Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (42 page)

Altogether they managed to take sixty-six Americans hostage. Six others managed to evade capture. A handful of the hostages were soon released, but the rest—fifty-two altogether—would remain in captivity for the next 444 days. The experience of the hostage taking transformed America’s self-image and dramatically altered the course of the Iranian Revolution.

The United States and its role in Iranian politics over the previous four decades were a central issue in the Iranian Revolution. For much of its modern history, a weak Iran had been dominated by the British and the Russians. Then, in 1953, the United States had actively supported a coup to topple the nationalist prime minister, Mohammed Mossadeq, whose move to nationalize Iran’s oil resources—largely controlled until then by the British—had made him so popular among Iranians that his power threatened the shah’s. Washington saw a pro-Western regime in Tehran as a vital bulwark against Soviet influence in the region. From then on, the Americans did whatever they could to prop up the shah, who was happy to reciprocate by buying enormous quantities of US weaponry and providing US intelligence with listening posts close to the border of the USSR. US experts helped to train the shah’s security forces, including SAVAK, his brutal secret police. The shah’s relentless program of Westernization was regarded by the Americans (and many Iranian elites) as laudable evidence of progress. Never mind that many Iranians saw the same cultural transformation—public consumption of alcohol, women in revealing dress, erotic movies—as an aggressive affront to their traditional values.

The shah regarded his alliance with the Americans as a source of his power. Khomeini saw the shah’s links with Washington as a major weakness. From the very beginning, the ayatollah’s harsh polemics against the Americans were a major source of his public popularity. In 1964 his campaign against the government culminated in a speech assailing the shah’s proposed status-of-forces law that granted US military forces in the country immunity from Iranian law. Khomeini referred to the law as a “capitulation,” a word that evoked the humiliating, quasi-colonial infringements of national sovereignty claimed by the British and other foreign powers in the nineteenth century.
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“They have reduced the Iranian people to a level lower than that of an American dog. If someone runs over a dog belonging to an American, he will be
prosecuted. Even if the shah himself were to run over a dog belonging to an American, he would be prosecuted.”
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The attack struck a nerve. Those Iranians who heard about it were thrilled that one of their religious leaders should have such temerity. For the shah, it was untenable. It was precisely these statements by Khomeini that prompted his exile.

As the revolution gathered steam in the course of 1979, the rhetoric of its leaders became increasingly laced with condemnation of US “imperialism” and “neocolonialism.” These terms had been absorbed from the lexicon of the Left, but they were easily wedded to a religious discourse. The United States became the “Great Satan,” while its partner, Israel, rated junior status as the “Little Satan” for its oppression of the Palestinians and its occupation of the holy places in Jerusalem. (Khomeini was an ardent supporter of the Palestinian cause from the very beginning, even using some of the religious taxes donated by his followers to finance Palestinian groups.) If someone needed to whip up emotions at a revolutionary demonstration, there was no better way to do it than to start some rousing anti-American chant.

Indeed, the US Embassy in Tehran had already been attacked once before, in mid-February 1979, just a few days after the ayatollah’s return. A group of young revolutionary militiamen stormed the complex, now operating with a reduced staff, and took the ambassador and his staff captive. The ambassador managed to call up the revolutionary authorities and request assistance, and about an hour after the attack they sent in forces who ordered the gunmen to disperse. Four Americans were wounded; an Iranian waiter was killed.
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In those first days of the revolution, Khomeini and his allies had many other things to worry about. The economy was in shambles, numerous armed factions and guerrilla groups roamed the land, and forces sympathetic to the shah were still active. It was not the moment to start a head-on conflict with the Americans. Indeed, many within Bazargan’s provisional government believed that the success of the revolution depended, to an extent, on Washington’s willingness to tolerate it. Though Bazargan and his colleagues joined in the anti-American rhetoric when necessary, they tried to keep it within limits.

All this changed radically when President Carter announced, on October 22, 1979, that he was allowing the shah to come to the United States for treatment of his cancer. Carter had at first demurred, but finally relented in the face of intense lobbying from such notables as Henry Kissinger, the former national security adviser and secretary of state, and former vice president Nelson Rockefeller, who considered the shah a personal friend. US officials in Iran and Iran analysts in Washington strongly advised against receiving him. Since his departure from Iran
in January, the shah had wandered the world, traveling from Egypt to Morocco to the Bahamas to Mexico. The shah’s cancer had been diagnosed some five years earlier, and though his disease was kept secret from the outside world for most of that time, its effects, and the drugs he took to counter them, may well have contributed to his depression and indecisiveness during the crucial months of rising turmoil. Now his illness affected the course of events once again.

The news that the hated shah was being welcomed to the United States prompted a great surge of dark emotion among the Iranian revolutionaries. The realization that Carter had granted refuge to the deposed king confirmed what many Iranians had suspected all along: even now, months after the shah had gone, his friends in Washington were still trying to help him. There was no better proof of American perfidy.

The student activists who decided to storm the embassy in November were a genuine grassroots group, a characteristic manifestation of the revolutionary ferment sweeping across Iran at the time. It remains unclear to this day whether Khomeini himself was informed in advance of the students’ plans to take over the embassy. By their own account, the students wanted to apprise Khomeini of their plans, but their spiritual leader, a radical ayatollah by the name of Mohammad Mousavi Khoeiniha, persuaded them to go ahead without doing so.

Prime Minister Bazargan and the other members of his government were appalled by the news and ordered the students to cease their occupation of the embassy complex. Bazargan and the other pragmatists had been quietly making diplomatic overtures to the Americans, hoping to restore a modicum of cooperation with Washington. They had entirely unsentimental reasons for doing so. Billions of dollars in Iranian money rested in American banks. Iran’s US-made fighter planes desperately needed spare parts. Oil refineries and factories depended on foreign (which all too often meant “American”) know-how to keep going. The pragmatists hoped that they could prevent a complete breakdown of relations with the Americans. That was an aim that the Carter administration undoubtedly shared. But the students refused. They had other priorities.

Khomeini himself maintained a conspicuous silence at first. Members of the provisional government—like Ebrahim Yazdi, by now foreign minister—later claimed that the revolution’s supreme leader initially signaled his opposition to the takeover. He was, perhaps, subsequently swayed to change his stance by news of the huge crowds of demonstrators who soon appeared outside the embassy compound, where they chanted their approval of the students’ action. Whatever the reason, that evening Khomeini went on the radio to applaud the students and denounce
the Great Satan. His announcement also signaled the start of an all-out clerical offensive against critics of theocratic rule.

At the beginning of November, just before the attack on the embassy, Bazargan and Yazdi had traveled to Algiers for the funeral of the just-deceased Algerian president. They seized the chance to meet with Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to discuss how Iran and the United States might get relations back on track (and, in particular, how to release the Iranian assets still held in US banks). Bazargan was even photographed as he shook Brzezinski’s hand—an image that haunted him in the weeks to come. As the students paraded blindfolded American diplomats before the cameras, exulting in their humiliation of the world’s most powerful country, those businesslike diplomatic contacts with the Americans suddenly looked like an act of treason. Three days after the students took over the embassy, Bazargan and his ministers resigned. It was the end of the dream of a “moderate Islamist” politics in Iran. From this point on, the Revolutionary Council, which had for so long acted like a parallel government, began to emerge as the center of political power in the new Islamic Republic.

The White House responded to the hostage taking with confusion. Hadn’t its own representatives just conducted talks with representatives of the same government that was now openly violating the terms of the Vienna Treaty, the international agreement that dictated the proper treatment of diplomats? The United States demanded the immediate release of the captives.

In fact, however, the Carter administration was deeply divided over how it should react. Carter’s foreign policy was run by two men who held starkly divergent opinions about the right ways to respond to the challenges of the age. Their differences go a long way toward explaining the vacillations of US foreign policy during this crucial period in global history.

Brzezinski was a Cold War Democrat who had a harshly realistic approach to foreign policy. As the son of a Polish diplomat who had emigrated to the United States, Brzezinski had a shrewd appreciation of the threat posed by totalitarian opponents, and he favored a hard line against Khomeini and the hostage takers. Carter’s secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, was a lawyer from a privileged background who embodied the spirit of 1970s détente.
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He was part of the US delegation at the Paris peace talks with North Vietnam at the end of the 1960s, an experience he liked to cite as evidence that it was possible to conduct dialogue with even the most ruthless of opponents. During the hostage crisis, he often mentioned President Truman’s policy of restraint toward the Chinese Communists in 1949, who had
kept US consul Angus Ward under arrest for a year, as well as the refusal of Lyndon Johnson to use force against the North Koreans when they seized the US spy ship USS
Pueblo
. In both cases, the Americans had been released after long periods in captivity. Brzezinski worried above all about the damage that an indecisive response would do to America’s international stature and accordingly favored demonstrations of resolve and the consideration of military means to end the crisis; Vance believed that the safety of the hostages was paramount and advised against anything that might provoke the Iranians. The two men’s disagreements meant that Carter had a hard time uniting his administration behind a single policy line. To the outside world, the American stance appeared indecisive, at times downright schizophrenic.

The year 1979 brought one crisis after another for US diplomats. At the end of November, just a few weeks after the hostages were seized in Tehran, the young Saudi insurgents who were inspired by dreams of the impending Day of Judgment occupied the Grand Mosque in Mecca. The attack—which may have been partly inspired by the young Sunnis’ desire to trump the millenarian rhetoric coming from Iran—triggered an exchange of inflammatory accusations by the United States and the revolutionary government in Tehran. The Americans, with little evidence to back up their claims, publicly depicted the mosque seizure as a Khomeini-inspired intrigue. Khomeini responded by accusing the Americans of orchestrating the whole episode as part of a systematic campaign to dishonor Islam. Muslims tended to believe the ayatollah’s version, and anti-US riots broke out across the Islamic world. In Pakistan a mob stormed the US Embassy in Islamabad, burning some of the buildings and killing two Americans before they were dispersed. On December 2, another group of rioters in the Libyan capital of Tripoli burned down the US Embassy building there.

All of these crises flared up and died away. Not so the situation in Tehran. US officials had failed to foresee how the seizure of the hostages would fuel a spiral of revolutionary radicalization. It unleashed a storm of nationalist emotions that the Khomeinists skillfully exploited toward their own domestic political ends. The Carter administration kept seeking “reasonable” interlocutors who could make a deal, failing to realize that the new leaders in Tehran actually had every reason to keep the situation smoldering along. Not only did the taking of the hostages feed into the ferment inside Iran, but it also dovetailed with Khomeini’s urge to spread revolution throughout the Muslim world. Defying the world’s most powerful superpower enabled Khomeini to pose as a latter-day Saladdin, single-handedly thwarting the evil designs of the West.

For the hostages themselves, geopolitics quickly gave way to much more mundane worries. Robert C. Ode was a State Department retiree, a former consular official who had rejoined the foreign service to fill a temporary post in the Tehran embassy. On the morning of November 4, he was helping a visitor with a visa application when he was told to leave his post because a mob had managed to get into the embassy compound. Ode and a few other officials from the consular department managed to get out of the compound and started walking toward the private residence of one of the men, but a few blocks away they were met by armed students. One of them fired a shot over the Americans’ heads. The students hustled them back to the compound.