Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (81 page)

Matters reached a head in the days before the American elections. In Tehran, buses were parked outside the U.S. embassy, a Swedish plane poised to fly the hostages out, and medical teams assembled to receive them at the American military base in Wiesbaden, Germany. For their part, the student captors informed the Iranian government that this time they were prepared to comply with the agreement and release the hostages.

If the hostages came home, it might provide Carter the margin of victory. The hostage crisis was now all over television again as reporters got wind of a possible settlement. There were pictures of the waiting buses and plane, interviews with the hostage families, and long recapitulations of the whole sorry story as the first-year anniversary of the takeover approached. Poised, ever cheerful Dorothea Morefield, wife of the captive embassy consul, was everywhere. “They [the Iranians] want to resolve it, want to bring it to an end,” she told one reporter, gazing out softly behind her big-rimmed glasses. “I think they [the hostages] are coming home and I don’t think it will be too much longer.”

A half-hour-long special on the hostage crisis, “A Year in Captivity,” punctuated by passages from letters written by Dick Morefield to his wife and children, aired on CBS just days before the election. The special suggested that an end to the crisis was at hand, perhaps too much at hand, with moderator Dan Rather commenting, “There are questions whether the deal is being rushed too hastily for election campaign purposes.”

Suspense over the election and the hostages rose toward a crescendo on election eve. Once again the nation was poised for a happy ending…and nothing happened. The Iranian leaders had apparently expected Carter to grab at the chance to save his presidency; they had demanded that he simply announce his acceptance of the deal on television. To his credit Carter didn’t bite. He coolly issued a statement calling the proposed deal “a good and constructive move,” but said that his actions would not be governed by the press of the campaign or his desire for a second term. There was still a filament of hope that the Iranians would go through with the release and complete the negotiations afterward. The president would note in his memoirs, “Now my political future might well be determined by irrational people on the other side of the world over whom I had no control.”

There were complex legal issues involved. Probably the most difficult conditions were the requests that Iranian assets be unfrozen and that legal claims against the country be dropped. There were about $10 billion in assets at stake, which included securities, gold deposits with the Federal Reserve, and money in the U.S. Treasury and in American banks both at home and abroad. At least $500 million was being held by American companies. Lodged against that fortune were lawsuits over debts incurred by the shah’s government that had gone unpaid after the revolution, including a $175 million bill from Sedco, a Texas oil equipment firm, a $93 million bill owed the E. I. Du Pont Corporation for a synthetic textile plant it had built in Iran, and an unpaid $85 million bill to the Xerox Corporation. The most hopeful part of the proposal was Iran’s suggestion that Algerian diplomats mediate final discussions.

Instead of a breakthrough, however, Carter’s beleaguered face appeared on TV to announce yet another in a long series of disappointments. The result was immediate. With typically cold calculation, Carter wrote in his diary that evening, Monday, November 3:

Pat [Cadell, his pollster] was getting some very disturbing public-opinion poll results, showing a massive slippage as people realized that the hostages were not coming home. The anniversary date…absolutely filled the news media. Time, Newsweek, U.S. News—all had cover stories on the hostages. And by Monday only a tiny portion (I think Pat said 19 percent) thought that the hostages were going to be coming home any time soon. This apparently opened up a flood of related concerns among the people that we were impotent…Strangely enough, my favorability rating went up—the way I handled the Iran situation went up, and the percentage that thought it was used for political purposes went down…[but] prospects had faded away for us to win.

On Election Day, Carter returned to his home in Plains, Georgia, to cast his vote. He told reporters, coyly, “I asked my wife who she was voting for, and I voted the same way.” When reporters asked him what he planned to do in the event that he lost, he demurred, saying that he expected to win, but he already knew the truth. In a moment rare for him, the president lost his composure thanking the gathered friends and family from his hometown. He said he felt “more encouraged than I have in the past” about winning the hostages’ release, and, asked about the impact the hostage crisis had on his reelection campaign, Carter said with conviction tinged by a trace of wistfulness, “I’d have to say it was a negative factor, but we acted properly.”

In the end, the third-party candidate Anderson wasn’t even a factor. American voters making up their minds at the last minute decided in favor of the Republican candidate, giving Reagan and his party an overwhelming victory. The former movie star and California governor took almost 10 percent more of the popular tally and a landslide of electoral votes—489 to 49. He carried forty-four of the fifty states.

There was widespread rejoicing in Iran over Carter’s defeat. It was regarded by many as another sign of Allah’s hand in world affairs, although no less a local hero than Mousavi Khoeniha, spiritual adviser to the student hostage takers, was less sanguine. Referring to Reagan, he told a reporter, “The yellow dog is brother to the jackal.”

On the first anniversary of their captivity, some of the hostages were awakened in Evin prison by radio broadcasts in English. Apparently the students wanted to spread the news, and had tuned in to a BBC station and cranked up the volume. Some of the report concerned the Polish uprising against its Soviet masters, and then came the news that Ronald Reagan had defeated Jimmy Carter in the American election.

Most of the hostages were delighted. They assumed that Reagan’s election meant something was going to happen. They had done such a good job convincing their guards that the “something” would not be good for Iran that Joe Hall felt the need to reassure a fearful Big Ali that nothing would happen right away.

“In the American system, Reagan will not take office until the end of January,” he explained.

Even those hostages who preferred Carter were heartened. They had known nothing of the deal for their release that had seemed so close as the election approached, so this news was the first in months that suggested change. Everyone, hostages and guards, started counting down the days until Reagan’s inauguration, January 21, 1981.

After Reagan’s victory, talks over the hostages cooled. For Laingen, Howland, and Tomseth, the only captives who were in a position to follow the process closely, it was maddening. Perhaps most distressing was the absence of continued American outrage. Somehow during the year of captivity, the threats and counterthreats and the failed rescue mission, the capacity for anger seemed to have exhausted itself. Negotiations proceeded through November, with overtures and responses, as though America were hammering out a trade agreement, not dealing with a criminal regime. Carter welcomed the conditions demanded by the Iranian kidnappers. Reagan, after the election, pledged to abide by whatever solution was reached. It seemed that American blood could no longer boil. Clare Boothe Luce, the elderly former journalist, ambassador, and conservative congresswoman, commented sarcastically, “The United States will end up apologizing to Iran for its having declared war on us.”

The passion had also drained out of Laingen’s writings. In the early months of captivity, his journal and long letters home were filled with repetitive railing against the flagrant injustice and folly of Iran’s policies. But he had emptied that well. Like a man who wakes up to a green sky, he had worn himself out trying to get other people to notice that something was wrong and now had given himself over to simple observation.

He wrote in his journal:

How do I feel about Iran? It has gone on so long that I think I have overcome most of the anger and bitterness I felt earlier. It is behind us now; we are alive and well and physically no worse for wear—only a year older! I could not feel good toward the leadership, certainly not the hard-liners, certainly not the clerics and the “student” militants. I think I feel scorn for them but not hate. They will suffer—are suffering—for what they did. They have brought Iran to the point of collapse, to a war that they encouraged in the sense that they weakened Iran to the point where Hussein felt he could attack—or felt angry enough to attack because of [Khomeini] and his constant call for Hussein’s overthrow…. There is the hard reality of our country’s interest. It is not in our interest to see Iran defeated or dismembered by war, or to see it weakened so that extremist political elements of another persuasion take over. On balance, our long-range interests are Iran, not Iraq.

Still, there was that “scorn.” Most revolutions are driven at least in part by fantasy, the belief that a certain class or tribe of people is special or chosen, that some idea represents the permanent apex of human thought, if not God’s own. Never was this more evident than in Iran. The rhetoric of the revolution was arrogant and self-righteous to the point of parody, and from his third-floor perch, monitoring the local TV, radio, and press, Laingen had heard about all he could stand. “Sanctimonious” was the word he used for it in his journal. It resembled the doublespeak of Orwell’s 1984, where the word “freedom” was simply assigned a new and opposite meaning—religious oppression was true freedom, a twist that could be appreciated only by donning the green-tinted glasses of Islam. “It is not freedom of the kind known in Western countries and termed liberalism,” explained his holiness the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at one Friday prayer meeting. “Freedom in that liberal sense is license to follow any sort of desire, passion, or corruption. Freedom under Islam lies within the framework of Islamic principles,” as determined of course by him and the other mullahs.

Month by month the clerics’ double-talk was becoming more institutionalized, more the official vocabulary of the state. If it were not totally clear that the religious extremists were in control, it became so when Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, the dapper official who had stepped down as foreign minister to make way for an appointee more acceptable to the ruling clerics, was briefly arrested in mid-November. Among other heresies, he pronounced in a TV interview, “Iran is governed by a group of fascist extremists who are driving this country to disaster.”

It sounded like something Laingen himself had written a year earlier.

In the interregnum, as Reagan began putting together his administration and Carter and his team prepared to move on, it appeared as if the hostage crisis was hastening toward some kind of ending, but it wasn’t clear what sort. Negotiations through Algeria had continued with Carter after his defeat, and once or twice more hopes of a settlement were fanned by news reports only to vanish again. Washington and Tehran traded final offers, and shortly before Christmas it appeared as though the talks had failed. Ayatollah Mohammed Behesti, Secretary of the Revolutionary Council, held a press conference in which he answered many questions in calm, correct English. He said that it was likely the hostages would be brought to trial, and those convicted of spying would be dealt with accordingly. Stansfield Turner, the CIA chief, advised the president on the first of December that the talks “offered little prospect of success.”

As the hostages entered their second year of captivity, the rain and cold had come again to Tehran, and the jubes once more were filled with swift-flowing mountain water. Another year of rust had formed on the great cranes poised on the skyline over now forgotten construction projects. The hostages had become little more than an afterthought. The country was at war. Iraq was raiding the pipelines and refineries of the country’s oil industry. It had set fire to the great works in Abadan during a siege of that city, doing precisely the kind of damage that American warplanes might have a year earlier if Carter had yielded to calls for punitive air strikes. Kurdish rebels backed by Saddam Hussein were fighting pitched battles against Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. The death toll that would ultimately reach a million had begun to grimly accumulate, and the country wore the gray pallor of hardship. Internally, the religious rulers continued their bloody purges of political opponents; any criticism of the regime was now treason. Gasoline and kerosene were being rationed. Many of the students involved in the takeover had left to defend their country against Saddam, a more urgent and tangible threat than the Great Satan.

Those who remained behind to supervise the hostages were no longer the darlings of the revolution and were weary of the task. The shah was dead and buried. All but the most ardent true believers had long ago concluded that the assassinations and countercoup they had imagined forming behind the embassy walls didn’t exist. Study of the “Spy Den documents” had revealed details of the considerable influence the United States had had over the shah—the embassy’s files contained records that went back decades—and showed that after the revolution the CIA and American military had tried to cultivate spies within the new regime, but this was hardly surprising. Such was the work of embassies the world over, including Iran’s. Still, the protest had served a purpose. It had helped leverage the mullahs into long-term power, a result that not all of the student planners had desired or foreseen, and it had, as public theater, spectacularly underscored an end to the nation’s old vassalage. As a show of defiance, it had been a yearlong, televised Boston Tea Party. If the past twelve months had proved anything, they had demonstrated how powerless the United States was to influence anything in the new Iran; if the embassy takeover had done nothing else, it had broadcast Iran’s total independence to the world. It had produced unforgettable images of America humbled: blindfolded hostages, burning flags, and the charred remains of airmen and helicopters in the desert, dead even before striking a blow. But Iran was now paying a terrible price in the real world for its symbolic triumph.