One day, when Swift was taken off to the bathroom, Queenie questioned Koob about their professional relationship.
“What do you report to Miss Swift?” she asked.
“I don’t report to Miss Swift. I report to Mr. Graves, my supervisor,” she said.
“Miss Swift said you report to her. What kind of things do you tell her about?”
“I don’t report to her.”
“She says you do. Are you calling her a liar?”
Koob said she didn’t understand why Swift would have said such a thing, if in fact she had. Swift had held a higher-ranking position at the embassy, so in that sense she “reported” to her, but not literally. Their exchange ended when Swift returned.
On Thanksgiving night Swift was taken away.
4. World-Devouring Ghouls
Perhaps because he seemed so listless and beaten, Richard Queen was the first hostage asked to sign the petition the students had drafted demanding the return of the shah. The young vice consul actually thought Iran had a good case for demanding the former monarch’s return, but at first he refused to sign.
“I thought your country was a free country,” the student with the petition asked. “If you agree, why don’t you sign it?”
“I don’t want to,” said Queen.
When he was shown the same document the next day with thirty hostage signatures at the bottom, he relented.
“It doesn’t make any difference anyway,” he said.
He signed his name so illegibly that they demanded he print it alongside the signature, and he managed to do that so imprecisely that later reprints of the document would identify him as “Richard Owen.”
Thirty-three hostages signed the petition, more than half of those in captivity. Most saw it as meaningless, clearly a document signed under duress, and that under the circumstances no one would take it seriously at home. But the petition caused a sensation in the United States. Written in awkward English ostensibly in the voice of the hostages, it called for the shah to be returned immediately.
“In this way, we will be free,” it said.
It had been carried out of Iran by the Swiss ambassador. The White House dismissed it summarily. State Department spokesman Hodding Carter said that it could hardly be accepted as a freely expressed appeal under the circumstances.
“If such a document does exist and if it’s authentic, it’s understood that statements made under duress have absolutely no validity and their only impact is to reflect adversely on the captors,” said Jody Powell.
“Everyone ought to understand that such statements or petitions will have absolutely no bearing upon the actions of the United States. They simply do not exist.”
Public opinion in America was at a boil. Television coverage was unrelenting. The three networks focused on the crisis as though nothing else of importance was happening in the world. It wasn’t simply several score American citizens held hostage, it was “America” held hostage, as if every part of the government had been paralyzed. And journalists continued to receive more access to Iranian leaders and the captors than anyone in officialdom.
A reporter from the University of Dayton’s radio station, WHIO, scored a minor coup by phoning the occupied embassy and, through an Iranian student translator, spoke for nearly an hour with the Iranian occupier who picked up the phone. The voice on the phone in Tehran identified himself only as “Mr. X.”
“Will you release the hostages once you have made your point?” the reporter asked.
“We cannot at this time, but we will have a statement later,” stated Mr. X, who said the students would not negotiate with the United States government.
The reporter suggested that they release one hostage as a show of good faith.
“We’ll think it over,” said Mr. X.
Most Americans wanted to strike back, and there was no shortage of ideas, everything from severe economic sanctions to nuclear weapons. Senator Barry Goldwater, the former Republican presidential nominee well known for his hard-nosed approach to foreign crises, proposed that the U.S. Air Force destroy Iran’s oil industry, “and let them sit there and starve to death.” A message hung on the front of the Chronicle building in San Francisco read, “Expel all Iranian students.” Those Iranians who dared rally in the United States in support of the embassy takeover were challenged by large, unruly crowds. After a number of violent incidents around the country, shows of revolutionary solidarity by Iranian students in America came to a halt. One group in Washington obtained a permit for a march, but when the day came for the march no one showed up. An Iran Air flight to New York had to be diverted to Montreal when union workers at JFK International refused to service the plane. Long-shoremen were refusing to load or unload any ships flying the Iranian flag.
Protesters burned the Iranian flag before that country’s consulate in Houston. In Riverside, California, an Iranian student was found shot to death, “execution style,” according to the police. At St. Louis University, a man with a shotgun was disarmed after he walked into an administration building demanding to know the names of Iranian students attending the school.
A small portion of the anger was directed at the White House. Some blamed Carter for creating the circumstances that led to the takeover, others for failing to take immediate military action. Conservatives saw America’s restraint as a sign of weakness—“Keep the Shah and send them Carter” read a placard carried by a protester in Texas.
National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski advocated a series of steps that would gradually tighten a noose around Iran, only to encounter resistance from within the administration at every turn. He proposed an immediate naval blockade on Iran, shutting down all of its imports and exports, a move that would have had the added benefit of pressuring European allies who relied on Iranian oil. It was opposed by the State Department, which felt it would do more to harm American alliances than to end the crisis. The president did act. Over the concerns of the Justice Department, Carter ordered most Iranian diplomats to leave, began deportation proceedings against all Iranians in the United States illegally, and banned oil purchases from Iran. He also froze the billions in Iranian assets in American banks.
Rescuing the hostages, furnishing the episode with a Hollywood ending, appeared to be nothing more than a fantasy. The isolation of Tehran, the location of the embassy compound in the heart of a city on fire with anti-Americanism, the easy opportunity for retaliation against the hundreds of American citizens living there—reporters, expatriates, spouses of Iranians, businessmen—all made it a very unattractive option. At the highest levels of government, Secretary of State Vance and his deputy Warren Christopher were dead set against any military effort to rescue their colleagues, and at that point in mid-November even the men secretly planning hard to create that option regarded it as foolhardy. Colonel Beckwith himself set the probability of success at “zero.”
The cover story of Time magazine on November 19 weighed the possibility of a rescue mission by interviewing “two dozen experts in and out of government,” and the consensus was that such an effort would be self-defeating and probably suicidal. Said Elmo Zumwalt Jr., the former chief of naval operations, “I think it’s pretty much out of the question…. Surprise is so difficult to achieve because U.S. planes would be detected as they neared Iran.” Zumwalt said approvingly that the Carter administration “has never seriously considered the military option.”