Laingen was bewildered. He was a true believer in the diplomatic calling, in the power of polite dialogue between nations. Iran was clearly hurting itself more than the United States by this assault on that tradition. It was, in his eyes, blindly self-destructive and utterly unwarranted. His entire professional frame of reference had been upended. He began a diary on the eighth of November, and in its first entry asked:
Why? To what end? What purpose is served? We have tried by every available means over the past months to demonstrate, by word and deed, that we accept the Iranian revolution, indeed, that we wish it well—that a society strongly motivated by religion is a society we, as a religious nation, can identify with. Far from wishing to see this nation, this government, stumble, we wish it well and hope it can strengthen Iran’s integrity and independence.
Laingen’s sympathetic spin on the revolution was of no use now. Perhaps the hardest part of his predicament was being rendered irrelevant. Trapped in the grand halls of Iran’s Foreign Ministry, he and Tomseth had ringside seats to the unfolding drama, but Laingen felt increasingly cut off from the powers in that country and his own. Watching the unanimous chorus of hatred directed at Americans from all directions, he saw early on that the embassy takeover, if it had in fact been conducted by idealistic students (and he doubted this), had evolved very quickly into something else. Less than a week into his velvet confinement, he wrote:
We feel compelled and obliged to watch the TV news, even though the constant barrage of anti-American propaganda becomes hard to take after a while. What is it doing to public opinion out there? What’s behind it? What is its purpose? Clearly it is the product of something more by now than an “unanticipated” attack by a crowd of students. Others have clearly seized upon it and are carrying this to ends not then planned or seen. Or is our assessment of this place again flawed, as it has been so often in the past?
His new irrelevance was brought bitterly home on the twelfth, when the newly appointed foreign minister, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, meeting with his staff for the first time, needed the reception room that had become home to the stranded Americans. Laingen, Tomseth, and Howland were removed to the big dining room, and while Bani-Sadr presided over his formal introduction in the next room, the three waited alone in grand emptiness next door, their shabby presence mocking the grandeur of their surroundings and the ritual in the next room. They sat at one end of a table built to accommodate forty. One played solitaire, one read a book, and the third took a long walk around the room, again and again, making circles.
19. George Lambrakis
Having accomplished more than they could have hoped, the students were at a loss. They owned the American mission, the embassy, the grounds, sixty-six Americans, and many thousands of pages of confidential files, but what were they going to do with it? They were convinced they knew in a general way exactly what had been going on in the embassy. The intelligence scandals of the 1970s in America had provided plenty of examples of CIA handiwork against revolutionary leaders—the clumsy attempts to assassinate the Cuban leader Fidel Castro, the successful hunting and killing of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the plot to kill the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, the overthrow and murder of leftist Chilean president Salvador Allende, to name just a few. They had the example of Mossadeq in their own modern history. But whatever the current plot was, it wasn’t immediately clear. Neither the students nor the clerics advising them had any practical understanding of how espionage or even how such a large embassy worked, or what all these people now in custody had been doing inside its high brick walls.
Before storming the compound, if the students had an idea about espionage it had been shaped more by Ian Fleming than by reality. This explained their suspicion of American watches, shoes, radios, and communications equipment. But apart from the apparatus of institutional secrecy, what they had found was for the most part opaquely pedestrian, an office building and its people. In their eyes, every American inside the compound was implicated in sinister doings, as either a spy or an employee in the service of the nefarious spy enterprise. Their task would now be to unravel the mystery.
Who had they actually taken hostage? At the Foreign Ministry were the embassy’s two highest-ranking officials, Laingen and Tomseth. Among those at the embassy were the heads of the mission’s eight sections: politics (headed by Tomseth), economics (Morehead “Mike” Kennedy), security (Golacinski), administration (Bert Moore), the consulate (Dick Morefield), the ICA (John Graves), the defense attaché (Colonel Tom Schaefer), and the military liaison group (Colonel Chuck Scott). Each section employed military or foreign service officers, and each had a support staff—clerks, secretaries, and several had communications specialists. The marines were under Golacinski. Koob and Royer, who had worked across town at the Iran-America Society, reported to Graves, as did the press attaché, Barry Rosen. Reporting to Laingen but operating with greater independence was the small CIA contingent, station chief Tom Ahern and his two subordinates, Daugherty and Kalp, who reported directly to Langley and had their own secure communications equipment. All had perfectly ordinary “cover” jobs at the embassy, so at first the students had no idea which of their captives they were. Thus the captors assumed everyone was a spy.
In the beginning, the students lacked this overview of the embassy bureaucracy. They had an overheated, sensational idea of what an embassy did that did not account for the more mundane tasks that formed the bulk of its activity. In that sense, their prize would prove to be something of a disappointment. They hadn’t imagined someone like, say, Bill Keough, the towering middle-aged former principal of the American school in Tehran, an institution that at one point had taught more than four thousand students, the sons and daughters of the then extensive U.S. government presence in Iran. To his captors, Keough was just a very large middle-aged white American of some importance, which meant he was probably a top spy. In fact, he was a lifelong educator who had spent most of his career teaching or managing schools in rural Vermont. He had been lured to the school in Iran by his love of classical history and literature—he had read of ancient travels in Persia and wanted to see the place himself. When his school had been depopulated and then closed after the revolution, Keough had transferred all the books and student records from the old building to the embassy grounds for safekeeping. He had since accepted a position as principal of the International School in Islamabad, Pakistan, and had briefly returned to Tehran to recover the most current of those old records—those for boys and girls still in school or applying to universities who needed their transcripts. He had been scheduled to fly back to Islamabad on November 5. When the students came over the walls he had been packing suitcases with the most critical of the old student files, and his biggest worry in the first days was that those files might be lost.