Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (52 page)

Unlike most members of the mission, Jaffe was not a political activist. He had pushed to have himself included in part because he was something of a publicity hound—a garrulous, energetic man, he was already well known in the Newburgh area as the “running rabbi,” after running in the New York City marathon—and in part because he was concerned about the Jewish hostages feeling neglected. He was interviewed by Forer, who was also Jewish, and a group of furtive young Iranians in a bare room on the west side of Manhattan and explained that he had been following the story closely, and had been struck by the outpouring of Christmas cards for the hostages. It made him feel for the special isolation of Jewish hostages such as Barry Rosen and Jerry Plotkin. Reports of the Forer mission had portrayed it primarily as Christian outreach—Forer was not religious and its co-organizer, the Reverend Jack Bremer, was a Methodist minister from Lawrence, Kansas—and Jaffe felt that the group ought to include a rabbi, so he had volunteered. After Forer invited him, Jaffe arranged to be briefed by two Israeli agents about the situation he would encounter in Iran.

Rupiper, a tall, slender man with long dark hair and glasses, was a member of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, a small order of Catholic priests dedicated to the poor and those on society’s margins. He had been an activist priest for many years, and like many of those in the group he had been sharply critical of American foreign policy in Central and South America. He had been recommended to Forer by the group Nebraskans for Peace, who knew him from several trips to jail protesting at Strategic Air Command bases in that part of the country. Rupiper believed American foreign policy was often criminal and saw the CIA as a tool of oppression. He had been imprisoned in Brazil for protesting America’s actions there.

Forer kicked off the trip with a press conference, at which he saluted the students for seizing the embassy and taking his countrymen hostage.

“We congratulate the students for their bold and courageous effort,” he said. Forer did acknowledge the act as “illegal,” as protests often were, but suggested that fact deserved to be considered “side by side with the anguish of the Iranian people.” Despite the fact the United States had essentially acquiesced in the kidnapping of its embassy and personnel for three months, Forer lambasted “the wanton exploitation of the hostage situation by the warmongers and moneychangers of this country,” describing his group as “the mainstream of American conscience.”

In Tehran, the group spent ten days attending the standard anti-American demonstrations, lectures, and presentations about the crimes of the shah and SAVAK. They visited the martyrs graveyard and saw the wheel-chair-bound “victims of SAVAK.” Jaffe was appalled when the group was taken to meet Yasir Arafat, the PLO chairman, whom he considered a mortal enemy of his people. At one demonstration, protesters pounded on their bus, chanting the usual “Death to America! Death to Carter!”; and the group narrowly escaped serious injury when a rickety reviewing stand erected to hold them at one rally collapsed, crushing some of the spectators below. When in the midst of the confusion of that accident Jaffe grabbed the hand of a female Quaker minister and helped pull her from the pile, they were immediately accosted by veiled Iranian women shaking their fingers with disapproval. At first, Jaffe didn’t know what was going on; then he realized the women were objecting to a man and a woman holding hands. Most of the others in the group seemed to take these things in stride. Jaffe grew increasingly alarmed, frightened, and disgusted by the reactions of his traveling companions. He was particularly struck by Rupiper, who seemed ready to join the revolution.

It was Valentine’s Day when they were finally taken to see the hostages. The members of the group stopped to buy candy and flowers from street vendors on their way to the embassy. They were escorted to a room in the chancery with blankets draped over the windows and decorated with the usual posters of Khomeini and other revolutionary trimmings. The hostages were brought in to see them in small groups before TV cameras.

They spent the longest time with marines Billy Gallegos and Paul Lewis, who was delighted when he saw Rupiper. Lewis had met him before. Gallegos seemed chipper. “I had no idea what was going on,” he said, referring to the embassy takeover. “I thought for sure he [the shah] would be back the second week.”

Lewis said, “I don’t feel that we were going to be taken out in the courtyard and shot. I think they realize that it wouldn’t do anyone any good.”

On his way out, Lewis stopped to chat with Rupiper and Jaffe. He told them that he had met Rupiper when the priest had visited his parish in Illinois several years earlier, soon after Rupiper had been freed from the prison in Brazil. Seeing the same priest in Tehran seemed an amazing coincidence to the young marine. He asked Rupiper to contact his parents, which the priest did not do.

As the last of the hostages left, the rabbi was disappointed because among the handful of hostages brought into the room there were no Jews. He asked the guards where the Jewish hostages were and he was told that they had declined the opportunity to meet with him and the others.

“They are asleep,” another of the guards said.

When the visiting Americans were on their way out, Jaffe was stopped and accused of accepting a note from Lewis. The group had promised going in that no one would accept notes from the hostages, only the letters that had been written for the occasion. Jaffe had received nothing from Lewis and was indignant. It crossed his mind that it was a setup, that perhaps something had been planted on him, and now he was going to be arrested and held with the embassy staff.

“I am here on a humanitarian mission and I will not be treated this way!” he said.

He was escorted to a courtyard and ordered to strip. His clothing was searched thoroughly. He was glad that he had scratched the names of the two Israeli agents out of his address book before the session, because the guards pored over it very carefully. There was no note to be found. Jaffe pulled on his clothing and on his way back to the others he tipped his yarmulke to the guards—they had neglected to look under it. He wanted them to know that if he had been hiding a note, they wouldn’t have found it.

When the Forer group returned home several days later, Jaffe told reporters that the situation in Iran looked bad and predicted that the hostages would be held for a long time.

In Omaha, Rupiper also predicted a long standoff, so long as “the United States refuses to acknowledge its guilt for the abuses of the past twenty-five years.” He said the hostages might be stuck in Tehran “for years.”

There was reason to be more optimistic than that. The White House believed it had mapped out a path for the hostages’ release.

The election of Bani-Sadr by such a strong majority in Iran seemed to bode well for the secret plan, and there were other encouraging signs. Iran’s new president promptly engineered the resignation of Mousavi Khoeniha, the students’ “spiritual adviser,” who since the takeover had been named head of Iran’s Council of National Radio and TV. In an interview with Le Monde, Bani-Sadr said that his government was no longer demanding the return of the shah before releasing the hostages. His remarks dovetailed neatly with the secret negotiations.

In another interview Bani-Sadr said, “If the U.S. government gets away from its past policy of intervention in [Iran’s] internal affairs, and if it accepts the right of the Iranian government to [pursue] the criminals…who have plundered our wealth and accepts in practical terms to help us in that matter, that would be the grounds for deliberation on the hostages.”

As far as the White House was concerned, the United States had no way to significantly interfere in Iran’s internal affairs anyway. The extradition proceedings in Panama appeared to satisfy the second demand. UN general-secretary Kurt Waldheim was putting together the six-man international commission to study America’s role in Iran, and Carter had agreed not to block it. The panel was virtually certain to denounce the United States for the quarter-century-old crime of overthrowing Mossadeq and for propping up the now-despised monarchy, but that was a humiliation the administration was willing to endure if it meant the safe return of the hostages.

Jordan had become fond of the two intermediaries, Villalon and Bourget, whom he had met with again secretly on February 9 in Bern, Switzerland. There they agreed to set up a secret meeting with Ghotbzadeh himself. The plan appeared to be unfolding smoothly, despite the Iranians’ tendency to keep adding new demands. One called for Iran to be able to claim “victory” when the hostages were released. Carter expressed concern about that, wondering how such a joint statement could be made palatable to the outraged American people.

“We’ve got three languages to play with,” said Jordan. “English, French, and Farsi. We can take an English word, find a French synonym that is weaker or even vague, and find a Farsi word that is even more so. We’ll stick with our English word and let them give it their best possible Farsi interpretation.”

“You can play with words all you want,” warned Carter. “But I am going to have to be able to stand up in front of the American people and defend whatever statement I make.”

Despite his misgivings, the president was willing to proceed. He was so hopeful that the process would lead to the hostages’ release that he wrote a note to Jordan prior to the scheduled meeting with Ghotbzadeh:

“If, at any time, the Government of Iran desires to release the American hostages at an earlier date than called for in the mutually agreed plan, the Government of Iran has my personal assurance that the United States will abide by all the terms of that plan.” Carter was fully on board.

Jordan flew to Paris on a Concorde with Henry Precht, with tickets they purchased themselves in order to keep the secret meeting off the books. Wearing a disguise—a wig, false mustache, and glasses—Jordan arrived at Villalon’s luxurious Paris apartment, and shortly after midnight on Sunday, February 17, he was joined by Iran’s embattled foreign minister himself, whose swarthy, thick, pugilistic features looked worn. He had dark lines under his small deep-set eyes. Jordan had been coached by the intermediaries to view Ghotbzadeh as a “rug merchant,” one who liked nothing better than to haggle. The two adversaries chatted amiably; Jordan told him that he was “honored” to be meeting with him. Ghotbzadeh was curious about the Concorde, which he had never flown on.

“We must be sure to do it while we can charge it to our governments,” said Jordan. “It’s very expensive!”

Ghotbzadeh emphasized that the meeting remain secret. If it became public, the foreign minister warned, “First I would lose my job and then I would lose my head!”

Jordan tried to ingratiate himself by telling the Iranian, on behalf of himself and the president, that it would be “terribly helpful” if he would explain the origins of the revolution and help sort out the present situation in Tehran. He listened as Ghotbzadeh recited the familiar story of America’s subversions, dividing his remarks into three periods, 1900–1953, 1953–1978, and the present. The foreign minister spoke reverently about Khomeini and the revolution, with what Jordan later called a “mystical” passion, and while he said he could not condone what the students had done, he regarded it as a small thing compared to the crimes of America and the shah. Ghotbzadeh spoke of the hostility between the United States and Iran sadly and, as Jordan would note later in a handwritten memo to Carter (in which he referred to Ghotbzadeh only as “Mr. S.”), “[with] regret that things between us had gone so far and were in such a mess.” Jordan tried to move the conversation past these differences. He asked for Ghotbzadeh’s opinion of Carter, and when the foreign minister complained that the president seemed to poorly understand his country, Jordan defended his boss, arguing that Carter had resisted pressures to intervene in Iran during the revolution and had ignored demands to respond militarily to the seizure of the embassy. The foreign minister acknowledged that the president had shown restraint.

“Now, let’s talk about the hostages,” Ghotbzadeh said. “I am in a better mood to talk about them since you have heard our case.”

Jordan asked about Michael Metrinko, the one American hostage who had not been seen or heard from since the day of the takeover. Ghotbzadeh said he did not know anything about Metrinko in particular but assured Jordan that all of the captive Americans were still alive. Then he confided, “Only I can solve this.”

Jordan asked how, and Ghotbzadeh’s big face produced a small, conspiratorial smile.

“It is easy to resolve the crisis,” he said. “All you have to do is kill the shah.”

“You’re kidding,” said Jordan, flabbergasted. After all the weeks of negotiations with his emissaries, after hammering out a complex multistepped plan to sort out this mess in a way acceptable to both sides, Ghotbzadeh suddenly introduces the idea of state-sponsored assassination?

“I am very serious, Mr. Jordan,” he said. “The shah is in Panama now. I am not talking about anything dramatic. Perhaps the CIA can give him an injection or something to make it look like a natural death. I’m only asking you to do to the shah what the CIA did to thousands of innocent Iranians over the past thirty years!”

Jordan let the baseless charge against the CIA go and addressed the idea of assassination.

“That’s impossible,” he said. “It’s totally out of the question.”

Ghotbzadeh went into a long explanation of why Iran “hated” both the United States and the Soviet Union, and speculated about being killed himself by either an American or a Russian spy. He eventually came around to discussing the existing plan, and (having apparently dropped the idea of bumping off the shah) suggested that if Carter stuck to the outline drawn up by Bourget and Villalon, the hostages would be released “soon.”

“What is soon?” Jordan asked.

“Weeks,” he said. He assured Jordan that the Iranian government, meaning the Revolutionary Council, would abide by its promises.

“What about the Ayatollah Khomeini?” Jordan asked.