House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill condemned the network for airing Iranian “propaganda.” Ford Rowan, NBC’s Pentagon correspondent, no doubt getting an earful from his military sources, resigned in protest.
Psychologists were enlisted by the networks to explore the concept of brainwashing, and military and intelligence analysts pored over Gallegos’s remarks for clues about where and how the hostages were being guarded. They were especially intrigued by one of the marine’s brief comments in passing. Near the end of the interview, Gallegos had been asked about which Americans he had been housed with.
“I was with a couple of political officers before we were up here in some of the houses,” he said. They understood that by “houses,” he meant the staff cottages on the embassy grounds. “I was with them and, after that, we were moved down to this other place, the mushroom…”
Mushroom? What had he meant by that?
Delta knew. They had learned of the nickname from the released hostages. It reminded the analysts of the old soldier’s lament, “I must be a mushroom because they keep me in the dark and feed me horseshit.”
Given the bewildering variety of news reports, it was impossible to sort out fact from fiction or, as intelligence analysts put it, information from noise. Every day there was a break in the saga from somewhere in the world, sometimes hopeful and sometimes alarming. The hostages were going to be released, or the hostages were going to be put on trial; the hostages were going to be tried by the students themselves and then executed, or the hostages were going to appear before a revolutionary tribunal and then be released. Some of the hostages were going to be released for Christmas, then none of the hostages would be. Iran’s terms for releasing them varied, depending on who was speaking. Iran was an enigma because no one appeared to be in charge. Everyone said Khomeini was, but the old prophet stayed aloof from the day-to-day workings of the state. He kept to his spiritual regimen in Qom and spoke only at intervals and rarely about specifics. Those known to be close to him, clerical figures and politicians who advised him and interpreted his words, were singing different songs, some of them confrontational and some of them conciliatory. The tune seemed to change daily. In a speech days before Christmas, Khomeini said the American captives convicted of spying “might not” be executed.
Feeding the confusion was the competitive scramble for scoops by every news agency in the world. There was no shortage of people to interview. One of the favorites was Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the most unlikely of Iranian public officials in the postrevolutionary period, a Chaplinesque little man with a peculiar pompadour, thick-rimmed glasses, and a carefully trimmed little mustache. He had been dumped as foreign minister by the Revolutionary Council but had not gone away. Khomeini had promptly named him economic minister, and as the weeks of the crisis wore on Bani-Sadr grew more and more openly critical of the embassy takeover. Originally he had spoken in favor of it, but by early December he had changed his mind. He told a French reporter that he opposed trying the hostages because such a step would violate international agreements that protected diplomats, as though taking them hostage itself wasn’t violation enough. Days later he told a Beirut correspondent that Iran ought to drop its demand for return of the shah, that the tactic had failed, and then a few days later he called for the hostages’ release. Ibrahim Yazdi, his predecessor as foreign minister, who had resigned the position after the embassy was overrun, now spoke out in favor of putting the Americans on trial, saying that such a step would provide a “strong motivating force” for the Iranian masses to rebuild their society. Ghotbzadeh, Bani-Sadr’s successor as foreign minister, set off a storm of confusion by suggesting that one step toward resolving the crisis would be to create an international grand jury to investigate U.S.–Iran relations. The proffer was promptly rejected by a spokesman for the students, who in typically colorful language suggested that Ghotbzadeh was a traitor—“On occasion he has spoken irresponsibly and led the enemy to his filthy and satanic whims.” This provoked the Ayatollah Mohammed Behesti, chairman of the Revolutionary Council, to defend Ghotbzadeh, pointing out that the foreign minister spoke not only for himself but for the council and thus for the imam himself. Dustups like these raised all sorts of questions in the White House. Who was really in charge? Who could be taken seriously? With whom should they be negotiating, the students? The Foreign Ministry? The Revolutionary Council? Khomeini?
Sadeq Khalkali, the revolution’s bloodiest ayatollah, most notorious as a “hanging judge,” told one interviewer that none of the American hostages would be executed, and then told another, weeks later, that only those convicted of spying would be sentenced to death. Then, later in December, he called for the hostages’ release.
“Every embassy has spies in it,” he said. “We cannot execute any spies according to Islamic laws. They will only be executed if they were directly responsible for ordering a murder. Even if we try the hostages, we do not want to condemn them. We want to condemn Carter and the American government.”
When the shah attempted to defuse the crisis in mid-December by leaving New York for Panama—an arrangement worked out by Washington with the obliging dictator Omar Torrijos—Khalkali announced that Iranian hit squads would assassinate the shah there, setting off weeks of anxiety throughout Central America, as nations scrambled to locate the assassins. Khomeini quickly pronounced the shah’s move to Panama meaningless, portraying it as nothing but a public relations maneuver and calling the small nation an “American puppet.” He wasn’t far from right. Hamilton Jordan had worked out the move, assuring the shah and the princess that their children could stay in the United States and continue their education, and even arranging for a mobile medical team to deliver to his new tropical home the same care the shah enjoyed in New York. Jordan also promised to help find Pahlavi a more permanent home, but soon learned how much of a pariah the former Iranian ruler had become. Only Panama and Egypt were willing.
As the stalemate dragged through its second month with no sign of solution, rumor became news. The Libyan dictator, Moammar Qaddafi, told Oriana Fallaci, “I have bad news. There is movement in the American military in Europe. The Americans are preparing parachutists and arming with armored vehicles, missiles, gas, neutron bombs, and other materiel.” He predicted the coming of World War Three. On December 11, both UPI and ABC-TV falsely reported that President Carter had set a ten-day deadline for the release of the hostages, which seemed to coincide with a statement from Tehran by Ghotbzadeh, who had called for an international tribunal to consider Iran’s grievances against the United States in ten days. It was implied that if the hostages were not released by that deadline America would launch some sort of punitive strike. An article in Pravda, the Soviet Union’s mouthpiece newspaper, reprinted under bold headlines in Tehran’s newspapers, suggested that the United States was preparing to use nuclear weapons against Iran. The article was signed “Alexei Petrov,” a well-known pseudonym for the highest-ranking officials in the communist state. A Kuwaiti newspaper had its own scoop from Tehran. The hostages were all going to be released before Christmas as a gesture of Islamist goodwill, and that in return Carter was going to make a televised address praising Islam and Iran and condemning the shah. Another Kuwaiti newspaper reported that the United States was planning to attack Iran on Christmas Eve.