was false. None of the thousands of documents they seized and published supports it, and a close look at the hostages themselves reveals only a handful who were engaged in spying, and those by their own admission ineffectually. The strongest argument in defense of the takeover is that Iran had legitimate grievances against the United States, which was true, but what two nations with long histories do not have grievances? They are a fact of international life. Diplomacy exists because it offers a chance of rising above them.
Indeed, the hostage crisis, an assault on diplomacy, itself ultimately depended on diplomacy for resolution. A quarter century later Iran’s stature in the world community remains diminished, and will remain so until the act itself is renounced. Diplomats serve at the pleasure of the host nation, and when they are no longer welcome they can be readily expelled. Holding America’s emissaries hostage was a crime not just against those held captive and their country but against the entire civilized world. President Carter deserves credit for his restraint, and the world community deserves blame for failing to respond adequately to the insult. Apart from pronouncements, the United Nations and most of our allies were content to leave the captive American mission to its fate. Anyone who believes in the importance of diplomacy as an alternative to war ought to regard that failure as significant, and those who see the UN as an answer to the world’s conflicts ought to take note.
The failure of the rescue mission spurred the U.S. military to place a greater emphasis on special operations. The tactical issues that confronted mission planners in 1979 would pose little problem for today’s more flexible and multifaceted force. Veterans of the rescue mission remain bitterly disappointed about the loss of life and their failure to reach Tehran but regard the mission as a vital step into the modern age of warfare. Those familiar with the details of their audacious plan are amused by the perception of Carter as a timid commander in chief.
The Iran hostage crisis was for most Americans their first encounter with Islamo-facism and, as such, can be seen as the first battle in that ongoing world conflict. Iran’s hatred of the United States was in part a consequence of heavy-handed, arrogant, and sometimes criminal twentieth-century American foreign policy, but it was also rooted in something that has nothing to do with that. It grew out of anger over the erosion of tradition. The modern Western world does not recognize revelation and divine right as the root of government authority. The trend of history has long been away from strict tribal authority grounded in one holy book or the other, whether the Koran, the Torah, the Bible, or any other ancient text, and toward those strictly human values distilled so well in the Declaration of Independence as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The murderous terrorism that has become a fact of modern life is part of the death throes of an ancient way of life. The glorious Islamist revolution in Iran, which a quarter century later has produced a despised, corrupt, and ineffectual religious dictatorship, will wind up little more than a footnote in the long and colorful history of that nation, and probably an embarrassing one, judging by the disgruntlement of many Iranians, including at least some of the old hostage takers.
In that sense, the hostage crisis is a case study in the futility of governing a country by fantasy. The stirring symbolism of the embassy takeover excited the nation, and in that sense served the political goals of the mullahs as they skillfully maneuvered for power. Indeed, even as the hostages were flying home in 1981, Iran’s chief negotiator was proclaiming a great victory, and gloating, “We rubbed dirt in the nose of the world’s greatest superpower.” But glee over that symbolic triumph had given way months earlier to real-life concerns, namely, the urgent need for military supplies to fend off the armies of Saddam Hussein. In the quarter century since, the fever of revolution in Iran has given way to a deep and widespread resentment of religious figures who presume to dictate the smallest, most personal details of people’s lives. Extremism, religious or otherwise, is by definition the province of a small minority. God speaks to very few, if any of us. The great majority of those who are not so blessed hold beliefs tinctured with doubt and basic decency.
The ordeal of the American hostages is easy to minimize in retrospect. All of them were released, most of them physically unharmed. Given the tragic and brutal progress of the Islamo-fascists in the years since, the videotaped beheadings and horrific mass slaughters, the embassy takeover seems almost polite. But as Philip Roth noted in the brief passage quoted at the front of this book, the “terror of the unforeseen is what…history hides.” The Americans taken prisoner on November 4, 1979, did not know if they would ever come home. Every day they lived with the threat of trial and execution, of becoming victims of Iranian political violence or an American rescue attempt. They lived with the arrogance of Islamist certainty, which prompts otherwise decent men to acts of unflinching cruelty. My goal was to reconstruct their experience as they lived it. The men and women held hostage in Iran survived nearly fifteen months of unrelenting fear. They were the first victims of the inaptly named “war on terror.”
Today a number of them are trying to sue the Iranian government for damages but are blocked by the agreement the United States signed to secure their release. It seems wrong to me that any country should be bound by an agreement signed under duress, yet the administration of President George W. Bush continues to oppose the hostages’ action.
The sorry course of Iran’s revolution suggests a pattern for the whole retrograde Islamist movement currently terrorizing the world. Driven by a vague goal of establishing a Koranic utopia, a fanatical fringe allies itself with mainstream political disaffection, but instead of opening the doors to liberty and prosperity it succeeds only in creating a closed and stunted society under the thumb of so-called spiritual leaders who prove, in the end, to be merely human, subject to the same temptations of power and wealth as rulers everywhere and always. The only political system that serves the majority is one that respects true human spirituality, something deeply personal and almost infinitely various.
The Hostages
The returning American hostages stepped off a plane in Wiesbaden, West Germany, into a whirl of unexpected and, for many, unwanted celebrity. Few of them felt heroic—indeed, some wrestled with feelings of shame—but they were heroes to their countrymen whether they liked it or not, complete with fan mail, flashing cameras, unceasing demands for interviews, honors, and even ticker-tape parades. The Miami Beach Convention Bureau donated a free weeklong vacation to all the hostages; Bill Royer was given a yellow Cadillac by wealthy admirers in Houston; Kevin Hermening was awarded a free lifetime pass to Milwaukee Brewers baseball games. Major League Baseball then awarded similar lifetime passes to all the hostages. There was much discussion over whether their treatment had amounted to “torture,” with divisions among the hostages themselves. Asked about it, one marine commander took a gentle swipe at the civilian foreign service. “Torture is a subjective term,” he said. “What some soft-living State Department types might consider torture is just normal living conditions for a marine.” The ever cantankerous and blunt Bob Ode knew that nothing about his experience was heroic, “unless there is a new definition of hero as being in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Nevertheless, President Reagan invited the lot of them to the White House, where he pinned small American flags to their lapels and thanked them for their service. The State Department employees were given the prestigious Medal of Valor; Michael Metrinko got two, one for his time as a hostage and another for his daring rescue of the young Americans who had been jailed in Tabriz months before the embassy takeover. The CIA employees received both the State Department award and the agency’s Exceptional Service Medallion. All of the military hostages were awarded meritorious service medals except Joe Subic, “Brother Subic,” the army sergeant whose self-serving behavior in captivity had earned the undying scorn of most of his fellow hostages, but not all.
“I think Joe has gotten a bum rap,” says Al Golacinski, who now works as a consultant in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. “He was a young man who was just more eager than most to be the center of attention and to please whoever was in charge. He is guilty of poor judgment in a difficult situation, that’s all. Nothing he did really harmed anybody.” Golacinski feels that Subic’s public mistakes were less harmful than some of the capitulations behind the scenes of other high-ranking hostages.
They all had stories about returning to their country’s smothering embrace. My favorite was Metrinko’s, the man in love with distant lands. He was accustomed to deliberately low-key homecomings after his frequent travels. Once, after being away for two years in the Peace Corps, he had come home to Pennsylvania without announcing his arrival, taken a cab from the bus station in Scranton, entered the big old family house in Olyphant quietly through the cellar door, taken a seat in the kitchen, and just said hello to whoever walked in. It was fun watching the startled, delighted reactions. But there would be no understated return this time.
