could use to make the case that they had been happy “guests” of the ayatollah.
One by one, the hostages were led in to be questioned by Ebtekar before the camera. Informed that their release might depend on their answers, most of the hostages tried to play along amiably without giving Ebtekar the satisfaction of praising their captors. Ahern just glared at her contemptuously. Regis Regan waited until the camera was turned on and then lewdly insulted her. He was hauled out and beaten. Metrinko glared at her and refused to speak. Ebtekar asked Dave Roeder, “Weren’t you fed amply? We know this was a bad situation, but didn’t everyone try to work together to make the best of it?”
“Turn off your camera,” Roeder told her. “I’m not going to say anything like that.”
The camera was turned off. Ebtekar suggested to Roeder that they do it again.
“If you do not cooperate, you will not be released with the rest of your colleagues,” she said.
Roeder refused.
Dick Morefield, the embassy consul whose wife Dorothea had become such a public figure at home, enjoyed the chance to talk politics with Ebtekar.
“We have made a decision that we are going to release some of you,” she said. “Wouldn’t you like to be released?”
“I understand that I will be released no sooner or later than when you come to the conclusion that it’s to your advantage. There isn’t much I can do that will either speed it up or delay it.”
“Have you been mistreated?” she asked.
“Do you mean, have I been tortured?” he asked. “No. I’ve been held in very close confinement under very difficult stressful conditions for a very long period of time. I have been through mock executions. But have I been beaten or tortured? No.”
She asked him what he had learned from the experience, and with the camera rolling he lectured her.
“One of the things that I didn’t learn was what you were trying to accomplish,” he said. “You were the first social revolution in history that didn’t have to compromise from the very first moment for lack of money. When you took over, you had all the money you needed to make Iran back into part of the fertile crescent. If you wanted to do reforestation, if you wanted to reinstitute the underground irrigation systems you once had…anything at all. Anything was possible because you had the money, and you threw that away.”
Ebtekar argued that all revolutions required a period of cleansing, of wiping away corrupt influences, such as Iran’s ties to the United States.
“All I’ve got to say is that nothing we could have done to you in our wildest dreams is half as bad as what you’ve done to yourselves,” Morefield said. “Your children and your grandchildren are going to curse your name.”
Bruce Laingen recorded his session in his diary.
I am shown to a chair behind a low table, on which is a microphone and a small plastic Christmas tree. My “interviewer” is none other than the celebrated “Mary,” the woman militant who is so often on Iranian TV interviewing my colleagues. She is in her usual Iranian dress, heavy scarves over her head, and with a trace of a smile. She tells me that she will ask me questions about my treatment and asks if I am prepared to respond. I answer that I assume I am. Sitting and standing around the room are perhaps 20 to 25 young Iranians, men and women; their purpose is not clear, but all of them seem by their manner to feel that they have a right to be present. I assume they are the veterans of the embassy seizure and are present tonight because they, too, sense that the climax of their operation is about to be reached, whether they like it or not.
Their manner is not hostile or friendly. We—I—seem to be regarded, as we always have been, as mere pawns in their larger purposes. Some look quizzically at me; most seem to ignore me. I make a determined effort to ignore them, and I am determined not to smile. I am angry, reflecting my frustration and anger over all these long months—now to see these “students” assembled for this final act in the drama arouses all my irritation from that long stretch of time. One wonders what is in their minds, how they really feel now, and how they regard the settlement that is probably near.
Mary begins her questioning, the exercise lasting only five minutes at most. The questions are about our treatment in the foreign ministry; my answers are as factual as I can make them, as terse as I can be without being rude. I am determined to keep my dignity and to make sure they understand that I haven’t lost it and don’t intend to do so now. The gist of my answers is that my treatment at the ministry had been reasonably fair, but that, like all my colleagues, I had suffered from the deprivation of my most fundamental human right, freedom. Answering questions about my experience in prison, I note that life there had been Spartan at best and cold. But I add that I had been glad in a sense to be taken there, since it gave me a chance to see what my colleagues had suffered.
Mary does not persist with her questions. There is no attempt to sermonize or to try to get me to acknowledge any Iranian grievances. She seems to conclude that I am not very interesting or useful, and so she coldly thanks me and terminates the conversation.
10. We Don’t Do Stuff Like That
Before Laingen and his roommates were removed from the Foreign Ministry, where they could listen to news broadcasts and receive visitors, he had learned enough to be convinced that the impasse had been broken. He had heard with pleasure the refreshingly blunt statements of the president-elect, whose use of words like “criminals,” “kidnappers,” and “barbarians” stood in marked contrast to Carter’s measured public comments. Reagan’s tough talk set off a scornful crescendo of renewed anti-American rhetoric from the pulpits of Tehran and alarmed Tomseth and Howland, who felt it didn’t help with the delicate negotiations they all knew to be under way, but Laingen felt it was a dose of exactly what was needed. Carter and Reagan, perhaps intentionally, were working a classic good cop/bad cop routine. Reagan’s words would make the powers in Iran think hard about blowing the remaining weeks they had to make a deal with the very reasonable Jimmy Carter.
This was more of the charge’s constitutional optimism, to which he clung even now when he had lost all sense of what was going on. For the first time since the day of the takeover he was cut off from all sources of outside information and from any sense of why things were happening, but his instincts were solid.
If the students believed the televised Christmas greetings they had allowed many of the hostages to make would earn them goodwill in the United States, they had miscalculated. The images of scrawny, unkempt American diplomats, held prisoner for more than a year, once again inflamed American anger and put the hostages back on the front pages. The Christmas tree at the White House remained unlit for the second year, although Carter allowed it to be illuminated briefly for a ceremony that remembered the hostages. There was renewed pressure on Washington to
At first, Radio Tehran seemed to welcome the coming clash. In a broadcast on the first of the year, it reported that Iran would be rid of the hostages soon. Either the United States would accept the country’s demands for their return or they would be tried as spies and executed. Carter took the threat seriously. He instructed his staff to prepare a declaration of war if trials began. Iran’s assets would be permanently frozen and some form of military action would proceed.
Despite the gathering clouds, or perhaps because of them, the bazaar-style haggling had resumed behind the scenes. Although he’d tendered a “final” offer weeks before, toward the end of December Carter dispatched a new initiative. In a Camp David meeting the week after Christmas with the Algerians, the president made another counterproposal that still fell way short of paying up the $24 billion Iran had demanded but that offered something new: “All claims by American institutions and companies against Iran in U.S. courts will be cancelled and nullified.” The immediate effect of that provision, which Carter once again labeled a “final offer,” would be to free Iran of the almost $3 billion in claims by Sedco, Du Pont, Xerox, and other corporations. The proposal also contained a new
