phase of the revolution was to bury the passion for freedom and democracy under fears of an American-led countercoup. America was the Great Satan, and Iran-loving, former Peace Corps volunteer Limbert one of its lesser devils. He had come to Iran almost twenty years ago to change the world. Well, it had changed all right.
He did not know exactly what was happening in the larger world, or what efforts the United States might be making to win their freedom, but he understood that President Carter had few options. At first he had thought that Khomeini, as the ruler of a state, could not allow a diplomatic mission to be arrested and held hostage. Now it was clear he had either overestimated or underestimated him. The part Limbert did not know was how this embassy stunt was affecting the local political situation. His perception was, in a way, stuck back in the heady first few days and weeks. But as the weeks wore on the stated purpose of the takeover—demanding the return of the shah—had receded, and an underlying purpose was becoming more clear.
Taking the embassy had toppled the provisional government, and as the country voted to endorse the language of a new properly Islamic constitution, the students and their extremist political allies were using documents and testimony wrung from the embassy staff selectively as propaganda. Most of the papers seized at the embassy were historical and did show the close relationship between the U.S. embassy and the shah’s regime, but many of the most recent filings were biographical. In their effort to make sense of postrevolutionary Iran, the staff collected information about many newly prominent Iranians, most of it gleaned from newspapers or other innocuous sources. Many of the files included little more than a name, age, job description, and contact information. But for some time it had been the policy to routinely classify even the most cursory file as “Limited Official Use,” if for no other reason than to help keep the collection together by restricting its distribution. In the climate of runaway suspicion that caused the embassy seizure, that designation of secrecy was enough to label any Iranian in the file as a collaborator or spy. As the weeks went on, the students and their clerical advisers would begin to produce some of these documents to discredit politicians and even religious figures they opposed. Any hint of a “secret” association with the Great Satan was enough to destroy a career, at the very least. It could also lead to prison and execution.
Limbert hadn’t known either Kupke or Graves, and because they were not allowed to speak he didn’t get to know much about them in the three weeks they would spend together. Day after day he did his small exercise routines, read, ate his meals, slept, and talked with his guards. He and his roommates could hear birds outside and the voices of children playing in nearby yards. They were able to convince some of the guards to leave one window open a crack to get some fresh air. For some reason, Graves was kept supplied with tobacco, and the smoke from his pipe hung in the air day and night. Through the walls they sometimes heard other American voices, but usually only a few words. The only break in the routine came when they had to use the toilet. A guard would blindfold Limbert and lead him down a flight of steps—he counted thirteen, and remembered it, in case he would ever have to go down them himself in the dark and in a hurry. In the bathroom was a shower, an unbelievable luxury, which he was allowed to use twice during his stay there. He thought a lot about escaping, but even though his mastery of Farsi would have given him an edge over most of his colleagues, it was winter and he had no shoes, no warm clothes. If he managed to slip out of the house, where would he go? Who would help him? Like most of the hostages, Limbert had concluded that the United States was not going to make a rescue attempt. If they had the capability or will to do that, it would have already happened.
It was in this room that Limbert pieced together from bits of radio reports that drifted in from down the hall that thirteen of their colleagues had been released.
7. The Largest Thefts and Exploitations in History
It would be hard to tell which came first, the unrelenting press attention or the public obsession. The story of sixty-six Americans held hostage by a distant, forbidding theocracy provoked indignation but also piqued the country’s imagination. Scott Miller, the station manager of KOBL in Oberlin, Ohio, had himself locked in a recording studio with only a sleeping bag. He spent part of every day tied to a chair, telling listeners he wanted to share the experience of the hostages.
At the National Cathedral in Washington, bells tolled each day at noon, once for each day of the lengthening captivity. In Lawrence, Massachusetts, all of the churches around its city hall sounded their bells fifty times each day at noon to remember the American captives. In Columbus, Ohio, protesters marched to express their anger at Iran, chanting, “Nagasaki, Hiroshima, why not Iran!” A popular country tune of the radio, “Message to Khomeini,” predicted that Iran would be turned into “an oil slick.” A man from Flushing, New York, climbed to a dangerous perch atop a West Hollywood billboard to protest American inaction, and ten thousand cabdrivers in Manhattan drove for a day with their lights on to express their solidarity with their captive countrymen and -women.
It was not hard to see where all this anger was heading. Carter’s public support was still high but voices of criticism and blame were already being heard. A former CIA director, Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger, criticized the president for not immediately setting a deadline for the hostages’ release, although he was vague about what consequences there ought to be for failing to meet the deadline. Ronald Reagan, likely to be one of the leading Republican challengers in the 1980 election, had already blamed Carter’s “weakness and vacillation” for causing the crisis in the first place, and dropped larger and larger hints that if he were in power America would not be pushed around by a “demented dictator” and his “rabble.” In his own party, Carter was cruising high in the polls ever since Senator Kennedy had shot himself in the foot with his conciliatory remarks, and although the Massachusetts senator was in the race to stay he would never recover.
Carter was considering tough options. In an exchange of memos with Brzezinski on December 21, the president directed that the National Security Council “list everything that Khomeini would not want to see occur and which would not invite condemnation of the U.S. by other nations.”
By now the families of many hostage members were becoming regulars on nightly news programs around the country, and so far there was not a negative word to be heard from them about the administration’s actions. They knew nothing of a possible rescue mission, and most were reassured by the president’s promise to take no action that might jeopardize their loved ones. Penne Laingen, the charge’s wife, was seen as an unofficial spokesman for the families, and her comments on TV were uniformly supportive and upbeat—she might as well have been working for State Department public relations. Dottie Morefield and her family were so conspicuous in San Diego that they were invited by the owners of the city’s pro football team to be special guests at a
Mindful of the promise to those families, and his department’s responsibility to its employees, Vance continued to argue against applying any pressure on Iran. He consistently counseled patience, pointing out that Iran was a nation in turmoil, its future course still uncertain, and new opportunities arose nearly every day to reopen diplomatic channels.
“Cy, you always have another diplomatic channel,” said Brzezinski.
On the tenth of December, NBC-TV aired an eighteen-minute interview with marine hostage Billy Gallegos, the first with a hostage broadcast in the United States. Clean-shaven and wide-eyed, he looked like a frightened, big-eyed boy.
Before this, the only other hostage voice heard was that of Jerry Plotkin, the middle-aged Californian who had come to set up a personnel agency—matching American workers to jobs in Iran—and had made the mistake of stopping by the embassy on the morning of the takeover. He had been allowed to speak on the phone for seven minutes to a Los Angeles radio station in late November, delivering remarks that had obviously been written for him, right down to the standard Islamic preface, “In the name of God.” He had also called for the return of the shah, and went on to woodenly read, “Let the world know no tyrant or dictator can ever find safe harbor in the United States. I am well both mentally and physically. We have been treated humanely. The students treat us kindly and with respect. The quality of the food is adequate and we are given three meals a day. The hostages’ living area is clean and each of the hostages has a mattress, blanket, armchair, and table.”
So far, the students seemed to see the American press as an ally. It made for a strange situation. The United States was, in effect, in a stalemated state of war with Iran, but while fifty-three of their countrymen were being held prisoner, dozens of American journalists moved freely in Tehran, scrambling to get access to the compound and the captives. ABC’s Peter Jennings was among them, wandering the streets to solicit the opinions of
