taking to have been a mistake from the beginning. Tabatabai was a veteran diplomat and knew well that the documents seized at the U.S. embassy revealed nothing more than the routine, prudent espionage conducted at diplomatic missions everywhere. Now, as the one-year anniversary of the embassy takeover approached, as Soviet troops built up in Afghanistan, as world opinion continued to condemn Iran, as economic sanctions, although hardly crippling, began to have a noticeable effect, and as Saddam Hussein’s military might massed on the nation’s western border and increasingly menaced Iranian forces inside their own country—a helicopter carrying President Bani-Sadr would nearly be shot down by Iraqi fighters in mid-September—it was all too clear that Iran would only become further isolated and vulnerable if the hostage standoff continued. While popular opinion still responded enthusiastically to anti-Americanism and calls for trying the hostages as spies, more practical elements in the country’s leadership, including some in the clergy, realized they could no longer afford to indulge in this warm bath of popular anger. Unlike the most devout of the mullahs consolidating power, these men were not entirely willing to leave their future in the hands of Allah. Iran had, for instance, started buying those desperately needed parts for their American-made jets from Islam’s presumed archenemy Israel.
Speaking with his brother-in-law Ahmad Khomeini one evening early that fall, Tabatabai again expressed his impatience with the hostage crisis. He admitted storming the embassy had had its purposes, but that “it has become a quagmire. I would like to try and end it,” he said.
“What is your idea?” Ahmad asked.
“If you endorse me, if you support me, I can find a way.”
Tabatabai said that he was friends with Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the West German foreign minister, and that through him he could arrange for private talks at the highest level of the American government. It was critical that the talks remain secret, because any public move toward an agreement with the Great Satan would trigger the wrath of Iran’s religious conservatives and could bring down catastrophic reprisals. Only someone with connections like Tabatabai’s would dare to initiate such discussions. Even he was frightened.
“What do you want?” Tabatabai asked his brother-in-law. “What should we expect America to do for us in return for releasing the hostages?”
Ahmad said that his father would be satisfied if the United States would express remorse or apologize for its historical role in Iran, unlock Iranian assets in America and withdraw any legal claims against Iran arising from the embassy seizure, and promise not to interfere in the future. This represented a significant retreat from the long-standing demands for the return of the shah and all his wealth. Tabatabai invited the West German ambassador to his house in Niavaran, an affluent suburb in north Tehran. The Iranian host dismissed his bodyguards early so that there would be no one to note the coming and going of the Germans. He asked the ambassador to quietly convey the new list of demands through Genscher to the White House.
Ever since the failed rescue mission, Carter had been at a loss about how to approach Iran. The debacle had, in the peculiar logic of this crisis, placed the United States on the defensive. There was little or nothing for Iran to gain by holding the hostages, especially with the shah dead and buried. Most of the monarch’s wealth had been moved from American banks, so the demand for the return of his wealth was moot. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance was replaced by Senator Ed Muskie, and the United States waited for Iran to make the next move. Even the slightest hint of a feeler got immediate and serious White House attention.
As Carter would note in his diary on September 10, “Ed Muskie called, and said he must see me immediately and alone. I told him to come over. He brought Chris [Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher] and I called in Zbig [Zbigniew Brzezinski]. We had a message through Genscher from Iran, to which I responded affirmatively.”
The proposal seemed to Carter designed to succeed. It represented a significant shift in Iran’s position, and other than the insistence on an apology the demands really did nothing more than undo the steps taken by the United States in retaliation for the hostage-taking. But who were they dealing with? Who was this Tabatabai? Even if the Germans vouched for him, what did that mean? Their earlier dealings had been with the elected president of the country and its foreign minister, neither of whom, it turned out, had any real power over the situation. Hard experience had demonstrated that there was only one Iranian in a position to deliver the hostages, and that was Khomeini. If Tabatabai could prove he spoke for the imam, the United States would take the proposal seriously.
In Tehran, the brothers-in-law knew they had Ayatollah Khomeini’s support, but even with that there was still the chance that the newly empowered
“Can you give me a guarantee that you can sell these things to the
Rafsanjani said he could.
So Tabatabai met again with the West German ambassador inviting him once more to his home at night and dismissing his security guards, and told him that the Americans should listen to a broadcast speech by Khomeini scheduled for three days hence. In the speech, the imam would mention the same four conditions Tabatabai had conveyed.
Three days later, Khomeini gave a long, rambling speech, at the end of which he enunciated Tabatabai’s four conditions for ending the hostage crisis. Journalists around the world correctly interpreted Khomeini’s conditions to be a major shift on Iran’s side of the impasse, but the White House played down the importance of the remarks. America was suffering a kind of hostage fatigue. Dick Gregory had just returned from Tehran, fifty pounds lighter from his months-long fast, and after outlining his own solution to the crisis, which essentially called for Carter to capitulate to every one of Iran’s demands, he began a doctor-supervised one-man march on Washington. His skeletal frame—he was down to under one hundred pounds—symbolized the country’s exhaustion and sense of futility over the matter. According to polls, Carter and Reagan were running neck and neck in the upcoming election, where the country’s attention was increasingly focused. Carter dispatched Deputy Secretary of State Christopher to meet secretly with Tabatabai in Bonn at Schloss Gymnich, a private palace owned by the West German Foreign Ministry.
Christopher was shocked to discover a tall, slick, urbane man in a well-cut tweed jacket who spoke with none of the overheated rhetoric they had come to expect. Nothing about the encounter with Tabatabai was what he and his entourage had expected. This emissary was pleasant, agreeable, and unfailingly polite. As they moved into a room for formal discussions, both Christopher and Tabatabai offered to let the other go first, and then the Iranian noted that the room they were about to enter had a Persian rug and took Christopher’s hand, “Let us step on this Persian carpet together, hand-in-hand…. Let us forget the past, start from now, and go into the future.”
His German was fluent, and he spoke to Christopher through a German translator because he had not dared bring a Farsi interpreter with him from the Foreign Ministry in Tehran—there was too much risk of a leak. It was hard to believe that this man with manicured fingernails, who held his cigarettes gingerly in the old theatrical manner, between the thumb and first two fingers, was a representative of the fierce mullahs governing Iran. There didn’t seem to be an ideological bone in his body; he was strictly pragmatic. Tabatabai was particularly interested in opening the gates for spare military parts and wanted that to be part of the deal. Over the next two days they hammered out an agreement to end the crisis, one that met all the new demands save one: the United States would not be issuing an apology. Both men agreed to take the proposals home for approval.
Tabatabai was excited. He prepared an eight-page account of the agreement in preparation for the flight home. He had flown to Bonn on a private plane owned by Iran’s Foreign Ministry, but when he arrived at the airport for the flight back to Tehran he was told his plane could not leave. War had broken out.
Saddam’s bombs crushed Tabatabai’s initiative. Iranian officialdom immediately blamed Iraq’s aggression on the United States. For nearly a month, the Carter White House waited for word from Tabatabai but there was none. It started to look as if the hostages would have to wait out this war.
As the American presidential campaign moved into the home stretch, it was watched with great interest from Iran, by both guards and hostages. Early on, the public had rallied around Carter, and his poll numbers were high, but they had begun to decline in early 1980 and, following the rescue attempt, they had plummeted. People seemed to feel sorry for him, which translated into respect but not support. His stewardship took on a sickly cast,
