them confrontational and some of them conciliatory. The tune seemed to change daily. In a speech days before Christmas, Khomeini said the American captives convicted of spying “might not” be executed.
Feeding the confusion was the competitive scramble for scoops by every news agency in the world. There was no shortage of people to interview. One of the favorites was Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the most unlikely of Iranian public officials in the postrevolutionary period, a Chaplinesque little man with a peculiar pompadour, thick- rimmed glasses, and a carefully trimmed little mustache. He had been dumped as foreign minister by the Revolutionary Council but had not gone away. Khomeini had promptly named him economic minister, and as the weeks of the crisis wore on Bani-Sadr grew more and more openly critical of the embassy takeover. Originally he had spoken in favor of it, but by early December he had changed his mind. He told a French reporter that he opposed trying the hostages because such a step would violate international agreements that protected diplomats, as though taking them hostage itself wasn’t violation enough. Days later he told a Beirut correspondent that Iran ought to drop its demand for return of the shah, that the tactic had failed, and then a few days later he called for the hostages’ release. Ibrahim Yazdi, his predecessor as foreign minister, who had resigned the position after the embassy was overrun, now spoke out in favor of putting the Americans on trial, saying that such a step would provide a “strong motivating force” for the Iranian masses to rebuild their society. Ghotbzadeh, Bani-Sadr’s successor as foreign minister, set off a storm of confusion by suggesting that one step toward resolving the crisis would be to create an international grand jury to investigate U.S.–Iran relations. The proffer was promptly rejected by a spokesman for the students, who in typically colorful language suggested that Ghotbzadeh was a traitor—“On occasion he has spoken irresponsibly and led the enemy to his filthy and satanic whims.” This provoked the Ayatollah Mohammed Behesti, chairman of the Revolutionary Council, to defend Ghotbzadeh, pointing out that the foreign minister spoke not only for himself but for the council and thus for the imam himself. Dustups like these raised all sorts of questions in the White House. Who was really in charge? Who could be taken seriously? With whom should they be negotiating, the students? The Foreign Ministry? The Revolutionary Council? Khomeini?
Sadeq Khalkali, the revolution’s bloodiest ayatollah, most notorious as a “hanging judge,” told one interviewer that none of the American hostages would be executed, and then told another, weeks later, that only those convicted of spying would be sentenced to death. Then, later in December, he called for the hostages’ release.
“Every embassy has spies in it,” he said. “We cannot execute any spies according to Islamic laws. They will only be executed if they were directly responsible for ordering a murder. Even if we try the hostages, we do not want to condemn them. We want to condemn Carter and the American government.”
When the shah attempted to defuse the crisis in mid-December by leaving New York for Panama—an arrangement worked out by Washington with the obliging dictator Omar Torrijos—Khalkali announced that Iranian hit squads would assassinate the shah there, setting off weeks of anxiety throughout Central America, as nations scrambled to locate the assassins. Khomeini quickly pronounced the shah’s move to Panama meaningless, portraying it as nothing but a public relations maneuver and calling the small nation an “American puppet.” He wasn’t far from right. Hamilton Jordan had worked out the move, assuring the shah and the princess that their children could stay in the United States and continue their education, and even arranging for a mobile medical team to deliver to his new tropical home the same care the shah enjoyed in New York. Jordan also promised to help find Pahlavi a more permanent home, but soon learned how much of a pariah the former Iranian ruler had become. Only Panama and Egypt were willing.
As the stalemate dragged through its second month with no sign of solution, rumor became news. The Libyan dictator, Moammar Qaddafi, told Oriana Fallaci, “I have bad news. There is movement in the American military in Europe. The Americans are preparing parachutists and arming with armored vehicles, missiles, gas, neutron bombs, and other materiel.” He predicted the coming of World War Three. On December 11, both UPI and ABC-TV falsely reported that President Carter had set a ten-day deadline for the release of the hostages, which seemed to coincide with a statement from Tehran by Ghotbzadeh, who had called for an international tribunal to consider Iran’s grievances against the United States in ten days. It was implied that if the hostages were not released by that deadline America would launch some sort of punitive strike. An article in
The confusion mirrored events in Iran, where Khomeini’s efforts to consolidate power were being severely challenged. The nation voted in early December to approve a new Islamic constitution that handed Khomeini supreme power for life, but there were reports that large numbers of Iranians had refused to vote in protest. The persecuted secular leftists who had allied with the mullahs to overthrow the shah were now openly warring with the emerging religious regime. The hostages heard nightly gun battles in the streets. There were organized uprisings in the ethnic regions of Baluchistan, Kurdistan, and Azerbaijan, where rebel forces briefly took control of the city of Tabriz until driven out by Revolutionary Guards. The rebelling Kurds rejected a proposal by the Revolutionary Council for “self-administration,” demanding full autonomy. Many of those battling Khomeini loyalists were followers of Ayatollah Kazem Shariatmadari, one of the premier clerics in Iran, who had publicly condemned the hostage taking. Purges in the Foreign Ministry resulted in the sacking of forty-five of its diplomats, all but three of them ambassadors, from Iranian missions around the world.
Iran was not just confusing, it was confused. The only common article of faith in the country was hatred and suspicion of the United States, which was just as strong among the Shariatmadari enthusiasts as their Khomeiniite rivals. The imam blamed all the upheaval on Carter who, he said, was fomenting unrest in order to distract the world from his own crimes. On December 19, the English-language newspaper
Hatred was a useful emotional rallying point, but the country had not yet figured out how to govern itself. No formal government was in place. There were sharp divisions on the Revolutionary Council about how to respond once the shah left the United States. They debated the question for four hours without reaching an agreement. One option considered was simply to release the hostages, since the departure of the shah from America would render moot the demand for Carter to return him. This was rejected as too humiliating. Another alternative was to immediately put the embassy “spies” on trial, to punish America for not complying with the students’ demand. But this was a step that would invite further international outrage and a likely military attack by America. Increasingly, the imam seemed to be taking his cue not from the circle of mature leaders who had come to power with him but from the young hostage takers, whose popularity with the masses gave their statements political weight.
At the White House Brzezinski and Vance continued to spar. The secretary of state was resolutely in favor of restraint and the pursuit of peaceful means, while Brzezinski leaned toward the old Cold War approach, exploring the feasibility of toppling the Islamist regime and urging the State Department in a December 4 memo to feel out foreign leaders to see which “alternative leaders and rival groups within and outside Iran” they might be willing to support as alternatives to Khomeini. President Carter stuck with a middle line. Public opinion polls so far showed strong support for his handling of the crisis, the typical surge of solidarity following a threat to the nation, but the president knew the boost would not last. Early in December he had held an interagency meeting to discuss ways that the United States might bring economic and/or military pressure on Iran, but there were few new ideas. Economic sanctions depended on worldwide cooperation, which was hard to make happen even after both the UN Security Council and the International Court of Justice at The Hague officially called for the hostages’ immediate unconditional release. Both the resolution and the order were shrugged off by the student captors and Iran’s revolutionary leaders. Carter’s call for a review of every visa held by an Iranian in the United States—there were about 50,000 of them—was quickly challenged in court and halted, at least temporarily, by a federal judge. Every move the president made just seemed to underscore his impotence.
In a series of speeches in mid-December, Khomeini mocked the president.
