missing him and praying for him…and then she began crying. She choked up and found it hard to continue speaking. All of them, hostages and guard, started crying. Hamid let Hall listen to the tape several times.
Queen’s mysterious condition was worsening. He was still bothered by bouts of wooziness and the strange numbness in his arm had spread.
One morning he was holding a plastic cup of tea in his left hand, waiting for it to cool, when, in the next moment, it was on the floor, hot liquid splashing everywhere.
“What the hell happened?” Hall asked, helping to sop up the spill.
Queen said he hadn’t even felt the cup slip from his hand. The symptoms were strange. Why was only his left side affected? Increasingly his left arm felt not only numb but weak. It was growing limp and useless. He also had a terrible itch along the left side of his torso, so bad that at times he scratched himself until it bled. He didn’t know why or how but it felt like parts of his body were dying.
He was visited again by the local doctor who had earlier diagnosed a “twisted spine.” He had nothing new to offer and left Queen with a renewed supply of vitamins. Since he got so little exercise, and spent most of his days reclining or sitting, Queen couldn’t easily dismiss the spine diagnosis. The vitamins did seem to help his mood, but they did nothing for his creeping illness, whatever it was.
4. That’s Illegal!
On January 25, Hamilton Jordan hosted Ghotbzadeh’s two unofficial emissaries in the White House. It was a happy day. News reports that morning said that Carter’s chief Democratic rival, Senator Ted Kennedy, had severely depleted his campaign fund and there was reason to believe that a “major policy address” he had scheduled would include the announcement that he was dropping out of the race. That, coupled with the first real chance of finding a solution to the hostage crisis, gave the administration a glimpse of a break in what had been a long season of bad weather.
The first session with Villalon and Bourget in London had been disappointing, and CIA reports on the two men raised serious questions about whether they could be trusted, but Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, eager for any avenue to resolve the crisis diplomatically, had urged Jordan to pursue it further. He gave the two visitors a tour, and to bolster their own credentials the emissaries gave Jordan the tape recording of Waldheim’s abject presentation to the Revolutionary Council—they said the tape was a gift from Ghotbzadeh.
Then the two secret emissaries delivered good news. They said that Iran’s governing council had authorized Ghotbzadeh to begin negotiations over the hostages, an important step because it indicated that Iran’s government, such as it was, appeared ready to assert its authority over the student hostage takers. It hardly guaranteed a solution, because if the council disapproved of whatever agreement they worked out, it could easily claim the foreign minister had acted on his own. Ghotbzadeh was sticking his neck out, and in postrevolutionary Iran there was no shortage of people willing to chop off his head.
That conversation led to discussions that went on for several days between Villalon and Bourget, and Jordan and Hal Saunders, an assistant secretary of state. The two emissaries outlined a road map to the hostages’ release. The one thing Waldheim had brought home from Iran was a promise by the council to look kindly on the creation of a UN commission to study Iran’s grievances against America. The United States would be encouraged to publicly oppose formation of this panel, because Carter’s opposition would enhance the group’s credibility in Iran, but the administration would have to promise to stop short of blocking its creation. After visiting Tehran, conducting its investigation, and presumably validating that nation’s historical complaints, the commission would then have the moral authority in Iran to condemn the holding of hostages as “un-Islamic,” and, Ghotbzadeh suggested, the imam would respond by letting the Americans go.
Jordan interrupted to complain that even casual UN observers would know that such a commission could not be created without America’s consent.
“Let me finish explaining the idea, and then you and Mr. Saunders can destroy it!” protested Bourget.
Jordan and Saunders said that the United States might play along, provided they had assurance that the commission would lead to the hostages’ release.
“There must be some balance to this,” Jordan said. He explained that the president would be making a major concession.
“I understand,” said Bourget, “but this same commission must win credibility with the Iranians…. Don’t forget the political pressures in Iran!”
“Don’t forget the political pressures here,” said Jordan. “President Carter will have to be able to publicly explain and defend our actions to the American people. Khomeini doesn’t have to run for reelection.”
The second day’s session lasted twelve hours. The two emissaries hammered out a detailed schedule, a formal dance that they believed would lead to the hostages’ freedom. Jordan was excited; he agreed to meet with them again after they returned from another visit to Panama, where they were keeping up the pretense of pursuing the shah’s extradition.
The chief of staff’s enthusiasm was not shared by everyone in the White House. At Brzezinski’s request, council staffer Gary Sick took a hard look at the plan and concluded that it was unlikely to succeed. He saw both Bourget and Villalon as men emotionally invested in the outcome of Iran’s revolution, who knew that the continuing hostage crisis was likely to be a drag on the country for a long time and so were eager to see it end. That didn’t mean they couldn’t be effective, but their analysis of events in that country seemed to him full of “wishful thinking.” Sick was also aware of how easily Ghotbzadeh could be left on a limb. If others decided to backtrack, the foreign minister could end up as scapegoat, accused of collaborating with the Great Satan. Sick wasn’t worried about Iran’s foreign minister, whom he saw as “crafty and very much concerned about his political skin.” In fact, he saw Villalon and Bourget as Ghotbzadeh’s hedge—he could safely back away from the agreement himself at any point claiming that he had never authorized the two. Sick recommended that to make the process work, they would need to get beyond these “well-meaning but possibly naive intermediaries,” and deal directly with both Ghotbzadeh and Bani-Sadr. Brzezinski was even more skeptical. He had a better sense than most in Carter’s inner circle of the emerging reality in Iran, that Bani-Sadr, Ghotbzadeh, and the rest of the “government” in Tehran were nothing more than a temporary dispensation. If Khomeini wasn’t at the other end of the talks, they were irrelevant.
Jordan remained sanguine. When news broke a few days later that six of the American embassy workers, Mark and Cora Lijek, Robert Anders, Lee Schatz, and Joe and Kathleen Stafford, who had been hidden by the Canadian mission in Tehran since the day of the takeover, had been spirited out of Iran, the news there was received with dismay. “That’s illegal!” one of the students at the embassy complained to a Western reporter. Ghotbzadeh had the gall to accuse Canada of “flagrantly violating international law” for helping six accredited diplomats escape being kidnapped and held hostage. The furtive presence in Iran of the six who had escaped capture at the embassy was the reason the State Department had refused from the beginning to announce the correct number of staffers there. One State Department correspondent had complained, “Goddamn it, how can you
As the month ended, President Carter’s patience seemed finally about to be rewarded. Bani-Sadr, the finance minister who had been outspokenly critical of the students, won more than 70 percent of the vote for president. Khomeini was admitted to the hospital with heart trouble, and in the speech he gave approving the voters’ choice he appeared to be preparing the people for his passing. “Be without fear, no matter whether a person comes or a person goes,” he said. It appeared as though Iran was on the verge of another tectonic shift. Daily there were new reports from different sources that a solution to the hostage crisis was imminent. Kennedy had not withdrawn from the presidential race, but it looked as if things might finally be breaking Carter’s way.
There was now a steady parade of Americans making unofficial visits to Tehran, ostensibly seeking some resolution of the crisis. The effect of these visits, nearly all of them by leftist activists whom the students regarded as allies, was to validate the hostage taking and legitimize the captors’ allegations.
