Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (82 page)

Of what use were the hostages now?

Carter had tried to conduct his handling of the hostage crisis from the beginning without concern for his political future, and now there was no future even to consider. It gave him solid footing for the next ten weeks of offers and counteroffers. When one of the many voices from Iran’s leadership at one point demanded a one-word answer from the president to its latest offer, Carter obliged.

“No,” he said.

They could deal with him, or they could wait and deal with President-elect Reagan, who publicly scorned the process. Reagan said little about the standoff, except to repeatedly deplore the taking of hostages, and he even refused to be briefed on the secret negotiations. Here was a man with none of Carter’s fluency on policy details, but who intuitively understood the role of theater in world politics. When he did speak, in an interview shortly before Christmas, standing with his wife, Nancy, before a Christmas tree, his face became a steely mask of contempt, the virtuous cowboy confronting Black Bart. He said that like most Americans he felt, deep down, “anger” at the very idea that demands were being made of America by “criminals and kidnappers.” Days later he said, “I don’t think you pay ransom for people who have been kidnapped by barbarians.” Both the president and the president-elect made it clear that Reagan would not simply pick up the process when Carter left office. His term would start with a clean slate, and in the brutal calculus of popular concern the hostages were an old and tired story. Throughout the campaign the Republican candidate had expressed nothing but disgust for the whole travesty, hinting that were he president nothing of this sort would be allowed to happen. With Carter it was taken for granted that he would do nothing rash, but there was no such certainty with Reagan, who with a large popular majority behind him might well consider swiftly ending the standoff. Many Americans would applaud a bold, punitive move by the new administration, even if it was a bloody one. By any calculation, most of the blood spilled would be Iranian. Thus the election results imparted a new urgency to the talks.

Carter had accepted Algeria as intermediary. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher led a delegation there after the election to present America’s formal response. It accepted all four of Iran’s demands in principle: 1) stop interfering in Iranian affairs; 2) unfreeze Iranian assets frozen after the embassy was seized; 3) remove sanctions and block legal claims resulting from the takeover; 4) block remaining assets of the shah from leaving the United States. The United States countered with a fifth demand that all of the above was contingent on the hostages’ safe return. Christopher then outlined to the Algerians the major sticking point: Iran had overestimated the shah’s missing fortune by a factor of a thousand—Iran put the figure at between $20 to $60 billion and the United States said it was closer to $20 to $60 million. There were also legal constraints on what an American president could do about the shah’s private holdings and to what extent he could interfere with the courts.

Christopher pointed out that although America could not legally seize the Pahlavi family fortune, Iran might sue for its return. The United States government also could not bar corporations from suing to recover money owed on unpaid contracts. To avoid having to convince American judges to rule in their favor, Iran responded by suggesting that the United States simply repay from its own Treasury money looted from the Iranian people. The White House acknowledged this line of reasoning, but it was unwilling to concede that the shah’s fortune was lawfully Iran’s. Carter had immediately rejected it.

In mid-December, Iran added a new demand, one that was particularly revealing and that amounted very nearly to an admission of wrong-doing. It wanted indemnity. It wanted the United States to forfeit any future claims against Iran by the hostages or their families. Since private lawsuits against foreign countries very rarely succeed, it was not a major concession, but Carter knew that such a step would close for the victims of this outrage their only legal avenue for redress. Carter directed that the hostage family organization, FLAG, be consulted, but the families were hardly inclined to hold up a deal that might bring their loved ones home. The White House accepted the demand.

What followed over the next month in Algiers was like haggling over a rug in the Tehran bazaar. The bargaining eventually boiled down to the amount of Iranian wealth deposited in American banks that Carter had locked in place the year before, weighed against the country’s outstanding debts, most of them for military hardware. Iran first demanded $14 billion in frozen assets and $10 billion in cash guarantees, then a day later suggested that the United States could expedite the release by depositing $24 billion in Algeria as a guarantee against whatever the assets proved to be, a sum that the president called “ridiculous.” Iran was, in effect, demanding $640 million per hostage. A few days before Christmas, it appeared as though the talks had broken down, until State Department officials with experience in the Middle East encouraged Carter to make a lowball counteroffer.

Christopher secretly proposed $6 billion.

And that’s where negotiations stalled. Cornered by a pack of reporters outside a grocery store in Plains, where the Carters were paying a pre-Christmas visit, the president didn’t sound hopeful.

“We explained our position very clearly through the Algerians,” he said, “and either they [the Iranian authorities] decided to ignore what we said or they have deliberately decided to make demands that they know we cannot meet.”

The Carters then climbed on a tandem bike, a Christmas gift from their hometown, and pedaled off down Main Street, looking positively carefree for the first time in more than a year.

At the end of November, the student captors began relocating the hostages to the Tehran mansion of onetime SAVAK chief Teymour Bahktiari, who had been assassinated by Iranian agents in Iraq after a falling-out with the shah in 1970. His extravagant home had been converted by the shah into a sumptuous guesthouse, and though it had fallen into disuse and some disrepair after the revolution it was, to the hostages, sheer luxury. There were working bathrooms with tubs and showers and hot and cold running water. Many of the rooms looked out over spacious gardens, which, while bare and sometimes snow-covered as winter closed over the city, and while the windows had been fitted with wire mesh or bars, it afforded for many of them the first steady view of the outdoors in over a year.

As usual, they didn’t know why they were being moved, but there was a growing sense even among the hostages that the long drama was nearing its end. They had very limited access to news, but there were subtle signs of a breakthrough everywhere, and the hostages missed none of them. In early December, still at Evin, Colonel Chuck Scott and his roommates had not seen the kindly guard supervisor Akbar for several weeks when one day he showed up with a bag of fresh pistachios. He announced that he was no longer involved with supervising hostages, that he had taken a job with PARS, the Iranian news agency. The whole situation, the standoff, the shah’s death, the war, had grown so complex and difficult that he said he no longer wished to be involved.

Scott was angry with him. The two had developed a friendship over the yearlong ordeal, and he was the one Iranian whom the colonel felt he could trust and even respect. Ever since the previous summer, Scott had seen Akbar’s enthusiasm for the exercise waning. The young Iranian still defended the action but acknowledged that nothing had worked out the way he and the others had planned. Scott had told him once during the previous summer in Tabriz that if he helped him and his roommates escape, he would see to it that Akbar would be paid for his efforts and set up in America or wherever he wanted with a new identity. He had been surprised by the guard’s response. He did not get angry nor did he dismiss the idea out of hand. “Be careful of what you say,” he had advised the colonel. It had always been reassuring to know that Akbar was there; many times he had interceded to pull Scott out of solitary or to calm tensions with guards and fellow hostages.

“Now you tell me that you’re tired of it?” Scott said.

His disgust wounded Akbar, who acknowledged a trace of betrayal in his departure. But after a few moments of conversation Scott’s anger melted. No one could understand better than he the desire to escape this dismal ordeal, and the fact that Akbar had stayed with it for so long despite his ambivalence started Scott thinking that there might be more behind his young friend’s departure than he was free to tell.

“Do you still think I will ever get home?” he asked.

“In my heart, I am sure you will live to see your family again,” Akbar said. “When you are released, if it is possible, I will come to say good-bye.”

Still alone, CIA station chief Tom Ahern delayed taking off his blindfold when he was first brought to the guesthouse. He had been placed in a very cold room in an overstuffed chair. He had a powerful sense that what he saw would finally reveal his fate. Was release near or death? He was certain that if the surroundings were worse than those he had left then he would never get out of Iran alive.

The upholstered chair was a good sign. He began reaching around and felt some kind of soft wallpaper, something fancy with padding behind it. He finally inhaled deeply, untied the blindfold, and discovered that he was sitting in an elegantly furnished room, and for the first time in fourteen months he was filled with the conviction that this ordeal was going to end well. He felt it in his bones. He was going home.

As part of the general improvement, his guards were now encouraging him to write letters. He thought it unlikely that any letter he wrote would actually be mailed, but he was certain that his captors would read it, so primarily for their eyes he wrote a long letter to his wife. It was a contingent good-bye letter. He wrote that Reagan’s election made it certain the United States would attack Iran and destroy the revolution. “If Reagan comes and gets them,” he wrote, “I won’t survive it. So let me say good-bye and I love you just in case.”

He hoped that would make them think.

Laingen, Tomseth, and Howland were finally moved from their spacious quarters at the Foreign Ministry, but not without a scuffle. When a group of students first showed up to take them, Howland got in a shoving match with the leader, kicking him in the groin, and the three had been escorted back upstairs at gunpoint. They were left alone in their rooms and, after a few minutes, a deputy foreign minister appeared looking shaken.

“This is not Iran,” he said, as if trying to convince himself. “This is not Iran. What has happened to us?”

“This is the first time in my diplomatic career that I have had a pistol pointed at my head,” said Laingen.

The three were successfully removed some days later and locked in prison for several weeks before being moved to the guesthouse.

Kathryn Koob and Ann Swift could scarcely believe their eyes when they arrived. They had been brought to what appeared to be a large, luxurious hotel room suite with a fifteen-foot ceiling. It was clean, with a closet, beds, a bathroom with hot and cold water, and a tub! At the center of the room was a large, gleaming mahogany table with two straight-back chairs, and hanging from the high ceiling was a pewter chandelier. The walls were papered with a textured material, and one whole wall was a floor-to-ceiling window covered with pale blue drapes. Koob and Swift were astonished. The suite was so large they could now actually run from room to room instead of running in place, as they had for most of the year. They jogged for almost an hour late that night, waiting for their bedding and possessions to arrive. Both were fit and had lost a lot of weight. Koob especially. She had dropped so many pounds that she had made Christmas presents out of the wide strips of material she had cut from the seams of her blue slacks. She used them to make bookmarks, on which she embroidered small designs. Reed thin for the first time since she had been a little girl, Koob was now virtually unrecognizable to those who had known her only as big, soft, and wide-hipped. She was now all sharp angles, the hard lines of her face ill suited to her wide-framed plastic glasses.

She and Swift counted this as their thirteenth move since the day they were taken prisoner. Koob took out her Christmas ornaments, some of them saved from the previous year, and set about decorating the enormous space. When the sun came up they were allowed to pull back the blue drapes and their rooms were flooded with sunlight. What a pleasure! They looked out over a snow-covered garden with a backdrop of mountains, a thrilling view after their months of close confinement. Koob marveled at the simple things, the feel of sunlight on her skin as she sat near the window, the way the tinsel and foil in her Christmas decorations twinkled. Yet the new home was harrowing in the evenings, as Iraqi air assaults on the capital continued. When the planes came over they moved to the entryway of the suite, as far away from the broad window as they could get.

The guards asked them to prepare their room for a holiday party. They received an artificial tree and strips of bright red and white ribbons and—of all things—yellow bows. The women wondered if their guards knew the significance of yellow ribbons back home and decided to put one big one front and center, where the cameras would not miss it. When it came time for the party, to their disappointment, they were led out. Women were forbidden to worship with the men, the guards explained. So they sat forlorn in a chilly room down the hall and listened to chorus after chorus of “Silent Night” as the male hostages were led into their suite in groups.

For the hostages’ second Christmas in captivity, the students and the Iranian government decided against allowing a visit from American clergy. Instead they arranged for ceremonies at the Foreign Ministry guesthouse to be conducted by priests and ministers from Tehran’s small Christian community.

Film of the celebrations, which resembled the one made a year earlier, was shown throughout the world.

Joe Hall stuffed his pockets with candy and pastries and asked if he could say something to the cameras for his wife Cheri.