1977 had built close ties between the Torrijos regime and the Carter administration, and the dictator had recently done the administration a favor by agreeing to accept the shah.
In a nondescript brick office building Jordan was introduced to Marcel Saliman and to Villalon and Bourget. Since his initial meeting with the men, Saliman had flown to Tehran and seen Ghotbzadeh, confirming for himself that the link promised by the two French-speaking visitors was real. Despite all the public rhetoric to the contrary, Saliman now told Jordan, Iran was eager to begin quiet talks about the hostages. What the two unofficial emissaries from Paris had suggested was that Iran be permitted to file legal papers in Panama seeking the extradition of the shah. The request would go nowhere, Saliman promised, but the process would provide cover for the secret negotiations.
It was a slender thread, but the Carter administration had few other prospects. The new year had begun with bewilderment and disappointment. The president had turned his efforts in December to the United Nations, where the administration had mounted a full-court diplomatic press on Iran. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim had agreed to personally intervene, and with the prospect of draconian economic sanctions in the balance it was hoped that Iran would bow to the weight of world opinion. Hopes were also high because the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan seemed to powerfully illustrate the threat posed by the great bear to the north, and now east. Soviet forces could easily push into Iran and grab the rich oil fields of the Persian Gulf; that had always been a big part of the logic in making the shah’s army and air force effectively a regional branch of the U.S. military. Now, without American help, Iran’s only ally was Allah.
These threats amounted to nothing in the febrile atmosphere of Tehran, however, where the alliance with Allah was considered very real and entirely sufficient. Instead of a breakthrough, the dignified Austrian diplomat, despite being wreathed in the prestige of the world body, had encountered nothing but suspicion and hostility. One Iranian observed the gaunt secretary-general “trembling like a leaf in the autumn wind” on an enforced tour of a graveyard to view the plots of those martyred in the revolution. He was escorted around Iran as a prop in the ongoing propaganda war. One morning on TV he was shown meeting “victims of SAVAK torture sessions,” a room filled with the disabled and deformed, many of them victims not of the secret police but of accidents and birth defects. Death threats, angry denunciations, and riots chased Waldheim from Iran a day before his mission was supposed to conclude. He had met with the Revolutionary Council, but Khomeini refused to see him. Waldheim returned to New York shaken and empty-handed—“I’m glad to be back,” he said, “especially alive”—even though from the White House’s perspective he had all but groveled before the mullahs. That impression would be reinforced weeks later when administration officials received a tape recording of Waldheim’s session with the council; in a memo to Carter, Hamilton Jordan would describe the secretary-general’s presentation as “apologetic, defensive, and at points obsequious.” The students, holding forth from their conference room at the so-called den of spies, called the secretary-general’s visit “a vague and suspicious trip,” and denounced him as “an American pawn.”
“We are not afraid of economic sanctions,” a student spokesman said. “They are not important for us or our people. We can stand it.” His comments apparently reflected the public mood accurately. On January 5, an estimated one million Iranians marched in Tehran to demonstrate steadfast support for the students. The hostages would go nowhere until the United States handed over the shah.
It was a sentiment shared by at least some Americans. A group of ministers from the United States had visited Iran seeking a “spiritual resolution” of the crisis and returned home in January with words of encouragement for the captors. The Reverend John Walsh of Princeton, New Jersey, called for the shah to be returned to Iran immediately for a show trial and what would be certain execution.
“Let justice roll,” he said.
Having thumbed their nose at the prospect of punitive sanctions, Iranian revolutionaries then had the pleasure of watching international willpower swoon. Waldheim himself argued to Carter that sanctions would only strengthen Iranian resolve. When Khomeini threatened to cut off oil exports to any nation that voted for sanctions, oil-dependent Japan quaked. The Soviet Union then twice vetoed the measure at the UN Security Council. Thus did the world organization dedicated to diplomacy acquiesce in the kidnapping of diplomats. When Carter proposed an economic boycott outside the auspices of the toothless UN, this, too, met with a cool reception. European nations found one reason after another to back away from holding Iran accountable. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, the captive American foreign mission was expendable.
The only bright spot came at mid-month, when Iran’s Revolutionary Council decided to expel all American reporters from the country, accusing them of “biased reporting.” As far as the White House was concerned, any easing of the media’s fixation on the story was a relief.
So Jordan was more than ready to grasp at this straw from Panama. A burly Georgia lawyer with a round baby face and a youthful crop of dark hair, he had signed on years earlier as a driver in Carter’s first, failed campaign for governor of Georgia. With a combination of native shrewdness and mutual loyalty, his role had risen with the candidate’s political fortunes, becoming Carter’s chief political strategist and managing his successful campaign for the White House. Unpretentious, informal, and blunt, his impatience for the niceties of wielding power in a tripartite government had made him few friends in the capital, where he was regarded by some as an arrogant amateur. But Jordan was a skillful behind-the-scenes horse trader, a man willing, despite his relatively provincial background, to throw himself into the most complicated matters, always with the complete trust of his boss.
Jordan told Saliman that even beginning an extradition process might spook the shah.
“If he gets scared and asks to come back to the States, we’d have to accept him,” he complained. Jordan had worked hard to ease the ailing former monarch across the border.
“Don’t worry,” said Saliman, promising that the extradition process would be purely for show. “Besides, I don’t even think the Iranians want him back.”
He explained that the return of the shah to Iran, a year after his departure, would set off a big fight among Iranians over what to do with him. “They wouldn’t know whether to torture him, shoot him, or hang him,” he said.
Six days later, Jordan was in a London hotel room meeting again with Villalon, who explained how the embassy seizure had strengthened the hand of religious extremists in Iran against more moderate, democratic elements, who were eager to see it ended. Bourget arrived later that day from Tehran, and the two men—Villalon, a dandy with jet-black hair combed straight back on his head, and Bourget, who looked like a hippie lawyer, his head framed with bushy shoulder-length hair and a long thick beard—delivered their message for obtaining the release of the hostages: “Return the shah to Iran.”
Jordan’s hopes deflated.
“It is absolutely impossible!” he said, visibly irritated. Among those around Carter, Jordan had been the one most sanguine about this clandestine avenue. Now he felt duped.
The more they talked, however, Jordan realized that the demand had been offered only as a necessary opening gambit. Again, Villalon and Bourget explained that the remnants of Bazargan’s crowd and the more secular men who had worked for Khomeini in Paris prior to the revolution were still in the fight. Though Abolhassan Bani-Sadr had been removed from the Foreign Ministry, he still held an important post and was a serious candidate for president, as was Ghotbzadeh, who had once been his boss in Paris. Under the new constitution, the president of Iran held considerably less power than the equivalent position in the United States, because the entire new government would remain subordinate to Khomeini, but the office was still important. Both Bani-Sadr and Ghotbzadeh, they said, privately deplored the taking of hostages but had to be careful about expressing that opinion publicly. The best they could do was applaud the takeover and suggest that the point had been made, as Bani-Sadr had already done. Ghotbzadeh was not prepared to go that far, but he was ambitious. An American concession of some kind might improve his standing prior to the vote, which could lead to a breakthrough. The moderates were, in any event, willing to talk. But before even considering a release of the hostages, they were demanding an international commission to study the crimes of the shah.
Here was where a strategic retreat by the White House might break the stalemate, they suggested. Carter had already said that he would not oppose such a commission, but only after the hostages were released. If he were to back off that position and allow the UN commission to visit Iran and meet with government officials, the student captors, and the hostages, there was a chance that the situation might improve.
The meeting ended with an agreement to continue talking. Bourget impressed Jordan with his access to Ghotbzadeh by picking up the phone in the hotel room and promptly getting the Iranian foreign minister on the line.
