Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (2 page)

All men in the Islamic organizations called each other “brother,” but Hashemi was part of a smaller, militant inner circle called the Brethren—“brothers who were more brothers than others,” was how one would later explain it. Most of those recruited for the takeover effort were simply students, but the Brethren were something more. They would eventually form the nucleus of the new Iran’s intelligence ministry. They were armed at all times and had connections with the powerful clergy and with high-ranking officials in the police and the provisional government who had sympathy for their political agenda. Hashemi had not been one of the instigators of the plot to seize the American embassy that day, but when those plans were formed he was naturally one of the first approached for help.

The plan was the brainchild of three young men, Ibrahim Asgharzadeh, an engineering student from Sanati Sharif University, Mohsen Mirdamadi from Amir Kabir University, and Habibullah Bitaraf from Technical University. Asgharzadeh was the first to suggest it. They would storm the hated U.S. embassy, a symbol of Western imperial domination of Iran, occupy it for three days, and from it issue a series of communiqués that would explain Iran’s grievances against America, beginning with the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadeq in 1953 and decades of support for the shah, now a wanted man in Iran accused of looting the nation’s treasure and torturing and killing thousands. America’s imperialist designs had not ended when the shah fled Iran the previous February. The criminal tyrant had recently been allowed to fly to America on the pretense of needing medical treatment and was being sheltered there with his stolen fortune. America was stirring up political opposition to the imam, instigating ethnic uprisings in the various enclaves that made up the border regions of their country, and had recently begun secretly collaborating with the provisional government to undermine the revolution. A clandestine meeting in Algiers between secular members of the provisional government and White House National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski had been revealed to dramatic effect in Tehran. All of it added up to only one thing in the students’ eyes: America was determined to hang on to its colony and restore the shah to his throne. The danger was pressing. The provisional government had sold out; it was nothing more than a group of old men wedded to Western decadence bent on tamping down the ardor of the Islamist uprising. One thing the revolution had taught the students was the folly of waiting for something to happen. They had seen the fruits of bold, direct action. Seizing the embassy would stop the American plot in its tracks and would force the provisional government to show its hand. Any move against the heroic embassy occupiers would expose acting Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan and his administration as American stooges. The students believed that if they did not act soon to expose him if his government weathered its first year, then the United States would have its hooks back in Iran for good, and their dream of sweeping, truly revolutionary change would die.

When Asgharzadeh had proposed the move two weeks earlier at a meeting of an umbrella activist group called Strengthen the Unity, it was opposed by two students, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from Tarbiat Modarres University and Mohammed Ali Seyyedinejad from Elm-o-Sanat University. Both preferred targeting the Soviet embassy instead. Asgharzadeh, Mirdamadi, and Bitaraf voted them down and then had expanded their planning cell by inviting activists from various local schools, including Hashemi, Abbas Abdi, Reza Siafullahi, and Mohammad Naimipoor, all young men experienced with street demonstrations and organizing. These Brethren were both students and members of the fledgling intelligence services. All of these men, including Ahmadinejad and Seyyedinejad, eventually joined ranks behind the seizure of the American embassy. They were all committed to a formal Islamic state and were allied, some of them by family, with the clerical power structure around Khomeini. Several, including Asgharzadeh, had been closely associated with the Keramat Mosque, home base for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, one of the most powerful young clerics in the country (and the man who would ultimately succeed Khomeini as supreme leader). The revolution was shaping up as a struggle between leftist nationalists who wanted a secular, socialist-style democracy and young Islamists like these who wanted something the world had not yet seen, an Islamic Republic.

The mullahs’ ideas about Iran and the world had merged with the naive idealism of students like these over the previous years to create a simple powerful vision. For years the banned writings of the philosopher-activist Ali Shariati had been circulating underground on Iran’s campuses, firing the imagination and national pride of students who dreamed of creating a new kind of Iranian state and of seizing center stage in the dreamy “revolution” of world youth that was raging in America and Europe. Shariati had embraced the leftist rhetoric of the era without endorsing the Soviet Union and regarded capitalism as a root evil. He saw in Islam a third path toward utopia, one that was neither communist nor capitalist but founded on “authentic,” divine principles. The philosopher saw the materialism of the West as the biggest threat to the purity of an Islamic state, and his writings had spawned a whole school of thought that interpreted the freedoms and excesses of America and western Europe as a plot to ensnare the virtuous and enslave the world in a capitalist, godless dystopia. Shariati himself had not been impressed with Iran’s clerical establishment, and much of what he had written was critical of old mullahs such as Khomeini, but in the heat of the revolution those differences had been forgotten. The idea of the third path, one rooted in the rich history of the Shia faith, dovetailed in most ways with the vision of the mullahs. The clerics lived a cloistered existence; their knowledge of history and current events was grounded exclusively in the Koran’s prerenaissance, seventh-century ideology. Theirs was a world suspended in an eternal struggle between good and evil, and one where neither was just an abstract concept. To the devout, Allah was alive in the world and so was satan, working with superhuman powers of deception and ruthless application of force. Only one superpower fit that description, and that was the godless, mercantile, devious monster known as the United States of America. To them, America was quite literally the embodiment of evil, the Great Satan, and their ultimate enemy. Young activists like Asgharzadeh, Mirdamadi, and the others were among the brightest of their generation—competition for places at Tehran’s universities was fierce—but most of them had excelled in math, engineering, or science. Few were well traveled or well read. It was easy for them to see the U.S. embassy behind its high walls as, quite simply and literally, the source of all evil.

In sessions during the previous week at Amir Kabir, they had divided up the work into six committees: Documents, Operations, Public Relations, Logistics, Hostage Control, and Information. They would need about four hundred students to carry out the assault and thousands more to rally in support outside the embassy walls. Preparations were made to feed the occupiers and the hostages for three days. Others worked on organizing mass demonstrations in support of the siege on the streets around the embassy. Given the anti-Americanism in Tehran, one of the group’s biggest fears was that opposition camps would either get wind of the idea and execute it first or move in and take over the demonstration once it had started, muddying the intended political message; they were primarily worried about the well-organized, militant leftist factions such as Mujahedin-e Khalgh and Fadaeian-e Khalgh. They knew the provisional government would move against them if it could, so it was critical that right from the start they be recognized as a strictly Islamic organization, one loyal to Khomeini, which is why they had come up with the name Muslim Students Following the Imam’s Line, to make their allegiance perfectly clear. At first it was just Students Following the Imam’s Line but then it was decided to add “Muslim” to distinguish theirs from the more secular student groups that also professed allegiance to Khomeini, most notably the well-organized communist Tudeh party. To make clear their affiliation on the day of the action they formed a committee to copy a photograph of their inspiration, the white-bearded, brooding imam, and prepare plastic-covered placards that would be hung around their necks on a length of string. “Muslim Students Following the Imam’s Line” was written on each photo, and armbands were made with the slogan “Allahuakbar” (God Is Great) and featuring a picture of the imam. This would also help them recognize one another in the confusion of the first hours. Hashemi had been charged with planning the assault. He figured there were about one hundred Americans working at the embassy. One of his subcommittees had prepared strips of cloth to bind and blindfold that many.

The planners had also dispatched several of their members to tip off in advance a member of the Assembly of Experts, the body drafting Iran’s new constitution, and four more of the student leaders, Bitaraf, Mirdamadi, Siafullahi, and Asgharzadeh, had called on Mousavi Khoeniha, a young, black-bearded radical cleric whose preaching they admired. A slight man who spoke softly outside the pulpit, Khoeniha was considerably to the left of the conservative mullah establishment, and he was popular with the Islamist youth organizations at the universities who shared his more free-form, interpretive take on Koranic doctrine. Khoeniha immediately endorsed the idea of the takeover. He agreed with the planners that the devilish practices inside the U.S. embassy needed to be derailed, and that its emerging secret ties with the provisional government needed to be broken. The young cleric saw clearly that seizing the American embassy would also put great pressure on Prime Minister Bazargan and his government. They would be obliged to protect their American friends. Yet if the embassy was seized correctly, and by what was seen to be a group of pious, nonviolent youth allied to Khomeini, then it would make it virtually impossible for Bazargan to act without an order from the imam himself. The planners asked him to take their plan to Khomeini, but on this the radical mullah demurred. Why ask permission? In the years of building a movement against the shah, students and more radical clerics many times had successfully pressured the more powerful and moderate mullahs simply by acting without asking. Khomeini had a stake in preserving the provisional government; after all, he had appointed it. Asking him to approve an act that could topple it might invite disapproval. But if the embassy were occupied by his own professed supporters, and a large crowd was massed around the wall cheering them on, it would make it very hard, perhaps even impossible, even for the imam to oppose it, which would paralyze Bazargan and his traitorous administration.

The students had also secured the support of the Revolutionary Guards through Mohsen Razaee, one of the young leaders of that organization (he would become its head in two years). With the quiet backing of both the police and Razaee, they were confident that no authority would chase them from the grounds before they had a chance to seize the Americans and make a statement.

Everyone involved knew this could be a deciding moment in the revolution. If Khomeini condemned the takeover and ordered the students out of the embassy, it would signal his firm support for the provisional government and would likely mean that the clerical establishment would not directly run the state. If he supported the takeover, it would most likely collapse the Bazargan administration and the hopes of those who preferred at least some separation of church and state. To the students, the former course meant nothing less than total defeat, since they saw Bazargan as an American collaborator. They felt the weight of history and saw a chance to change the world.

Days after the plan was hatched, Khomeini gave a speech urging “all grade-school, university, and theological students to increase their attacks against America.” Asgharzadeh thought at first that the imam had been told of their plan and was signaling his support. He was elated, and then surprised and disappointed to learn from Khoeniha that the imam had not been consulted and knew nothing of the takeover plan. The remarks may have been coincidental, but they certainly suggested that Khomeini would support the assault.

Now, as Hashemi moved among the throng just blocks away from the embassy, he could see all the pieces coming together as planned. He would be one of the first through the gates. Abbas Abdi carried a loudspeaker from which he would issue the command to begin. Asgharzadeh was there too. He would stay back and try to make sure that those entering were members of his own group, and then see that the gates were locked behind them—if they were going to maintain control of the action they needed to prevent rival political organizations from storming inside. Mohammad Naimipoor had his large group of protesters assigned with forming a giant human ring around the chancery. Some of the chador-wearing women carried bolt cutters under their robes, for the chains on the gates, and also new chains and locks with which to secure the gates behind them. In addition to the laminated photos and armbands, all carried cards identifying their organization. Some carried the strips of cloth to bind and blindfold their American captives. It was both thrilling and daunting. Many saw the fine Aban rain that morning as heavenly approval, a symbol of Iran purifying itself, washing itself clean of its relationship with the Great Satan.

Hashemi’s concealed weapon was more to deal with rival factions than with the Americans. A short-lived takeover of the embassy in February had devolved into gunfights between competing militias. The students had decided that their assault would be strictly nonviolent. They would not harm the Americans, even if they opened fire. But there was also a chance things would get out of control. Would the marines shoot? If they did, and the bloodied bodies of martyrs were passed out to the crowd, what would happen then?

Walking down the wide corridor that ran the length of the chancery’s second floor, John Limbert mapped out his day in hopes of finding an hour to slip out for a haircut. He was on his way to the meeting that officially began each workday at the embassy. The second secretary in the political section, he had been traveling the week before in southern Iran, and it occurred to him that his thick brown hair, which now fell over the tops of his ears, must look pretty shaggy.