Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History (3 page)

Ironically, the shah was said to be somewhat nervous about the election of Jimmy Carter. The shah’s main concern, it seems, had been Carter’s stated goal of making human rights a central tenet of his presidency. Sensitive to public opinion, the shah was apparently concerned that Carter might think he was a tyrant. He needn’t have worried. As late as New Year’s Eve 1978, just one week before a series of violent clashes would touch off the revolution, President Carter visited Tehran and reassured the shah of America’s firm commitment by calling Iran an “island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world.” While Carter may have had good reasons to support the shah, or he had no alternative given the strategic alliance created under the necessities of the Cold War, this perceived hypocrisy did not go unnoticed by the masses in Iran. The American president was now considered to be a close friend of the shah, and it wasn’t long before crowds of angry demonstrators began denouncing Carter’s name alongside that of the shah’s.

Despite the Iranians’ rhetoric, there seemed to be some common ground between the two countries. The shah, for one, had
purchased vast amounts of American military equipment during the Nixon and Ford administrations, some of which still had to be delivered. In addition, Iran had several billion dollars deposited in U.S. banks, money the revolutionary government would desperately need to stay afloat. During the fall of 1979, Khomeini had yet to solidify his power, and the country was being loosely run by the relatively “moderate” government of Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan. In June of 1979, the Iranians accepted the appointment of Bruce Laingen as the U.S. embassy’s chargé d’affaires, and it appeared the two countries were on track to normalize relations.

Fleeing Iran, the shah spent several months as an international “fugitive,” until President Carter was persuaded to admit the deposed ruler for humanitarian reasons, when it was discovered he was suffering from lymphoma and needed emergency medical treatment. Yet even as he admitted the shah, Carter knew he was taking a risk. Khomeini had been calling for the shah to return to face “crimes,” and Carter was worried about reprisals. In a breakfast meeting at the White House with his staff, he reiterated his concerns, asking them, “What course of action will you recommend to me if the Americans in Iran are seized or killed?” No one had an answer.

N
ews of the shah’s arrival in America immediately touched off a wave of anger and paranoia among the Iranian population, which feared the United States was conspiring to reinstall him. For months, Iranian newspapers had been running fabricated stories claiming the United States was behind every setback that befell the country. Khomeini, searching for a way to strengthen his control, added fuel to the flames, calling on students
to expand their attacks on America in the hopes that the United States would be pressured to return the deposed ruler. Predictably, Iranians set their sights on the most obvious target they could find: the American embassy in Tehran.

T
he morning of November 4, 1979, had started off just like any other, and for the Americans heading to work that day there was no reason to suspect that the embassy was in the crosshairs of a massive assault. Bruce Laingen had chaired a morning meeting of the department heads, after which he, along with Vic Tomseth and Mike Howland, had gone to Iran’s foreign ministry to discuss obtaining diplomatic immunity for American military personnel stationed in Iran.

One of the first people to see the militants enter the compound was John Graves, who was the public affairs officer. Graves had been in Iran for more than a year and had been through the Valentine’s Day attack.

The press office was located just off the motor pool near the front gate. Somebody had cut the chain looped through the gate, and a large crowd of demonstrators came surging in. Most of them were women carrying signs that read,
DON’T BE AFRAID
and
WE ONLY WANT TO SET IN
—mistakenly using the English “set” instead of “sit” in the latter. The preponderance of females in the first wave was actually by design, as the militants felt that the U.S. Marines would be hesitant to fire on the women. As Graves stood by the window he watched one of the militants approach an Iranian policeman who was supposed to be protecting the embassy, and the two men embraced. Graves wasn’t surprised.

As the militants dispersed throughout the compound, the rest of the embassy personnel were slow to react. Demonstrations and crowds shouting “Death to America” and “Down with the shah” had become an almost daily occurrence, so much so that the Americans working inside referred to them as background noise. To complicate matters, the militants had chosen to launch their attack on National Students Day, an event commemorating the death of a group of students killed by the shah’s forces during a demonstration at the University of Tehran the year before. The demonstration had drawn several million students, and the planners were able to use this larger crowd to camouflage their assault.

In a matter of minutes, the militants were able to completely cut off the chancery. Staffers and embassy personnel, now fully aware of what was going on, stood on chairs to peer out windows. Some crowded around closed-circuit monitors located down in the security room. What they saw startled them. The embassy grounds were swarming with militants who were waving signs and chanting, “We only want to set in!” Then, one by one, the closed-circuit monitors went blank as the cameras were yanked out of the walls.

M
ost of the embassy personnel were calm, some even annoyed. It seemed as if the students were just going to march around the embassy grounds chanting and cheering until it was time to go home. Over and over, voices rose above the din—some with the aid of megaphones—shouting, “We mean you no harm! We only want to set in!”

Unbeknownst to the Americans, this was not some overzealous protest march but a well-coordinated assault. Calling themselves
Muslim Students Following the Imam’s Line, the students had cased the embassy for many days and had drawn up detailed maps. They’d cut strips of cloth to use as blindfolds for nearly one hundred hostages and had even stockpiled food to feed their captives.

The plan was to occupy the embassy for three days, at which point they would read a list of grievances against the shah and America. Their principal hope was that the attack would weaken the position of the moderate Bazargan government by forcing it into a tough situation. If Bazargan came to the rescue of the Americans, then Iranians would see him and other moderates in the government for what they were: puppets of the West.

Some of the militants carried makeshift weapons such as bike chains, boards, even hammers. At least a few carried pistols, contradicting later claims that the assault was completely nonviolent.

After locking down the chancery, the marines quickly donned their riot gear. They loaded pistols and shotguns and took up positions throughout the embassy. The adrenaline was pumping and some seemed eager for a fight. One lay down in one of the offices on his belly with ammunition easily within reach, sighting down the barrel of his shotgun sniper-style as he scanned the window.

Meanwhile Laingen, Tomseth, and Howland were in a car on their way back from their meeting at the foreign ministry. They had just pulled out into traffic when Al Golacinski called on the radio and told them to turn around. “There’s hundreds of people swarming all over the embassy grounds,” he said. The three realized that even if they reached the embassy, they probably wouldn’t be able to make it inside. They quickly decided that the best course of action would be to head back to the foreign ministry and try to organize help from there.

The last thing Laingen told Golacinski before signing off was to make sure that the marines didn’t open fire. If even one of the marines fired, then they would likely have a bloodbath on their hands.

“What about tear gas?” Golacinski asked him.

“Only as a last resort,” Laingen responded.

By this time, the staffers on the second floor of the chancery began to realize that the attack was more serious than they had at first thought. Some of the marines and other Americans, including John Graves, who’d been working in the outer buildings, had already been captured, and the Americans in the chancery watched from the second-floor windows as their colleagues were blindfolded, had their hands tied, and were marched toward the ambassador’s residence near the back of the compound.

Don Hohman, an army medic who was at the Bijon apartments across the street from the back gate, radioed Golacinski to tell him that a group of Iranians had broken in over there as well. Up on the fourth floor, he could hear them kicking down doors and searching the apartments below. Golacinski realized there was little he could do; he told Hohman he was on his own. (Hohman would later be captured as he tried to scale down the outside of the building.)

At the moment, Golacinski had bigger problems than Hohman; word had reached him on the radio that the chancery had just been breached. Despite the fact that several million dollars had recently been spent to fortify the building, the militants had found the structure’s one weak spot: a basement window that had been left unbarred as a fire escape. In fact, the intruders seemed to know beforehand exactly where it was.

With the militants inside the chancery’s basement, Golacinski ordered everyone, including the Iranian staffers waiting on the first
floor, up to the second floor. (The second floor was normally considered off-limits to the local employees.) In a fit of bravery or stupidity, depending on how you look at it, Golacinski then asked Laingen over the radio if he could go outside to “reason” with the crowd, which now numbered well over a thousand. Laingen told him he could do so only if he could guarantee his own safety, which he could not. Golacinski went anyway, and he was soon captured and marched back to the chancery at gunpoint.

On the second floor of the chancery, marines and staffers began piling up furniture behind the steel door. The central hallway was crowded now and everyone shared worried glances. Some of the Iranian employees started crying. Marines walked among everyone handing out gas masks. Other marines cocked and recocked their shotguns. The mood was tense.

Elsewhere in the building, a small group of Americans was busy destroying documents and dismantling sensitive communications equipment so it couldn’t fall into the hands of the militants. The order to do so had been slow in coming from Laingen, since it was hoped that the demonstration would end without incident. A few of the more enterprising staff members had already begun destroying documents inside the embassy’s ultrasecure communications room, referred to as the “vault” because it could be sealed off by a large steel safelike door. Besides housing the communications equipment, the vault, which was about twelve feet by twelve feet, also contained a barrel-like device used to pulverize documents. However, the machine often jammed, so somebody had brought in a commercial shredder that cut papers into long strips. But the going was slow, and rather than destroying the documents completely, it left a pile of strips on the floor.

The situation was deteriorating fast. The militants led Al Golacinski into the basement of the chancery and then marched him up to the second floor, where the Americans had barricaded themselves behind the reinforced door. The stairwell was filling with tear gas and his eyes stung. Someone waved a burning magazine in front of his face and he recoiled in fear. “Don’t burn me!” he shouted. Then the barrel of a gun was shoved to the back of his head and he was given an ultimatum: tell them to open this door or you die.

Golacinski shouted through the metal door, telling his colleagues that there was no point resisting. He said the militants had already captured eight Americans (this was his own assessment) and that they only wanted to read a statement and then leave. “This is just like February 14,” he said.

John Limbert, a political officer who spoke fluent Farsi, volunteered to go outside and see if he could persuade them to free Golacinski. At first the militants were surprised when he admonished them like children in their own language, telling them that the Revolutionary Guard was on the way to kick them out. They knew he was bluffing, and in a matter of minutes he was captured and given the same option as Golacinski: get your friends to open this door or we shoot you.

Laingen had by now realized that resisting further was hopeless. Despite their best efforts at the Iranian foreign ministry, he and Tomseth had been unable get the Iranian government to help. Using the telephone in the foreign minister’s office, he called the U.S. embassy and told Ann Swift, the embassy’s senior political officer, to surrender. Swift and two other staffers were manning a bank of phones in Bruce Laingen’s outer office. As the most senior official
present at the embassy, she was doing her best to keep the lines of communication open. Early in the assault, she had called the Operations Center at the U.S. State Department and had been put through to three senior officials, including Hal Saunders, the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs. Saunders was still on the phone with Swift an hour later when Laingen told her it was time to give up. “We’re going to let them in,” she told Saunders over the phone.

Realizing the seriousness of the situation, Saunders then relayed this information to President Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who then called the president at four in the morning. Carter was “deeply disturbed but reasonably confident” that the Iranian government would quickly remove the militants, much as it had on February 14.

After surrendering, the Americans in the chancery resigned themselves to their fate. When the steel door was finally opened, the breathless mob flooded in. The staffers inside the vault would continue to hold out for another hour or so destroying documents, but in the end they too would be forced to give up.

The original security plan had called for the embassy staff to hold on for two hours until the Iranian government could send help. As it turned out, the plan had worked to perfection. The only problem, of course, was that the help never came.