MATT TREVITHICK,
30, walked into a Boston coffee shop towing a roller suitcase. He was as tall as I remembered — six-foot-four — but less stocky, less of the collegiate oarsman apparent in his physique. Same quick smile, same gleam in his blue eyes, though a cloud of seriousness hovered about his face, and his hair was shorter, thinner.
The last time I’d seen him was two and a half years earlier, when I wrote about his efforts to launch national rowing programs in Afghanistan and Iraq. Since then, Trevithick had reported from the Korengal Valley in northeastern Afghanistan — one of the deadliest patches of Taliban territory — for the online magazine The Daily Beast, ghost-written a memoir for the first post-Taliban minister of higher education in Afghanistan, settled in Turkey, and co-founded an independent research group devoted to humanitarian crises in the region. He smiled when he recognized me. I pulled my hand from my pocket. But knowing he’d just spent 41 days in Iran’s most notorious prison, I gave him a hug instead.
Trevithick reunites with his mother, Amelia Newcomb, at Logan International Airport in Boston in January 2016.
22 I NMH Magazine
Trevithick was running late, so we didn’t have time to catch up over coffee. His train for New York City was scheduled to leave Boston’s South Station in 35 minutes. He was on his way to “break his silence” in a series of national interviews, starting with Anderson Cooper on CNN. Trevithick’s release from Evin Prison in Tehran 10 days earlier was big news. He’d been freed along with four Iranian-Americans, including Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, who had been held for more than 500 days. When I saw Trevithick’s name among the released, I was shocked. Almost no one had even known he was in prison. His family and the U.S. State Department had kept his detention under wraps while diplomatic channels were being worked. A few days after the story broke, a picture appeared in the Boston Globe showing Trevithick and his mother rushing out of Logan airport on their way to the family’s home in Hingham, Massachusetts. News trucks gathered outside the house, waiting for something, anything. More than one report described Trevithick as “in seclusion,” and I wondered if he’d suffered some sort of trauma while behind bars. We stepped outside and grabbed a taxi, settling in the back as the cabbie steered us into the morning traffic. The tan computer bag on Trevithick’s lap was the same one he’d been carrying the day of his arrest and the only item he left Iran with, aside from the clothes he was wearing. Trevithick had been studying Farsi at Tehran University. It was his second trip to Iran; the first was
PHOTO: © ARAM BOGHOSIAN/EPA/CORBIS