Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (80 page)

“What do you want?” Tabatabai asked his brother-in-law. “What should we expect America to do for us in return for releasing the hostages?”

Ahmad said that his father would be satisfied if the United States would express remorse or apologize for its historical role in Iran, unlock Iranian assets in America and withdraw any legal claims against Iran arising from the embassy seizure, and promise not to interfere in the future. This represented a significant retreat from the long-standing demands for the return of the shah and all his wealth. Tabatabai invited the West German ambassador to his house in Niavaran, an affluent suburb in north Tehran. The Iranian host dismissed his bodyguards early so that there would be no one to note the coming and going of the Germans. He asked the ambassador to quietly convey the new list of demands through Genscher to the White House.

Ever since the failed rescue mission, Carter had been at a loss about how to approach Iran. The debacle had, in the peculiar logic of this crisis, placed the United States on the defensive. There was little or nothing for Iran to gain by holding the hostages, especially with the shah dead and buried. Most of the monarch’s wealth had been moved from American banks, so the demand for the return of his wealth was moot. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance was replaced by Senator Ed Muskie, and the United States waited for Iran to make the next move. Even the slightest hint of a feeler got immediate and serious White House attention.

As Carter would note in his diary on September 10, “Ed Muskie called, and said he must see me immediately and alone. I told him to come over. He brought Chris [Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher] and I called in Zbig [Zbigniew Brzezinski]. We had a message through Genscher from Iran, to which I responded affirmatively.”

The proposal seemed to Carter designed to succeed. It represented a significant shift in Iran’s position, and other than the insistence on an apology the demands really did nothing more than undo the steps taken by the United States in retaliation for the hostage-taking. But who were they dealing with? Who was this Tabatabai? Even if the Germans vouched for him, what did that mean? Their earlier dealings had been with the elected president of the country and its foreign minister, neither of whom, it turned out, had any real power over the situation. Hard experience had demonstrated that there was only one Iranian in a position to deliver the hostages, and that was Khomeini. If Tabatabai could prove he spoke for the imam, the United States would take the proposal seriously.

In Tehran, the brothers-in-law knew they had Ayatollah Khomeini’s support, but even with that there was still the chance that the newly empowered Majlis would dig in its heels. In an effort to forestall an ugly public battle, they set about building a quiet consensus for the initiative. They visited Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, the speaker of the Majlis, and found that he was delighted by the idea.

“Can you give me a guarantee that you can sell these things to the Majlis?” Tabatabai asked.

Rafsanjani said he could.

So Tabatabai met again with the West German ambassador inviting him once more to his home at night and dismissing his security guards, and told him that the Americans should listen to a broadcast speech by Khomeini scheduled for three days hence. In the speech, the imam would mention the same four conditions Tabatabai had conveyed.

Three days later, Khomeini gave a long, rambling speech, at the end of which he enunciated Tabatabai’s four conditions for ending the hostage crisis. Journalists around the world correctly interpreted Khomeini’s conditions to be a major shift on Iran’s side of the impasse, but the White House played down the importance of the remarks. America was suffering a kind of hostage fatigue. Dick Gregory had just returned from Tehran, fifty pounds lighter from his months-long fast, and after outlining his own solution to the crisis, which essentially called for Carter to capitulate to every one of Iran’s demands, he began a doctor-supervised one-man march on Washington. His skeletal frame—he was down to under one hundred pounds—symbolized the country’s exhaustion and sense of futility over the matter. According to polls, Carter and Reagan were running neck and neck in the upcoming election, where the country’s attention was increasingly focused. Carter dispatched Deputy Secretary of State Christopher to meet secretly with Tabatabai in Bonn at Schloss Gymnich, a private palace owned by the West German Foreign Ministry.

Christopher was shocked to discover a tall, slick, urbane man in a well-cut tweed jacket who spoke with none of the overheated rhetoric they had come to expect. Nothing about the encounter with Tabatabai was what he and his entourage had expected. This emissary was pleasant, agreeable, and unfailingly polite. As they moved into a room for formal discussions, both Christopher and Tabatabai offered to let the other go first, and then the Iranian noted that the room they were about to enter had a Persian rug and took Christopher’s hand, “Let us step on this Persian carpet together, hand-in-hand…. Let us forget the past, start from now, and go into the future.”

His German was fluent, and he spoke to Christopher through a German translator because he had not dared bring a Farsi interpreter with him from the Foreign Ministry in Tehran—there was too much risk of a leak. It was hard to believe that this man with manicured fingernails, who held his cigarettes gingerly in the old theatrical manner, between the thumb and first two fingers, was a representative of the fierce mullahs governing Iran. There didn’t seem to be an ideological bone in his body; he was strictly pragmatic. Tabatabai was particularly interested in opening the gates for spare military parts and wanted that to be part of the deal. Over the next two days they hammered out an agreement to end the crisis, one that met all the new demands save one: the United States would not be issuing an apology. Both men agreed to take the proposals home for approval.

Tabatabai was excited. He prepared an eight-page account of the agreement in preparation for the flight home. He had flown to Bonn on a private plane owned by Iran’s Foreign Ministry, but when he arrived at the airport for the flight back to Tehran he was told his plane could not leave. War had broken out.

Saddam’s bombs crushed Tabatabai’s initiative. Iranian officialdom immediately blamed Iraq’s aggression on the United States. For nearly a month, the Carter White House waited for word from Tabatabai but there was none. It started to look as if the hostages would have to wait out this war.

As the American presidential campaign moved into the home stretch, it was watched with great interest from Iran, by both guards and hostages. Early on, the public had rallied around Carter, and his poll numbers were high, but they had begun to decline in early 1980 and, following the rescue attempt, they had plummeted. People seemed to feel sorry for him, which translated into respect but not support. His stewardship took on a sickly cast, with a number of events and issues combining to make the humble engineer from Plains, Georgia, seem well intentioned but yielding and ineffectual. His concern for human rights and his willingness to reevaluate foreign policy on those terms rankled those who believed that containing the larger evil of communism occasionally demanded unsavory acts and alliances. The decision to cede the Panama Canal back to that tiny Central American nation was both pragmatic and inevitable, but it gave America-firsters the charge that Carter was a pushover and an apologist for the nation’s power. Rising oil prices throughout his tenure dramatically revealed the United States’ growing dependence on oil imports from the Middle East and a vulnerability to decisions over which Washington had only limited influence. Ever since the 1973 OPEC embargo the world’s markets had been jumpy, and Iran’s decision to bar oil exports briefly in 1978 had panicked investors globally, even though the country accounted for an insignificant portion of oil supplies. The seizure of the embassy created more concern, and then OPEC raised oil prices 50 percent in 1979. Carter’s perfectly sensible call under the circumstances for Americans to conserve oil and gas, reasoning in his button-front sweater before a White House fireplace, produced one of those iconic images that permanently brand public figures. Here was a critical natural resource that the United States could no longer cheaply supply, controlled by suppliers it could no longer direct or even influence. It was an admission of impotence. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan at the end of 1979, it aggravated the sense of American weakness. The hostage crisis confirmed the impression. It was a prolonged national humiliation, painted in ever worsening detail by the majority of the news media, from the parading of blindfolded American diplomats before angry crowds to a series of failed diplomatic initiatives to the military ineptitude at Desert One. The previous three and a half years seemed marked with Carter’s sad, puffy face on a TV screen, earnestly administering another dose of bad news.

Ronald Reagan, whose familiar chiseled features recalled an era of seemingly limitless American potential, skillfully played off Carter’s powerlessness. The Gipper’s broad-shouldered, cinematic swagger alone was anodyne to Carter’s “malaise.” America had received enough doses of bitter medicine from the peanut-farmer president and was eager to sail off into a dreamworld of patriotic bliss. Reagan deliberately dithered when pressed for specifics, but his well-articulated dreams were rooted in the country’s fondest fantasy of itself. Arriving in a blizzard of brilliant red, white, and blue, the Republican convention was a restorative to the country’s sagging spirits, and it gave Reagan a big enough boost to overtake the president in most polls. Carter gained ground during the Democratic convention in late summer, but Reagan’s appeal and the stubborn presence of Representative John Anderson in the campaign, whose small percentage of the vote would come primarily from former Carter voters, kept the Republican candidate on top. In the final months of the campaign, Reagan refused to debate the president on television unless Anderson was included, which would likely broaden the third-party candidate’s exposure and pull.

In Tehran, the guards at Evin prison took a straw poll one evening to see who the hostages would elect for president. Limbert selected Carter. Most of his colleagues wanted Reagan, as did the guards, who considered the hated Carter’s electoral woes a great victory for Iran and glowed with satisfaction that their actions were shaping big events in the United States. They were convinced that anyone other than Carter would understand their reasons for seizing the embassy and would admit the great wrongs America had committed in Iran.

Lieutenant Colonel Dave Roeder asked one of them, “Do you know who Ronald Reagan is?”

“He was a movie star,” the guard said.

“Do you know what will happen to Iran if Reagan wins the election?” Roeder asked. The white-haired prisoner with the deep-set eyes and heavily lined face leaned forward dramatically, made a sudden expanding gesture with his hands, and said, “Boom!”

All through October, as Election Day in the States approached, rumors swirled about the hostages’ imminent release. The Majlis finally took up the issue toward the end of the month, and after days of private debate there were strong signs that the country was ready to give up the hostages. In what the Associated Press termed “rampant worldwide speculation,” there were reports from a variety of sources about a secret deal to free the hostages before Election Day, the first anniversary of the takeover. Ever since the coincidence of the Wisconsin primary, when Carter was unfairly accused of having deliberately stirred expectations for a breakthrough in the crisis to improve his chances, the White House had been under suspicions that Carter found particularly wounding. His critics made mutually contradictory accusations, that he was powerless and incompetent but also that he was somehow manipulating the crisis to his benefit. The Republican campaign all but conceded that the president was likely to produce an election eve solution to the crisis. Suspicion went both ways. There were also rumors, although less widespread, that Reagan’s campaign was somehow conspiring to prevent a hostage release before Election Day. For his part, Carter and his staff repeatedly stated that rumors of a secret deal were baseless.

They were not entirely so. Early in October, the amateur botanist Tabatabai had employed a horticultural metaphor in a secret message to Warren Christopher, reporting that the terms they had worked out in Bonn before the outbreak of the Iran–Iraq war “had fallen on fertile ground.” This message had been conveyed to Carter at a campaign stop in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

After a secret debate in the Majlis, Rafsanjani had made good on his guarantee, winning a 100–80 vote in support of the agreement despite last-minute minority efforts to scuttle it by walking out. In a speech at the end of the month, Khomeini announced that the conditions under consideration were “just,” and no less a figure than the hanging judge Ayatollah Khalkali, who only a few months back had toyed on TV with the charred corpses of American airmen killed in the rescue attempt, predicted that the hostages would soon be released, citing Iran’s desperate need for the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of military contracts that the country had purchased before the embassy seizure—the same contracts that imprisoned American military men had brought to the revolutionary government’s attention more than a year earlier.

“We want to free the hostages before the election,” Khalkali said. “We know the war with Iraq will be long. Many will die if the United States doesn’t give us the weapons we have already bought. We need the reserve parts now.”

On the last day of the month, Radio Tehran tried to put the best face on this change of heart. It announced that a “just method” for the hostages’ release had been worked out by the Majlis, emphasizing that the conditions would force the United States to make “concessions.” Iran, it seemed, was ready simply to declare victory and send the American hostages home wrapped in great clouds of cant.

The bitter struggle waged by Islam against the greatest tyrannical force in the world to raise the word of right and obliterate the signs of falsehood and aggression is the best example for humanity to follow in its journey towards right and justice. The seizure of the spy hostages was a bold human act by the heroic Iranian people, undertaken with confidence and loyalty, in order to rid the world of the vicious hand which had played havoc with the people’s dignity, freedom, and independence. The detention of these spies for a year is an unforgettable lesson for those who let themselves be seduced into working in this ill-fated field. It is also a good lesson for the tyrants who rely on such unethical methods to carry out their oppression against the people.