Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (43 page)

There the students tied Ode’s hands behind his back, blindfolded him, and put him in a room. “I strongly protested the violation of my diplomatic immunity, but these protests were ignored,” he later wrote in a day-by-day account of his captivity. Later in the day he was brought together with a group of other hostages in a different part of the building, though they were forbidden to speak with each other. Their hands were untied only when they were eating or had to go to the bathroom. “Some students attempted to talk with us, stating how they didn’t hate Americans—only our U.S. Government, President Carter, etc.” That first night, after a meager dinner of sandwiches, Ode and the others slept on the floor of the living room in the ambassador’s residence.
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The days that followed brought a bewildering series of changes in location. For a while Ode and his fellow captives were held in an equipment storage area, where they slept, still with hands bound, on concrete floors. His captors confiscated Ode’s personal belongings, including his wedding ring. Nine days after the hostage taking began, Ode found himself in what had been the ambassador’s bedroom. He and the other hostages were forced to sit on chairs facing the wall in crepuscular darkness, since the students always kept the drapes closed. “Sitting in a chair all day long was extremely tiresome.” At one point the hostages received a visit from the pope’s representative—“a fat, dumpy little Italian who tapped me on the arm and clucked ‘Molto buono’ and ‘Pazienza.’” Diplomats from the Syrian and Belgian embassies also visited. They offered no conversation, “just looked at us as though we were animals in a zoo!” On November 14, the students asked Ode and others to sign a statement asking the US government to return the shah to his homeland. (Ode noted that he was number 36 on the list of signers.)

In the weeks that followed, Ode carefully documented the mundane details of his captivity. “Venetian blinds were always closed in our room and the window was
covered inside and out with newspapers.” Lights were often left on in the hostages’ quarters at night, making it hard to sleep, and the problem was compounded by the Iranians’ penchant for all-night political demonstrations, complete with chants and speeches broadcast over loudspeakers. Armed guards stood in the hallways with assault rifles. One evening, without warning, one of Ode’s roommates—the embassy’s assistant air attaché—was taken away and subjected to an all-night interrogation; the next day he was taken away again, with no explanations forthcoming. For months Ode did not know whether he was dead or alive. In mid-December his captors gave Ode a razor and shaving cream, and he was able to shave off the beard he had accumulated in his first thirty-eight days of imprisonment. On December 14, his forty-first day, Ode was finally allowed to go outside for the first time. “Although I had been exercising in my rooms by pacing back and forth as much as possible, being out in the fresh air for the first time made me feel almost as though I had just gotten up from a hospital bed for the first time after a long period in the hospital!” A few days later he was able to persuade the students to return his wedding ring.

In the early hours of Christmas Day 1979, Ode’s captors shook him awake. His Iranian captors told him to dress and then tied his hands and blindfolded him. He and three of his colleagues were led into the living room of the embassy residence. Their hands were untied and their blindfolds removed. Their eyes were exposed to a harsh, blinding light that filled the room. TV cameras had been set up to record the scene.

The American hostages, who were now approaching the end of their second month in captivity, had been told that they would be participating in a Christian Christmas service with priests brought in especially for the purpose. Though Ode had been expecting all the hostages to be there, only three of the others were allowed to join him. (It is possible he was chosen for this select group because he was the oldest of the captives.) The men found themselves confronting a surreal tableau. “The room had been decorated for Christmas with a tree, decorations on the walls, and a table with oranges, apples, some Christmas cookies and Kraft caramels on plates,” Ode recorded. A tall man in a maroon robe turned out to be William Sloan Coffin of Riverside Memorial Church in New York, famed for his days as a high-profile protester against the Vietnam War. He sat at a piano and played a few Christmas carols for the hostages, who sang along. On the floor was a pile of Christmas cards that had been collected for the hostages by a New York radio station; Ode was allowed to take a dozen or so back to his room. And, astonishingly, there was even a meal to suit the occasion: “We were served a special dinner on Christmas—turkey, sweet potatoes (candied), cranberry jelly, cake and jello.”
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The hostage takers were hoping to demonstrate to the world their generosity toward their captives. It is doubtful that this stagecraft fooled anyone—especially in those countries with knowledge of the Orwellian propaganda that had permeated a century rich in totalitarian spectacle. The Iranians claimed to be building an entirely new kind of government, and to some extent this was true. But in the process they were also resorting, all too obviously, to models laid out by earlier dictatorships. The Nazis and the Soviets had both perverted the truth in just this same sort of way. Was this the path that Islamic government was to follow? It did not bode well for the future of the revolution.

T
he Muslim Students Following the Imam’s Line were political amateurs. They acted according to an inchoate mixture of anti-imperialist sentiment and woolly conspiracy theories. The hostages who attempted to question their captors about their motivations usually found it a frustrating experience. The young revolutionaries believed not only that the United States was controlled by Jewish plutocrats who were conducting warfare on Muslims around the world, but also that the Americans were responsible for natural disasters like earthquakes and hurricanes, all of them conjured up by diabolical scientists. One of the hostages was told by a captor that Iran and America had been enemies for four hundred years. When the American responded that the United States had existed for only two hundred years, the Iranian breezily dismissed him: Khomeini had said it, and therefore it was true.
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The Carter White House never quite managed to understand what its opponents were about, either. There were very few Americans around who had some notion of what life was like inside a Shiite seminary, and there were equally few who knew the work of Shariati or the other intellectuals who had fused the modern idea of revolution with ancient Quranic teachings. One might have argued that the paranoid fanaticism of Khomeini’s supporters and the proliferation of conspiracy theories actually had many precedents in the history of revolution. Both France in 1789 and Russia in 1917 had their share of such developments. In the Iranian Revolution, the revolutionary mind-set gained an extra boost from the red-hot emotionality of ingrained Shiite traditions of resistance to established authority. But these psychological realities seem to have completely eluded the makers and managers of US foreign policy, a group whose collective Cold War experience had left little room to contemplate the mobilizing force of religious emotion. Carter reassured himself with the conclusion that Khomeini was simply mentally ill.

The gap between the two sides quickly became unbridgeable. The Americans saw the Iranians’ blatant violation of the rules for the treatment of diplomats as
evidence that the new regime had little interest in abiding by the norms of international behavior. The Iranians viewed the Americans’ refusal to give up the shah as proof that Washington aimed to sabotage the revolution (or, at minimum, prevent the shah from revealing his American-sponsored crimes in the court of public opinion). More than three decades after the revolution, Washington has yet to establish diplomatic relations with the Islamic Republic, and there is little likelihood that either country will have an interest in doing so anytime soon. Dialogue between them has remained a near impossibility (aside from the extralegal machinations of the covert Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s or a few cursory discussions of issues of common interest, such as a brief colloquy on Afghanistan in 2001).

The divergence between the two worldviews is nicely encapsulated by the failure of Operation Eagle Claw, the Carter administration’s attempt to rescue the hostages with special-operations forces in April 1980. The effort to send a helicopter-borne contingent deep into Iranian territory ended in disaster when the choppers ran into an unexpected dust storm that forced one of them to crash-land. Several others succumbed to malfunctions, and the mission had to be aborted before any of those involved had come close to Tehran. For most Americans, the sorry tale of helicopters humiliated by a swirl of desert sand served merely to heighten the worst foreign-policy humiliation since the defeat in Vietnam. For Iranians, the whole story offered yet more proof of America’s perfidy and conspiratorial intentions. (The hostages were finally released, after long and arduous negotiations between the Carter Administration and the government in Tehran, on January 20, 1981, as newly elected President Ronald Reagan was giving his inauguration speech.)

1979 was, overall, a low point in the history of US diplomacy. It was also the year in which, in February, the US ambassador of Kabul, Adolph Dubs, was taken hostage by leftist militants. He was killed when Afghan government forces tried to free him—the last US ambassador to die on the job until the killing of J. Christopher Stevens, Washington’s envoy to Libya, in the city of Benghazi in 2012.

Americans still tend to think of the hostage crisis in terms of its effect on the United States. But what this version of events tends to overlook is the profound extent to which the story of the hostages also influenced the course of events inside Iran itself. The seizure of the embassy came at a critical moment. The revolution had bogged down in strife between the clerics and their various domestic opponents. Khomeini was growing increasingly impatient with the moderates’ criticisms of his plans for a constitution that followed his theory of theocratic rule. The seizure of the embassy, and the surge of public emotion it unleashed, gave him just the leverage he needed.

In theory, at least, Bazargan could have pushed back. All things considered, the prime minister had done a remarkable job of stabilizing the economy—though his government was harshly criticized by the leftists for not doing enough to help the poor. He could, theoretically, have tried to use this relative success as the capital for a future political career. He enjoyed wide backing among the moderates who wanted to see a stronger division between church and state, and he even had the qualified support of some of the leftist militia groups. But in reality, it was too late. By the time he left the office, it had become eminently clear to him where Khomeini was taking the revolution. Though many of his supporters urged him to campaign for the presidency, Bazargan declined, and he quietly faded into the background of Iranian politics. He died of a heart attack in 1995.

The downfall of Bazargan’s government cleared the way for Khomeini’s camp to establish their vision of a theocratic state. Ali Khamenei, the young radical who later became Khomeini’s successor, once said that the Revolutionary Council had appointed Bazargan prime minister “because we had no one else, and at that time we ourselves lacked the ability.”
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Such concerns apparently no longer applied. On November 15, the Assembly of Experts—the constituent assembly that had been convened two months earlier—completed its deliberations.
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The original draft constitution had been completely transformed. Now it made the
faqih
, the jurisprudent in chief, the centerpiece of the entire political order. It gave him power over the Revolutionary Guard, the state-controlled media, and the judiciary.
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It also gave him control over the Guardian Council, which vets candidates for election and has veto power over decisions of parliament.
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The draft constitution also made sharia the basis of the new legal system. With time the supreme leader received even more authority, including control over broad swaths of the economy and the ability to appoint the all-important Friday prayer leaders (who were already key figures in the polity that was emerging from the phase of revolutionary turmoil). The Shia clergy received far-reaching powers for the supervision of society.
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Though an Islamist of long standing, Bazargan was not a cleric, and that had made it relatively easy to dispose of him. But to those who were now determined to bring Iran under tight clerical control, the case of Grand Ayatollah Mohamed Kazem Shariatmadari, the country’s top-ranking religious leader, posed a much more serious challenge. Back in 1963, when Khomeini was under intense pressure from the shah, it was Shariatmadari, Khomeini’s senior both literally and clerically, who had seen to it that the younger man received the title of “ayatollah”—a status that made it virtually impossible for the shah to execute him. Some Iranians contend that Shariatmadari deserved the credit for saving Khomeini’s life. By 1979,
in any event, Shariatmadari was the highest-ranking cleric in Iran, and second in popularity only to Khomeini. When the revolution broke out, Shariatmadari sided with the religious opposition and supported it. But he made it clear from the start that he wanted to go back to the constitution of 1906, which had established a constitutional monarchy with a small group of clerics exercising oversight over legislation to ensure conformity with the principles of Islam. In the summer of 1979 he opposed the narrow path for the drafting of the constitution originally proposed by the Khomeinists. Shariatmadari gave his support instead to the opposition demands for an elected constitutional assembly that would have represented a broad range of views. It is a mark of his stature at the time that the leaders of the revolution felt that they at least had to acknowledge his reservations and craft a compromise. At first Khomeini’s entourage had planned for an Assembly of Experts (a constituent assembly) with only around forty members; at Shariatmadari’s urging they expanded it to seventy-three. Though the moderates congratulated themselves on their success at forcing the change, it soon became clear that the expanded assembly would do them little good. Clerics still retained a majority in the body, and the draft they presented on November 15 reflected the predispositions of the active clergy around Khomeini. Shariatmadari and other moderates were horrified by the result.