Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (37 page)

Feeding the confusion was the competitive scramble for scoops by every news agency in the world. There was no shortage of people to interview. One of the favorites was Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the most unlikely of Iranian public officials in the postrevolutionary period, a Chaplinesque little man with a peculiar pompadour, thick-rimmed glasses, and a carefully trimmed little mustache. He had been dumped as foreign minister by the Revolutionary Council but had not gone away. Khomeini had promptly named him economic minister, and as the weeks of the crisis wore on Bani-Sadr grew more and more openly critical of the embassy takeover. Originally he had spoken in favor of it, but by early December he had changed his mind. He told a French reporter that he opposed trying the hostages because such a step would violate international agreements that protected diplomats, as though taking them hostage itself wasn’t violation enough. Days later he told a Beirut correspondent that Iran ought to drop its demand for return of the shah, that the tactic had failed, and then a few days later he called for the hostages’ release. Ibrahim Yazdi, his predecessor as foreign minister, who had resigned the position after the embassy was overrun, now spoke out in favor of putting the Americans on trial, saying that such a step would provide a “strong motivating force” for the Iranian masses to rebuild their society. Ghotbzadeh, Bani-Sadr’s successor as foreign minister, set off a storm of confusion by suggesting that one step toward resolving the crisis would be to create an international grand jury to investigate U.S.–Iran relations. The proffer was promptly rejected by a spokesman for the students, who in typically colorful language suggested that Ghotbzadeh was a traitor—“On occasion he has spoken irresponsibly and led the enemy to his filthy and satanic whims.” This provoked the Ayatollah Mohammed Behesti, chairman of the Revolutionary Council, to defend Ghotbzadeh, pointing out that the foreign minister spoke not only for himself but for the council and thus for the imam himself. Dustups like these raised all sorts of questions in the White House. Who was really in charge? Who could be taken seriously? With whom should they be negotiating, the students? The Foreign Ministry? The Revolutionary Council? Khomeini?

Sadeq Khalkali, the revolution’s bloodiest ayatollah, most notorious as a “hanging judge,” told one interviewer that none of the American hostages would be executed, and then told another, weeks later, that only those convicted of spying would be sentenced to death. Then, later in December, he called for the hostages’ release.

“Every embassy has spies in it,” he said. “We cannot execute any spies according to Islamic laws. They will only be executed if they were directly responsible for ordering a murder. Even if we try the hostages, we do not want to condemn them. We want to condemn Carter and the American government.”

When the shah attempted to defuse the crisis in mid-December by leaving New York for Panama—an arrangement worked out by Washington with the obliging dictator Omar Torrijos—Khalkali announced that Iranian hit squads would assassinate the shah there, setting off weeks of anxiety throughout Central America, as nations scrambled to locate the assassins. Khomeini quickly pronounced the shah’s move to Panama meaningless, portraying it as nothing but a public relations maneuver and calling the small nation an “American puppet.” He wasn’t far from right. Hamilton Jordan had worked out the move, assuring the shah and the princess that their children could stay in the United States and continue their education, and even arranging for a mobile medical team to deliver to his new tropical home the same care the shah enjoyed in New York. Jordan also promised to help find Pahlavi a more permanent home, but soon learned how much of a pariah the former Iranian ruler had become. Only Panama and Egypt were willing.

As the stalemate dragged through its second month with no sign of solution, rumor became news. The Libyan dictator, Moammar Qaddafi, told Oriana Fallaci, “I have bad news. There is movement in the American military in Europe. The Americans are preparing parachutists and arming with armored vehicles, missiles, gas, neutron bombs, and other materiel.” He predicted the coming of World War Three. On December 11, both UPI and ABC-TV falsely reported that President Carter had set a ten-day deadline for the release of the hostages, which seemed to coincide with a statement from Tehran by Ghotbzadeh, who had called for an international tribunal to consider Iran’s grievances against the United States in ten days. It was implied that if the hostages were not released by that deadline America would launch some sort of punitive strike. An article in Pravda, the Soviet Union’s mouthpiece newspaper, reprinted under bold headlines in Tehran’s newspapers, suggested that the United States was preparing to use nuclear weapons against Iran. The article was signed “Alexei Petrov,” a well-known pseudonym for the highest-ranking officials in the communist state. A Kuwaiti newspaper had its own scoop from Tehran. The hostages were all going to be released before Christmas as a gesture of Islamist goodwill, and that in return Carter was going to make a televised address praising Islam and Iran and condemning the shah. Another Kuwaiti newspaper reported that the United States was planning to attack Iran on Christmas Eve.

The confusion mirrored events in Iran, where Khomeini’s efforts to consolidate power were being severely challenged. The nation voted in early December to approve a new Islamic constitution that handed Khomeini supreme power for life, but there were reports that large numbers of Iranians had refused to vote in protest. The persecuted secular leftists who had allied with the mullahs to overthrow the shah were now openly warring with the emerging religious regime. The hostages heard nightly gun battles in the streets. There were organized uprisings in the ethnic regions of Baluchistan, Kurdistan, and Azerbaijan, where rebel forces briefly took control of the city of Tabriz until driven out by Revolutionary Guards. The rebelling Kurds rejected a proposal by the Revolutionary Council for “self-administration,” demanding full autonomy. Many of those battling Khomeini loyalists were followers of Ayatollah Kazem Shariatmadari, one of the premier clerics in Iran, who had publicly condemned the hostage taking. Purges in the Foreign Ministry resulted in the sacking of forty-five of its diplomats, all but three of them ambassadors, from Iranian missions around the world.

Iran was not just confusing, it was confused. The only common article of faith in the country was hatred and suspicion of the United States, which was just as strong among the Shariatmadari enthusiasts as their Khomeiniite rivals. The imam blamed all the upheaval on Carter who, he said, was fomenting unrest in order to distract the world from his own crimes. On December 19, the English-language newspaper Kayhan printed as its “Thought for Today” the following: “U.S. is hatching a plot against the Islamic Revolution every day. Don’t forget that U.S. is your worst enemy. Don’t forget to chant, ‘Death to U.S.’ along with ‘Death to Saddam.’”

Hatred was a useful emotional rallying point, but the country had not yet figured out how to govern itself. No formal government was in place. There were sharp divisions on the Revolutionary Council about how to respond once the shah left the United States. They debated the question for four hours without reaching an agreement. One option considered was simply to release the hostages, since the departure of the shah from America would render moot the demand for Carter to return him. This was rejected as too humiliating. Another alternative was to immediately put the embassy “spies” on trial, to punish America for not complying with the students’ demand. But this was a step that would invite further international outrage and a likely military attack by America. Increasingly, the imam seemed to be taking his cue not from the circle of mature leaders who had come to power with him but from the young hostage takers, whose popularity with the masses gave their statements political weight.

At the White House Brzezinski and Vance continued to spar. The secretary of state was resolutely in favor of restraint and the pursuit of peaceful means, while Brzezinski leaned toward the old Cold War approach, exploring the feasibility of toppling the Islamist regime and urging the State Department in a December 4 memo to feel out foreign leaders to see which “alternative leaders and rival groups within and outside Iran” they might be willing to support as alternatives to Khomeini. President Carter stuck with a middle line. Public opinion polls so far showed strong support for his handling of the crisis, the typical surge of solidarity following a threat to the nation, but the president knew the boost would not last. Early in December he had held an interagency meeting to discuss ways that the United States might bring economic and/or military pressure on Iran, but there were few new ideas. Economic sanctions depended on worldwide cooperation, which was hard to make happen even after both the UN Security Council and the International Court of Justice at The Hague officially called for the hostages’ immediate unconditional release. Both the resolution and the order were shrugged off by the student captors and Iran’s revolutionary leaders. Carter’s call for a review of every visa held by an Iranian in the United States—there were about 50,000 of them—was quickly challenged in court and halted, at least temporarily, by a federal judge. Every move the president made just seemed to underscore his impotence.

In a series of speeches in mid-December, Khomeini mocked the president.

“The Americans don’t simply want to free these spies, all this crisis is to help Carter get reelected…Carter doesn’t understand more than this. He doesn’t attach any importance to human beings…he has suffered a political defeat in the eyes of the world. This ‘humanitarian’ thinks he can mobilize the whole world into starving us. Unfortunately for Mr. Carter, his secretary of state went round but nobody took any notice of him. They all turned him down. This ‘humanitarian’ intends to expel fifty thousand of our young people for one reason or another…. Recently we heard that a judge had pronounced this to be against the law.”

Despite his promise to the hostages’ families, Carter was inching reluctantly toward military action.

The president was briefed daily on the progress of planning for the rescue mission. Despite the fact that at least a dozen of the hostages, maybe more, had been moved off the embassy compound, a fact well known enough in Iran for there to be crowds around some of the north Tehran residences where they were being held, the complex assault plan remained focused on the embassy. A ten-man squad was going to hit the Foreign Ministry to free Laingen, Tomseth, and Howland, but the other, scattered hostages were off the radar.

Delta Commander Beckwith kept adding men to his assault force; the original sixty men became seventy-five. As the number grew, so did the need for helicopters. Two more Sea Stallions were added to the mission plan and began making their way to the Kitty Hawk in the Persian Gulf. Intelligence analysts had located an airstrip, a thirty-minute helicopter flight from Tehran, that the rangers would seize for the final evacuation of the hostages and rescue force. It was an unoccupied asphalt strip at Manzariyeh that had been part of a bombing range and that was apparently manned now by just a small unit of Iranian army engineers. A company of rangers would seize the strip at the same time Delta was hitting the embassy. It was determined that the runway was long enough and flat enough to receive the C-141s that would carry everyone out.

Reliable intelligence remained the biggest challenge. In mid-December the CIA managed to place an agent in Tehran. It had called out of retirement an elderly World War Two–era spy of eastern European origin called “Bob,” a tall, thickset man in his sixties with leathery skin who had been living in South America. He spoke a variety of languages from that region, but not Farsi. He agreed to enter Iran as a businessman, along with two friendly Iranians, one who was sick with cancer and thus fatalistic about the risks and the other a young Iranian-American air force crewman code-named “Fred,” who had family there. They scouted out the possibilities for obtaining a warehouse and trucks—the warehouse to hide Delta Force through the long day preceding the assault, and the trucks to deliver the force from the hiding place to the embassy. Bob landed on a commercial flight at Mehrabad Airport and breezed through customs; Delta Force noted with surprise the ease of entry.

Beckwith’s concern for secrecy closed one potentially rich avenue of information. A West German special forces unit offered to let Delta place several of its men with a TV crew that was being sent to Tehran, ostensibly to report for one of that country’s television networks. The students often allowed TV crews other than American, particularly German ones, fuller access to the embassy. But Beckwith did not want the military of any foreign country involved, even a friendly one.

To solve the fuel blivit problem, it was decided that two C-130s carrying the rubber bladders inside would have to land at the first night-chopper refueling point, which meant they needed to find a patch of desert large enough, flat enough, and solid enough to support the large aircraft. The only way to make sure about the firmness of the ground—loose sand would bog down the big planes—would be to send someone into Iran to inspect the location, so plans were put in motion to send a small, daring reconnaissance group to the Iranian desert.

The president canceled his annual trip home to Georgia for the Christmas holidays in order to remain in the White House and deal with the crisis. He ordered that the lights on the White House Christmas tree be left dark.

On the embassy grounds, in the basement of the warehouse across a narrow hall from the Mushroom Inn, vice consul Richard Queen shared a room with warrant officer Joe Hall. The fluorescent overhead lights hummed day and night, casting enough light to be annoying when they wanted darkness but not enough to comfortably read. Nothing could be heard through the warehouse walls, and it was constantly cold and clammy.

As Christmas approached, they were let outdoors to walk in small circles in the walled courtyard of the ambassador’s residence. Hall was so moved by the fresh cold air, by the direct sunlight, the newly fallen snow, the crows circling in the blue sky overhead, that he wept, but when Queen was offered the same chance he declined. Hall was amazed that anyone would refuse an opportunity to go outside, but his roommate said that for some reason he had begun to feel woozy.