Guests of the Ayatollah

Khoeniha smiled when I asked where it had come from. It was a souvenir from the U.S. embassy.

He dismissed as immaterial the popular American theory of an “October surprise,” the theory mounted most compellingly by former Carter adviser Gary Sick in a book by that name. Sick shows that several of Reagan’s advisers, most notably his campaign manager William Casey (later CIA director), intervened through Iranian friends in the summer and fall of 1980 in an effort to prolong the hostages’ ordeal until after the November elections. Sick makes a strong case that such contacts were made, and the efforts were confirmed by Khoeniha, several of the other hostage takers, and also Sadegh Tabatabai, the former provisional government official who instigated the talks with Warren Christopher that eventually led to the hostages’ release. Like the cleric, they found the Reagan campaign’s efforts a revealing peek at the cynical underside of American politics but said they had little bearing on Iran’s decision to hang on to the hostages until Carter officially left office.

Despite Carter’s image at home of being conciliatory to a fault, and the most human rights–conscious president in modern times, during the 1978–79 revolution he had come to personify for Iranians the Great Satan, and, as we have seen, where the gerogan-giri was concerned, symbols mattered more than reality. Reagan may have been perceived as more of a hard-liner, but to Iran he merely represented a change, and a triumph. Carter’s defeat was tangible proof that the hostage takers had changed history; they had brought down the leader of the free world. It didn’t take any push from Reagan’s minions for them to see an advantage in waiting until after the elections to free the hostages.

Still, despite that obvious advantage, Iran was desperate enough in its need for military parts by the fall to consider releasing the hostages early. Thus Tabatabai’s efforts in September, blessed by the imam himself, which he believes would have borne fruit before the U.S. Election Day were it not for the outbreak of war with Iraq. Even with the distraction of the war, Iran’s leadership made one last effort to tempt Carter just days before the vote, floating a complex new offer and urging the president to respond immediately via a press conference. It seems apparent to me that neither of these efforts would have been made if Iran had already struck a deal with the Reagan campaign. Likewise, if such a deal had been made, and if Iran had already gotten what it wanted from the president-elect, why keep the hostages after Carter’s defeat for almost three months more? The nation was in desperate need of its military parts, and the students themselves were weary of serving as jailers. In this case the most likely explanation seems the obvious one. The deal to release the hostages was complicated, and it took three months of difficult negotiations to achieve.

All of the hostage takers I interviewed said that the decision to wait until Carter officially left office was deliberate, a final insult to the man they had propped up as the representative of the devil on earth.

That’s the memory of the most famous of the hostage takers, Nilufar Ebtekar, whom I met on my second trip to Tehran in a conference room upstairs in the Ministry of the Environment. In the six months since I had met with her husband, Mohammad Hashmei, their ambitious resort venture had gone bankrupt. They had sold their home to pay off their debts and, according to Ebtekar, were living with her mother.

The Iranian vice president is a plump middle-aged woman with a soft round face and pretty smile, who was wrapped from head to toe in the same manner of the Sisters of Mercy who’d taught me in grade school. Most of the hostages hold a special scorn for “Mother Mary,” or “Screaming Mary,” which may be undeserved. She has written a book about the episode called Takeover in Tehran, which is the best explanation I have seen of what motivated her and the other students, and evokes the naive, heady romanticism of the time. Harsh feelings about Ebtekar seem to stem in part from her fluent, American-accented English, which casts her perhaps undeservedly as a “Tokyo Rose” figure, as though anyone with such clear familiarity with America who would take part in denouncing it was somehow a traitor. During the hostage crisis, she was often encountered by the hostages with cameras in tow, trying to elicit comments from them that would frame their ordeal in favorable terms. She would ask leading questions, such as, “You have been treated well, haven’t you?” Michael Metrinko summed up his feelings about Ebtekar in this way: “If she were on fire on the street I wouldn’t piss on her to put it out.” She has a smarmy, self-certain manner that anyone would find annoying. And she has not moderated her views of the United States one bit.

“Did you know that no American publisher would publish my book?” she asked me.

I had purchased it at a bookstore in Pennsylvania without any difficulty, and hadn’t noticed that the book had a Canadian publisher. She was convinced this was a result of U.S. government censorship.

“I originally intended to publish the book in the United States,” she said. “And we approached fifty major American publishers through a well-respected literary agent in New York.” She was very confident that the book would be published. Then, after two or three years, she felt there was something that prevented the book from getting published.

“There are publishers in the United States who specialize in publishing tracts against the United States government,” I said.

“Not big publishers,” she said.

“No, they’re not. Big publishing houses tend to buy books that they think will sell well enough to make a profit. I suspect they didn’t think yours would.”

She wasn’t buying it. The notion of government censorship made more sense to her than the idea that a self-serving book by a generally despised Iranian about a twenty-five-year-old incident would lack commercial appeal.

Ebtekar seems to have missed the uglier parts of the Iranian revolution. She still has a warm feeling about the gerogan-giri and talks of it in dreamy, idealistic tones.

“It was more or less clear for all of us that this action would prevent further interference of the Americans in Iranian affairs,” she said. “At least it would for some time delay the different plots that they had against the Islamic Revolution. This was clear in our minds. This action would serve as an impediment to American policy in Iran. As it took longer and as different developments took place, both in Iran and at the international level, the students understood how important and how decisive this action was after changing the direction of affairs in Iran and in the region, and also how inspirational it was for many other freedom-seeking movements in the world. Because at that time, the general idea was that either governments have to be under American influence or under Russian influence, Soviet influence at that time. So either the East or the West, nothing in between. Freedom- seeking movements were usually just somehow affiliated with the East. Socialist or communist, I suppose. But what happened in Iran was affiliated to the East and the West. And I think this event, the actions the students took, was in a sense quite inspirational for many freedom-seeking countries in the world and for many nations who were looking for a sense of identity.”

She lectured me further about the universal principles of democracy. She still feels that the reason why the American public did not rise up as one to support holding scores of its fellow citizens hostage was U.S. government censorship: “The government, the American administration, was keeping the American public unaware of what happened in Iran.” If the truth had been reported, she believes, things would have gone differently.

“Because if you go back to the basics, if you go back to the principles, if you go back to the Declaration of Independence of America, the Constitution, what the students were speaking about were common values, values that are appreciated by people in America, in Iran, in Europe,” Ebtekar said. “And I think that many of the ideas and the concepts that the students, Iran, the Islamic Revolution had in mind were concepts very close to the concepts inherent in the American Constitution, the Declaration of Independence. What were we after other than independence? We were after the right to determine our future. We were after the right to decide about our destiny. That’s all. And we were after religious principles, which are highly regarded in American society.”

Just days after this conversation, when I was in London, I turned on the TV in my hotel room and was startled to see Ebtekar’s wrapped face. She was being interviewed on a split screen with a BBC announcer and Iran’s new Nobel Peace Prize winner, Shirin Ebadi, talking about how proud everyone in Iran was of her, even though Ebadi was awarded the prize for work opposing the oppressive regime Ebtekar so ably represents and defends.

The announcer asked the Iranian vice president how she, as a woman, could defend a regime that forbade Ebadi to travel to Stockholm and receive her award without permission from her husband.

If Ebtekar squirmed, it was only for a split second. She smiled and segued smoothly into a recitation of the gains women had made under Iran’s Islamic regime.