An Iranian news report that suggests that an imprisoned Washington Post correspondent is a spy who furnished economic and industrial data to the Central Intelligence Agency was viewed by friends on Monday as a sign that a trial might be held soon.
The report by the Fars News Agency was laden with innuendo and unattributed assertions about the correspondent, Jason Rezaian, and his Iranian-American expatriate connections.
But the Fars report, published Sunday, also provided more specifics than had been stated previously in the Iranian press about the accusations against Mr. Rezaian, a dual Iranian-American citizen from California who has been held for nearly nine months in Evin Prison in Tehran with virtually no public explanation.
Mr. Rezaian’s family in the United States, his friends and advocacy groups have described his arrest as a travesty. Martin Baron, executive editor of The Washington Post, said in response to the Fars report that any charges of espionage “would be absurd, the product of fertile and twisted imaginations.”
Some have said it reflects tensions in the Iranian hierarchy between President Hassan Rouhani and hard-liners, including the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who are suspicious of efforts to improve relations with the United States.
“To justify the arrest, they spread lies,” said Omid Memarian, an expatriate Iranian journalist in New York who is a friend of Mr. Rezaian and was identified in the Fars report as one of his suspicious acquaintances.
Mr. Memarian said the timing of the Fars report suggested that judicial authorities were close to announcing a trial date because it appeared intended to “create a storm in the media to influence the court — they’ve created the image of a spy.”
The Fars report suggested that Mr. Rezaian, whom it referred to as “Mr. Journalist,” had shared economic and industrial information about the effects of Western sanctions on to contacts in the United States, whom the report described as “errand boys” of the United States Treasury, Congress and the C.I.A.
The report said the contacts included Mr. Memarian, who had been imprisoned in Iran years ago for his writings and who has written critically about Mr. Rezaian’s incarceration, and Karim Sadjadpour, a senior associate in the Middle East program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“Selling economic and industrial information of Iran in the sanction condition is exactly the same as selling food to the enemy in wartime,” the Fars report stated. “And Iran is just a sample of the Mr. Journalist’s espionage.”
The Fars report came amid the most intense phase in the negotiations over Iran’s disputed , for which a framework agreement was reached on April 2. There is a June 30 deadline for completion.
Some people following Mr. Rezaian’s case suggested privately that the Fars report might have been meant to sabotage any possible effort to ease his prison conditions or to even allow him to go free on bail.
They said an easing of Mr. Rezaian’s confinement had been planned in February but was annulled when a hard-line politician, Hamid Rasaei, who has been accused by Mr. Rouhani’s administration of corruption, charged that Mr. Rezaian had managed to “infiltrate” the presidential office through contacts with a nephew of the president. Mr. Rasaei’s statement was prominently published by Fars.
On Monday, a spokesman for the judiciary said that a court date for Mr. Rezaian will be set once the investigations were over. “I have told the judge of the case to ask the lawyers to speed up their studies and let the case come to an end,” the spokesman, Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejei, was quoted by the Iranian Labor News Agency as saying.
Mr. Rezaian, 39, was arrested on July 22 along with his wife, Yeganeh Salehi, an Iranian journalist for a United Arab Emirates newspaper, and two others. All but Mr. Rezaian were later released on bail.
“Jason Rezaian has become an unfortunate pawn for a clique of hard-liners who want to embarrass the Rouhani government and feel threatened by U.S.-Iran rapprochement,” Mr. Sadjadpour said Monday. “If Ayatollah Khamenei wanted Jason out of prison I think he’d be out.”