stranded at the Foreign Ministry, they were in the curious position of being both inside and outside the ordeal.
They had watched the provisional government collapse, which reduced them to being vagabond emissaries to a government that did not exist. In the first days they had been treated like diplomats, important men. They had received visitors from other embassies during the day in the ministry’s diplomatic reception room—struggling to keep themselves presentable in clothing they had worn day and night—and talked to Washington regularly by phone. Tomseth spoke fluent Farsi, so he translated the reports on television, radio, and in Tehran’s newspapers. They followed with hope and then disappointment the aborted mission of Clark and Miller. An effort at mediation by the Palestine Liberation Organization was reportedly under way, but, so far, had yielded no results.
They were not officially hostages. They had not been directly forbidden to leave for a friendly embassy, but even if they were not stopped on their way out, the practical problems were considerable. Any embassy that accepted them would itself become a target for these fanatics. How could they impose on their friends like that? And how could they just walk out on their colleagues? Staying on had its own logic. Laingen not only believed but expected that the outrage would be set right. After the failure of the Clark/Miller mission, there seemed to be no way for Washington to establish a dialogue with Iran. The crisis then worsened with a round of spiteful gestures. Carter froze six billion dollars of Iranian assets and suspended oil imports from Iran, and the imam responded by banning exports to America, which said, in effect,
They slept on sofas in the ministry’s long and narrow formal dining room and spent most of their time during the day in the reception area’s central salon, a larger room forty feet wide and seventy feet long. The wood floors were creaky, the ceilings high and hung with beautiful crystal chandeliers. It was a sunny, airy space. Large windows faced north toward the snowcapped mountains, but most days the city’s heavy smog completely cloaked the view. The ornate rugs were thin and faded with age and traffic. Unlike their colleagues, they were not bound, blindfolded, harangued, and interrogated, and they had access to the local news. Laingen, an avid tennis player, was used to being outdoors and exercising, and as the ordeal crept along through the first week, and then into another, he could not recall a time when he had been so long indoors. A kindly official in the protocol section had brought them clean socks and underwear, so they could alternate, washing the dirty underclothes in the morning and hanging them on the legs of the table leaves that were set upside down on the dining table. They could still communicate with Washington via telex, but because it was an open line they could not have candid exchanges.
Laingen was bewildered. He was a true believer in the diplomatic calling, in the power of polite dialogue between nations. Iran was clearly hurting itself more than the United States by this assault on that tradition. It was, in his eyes, blindly self-destructive and utterly unwarranted. His entire professional frame of reference had been upended. He began a diary on the eighth of November, and in its first entry asked:
Why? To what end? What purpose is served? We have tried by every available means over the past months to demonstrate, by word and deed, that we accept the Iranian revolution, indeed, that we wish it well— that a society strongly motivated by religion is a society we, as a religious nation, can identify with. Far from wishing to see this nation, this government, stumble, we wish it well and hope it can strengthen Iran’s integrity and independence.
Laingen’s sympathetic spin on the revolution was of no use now. Perhaps the hardest part of his predicament was being rendered irrelevant. Trapped in the grand halls of Iran’s Foreign Ministry, he and Tomseth had ringside seats to the unfolding drama, but Laingen felt increasingly cut off from the powers in that country and his own. Watching the unanimous chorus of hatred directed at Americans from all directions, he saw early on that the embassy takeover, if it had in fact been conducted by idealistic students (and he doubted this), had evolved very quickly into something else. Less than a week into his velvet confinement, he wrote:
We feel compelled and obliged to watch the TV news, even though the constant barrage of anti-American propaganda becomes hard to take after a while. What is it doing to public opinion out there? What’s behind it? What is its purpose? Clearly it is the product of something more by now than an “unanticipated” attack by a crowd of students. Others have clearly seized upon it and are carrying this to ends not then planned or seen. Or is our assessment of this place again flawed, as it has been so often in the past?
His new irrelevance was brought bitterly home on the twelfth, when the newly appointed foreign minister, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, meeting with his staff for the first time, needed the reception room that had become home to the stranded Americans. Laingen, Tomseth, and Howland were removed to the big dining room, and while Bani-Sadr presided over his formal introduction in the next room, the three waited alone in grand emptiness next door, their shabby presence mocking the grandeur of their surroundings and the ritual in the next room. They sat at one end of a table built to accommodate forty. One played solitaire, one read a book, and the third took a long walk around the room, again and again, making circles.
19. George Lambrakis
Having accomplished more than they could have hoped, the students were at a loss. They owned the American mission, the embassy, the grounds, sixty-six Americans, and many thousands of pages of confidential files, but what were they going to do with it? They were convinced they knew in a general way exactly what had been going on in the embassy. The intelligence scandals of the 1970s in America had provided plenty of examples of CIA handiwork against revolutionary leaders—the clumsy attempts to assassinate the Cuban leader Fidel Castro, the successful hunting and killing of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the plot to kill the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, the overthrow and murder of leftist Chilean president Salvador Allende, to name just a few. They had the example of Mossadeq in their own modern history. But whatever the current plot was, it wasn’t immediately clear. Neither the students nor the clerics advising them had any practical understanding of how espionage or even how such a large embassy worked, or what all these people now in custody had been doing inside its high brick walls.
Before storming the compound, if the students had an idea about espionage it had been shaped more by Ian Fleming than by reality. This explained their suspicion of American watches, shoes, radios, and communications equipment. But apart from the apparatus of institutional secrecy, what they had found was for the most part opaquely pedestrian, an office building and its people. In their eyes, every American inside the compound was implicated in sinister doings, as either a spy or an employee in the service of the nefarious spy enterprise. Their task would now be to unravel the mystery.
Who had they actually taken hostage? At the Foreign Ministry were the embassy’s two highest-ranking officials, Laingen and Tomseth. Among those at the embassy were the heads of the mission’s eight sections: politics (headed by Tomseth), economics (Morehead “Mike” Kennedy), security (Golacinski), administration (Bert Moore), the consulate (Dick Morefield), the ICA (John Graves), the defense attache (Colonel Tom Schaefer), and the military liaison group (Colonel Chuck Scott). Each section employed military or foreign service officers, and each had a support staff—clerks, secretaries, and several had communications specialists. The marines were under Golacinski. Koob and Royer, who had worked across town at the Iran-America Society, reported to Graves, as did the press attache, Barry Rosen. Reporting to Laingen but operating with greater independence was the small CIA contingent, station chief Tom Ahern and his two subordinates, Daugherty and Kalp, who reported directly to Langley and had their own secure communications equipment. All had perfectly ordinary “cover” jobs at the embassy, so at first the students had no idea which of their captives they were. Thus the captors assumed everyone was a spy.
In the beginning, the students lacked this overview of the embassy bureaucracy. They had an overheated, sensational idea of what an embassy did that did not account for the more mundane tasks that formed the bulk of its activity. In that sense, their prize would prove to be something of a disappointment. They hadn’t imagined someone like, say, Bill Keough, the towering middle-aged former principal of the American school in Tehran, an
