Guests of the Ayatollah

embassy could be viewed as an aftershock, especially with that atmosphere of anti-Americanism. For students who were nationalists or some that were religious, we were in an environment where even the air you breathed was anti-American. So this was not a strange event to take place. We should have stayed with the plan. We failed in enforcing it the way it was meant to be. If everything was going by plan, the mass media, our society, and the whole world would have helped us to pass on our message.”

Instead, the takeover poisoned ties between the two countries and created a situation that benefits neither.

“All this is like a dysfunctional cycle which needs to be stopped at some point,” Asgharzadeh continued. “I do not like to bring back all those bitter memories because it will not help the situation. Instead I think that both countries need to change their policies and behavior. Changing policies and behavior is accepted and understandable in international law, but if one wants to exterminate the other, it is the right of the other to take any kind of action for defense and survival…. I hope that the people of the United States, intellectuals and politicians, understand the situation that we were involved in during those days and what caused us to take such action. We know that an event like the hostage taking could not and should not be repeated again and we are willing to come to a better understanding and relationship today.”

Among the old hostage takers, Asgharzadeh is not the only one who has found himself at odds with the current regime. On the day before I was supposed to interview Mirdamadi, another of the students’ founding members, he was beaten by stick-wielding Basij. The slightly built, balding man was delivering a speech at a university when his assailants stormed the lecture hall and attacked him. A photograph on the front pages of the next morning’s newspapers in Tehran showed his head and chest bloodied and bandaged.

Abbas Abdi, another gerogan-gir who became a journalist, has been jailed repeatedly for criticizing the regime and for advocating renewed talks with the United States. He spent eight months in solitary confinement in 1993, and on both of my visits he was serving a four-and-a-half-year term in the notorious Evin prison—where some of his former hostages were kept—for publishing poll results showing that 74 percent of Iranians favored renewing ties with the United States. The newspaper for which he served as editor in chief, Salam, was banned in the late 1990s, and several years ago Abdi got into trouble with the government when he attended a much publicized meeting in Paris with one of his hostages, Barry Rosen, the embassy’s press attache, in an attempt to begin what Abdi described as a “healing process.” The meeting of the two men fell well short of a warm and fuzzy reunion, however. Rosen condemned the seizure of the hostages and Abdi refused to apologize for it. Indeed, Abdi’s old captives feel little sympathy for his current plight. Dave Roeder told me, “It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”

Perhaps the treatment of reformers like Mirdamadi and Abdi explains why some of the gerogan-girha tend to speak in stilted euphemisms, even when they are discussing events now a quarter of a century old. Mohammad Naimipoor, a friend and political ally of Abdi’s who was also one of the gerogan-girha, would say, “What happened overall between Iran and the U.S. could have been handled much better. Even the taking of hostages, in my opinion, could have been handled much better.”

When we interviewed Naimipoor, in December of 2003, he was an elected member of the Majlis, but both he and Mirdamadi had been crossed off the list of eligible candidates by the Guardians Council. Thickset and graying, Naimipoor at forty-eight regards himself as “an old man.”

“Because of all the stress and pressures we have had to live with, we have all aged well beyond our actual years,” he told me. Several months after our interview, he suffered a debilitating stroke. “The taking of hostages could have alerted everyone—the world, the Americans—about what had taken place in Iran. I don’t think American politicians really care about ordinary people and nations, and do not want to be troubled by them. Instead they would rather deal with governments and rulers. That is why I think after the taking of hostages the Americans did whatever was in their power against Iran.

“For example, I cannot conceive of the war with Iraq without the American role and involvement [in support of Iraq]. This attitude has only deepened the sense of hostility and concern among our people. I think a solution to the U.S.–Iranian relations requires rather delicate methods, which are beyond the reach of the rough and harsh methods used by politicians, who much too readily resort to power and to force. I think even now that the U.S. is [the sole superpower]. All the evidence shows that if they continue in their present course they will only create further resentment among third world people, and especially among Muslims. Under such circumstances, even with normal diplomatic relations in place, the relations between people and the U.S. will not be normal and appropriate. In effect the U.S. will not have a place in people’s hearts. In an era when we all agree we are living in a global village and in the age of communication, in my opinion, staying on this course is politically shortsighted.”

Naimipoor was hopeful that some of the initiatives proposed by former President Khatami would renew a dialogue between the United States and Iran, but he has been disappointed by America’s more confrontational pose under President Bush. At the same time, he welcomed the U.S. invasion of neighboring Iraq and the toppling of Saddam.

“Let me say something unambiguously. The Iraqis used to live under absolute terror during Saddam’s reign,” Naimipoor said. “During a trip I made to Iraq I could clearly sense and detect the fear in the very fiber of ordinary Iraqis. I had lived under the shah, and had been a political prisoner of the SAVAK. I had experienced [torture] with my own body. But my impression of Iraq was far more bitter and disturbing. The vast majority of Iraqis are certainly happy that the Americans have come and saved them.”

The former hostage taker would like to see ties between America and Iran reestablished.

“I do not see the U.S.–Iranian relations as a taboo at all,” he said. “I think this taboo should be broken, and I have done whatever was in my power to do this. I think nations should have relations with each other. Even now I believe it is in our national interest to establish this relationship in a reasonable manner.”

If anyone at the time had a clear vision of what the embassy takeover’s full consequences would be, it was Mohammad Mousavi Khoeniha, the man Bani-Sadr believed engineered the whole thing. Khoeniha was the black- bearded young cleric to whom the students took their plan in October of 1979. He has long been a somewhat mysterious figure, the clerical hand behind the scenes. His criticism of the regime in recent years has pushed him to the periphery—his newspaper has been banned—and when I sought an interview with him he sent word, “Consider me dead.” He had resurrected himself enough by the time I returned to Tehran to meet with me, and we did so in his spacious, sunny office two flights up in a leafy neighborhood in the north of the city. His long black beard had turned white. He was a small, precise man dressed in an elegant gray tunic and wearing a white turban.

“We didn’t foresee [the provisional government’s] resignation,” Khoeniha said. “We merely had thought that it would oppose us, and that the imam either would decide to accept the interim government’s request, and in that case would order the students to evacuate the embassy compound, or support us. But that the interim government, as a sign of opposition, would go to the degree of resigning, we hadn’t thought of that. We had so many bitter memories from the government of the United States that such actions seemed absolutely legitimate and reasonable to us.”

If there was concern about activities at the embassy, why wasn’t the diplomatic mission simply asked to leave?

“Our goal was not expelling the Americans from Iran, but [because] in those days, when the shah was allowed to enter the United States supposedly for medical treatment, our analysis was that this was nothing but an excuse and America would make the shah an axis for all the people who had fled Iran, both military personnel and civilians. With the shah an axis for those fugitives, America would organize some measures against the Islamic Revolution there. We made our move in order to prevent such an action.”

In 1999 Khoeniha was charged with publishing lies and classified information and was found guilty by a special court for the clergy. He was given a three-and-a-half-year prison term and was sentenced to be flogged, but because of his sterling revolutionary credentials the penalty was reduced to a fine. Despite his feelings about the current regime, Khoeniha remains a staunch defender of the embassy takeover, and he still thinks the United States owes Iran an apology for meddling in its affairs. As I was leaving his office, located over the former offices of his newspaper, I noticed a gray four-drawer metal filing cabinet in the corner with a combination lock on the front. It bore a plate with the inscription “Property of the General Services Administration.”