Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (90 page)

I also heard the theory from a liberal magazine editor and critic of the current regime, a worn-looking man with a concave face and tobacco stains on his fingertips, who argued vigorously, “If you consider the event backwards, from where we are today to the point twenty-five years ago when the takeover took place, and you consider who was hurt most by it and who most benefited from it, then you would have to conclude that the answer is Iran in the first place and America in the second place.”

He went on for a while, outlining the details of his hypothesis, and then waited with a pleased look on his face as the whole torrent of Farsi was translated to me. I said nothing in response, so he asked, “What do you think?”

“I think you’re crackers,” I said.

My translator looked at me quizzically.

“Just use the word ‘crackers,’ I told him.

The editor seemed confused by my response but nodded sagely.

The wild conspiracy theories suggest a recognition that the embassy takeover was a mistake but an unwillingness to admit responsibility for it. Some, though, are ready to do that.

“To my mind, the taking of the embassy was emotional but ill considered,” said Alizera Alavitabar, a professor of public policy who did not take part but who enthusiastically supported the takeover when it happened. “I personally was very naive at that time. For example, sometimes I thought that if I would get a chance to have an interview on American television, I could tell them what their administration had done to us and soon we would have all the American people behind us…. In those days I thought you can build a paradise out of the world. My utopia was a society of mysticism, Sufism, and love, in addition to brotherhood and equality. I never thought of equality only for religious people. I also never believed in discrimination against women. I always thought men and women are equals…. [The takeover] strengthened and endorsed the radical movements and ideas in Iran instead of liberal ones…. It promoted fundamentalism. Fundamentalism was not the main drive behind our revolution. Modernism was. Bear in mind that all of this impact was not foreseen. If you want my opinion today I should say that if I had the same mind I have today, I would not support that action, but if you take me back to the same time, same social environment, same age, and same views, I would be supportive of the takeover again. I am not the same age with the same ideas and the conditions are different therefore I am not happy with what happened.”

“Do you ever wish it had never happened?” I asked.

“You know, I am not sure if that would be a good wish. As I said, if you take me back to the same time and condition I would say go ahead and attack the embassy. In those conditions it was inevitable. There would have been an emotional reaction toward America anyways…. The society was so ready for it…. But considering the things that happened afterward, it wasn’t to our benefit…. It kept us unified and together in a time when there were conflicts in the society, but the cost of it was high.”

So ambivalence and conspiracy-theorizing have left the gerogan-girha themselves well known, but hardly cultural heroes.

“At the time, I was so happy my friends and I went three nights in a row to the embassy and stayed up all night long,” said a bookseller who operates a street stand in central Tehran. “It was fun. There was food and chanting and marching, boys and girls. Now, I don’t know. I’m not sure why it happened, or who planned it. I do not see the hostage takers as heroes.”

Mohammad Hashemi, one of the student leaders, who recently stepped down from his powerful position in the Intelligence Ministry to become an entrepreneur developer, dismisses such talk with an impatient wave of his chubby hand. Seated before a big color map of the world in his office several flights up from a wet, busy street in downtown Tehran, he served small glasses of tea and chatted jovially. Today he is an animated middle-aged fat man, dark, short, thick, and wide, with great round cheeks, a goatee framing voluptuous pouting lips, aviator-style glasses tinted faintly orange, and a wild spray of bushy gray hair that widens from his ears down to his round shoulders. He was talkative, imperious, animated, and proud.

Hashemi was eager to put the episode in the past but breezily unapologetic.

“One of the characteristics of the Iranian people is that they are strongly against oppression and injustice,” he said. “Second, our pride is very important to us. We might die from hunger, lose many advantages, but we will never sacrifice our dignity.” His role in the takeover was just an early step on a path to respect and power in his country. He is proud not only of what he and the others did but how they did it. “We knew that there is an end to everything, like there is peace after every war,” he said. “We wanted it to be a hostage taking without any kind of harshness and scuffle, unique in history, a hostage taking that represented a nation and its concerns, and that is what we are proud of.”

This, he believes, was the essence of the embassy seizure, an emotional act by angry young idealists who felt wronged by decades of U.S. policy. The action shaped not only his career but his personal life. During the fourteen-month takeover, he courted and eventually married Nilufar Ebtekar. Of all the gerogan-girha, none have achieved such high-ranking roles in the ruling regime as this couple. Not surprisingly, they are its most prominent defenders. Which explains in part why both were willing to meet with me.

Yet they had, it seems, another motive. The Iranian power couple was looking for publicity. They were heavily invested in an ambitious new vacation resort on the Caspian Sea called Cham Paradise. On my first visit to Tehran in December 2003, Hashemi showed me slick brochures and advertisements for the venture printed in both Farsi and English, clearly designed to help attract foreign visitors as well as Iranians. Hashemi predicted that soon there will be a significant thaw in relations between Iran and the Western world, including the United States. The project seemed to rest in part on that supposition, and in the hope that English-speaking tourists would be drawn to the beauties of the Caspian shore despite the forbidding piety of its regime. Hashemi was obviously excited. He showed me a detailed model of the project, a cluster of modern apartment buildings, hotels, villas, lakes, restaurants, and other features arrayed on the tip of a peninsula that juts into the sea. Then he had an idea.

“Perhaps, in a few years, we might invite back the Americans we held hostage, and they can all stay at the resort as our guests!”

“This time, can they go home when they want?” I asked, then waited for my question to be translated to him.

Listening to the Farsi, Hashemi first scowled and then reeled with laughter. He said to me in English, “You make a joke!”

On my trips to Tehran I made efforts to meet all of the original hostage takers. What I discovered was a group of graying politicians and intellectuals with a broad range of views about the event. How they felt about the gerogan-giri tended to define where they stood on Iran’s wide political spectrum. Some remain true believers and have prospered in the mullahocracy they helped create, and even as they acknowledge that the embassy seizure permanently stained their nation in the eyes of the world, they defend it as necessary and just. They see the problems of modern Iran as growing pains and are heartened by the upsurge in Islamist fundamentalism around the world. Some of these true believers refused to speak to an American reporter, who they suspected would misunderstand or distort their words. Other gerogan-girha are ambivalent about what they did, weighing the pride and satisfaction of their youthful defiance against a more mature understanding of world politics. These people tend to stay in the shadows, afraid of getting into trouble or drawing attention to themselves. But a surprising number of gerogan-girha, constituting a third group, are outspokenly embarrassed by their role and regard their actions as a monumental mistake—a criminal act that disrupted not just the lives of the American hostages but ultimately the structure of their own country, which has yet to live down its outlaw status among nations.

Some of the gerogan-girha have gone into exile and taken up arms against the religious rulers; others have been harassed, denounced, beaten, or imprisoned for advocating democratic changes. In some cases they have been persecuted by their former colleagues. “None of us in the revolution believed Iran would ever have an autocratic regime again,” said Mohsen Mirdamadi, a leader of the gerogan-girha who is today a controversial reform politician, in an interview with a Knight Ridder correspondent earlier this year. “Yet here we are.”

Ibrahim Asgharzadeh was a reed-thin, intense engineering student with a neatly trimmed beard when he came up with the idea, in September of 1979, of seizing the American embassy. “The initial idea was mine,” he told me in an interview in December 2003 at the office of his newspaper, Hambastegi, off an alley in Tehran. “Ever since high school I had been outraged by American policies.”

In addition to his terms in the Majlis, Asgharzadeh has been president of the Tehran City Council and ran unsuccessfully for president in 2001. In his politics and journalism he has strongly urged the mullahs to adopt democratic reforms, such as freedom of the press and the elimination of the veto powers they wield over political candidates and legislation. He has been banned from seeking public office and, in 1992, served a term in solitary confinement. When I interviewed Asgharzadeh, he looked entirely different from the images I had seen of him in the hostage-crisis days; he looked much too prosperous and at ease for his outlaw status. Despite appearances he has become the most prominent of the gerogan-girha who have turned against the mullahocracy. He chose his words carefully (to denounce the takeover is, in a sense, to debunk one of the founding myths of the regime), but his feelings about the episode were clear:

“Hostage taking is not an acceptable action under international norms and standards. The hostages underwent severe emotional difficulties. Prolonging it affected both countries in a negative way. The chaos caused such tension between Iran and the United States that even now, after two decades, no one knows how to resolve it. We failed in enforcing it the way it was meant to be. We lost control of events very quickly—within twenty-four hours! Unfortunately, things got out of hand and took their own course. The initial hours were quite pleasant for us, because [the protest] had a clear purpose and justification. But once the event got out of its student mold and turned into a hostage taking, it became a long, drawn-out, and corrosive phenomenon.”

Asgharzadeh and his fellow planners knew at the time that seizing the embassy would be dramatic and popular with large portions of the Iranian people; they had even thought it might lead eventually to the fall of Bazargan’s provisional government. But he and the others had not anticipated how explosive the public response would be. Hundreds of thousands of jubilant Iranians jammed the streets around the embassy to celebrate and rant against the evil U.S. plotters. He said the students spent much of their first day on the embassy grounds fending off these rivals, who they feared would muddy the purity of their protest with ideological cant, or even harm the Americans. In the confusion, Asgharzadeh recalled, they failed to fully control even their own members.

“American hostages were not supposed to be paraded blindfolded in front of the press,” he told me. “The blindfolding was done only for security reasons. In order to control the hostages we used strips of cloth to blindfold them. Unfortunately, our humane objectives were really distorted. We objected strongly to this behavior, and the people who did this were reprimanded, but the damage had been done. These things did happen, even though we tried very hard to prevent the operation from being manipulated and abused by political groups and factions.” Asgharzadeh and his fellow students eventually chased the other political groups out of the compound and locked the gates.

How would President Carter respond? Would there be military action? Sanctions? A blockade? This was an unprecedented event, amplified by around-the-clock global television coverage, and it seemed to herald something completely new and unpredictable in international affairs. The thing began to take on a life of its own. With the provisional government in tatters, the United States had no one with whom to negotiate a solution, and the students, locked inside the embassy compound with their hostages, unprepared for a drawn-out ordeal and with no plan for ending it, watched the great storm swirling outside the embassy walls and began to see themselves as captives too.

Still, the episode remained thrilling for them, romantic even. During the long occupation, Asgharzadeh met and proposed to his wife, Tahereh Rezazadeh, one of the guards, at the embassy compound.

Asgharzadeh realizes that he cannot change the past. But knowing what he knows now he would not do it again. “If today I was to devise a plan or political action, for myself personally or for the team of comrades that we were, it would certainly not be an action along the lines of the takeover of the American embassy,” he said. “Five years ago I had a speech in front of the American embassy, in which I mentioned that this big wall between us should be demolished. I was attacked and criticized by my own friends and accused by the opposing parties. In that speech I said that we were concerned then that some of the diplomats were working for the CIA. Some of the documents we found were in favor of this opinion. They were working beyond regular tasks of a diplomat. Many of them were simple diplomats and had nothing to do with these activities. Five years ago in my speech I mentioned that we should invite back those hostages to make up for what they went through, and to show that we had good intentions.

“I think that the revolution was like a big earthquake. We know that every earthquake has some aftershocks, which could be almost as strong. In an atmosphere like that I think the situation with the American embassy could be viewed as an aftershock, especially with that atmosphere of anti-Americanism. For students who were nationalists or some that were religious, we were in an environment where even the air you breathed was anti-American. So this was not a strange event to take place. We should have stayed with the plan. We failed in enforcing it the way it was meant to be. If everything was going by plan, the mass media, our society, and the whole world would have helped us to pass on our message.”