Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (86 page)

“Why did we surrender?” he asked the CIA station chief. “I wanted to stay there in the vault for two weeks and force the United States government to make a decision—we still had a phone line open—whether to come save us or not.”

Ahern said that the decision was his responsibility, his best judgment at the time.

“So why did you open the door when I was on the roof?” Kupke asked. “When I came down, they just kicked the hell out of me!”

Ahern explained that they had Golacinski outside the door with a gun to his head.

“Tom, couldn’t you have at least taken a head count?” complained Kupke. “You left me. I had guns scattered around. I was on the roof by myself, only to find out there was a bunch of Iranians down there when I decided to come down.”

“Well, Al convinced me they were going to shoot him,” Ahern said, “and Al promised me that they wouldn’t hurt anybody.”

Metrinko was at peace with his own behavior. He had fought his captors and insulted them every day, right up to the ride to the airport, and he had fresh scrapes and bruises to show for it. His fifteen months in captivity would be summed up many years later by Ebtekar: “We thought [him] to be deranged; [he] hated everyone and was hated in return.” Always the loner, he sat quietly and contentedly in the midst of the celebration taking long swigs of champagne. He felt different, and he tried to define to himself how. It was partly the champagne, but that alone didn’t account for the luxurious sensation that seemed to settle him deeper into his seat. Then he realized what it was. It was a feeling he had almost forgotten. For the first time in four hundred and forty-four days, he felt relaxed.

President Reagan made the announcement. He stood up in the Capitol Rotunda, where he was the guest of honor for a congressional luncheon, and raised a glass of champagne.

“The plane bearing our prisoners has left Iranian airspace,” he said to the cheers of the revelers. Then he took a long gulp of bubbly.

Carter made the same announcement in soft rain on a platform erected to welcome him home to Plains, disappointed not to have been able to make the announcement to the whole nation but relieved nevertheless.

He said, “Just a few moments ago on Air Force One, before we landed at Warner Robins, I received word officially for the first time that the aircraft carrying the fifty-two American hostages”—and then his voice broke and tears choked his words; he took a second to swallow and continued—“has cleared Iranian airspace. Every one of the fifty-two hostages is alive, well, and free.”

After that Carter smiled, the crowd cheered, a band started playing, and the former president slipped his arm around his wife’s waist and they started to dance.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (© Vahid Salemi/AP)

Mohammad Mousavi Khoeniha, “spiritual adviser” to the students who seized the embassy. (Courtesy: Wild Eyes Productions)

Barry Rosen and Kevin Hermening protesting the visit of Ahmadinejad to the United Nations in 2005. (© Tina Fineberg/AP)

Nowadays the grand old embassy in Tehran looks forlorn, like a hostage left behind and long forgotten. The chancery, a solid battleship of an office building in orange brick, two stories high and more than a block long, was once the symbol of America’s formidable presence in Iran. Today it remains standing in the heart of the capital, facing a wide, busy thoroughfare renamed Taleghani Avenue, after the murdered cleric whose sons Michael Metrinko was waiting to meet on the morning of the takeover. Although more crowded with structures, the grounds are still a large, leafy oasis, a haven from the noisy hustle of this city of now more than twelve million. Long ago dubbed by its invaders and occupiers the “den of spies,” this old symbol of America’s friendship with Iran is festooned with hateful garnish: anti-American graffiti, banners, and propaganda displays to remind people of the nation’s undying disdain. The compound is now home to the Revolutionary Guards, an elite military unit that reports to the black-turbaned elite of Iran’s authoritarian mullahocracy, and to the Basij, Islamic brownshirts, the civilian goon squads who turn out in large numbers at a moment’s notice to demonstrate on behalf of the regime and to help put down public displays of dissent and “immorality,” such as women whose scarves do not fully cover their hair or young people holding hands. The chancery itself now serves as an anti-American museum, with a grim, ugly, permanent display called the “Great Aban 13th” exhibition. The takeover is remembered as one of the founding events of the Islamic “republic,” for better or worse, and one whose repercussions are still being felt throughout the world.

The museum is supposed to be an official shrine to that bold act of national defiance, but in the four times I went there in 2003 and 2004 it was empty of visitors. A bookstore just outside the entrance that was once known for selling anti-American literature and reprints of the infamous “Spy Den Documents” was vacant when I first saw it, its racks empty, and when I visited again nine months later it appeared ready to reopen as a bookstore for children. The anti-American slogans and spiteful artwork that had been spray-painted on the embassy’s outer brick walls by angry crowds during the fourteen-month crisis had faded, including an image of the Statue of Liberty with a death mask for a face and a sign in English that said “Death to the USA.” The official shield of the United States on the front gate has been chipped or sandblasted away beyond recognition.

Even the guardhouse on the southeast corner, where visitors enter, was in shambles. On my first visit, two friendly, unshaven Revolutionary Guards stood behind the counter in a small marble-veneered reception area that looked like a frat house on Sunday morning, with battered furniture, an old swivel chair leaning precariously on its stem with cushion stuffing hanging out, dirt caked on the floors and walls, and muddy boot prints everywhere. I pointed quizzically at a complete boot print on the ceiling and, grinning, asked my guide and translator, Ramin, to tell the guards that, as an American citizen, I protested the abuse of what could arguably be called American property.

“Tell them that if they are going to steal it, the least they could do is take care of it,” I said.

When Ramin relayed my comments, the guards laughed, looked around sheepishly at the mess, and shrugged happily. They were conscripts serving out the last few months of their duty at a gravy post. “It’s great here,” one said. “Nothing ever happens.”

It took some doing and a few bribes to the guards’ higher-ups to get inside. The exhibit is amateurish, as if put together by a group of high school students with a bad attitude. On the front steps are two cartoonish statues that appear to have been fashioned out of papier-mâché and thickly coated with bronze-colored paint. One is of a surrendering marine—apparently based on a photograph of Sergeant Steve Kirtley—with his arms up and his hands clasped behind his head; the other is a replica of the Statue of Liberty with a white bird (a symbol of Islam) caged in her abdomen. Inside was more of the same: displays illustrating America’s “role of evil” in the world over the past several decades; lots of gory photographs of wounded children presented as victims of American bombings; and a framed copy of an important-looking “spy document,” stamped “Classified” and “Top Secret,” but which on closer inspection turned out to be a memo requesting additional drivers for the embassy’s motor pool. There were also pieces of the helicopter engines recovered in the Iranian desert following the failed rescue mission, photographs of the hostages themselves, and somewhat dated propaganda showcasing America and Saddam Hussein as partners in crime. In its preoccupation with American symbols, the whole exhibit is more a defacement than an indictment, like drawing a big nose and mustache on a poster of someone famous. That such a gloating, adolescent display has endured in the heart of Tehran for a quarter century says more about Iran than it does about America.

The taking of the embassy in Tehran was a crime. The argument of the hostage takers that it was engaged in a massive spy operation intent on stopping the revolution, killing Khomeini, and restoring the Peacock Throne was false. None of the thousands of documents they seized and published supports it, and a close look at the hostages themselves reveals only a handful who were engaged in spying, and those by their own admission ineffectually. The strongest argument in defense of the takeover is that Iran had legitimate grievances against the United States, which was true, but what two nations with long histories do not have grievances? They are a fact of international life. Diplomacy exists because it offers a chance of rising above them.

Indeed, the hostage crisis, an assault on diplomacy, itself ultimately depended on diplomacy for resolution. A quarter century later Iran’s stature in the world community remains diminished, and will remain so until the act itself is renounced. Diplomats serve at the pleasure of the host nation, and when they are no longer welcome they can be readily expelled. Holding America’s emissaries hostage was a crime not just against those held captive and their country but against the entire civilized world. President Carter deserves credit for his restraint, and the world community deserves blame for failing to respond adequately to the insult. Apart from pronouncements, the United Nations and most of our allies were content to leave the captive American mission to its fate. Anyone who believes in the importance of diplomacy as an alternative to war ought to regard that failure as significant, and those who see the UN as an answer to the world’s conflicts ought to take note.

The failure of the rescue mission spurred the U.S. military to place a greater emphasis on special operations. The tactical issues that confronted mission planners in 1979 would pose little problem for today’s more flexible and multifaceted force. Veterans of the rescue mission remain bitterly disappointed about the loss of life and their failure to reach Tehran but regard the mission as a vital step into the modern age of warfare. Those familiar with the details of their audacious plan are amused by the perception of Carter as a timid commander in chief.

The Iran hostage crisis was for most Americans their first encounter with Islamo-facism and, as such, can be seen as the first battle in that ongoing world conflict. Iran’s hatred of the United States was in part a consequence of heavy-handed, arrogant, and sometimes criminal twentieth-century American foreign policy, but it was also rooted in something that has nothing to do with that. It grew out of anger over the erosion of tradition. The modern Western world does not recognize revelation and divine right as the root of government authority. The trend of history has long been away from strict tribal authority grounded in one holy book or the other, whether the Koran, the Torah, the Bible, or any other ancient text, and toward those strictly human values distilled so well in the Declaration of Independence as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The murderous terrorism that has become a fact of modern life is part of the death throes of an ancient way of life. The glorious Islamist revolution in Iran, which a quarter century later has produced a despised, corrupt, and ineffectual religious dictatorship, will wind up little more than a footnote in the long and colorful history of that nation, and probably an embarrassing one, judging by the disgruntlement of many Iranians, including at least some of the old hostage takers.

In that sense, the hostage crisis is a case study in the futility of governing a country by fantasy. The stirring symbolism of the embassy takeover excited the nation, and in that sense served the political goals of the mullahs as they skillfully maneuvered for power. Indeed, even as the hostages were flying home in 1981, Iran’s chief negotiator was proclaiming a great victory, and gloating, “We rubbed dirt in the nose of the world’s greatest superpower.” But glee over that symbolic triumph had given way months earlier to real-life concerns, namely, the urgent need for military supplies to fend off the armies of Saddam Hussein. In the quarter century since, the fever of revolution in Iran has given way to a deep and widespread resentment of religious figures who presume to dictate the smallest, most personal details of people’s lives. Extremism, religious or otherwise, is by definition the province of a small minority. God speaks to very few, if any of us. The great majority of those who are not so blessed hold beliefs tinctured with doubt and basic decency.

The ordeal of the American hostages is easy to minimize in retrospect. All of them were released, most of them physically unharmed. Given the tragic and brutal progress of the Islamo-fascists in the years since, the videotaped beheadings and horrific mass slaughters, the embassy takeover seems almost polite. But as Philip Roth noted in the brief passage quoted at the front of this book, the “terror of the unforeseen is what…history hides.” The Americans taken prisoner on November 4, 1979, did not know if they would ever come home. Every day they lived with the threat of trial and execution, of becoming victims of Iranian political violence or an American rescue attempt. They lived with the arrogance of Islamist certainty, which prompts otherwise decent men to acts of unflinching cruelty. My goal was to reconstruct their experience as they lived it. The men and women held hostage in Iran survived nearly fifteen months of unrelenting fear. They were the first victims of the inaptly named “war on terror.”

Today a number of them are trying to sue the Iranian government for damages but are blocked by the agreement the United States signed to secure their release. It seems wrong to me that any country should be bound by an agreement signed under duress, yet the administration of President George W. Bush continues to oppose the hostages’ action.

The sorry course of Iran’s revolution suggests a pattern for the whole retrograde Islamist movement currently terrorizing the world. Driven by a vague goal of establishing a Koranic utopia, a fanatical fringe allies itself with mainstream political disaffection, but instead of opening the doors to liberty and prosperity it succeeds only in creating a closed and stunted society under the thumb of so-called spiritual leaders who prove, in the end, to be merely human, subject to the same temptations of power and wealth as rulers everywhere and always. The only political system that serves the majority is one that respects true human spirituality, something deeply personal and almost infinitely various.