
SEASON FIVE
Lethal Dissent: Iran’s hunt for its citizens abroad
On Spec’s 18-month investigation takes you inside the secret war waged on Iranian dissidents in exile. We follow poets, soldiers, politicians and ordinary folk who have escaped the Islamic Regime but still live in fear of being hunted down and forced back to Iran to be imprisoned or executed.
Lethal Dissent is produced in partnership with The World, with funding from the Pulitzer Center and Radio Zamaneh.
ATTENTION: If you are seeing a “Preview” badge in the podcast player, you can click on “On Spec Podcast” next to it to listen to the full episodes on Spotify.
SEASON FIVE’S GUEST HOST
Nafisa Haji
“Headline news—especially lately—feels like a constant bombardment of horror and shock, lacking context and nuance. Slow journalism fills this gap, giving us human stories we can relate to and which can inform us to the point of taking action for change.”
Nafisa Haji is an American author, born and raised in Los Angeles. She studied history at the University of California at Berkeley, taught elementary school in downtown Los Angeles, and earned a doctorate in education from the University of California at Los Angeles. She is the author of two novels, The Writing On My Forehead and The Sweetness of Tears, is currently working on a third, and lives in Bodrum, on the Aegean Coast of Turkey.

Take a deep dive into the episodes below
Fariba Nawa and Özge Sebzeci wrap up the season with some great news about some of the characters we met in Lethal Dissent.
In the final episode, Mohammad Shabani’s suicide note is analyzed by a handwriting expert and Fariba Nawa gets the results. She follows the ripple effects of the new information, and Mohammad’s best friend tries to make sense of what it means.
Fariba Nawa is threatened. She steers her reporting to focus on impunity. The investigation into Iran’s hunt for dissidents goes to the United Nations, inside a Turkish parliamentary hearing, and to the US State Department to find out if anyone will intervene.
The Sağlam family's kidnapping operation is caught in a police dragnet. The ensuing police investigation reveals an entire network of conspirators behind the Sağlams. When one conspirator is arrested and interrogated, he confesses. Fariba Nawa uses the confession to tell the story of Iran's behind-the-scenes involvement.
Rezaie gets into the car with the Sağlams. But he already knew he was being tricked. His suspicions had begun long before he climbed into the car, back at the kebab restaurant when the Sağlams introduced him to an American woman. Fariba Nawa tries to untangle the story of the American woman, and finds out how Rezaie foiled the kidnapping plot against him.
In the city where the dissident Mohammad Shabani died, Fariba Nawa finds evidence that points towards his cause of death.
The death of poet Mohammad Shabani, an Iranian dissident living in Turkey, catches his friends, family, and supporters by surprise. Fariba Nawa finds one of Mohammad Shabani’s confidantes and learns new details about his life in exile before he died.
When two close friends who work for the Iranian government follow their conscience, it puts them at odds with the regime. Now one of them is dead. To figure out what might have happened, reporter Fariba Nawa goes back to the beginning.
Reporter Fariba Nawa introduces her investigation into Iranian plots against exiles in Turkey. She tells the story of Iran’s history of violence against its citizens at home, and how that violence has grown to cross international borders today. The fate of a dissident in France becomes a blueprint for the questions she seeks to answer.