Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (91 page)

Instead, the takeover poisoned ties between the two countries and created a situation that benefits neither.

“All this is like a dysfunctional cycle which needs to be stopped at some point,” Asgharzadeh continued. “I do not like to bring back all those bitter memories because it will not help the situation. Instead I think that both countries need to change their policies and behavior. Changing policies and behavior is accepted and understandable in international law, but if one wants to exterminate the other, it is the right of the other to take any kind of action for defense and survival…. I hope that the people of the United States, intellectuals and politicians, understand the situation that we were involved in during those days and what caused us to take such action. We know that an event like the hostage taking could not and should not be repeated again and we are willing to come to a better understanding and relationship today.”

Among the old hostage takers, Asgharzadeh is not the only one who has found himself at odds with the current regime. On the day before I was supposed to interview Mirdamadi, another of the students’ founding members, he was beaten by stick-wielding Basij. The slightly built, balding man was delivering a speech at a university when his assailants stormed the lecture hall and attacked him. A photograph on the front pages of the next morning’s newspapers in Tehran showed his head and chest bloodied and bandaged.

Abbas Abdi, another gerogan-gir who became a journalist, has been jailed repeatedly for criticizing the regime and for advocating renewed talks with the United States. He spent eight months in solitary confinement in 1993, and on both of my visits he was serving a four-and-a-half-year term in the notorious Evin prison—where some of his former hostages were kept—for publishing poll results showing that 74 percent of Iranians favored renewing ties with the United States. The newspaper for which he served as editor in chief, Salam, was banned in the late 1990s, and several years ago Abdi got into trouble with the government when he attended a much publicized meeting in Paris with one of his hostages, Barry Rosen, the embassy’s press attaché, in an attempt to begin what Abdi described as a “healing process.” The meeting of the two men fell well short of a warm and fuzzy reunion, however. Rosen condemned the seizure of the hostages and Abdi refused to apologize for it. Indeed, Abdi’s old captives feel little sympathy for his current plight. Dave Roeder told me, “It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”

Perhaps the treatment of reformers like Mirdamadi and Abdi explains why some of the gerogan-girha tend to speak in stilted euphemisms, even when they are discussing events now a quarter of a century old. Mohammad Naimipoor, a friend and political ally of Abdi’s who was also one of the gerogan-girha, would say, “What happened overall between Iran and the U.S. could have been handled much better. Even the taking of hostages, in my opinion, could have been handled much better.”

When we interviewed Naimipoor, in December of 2003, he was an elected member of the Majlis, but both he and Mirdamadi had been crossed off the list of eligible candidates by the Guardians Council. Thickset and graying, Naimipoor at forty-eight regards himself as “an old man.”

“Because of all the stress and pressures we have had to live with, we have all aged well beyond our actual years,” he told me. Several months after our interview, he suffered a debilitating stroke. “The taking of hostages could have alerted everyone—the world, the Americans—about what had taken place in Iran. I don’t think American politicians really care about ordinary people and nations, and do not want to be troubled by them. Instead they would rather deal with governments and rulers. That is why I think after the taking of hostages the Americans did whatever was in their power against Iran.

“For example, I cannot conceive of the war with Iraq without the American role and involvement [in support of Iraq]. This attitude has only deepened the sense of hostility and concern among our people. I think a solution to the U.S.–Iranian relations requires rather delicate methods, which are beyond the reach of the rough and harsh methods used by politicians, who much too readily resort to power and to force. I think even now that the U.S. is [the sole superpower]. All the evidence shows that if they continue in their present course they will only create further resentment among third world people, and especially among Muslims. Under such circumstances, even with normal diplomatic relations in place, the relations between people and the U.S. will not be normal and appropriate. In effect the U.S. will not have a place in people’s hearts. In an era when we all agree we are living in a global village and in the age of communication, in my opinion, staying on this course is politically shortsighted.”

Naimipoor was hopeful that some of the initiatives proposed by former President Khatami would renew a dialogue between the United States and Iran, but he has been disappointed by America’s more confrontational pose under President Bush. At the same time, he welcomed the U.S. invasion of neighboring Iraq and the toppling of Saddam.

“Let me say something unambiguously. The Iraqis used to live under absolute terror during Saddam’s reign,” Naimipoor said. “During a trip I made to Iraq I could clearly sense and detect the fear in the very fiber of ordinary Iraqis. I had lived under the shah, and had been a political prisoner of the SAVAK. I had experienced [torture] with my own body. But my impression of Iraq was far more bitter and disturbing. The vast majority of Iraqis are certainly happy that the Americans have come and saved them.”

The former hostage taker would like to see ties between America and Iran reestablished.

“I do not see the U.S.–Iranian relations as a taboo at all,” he said. “I think this taboo should be broken, and I have done whatever was in my power to do this. I think nations should have relations with each other. Even now I believe it is in our national interest to establish this relationship in a reasonable manner.”

If anyone at the time had a clear vision of what the embassy takeover’s full consequences would be, it was Mohammad Mousavi Khoeniha, the man Bani-Sadr believed engineered the whole thing. Khoeniha was the black-bearded young cleric to whom the students took their plan in October of 1979. He has long been a somewhat mysterious figure, the clerical hand behind the scenes. His criticism of the regime in recent years has pushed him to the periphery—his newspaper has been banned—and when I sought an interview with him he sent word, “Consider me dead.” He had resurrected himself enough by the time I returned to Tehran to meet with me, and we did so in his spacious, sunny office two flights up in a leafy neighborhood in the north of the city. His long black beard had turned white. He was a small, precise man dressed in an elegant gray tunic and wearing a white turban.

“We didn’t foresee [the provisional government’s] resignation,” Khoeniha said. “We merely had thought that it would oppose us, and that the imam either would decide to accept the interim government’s request, and in that case would order the students to evacuate the embassy compound, or support us. But that the interim government, as a sign of opposition, would go to the degree of resigning, we hadn’t thought of that. We had so many bitter memories from the government of the United States that such actions seemed absolutely legitimate and reasonable to us.”

If there was concern about activities at the embassy, why wasn’t the diplomatic mission simply asked to leave?

“Our goal was not expelling the Americans from Iran, but [because] in those days, when the shah was allowed to enter the United States supposedly for medical treatment, our analysis was that this was nothing but an excuse and America would make the shah an axis for all the people who had fled Iran, both military personnel and civilians. With the shah an axis for those fugitives, America would organize some measures against the Islamic Revolution there. We made our move in order to prevent such an action.”

In 1999 Khoeniha was charged with publishing lies and classified information and was found guilty by a special court for the clergy. He was given a three-and-a-half-year prison term and was sentenced to be flogged, but because of his sterling revolutionary credentials the penalty was reduced to a fine. Despite his feelings about the current regime, Khoeniha remains a staunch defender of the embassy takeover, and he still thinks the United States owes Iran an apology for meddling in its affairs. As I was leaving his office, located over the former offices of his newspaper, I noticed a gray four-drawer metal filing cabinet in the corner with a combination lock on the front. It bore a plate with the inscription “Property of the General Services Administration.”

Khoeniha smiled when I asked where it had come from. It was a souvenir from the U.S. embassy.

He dismissed as immaterial the popular American theory of an “October surprise,” the theory mounted most compellingly by former Carter adviser Gary Sick in a book by that name. Sick shows that several of Reagan’s advisers, most notably his campaign manager William Casey (later CIA director), intervened through Iranian friends in the summer and fall of 1980 in an effort to prolong the hostages’ ordeal until after the November elections. Sick makes a strong case that such contacts were made, and the efforts were confirmed by Khoeniha, several of the other hostage takers, and also Sadegh Tabatabai, the former provisional government official who instigated the talks with Warren Christopher that eventually led to the hostages’ release. Like the cleric, they found the Reagan campaign’s efforts a revealing peek at the cynical underside of American politics but said they had little bearing on Iran’s decision to hang on to the hostages until Carter officially left office.

Despite Carter’s image at home of being conciliatory to a fault, and the most human rights–conscious president in modern times, during the 1978–79 revolution he had come to personify for Iranians the Great Satan, and, as we have seen, where the gerogan-giri was concerned, symbols mattered more than reality. Reagan may have been perceived as more of a hard-liner, but to Iran he merely represented a change, and a triumph. Carter’s defeat was tangible proof that the hostage takers had changed history; they had brought down the leader of the free world. It didn’t take any push from Reagan’s minions for them to see an advantage in waiting until after the elections to free the hostages.

Still, despite that obvious advantage, Iran was desperate enough in its need for military parts by the fall to consider releasing the hostages early. Thus Tabatabai’s efforts in September, blessed by the imam himself, which he believes would have borne fruit before the U.S. Election Day were it not for the outbreak of war with Iraq. Even with the distraction of the war, Iran’s leadership made one last effort to tempt Carter just days before the vote, floating a complex new offer and urging the president to respond immediately via a press conference. It seems apparent to me that neither of these efforts would have been made if Iran had already struck a deal with the Reagan campaign. Likewise, if such a deal had been made, and if Iran had already gotten what it wanted from the president-elect, why keep the hostages after Carter’s defeat for almost three months more? The nation was in desperate need of its military parts, and the students themselves were weary of serving as jailers. In this case the most likely explanation seems the obvious one. The deal to release the hostages was complicated, and it took three months of difficult negotiations to achieve.

All of the hostage takers I interviewed said that the decision to wait until Carter officially left office was deliberate, a final insult to the man they had propped up as the representative of the devil on earth.

That’s the memory of the most famous of the hostage takers, Nilufar Ebtekar, whom I met on my second trip to Tehran in a conference room upstairs in the Ministry of the Environment. In the six months since I had met with her husband, Mohammad Hashmei, their ambitious resort venture had gone bankrupt. They had sold their home to pay off their debts and, according to Ebtekar, were living with her mother.

The Iranian vice president is a plump middle-aged woman with a soft round face and pretty smile, who was wrapped from head to toe in the same manner of the Sisters of Mercy who’d taught me in grade school. Most of the hostages hold a special scorn for “Mother Mary,” or “Screaming Mary,” which may be undeserved. She has written a book about the episode called Takeover in Tehran, which is the best explanation I have seen of what motivated her and the other students, and evokes the naive, heady romanticism of the time. Harsh feelings about Ebtekar seem to stem in part from her fluent, American-accented English, which casts her perhaps undeservedly as a “Tokyo Rose” figure, as though anyone with such clear familiarity with America who would take part in denouncing it was somehow a traitor. During the hostage crisis, she was often encountered by the hostages with cameras in tow, trying to elicit comments from them that would frame their ordeal in favorable terms. She would ask leading questions, such as, “You have been treated well, haven’t you?” Michael Metrinko summed up his feelings about Ebtekar in this way: “If she were on fire on the street I wouldn’t piss on her to put it out.” She has a smarmy, self-certain manner that anyone would find annoying. And she has not moderated her views of the United States one bit.

“Did you know that no American publisher would publish my book?” she asked me.

I had purchased it at a bookstore in Pennsylvania without any difficulty, and hadn’t noticed that the book had a Canadian publisher. She was convinced this was a result of U.S. government censorship.

“I originally intended to publish the book in the United States,” she said. “And we approached fifty major American publishers through a well-respected literary agent in New York.” She was very confident that the book would be published. Then, after two or three years, she felt there was something that prevented the book from getting published.

“There are publishers in the United States who specialize in publishing tracts against the United States government,” I said.

“Not big publishers,” she said.