It was something of a shock to hear over the weekend that a friend and one-time colleague of mine, Roxana Saberi, had been arrested in Iran. She’s now been detained for over a month, and her family is clearly worried.

Roxana has been a freelance reporter inside Iran for the last six years, primarily for National Public Radio. She’s also filed many reports for FOX News as well. She is an American citizen who also carries an Iranian passport because her father is Iranian.

According to her family, Roxana has not been heard from since February 10 when she made a quick phone call to her parents in Fargo, North Dakota. She told them she had been arrested on January 31 for buying a bottle of wine, an illegal activity in Iran. Shortly after her call ended, she phoned back to ask her parents to keep quiet about the whole affair since she hoped to be released in a couple of days.

Roxana’s parents did exactly that for 18 days. They finally decided they had waited long enough, so this weekend they went public with the story. NPR first broke the story, Fox News then picked up on it, and now it’s gone national, including a report in The New York Times.

From right: Tom Tangney, Roxana Saberi, and Naoko Funayama; photo by Dan Tritle

Roxana’s father, Reza, says the family has now contacted lawyers in Iran to help their 31-year-old daughter. The U.S. does not have diplomatic relations with Iran but the State Department has been informed of Roxana’s situation.

Saberi says his daughter thinks the wine purchase may be nothing more than a pretext to detain her. He points out that a while back, a colleague of his daughter’s was also arrested, supposedly for buying a bottle of wine, too. But he didn’t even drink! Reza Saberi says neither he nor his daughter have any idea why she should be detained for so long.

Mr. Saberi says Roxana was working on a book detailing her impressions of Iran but he doesn’t think there was anything controversial in it. He says Iran pulled his daughter’s press credentials last year but she chose to stay to work on her book. He says she was planning on returning home to America for good in just a couple of months. He and his wife are obviously concerned and upset about what’s happened to Roxana and hope publicity will pressure the Iranian government to release her.

I met Roxana in 2002, the year before she headed off to Iran. We were both part of a contingent of American journalists who covered the German Elections that Fall with the RIAS/Berlin program, a terrific 2-week-long German/American journalists exchange program.

She was a bright and ambitious 25-year-old at the time, who had already earned a master’s degree at Cambridge University and had plans to eventually join the U.S. Foreign Service. She took her time in Germany very seriously, soaking up as much as she possibly could. She sought out advice about writing and reporting from anyone and everyone. I remember one night, while the rest of us were out partying and then crashing, she stayed up all night working on a story she had to file the following morning. When we all clambered on the bus the following morning bleary-eyed, Roxana still managed to look “like a million bucks” on absolutely no sleep. She was also one of only three of us who attended a giant international press conference the morning after the election. There she was, standing up amidst hundreds of international journalists, asking an involved question to the panel of German Elections officials, again on almost no sleep. What a pro.

We kidded her unmercifully about being Miss North Dakota in the 1997 Miss America Pageant (!!!) but she was always a good sport about it. Just imagine – being a beauty queen with an Iranian father and a Japanese mother in North frickin’ Dakota. That always made me laugh.

I kept in touch with her via email for a couple of years as she settled in in Iran. Whenever I asked her about the dangers, she always expressed confidence she knew how to navigate the tricky highways and by-ways of life in Iran. She was working hard on mastering Farsi and was managing to find enough freelance work along the way. Besides, she told me, she absolutely loved the country, finding it incredibly beautiful.

I can only imagine what life must be like for Roxana right now. I find myself going back to the graphic novel (and then animated film) PERSEPOLIS about one Iranian girl’s experience growing up in the shadow of the Iranian Revolution. I also very recently read a review of a book by an Iranian woman who tells of the increasingly repressive life women are leading in Iran these days. She eventually had to emigrate to London for her own safety. That sounds a bit like the last story Roxana filed for NPR before she had her press credentials pulled. It was a story about the arrest of a number of Iranian women for “inappropriate dress.” One of the women told Roxana, as she was being hauled off to jail, that this was just going to make her madder. Next time, this woman said, she was going to wear something even shorter.

I have no idea if that type of story angered Iranian officials enough to arrest her, but Roxana herself was never personally antagonistic or defiant. She’s far too much a diplomat to cause a scene. Whenever she reported from Iran, she was always appropriately covered up. She may have reported the truth but she was always respectful.

I trust this will all work out for the best in the end. With all the international attention this case is bound to attract, coupled with a new team setting a new agenda in the White House, I just don’t see how Iran is going to benefit from holding Roxana much longer. What I’m hoping for is a quick resolution to this immediate personal crisis. And then, who knows? This could all be great fodder for a terrific opening or closing chapter in her upcoming book. I’ll be first in line to read it.