself'.
Cooper always denied that he had been involved in espionage in Iran, and claimed he had just been unlucky. 'I think, perhaps unfortunately, I matched the profile of an English spy… I had no particular job, and I'd lived there for many years.'
Despite his insouciant attitude and lack of bitterness to the Iranians, Cooper deeply regretted that his mother and one of his brothers had died during his captivity without knowing that he would one day be released; he also suffered from PTSD. In his later years he ran a property and holiday business in Spain.
Roger Cooper's second marriage, to Cherlee Botkin, an American, was also dissolved. He is survived by his daughter, Gisu, who came to live in Britain with her father and became a GP.
Roger Cooper, born January 29 1935, died May 18 2025
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