Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (69 page)

Kathryn Koob and Ann Swift were told to pack on the day after the rescue attempt, but when they were finally moved, after waiting anxiously all day, they were simply taken to another room in the chancery. It had been home to three male hostages, one of whom had written on the wall “Khomeini Hilton, 176 days.” It was so dirty the women immediately asked for buckets, mops, scrub brushes, and a vacuum.

They had no sooner cleaned it than they were moved again, across the hall. They pleaded with Hamid to let them stay in the room they had laboriously scrubbed and improved, but to no avail. They were marched across the hall to a room that was just as dirty as the first. They scrubbed and vacuumed this one, too.

The women were not the only ones who stayed behind. In another room in the big, now mostly vacant office building was Bob Ode, who when he heard the demonstrations and saw the other hostages being taken off assumed that an agreement at last had been reached between Iran and the United States. He and Bruce German had packed expectantly, but when only German was taken away Ode’s disappointment and anger erupted. He swore a blue streak at the guards, dredging up language he hadn’t used since he was a sailor in World War Two. It was a full-fledged temper tantrum, pointless and probably self-destructive, which Ode understood but could not contain. He screamed at them until a senior guard named Akmed came into his room and upbraided him.

“Older men should have more dignity,” he said.

Dignity was the last thing on Ode’s mind. His disappointment ached. He assumed that German was being taken home, and he was not, because he had misbehaved. The notion seemed confirmed when the next morning he was taken from the room but not even out of the building. He was moved down the hall into a room with Don Hohman, the embassy medic. The rest of the building had grown quiet as a tomb. When Ode complained that the new room wasn’t as comfortable as the old one, where he had everything set up, Hamid told him, “It is because you cursed at the students.” Besides, said Hamid, the new room was larger.

“But the other room had a desk with drawers where we could keep our things, and two chairs, and was brighter,” Ode pleaded.

“This will be your room from now on,” said Hamid.

“How long is ‘from now on’?” Ode asked.

Hamid told Ode that he complained too much.

Barbara Timm was awakened at the Intercontinental Hotel Friday morning in Tehran by a team of angry students, who accused her and her husband of having come as part of the “secret invasion.” That was how the mission was being portrayed in Iran. The United States had attempted a military invasion of Iran but had been dealt a crushing defeat. One of the students suggested that the Timms and their lawyer had been sent by the U.S. government as a distraction.

“You tricked us,” one of them accused her. “You lied to us. We believed that you were just a mother coming to see her son.”

She had seen Kevin on Monday, and the days between then and the rescue mission had unfolded like absurdist theater. First they had been visited by, of all people, the comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory, who had come to Tehran threatening to fast outside the occupied embassy until the hostages were released. Timm had also met and lunched with a freelance American journalist named Cynthia Dwyer, who had come to Tehran to research an article. They had met at a restaurant in the huge hotel lobby. To further complicate matters, the young Iranian woman who was acting as their interpreter had taken them to meet Iranians who were opposed to Khomeini and the taking of the embassy. They had also attended a prayer service and heard calls of “Death to Carter” and “Death to America.” It was all so strange it was hard to know what to think. What sustained Timm was the hope that she might get another chance to visit with Kevin and perhaps even rescue him from this place. She had passed the long days of that week filled with anxiety, confusion, and hope.

Now this, some kind of American attack. The Timms were dismayed. She knew any hope of taking Kevin home was gone and began to fear arrest and detention herself. She had long opposed any use of force to resolve the standoff. Why had Carter done this while she was in Tehran? What if the hostage takers now blew up the embassy and killed the hostages, something they had threatened to do if the United States attacked? Ken Timm had seen what looked like plastic explosives at various places around the outside of the chancery. In this state, Timm got a panicked international phone call from Bonnie Graves, the wife of hostage John Graves, who was angry and distraught and who urged an immediate public apology to Iran. In hopes of sparing her husband what was to come, Bonnie urged Barbara to specifically mention the “family of John Graves.” McAfee also urged her to make the statement, as a way of clearing any suspicions about her and her husband and as a way to head off a possible bloody response by the hostage takers.

So Timm went before the TV cameras in the hotel lobby and read a statement drafted by McAfee.

“On behalf of my family and the family of Bonnie Graves, we deeply regret there has been military action taken,” she said. She was more vehement in answer to reporters’ questions. “I am very angry that the president of our country would do something so stupid, something that we’ve been told for five months could be so disastrous and could not in any way bring about good results. As a result of trying to make a military move I believe it is time the American people see that President Carter and his advisers are not capable of handling this crisis and that it should be turned over to the people, turned over to the Congress.” She lied and told reporters that she did not fear for her son.

On the same day, as Iranian army investigators pored over the wreckage at Desert One and gathered the charred remains of the eight dead members of the failed rescue mission into plastic bags, Timm attended a presidential press conference in Tehran, where Bani-Sadr lambasted her country. Rumors ran high in Iran, and Iranians of course did not believe President Carter’s statement about the nature and scope of the mission. The passengers on the arrested bus were quizzed repeatedly about their miraculous escape from peril. Some claimed to have seen at least a dozen helicopters and four hundred to five hundred American soldiers. There were reports that at least forty Iranians, some of them former students of the U.S. Air Force Academy, had been allied with the plot, which was not just a rescue mission but a full-scale invasion and an attempt to murder Khomeini and destroy the revolution.

At Bani-Sadr’s side, a sobbing Timm addressed the world press.

“I am going to tell you and the people of Iran that our family and another family of one of the hostages, the Graves family, deeply regret the action our president took yesterday. We’d like to apologize for that action.”

Gloating over the American “defeat,” Khomeini chastised Carter for his “foolish maneuver” and warned that any further military action by the United States would prompt the immediate execution of all hostages. His threat actually came as a relief to the White House and hostages’ families, who remembered earlier such threats by the student captors. It appeared to mean that, perhaps because of the complete ignominy of the mission’s failure, there would be no executions this time.

A cruel and macabre press conference was held the next morning at the embassy, where remains of the dead crewmen were put on display. Attended by the imam’s son and grandson, it was orchestrated by Ayatollah Khalkali, the hanging judge, who opened the session by expressing condolences to the families of the dead and then unzipped one of the plastic body bags and withdrew a blackened severed hand and forearm to show off its military-style wristwatch. He insisted that twenty-nine Americans had perished, and then claimed to have nine skulls in the bags before him, not eight—one might have belonged to the driver of the exploded fuel truck, who had not escaped the blaze as was thought. Khalkali joked, “I can show you nine skulls. Perhaps Carter can explain how some American soldiers have two heads?” He said evidence recovered from the site—they had found a driver’s license in a wallet left behind by one of the mission participants, Stanley E. Thomas—showed that at least one of the invaders had been African-American, which proved, said the ayatollah, that the American invaders had been compelled to participate since no black would volunteer for such a thing.

Barbara Rosen had been in Bonn for her meeting with Chancellor Schmidt when news of the rescue attempt broke. She closed herself in her hotel bathroom and cried. She was terrified about what might now happen to her husband Barry and the rest, appalled at the display of American military ineptitude, and felt personally betrayed by Carter’s decision; did he still have the photos of her and Barry’s daughters she had given him in that first meeting with the families in December? But when she faced a large crowd of reporters later at the American embassy she took Schmidt’s advice and bit her lip. She declined to criticize the president or the military. She met up with the other members of the FLAG European mission in Paris the next day and together they went to Rome for an audience with Pope John Paul II. They had hoped to talk with the pope and solicit his aid in resolving the crisis, but instead they were put in a long line of ceremonial visitors and were ushered before the pope only for a few moments. He told them he would pray and work for the hostages’ release and gave each a set of rosary beads.

The Timms were not allowed to leave Tehran on Friday as scheduled. Barbara spent a long and difficult Saturday wondering if she and her husband would ever be permitted to go. She was further shocked to learn that an angry reception now awaited them at home. Phone calls from Milwaukee revealed that her “apology” had set off a furor in the United States. Threatening phone calls had come to their house and there were police stationed outside it. Timm felt that she was at the center of a colossal worldwide misunderstanding, and whatever she did or said just seemed to make it worse. She kept playing over in her mind the moment Ebtekar had said, “Time’s up,” and her son had been pulled from the room.

Permission to depart came on Sunday, and when their plane lifted into the air Timm collapsed into tears. She felt helpless and angry and guilty and terribly relieved all at the same time. As she cried, a journalist on the same flight took a picture of her. McAfee lost his temper, grabbing the camera and tearing the film out of it.

They stopped in London and ignored the press there, and when they landed in Chicago the next day there was another press mob waiting. It was not friendly.

Most Americans heartily approved of the rescue attempt, and were saddened and disappointed by its failure, but they did not condemn the president. Polls taken in the days afterward showed that while a substantial majority disagreed with the handling of the hostage crisis overall—Ronald Reagan called it “a national disgrace”—a full 66 percent agreed with the president’s decision to launch the mission. His approval ratings for handling the hostage crisis fell, but not precipitously, from 47 percent to 42 percent. Overall, Carter still led Reagan in the polls.

In the final meeting before Carter had given the go-ahead to the mission, Brzezinski had brought up the possibility of failure. He had suggested, in keeping with his aggressive posture, that the military draw up a plan that would, in a way, cushion the blow. If it became apparent that the mission was going to fail, then the United States should attack Iran from the air, destroying key oil facilities. The president could then go on television, Brzezinski said, and announce that his patience with Iran had been exhausted by its blatant disregard for international law and its refusal to negotiate in good faith and, as a result, he had authorized a hostage rescue mission and a variety of retaliatory air strikes.

“Then you could say, ‘I regret to say that the rescue mission has failed, but we have struck and destroyed the Abadan oil refinery,’” Brzezinski offered. “You could then warn Iran that if any harm comes to the American hostages, ‘This is just a foretaste of what is coming.’”

Carter had dismissed the suggestion. “We’ll discuss that later,” he told his national security adviser and had not followed up. Now there was just the cold fact of failure to report, and the president’s stolid, grim face appeared on television screens to deliver the news straight.

Across a wide, disappointed nation, the president took a predictable beating from the pious second-guessers of the nation’s editorial pages.

The News-Tribune of Tacoma, Washington, boldly concluded, “It may be too early to make a judgment, but first impressions are that the U.S. badly bungled the rescue mission. Further, although Carter certainly deserves the benefit of the doubt at this point, it appears he failed miserably in judgment and leadership.”

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch predicted that the mission’s failure would deepen Iranian distrust of the United States, and that it “cannot have beneficial consequences for ending the hostage situation. To be sure, they now know that Mr. Carter is capable of rash action, but America’s failure is more likely to strengthen the Ayatollah’s hand than to persuade him to bring the crisis to an end.”

The Phoenix Gazette accused Carter of undermining the mission by trying to manage it himself from Washington instead of leaving decisions to men in the field. The Baltimore Evening Sun offered the remarkable opinion that authorizing the mission had been wrong because there was a chance it might not succeed: “Any possibility of failure should have ruled it out. We remain unconvinced…that the decision to resort to military action was in fact a wise one. On the evidence thus far, it was not.” The paper presumably remained solidly behind missions entailing no risk whatsoever.

The San Diego Evening Tribune objected to the unilateralism and secrecy of the mission: “Military action may ultimately become necessary. But it should not be undertaken without full consultation with Congress, with our allies, and with other nations in the Middle East.”

The Daily Mail of Charleston, West Virginia, was bewildered: “It is incredible, in the first place, that the president ever supposed that a commando raid into downtown Tehran would ever have a chance…. How could Mr. Carter, who for nearly six months has done virtually nothing to obtain the hostages’ release, attempt such a foolhardy operation as this? Having failed to consult with Congress, as the War Powers Act would appear to require, he can scarcely share the responsibility with anyone else…. Mr. Carter has contrived to make matters worse.”