Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History (6 page)

I came dragging home on Thursday night, exhausted after working eighteen-hour days for the past four days. I was drained, and took off my coat as I walked through the greenhouse, which served as a vestibule attached to our kitchen. We often had formal dinners in there in the winter and hoped for snow each time. It was a magical place at night with the snow and a little candlelight. I loosened my tie and sank into my favorite chair in the living room, removing my shoes. Karen came to meet me with a beer and a hug. She sat down next to me on the sofa and listened while I rattled on about the job, the office, the Pentagon, everything. It was beginning to look more and more like the crisis was going to drag out indefinitely. On November 5, the Ayatollah Khomeini’s son Ahmad had praised the takeover as being in the name of the people. After that, the entire religious leadership of Iran had thrown its support behind the militants. Mehdi Bazargan, Iran’s prime minister, was forced to resign in protest, and this meant that there was only one person left for President Carter and his administration to deal with: the Ayatollah Khomeini.

I paused long enough to take a sip of beer and felt her looking closely at me. Glancing up, I saw that she had been waiting for me to stop talking so that she could tell me something.

“What?” I said. I thought on some subconscious level that she was having a problem with one of the kids.

“Honey, I’ve been thinking,” she began. “I’ve been thinking of how to get those Iranians to leave the embassy and free the hostages. How to end the crisis. And I’ve got an idea…”

“Okay,” I said. “Tell me your idea.” I leaned back into my chair. The truth was that I was only half listening—I was that tired.

“You have to kill the shah,” she said.

I turned to face her. “I’m all ears,” I said.

3

DIPLOMACY

The first few weeks of November became something of a blur for me at the CIA as we worked on getting the advance team up and running. We were meeting with the chief of the Near East Division, Chuck Cogan, his deputy, Eric Neff, and his branch chiefs to get organized and figure out what the U.S. options were. Out of those meetings evolved the division of labor. In a crisis situation such as this, a nation has four options to review: overt diplomacy, or trying to engage the government of revolutionary Iran; military assault; secret diplomacy; or covert action.

From the beginning, the Carter administration faced a number of challenges. When Khomeini and the Revolutionary Council threw their support behind the takeover, there was basically nobody for the U.S. government to negotiate with. Carter tried sending two emissaries, but Khomeini refused to allow them to even enter the country. With overt diplomacy off the table, Carter then turned to his military planners, who gave him a similarly bleak
assessment. If the United States were to launch a retaliatory strike, the Iranians might execute the hostages. The chance of rescue also seemed remote. Geographically, Iran was extremely isolated and the U.S. embassy compound was located in the heart of the capital city. It appeared there would be no way to get the rescuers in and back out without the Iranians knowing.

At that point the president settled on a two-track strategy of trying to ramp up diplomatic pressure, while giving the military the green light to work on contingency planning for a rescue. Under no condition would the United States hand over the shah.

In keeping with the first part of his strategy, on November 9 the president halted all shipments of military materials and spare parts to Iran. Then, on November 12, he cut off America’s importation of oil from the country (about seven hundred thousand barrels a day). And on November 14, when word got out that the Iranians were trying to withdraw the nearly twelve billion dollars in deposits the shah had placed in American banks, Carter signed an executive order freezing the money.

The effect these measures had was minimal. Iran, for its part, escalated the war of words, demanding that the United States return the “criminal” shah and his assets, and warning America that if any rescue attempt was made, the hostages would be executed and the embassy blown up. In a speech given before a roaring crowd of supporters, Khomeini goaded Carter, saying, “Why should we be afraid?…Carter does not have the guts to engage in a military action.” And if it came to that, Khomeini claimed that the whole nation of Iran was ready to die as martyrs.

One of the biggest problems that Carter would have to soon face was the fact that normal diplomatic maneuvers—international
pressure, the threat of being branded an outlaw state, and so on—had no effect on Iran. For Khomeini, a medieval-style prophet convinced that his dream of an Islamic Republic was divinely inspired, no sacrifice was too great to achieve this goal, including sullying the international standing of his country. Faced with such a fatalistic perspective, the career diplomats in Washington were soon at a loss. It was almost like dealing with aliens from another planet.

U
nderstandably, as the days wore on and the impasse continued, it wasn’t long before the public began doubting the president’s resolve. And while the Carter administration was cautioning restraint, protests and violence toward Iranians erupted all over America. In one surreal instance, Hamilton Jordan, President Carter’s chief of staff, remembers driving past a demonstration outside the Iranian embassy in Washington, where American police were holding back an angry crowd. It was the irony of all ironies. Here was the United States protecting Iranian diplomats, while at the same time in Iran, American diplomats were being held captive and abused.

How could the president stand by and do nothing while sixty-six Americans were in danger? There was no shortage of critics, including political foes of Carter who used the moment to score points by decrying him as weak and ineffective.

News coverage of the crisis was relentless. From day one, the event had become a media circus, with hundreds of journalists from all over the world descending on the U.S. embassy in Tehran to point their cameras and pontificate on the nightly news. It’s clear that early on the militants viewed the media as an ally and counted
on them to beam their message into America’s living rooms. This, of course, led to an odd situation in which American journalists roamed freely about the city while sixty-six of their fellow countrymen were being held hostage. Most of the news anchors would set up for their nightly broadcasts right outside the embassy’s gates while nearby crowds chanted, “Death to America” and “Down with Carter.”

One of the reasons for this frenzied coverage was the highly personalized nature of the crisis. The hostages came from different parts of the country and had friends and family who could be interviewed, all of which gave local news outlets a chance to weigh in on a national story. One local radio station in Ohio was somehow able to call the embassy and speak with one of the militants, who identified himself as “Mr. X.” At another radio station in the Midwest, the station manager spent a portion of the day tied to a chair in his studio to better communicate to his listeners what it felt like to be in captivity.

The family members of the hostages were repeat guests on talk shows and radio programs. And with each appearance, the echo chamber increased. Carter was criticized for not being bold enough, and for allowing the shah into the country. One of his most outspoken critics was Dorothea Morefield, the wife of Dick Morefield, who was the embassy’s consul general. She repeatedly criticized Carter for not having evacuated the embassy before he had allowed the shah to come to New York.

In one instance, Mike Wallace of
60 Minutes
was granted an interview with Khomeini. The questions had to be submitted beforehand, and when Wallace tried to go off script the imam refused to answer. Throughout the interview Wallace was extremely—almost excessively—respectful of Khomeini, which rubbed the Carter administration the wrong way.

The Iran hostage situation was also the prime subject for Ted Koppel’s ABC show
Nightline
, which began four days after the siege of the embassy and continued its coverage throughout the crisis and well beyond.

In a fit of frustration, Carter told his press secretary one day that he was tired of seeing “those bastards holding our people referred to as ‘students.’ They should be referred to as ‘terrorists’ or ‘captors,’ or something that accurately describes what they are.”

The militants for their part soon revealed their talents for manipulating the media, who were hungry to gain access to the hostages and willing to tolerate almost anything to get an exclusive. They organized staged events, handed over signed “confessions,” and ferreted out the most malleable of the hostages to give false statements about the conditions of their captivity. Thirty-three hostages were made to sign a petition requesting the return of the shah. And the more attention they got, the more emboldened the militants felt.

One of Carter’s early strategies was to encourage outside intermediaries with connections or access to Khomeini to try to resolve the crisis. Pope John Paul II sent an emissary to Qom only to have Khomeini lecture the Vatican on the evils of the shah and the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church toward his regime. The imam was reported to have told the emissary that if Jesus were alive today, he would want Carter impeached.

On December 19, NBC aired an interview with Marine Sergeant Billy Gallegos, the first such exclusive with a hostage. The conditions given by the militants, however, stipulated that Nilufar Ebtekar, the militants’ spokesperson, otherwise known as “Tehran Mary,” be allowed to read an unedited statement before and after the interview. In it, Ebtekar proceeded to lecture the American people about the
evils of the shah and the past sins of America’s imperialistic agenda, after which a hollow-eyed Gallegos came on the air to demand that the Carter administration hand over the shah.

Naturally, the American population responded to such displays with anger and frustration, which mystified the militants.

Early on the militants were convinced that their actions would cause the “oppressed” in America, namely blacks and other minorities, to rise up and overthrow the government. On one occasion the militants purchased a half-page ad in the
New York Times
calling for America’s minorities to revolt. When the revolution didn’t come, they assumed it was because of media censorship. For instance, when NBC aired the Gallegos interview, the producer mentioned to Ebtekar that for time constraints they were going to have to edit the segment, which she took to mean that the U.S. government had commanded NBC to censor it. Having grown up in Iran, she had no concept of a press that was not controlled by the state.

When the reality eventually emerged that Americans actually despised the militants for kidnapping and torturing their fellow countrymen, the militants were shocked and saddened. To some of the hostages who interacted with them on a daily basis, it fit perfectly with the militants’ skewed worldview. Much like actors in a Hollywood movie, the militants saw themselves as the heroes and expected the whole world to perceive them as such.

U
pon taking over the embassy, the militants appeared almost as shocked as the Americans that their plan had succeeded. They had very little idea about how an embassy operated or what the staff did. In their minds, the embassy’s sole purpose was for
spying. In one press conference they held up a Dictaphone claiming it was a spy apparatus of some sort—this got a laugh from us at the CIA.

They seemed eager to believe any conspiracy theory, no matter how far-fetched. So any name that was found in an address book was considered a conspirator. Some of the political officers who had extensive contacts within the country were terrified that these militants were going to hunt down representatives of some local governments and shoot them for simply having met with an American diplomat. The students seemed not to comprehend the whole purpose of diplomatic relations.

In reality there were only three CIA officers at the embassy when it was taken. But even their involvement was nominal. The revolution had severed most of the ties we had with former agents, and those officers, two of whom had been in the country for less than three months before the embassy fell, had spent the majority of their time building their cover and getting to know the layout of Iran and its government. In the minds of the students, however, everyone at the embassy was somehow connected to the CIA, and they set out to prove this theory, diligently and viciously.

Relatively early on in their confinement, the hostages were subjected to beatings, sleep deprivation, and long periods of painful binding, and they were often made to stay in awkward or uncomfortable positions. They were also repeatedly threatened. Dick Morefield was even made to lie on the floor while a gun was pointed to the back of his head. On another occasion, Colonel Dave Roeder, the assistant defense attaché, was shown a picture of his family and told by the militants that they knew his son’s school bus route back in America. If he didn’t start cooperating, they told him, they would kidnap his son, cut him up, and send the pieces to his wife.

Other hostages, especially the three CIA officers, were kept in isolation for nearly the entirety of their 444 days of captivity. All of them were undernourished and underfed and would emerge from captivity as shells of their formers selves.

In early November, the conditions under which the hostages were being held were largely unknown to the Carter administration or the public at large. Then, on November 18 and 19, in a deal brokered by representatives from the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), a group of thirteen hostages, consisting of women and minorities, was allowed to leave. Before going, they were subjected to a press conference, where they were made to sit in front of a sign that denounced America for harboring the shah. It was upon their return that the White House learned of the extreme conditions that the hostages were being subjected to.