“What is your job?” she asked.
Rosen told her the truth.
“What is the true function of a ‘press attaché,’” she asked, implying that the job description was a cover. “Who are the Iranian ‘journalists’ you had contact with?”
He told her that he would be happy to discuss his job with her at some other time.
“This isn’t the time or place,” he said. “This is the territory of the United States, which you have invaded.”
She responded angrily. This was their country, not his. The so-called embassy was actually a spy den, and now she and the other students had taken it back. He and his colleagues were the invaders, planning their “conspiracies and corruptions.”
Rosen had noticed that Yusef, the chef, had a large bottle of scotch on a nearby shelf, so instead of engaging in pointless argument with the woman he reached out to the bottle and suggested that they both have a drink. Her eyes widened in horror. In the new Iran to offer alcohol to a pious daughter of the faith was unforgivably rude, an insult to the purity of Muslim womanhood. She threw up her arms in disgust and exited the room, slamming the door behind her in a dismissive swish of fabric.
Ibrahim Yazdi, the foreign minister, had left Laingen, Tomseth, and Howland at midafternoon for the hour-and-a-half drive to Qom to meet with Khomeini. Before leaving, Yazdi asked Laingen, “Where do you and your colleagues propose to go?”
The chargé, still hot, told Yazdi that it was up to the provisional government.
“You have an obligation to protect us,” Laingen told him. There were anti-American mobs on the streets all over Tehran; indeed, the chargé had learned that an armed gang had already been asking for him and the other two Americans at the front gates of the Foreign Ministry.
Yazdi said he didn’t believe the situation was that bad but made arrangements for the three to spend the night in the Foreign Ministry building. He was exhausted. His plane from Algiers had flown through the night and arrived only that morning, and he had not slept for two days. He snoozed in the car on the drive east to the holy city.
Khomeini normally rested in the afternoon and received guests early in the evening. When Yazdi was shown into the imam’s receiving room he sat on a floor cushion alongside the white-bearded cleric and told him what had happened at the U.S. embassy. It was his impression that Khomeini was hearing the news for the first time.
“Who are they?” he asked. “Why have they done this?”
Yazdi explained that the hostage takers appeared to be university students, and that they were demanding the immediate return of the shah and his assets.
“Go and kick them out,” Khomeini said.
Yazdi did nothing with those instructions at first. There didn’t seem to be any reason for haste. The takeover was accomplished. With the imam’s permission it would be a simple matter to clear out the students and give the compound back to the American mission, and it might be best to let things cool off for a few hours before starting. He briefed Khomeini on the now controversial meeting he and Bazargan had held with Brzezinski in the prime minister’s hotel room in Algiers. Then he got back in a car for the drive to Tehran and figured he would relay the imam’s instructions about the embassy to Bazargan when he returned.
So the weary foreign minister was startled that evening in Tehran, after he had been driven back from Qom, when he heard on the radio the imam’s first public statement endorsing the takeover and the goals of the students. It wasn’t halfhearted either. In a complete reversal of the sentiments he had expressed earlier, Khomeini warmly supported the move and praised the students. Yazdi was not surprised. He had come to know Khomeini, and despite the ayatollah’s fierce visage, he was a maddeningly vacillating man. In political matters, he tended to side with whomever last had his ear, and because he often regarded the affairs of state as trivial compared to his spiritual concerns, he was usually reluctant to make unpopular decisions. The jubilant scene outside the embassy was being shown on television throughout the country. Yazdi was impressed by the way this stunt had been orchestrated. Whoever was responsible, he thought, had wisely avoided informing the imam in advance, knowing that Khomeini would be less likely to oppose a popular fait accompli than a half-baked idea. The planners had done a great job of getting out the crowd, too. Yazdi had reports of food being served, street performances, and people being delivered by the busload from all over the region. Some of it might have been spontaneous, and the celebratory mood was definitely real, but some serious planning had gone into it.
In between the imam’s meeting with Yazdi and the radio broadcast, several things had happened in Qom. Ahmad Khomeini, the imam’s son, had received a phone call from his friend the popular young Tehran cleric Mohammad Asqar Mousavi Khoeniha, the students’ “spiritual leader.” He had assured the younger Khomeini that the geroghan-girha, the hostage takers, were devout Muslims, not the leftist hooligans who had seized the embassy in February. They had acted, Khoeniha said, in response to the imam’s call for students to “attack” America. Ahmad Khomeini agreed to fly by helicopter to the U.S. embassy and see for himself what was going on.
Arriving on the scene, the younger Khomeini had literally been carried away by the rapture of the mob dancing in the streets. He was lifted bodily over the embassy walls, his presence alone interpreted as the imam’s imprimatur. The young cleric briefly lost his black turban and a slipper in the excitement. After touring the embassy and viewing the captive Americans he had returned to Qom with a glowing report on the students and the suspicious American spy documents and equipment they had seized. When it was clear that what had happened was enormously popular, and that the action had the support of influential clerics like Khoeniha, the imam understood that what to Yazdi was a nuisance was in fact an opportunity.
As he prepared finally for bed, Yazdi knew there was now nothing he or the provisional government could do. The matter was out of their hands.
13. Wheat Mold
Before he was blindfolded again, John Limbert watched from a chair at the residence as the twilight faded, sitting alongside the Filipino cashier, whom the students had not yet decided whether to consider an American spy or an oppressed Third World national. Limbert had given his name and job title when asked and had refused a cigarette. He had learned that these protesters called themselves “Muslim Students Following the Imam’s Line,” and understood that they were religious and more aligned with the mullahs than the leftists, who predominated on the college campuses. Most of those he had talked to so far were more curious than hostile. Some were from rural areas, small towns, and they reminded him of the students he had taught in Shiraz. He saw that they were in over their heads but didn’t know it yet. They had been brought up with a very narrow idea of the world. Most of them probably had no idea where America was on a map, much less any understanding of U.S.–Iran relations. For most, this was probably their first encounter with Americans and, given the ridiculous propaganda in the previous year, they were no doubt surprised to find that the embassy personnel didn’t have horns. Limbert couldn’t help himself; he liked them.
As soon as he figured out who they were the events of the day came into better focus. It wasn’t clear if they were acting with the approval of the imam, as their name implied. Limbert suspected not. The atmosphere in the crowded residence was strange. Some of the initial tension evaporated for the Americans when it was evident that they were not going to be harmed, at least not immediately. Captors and prisoners were talking freely to each other, and at one point a student brought a radio into the room, and everyone sat together listening eagerly to hear how the day’s event was reported. They listened to Radio Tehran and the BBC international report, and he could see that the students seemed a little disappointed when the embassy takeover was treated in the London report as a relatively minor story. The students considered their “victory” nothing short of miraculous. They had stormed the American fortress and overrun it without a casualty! In one sense it was too good to be true, and in another…what were they supposed to do now?