Fanny Esfandiari, a 93-year-old great-grandmother with heart disease and bad eyesight, made a desperate trip to Iran's notorious Evin Prison earlier this month.

"I have to find my daughter," she told relatives reluctant to drive her. None thought it would be productive -- or worth the risks. A nephew finally agreed. He stayed in the car as Esfandiari slowly shuffled on her cane up to the hulking white stone compound in Tehran where Iran's kings and theocrats have incarcerated their most famous political prisoners as well as their toughest criminals.

Esfandiari asked to see her daughter, Haleh Esfandiari of Potomac, a scholar once described as the "gold standard" of Middle East analysts, who was detained by Iranian intelligence on May 8...

After Iran's judiciary announced last week that Esfandiari was being investigated for "crimes against national security," 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner and human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi agreed to take her case...

Iran's leading hard-line newspaper, Kayhan, now a mouthpiece for Ahmadinejad's government, alleged last week that Esfandiari was fomenting a "velvet revolution" in Iran and spying for the United States and Israel...

In contrast to many foreign-policy analysts, Esfandiari avoided the talk show circuit and media interviews. "Haleh was always very careful. She never accepted Voice of America interviews and advised me to avoid VOA and Persian media as well," says Afshin Molavi, an Iranian-born fellow at the New America Foundation. "Even when the reform movement was in high gear, she was very cautious and rarely spoke out in public on Iran issues. To suggest that she was involved in some sort of velvet-revolution plot would be farcical were it not so outrageous..."

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