Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (21 page)

At this point, even the soldiers planning a rescue mission doubted it would ever be undertaken, and not only because it was so difficult and unlikely to succeed. As frustrating as the embassy takeover was to Americans, it was clearly a provocation that called for a measured response. It seemed likely that the seizure had taken Iranian authorities by surprise as much as it had Americans, and it made sense to allow time for the confusion of powers in that country to sort out its response. At a meeting of the National Security Council in the White House that morning, Carter had approved the idea of sending Ramsey Clark and William Miller to Tehran with their carefully composed letter, but on his way out of the room the president vented his impatience.

“By the way, I’m tired of seeing those bastards holding our people referred to as ‘students,’” he said. “They should be referred to as ‘terrorists,’ or ‘captors,’ or something that accurately describes what they are.”

“Yes, sir,” said Jody Powell, his press secretary. After the president left the room, Powell mused, “How about ‘Islamic thugs’?”

Any hope of the higher powers in Iran backing away from the embassy takeover dimmed further when Khomeini gave another speech in praise of the students.

“When we face plots, our young people cannot wait around,” he said. “Our young people must foil these plots…. We are facing underground treason, treason devised in these very embassies, mainly by the Great Satan, America…. They must be put in their place and return this criminal to us as soon as possible. If they do not, we shall do what is necessary.”

Predictably, public endorsements had quickly followed up and down the emerging Tehran establishment, from Ayatollah Mohammed Behesti to Ayatollah Husayn-ali Montazari, the spiritual leader of Tehran. Close behind came news that Prime Minister Bazargan and his entire cabinet had resigned. Given their precarious status since news of the meeting with Brzezinski in Algiers, they were in no position to buck the tide. They lacked the power to evict the students anyway. Khomeini had made efforts to talk Bazargan into staying on—the beleaguered prime minister had tried to resign three times earlier that year as it had become increasingly apparent that the new Iran would be ruled directly from Qom—but had been induced to stay. Not this time. He told Ahmad Khomeini, the imam’s son, “My existence as prime minister has become useless in this country.”

In less than forty-eight hours, a group of students from the big universities in Tehran had engineered a mini–coup d’état. The takeover of the U.S. embassy had ignited a great storm of anti-Americanism and anti-secularism, which swept aside any prospect of a conventional, Western-style nation. Religious conservatives were going to shape Iran’s future, not the secular nationalists, socialists, and communists who had dominated the movement’s educated class. The young leftist cleric who had “advised” the students, Mousavi Khoeniha, had foreseen the possibility of this happening but had never guessed that it might work so well, and so fast.

Ibrahim Yazdi left his office at the Foreign Ministry that day feeling defeated and angry. He was angry at the United States for historically bad policies in his country, and for the colossally insensitive and unnecessary blunder of allowing the shah to travel to New York; why couldn’t the doctors have gone to see him? Yazdi didn’t know what was going to happen, but even beyond the danger of provoking the United States he was convinced that taking diplomats hostage was going to do lasting damage to his country. Since when was national policy set by secret societies on college campuses?

He was not that angry with Khomeini. Despite having been personally accused of treason by the more rabble-rousing elements of the religious camp for meeting with Brzezinski, Yazdi was comfortably ensconced in Khomeini’s good graces; he had served him tirelessly during his years in the United States and in Paris during the year before his triumphal return to Iran. The imam urged Yazdi to take a position with the now ruling Revolutionary Council (as Bazargan did), but the departing foreign minister declined. He didn’t trust the mullahs; behind closed doors they said one thing and publicly they did another. Instead, he accepted an appointment as Khomeini’s special emissary to resolve political disputes in outlying provinces. He knew that the old man was well intentioned, but he was also largely ignorant of the outside world and vulnerable to manipulation. When he had the imam’s ear, as he had briefly the previous day, Yazdi could convince him that holding diplomats hostage was not something that a responsible government did, that the world of diplomacy was vitally important for all countries; at its best it preserved options in a time of crisis, it prevented misunderstandings, and when circumstances seemed hopeless it sometimes provided a peaceful way out. Violating the protocols of statesmanship so blatantly would withdraw Iran from the community of nations and would deprive it of this essential tool for interacting with the rest of the world. Such arguments appealed to Khomeini’s humility and wisdom, asking him to look past the passions of the moment toward Iran’s long-term interests. But he knew the ambitious mullahs around Khomeini had their powerful ways of appealing to him, too. They would argue that severing ties with the Western world was critical for ensuring the success of the revolution and in creating a pure Islamist state. They fed him the stories about American plots, some of which Yazdi himself believed were true. There were those in Khomeini’s religious inner circle in Qom who were sincere, but others were like power-hungry courtiers anywhere. They were opportunists, and in this embassy seizure they saw their chance. Yazdi counted Ahmad, the imam’s son and heir apparent, as one of those. There was no mistaking who had the imam’s ear last.

In his speech that day, Khomeini called the takeover “a second revolution, more glorious than the first.”

In Washington all this removed the best hope for an early resolution. At a second meeting of the National Security Council that afternoon, General Jones presented the rescue option he had heard from Burruss that morning with his own pessimistic assessment of its chances. Ramsey Clark and William Miller flew from Washington to Greece, and then to Turkey, awaiting permission to enter Iran and deliver the letter crafted so carefully by Precht and White House officials. Their mission stalled there, as they waited for confirmation that they would be welcomed in Tehran. NBC’s Richard Valeriani, who had been sitting on the story, finally aired it on the Today show after the State Department relented. The network had cameras pointed at the stalled plane in Turkey, where it sat and sat. Finally official word came from Tehran that the emissaries would not be allowed into the country. To make matters worse, the students issued a statement promising to execute the hostages if America made an effort to free them. Carter was hamstrung. He lacked a viable military option and there seemed to be no one in Iran willing to negotiate.

As Hamilton Jordan left the White House that evening, November 6, he noticed a big crowd outside the Iranian embassy on Massachusetts Avenue.

“Let our people go!” they chanted, as passing cars honked in approval.

Jordan was struck by the contrast: the powers in Iran applauding the seizure of America’s embassy, while in D.C. police had carefully roped off an area around the Iranian embassy and were busily protecting it from angry Americans.

The hostages at the embassy had no idea what effect their kidnapping was having around the world. They lived in enforced silence, cut off from anything outside the four walls of whatever room held them. With mobs howling outside for their blood, it was hard to think past their immediate predicament.

Bill Belk spent most of his first week in captivity tied to a chair in one of the cottages. A picture of him snapped on the day of the takeover, a tall man with longish hair and long sideburns, blindfolded, bound, and proudly erect, standing a good foot taller than his captors with his head held high, had been reprinted in newspapers and magazines all over the world. Unbeknownst to Belk, his image had come to symbolize the crisis.

He was a well-traveled member of the foreign service, an adventurer who often volunteered for difficult assignments around the world. He had discovered that the danger in these places was often overstated, that prices were generally low and the food was good. He had known little about Iran before taking the post in Tehran. He knew there had been a revolution only weeks before he had arrived, but he neither knew nor cared much about how or why it had happened. His job was to operate the new communications equipment called TERP, which had simplified a lot of the old teletype rigmarole by projecting a video image of the received message before it was printed out. It eliminated the need to retype the coded material because an optical character reader translated the messages and gave the communicator a chance to make small corrections on the video screen before printing it out. The flow of messages in and out was brisk, and keeping track of it was a full-time job. His was a narrow but necessary skill, and with it Belk had seen the world. Of all the places he had been in his career, mostly in Asia and Africa, he thought Iran was the prettiest, with its beautiful snowcapped mountains and endless deserts. Tehran was inexpensive and had good restaurants and shops. People would stop him on the street, grabbing his hand to admire his diamond rings and watch. Belk collected beautiful things, and he enjoyed shopping for exotic treasures. In Iran he had particularly admired the delicate workmanship on picture frames fashioned out of camel hair, copper, and wood.

Being tied to a chair for three days was mighty uncomfortable, but even worse, thought Belk, were the windy lectures of a pious guard named Seyyed. Filled with the arrogance of youth and flush with triumph, he held forth endlessly in passable English to his captive audience on the theocratic and philosophical underpinnings of the revolution. It held little interest for Belk, who was tired, hungry, stiff, and sore, and who was disinclined to deal in deep abstraction under the best of circumstances. To him, all this heated reasoning was Seyyed’s way of convincing himself that it was right to hold diplomats hostage.

The nylon rope that dug sharply into Belk’s wrists was finally replaced by a strip of white cloth, which was a tremendous relief. The cloth was more a token than actual restraint, because it would have been easy to slip his hands out. On the fourth day he was placed in a room with Don Hohman, a lean, red-haired army medic who had been deployed to Tehran for six months because the State Department had been unable to find a civilian nurse who would take the job. He was the embassy’s official doc. Hohman was less stoic than most about the treatment they were receiving, and he amused Belk by his sturdy defiance—Belk saw him as a typical red-haired hothead. He complained to the guards constantly and about everything. He refused the mashed peas and rice they offered at mealtime—“I don’t want your goddamn food”—and even water—“I don’t want your goddamn water.” He constantly interrupted Seyyed with such determined insults that Belk was certain the medic was going to be taken out and shot.

After several days together, Belk felt the sting of an insect bite and, shortly afterward, the symptoms of an allergic reaction. His breathing began to grow labored.

Hohman knew exactly what was happening. Belk’s windpipe was swelling up, choking him from the inside. He screamed at the bewildered guards that his colleague needed a shot of adrenaline immediately or he was going to die. Two of the Iranians were medical students, and they could see that Hohman was right. Belk’s skin was flushed and forming hives, and his breathing was so strained he looked ready to pass out. They untied Hohman and he took off running for his medical office. The guards ran after, trying to maintain the pretense of escorting him. There was a real danger of Hohman being shot as an escapee; that’s what he looked like, racing across the compound with armed guards in hot pursuit, and when he got to the chancery a startled guard there hit him with the butt of his weapon. He then pointed it at the two Iranian guards who came running up behind the stunned medic.

The medical students explained the emergency while Hohman swore and fumed, and finally he was allowed to run to his office, where he grabbed a bottle of epinephrine, Benadryl, a bottle of oxygen, and a cardioverter, a device for administering an electrical shock to the heart in case things got really bad. He ran back to the cottage, found Belk unconscious, and injected him with epinephrine. That quickly restored his normal breathing and Belk woke up.

His eyes were swollen shut and he was covered with hives. The guards asked him if he wanted to go to a hospital and Belk said no. He had heard of a hostage taking in Africa where a woman was taken to the hospital and never seen again.

“I’ll stay here with my friends,” he said. Hohman gave him some Benadryl for the hives. The guards brought a mattress in so that Belk could lie down instead of sitting in the chair, and they allowed Hohman to sit beside him. The medic sat up all night monitoring Belk’s pulse and breathing. Hohman had impressed the guards with his competence and quick action and he would be accorded a measure of respect for the remainder of his captivity. Belk felt better in a few days and remained deeply grateful to the young red-haired sergeant who had risked being shot as an escapee in order to save his life.

As the students scrambled to organize themselves for a longer siege, one decision made quickly was to take a small group of hostages away from the embassy, to be held as insurance against a rescue attempt.

One of those chosen to go was Dick Morefield, the balding consul general, who was awakened in the middle of the night.

“Are you Mr. Morefield?” the guard asked.

He was handcuffed and a blanket was draped over his head, then he was led out of the ambassador’s house. He assumed the worst. Since he was one of the highest-ranking members of the embassy staff, he assumed he was being taken out somewhere to be executed.

From the backseat of a car he watched as men in military fatigues led other hostages out of the building. They were all driven someplace else in Tehran and led down to a basement, where they were placed on a bench. A bright light was shone down. Morefield’s hands were cuffed to the men on either side of him.