Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (48 page)

On January 25, Hamilton Jordan hosted Ghotbzadeh’s two unofficial emissaries in the White House. It was a happy day. News reports that morning said that Carter’s chief Democratic rival, Senator Ted Kennedy, had severely depleted his campaign fund and there was reason to believe that a “major policy address” he had scheduled would include the announcement that he was dropping out of the race. That, coupled with the first real chance of finding a solution to the hostage crisis, gave the administration a glimpse of a break in what had been a long season of bad weather.

The first session with Villalon and Bourget in London had been disappointing, and CIA reports on the two men raised serious questions about whether they could be trusted, but Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, eager for any avenue to resolve the crisis diplomatically, had urged Jordan to pursue it further. He gave the two visitors a tour, and to bolster their own credentials the emissaries gave Jordan the tape recording of Waldheim’s abject presentation to the Revolutionary Council—they said the tape was a gift from Ghotbzadeh.

Then the two secret emissaries delivered good news. They said that Iran’s governing council had authorized Ghotbzadeh to begin negotiations over the hostages, an important step because it indicated that Iran’s government, such as it was, appeared ready to assert its authority over the student hostage takers. It hardly guaranteed a solution, because if the council disapproved of whatever agreement they worked out, it could easily claim the foreign minister had acted on his own. Ghotbzadeh was sticking his neck out, and in postrevolutionary Iran there was no shortage of people willing to chop off his head.

That conversation led to discussions that went on for several days between Villalon and Bourget, and Jordan and Hal Saunders, an assistant secretary of state. The two emissaries outlined a road map to the hostages’ release. The one thing Waldheim had brought home from Iran was a promise by the council to look kindly on the creation of a UN commission to study Iran’s grievances against America. The United States would be encouraged to publicly oppose formation of this panel, because Carter’s opposition would enhance the group’s credibility in Iran, but the administration would have to promise to stop short of blocking its creation. After visiting Tehran, conducting its investigation, and presumably validating that nation’s historical complaints, the commission would then have the moral authority in Iran to condemn the holding of hostages as “un-Islamic,” and, Ghotbzadeh suggested, the imam would respond by letting the Americans go.

Jordan interrupted to complain that even casual UN observers would know that such a commission could not be created without America’s consent.

“Let me finish explaining the idea, and then you and Mr. Saunders can destroy it!” protested Bourget.

Jordan and Saunders said that the United States might play along, provided they had assurance that the commission would lead to the hostages’ release.

“There must be some balance to this,” Jordan said. He explained that the president would be making a major concession.

“I understand,” said Bourget, “but this same commission must win credibility with the Iranians…. Don’t forget the political pressures in Iran!”

“Don’t forget the political pressures here,” said Jordan. “President Carter will have to be able to publicly explain and defend our actions to the American people. Khomeini doesn’t have to run for reelection.”

The second day’s session lasted twelve hours. The two emissaries hammered out a detailed schedule, a formal dance that they believed would lead to the hostages’ freedom. Jordan was excited; he agreed to meet with them again after they returned from another visit to Panama, where they were keeping up the pretense of pursuing the shah’s extradition.

The chief of staff’s enthusiasm was not shared by everyone in the White House. At Brzezinski’s request, council staffer Gary Sick took a hard look at the plan and concluded that it was unlikely to succeed. He saw both Bourget and Villalon as men emotionally invested in the outcome of Iran’s revolution, who knew that the continuing hostage crisis was likely to be a drag on the country for a long time and so were eager to see it end. That didn’t mean they couldn’t be effective, but their analysis of events in that country seemed to him full of “wishful thinking.” Sick was also aware of how easily Ghotbzadeh could be left on a limb. If others decided to backtrack, the foreign minister could end up as scapegoat, accused of collaborating with the Great Satan. Sick wasn’t worried about Iran’s foreign minister, whom he saw as “crafty and very much concerned about his political skin.” In fact, he saw Villalon and Bourget as Ghotbzadeh’s hedge—he could safely back away from the agreement himself at any point claiming that he had never authorized the two. Sick recommended that to make the process work, they would need to get beyond these “well-meaning but possibly naive intermediaries,” and deal directly with both Ghotbzadeh and Bani-Sadr. Brzezinski was even more skeptical. He had a better sense than most in Carter’s inner circle of the emerging reality in Iran, that Bani-Sadr, Ghotbzadeh, and the rest of the “government” in Tehran were nothing more than a temporary dispensation. If Khomeini wasn’t at the other end of the talks, they were irrelevant.

Jordan remained sanguine. When news broke a few days later that six of the American embassy workers, Mark and Cora Lijek, Robert Anders, Lee Schatz, and Joe and Kathleen Stafford, who had been hidden by the Canadian mission in Tehran since the day of the takeover, had been spirited out of Iran, the news there was received with dismay. “That’s illegal!” one of the students at the embassy complained to a Western reporter. Ghotbzadeh had the gall to accuse Canada of “flagrantly violating international law” for helping six accredited diplomats escape being kidnapped and held hostage. The furtive presence in Iran of the six who had escaped capture at the embassy was the reason the State Department had refused from the beginning to announce the correct number of staffers there. One State Department correspondent had complained, “Goddamn it, how can you not know!” There was some concern in the White House that the Canadian coup would derail the secret protocol, but early reports from Bourget and Villalon were good. They had delivered the outline prepared in the White House to Ghotbzadeh and reported back that, despite his public pronouncements, privately Ghotbzadeh saw the ill will stirred up by the escape of the “Canadian Six” as a minor setback.

As the month ended, President Carter’s patience seemed finally about to be rewarded. Bani-Sadr, the finance minister who had been outspokenly critical of the students, won more than 70 percent of the vote for president. Khomeini was admitted to the hospital with heart trouble, and in the speech he gave approving the voters’ choice he appeared to be preparing the people for his passing. “Be without fear, no matter whether a person comes or a person goes,” he said. It appeared as though Iran was on the verge of another tectonic shift. Daily there were new reports from different sources that a solution to the hostage crisis was imminent. Kennedy had not withdrawn from the presidential race, but it looked as if things might finally be breaking Carter’s way.

There was now a steady parade of Americans making unofficial visits to Tehran, ostensibly seeking some resolution of the crisis. The effect of these visits, nearly all of them by leftist activists whom the students regarded as allies, was to validate the hostage taking and legitimize the captors’ allegations.

In early January one of these visitors was Native American activist John Thomas, who would participate in a student-led seminar that branded the United States the major enemy of all the oppressed nations of the world and ended up leading the mob outside the embassy in chants of “Death to Carter,” urging his new Iranian friends to put all the hostages on trial. They were all spies, Thomas said.

In the days before his arrival the possibility of a meeting with the activist was offered to Rick Kupke, because of his Native American heritage. Kupke was told that he first must write a letter to President Carter explaining what he and the others and the embassy had done wrong and urging the president to take the necessary steps for their release.

Kupke was given a pen and a piece of paper. He was less than eager to meet with Thomas—he and his family had never felt much kinship with the native American political movement—but he did like the idea of something to break the monotony, and he worried about what might happen to him if he disappointed his captors, who seemed quite eager to make the session happen. At the time he was being held in the basement of the chancery with Mike Kennedy and John Graves. Kupke confessed to them, “I don’t know what to do.”

Graves, the embassy’s press attaché, was a flamboyant man with a long graying beard, a world-weary but playful air, and a cutting sense of humor. He had worked in Vietnam and had been involved there in the interrogation of Vietnamese prisoners.

“I’ll give you a trick,” he said. “If you pull it off, they probably won’t bother you, but if you get caught you’ll probably regret the day you were born.”

Graves suggested that Kupke write four or five pages of nothing, just doodle verbally, and if they got mad when they read it, tell them, “Okay, bring me more paper, I’ll redo it.”

“Then do the same thing again,” Graves said. “I’ve only known you for two or three months, but if anybody can play stupid, you can.”

Kupke swallowed the insult and took the advice. He decided to write like a third grader. He began his letter, “Dear Jimmy.” Then he wrote, “How are you? I am fine. I find myself laying here on this floor. I’m not sure how I got here, but I sure find myself here a lot. Any way you can figure to get us out of here is good. The way I see things is that a lot of things happened…” It went on like this four pages.

Mailman, one of their guards, returned with the papers, flushed with anger.

“Are you joking or something?” he asked.

“No, no,” said Kupke. “What’s wrong?”

“This is no good.”

“Can I have more paper?”

Mailman gave him more, telling him, “You do a better job.”

“Okay,” Kupke said. “I like doing this.”

And he started another letter. “Dear Jimmy. How are you? I am fine. But there are several things that I’d like to tell you. Above all, it’s just how hard this floor is that I’m sleeping on. And I think there’s things that ought to be done immediately…”

Mailman took his pencil away and Kupke was never asked to write another letter.

Graves’s advice was good, but his superior attitude grated on Kupke. The fifty-three-year-old foreign service officer had actually been held hostage briefly once before in his career, on the island of Fernando Póo off the coast of Nigeria. He saw himself as a modern Renaissance man: he was an avid tennis player, motorcyclist, skier, and scuba diver, the father of six, and an unabashed and unapologetic egotist. He was half-French and leaned toward Gallic in most things. He regarded that country’s style, food, and international acumen as entirely superior to America’s. His children were being raised French, he said proudly, and went on and on about their sophistication, brilliance, and accomplishment—in sharp contrast, it went without saying, to Kupke’s own. Graves had nothing but scorn for the American policies that had created the situation in Iran and regarded the Iranian students’ anger, if not their actions, as entirely justified. He thought Iran did deserve at least an apology from the United States, and held forth at length about the idiots in Washington who had allowed this situation to develop. Graves had other annoying traits. He smoked his pipe constantly, clouding the room with smoke, and chewed with his mouth open, loudly smacking his lips. He was routinely insulting in an offhand way. At one point in his career he had been an English teacher and he had never lost the habit of instruction. Kupke’s usage was strictly rural colloquial and Graves could not curb his contempt.

Once, pacing impatiently as he waited for the single bathroom to open, Kupke complained, “Somebody must have went in there and died.”

“No,” Graves corrected. “Somebody must have gone in there and died.”

“Whatever.”

“I can tell you’re from the Midwest by the way you’re pacing,” Graves said. “Why?”

“Because you drag your heels like a midwestern shitkicker.”

One day Graves came back from the bathroom and his hair and beard, which had been a graying brown, were suddenly completely white. At first Kupke thought the captivity had scared his hair white, but then he realized that Graves had been dying his hair. He’d evidently decided to shampoo in the bathroom sink.

Kupke both admired Graves and was put off by his airs. The marines Jimmy Lopez, Rocky Sickmann, and Greg Persinger loathed him. His Gallic superiority was to them simple anti-Americanism, and they didn’t get his prickly sense of humor. He was less diligent than they about washing himself and his clothing, so he gave off a stench that in such constant close quarters was considered abusive. Like so many of the hostages, Graves had been immediately and mistakenly tagged as CIA, partly because of his age and senior status—the students now had access to the embassy’s payroll records, so they knew how much their prisoners were being paid. Graves’s check was near the top of the list. But they also assumed he was a spy because his name had turned up on a list of suspected CIA agents in a book that was published in East Germany. He had been awakened one night about two weeks after the takeover by a rough-looking Iranian whom he had not seen before. The man showed him the East German book, which had an old picture of Graves and his name.

“That’s not me,” Graves said, lying.

He was hauled off, certain that he was going to be shot. Instead, he was thrown into the back of a station wagon and driven somewhere off the compound, where he was kept for about three weeks and interrogated continually, always at night. He didn’t have much to tell. They all wanted to know about the plot to kill Khomeini. Graves told them it was silly, which convinced them all the more that he was in on it.

Shortly before John Thomas’s arrival, Bruce German, the embassy’s budget management officer who, more than most of the embassy workers, had been ill-prepared emotionally for such a trial and who had spent much of his time in captivity without word from his wife or family, wrote an angry letter addressed to Ben Bradlee, the executive editor of the Washington Post. Thomas carried it home and delivered it. The Post published it after verifying its authenticity and it came as a shock in America. It voiced the fear and bewildered anger of the hostages and German’s startling empathy for his kidnappers: