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AMONG THE HOSTAGE-TAKERS |
Twenty-five years ago in Tehran a group of Iranian
students stormed the U.S. embassy and took hostage the entire American
diplomatic mission-igniting a fifteen-month international crisis whose impact
is reverberating still. Now, for the first time, many of the leading
hostage-takers speak candidly about their actions-which a surprising number
deeply regret.
Nowadays the grand old U.S. embassy in Tehran looks forlorn, like a hostage
left behind and long forgotten. A solid battleship of an office building in
orange brick, two stories high and more than a block long, it was once the
symbol of America's formidable presence in Iran. Today it still stands in the
heart of the capital, facing a wide, busy thoroughfare called Taleghani Avenue,
at the front of a leafy twenty-seven-acre oasis, a rare haven from the noisy
hustle of this city of more than 12 million. Long ago dubbed the "Den of
Spies" by Islamic radicals, the old embassy building is now garishly
covered with anti-American graffiti, banners, and propaganda displays to remind
people of the nation's undying disdain for its once favorite ally. The embassy
compound is home to the Revolutionary Guards, an elite military unit that
reports to the black-turbaned clerics of Iran's authoritarian mullahocracy, and
to the basij, Islamic brownshirts, the civilian goon squads that turn out en
masse and at a moment's notice to demonstrate on behalf of the regime and to
help put down those who engage in public displays of dissent and
"immorality," such as women whose scarves do not fully cover their
hair, or young people who hold hands. The former embassy itself serves as an
anti-American museum, with a grim, ugly permanent display called "The
Great Aban 13th Exhibition," commemorating one of the most important dates
on the modern Iranian calendar. Aban 13 corresponds to November 4, the date on
which, twenty-five years ago, scores of Iranian students scaled the compound
walls and took hostage the entire U.S. diplomatic mission, setting off a tense
fifteen-month standoff between the United States and Iran. It was one of the
founding events of the Islamic Republic, and its geopolitical repercussions are
still being felt throughout the world.
The old embassy is supposed to be an official shrine to that bold act of
national defiance, which defined for the world the glorious 1979 revolution, a
kind of Iranian counterpart to America's Boston Tea Party-but more central and
significant. Yet in the four times 1 went to the embassy during trips to Iran
in the past year, it was empty of visitors. A bookstore just outside the
entrance, which was once known for selling anti-American literature and
reprints of the thousands of secret embassy documents seized in the takeover
(the infamous "spy den documents"), was vacant when I first saw it in
December, its racks empty, but nine months later appeared ready to reopen as a
bookstore for children. The slogans and spiteful artwork that had been
spray-painted on the embassy's brick outer walls by angry crowds during the
tumultuous hostage crisis had faded-including an image of the Statue of Liberty
with its face portrayed as a death mask and a sign in English that said
"DEATH TO THE USA."
Even the guardhouse on the southeast corner, where visitors enter, was in
shambles. 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 boot
print on the ceiling, and asked my guide and interpreter, Ramin, to tell the
guards that as an American citizen, I protested these abuses of what could
arguably be called U.S. 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."
The exhibit itself 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 from papier-mâché and thickly
painted over in bronze. The first-seemingly based on a photograph of one of the
hostages, Corporal Steven Kirtley-is of a Marine surrendering with his hands
clasped behind his head; the second is a replica of the Statue of Liberty with
a white bird (a symbol of Islam) caged in her abdomen. Inside the museum is
more of the same: displays illustrating America's "role of evil" in
the world over the past several decades; lots of gory photographs of children
presented as victims of American bombings; and a framed copy of an
important-looking "spy document," impressively stamped CLASSIFIED and
TOP SECRET, which on closer inspection turns out to be a memo requesting
additional drivers for the embassy's motor pool. There are also pieces of
helicopters recovered in the Iranian desert from a failed U.S. secret mission
on April 24, 1980, to rescue the hostages; photographs of the hostages
themselves; and somewhat dated propaganda showcasing America and Saddam Hussein
as partners in crime. But in its preoccupation with American symbols the
exhibit is more a defacement than an indictment, like drawing a big nose and a
moustache 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 the United States.
For a visiting American, Iran is like Bizarro World, the mirror universe in
Superman comics in which everything is inverted. Bad is good and good is bad.
In Tehran patriotic symbols of the United States are everywhere, but always
wrenched into images of violence, evil, and defeat. The American flag is shown
in the shape of a gun; the bald eagle is shown going down in flames. In the
West we are bombarded with advertising images of youth, beauty, sex, and life;
in Tehran the preponderance of advertising images celebrate death. There are
murals everywhere honoring martyrs-primarily those who died in the eight-year
Iran-Iraq War, in the 1980s, but also more recent Islamic martyrs, including
Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas, who was assassinated by
Israeli forces in Gaza earlier this year. Billboards in the West often feature
scantily dressed, provocatively posed teens, but in Tehran the gigantic wall
murals tend to depict robed grandpas and grumpy-looking white-bearded
clerics-especially common are the bespectacled face of the current Supreme
Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the more imposing, threatening visage of
the late Imam, Ruhollah Khomeini, the major force behind the overthrow of the
Shah in 1979, and the father of Iran's theocratic state.
This Bizarro World feeling is pervasive. In August, when I left on one of my
visits to Iran, a media blitz at home was trumpeting a more or less nonstop
parade of American triumphs in the Olympic Games in Greece. Days later in
Tehran the popular press was heralding a humiliating cascade of U.S. defeats.
The Tehran Times reported an "anguished reaction" in Washington,
D.C., over the three losses of the men's basketball team and its failure to win
a gold medal (it won bronze), and when the American boxer Andre Ward advanced
toward a gold medal, it ran the headline "SAVES U.S. TEAM FROM HISTORIC
FAILURE." Coverage of the fighting in Iraq cheers savage insurgent
violence there, and portrays the Iraqi Shia Ayatollah Ali Sistani-not the U.S.
and British armies that actually toppled the tyrant Saddam Hussein-as the real
force for democracy and independence.
And just when one seems to have the place in full inverse focus, there comes
some wildly discordant note-such as the blocks-long open-air drug market right
in Tehran's center, where dealers hawk Viagra, Ecstasy, and opium, at
rock-bottom infidel prices. In this pious city where women are forced to cover
their bodies and heads, even in stifling summer heat, it is common to see prostitutes-duly
scarved and draped-freely patrolling the streets, sending with a slightly
heavier application of makeup, flamboyant jewelry, and a few straying strands
of hair the same message sent by spike heels and a G-string in Atlantic City.
As I posed before a Khomeini mural for a snapshot one afternoon, a well-dressed
young Iranian passerby asked me in perfect English, "Why do you want a
picture of that asshole?"
Nowhere is Bizarro World more evident than in the country's national memory of
the gerogan-giri, the "hostage-taking." On November 4, 1979, a
well-organized core group of about sixty Iranian university students scaled the
walls of the U.S. embassy compound, seized the embassy building, and bound and
blindfolded about sixty Americans, including the embassy's top foreign-service
and CIA officers, military liaisons, administrators, clerks, secretaries, and a
detachment of Marine guards. The invaders, calling themselves Students
Following the Imam's Line, demanded that their despised Shah, who had been
forced to flee the country nine months earlier and had just been admitted to
the United States for cancer treatment, be returned immediately to face
revolutionary justice. Hundreds of his former associates had already been
executed or thrown in jail. President Jimmy Carter refused the demand, and the
subsequent fifteen-month standoff became one of the signature international
crises of modern times. It left a lot of Americans feeling helpless and
enraged, while imbuing Iranians, many of whom blamed the United States for the
Shah's inarguable despotism, with a new sense of strength and national purpose.
The episode turned tragic when the secret rescue mission, approved after much
agonizing by President Carter, ended in catastrophe at a staging area in the
Iranian desert: owing to freak dust storms, several helicopters had to set down
or turn back and the entire operation had to be aborted. During the withdrawal
one helicopter collided with a C-130 transport plane, exploded into flames, and
left eight American Marines and airmen dead. In a final insult to Carter, the
hostages were all released on January 20, 1981-Inauguration Day for the man who
had defeated him, Ronald Reagan. The hostage-taking was an outrageous violation
of international law and of the age-old rules governing diplomatic relations
between civilized nations; but as shocking as it was at the time, in today's
world of vicious Islamist terrorism the gerogan-giri seems almost quaint.
The different ways this event is remembered in America and in Iran
illustrate how nations invent their own pasts, and how the simplification of
history can create impossible gulfs between peoples. To Americans, the hostage
crisis was an unprovoked, inexcusable crime, carried out by a scruffy band of
half-crazy Islamist zealots driven by a senseless hatred of all things
American. It was a terrifying ordeal for the hostages and their families, fatal
for eight of the would-be rescuers, and a political disaster for Jimmy
Carter-perhaps the single most important factor in making him a one-term
President. In the United States it was a protracted, very public humiliation,
made worse by breathless lead-story coverage in newspapers and on television,
which began newscasts with a daily reminder of the predicament ("DAY 54:
AMERICA HELD HOSTAGE"). It was America's first modern encounter with
hostile Islamists, and the first time Americans heard their country called
"the Great Satan."
For many Iranians, however, the hostage crisis was a glorious triumph.
Embossed with florid Shia mysticism, the episode has taken on the force of
national myth-an epic story of a small group of devout young gerogan-girha
(hostage-takers) who, armed with only prayer and purity of heart, stormed the
gates of the most evil, potent empire on the planet, booted out the American
devils, and secured the success of the mullahs' revolution. It is a poignant
and poetic tale of how these innocent servants of the Imam treated their often
crude and abusive captives with kindness and respect even as they pieced
together shredded embassy documents to expose and thwart America's plots to
destroy the revolution and reinstate the Shah. And when the Great Satan
dispatched its deadly commandos to slay these young heroes (this is the part
that fires the blood of the faithful), Allah stirred dust storms to down the
infidel helicopters and turn back the invaders. This is the story taught to
schoolchildren who are bused in to see the Great Aban 13th Exhibition and to
touch the remains of the helicopters that Allah scorched while the innocent
gerogan-girha slept.
For the past three years I have been working on a book about the hostage
crisis, trying to see it through both American and Iranian eyes and to
understand how it shaped the world of today. On two recent trips to Tehran, I
went looking for the people who planned and directed the embassy takeover and
the ones who found themselves caught up in it. I wanted to know who they were,
what had happened to them in the quarter century since they climbed the embassy
walls, what they had hoped to accomplish, and how they felt, in retrospect,
about what they had done. Given Iran's current status as one of the two
remaining countries on President Bush's "axis of evil," a designation
most Iranians seem both to resent and to perversely enjoy, I thought I might
learn something about the world's proudest and noisiest self-styled Islamic
republic by finding those who so enthusiastically poisoned its relationship
with the United States.
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 clearly
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 in trouble or of 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 life of their own country,
which has found itself ever since in a downward spiral of economic, political,
and social isolation.
Ibrahim Asgharzadeh, a ringleader of the takeover who has become a reform
politician and newspaperman, is emphatic in his assessment:
"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."
One thing I learned from talking to the gerogan-girha was that the episode
Americans remember as the "hostage crisis" was not supposed to
involve the prolonged detention of hostages. The students who seized the
embassy believed that they were participating in a conventional protest-not
unlike those at U.S. colleges a decade before, when rebellious American
students occupied campus buildings. The young Iranians envisioned having to
subdue and confine members of the American mission for perhaps a day or two,
but they had no intention of holding them for any length of time. They made no
preparations for doing so.
The demand for the Shah's return was primarily rhetorical. The
hostage-takers' immediate goal was to put pressure on the provisional
government of Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan. This interim authority had been
appointed by Khomeini after the fall of the Shah to preside until a new
constitution could be written. The revolution had unleashed tumultuous
political passions, and Khomeini, monitoring events from the holy city of Qom,
was of two minds about the future. Should Iran be ruled directly by clerics, or
should it have a secular democracy? Bazargan favored a Western-style state, but
in the eyes of extremists-both Islamists and Marxists-he was watering down the
revolution. They saw the provisional government's efforts to stabilize Iran and
to re-establish ties with the rest of the world as a sellout.
The opportunity for radical change appeared to be slipping away. So
extremists fanned fears of an American-led countercoup, and portrayed as
treason all contacts between the provisional government and the United
States-which were mostly over such practical matters as recovering the $6
billion the Shah had deposited in U.S. banks and obtaining needed parts for the
Iranian air force's American-built F-16s. The plan to seize the embassy grew
out of these fears. Many of the students involved believed the stories of an
American plot, but the cooler heads behind them had more-local concerns. Khomeini
was not-as many Americans always assumed-informed about the takeover in
advance, and by the time it was presented to him it was already a fait
accompli, and hugely popular. Hundreds of thousands of gleeful Iranians
celebrated in the streets around the embassy night and day, burning Carter in
effigy and chanting "Death to America!" Khomeini had little choice
but to embrace the brash gerogan-girha, and to officially anoint them national
heroes. In a development never foreseen or even hoped for by the student
leaders, Bazargan's government resigned two days after the takeover, and the
revolution tilted permanently into the arms of the mullahs.
The gerogan-girha saw themselves as part of an experiment that ought to be
familiar to Americans. They were trying to build a utopia, their own version of
"a city upon a hill." They were striving toward umma, a perfect,
classless, crimeless Muslim community infused with the "spirit of
God."
But instead of a shining city upon a hill, Tehran today is a bland, teeming
sprawl, a study in faded brown and gray, swimming in a miasma of smog and dust
that leaves everything coated with a patina of grit. Umma remains a distant,
unfulfilled promise, as Iranians grapple with unemployment, rural migration to
the cities, rampant corruption, and self-destructive domestic and foreign
policies. Straining under tight economic sanctions imposed by the United States
and some of its Western allies, Iran remains an international pariah; it courts
even tougher sanctions by reportedly working to manufacture nuclear weapons-an
effort the regime officially denies but nearly everyone believes is well under
way. Women live under archaic restrictions on employment, social relations, and
mode of dress. Teachers and other intellectuals labor under oppressive
government oversight. Political dissenters often end up in jail, or worse. The
country's vast Intelligence and Security Ministry is as omnipresent and feared
as was SAVAK, the Shah's old secret police.
The gerogan-girha live in the ruins of their dream. As they've grown
gray-haired and plump, the fame and admiration they once enjoyed have faded
like the graffiti at the Den of Spies. Those who despise the current regime now
regret their role in bringing a small circle of wealthy, authoritarian clerics
to power. And more than anything they blame the hostage crisis for a litany of
problems and setbacks that have befallen their country in the past quarter of a
century. Iran's loss of ties to the United States after the embassy seizure
prompted Saddam Hussein to invade in 1980 (when the hostages were still being
held). In the ensuing war Iran lost more than half a million young men. Iran's
status as an outlaw nation has had a stifling effect on its chances for an
economic turnaround.
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 perse-cuted by
their former colleagues. "None of us in the revolution believed Iran would
ever have an autocratic regime again," Mohsen Mirdamadi, a leader of the
gerogan-girha who is today a controversial reform politician, told a 
Knight
Ridder correspondent earlier this year. "Yet here we are."
Ibrahim Asgharzadeh was a wiry, intense, bearded engineering student when he
came up with the idea, in September of 1979, to seize the American embassy.
"The initial idea was mine," he told me in an interview in December
at the office of his newspaper, Hambastegi, off an alley in Tehran. "Ever
since high school I had been outraged by American policies."
According to Asgharzadeh, there were five students at that first planning
meeting. Two of them wanted to target the Soviet embassy, because, he said, the
USSR was "a Marxist and anti-God regime." But the two
others-Mirdamadi and Habibullah Bitaraf (now Iran's Minister of Energy)-supported
Asgharzadeh's choice. "Our aim was to object to the American government by
going to their embassy and occupying it for several hours," he said.
"Announcing our objections from within the occupied compound would carry
our message to the world in a much more firm and effective way."
Asgharzadeh has served as a member of the Majlis (Iran's legislature) and as
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 veto
powers they wield over political candidates and legislation. When I interviewed
Asgharzadeh in Tehran, he looked entirely different from the images of him I
had seen in the hostage-crisis days; he is now clean-shaven and very much at
ease in a well-tailored suit. Indeed, he looked much too prosperous for his
outlaw status; he has been banned from seeking public office, and in 1992
served a term in solitary confinement.
Asgharzadeh is the most prominent of the gerogan-girha who have turned
against the mullahocracy. With the advantage of hindsight, he now sees the
embassy takeover as a mistake-one that has had a disastrous long-term impact on
his country. 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. "We failed in enforcing it the way it was
meant to be," he said. "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. Students Following the Imam's Line, wearing laminated
images of Khomeini around their necks in order to distinguish themselves from
other, mostly left-wing political groups that rushed to join the protest, 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 blind-folding 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 Jimmy 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.
In the coming weeks, as it became clear that the stalemate would not be
resolved quickly, the hostage-takers recruited hundreds of volunteers to serve
as guards, put them through hasty military training, and organized themselves
into committees to handle the various practical challenges of holding, feeding,
and housing a large number of prisoners. Many of the volunteers went to work
piecing together documents that had been shredded by embassy officials on the
day of the takeover, while others tried to decipher and translate them. Fluent
English-speakers were brought in, including Massoumeh Ebtekar, who became the
voice of the gerogan-girha at daily press conferences with the world media and
is now one of Iran's Vice Presidents and the Minister of the Environment, and
Hussein Sheikh al-Islam, who zealously interrogated the higher-level embassy
staffers and CIA officers, and who is today a conservative member of the Majlis.
For the young Iranians in charge of the compound, those days were heady and
even romantic: Asgharzadeh met and proposed to his wife, Tahereh Rezazadeh, and
Ebtekar met and ultimately married Muhammad Hashemi, one of the core group of
leaders. But the days grew tedious, frustrating, and-when the failed U.S.
rescue mission awakened the gerogan-girha to the dangers-frightening.
For the first two days the seized Americans inside the compound were tied to
chairs in the ambassador's residence and blindfolded. In the coining weeks and
months thirteen of them were released-all women and blacks, in the hope of
winning the public support of America's "oppressed" minorities. Most
of the remainder-lower-level embassy staffers, guards, and a few unfortunates
who had come to Iran on business or as part of cultural exchanges-were herded
into the basement of a warehouse on the embassy grounds, where they lived for
months in a large windowless space divided into cells by bookshelves. They
slept on mats on the floor and were forbidden to speak. The higher-level
Americans-diplomats, CIA officers, and military-liaison personnel-were
sequestered, and taken away one by one for interrogation. Some were beaten; the
CIA officers were worked over with heavy rubber hoses under the supervision of
al-Islam.
After the failed rescue mission, in April, the gerogan-girha realized the
tactical error of keeping the hostages all in the same place, and they were
hastily scattered around the country, some to prisons and some to private
homes. For the next nine months the captors played shell games with the
hostages, moving them frequently.
Asgharzadeh realizes that he cannot change the past. But knowing what he
knows now, he would not do it again. "If today I were 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.
Among the old hostage-takers, Asgharzadeh is not the only one who has found
himself at odds with the current regime. In December, the day before I was
supposed to interview Mohsen Mirdamadi, one of the original planners of the
takeover and now a reform member of the Majlis, he was beaten by stick-wielding
basij. Mirdamadi, a slightly built 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-girha leader 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 is today 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 in trouble with the
government when he attended a much publicized meeting in Paris with one of his
hostages, Barry Rosen, the embassy's public-affairs officer, in an attempt to
begin what Abdi described as a "healing process." But the meeting of
the two men fell well short of a warm and fuzzy reunion. Rosen condemned the
seizure of the hostages, and Abdi refused to apologize for the action. Indeed,
Abdi's old captives feel little sympathy for his plight. One of them, Dave
Roeder, a retired Air Force colonel, 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. Muhammad Naimipour, a friend
and political ally of Abdi's who was also one of the gerogan-girha, would say
only, "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 I interviewed Naimipour, in December, he was an elected member of the
Majlis, but he has since been crossed off the list of eligible candidates
(those who are too critical of the regime are branded "un-Islamic")
by the Guardian Council, a twelve-member body of clerics and judges accountable
only to the current Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. Thick-set and graying,
Naimipour 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 Naimipour suffered a stroke.
If anyone at the time had a clearer vision of what the embassy takeover's
full consequences might be, it was Muhammad Mousavi Khoeiniha, the
black-bearded young cleric to whom the students took their plan in October of
1979. Khoeiniha was a well-known spiritual leader whose sermons in the
Jobbestan Mosque, in northern Tehran, drew hundreds of radicals. When the
students decided to invade the U.S. embassy, they sought out Khoeiniha in hopes
of winning advance approval from Khomeini, with whom the young cleric had close
ties. To their surprise Khoeiniha-without consulting Khomeini-immediately gave
them his blessing, and thus established himself as the key clerical figure
behind the gerogan-girha. Khoeiniha told me in an interview in Tehran in August
that he had chosen not to ask the Imam's permission because "I did not think
it was appropriate to involve him in some action being contemplated by a group
of students."
Khoeiniha scoffed at the suggestion that his motive might also have been to
force the issue; clearly, asking permission would have set off a furious round of
backstage negotiations, which might have aborted the whole idea. But seizing
the embassy would stir up popular support and put Khomeini on the spot,
compelling him to either make the highly unpopular choice of backing the
provisional government-which would have been duty-bound to evict the
trespassing students-or go for the practical, post facto option of throwing his
powerful support behind them. It was a clever and fateful piece of political
engineering by Khoeiniha.
Today he remains a controversial, even somewhat mysterious figure. He is a
leader of the reform movement, and was the managing director of the banned
newspaper Salam. In 1999 he 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, Khoeiniha 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 spacious
office in central Tehran, 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."
Khoeiniha smiled when I asked where it had come from. It was a souvenir from
the U.S. embassy.
In the nine months between the fall of the Shah's regime and the takeover of
the embassy, Iranian fundamentalists increasingly saw even routine contact
between Bazargan's provisional government and U.S. officials, both in Tehran
and abroad, as part of a CIA plot to undermine Khomeini, derail the Islamic
revolution, and restore the Shah to power. Their fears were not irrational. The
CIA had done something very similar in 1953, when its station chief, Kermit
Roosevelt, orchestrated the collapse of an elected government under Prime
Minister Muhammad Mosaddeq, and put the Shah on the throne. These actions had
shaped the next quarter century of Iranian life. When the United States decided
to admit the ailing exiled Shah for medical treatment, in late October of 1979,
the students saw history repeating itself.
But they were wrong. The Shah was terminally ill with cancer, and Carter's
decision to allow him treatment in the United States appears to have been
purely humanitarian. In November of 1979 the United States had no intention-nor
was it capable-of returning the Shah to the throne. As the famous documents
seized in the embassy would eventually show, the American spy presence in Iran
was at a pitifully low ebb. Only three CIA officers were in the country: Tom
Ahern, the station chief; and two undercover operatives, Bill Daugherty and
Malcolm Kalp. None of these men even spoke Farsi, and none had been in the
country for longer than four months; Kalp had been in Tehran less than a week
when the embassy was taken.
U.S. intelligence activities inside Iran during the previous twenty years
had been directed primarily at the Soviet Union-and entailed mostly the
monitoring of missile tests from bases along Iran's northern border. The
warehouse basement where the gerogan-girha initially stashed most of the
hostages-who called it the Mushroom Inn-had been built to house data-processing
and communications equipment for those listening posts. Iran, as a staunch
American ally, was not even a minor target for intelligence gathering. There is
no better proof of this than the way the CIA was blindsided by the revolution.
No one in Washington saw it coming.
After the revolution the CIA seemed to be largely groping for some
understanding of the new regime taking shape in Tehran. Not that the Agency
lacked bad intentions. Down the road it was hoping to at least nudge the
revolution in a pro-American direction. A top-secret cable to the CIA director,
Stansfield Turner, taken from Ahern's desk on the day of the takeover (he had
neglected to shred it), summarized the station chief's goals and
accomplishments.
You asked me to comment at some point about our prospects for influencing
the course of events. Only marginally, I would say, until the military
recovers, and that is a process we can do almost nothing to affect. What we can
do, and I am now working on, is to identify and prepare to support the
potential leaders of a coalition of westernized political liberals, moderate
religious figures, and (when they begin to emerge) western-oriented military
leaders.
Hardly the stuff of a countercoup. Still, the gerogangirha did their best to
paint the documents they seized as proof of their darkest suspicions, and to
this day most of them insist that the embassy seizure did thwart active plots
against the revolution.
Iran is still very much in the grip of CIA-phobia, which has spawned a
national industry of conspiracy theories. One of the more breathtaking of these
holds-and the irony here is apparently lost on most Iranians-that the embassy
seizure was actually orchestrated by the CIA. In other words, the gerogan-girha
were nothing but CIA stooges. How else to explain the world of trouble that
followed the hostage crisis-the economic stagnation; the crackdowns on free
speech; the constant patrols of the religious police; the jailing, torture, and
even execution of political dissidents; the eight-year war with Iraq; the
isolation from the international community?
Reza Ghapour, a fundamentalist scholar who was born the year before the
embassy takeover, recently published a book that attempted to prove this theory
of its origins. When I interviewed him in December, he told me with a straight
face and a strong voice that the CIA had been responsible not only for
installing and preserving the Shah but also for engineering his overthrow and
secretly planning his return, for propping up the provisional government that
followed the coup and fomenting the national unrest that ultimately undermined
and toppled it, and for secretly orchestrating the seizure of the Den of Spies
and keeping fifty-two Americans (three of them initially trapped at the Iranian
Foreign Ministry) hostage for more than a year.
"Aren't some of these things mutually contradictory?" I asked.
"For instance, why would the CIA wish to foment trouble for a provisional
government it was secretly supporting?"
The slender, bearded Ghapour smiled at me with sweet condescension.
"You must view the world through the lens of Islam to see the logic of
these things," he said.
I heard the same general theory in slightly different form any number of
times. Once was from Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the former President of Iran, who
was elected during the hostage crisis and eventually fled to Paris, accused of
being a CIA agent himself. Bani-Sadr, who still lives in Paris, under
around-the-clock protection by the French police, is of the school that
believes earth-shattering events do not happen spontaneously; he finds it hard
to accept that a group of college students by themselves cooked up a protest
that had such profound consequences for Iran-not to mention his own life.
I also heard the theory from a liberal magazine editor, a critic of the
current regime, who did not want to be named. A worn-looking middle-aged man
with a concave face and tobacco stains on his fingertips, he argued fiercely,
"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." The United States has gained, he said, by impeding the progress of
the world's first self-styled Islamic republic.
He went on for a while longer, filling in some of the wilder possibilities
of his hypothesis, and then waited with a pleased look on his face as the whole
torrent of Farsi was conveyed by my interpreter. I said nothing in response, so
he told the interpreter to ask me, "What do you think?"
"I think you're crackers," I said.
My interpreter looked at me quizzically.
"Just use the word 'crackers,'" I told him.
The surviving gerogan-girha who have prospered most in the mullahocracy are
regarded by many Iranians as opportunists, and the most tempting targets for
this label are Muhammad Hashemi, who just retired as first deputy of the
Ministry of Intelligence and Security, and his wife, Massoumeh Ebtekar, the
Minister of the Environment. (If the smoggy skies of Tehran are any indication,
Ebtekar has done her job with a notable lack of success.) They are Iran's
premier power couple. As one might expect, both regard the embassy takeover as
an unadulterated success. They promptly agreed to see me separately when I
visited Iran in December.
I found Hashemi in an office several flights up from a noisy, bustling
street in downtown Tehran. It was a chilly, wet, dreary day, and he served the
customary small glasses of tea and chatted animatedly in front of a big color
map of the world. Over the years Hashemi has grown thick and wide, with great
round cheeks, a goatee framing large, pouting lips, and a wild spray of bushy
gray hair. Self-assured, even imperious, Hashemi defends not only what he and
the other hostage-takers did but also how they did it.
"We knew that there is an end to everything, like there is peace after
every war," Hashemi told me. "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."
Hashemi's key role in the takeover turned out to have been a good career
move. Early in 1979 he was a college student majoring in film at Tehran
Polytechnic University, but after the Shah's ouster he had abandoned his
studies to devote himself full-time to the revolution-joining not only
Asgharzadeh's student group but also a far more violent band of militants
inside the Revolutionary Guards, who had become the enforcers of the
mullahocracy. After the hostage crisis ended, with the release of the Americans,
Hashemi and several of the other Revolutionary Guard participants went on to
found the new regime's Ministry of Intelligence and security. Today it is the
country's much feared and omnipresent central spy agency, which answers not to
the President or the Majlis but to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In
the years after the embassy takeover Hashemi's ministry conducted the vicious
purges that broke the back of domestic opposition to mullah rule, and hunted
down and assassinated enemies of the revolution overseas.
As one of the ringleaders of the embassy takeover, Hashemi recruited Ebtekar
to join the gerogan-girha in the early hours of the crisis. He knew that,
having lived in a suburb of Philadelphia as a child, she spoke fluent English.
Ebtekar became the best known of the gerogan-girha, because, with her
American-accented English, she was the natural choice to be the group's
mouthpiece. Known as "Mother Mary" and "Screaming Mary,"
she was especially disliked by many of the hostages, in part because her accent
made her seem like a turncoat, a "Tokyo Rose," in part because of her
endless propagandizing. She would saunter through the captured embassy with a
camera crew in tow, urging the hostages to describe their ordeal in upbeat
terms. "You have been treated well, haven't you?" was her constant
refrain. During one such filming session, in the final days of captivity, Army
Sergeant Regis Regan got so fed up with Ebtekar that he let loose with a stream
of invective and was dragged into a hallway for a beating. Another former
hostage, Michael Metrinko, one of the embassy's political officers, summed up
his feelings about Ebtekar this way: "If she were on fire on the street, I
wouldn't piss on her to put it out."
Ebtekar has written a book called Takeover in Tehran, which is the best
explanation I've read of what motivated her and the other gerogan-girha, and
which colorfully evokes the naive, heady romanticism of the era. The book,
which has been published in Iran and in other countries around the world, is
available in English in the United States, thanks to a Canadian publisher.
"Did you know that no American publisher would publish my book?"
Ebtekar asked me, when we met in a conference room in the Ministry of the
Environment's headquarters. A chronic didact, she was wrapped from head to toe
in the same manner as the Sisters of Mercy who taught me in grammar school. She
blamed her failure to find an American publisher squarely on U.S. government
censorship.
"We approached fifty major American publishers through a well-respected
literary agent in New York," she said. All of them rejected it.
"There are publishers in the United States who specialize in publishing
tracts against the United States government," I said.
"Not big publishers," she said.
"No, they're not," I replied. "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."
Ebtekar wasn't buying it. As a member in good standing of the Iranian
government for many years, she found perfect sense in the notion of government
censorship. Revisiting the embassy takeover, she reverted to the old lecturing,
holier-than-thou manner about which I had heard so much from the hostages, and
which anyone would find annoying.
"If the real truth had been reported, things would have gone
differently," Ebtekar said, adding that if the U.S. government had not
kept "the real story" from the American public, the gerogan-girha's
decision to imprison the American diplomats, office workers, and Marines and
threaten them with trial and execution would have been supported in the United
States. She was just getting warmed up. "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." I began to feel a sudden kinship with Michael Metrinko.
Just days after this conversation, during a stopover in London on my way
home, I turned on the TV in my hotel room and was startled to see Ebtekar's
tightly wrapped face. She was being interviewed by a CNN announcer on a split
screen with Iran's newly anointed Nobel Peace Prize winner, Shirin Ebadi, a
lawyer, a feminist, and a human-rights activist. Ebtekar was talking about how
proud everyone in Iran was of Ebadi, even though Ebadi is widely known as a
determined critic of the regime-indeed, her award was a symbolic blow against
the government's repressive policies.
Under Iran's theologically inspired laws, women are not allowed to travel
without permission from their husbands. The CNN announcer asked the Iranian
Vice President how she could defend such a system.
If Ebtekar squirmed, it was only for a split second. She smiled and smoothly
segued into a windy recitation of the gains women had made under Iran's Islamic
regime.
Several days before, it had occurred to me as I finished my interview with
her husband that his willingness to talk to me might reflect an ulterior
motive. It seems that he and his wife were heavily invested in an ambitious new
vacation resort on the Caspian Sea called Cham Paradise. Hashemi showed me
slick brochures and advertisements for the venture, printed in both Farsi and
English; they were evidently designed to attract foreign visitors as well as
Iranians. He boldly predicted that soon there would be a significant thaw in
relations between Iran and the Western world, including the United States. The
resort project seemed to rest in large part on that dubious proposition.
Hashemi was clearly excited as he showed me a detailed model of the project-a
cluster of modern apartment buildings, hotels, villas, restaurants, lakes, and
other features arrayed on the tip of a peninsula. Then he had an idea.
"Perhaps, in a few years," he said, "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, and waited
for my interpreter to relay the question to him.
Listening to the Farsi, Hashemi first scowled, and then reeled with
laughter. He said to me in English, "You make a joke!"
By the time I returned to Iran in August, Cham Paradise had gone bust.
Hashemi and Ebtekar had been forced to sell their home to pay off their debts,
and the two were living with her mother-somehow, one suspects, blaming the
United States for their troubles. They were not the only gerogan-girha true
believers who had fallen on hard times. When I tried to reach Hussein Sheikh
al-Islam, the chief interrogator and the man that the former CIA station chief
Tom Ahern (among others) remembers beating him with a rubber hose, I was
informed by al-Islam's brother that he refused to speak to an American
writer-for two reasons. The first, his brother said, was that he believes an
American could never understand the "mysticisms" of the gerogan-giri.
The second was that al-Islam blames the United States for thwarting his
ambition to become a prominent Iranian diplomat. It seems that the only country
that would accept him was Syria, historically a partner in terrorism with Iran.
On my last day in Tehran I visited the Den of Spies one more time. I was
accompanied by David Keane, a filmmaker who is shooting a documentary in tandem
with my reporting about the hostage crisis. David (who is also my cousin)
wanted to shoot some film inside the compound and inside the old embassy
building itself. We stopped at the by now familiar guardhouse on the southeast
corner, and to our surprise, it had been spruced up. The walls and ceiling
looked as if they'd been given a new coat of paint, the boot prints had
vanished, and the broken-down furniture had been replaced. Another
bored-looking team of young Revolutionary Guards-this time a threesome-sat
sullenly behind the marble-veneered reception counter. Yes, we had an
appointment. Yes, we had papers-Ramin held up an imposing document with
multiple important-looking signatures. One of the guards rang up a superior to
announce our arrival, and we sat down to wait for an escort inside.
We sat for hours before a mid-level official in the management of the
compound arrived at the guardhouse. A worried-looking man in an open-collared
pale-blue shirt, he said we would be permitted to walk through the exhibit, but
no filming would be allowed. Our appointment, our document with the important
signatures, did not seem to matter.
"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 visit in December we had overcome initial resistance to allowing us
into the exhibit with a small reshveh, or tip (literally translated,
"success fee"), at which point we were given a bang-up tour. But
David had had no video camera that day. We suggested that Ramin offer another
reshveh. No, Ramin said, management of the compound had turned over since our
last visit, and the officials now in charge were new to the job and too nervous
to bend the rules. Blue Shirt disappeared, and we waited another hour before he
came back with exciting news: we would be allowed to film inside the exhibit
hall, but David would have to use the officials' own video 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? Blue Shirt left
to investigate, and returned to report sadly that they could not find their
camera. "You will have to hire a camera," he said.
"But I have a camera!" David shouted, holding up his 
Sony
model. "You can inspect it if you like."
Even the Revolutionary Guards behind the counter felt our frustration, and
they joined in the argument. "What's the big deal?" one said.
"Let them take pictures with their camera."
Blue Shirt was insistent: no, the camera would have to be rented.
Later, just as a search party was about to head off to find a camera-rental
shop, another administrator came running out with the announcement that the
official camera had at last been located. So after a long day of waiting, David
and I were finally escorted into the compound. We passed through a small pine
grove, walked past the old white two-story ambassador's residence, where most
of the hostages had spent their first days in captivity, and then were led into
a small new administrative building in the back of the compound, where tennis
courts had once been. After all the back-and-forth the official camera turned
out to be a 
Sony-exactly
the same model that David was carrying. We exchanged a round of handshakes and
thank-yous with our hosts and set off for the embassy building exhibit to begin
taping.
We had gone about ten steps when Blue Shirt came running back out.
"No," he cried. "It has been decided that you can only take
still pictures-no moving pictures."
That was when we gave up. We had already taken still pictures, on our
earlier visit. As we made our way out of the compound, crossing the sidewalk
onto Taleghani Avenue to hail a cab, the three young Revolutionary Guards came
running after us. We wondered for a minute if the procedures were going to
change yet again.
The guards all spoke to Ramin in Farsi, smiling and gesturing toward us, and
then he relayed their comments: "They want me to tell you that they are
embarrassed, that they think this is silly. They want to apologize on behalf of
their country."
Ramin grinned as the soldiers huddled around him, grabbing at him in a
friendly way. "They want me to tell you that they love America."
The soldiers flashed big smiles at us and nodded approvingly. And right
there in front of the DEATH TO THE USA sign, in front of the faded banners
denouncing "The Great Satan," one of the Revolutionary Guards raised
his thumb high into the air and said in halting English, "Okay, George W.
Bush!"
So things have not worked out quite as the gerogangirha planned. They have
arrived in a new century with the varying perspectives of middle age. The
righteous and successful see every step on their path as a correct one, and the
righteous but disappointed still have an old enemy to blame. Those with
misgivings concede the missteps of their youth, which they regret but cannot
fully disown. They failed to create the world they dreamed of, but that is an
old story. Some now accept the blame, or at least a big responsibility, for
things they would like to change.
Still, even among those who now despair over the long-term consequences of
the hostage crisis, I noticed a lift in mood when they talked about those
stirring, intense, and dangerous days. No matter how it turned out for them,
whether it made them proud or bitter, whether they feel they deserve
international praise or scorn, for one long year they had the world s most
powerful nation by the throat. At the center of the world's stage, for better
or for worse, they danced a joyful and defiant dance.