Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (61 page)

Then, in mid-April, Carter announced a ban on travel to Iran. Without putting it in so many words, the decision was meant primarily to encourage American news organizations to bring their reporters home, mindful of Vance’s worry about what might happen in the aftermath of a rescue attempt. Carter could not order reporters out of Iran without provoking a showdown over freedom of the press—Powell had speculated that such a direct move might actually prompt the networks and major newspapers to send more reporters there, simply to assert their independence—but the president did specifically ask news organizations to “minimize, as severely as possible” their presence there. Even that prompted an angry response from news editors, who accused the White House of trampling First Amendment freedoms.

“I warned him that you people would get on a high horse,” Powell told CBS News executive producer Sandy Socolow, and then the president’s press secretary tried to hint at the real concern. “I personally don’t give a good goddamn what you people do. If I had my way, I’d ask the fucking ayatollah to keep fifty reporters and give us our diplomats back. Then you people who have all the answers could figure out how to get them out.” Socolow didn’t get the hint.

The travel ban was not directed at the families of the hostages, but it had the effect of dismantling McAfee’s plan. One by one the other families dropped out. News reports in late winter and early spring were hopeful, and nobody wanted to do anything that might derail an agreement. Several of the wives, Penne Laingen, Louise Kennedy, whose husband Mike headed the economics section, and Katherine Keough, whose husband Bill was the school headmaster who had been trapped at the embassy with the others, formed their own organization in March, called FLAG (Family Liaison Action Group), and were given office space at State Department headquarters. They took it upon themselves to improve outreach to the others, to coordinate public statements and actions, and to keep reminding official Washington, America, and the world that their loved ones’ fate hung in the balance of this dispute. FLAG conducted a mission to Europe, led by Louise Kennedy, and including Barbara Rosen, Jeanne Queen, mother of the ailing vice consul, and Pearl Golacinski, mother of the former embassy security chief who, with a gun to his head, had urged his colleagues to open the doors on the day of the takeover. The group met with French president Giscard d’Estaing, and then split up for meetings with other European heads of state. Rosen, who just months ago had been daunted by the prospect of meeting strangers, traveled to Bonn and found herself in serious conversation with German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who told her that he thought the use of force by America would only worsen the crisis. He had more advice.

“Tell my friend Jimmy to get it off the front pages,” he said. “Let him concentrate on Afghanistan or even the old Russian threat, anything to stop giving the militants what they need.”

Rosen asked if he thought she should speak out against her government if it attempted to use force, and Schmidt told her no. “It is most important not to embarrass your own country,” he said. “Do everything you can to influence it, but do not oppose it.”

Opposition was precisely what motivated Timm to go to Iran herself. The government’s travel ban was the final straw. It made her determined to go. She felt her son’s loneliness and isolation viscerally, and believed none of her letters to him were getting through. Reports of the visits by American clergymen had infuriated her, because it was said that the ministers had carried letters from home to the hostages. Evidently at least some of the other families had known about these ministers’ trip and had been provided the opportunity to give them letters. Why hadn’t she? How could the authorities be so careless and incompetent?

After that, the government’s sins kept accumulating. When she saw a news report that thousands of Iranians had been let into the United States since the embassy takeover, she couldn’t believe it. What was happening? For the first time in her life she felt betrayed by her own government. Nothing made sense anymore, and her confusion gave birth to suspicion. The card she had heard about had been mailed to Canada. Why had that one gotten through? Kevin was a faithful correspondent, and she knew that under these circumstances, if he was writing to perfect strangers and asking them to contact his mother, then he was certainly writing regularly to her. Was she not getting his letters because the government was intercepting them? Why would it do that? The only answer she came up with was that something must be going on that the authorities did not want her to know about. She had seen Kevin on TV reading the statement in support of his captors in December. Maybe the United States was up to something in Iran that it did not want the American people to learn. In time, she was ready to believe anything that fed her conspiracy theories. The Iranians holding her son and the others insisted that the fault for everything was America’s. Maybe they were right!

As the other families dropped out, Timm grew more committed. Because Iran’s embassy in Washington had been closed, she and her husband Ken and McAfee left for Paris in mid-April to seek visas at the embassy there.

Milwaukee reporters followed them, demanding an interview at the airport in New York, where Timm asked the United States to apologize to Iran for its support of the shah. She assumed that she would be leaving the journalists behind, but they boarded her plane with their cameras and microphones and moved into the same Parisian hotel. Timm wasn’t bothered by it; she was so accustomed to the reporters and cameras by now that as she ventured into strange lands the familiar entourage actually comforted and emboldened her. Their reports made much of her defiance of President Carter’s travel ban, but Timm said she had never been informed of it personally and, unless word reached her directly from the White House, she was going. After waiting five days in Paris for a visa, the three left the reporters behind (Iran refused them visas) and flew to Germany, where they caught a connecting flight to Damascus, and then a plane to Tehran, all the while expecting the CIA to show up at the last moment to stop them. When she heard her name being called on the public address system at the German airport, she assumed it was the long arm of the law, but it turned out to be another reporter looking for a comment. She hung up on him. This was quite a dramatic stepping out for Barbara Timm. Her son’s graduation from embassy guard training the year before in Quantico, Virginia, had been the first flight she had ever taken. When they landed in Damascus it hit her. They had left behind everything familiar. In Syria all of the people who looked normal to her got off the plane. Only Timm, her husband, and the lawyer stayed. When new passengers boarded, all the women were draped in chadors. Timm had a moment of terror. What in God’s name are we doing? She suddenly wanted to get off the plane and go back home, but it was too late to turn back.

Her fear heightened when they landed in Tehran. Waiting for them was a mob of journalists; it seemed like thousands. There were armed men in green uniforms everywhere. They and their luggage were searched. Once they cleared customs the cameras and microphones closed in on them so fast Timm thought she was going to be trampled to death. She latched on to McAfee and did whatever he suggested, even though she didn’t agree with most of what he said. Right away, for instance, he had urged her to step up before the cameras and answer the reporters’ questions.

“We’ve come this far and we have a responsibility to the world,” he told her.

Trembling with fear, Timm answered question after question before finally they were placed in a car. A pretty young Iranian woman got in with them to act as interpreter. At Timm’s request, they drove by the embassy on their way to their hotel, and when she saw it—the walls draped with hateful anti-American propaganda, more mobs of press waiting outside the front gate—she finally broke down. He’s in there, she thought. I’m this close. Does he sense that I am here? Have they told him I’m coming? When the car slowed down before the front gate, more reporters came running over and the driver stepped on the gas to speed away.

They went back late that night with their interpreter without informing anyone. The media mob was gone. Student guards stood with weapons outside as well as inside the front gate at posts formed by stacked sandbags. Their interpreter talked for a few moments with the guards, and after a short wait Nilufar Ebtekar walked out to see them. The chubby, black-clad young woman launched immediately into a rant: “You are here to see the evidence of the plotting and spying your country was doing in Iran…your CIA has…the Great Satan in 1953…and it was the CIA and SAVAK that tortured and killed…” Timm tuned her out. She had heard it all before a hundred times on TV. Standing before this round-faced, diminutive, arrogant yet familiar young woman who was holding her son prisoner, Timm felt all her fear drop away. She felt rage. She was here to see her son. She had nothing whatsoever to do with the things Ebtekar was going on about. She was a mother from Milwaukee who wanted to visit with her son. Timm started to cry, and then she started to scream at Ebtekar, woman to woman.

“You don’t know what it’s like to be a mother! What would your mother do if you—you can’t be any older than my son is! And you’ve got a mother someplace. Underneath all that shit that you are wearing there’s got to be a human being someplace. You’ve got a mother. How would she feel if you were locked up in a strange country someplace?”

She called Ebtekar cold and heartless.

“You don’t even behave like you’re human,” she said. “Even these guards with their guns talk to us like real people.”

Timm was so furious that she started to turn away. She didn’t even know where she was going, she just had to get away from Ebtekar. She made it partway down the sidewalk before her husband caught up to her.

“She wants to talk to you,” he said.

When she came back, tears still running down her cheeks, Ebtekar had dropped the hectoring tone. She spoke quietly and soothingly.

“If you want to see your boy we’ll have to get a permit,” she said. She said that if they met with Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, the foreign minister, and with the president, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, and got permission, then they could come back and meet with her son. Despite the hour they drove immediately to the foreign ministry, and while the Timms waited in the car McAfee went inside. He returned a short while later with a piece of paper that he said would be all the permission they needed. They drove back to the embassy, where Ebtekar examined the paper and told them to return the next day.

Timm hardly slept that night. The following morning, Monday, April 21, they received a phone call in their hotel room. Several students from the “den of spies” were going to collect them from the hotel, she was told, and McAfee was not allowed to accompany them. This frightened Timm. Ever since she had arrived in Tehran she felt the lawyer was her shield. But she wasn’t going to turn back now. At the appointed hour three young Iranians knocked on their door: Ebtekar and two men. Timm begged them to let McAfee come along and cried when they said no.

They were driven to Behest-e-Zahra cemetery, where Timm was instructed to walk among the graves before a battery of TV cameras. There were Iranian women in chadors waiting by some of the graves, and as she approached with the cameras behind her they would drop to their knees and begin to wail. It all appeared to be theater, orchestrated and narrated by Ebtekar, who explained that these were some of the many victims of the Great Satan and the shah, martyred in their revolution.

“We are friends of the American people,” Ebtekar told her before the cameras, “but the American people must ask their government to return this criminal to Iran so he can be tried.”

Timm got the impression that she was being sized up. They still had not promised to let her see her son. She sat with them for a long time, mostly listening and promising to take their comments and ideas home with her. They told her that they believed Congress ought to investigate and expose the years of American meddling in Iran, and she said that she would advocate that on her return. Finally, driving away from the cemetery, they told her that they had decided to let her see her son for thirty minutes. Timm was told that she and Kevin were not allowed to discuss “politics,” and she readily agreed. She was driven to a rear gate of the compound at midafternoon.

She and her husband were left in a littered, dusty room somewhere on the compound, into which came a young bearded man who questioned them at length. He wanted to know where they were born, where they had grown up and gone to school, what jobs they had…it went on and on. Whom had they met with in Washington before coming? Did they have any special instructions? Had either ever worked for the United States government? Timm was petrified and answered as best she could. When the man urged her to make statements critical of her country on camera, angry as she was at the government, she refused.

Hermening was blindfolded and led out of the chancery to a car. He was driven in what appeared to be circles around the city for about fifteen minutes before steering back into what he felt certain was the embassy compound. He was taken into a building and up a flight of stairs. When they removed the blindfold he was seated at a dining room table with a flowerpot at the center filled with red flowers around a big microphone.

At the last minute, the man questioning Barbara Timm had refused to let her husband come along. Protesting that decision, she had been escorted down a long, scummy, trash-strewn corridor accompanied by Ebtekar and two young men walking on either side of her so closely that she could feel their breath on her arms. She was more frightened than she had ever been in her life. Then, as they mounted a flight of stairs and went down another long corridor, with Ebtekar reminding her that there was to be no conversation about politics, nothing about the hostage situation, that she could discuss only family matters, Timm suddenly doubted that she was being taken to see her son at all. What if Ebtekar were just humoring her with these instructions, leading her along to a place where they would shoot her? She started to cry.