Guests of the Ayatollah

Mohammad Hashemi, another of the primary architects of the takeover, rose to become deputy minister for information, Iran’s second most powerful intelligence official. Mohsen Mirdamadi was serving in the Majlis before he and other reformers were crossed off the ballots by the mullahs. Mohammed Reza Khatami, speaker of the Majlis and brother of Iran’s former two-term president, was one of the original planners of the takeover, and among other student leaders who have served in the Majlis are Asgharzadeh and the infamous guard and interrogator known to the hostages as “Gaptooth,” Hussein Sheikh-ol-eslam, who was primarily responsible for translating the seized documents and is the man who took a rubber hose to Ahern and Daugherty. Sheikh-ol-eslam reportedly blames the United States for his inability to pursue a career in diplomacy. It seems the only country that would accept him as ambassador was Syria. It may well be that America has had a hand in this, but pursuing a career in diplomacy after seizing and holding any diplomatic mission hostage for more than a year would be like trying to join an exclusive club after first urinating on its front steps.

We tried to approach Sheikh-ol-eslam through his brother, a psychiatrist, who reported back that there was no point in talking to American journalists. He said his brother believed that I could never comprehend the “mysticism” of the event, which is probably true.

Once celebrated as national heroes, the gerogan-girha are today viewed critically from both ends of Iran’s political spectrum. Those on the left, who want to topple the mullahs and create a true democracy, rightly blame the students for turning their revolutionary dreams into a religious autocracy. On the right, religious extremists attack the old students as opportunists and celebrate only the “pure” gerogan-girha who after the takeover heeded the imam’s call to the martyr brigades and perished with most of the rest of their generation in the war with Iraq. Conspiracy buffs on both sides suspect today that the gerogan-giri itself, which helped prompt the disastrous Iran–Iraq War and twenty-five years of international troubles for Iran, was a secret CIA plot, which makes the students either stooges or, at worst, American agents. To Americans this is laughable, but in Iran it is taken seriously by many, even well-educated people.

Reza Ghapour, a young fundamentalist “scholar” who recently compiled a book illustrating this theory of the takeover, told me with a straight face and strong voice that the CIA was responsible for installing and preserving the shah, for engineering his overthrow and secretly planning his return, for propping up the provisional government that followed the coup and fomenting the national unrest that ultimately undermined and toppled it, and for secretly engineering the seizure of the “den of spies” and keeping fifty-two Americans imprisoned for more than a year.

“Aren’t some of these things mutually contradictory?” I asked. “For instance, why would the CIA wish to foment trouble for a provisional government it was secretly supporting?”

Ghapour smiled sweetly.

“You must view the world through the lens of Islam to see the logic of these things,” he said.

I heard the same idea several times. Once from Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the former president of Iran who was elected during the hostage crisis and who eventually fled to Paris—accused of being a CIA agent himself— where he lives today under protection of the French police. (His foreign minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, who had warned Hamilton Jordan that he was sticking out his neck by engaging in secret talks with America, was convicted of plotting against the state and executed in 1982.) Bani-Sadr is of the school that believes earth-shattering events generally do not happen spontaneously, and finds it hard to accept that a group of college students cooked up by themselves a protest with such profound consequences for Iran, not to mention his own life. “There needs to be a person who is the intermediary who receives the project and can transform that project into a revolutionary one that is passed on to the students,” he says, naming as his prime suspect Mohammad Mousavi Khoeniha, the relatively unknown cleric who served as the so-called spiritual adviser to the gerogan- girha. Bani-Sadr thinks Khoeniha was put up to it by the CIA.

I also heard the theory from a liberal magazine editor and critic of the current regime, a worn-looking man with a concave face and tobacco stains on his fingertips, who argued vigorously, “If you consider the event backwards, from where we are today to the point twenty-five years ago when the takeover took place, and you consider who was hurt most by it and who most benefited from it, then you would have to conclude that the answer is Iran in the first place and America in the second place.”

He went on for a while, outlining the details of his hypothesis, and then waited with a pleased look on his face as the whole torrent of Farsi was translated to me. I said nothing in response, so he asked, “What do you think?”

“I think you’re crackers,” I said.

My translator looked at me quizzically.

“Just use the word ‘crackers,’ I told him.

The editor seemed confused by my response but nodded sagely.

The wild conspiracy theories suggest a recognition that the embassy takeover was a mistake but an unwillingness to admit responsibility for it. Some, though, are ready to do that.

“To my mind, the taking of the embassy was emotional but ill considered,” said Alizera Alavitabar, a professor of public policy who did not take part but who enthusiastically supported the takeover when it happened. “I personally was very naive at that time. For example, sometimes I thought that if I would get a chance to have an interview on American television, I could tell them what their administration had done to us and soon we would have all the American people behind us…. In those days I thought you can build a paradise out of the world. My utopia was a society of mysticism, Sufism, and love, in addition to brotherhood and equality. I never thought of equality only for religious people. I also never believed in discrimination against women. I always thought men and women are equals…. [The takeover] strengthened and endorsed the radical movements and ideas in Iran instead of liberal ones…. It promoted fundamentalism. Fundamentalism was not the main drive behind our revolution. Modernism was. Bear in mind that all of this impact was not foreseen. If you want my opinion today I should say that if I had the same mind I have today, I would not support that action, but if you take me back to the same time, same social environment, same age, and same views, I would be supportive of the takeover again. I am not the same age with the same ideas and the conditions are different therefore I am not happy with what happened.”

“Do you ever wish it had never happened?” I asked.

“You know, I am not sure if that would be a good wish. As I said, if you take me back to the same time and condition I would say go ahead and attack the embassy. In those conditions it was inevitable. There would have been an emotional reaction toward America anyways…. The society was so ready for it…. But considering the things that happened afterward, it wasn’t to our benefit…. It kept us unified and together in a time when there were conflicts in the society, but the cost of it was high.”

So ambivalence and conspiracy-theorizing have left the gerogan-girha themselves well known, but hardly cultural heroes.

“At the time, I was so happy my friends and I went three nights in a row to the embassy and stayed up all night long,” said a bookseller who operates a street stand in central Tehran. “It was fun. There was food and chanting and marching, boys and girls. Now, I don’t know. I’m not sure why it happened, or who planned it. I do not see the hostage takers as heroes.”

Mohammad Hashemi, one of the student leaders, who recently stepped down from his powerful position in the Intelligence Ministry to become an entrepreneur developer, dismisses such talk with an impatient wave of his chubby hand. Seated before a big color map of the world in his office several flights up from a wet, busy street in downtown Tehran, he served small glasses of tea and chatted jovially. Today he is an animated middle-aged fat man, dark, short, thick, and wide, with great round cheeks, a goatee framing voluptuous pouting lips, aviator-style glasses tinted faintly orange, and a wild spray of bushy gray hair that widens from his ears down to his round shoulders. He was talkative, imperious, animated, and proud.

Hashemi was eager to put the episode in the past but breezily unapologetic.

“One of the characteristics of the Iranian people is that they are strongly against oppression and injustice,” he said. “Second, our pride is very important to us. We might die from hunger, lose many advantages, but we will never sacrifice our dignity.” His role in the takeover was just an early step on a path to respect and power in his country. He is proud not only of what he and the others did but how they did it. “We knew that there is an end to everything, like there is peace after every war,” he said. “We wanted it to be a hostage taking without any kind of