Socolow, and then the president’s press secretary tried to hint at the real concern. “I personally don’t give a good goddamn what you people do. If I had my way, I’d ask the fucking ayatollah to keep fifty reporters and give us our diplomats back. Then you people who have all the answers could figure out how to get them out.” Socolow didn’t get the hint.
The travel ban was not directed at the families of the hostages, but it had the effect of dismantling McAfee’s plan. One by one the other families dropped out. News reports in late winter and early spring were hopeful, and nobody wanted to do anything that might derail an agreement. Several of the wives, Penne Laingen, Louise Kennedy, whose husband Mike headed the economics section, and Katherine Keough, whose husband Bill was the school headmaster who had been trapped at the embassy with the others, formed their own organization in March, called FLAG (Family Liaison Action Group), and were given office space at State Department headquarters. They took it upon themselves to improve outreach to the others, to coordinate public statements and actions, and to keep reminding official Washington, America, and the world that their loved ones’ fate hung in the balance of this dispute. FLAG conducted a mission to Europe, led by Louise Kennedy, and including Barbara Rosen, Jeanne Queen, mother of the ailing vice consul, and Pearl Golacinski, mother of the former embassy security chief who, with a gun to his head, had urged his colleagues to open the doors on the day of the takeover. The group met with French president Giscard d’Estaing, and then split up for meetings with other European heads of state. Rosen, who just months ago had been daunted by the prospect of meeting strangers, traveled to Bonn and found herself in serious conversation with German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who told her that he thought the use of force by America would only worsen the crisis. He had more advice.
“Tell my friend Jimmy to get it off the front pages,” he said. “Let him concentrate on Afghanistan or even the old Russian threat, anything to stop giving the militants what they need.”
Rosen asked if he thought she should speak out against her government if it attempted to use force, and Schmidt told her no. “It is
Opposition was precisely what motivated Timm to go to Iran herself. The government’s travel ban was the final straw. It made her determined to go. She felt her son’s loneliness and isolation viscerally, and believed none of her letters to him were getting through. Reports of the visits by American clergymen had infuriated her, because it was said that the ministers had carried letters from home to the hostages. Evidently at least some of the other families had known about these ministers’ trip and had been provided the opportunity to give them letters. Why hadn’t she? How could the authorities be so careless and incompetent?
After that, the government’s sins kept accumulating. When she saw a news report that thousands of Iranians had been let into the United States since the embassy takeover, she couldn’t believe it. What was happening? For the first time in her life she felt betrayed by her own government. Nothing made sense anymore, and her confusion gave birth to suspicion. The card she had heard about had been mailed to Canada. Why had that one gotten through? Kevin was a faithful correspondent, and she knew that under these circumstances, if he was writing to perfect strangers and asking them to contact his mother, then he was certainly writing regularly to her. Was she not getting his letters because the government was intercepting them? Why would it do that? The only answer she came up with was that something must be going on that the authorities did not want her to know about. She had seen Kevin on TV reading the statement in support of his captors in December. Maybe the United States was up to something in Iran that it did not want the American people to learn. In time, she was ready to believe anything that fed her conspiracy theories. The Iranians holding her son and the others insisted that the fault for everything was America’s. Maybe they were right!
As the other families dropped out, Timm grew more committed. Because Iran’s embassy in Washington had been closed, she and her husband Ken and McAfee left for Paris in mid-April to seek visas at the embassy there.
Milwaukee reporters followed them, demanding an interview at the airport in New York, where Timm asked the United States to apologize to Iran for its support of the shah. She assumed that she would be leaving the journalists behind, but they boarded her plane with their cameras and microphones and moved into the same Parisian hotel. Timm wasn’t bothered by it; she was so accustomed to the reporters and cameras by now that as she ventured into strange lands the familiar entourage actually comforted and emboldened her. Their reports made much of her defiance of President Carter’s travel ban, but Timm said she had never been informed of it personally and, unless word reached her directly from the White House, she was going. After waiting five days in Paris for a visa, the three left the reporters behind (Iran refused them visas) and flew to Germany, where they caught a connecting flight to Damascus, and then a plane to Tehran, all the while expecting the CIA to show up at the last moment to stop them. When she heard her name being called on the public address system at the German airport, she assumed it was the long arm of the law, but it turned out to be another reporter looking for a comment. She hung up on him. This was quite a dramatic stepping out for Barbara Timm. Her son’s graduation from embassy guard training the year before in Quantico, Virginia, had been the first flight she had ever taken. When they landed in Damascus it hit her. They had left behind everything familiar. In Syria all of the people who looked normal to her got off the plane. Only Timm, her husband, and the lawyer stayed. When new passengers boarded, all the women were draped in chadors. Timm had a moment of terror.
Her fear heightened when they landed in Tehran. Waiting for them was a mob of journalists; it seemed like thousands. There were armed men in green uniforms everywhere. They and their luggage were searched. Once they cleared customs the cameras and microphones closed in on them so fast Timm thought she was going to be trampled to death. She latched on to McAfee and did whatever he suggested, even though she didn’t agree with most of what he said. Right away, for instance, he had urged her to step up before the cameras and answer the reporters’ questions.
“We’ve come this far and we have a responsibility to the world,” he told her.
Trembling with fear, Timm answered question after question before finally they were placed in a car. A pretty young Iranian woman got in with them to act as interpreter. At Timm’s request, they drove by the embassy on their way to their hotel, and when she saw it—the walls draped with hateful anti-American propaganda, more mobs of press waiting outside the front gate—she finally broke down.
They went back late that night with their interpreter without informing anyone. The media mob was gone. Student guards stood with weapons outside as well as inside the front gate at posts formed by stacked sandbags. Their interpreter talked for a few moments with the guards, and after a short wait Nilufar Ebtekar walked out to see them. The chubby, black-clad young woman launched immediately into a rant: “You are here to see the evidence of the plotting and spying your country was doing in Iran…your CIA has…the Great Satan in 1953…and it was the CIA and SAVAK that tortured and killed…” Timm tuned her out. She had heard it all before a hundred times on TV. Standing before this round-faced, diminutive, arrogant yet familiar young woman who was holding her son prisoner, Timm felt all her fear drop away. She felt rage. She was here to see her son. She had nothing whatsoever to do with the things Ebtekar was going on about. She was a mother from Milwaukee who wanted to visit with her son. Timm started to cry, and then she started to scream at Ebtekar, woman to woman.
“You don’t know what it’s like to be a mother! What would your mother do if you—you can’t be any older than my son is! And you’ve got a mother someplace. Underneath all that shit that you are wearing there’s got to be a human being someplace. You’ve got a mother. How would she feel if you were locked up in a strange country someplace?”
She called Ebtekar cold and heartless.
“You don’t even behave like you’re human,” she said. “Even these guards with their guns talk to us like real people.”
Timm was so furious that she started to turn away. She didn’t even know where she was going, she just had to get away from Ebtekar. She made it partway down the sidewalk before her husband caught up to her.
“She wants to talk to you,” he said.
When she came back, tears still running down her cheeks, Ebtekar had dropped the hectoring tone. She spoke quietly and soothingly.
