All of this culminated in young Subic displaying a Christmas card from which he read a special greeting to Imam Khomeini on behalf of the hostages. All of this is incredible. I have heard of brainwashing and mind control. I have read of such and recognize that in all hostage situations this is commonplace. But here is an example involving people I know and whom I respect…Eight weeks of confinement and harassment by sound from the crowds in the streets brought the hostages to the point of servitude to their captors’ purposes. And all this in a setting of Christmas with the two priests sitting docilely, watching and listening to the entire charade.
If the students felt such images were going to affect public opinion in the United States, they were right. Americans were horrified. There was an outpouring of sympathy for the hostages. Bishop Gumbleton explained in press conferences at home that the four men had clearly been forced to make the statements. He told reporters that while the men were reading the statements, one of them [Hermening] had whispered to him, “This is just a put-up job. Don’t pay any attention to what you hear.”
Gumbleton said he had asked, “Aren’t you afraid of what might happen if I report that when I return?”
“Just tell the truth, sir,” the hostage told him. “That’s all we care about.”
Laingen didn’t need the bishop of Detroit to tell him that. He knew what kind of stress his colleagues were under and felt guilty that his own circumstances were so much more comfortable. On Christmas Eve they had been delivered a gift basket from the Spanish ambassador, a wicker basket stuffed with various kinds of Iranian candy, and a visit by the British ambassador, who brought sturdier fare, a basket with a variety of meats and snacks and a bottle of “cough syrup,” which contained a lovely red wine—all the more delicious with dinner that evening after such long deprivation. Coffin, Howard, and Gumbleton paid them a visit, and they talked with the clergymen for hours. Tomseth was impressed with Howard and Gumbleton, whom he found to be sincere and there purely for humanitarian reasons. He was suspicious of Coffin, who had the air of a grandstander about him. It seemed to the veteran diplomat that the famous leftist preacher was playing to his home audience. In one glib aside he had remarked, “This situation is much too serious to be left in the hands of professionals!”
The minister seemed not to appreciate that he had just insulted three foreign service professionals.
“You are being absolutely silly,” Laingen told him.
When they left, Laingen hoped that their visitors, whatever their motives, had been appropriately shocked by the zealotry of the students and the new strange political contours of this land. Islamic fundamentalism posed a threat that transcended the traditional liberal-conservative polarity that had defined Western politics for generations. There was a natural tendency of liberals like Coffin, Howard, and Gumbleton to seek dramatic change and to see any revolutionary as ideological kin, but they needed to be careful in this case about who they were cozying up to. The world was a more complicated place than they imagined. A new form of totalitarianism was taking shape, a religious variation on an ugly twentieth-century theme.
In the end, Coffin, Howard, and Gumbleton would fly home with their own sketchy notions of what was going on in Iran, while Laingen and the others were left behind as its captives.
Vice consul Bob Ode stewed over the Christmas party for days afterward. In the brief chance he had to speak to Coffin—the minister knew he was the eldest of the hostages and had sought him out to ask how he was doing—Ode had said, “If you are under the impression that the students are being kind to us, then you are mistaken.”
Ode’s wedding ring had been returned, but he had not been given back a ring that his parents had given him when he’d turned twenty-one and that he had worn his entire adult life. The naked finger reminded him every day of the injustice. Several days after Christmas he asked for paper and a pen and wrote numerous appeals, each in neatly printed capital letters. He wrote to Coffin, politely thanking him for coming, and then spelled out his misgivings about the ceremony and the minister’s apparent misplaced sympathies. He wrote another to the Washington Post, and others to President Carter and several other likely candidates for president in the coming year.
In one of his letters, Ode expressed thanks for the various cards that had been sent to him and others by strangers from around the United States, all of them promising to pray for their release. “I don’t mean to be unappreciative,” he said, “but what we need most is action—not prayers.”
Despite its obvious propaganda value, John Limbert felt that the Christmas event had also been a genuinely kind gesture by at least some of the students. He found that comforting. It seemed unlikely that after such a public display of charity they would be marched out to be shot any time soon. Even more reassuring was the visit several days after the holiday by Ayatollah Montazari, a chubby, often jolly middle-aged cleric who was reputed to be the first in line to eventually succeed Khomeini. The students were very excited and nervous about the visit. Montazari arrived at the Mushroom Inn with a TV crew in tow and addressed all of the hostages in the basement prison in a calm, friendly way. He was known among the hostages as “Screaming Monty,” because of thundering, feverish orations that drove the devout to great exertions of public prayer and denunciation. In person he was a short man with a face full of blackheads and sprouts of hair projecting from both ears. He reiterated the students’ demand for the return of the shah, and spoke to the hostages of his own years of imprisonment under the old regime, assuring them that they, too, would survive and prosper. When America relented, he said, they all would be released.
Colonel Scott, though relieved to hear that they would eventually be released, found the speech depressing. The bottom line, as he saw it, was that the Iranian clergy were holding fast to the students’ original demand that the “criminal shah” be returned for trial, which meant, as far as he was concerned, a very long stay.
When he finished speaking, Montazari walked around the crowded basement room and shook hands with each of the hostages.
When the cleric approached Limbert, the hostage took his hand and reminded him in Farsi, “We have met before.”
“Yes, I remember,” Montazari said, surprised. “You came with Mr. Precht to see me.”
It was an important moment, Limbert thought, because he knew the students were accusing anyone who had met with Americans from the embassy of spying. Those in the ayatollah’s entourage were visibly shocked. The meeting had taken place weeks before the takeover, and Limbert had accompanied Henry Precht as an interpreter. He had liked the cleric, who seemed less rigid than others he had met. He was impressed by the fact that Montazari seemed to harbor no grudge against the shah, this in a country where grudges seemed the guiding spirit of the day.
Montazari stopped into the room where Hall and Queen were being kept. Hall noted with displeasure that the great man’s entourage was wearing muddy boots. The ayatollah spoke to Hall and Queen through a translator.
“How are you?” he asked.
Hall was never sure what to say or how to act in this situation. Should he curse at the cleric or behave politely? He wanted to conduct himself with dignity, as a professional and an adult, but under these circumstances how exactly was that to be done? He saw some of his colleagues take perverse pride in treating their captors with nothing but scorn and bile, while others had become sickeningly meek and submissive. Some, like Subic, were actually trying to be helpful. He saw himself as somewhere in the middle. So how should he respond? Both he and Queen told Montazari that they were fine, but in a way that made it clear that they were anything but.