The telephone access in prison varied over the years. When I first entered, we had 15 minutes every month. You could apply for special permission, and get phone access twice a month or perhaps even every week. Informants could often get permission for daily phone calls.
Prisoners would be taken in groups of around 10 to the phone room in the morning on the day appointed for their cellblock. The phone room opened whenever the room supervisor arrived, usually around 9 a.m. and closed no later than 1 p.m. Inmates like me, who were calling overseas, could often not reach their families in the morning because of the time differences between countries. I myself was not able to talk to my children for the first couple years of my imprisonment because when I was allowed to call, they were already asleep.
Because most of the prisoners were foreigners, eventually the jail administration opened the phone room on certain days in the late afternoon. This change made the escape plan much more feasible.
By late afternoon, the administrative offices of the prison were closed, and the police staff was much fewer than in the mornings.
The phone room was located only about five meters from the door to the reception area. If we could get all the members of our group into the phone room around the time of Maghrib, we would be able to go directly to the reception area door without having to run from our cellblock through several doors and past at least 8 to 10 guards.
Maghrib was the ideal time because I knew that visibility for the gun towers would be less clear. We would all wear gray clothes underneath our prison uniforms to further decrease the ability of the riflemen in the towers from seeing us as we ran to the getaway car that would be waiting approximately 50 meters up the road at a petrol station.
Once I received a written approval from the prison manager to use the phone in the afternoon, which I would have to show to the room supervisor, I simply faked his signature on approvals for the other members of the group; we then only had to coordinate with the driver outside, the contacts for the boat to Iran, and choose our day.
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