It sounded like something Laingen himself had written a year earlier.
9. Weren’t You Fed Amply?
In the interregnum, as Reagan began putting together his administration and Carter and his team prepared to move on, it appeared as if the hostage crisis was hastening toward some kind of ending, but it wasn’t clear what sort. Negotiations through Algeria had continued with Carter after his defeat, and once or twice more hopes of a settlement were fanned by news reports only to vanish again. Washington and Tehran traded final offers, and shortly before Christmas it appeared as though the talks had failed. Ayatollah Mohammed Behesti, Secretary of the Revolutionary Council, held a press conference in which he answered many questions in calm, correct English. He said that it was likely the hostages would be brought to trial, and those convicted of spying would be dealt with accordingly. Stansfield Turner, the CIA chief, advised the president on the first of December that the talks “offered little prospect of success.”
As the hostages entered their second year of captivity, the rain and cold had come again to Tehran, and the jubes once more were filled with swift-flowing mountain water. Another year of rust had formed on the great cranes poised on the skyline over now forgotten construction projects. The hostages had become little more than an afterthought. The country was at war. Iraq was raiding the pipelines and refineries of the country’s oil industry. It had set fire to the great works in Abadan during a siege of that city, doing precisely the kind of damage that American warplanes might have a year earlier if Carter had yielded to calls for punitive air strikes. Kurdish rebels backed by Saddam Hussein were fighting pitched battles against Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. The death toll that would ultimately reach a million had begun to grimly accumulate, and the country wore the gray pallor of hardship. Internally, the religious rulers continued their bloody purges of political opponents; any criticism of the regime was now treason. Gasoline and kerosene were being rationed. Many of the students involved in the takeover had left to defend their country against Saddam, a more urgent and tangible threat than the Great Satan.
Those who remained behind to supervise the hostages were no longer the darlings of the revolution and were weary of the task. The shah was dead and buried. All but the most ardent true believers had long ago concluded that the assassinations and countercoup they had imagined forming behind the embassy walls didn’t exist. Study of the “Spy Den documents” had revealed details of the considerable influence the United States had had over the shah—the embassy’s files contained records that went back decades—and showed that after the revolution the CIA and American military had tried to cultivate spies within the new regime, but this was hardly surprising. Such was the work of embassies the world over, including Iran’s. Still, the protest had served a purpose. It had helped leverage the mullahs into long-term power, a result that not all of the student planners had desired or foreseen, and it had, as public theater, spectacularly underscored an end to the nation’s old vassalage. As a show of defiance, it had been a yearlong, televised Boston Tea Party. If the past twelve months had proved anything, they had demonstrated how powerless the United States was to influence anything in the new Iran; if the embassy takeover had done nothing else, it had broadcast Iran’s total independence to the world. It had produced unforgettable images of America humbled: blindfolded hostages, burning flags, and the charred remains of airmen and helicopters in the desert, dead even before striking a blow. But Iran was now paying a terrible price in the real world for its symbolic triumph.
Of what use were the hostages now?
Carter had tried to conduct his handling of the hostage crisis from the beginning without concern for his political future, and now there was no future even to consider. It gave him solid footing for the next ten weeks of offers and counteroffers. When one of the many voices from Iran’s leadership at one point demanded a one-word answer from the president to its latest offer, Carter obliged.
“No,” he said.
They could deal with him, or they could wait and deal with President-elect Reagan, who publicly scorned the process. Reagan said little about the standoff, except to repeatedly deplore the taking of hostages, and he even refused to be briefed on the secret negotiations. Here was a man with none of Carter’s fluency on policy details, but who intuitively understood the role of theater in world politics. When he did speak, in an interview shortly before Christmas, standing with his wife, Nancy, before a Christmas tree, his face became a steely mask of contempt, the virtuous cowboy confronting Black Bart. He said that like most Americans he felt, deep down, “anger” at the very idea that demands were being made of America by “criminals and kidnappers.” Days later he said, “I don’t think you pay ransom for people who have been kidnapped by barbarians.” Both the president and the president-elect made it clear that Reagan would not simply pick up the process when Carter left office. His term would start with a clean slate, and in the brutal calculus of popular concern the hostages were an old and tired story. Throughout the campaign the Republican candidate had expressed nothing but disgust for the whole travesty, hinting that were he president nothing of this sort would be allowed to happen. With Carter it was taken for granted that he would do nothing rash, but there was no such certainty with Reagan, who with a large popular majority behind him might well consider swiftly ending the standoff. Many Americans would applaud a bold, punitive move by the new administration, even if it was a bloody one. By any calculation, most of the blood spilled would be Iranian. Thus the election results imparted a new urgency to the talks.
Carter had accepted Algeria as intermediary. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher led a delegation there after the election to present America’s formal response. It accepted all four of Iran’s demands in principle: 1) stop interfering in Iranian affairs; 2) unfreeze Iranian assets frozen after the embassy was seized; 3) remove sanctions and block legal claims resulting from the takeover; 4) block remaining assets of the shah from leaving the United States. The United States countered with a fifth demand that all of the above was contingent on the hostages’ safe return. Christopher then outlined to the Algerians the major sticking point: Iran had overestimated the shah’s missing fortune by a factor of a thousand—Iran put the figure at between $20 to $60 billion and the United States said it was closer to $20 to $60 million. There were also legal constraints on what an American president could do about the shah’s private holdings and to what extent he could interfere with the courts.
Christopher pointed out that although America could not legally seize the Pahlavi family fortune, Iran might sue for its return. The United States government also could not bar corporations from suing to recover money owed on unpaid contracts. To avoid having to convince American judges to rule in their favor, Iran responded by suggesting that the United States simply repay from its own Treasury money looted from the Iranian people. The White House acknowledged this line of reasoning, but it was unwilling to concede that the shah’s fortune was lawfully Iran’s. Carter had immediately rejected it.
In mid-December, Iran added a new demand, one that was particularly revealing and that amounted very nearly to an admission of wrong-doing. It wanted indemnity. It wanted the United States to forfeit any future claims against Iran by the hostages or their families. Since private lawsuits against foreign countries very rarely succeed, it was not a major concession, but Carter knew that such a step would close for the victims of this outrage their only legal avenue for redress. Carter directed that the hostage family organization, FLAG, be consulted, but the families were hardly inclined to hold up a deal that might bring their loved ones home. The White House accepted the demand.
What followed over the next month in Algiers was like haggling over a rug in the Tehran bazaar. The bargaining eventually boiled down to the amount of Iranian wealth deposited in American banks that Carter had locked in place the year before, weighed against the country’s outstanding debts, most of them for military hardware. Iran first demanded $14 billion in frozen assets and $10 billion in cash guarantees, then a day later suggested that the United States could expedite the release by depositing $24 billion in Algeria as a guarantee against whatever the assets proved to be, a sum that the president called “ridiculous.” Iran was, in effect, demanding $640 million per hostage. A few days before Christmas, it appeared as though the talks had broken down, until State Department officials with experience in the Middle East encouraged Carter to make a lowball counteroffer.
Christopher secretly proposed $6 billion.
And that’s where negotiations stalled. Cornered by a pack of reporters outside a grocery store in Plains, where the Carters were paying a pre-Christmas visit, the president didn’t sound hopeful.
“We explained our position very clearly through the Algerians,” he said, “and either they [the Iranian authorities] decided to ignore what we said or they have deliberately decided to make demands that they know we
