Guests of the Ayatollah

smaller ones “mullahs” and the larger “ayatollahs,” and took some pleasure in crunching them underfoot.

Chocolates, books, and occasional packages from home were delivered by their most faithful visitor, the Swiss envoy. On one call he passed along, laughing, an official request from the home office in Washington. It was standard procedure for the heads of embassies to produce annual employee evaluations for the department’s files. Even though the entire Tehran staff was detained under fairly remarkable circumstances, the efficient bureaucracy of Foggy Bottom still wanted its annual “fitness reports.”

For the next few days, Laingen and Tomseth worked up assessments of their colleagues. At the end of each they wrote, “This is being written in Tehran. The recipient of our report is not here because he’s being held hostage. So he cannot have any direct input.”

They sent the reports back with the Swiss envoy on his next visit.

It was more apparent every day that the one unmistakable consequence of the embassy seizure had been to tilt the balance of power in Iran toward the clergy. At the time of the revolution it was unclear how the new Iran would shake out, but voting for the Majlis in May had produced an overwhelming victory for religious hardliners and had further isolated such secular leaders as Bani-Sadr and Ghotbzadeh, whose powerlessness had been fully exposed by their failure to get all the hostages transferred to government custody. The new leader of the Iranian legislature, Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, dismissed the hostage issue as a low priority, and stated that it would not even be discussed until July.

The only contact between an American and Iran’s leadership that summer occurred when an audience with the imam was granted to Dick Gregory, who had dropped forty pounds fasting for the hostages’ release. The comedian/activist advocated a solution that would bring the majority of the Americans home, leaving only the most “suspicious” behind to stand trial as spies. Bani-Sadr, for his part, believed that President Carter was still plotting to destroy the revolution and saw conspiracies everywhere. Despite their political differences, both the embattled Iranian president and his radical religious opponents imagined a White House completely obsessed with Iran. Since they considered the United States not just amoral but evil, they developed stunning hypotheses of American deceit. Bani-Sadr accused the United States of sending teams of assassins to find and kill its own captive countrymen in an effort to bring further ignominy on Iran. Increasingly, he blamed America for the whole mess, and, in time, would convince himself that the United States had actually planned and instigated the takeover of its own embassy, and that the Muslim Students Following the Imam’s Line were either dupes or directly employed by the CIA.

When Bani-Sadr had said, “We will live with the hostages,” it alarmed Laingen. With religious authority clearly entrenched, there were regular reports of sweeping executions—dozens of “coup plotters” or “spies” were dispatched at a time. Ayatollah Khalkali held multiple public executions on the streets of Tehran, and boasted that he had personally dispatched to Allah in just three months a thousand “counterrevolutionaries” and four hundred common criminals for drug violations. Victims were put to death for homosexuality, adultery, and drug dealing as well as political crimes. Troops opened fire on thousands of leftist demonstrators as they marched in the street toward the U.S. embassy on June 12, killing five and injuring three hundred. These vicious excesses went well beyond the crimes of the shah, and the purges were just beginning. Khomeini issued an ominous call for a “cultural revolution” to rid Iran of remnants of monarchical and Western influence. Iranians from all walks of life were denounced as spies or collaborators, and many were shown “confessing” their crimes on television prior to their executions. Laingen wondered what possessed a clearly doomed man to do such a thing. Why would even a real enemy of the regime give his captors the satisfaction of admitting everything before execution? Did he do so in the hope that it would earn him clemency or protect his family and friends from arrest or persecution? It was a subject of more than just casual interest to him. Many in the Majlis were still calling for trials of the American “spies.” What would he do when his turn came?

All this was accompanied by increasing talk of putting at least some of the hostages on trial. Ever since the failed rescue attempt, spy fever had seized the country. Dozens of military men were executed for their alleged role in aiding the planned American “invasion.” One woman turned in her husband, who she said had confessed to her that he worked for the CIA. There was new outrage in Iran in June when a young man walked into a Tehran police station and announced that he had just hung his twenty-three-year-old younger sister, Amaz, because his family had discovered that she was five months pregnant by Sergeant Mike Moeller, one of the embassy marines being held hostage. Moeller had been questioned in detail about the woman on Easter Sunday and admitted he had known her. Amaz was a regular at parties the marines had held in the small house Moeller was renting—they were not allowed to have alcohol on the embassy grounds, and the marines had not yet been moved to the Bijon apartments behind the complex. Moeller knew that several marines had engaged in sex with Amaz but denied that he was one of them. The authorities claimed that the unfortunate woman had specifically mentioned Moeller in her diary, and the marine suggested it was only because the parties had been held at his house. The brother who killed Amaz received an outpouring of public sympathy; Moeller faced charges for engaging in an “illegal sexual affair.”

The episode fed the predatory image of Americans, and thus served an important political purpose. Facing increasing opposition from ethnic minorities and secular factions, and having discovered an apparently well- organized military plot to overthrow the revolutionary government, Khomeini resorted to a familiar tactic. He blamed all opposition and betrayal on secret American meddling and whipped up anti-American displays. On July 4, hundreds of thousands of Iranians marched in Tehran to protest continued American efforts to undermine their revolution.

Countrywide celebrations marked the death of the shah three weeks later, but for the hostage takers his passing was irrelevant; indeed, for most of the students the demand for his return had been purely rhetorical from the beginning. “Larger issues have taken his place in the negotiations that have yet to begin,” Laingen wrote. More than a year after overthrowing the shah’s government because of its brutality, an even more brutal boss was on the throne, proclaiming his own version of divine right. Laingen wrote:

There is no doubt that the clergy are now in the saddle, and they are determined to exploit their current opportunity to entrench themselves as deeply and firmly as possible, all this out of that group’s genuine conviction that Iran’s problems stem from its failure to follow the precepts and practices of Shia Islam in all aspects of life. Hence the drive for “purity” and “cleansing” of the body politic of all contrary tendencies, not least the exterior manifestations of aping Western ways and the pernicious (in their view) penetration of Western cultural influences that have exposed Iran to weakness and that threaten the Islamic way of life.

It seemed clear to Laingen that this consolidation of power was not just happenstance, and because the embassy takeover had so strengthened the hands of the mullahs, it must have been engineered, or at least steered, by them.

The Tehran Times

of the past two days has carried excerpts from an interview with the celebrated cleric Mousavi Khoeniha, the clerical link with the “students” at the embassy since the day of the seizure and, as it is now much clearer, the link before that, too, in the planning of the seizure. Khoeniha’s insistence that the ARK [Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini] had not been informed before the seizure of the students’ plans. Said he: “We knew it would have been incorrect for the leader of our revolution to know in advance what we were going to do.” That, he said, would have been “politically unwise.” Later, “We simply did not think that our action would have such grave international consequences.” (Obviously not. The gentleman is obviously too shallow to have any such comprehension.)

It is old stuff, but it raises the question anew: Khoeniha was the link between these “students” planning the act, and who else? Who else among the clerics, and in the ARK’s entourage, knew about it in advance? It is too much to expect me to believe that there were not others.

Laingen still struggled to keep up appearances. He was, after all, the highest ranking American official in Iran. From time to time, in his official capacity, he hand-printed letters to Iran’s officials, if only to remind them that he and the other hostages were still there.

At the end of June he wrote Bani-Sadr.

Dear Mr. President,

Today’s press had reported you as deploring what you describe as the fundamental hostility of the United