Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (92 page)

“No, they’re not. Big publishing houses tend to buy books that they think will sell well enough to make a profit. I suspect they didn’t think yours would.”

She wasn’t buying it. The notion of government censorship made more sense to her than the idea that a self-serving book by a generally despised Iranian about a twenty-five-year-old incident would lack commercial appeal.

Ebtekar seems to have missed the uglier parts of the Iranian revolution. She still has a warm feeling about the gerogan-giri and talks of it in dreamy, idealistic tones.

“It was more or less clear for all of us that this action would prevent further interference of the Americans in Iranian affairs,” she said. “At least it would for some time delay the different plots that they had against the Islamic Revolution. This was clear in our minds. This action would serve as an impediment to American policy in Iran. As it took longer and as different developments took place, both in Iran and at the international level, the students understood how important and how decisive this action was after changing the direction of affairs in Iran and in the region, and also how inspirational it was for many other freedom-seeking movements in the world. Because at that time, the general idea was that either governments have to be under American influence or under Russian influence, Soviet influence at that time. So either the East or the West, nothing in between. Freedom-seeking movements were usually just somehow affiliated with the East. Socialist or communist, I suppose. But what happened in Iran was affiliated to the East and the West. And I think this event, the actions the students took, was in a sense quite inspirational for many freedom-seeking countries in the world and for many nations who were looking for a sense of identity.”

She lectured me further about the universal principles of democracy. She still feels that the reason why the American public did not rise up as one to support holding scores of its fellow citizens hostage was U.S. government censorship: “The government, the American administration, was keeping the American public unaware of what happened in Iran.” If the truth had been reported, she believes, things would have gone differently.

“Because if you go back to the basics, if you go back to the principles, if you go back to the Declaration of Independence of America, the Constitution, what the students were speaking about were common values, values that are appreciated by people in America, in Iran, in Europe,” Ebtekar said. “And I think that many of the ideas and the concepts that the students, Iran, the Islamic Revolution had in mind were concepts very close to the concepts inherent in the American Constitution, the Declaration of Independence. What were we after other than independence? We were after the right to determine our future. We were after the right to decide about our destiny. That’s all. And we were after religious principles, which are highly regarded in American society.”

Just days after this conversation, when I was in London, I turned on the TV in my hotel room and was startled to see Ebtekar’s wrapped face. She was being interviewed on a split screen with a BBC announcer and Iran’s new Nobel Peace Prize winner, Shirin Ebadi, talking about how proud everyone in Iran was of her, even though Ebadi was awarded the prize for work opposing the oppressive regime Ebtekar so ably represents and defends.

The announcer asked the Iranian vice president how she, as a woman, could defend a regime that forbade Ebadi to travel to Stockholm and receive her award without permission from her husband.

If Ebtekar squirmed, it was only for a split second. She smiled and segued smoothly into a recitation of the gains women had made under Iran’s Islamic regime.

In my search for the hostage takers I was particularly eager to find and interview the guard known as Akbar, whose open-mindedness during that time was such a surprise and comfort to many of the hostages. I wasn’t even sure of his name. It had been reported by Scott and others as Akbar Housseini.

There were more than four hundred young Iranians involved in the takeover, the bulk of whom worked as guards or performed other menial tasks. Akbar was by all accounts a significant player. He was a few years older than most of the students, and unlike the others he is remembered with a touch of fondness by his former captives, a well-educated young man with mixed feelings about what he and his comrades were doing, who seemed troubled by the fact that this prolonged piece of dangerous political theater, so thrilling to his young comrades, was toying with the lives of scores of people in a way that was painful for them and in some cases deeply unfair. Akbar treated his prisoners with kindness and understanding, sometimes even defying the leadership of his own group to hand-carry letters out of the embassy from particularly isolated hostages and post them himself. When Colonel Scott wrote his own account of the ordeal, he devoted nearly half the book to Akbar, writing out the stories his friendly captor had told him about prison and torture under the shah, and detailing their running dialogue during the long ordeal. There is a picture of him in the book, a slender modish-looking young man in bell-bottom jeans and army jacket, clean shaven except for a neatly trimmed mustache, carefully styled hair, and sideburns, and holding a rifle while posing rakishly on the hood of a jeep before one of the embassy gates. Scott had received one letter from him not long after his release, but had not heard from him since. He did not believe the name “Akbar Housseini” was a pseudonym but didn’t know for sure. The last he had heard, sometime in the late 1980s his former jailer was working for the PARS news agency.

I checked with the news agency and they had never heard of him.

None of the hostage takers I interviewed seemed to know who he was. With his central role in the takeover and his long career in intelligence, I figured Mohammad Hashemi was a good bet, but when I asked he twisted his bullfrog features into a look of bewilderment.

“Who?” was the answer relayed by my translator.

“Akbar Housseini.” I spelled it.

Hashemi shrugged.

“Is a pseudonym,” he suggested, ignoring the translator and suddenly speaking directly to me in English. “No one used real names. I don’t know him. If he was with us, I would know.”

I finally got a lead on Akbar on the day before I had to leave Iran. It turned out that Kamal Taheri, the fellow who, for a fee, procured our visas, had been involved himself in the embassy takeover, as a young intelligence agent working for Hashemi. He examined the photograph of Akbar and said, “It looks like Lavasani. He became an ambassador and now nobody knows where he is.”

I quickly did a Google search on the creaking dial-up Internet connection at Tehran’s Laleh Hotel and found two Lavasanis. There was a Hassan Lavasani, who was foreign editor of IRNA (Iran National News Agency), and there was a Mohammad Hussein Lavasani, who had served as Iran’s ambassador to Canada and to Turkey. Scott remembered that Akbar had worked for a news agency years ago, so that lent credence to him being Hassan, and Taheri remembered that he had been an ambassador, which suggested Mohammad.

It was a national holiday, so Hassan Lavasani wasn’t in at the IRNA offices. A man at the front desk eyed the photograph carefully and shook his head.

“No,” he said. “It isn’t him. Not even close.”

There was an interesting story about Mohammad Lavasani, which, if he was one of the hostage takers, hinted at a kind of brutal poetic justice—even if visited upon the wrong former hostage taker. In 1993, when he was serving as ambassador to Canada, agents of the militant Iranian MKO climbed the walls of the Iranian embassy, broke into the ambassador’s residence, and beat Lavasani brutally, breaking an arm and several ribs. Even though the assailants videotaped the beating, the men subsequently arrested and charged with the crime were later acquitted in Canadian courts. Lavasani had more recently served as Iranian ambassador to Turkey.

The Canadian embassy in Tehran had no knowledge of Lavasani’s whereabouts, and he was no longer at the post in Ankara, so we went looking at the Iranian Foreign Ministry. It is a complex of buildings constructed in the traditional, ornate Persian style, a rare sight in the city today.

We stopped some officious young men on the sidewalk and they directed us to a reception desk in one of the buildings. Sure enough, Lavasani had an office in that building but had not been in it for some time.

“He’s a grouchy man,” said the receptionist, which didn’t sound like the man the hostages remembered as being so kindly and cheerful, but then, twenty-five years and a good hiding in Ottawa could sour a man. The receptionist looked hard at the photograph and shook his head.

“It doesn’t look like the same person,” he said.

We tried one more building in the complex, where a man said that Lavasani was out of the country.

“We don’t know where,” he said.

At that, the trail went cold. I’m still looking for Akbar.

I also tried to reach Amir Entezam. Other than the two Iranians—the Education Ministry official Victoria Bassiri and the journalist Simon Farzami—who were executed as a direct result of the embassy takeover, Entezam is the man who has arguably suffered the most from it. A respected diplomat in 1979, his name cropped up in some of the documents seized in the embassy. The CIA had approached Entezam in Stockholm during the postrevolutionary period to see if he was willing to provide information. By all accounts, Entezam refused. But in the furor of anti-Americanism after the embassy seizure, merely having met with someone identified as a CIA officer was tantamount to treason. Entezam was sentenced to prison and he has been locked up ever since.

Today he is elderly and infirm. For the past year he has been confined at home, although he is still technically a prisoner. He reluctantly declined to talk. A friend said that Entezam would like nothing better than to tell his story, but several years ago, when he had been let out on probation, he attended a memorial service for an Iranian poet and was briefly interviewed by a reporter. He offered some innocuous comments about the state literature and sports in Iran. He was put back in prison for three years.

Ramin, our interpreter, explained that any interview would have official authorization.

“You live in Iran, right?” the friend asked him. “Then you know that just because you receive permission from one official, it doesn’t mean that another official won’t object and punish him. His back is bad and he can no longer use the Iranian squat toilets they have in prison. We are afraid he will not survive if he goes back.”

The standard practice of journalists writing about a foreign country is to assume a commanding overview, offer important insights, and arrive at impressive conclusions. I can offer only these observations, experiences, and conversations, which amount to nothing more than random pieces of an unsolvable puzzle. My impression, for what it’s worth, is that Iranians today are conflicted and ambivalent about the embassy takeover. Despite all the flamboyant rhetoric, the great show of resolute anti-Americanism, and divinely sanctioned purpose, the “Great Aban 13th” exhibition is at some level an enduring embarrassment.

On our last day in Tehran, we visited the “den of spies” one more time. David wanted to shoot some film inside the compound and chancery. We stopped in at the guardhouse on the southeast corner and saw that it had been spruced up! There were no more boot prints on the walls and ceiling, which looked to have been given a new coat of paint, and the old busted furniture had been replaced. Another bored team of young Revolutionary Guards sat behind the marble-veneered reception counter. We had stopped by the “den” three days before, unexpectedly, and had been turned away—the empty exhibit hall was off-limits. This time we had made an appointment. The guard rang an official to announce our arrival and we sat down to wait for an escort inside.

Hours later, a mid-level official in an open-collared pale blue shirt stopped by to say that we could walk through the exhibit but that no filming would be allowed.

“It’s an exhibit,” I argued. “The whole idea is for people to see it. If we film it, millions of people will.”

On our previous visit, we had gotten through initial resistance with a small reshveh, at which point we were given a bang-up tour. But David had not brought a movie camera that day. We suggested that Ramin offer a similar incentive. No, Ramin said, this group of officials was new to the job—management of the grounds had turned over since our last visit—and too nervous to bend the rules. Blue Shirt disappeared, and we waited for another hour. He came back with exciting news. We would be allowed to film inside the exhibit hall but David would have to use their camera. This prompted further discussion. What kind of camera did they have? Would it be compatible with the digital cassettes David used in his camera? He left with those questions, then returned to report that they could not find their camera.

“You will have to hire a camera,” he said.

“But I have a camera!” shouted David, holding up his impressive Sony model. “You can inspect it if you like.”

Even the Revolutionary Guards behind the counter felt our frustration. They joined in the argument—“What’s the big deal? Let them take pictures with their camera.” No, a camera would have to be rented. As a car pulled away to find a rental shop, another official came running with the news that they had located their own.

After a long day of waiting, David and I were finally escorted through the small pine grove at the east end of the compound, past the old two-story white ambassador’s residence where most of the hostages had spent their first days in captivity tied to chairs, and into a small new office building at the rear of the site where the tennis courts had once been. The “official” camera turned out to be exactly the same as the model David was carrying. After exchanging a round of thank-yous and handshakes, he clipped a cassette in it and we set off at last for the chancery building to film the exhibit.

We got about ten steps. Blue Shirt came running back out.

“No, it has been decided that you can only take still pictures, no moving pictures,” he said.