Guests of the Ayatollah

with a number of events and issues combining to make the humble engineer from Plains, Georgia, seem well intentioned but yielding and ineffectual. His concern for human rights and his willingness to reevaluate foreign policy on those terms rankled those who believed that containing the larger evil of communism occasionally demanded unsavory acts and alliances. The decision to cede the Panama Canal back to that tiny Central American nation was both pragmatic and inevitable, but it gave America-firsters the charge that Carter was a pushover and an apologist for the nation’s power. Rising oil prices throughout his tenure dramatically revealed the United States’ growing dependence on oil imports from the Middle East and a vulnerability to decisions over which Washington had only limited influence. Ever since the 1973 OPEC embargo the world’s markets had been jumpy, and Iran’s decision to bar oil exports briefly in 1978 had panicked investors globally, even though the country accounted for an insignificant portion of oil supplies. The seizure of the embassy created more concern, and then OPEC raised oil prices 50 percent in 1979. Carter’s perfectly sensible call under the circumstances for Americans to conserve oil and gas, reasoning in his button-front sweater before a White House fireplace, produced one of those iconic images that permanently brand public figures. Here was a critical natural resource that the United States could no longer cheaply supply, controlled by suppliers it could no longer direct or even influence. It was an admission of impotence. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan at the end of 1979, it aggravated the sense of American weakness. The hostage crisis confirmed the impression. It was a prolonged national humiliation, painted in ever worsening detail by the majority of the news media, from the parading of blindfolded American diplomats before angry crowds to a series of failed diplomatic initiatives to the military ineptitude at Desert One. The previous three and a half years seemed marked with Carter’s sad, puffy face on a TV screen, earnestly administering another dose of bad news.

Ronald Reagan, whose familiar chiseled features recalled an era of seemingly limitless American potential, skillfully played off Carter’s powerlessness. The Gipper’s broad-shouldered, cinematic swagger alone was anodyne to Carter’s “malaise.” America had received enough doses of bitter medicine from the peanut-farmer president and was eager to sail off into a dreamworld of patriotic bliss. Reagan deliberately dithered when pressed for specifics, but his well-articulated dreams were rooted in the country’s fondest fantasy of itself. Arriving in a blizzard of brilliant red, white, and blue, the Republican convention was a restorative to the country’s sagging spirits, and it gave Reagan a big enough boost to overtake the president in most polls. Carter gained ground during the Democratic convention in late summer, but Reagan’s appeal and the stubborn presence of Representative John Anderson in the campaign, whose small percentage of the vote would come primarily from former Carter voters, kept the Republican candidate on top. In the final months of the campaign, Reagan refused to debate the president on television unless Anderson was included, which would likely broaden the third-party candidate’s exposure and pull.

In Tehran, the guards at Evin prison took a straw poll one evening to see who the hostages would elect for president. Limbert selected Carter. Most of his colleagues wanted Reagan, as did the guards, who considered the hated Carter’s electoral woes a great victory for Iran and glowed with satisfaction that their actions were shaping big events in the United States. They were convinced that anyone other than Carter would understand their reasons for seizing the embassy and would admit the great wrongs America had committed in Iran.

Lieutenant Colonel Dave Roeder asked one of them, “Do you know who Ronald Reagan is?”

“He was a movie star,” the guard said.

“Do you know what will happen to Iran if Reagan wins the election?” Roeder asked. The white-haired prisoner with the deep-set eyes and heavily lined face leaned forward dramatically, made a sudden expanding gesture with his hands, and said, “Boom!”

All through October, as Election Day in the States approached, rumors swirled about the hostages’ imminent release. The Majlis finally took up the issue toward the end of the month, and after days of private debate there were strong signs that the country was ready to give up the hostages. In what the Associated Press termed “rampant worldwide speculation,” there were reports from a variety of sources about a secret deal to free the hostages before Election Day, the first anniversary of the takeover. Ever since the coincidence of the Wisconsin primary, when Carter was unfairly accused of having deliberately stirred expectations for a breakthrough in the crisis to improve his chances, the White House had been under suspicions that Carter found particularly wounding. His critics made mutually contradictory accusations, that he was powerless and incompetent but also that he was somehow manipulating the crisis to his benefit. The Republican campaign all but conceded that the president was likely to produce an election eve solution to the crisis. Suspicion went both ways. There were also rumors, although less widespread, that Reagan’s campaign was somehow conspiring to prevent a hostage release before Election Day. For his part, Carter and his staff repeatedly stated that rumors of a secret deal were baseless.

They were not entirely so. Early in October, the amateur botanist Tabatabai had employed a horticultural metaphor in a secret message to Warren Christopher, reporting that the terms they had worked out in Bonn before the outbreak of the Iran–Iraq war “had fallen on fertile ground.” This message had been conveyed to Carter at a campaign stop in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

After a secret debate in the Majlis, Rafsanjani had made good on his guarantee, winning a 100–80 vote in support of the agreement despite last-minute minority efforts to scuttle it by walking out. In a speech at the end of the month, Khomeini announced that the conditions under consideration were “just,” and no less a figure than the hanging judge Ayatollah Khalkali, who only a few months back had toyed on TV with the charred corpses of American airmen killed in the rescue attempt, predicted that the hostages would soon be released, citing Iran’s desperate need for the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of military contracts that the country had purchased before the embassy seizure—the same contracts that imprisoned American military men had brought to the revolutionary government’s attention more than a year earlier.

“We want to free the hostages before the election,” Khalkali said. “We know the war with Iraq will be long. Many will die if the United States doesn’t give us the weapons we have already bought. We need the reserve parts now.”

On the last day of the month, Radio Tehran tried to put the best face on this change of heart. It announced that a “just method” for the hostages’ release had been worked out by the Majlis, emphasizing that the conditions would force the United States to make “concessions.” Iran, it seemed, was ready simply to declare victory and send the American hostages home wrapped in great clouds of cant.

The bitter struggle waged by Islam against the greatest tyrannical force in the world to raise the word of right and obliterate the signs of falsehood and aggression is the best example for humanity to follow in its journey towards right and justice. The seizure of the spy hostages was a bold human act by the heroic Iranian people, undertaken with confidence and loyalty, in order to rid the world of the vicious hand which had played havoc with the people’s dignity, freedom, and independence. The detention of these spies for a year is an unforgettable lesson for those who let themselves be seduced into working in this ill-fated field. It is also a good lesson for the tyrants who rely on such unethical methods to carry out their oppression against the people.

Matters reached a head in the days before the American elections. In Tehran, buses were parked outside the U.S. embassy, a Swedish plane poised to fly the hostages out, and medical teams assembled to receive them at the American military base in Wiesbaden, Germany. For their part, the student captors informed the Iranian government that this time they were prepared to comply with the agreement and release the hostages.

If the hostages came home, it might provide Carter the margin of victory. The hostage crisis was now all over television again as reporters got wind of a possible settlement. There were pictures of the waiting buses and plane, interviews with the hostage families, and long recapitulations of the whole sorry story as the first-year anniversary of the takeover approached. Poised, ever cheerful Dorothea Morefield, wife of the captive embassy consul, was everywhere. “They [the Iranians] want to resolve it, want to bring it to an end,” she told one reporter, gazing out softly behind her big-rimmed glasses. “I think they [the hostages] are coming home and I don’t think it will be too much longer.”

A half-hour-long special on the hostage crisis, “A Year in Captivity,” punctuated by passages from letters written by Dick Morefield to his wife and children, aired on CBS just days before the election. The special suggested that an end to the crisis was at hand, perhaps too much at hand, with moderator Dan Rather commenting, “There are questions whether the deal is being rushed too hastily for election campaign purposes.”