The Hostage Drama in Iran Drags On—Forty Years Later

Forty years ago Monday, thousands of Iranian students stormed the sprawling U.S. Embassy compound in Tehran. They had waited for three pieces of intelligence, Ibrahim Asgharzadeh, the group’s ringleader, later told me. The plotters, assembled from campuses across Tehran, needed an inside plan of the embassy. They scouted it out from two student apartments across the street. Then they needed a log of the personnel, so they posted watch around the clock to identify the diplomats coming and going. “We wanted all the Americans inside when we took it,” he said. The final piece was intelligence on the marines guarding the mission. “We had to do this all ourselves, and we were just students.”

The young revolutionaries intended to hold the embassy for three to five days to protest the Carter Administration’s decision to take in the ailing former shah, Asgharzadeh said. Instead, egged on by the government, the drama involving fifty-two imprisoned Americans dragged on for four hundred and forty-four days. It haunts the relationship to this day.

For the United States, the embassy takeover was the last in a trifecta of humiliations in the nineteen-seventies. It followed the American retreat from Vietnam that eroded the U.S. image as an invincible military power. Watergate led to the only resignation of a U.S. President and created a crisis of confidence in American democracy. The embassy takeover introduced the yellow ribbon as a national symbol of American vulnerability. To this day, American policymakers, both Republican and Democratic, view Iran through this hostage prism.

“The Iranian regime continues to target innocent civilians for use as pawns in its failed foreign relations,” the White House said in a statement on Monday. “Until Iran changes this and its other hostile behavior, we will continue to impose crippling sanctions. The Iranian regime has a choice. Instead of being the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, it can put the Iranian people first. It can choose peace over hostage taking, assassinations, sabotage, maritime hijacking, and attacks on global oil markets. The United States seeks peace, and we support the Iranian people. It is time for the Iranian regime to do the same.”

Four decades later, America remains the “Great Satan” in Iran. On Monday, thousands turned out at the former U.S. Embassy in Tehran and at a thousand rallies across the Islamic Republic to mark the anniversary. Officially, it’s known as the National Day of Fighting Against Global Arrogance. More than a dozen new propaganda murals—in red, white, and blue—were painted on the embassy’s brick wall. One depicts Mickey Mouse waving a smoking gun. In another, two missiles are launching from Uncle Sam’s hat. A third shows barbed wire emerging from a McDonald’s French-fry container. A fourth portrays a Statue of Liberty without the arm that hoists the flame of freedom. A fifth replaces the stars on the U.S. flag with skulls and the stripes with rows of soldiers firing rifles. “We are fighting against the United States for our independence and our faith,” the Army Commander Major General Abdolrahim Mousavi told the crowd at the embassy.

The embassy—dubbed the U.S. Den of Espionage Museum—has been preserved as it was in the seventies. I’ve toured it twice. Signs identify espionage gear and passport-forgery machines. Three mannequins with tacky wigs are positioned on chairs in the “glassy room,” where secret meetings were protected by anti-eavesdropping equipment. The Iranians have added their own touches, such as colorful graffiti in a hallway declaring “There is no time for imperialism in Iran anymore.”

Iran’s revolution remains as paranoid about U.S. intentions—and diplomacy—as it was in 1979. On Sunday, the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, charged that U.S. aggression has grown “wilder and more flagrant” over the years. “Those who believe that negotiations with the enemy will solve our problems are a hundred per cent wrong.” Khamenei dismissed the ongoing diplomacy orchestrated by the French President, Emmanuel Macron, who tried to convince President Trump and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to meet at the U.N. General Assembly in September. “The French President, who says a meeting will end all the problems between Tehran and America, is either naïve or complicit with America,” Khamenei said.

The lingering tragedy of the embassy takeover is that Iran has institutionalized hostage-taking over the past forty years. Human beings have become pawns, both in Iran’s internal political rivalries and in the tensions between the two capitals. Since the release of the fifty-two American hostages on the day Ronald Reagan was inaugurated, in 1981, dozens of Westerners—students, businessmen, environmentalists, academics, and art-gallery owners—have been picked up. Most have been locked up in the overcrowded Evin House of Detention, one of the world’s most infamous prisons. In Lebanon, Iran’s allies in Hezbollah have nabbed dozens more. I’ve known many of them: two were my colleagues at a Washington think tank and another was my former research assistant. At least six Americans are currently detained in Iran, according to diplomatic sources. Their stories are heartbreaking.

Among them is Xiyue Wang, a Princeton doctoral student who was arrested, in 2016, while doing archival research in Iranian libraries. He was charged with “infiltrating” Iran and espionage; he was sentenced to ten years in prison. His appeal was denied. His wife and young child remain in New Jersey.

Siamak Namazi, a business consultant based in Dubai, was in Iran visiting his elderly parents when he was arrested, in October, 2015. He had long-standing contacts with the Iranian government, including the Foreign Minister. In 2013, he had written an Op-Ed in the Times appealing for medicines to be approved for export to Iran. “Patients in Iran are dying of treatable diseases because of shortages in life-saving medicines. The past year has been nothing short of catastrophic,” he wrote. His father, Baquer, then eighty, was arrested four months later. He formerly worked for UNICEF. Both were charged with espionage and sentenced to ten years.

Michael White, a Navy veteran from Imperial Beach, California, was picked up while visiting his girlfriend, in July, 2018, in Mashhad. He had been to Iran before. White was sentenced to ten years for insulting Iran’s Supreme Leader and posting a private photo on social media. A survivor of throat cancer, he has had surgery in prison to remove a melanoma on his back, his mother reported in August.

Robert Levinson, a former F.B.I. agent who was on a rogue C.I.A. operation, disappeared on Kish Island in 2007. He is the longest-held American hostage in Iran. In 2012, the family released five proof-of-life photos showing Levinson in an orange jumpsuit similar to the uniforms of prisoners held in Guantánamo Bay. He had a long, bushy gray beard and unkempt hair. In each photo, Levinson held a piece of white paper with a message. The first read, “4th Year. You Can’t or You Don’t Want…?” The second: “Help me.” The third: “Why You Can Not Help me.” The fourth: “This is the result 30 Years Serving for USA.” The final read, “I am here in GUANTANAMO. Do You Know Where It Is?” The F.B.I. reported that he appeared to have lost up to sixty pounds. On Monday, the United States increased the reward—from five million dollars to twenty million dollars—for information leading to his freedom. The Levinson family runs an informational Web site that includes a clock ticking off the minutes of his captivity. As of Monday, he will have been missing for more than four thousand and six hundred days.

In an e-mailed statement, his family said, “The U.S. government continues to make it clear to Iran that Bob Levinson’s return is an absolute priority. Until the Iranian authorities return Bob Levinson home to his family, their prisoner exchange rhetoric is nothing but hypocrisy on an international scale.”

In April this year, during a trip to the United Nations, the Iranian Foreign Minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, offered a prisoner swap with the United States and other Western nations. “I put this offer on the table publicly now. Exchange them,” he said in a speech at the Asia Society, in New York. “I’m ready to do it. And I have authority to do it. We informed the government of the United States six months ago that we are ready.”

The State Department dismissed the overture as a public-relations stunt. But, behind the scenes, both countries have recently taken steps on detainee issues. The Trump Administration relayed a message to Iran that it would have to prove its good intentions before any discussions could begin. In June, Iran released Nizar Zakka, a Lebanese national who is a permanent resident of the United States. An information-technology expert and an advocate for Internet freedom, Zakka was arrested, in 2015, as he left a conference in Tehran that the government had invited him to attend. Zakka was tried for espionage and sentenced to a decade in prison; he spent the first year in solitary confinement. After serving almost four years, he was released following an appeal by the Lebanese President, an ally of both the United States and Hezbollah.

In September, the United States deported Negar Ghodskani, an Iranian national who was arrested in Australia in 2017. The United States claimed that she had facilitated sanctions-busting while working for an intermediary company that bought American equipment for Iran’s state broadcasting company. Iran countered that she was an innocent clerk and translator. The case gained international attention because she gave birth while imprisoned in Australia. In a plea agreement, a U.S. court sentenced her to the twenty-seven months that she had served in an Australian prison, while contesting extradition to Minnesota.

In October, Zarif announced that he had conveyed—through the Swiss Embassy, which represents American interests in Tehran—a list of twenty Iranian prisoners held in the United States for sanctions-busting. Zarif called them “hostages.” The United States says that it holds twenty-nine Iranians on various charges, which range from fraud and narcotics charges to a sex offense.

Zarif cited the case of Masoud Soleimani, a prominent stem-cell researcher and professor who was arrested when he landed in the United States, in October, 2018. He was charged with trying to export vials of proteins used to culture cells in medical research. The case is controversial. The United States alleged that Soleimani (no relation to a prominent leader of Iran’s Quds Force with the same name) was violating sanctions on Iran. His lawyers claimed that humanitarian goods—including medical goods, pharmaceuticals, and education materials—are exempt from U.S. sanctions. U.S. Prosecutors in Atlanta countered that he had not received export authorization from the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.

In 2016, the Obama Administration did agree to a hostage swap, which coincided with the implementation of the nuclear deal between Iran and the world’s six major powers. Tehran freed one American and four Iranian-American dual nationals, including Jason Rezaian, a Washington Post correspondent. The United States, in turn, pardoned or commuted the sentences of one Iranian and six Iranian-Americans. Trump has assailed the agreement.

Over the decades, many of Iran’s original student hostage-takers have become reformers, some after their own experiences in prison. Within a decade, Asgharzadeh ran for Parliament and began giving feisty speeches about the need for reforms and more freedoms. He went to jail briefly and was then banned from major political office. But he didn’t stop. In 1998, at the annual commemoration in front of the embassy, I heard Asgharzadeh tell a younger generation of students, “Our dealings with the hostages were not directed against the American people, and not even against the hostages themselves. Today, we invite all the hostages to return to Iran, as our guests. Regarding relations with America, we must look to the future, and not the past.” Last week, he told the Associated Press that he regrets the takeover and its aftermath. “Like Jesus Christ,” he said, “I bear all the sins on my shoulders.”

But another hostage swap would do little to remove Iran’s image as a renegade nation that does not respect human rights or international norms. Relations between Tehran and Washington—already heightened this year over the destruction of each other’s drones, Iran’s attacks on six foreign oil tankers, and a massive aerial assault on two of Saudi Arabia’s most important oil facilities—took a further dive on Monday. Iran announced that it has doubled the number of advanced centrifuges it operates to produce enriched uranium, a fuel that can be used for either a nuclear bomb or peaceful nuclear energy. It is a violation of the nuclear deal brokered, in 2015, between Iran and the world’s six major powers. The increased production will reduce the projected time needed to produce materials for building a bomb to under a year. Iran also revealed that it has a new prototype centrifuge that is fifty times faster than the equipment allowed under the nuclear deal. President Trump had abandoned the deal and reimposed economic sanctions last year, but the other five nations—Britain, China, France, Germany, and Russia—have all been scrambling to prevent Iran from walking away, too.

In new punitive measures timed to the anniversary, the Trump Administration on Monday imposed sanctions on nine officials in “a shadow network of Khamenei’s military and foreign-affairs advisers who have for decades oppressed the Iranian people, supported terrorism, and advanced destabilizing policies around the world,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Monday. The targets include officials in the Supreme Leader’s inner circle, the Armed Forces General Staff, the judiciary, and the Expediency Council. Two of them were allegedly involved in the bombing of U.S. Marine peacekeepers in Lebanon in 1983.

Tehran’s violation of international treaties on the protection of embassies did not end with the assault on the American mission. In 2011, a mob of youths widely believed to be from the Basij, a paramilitary wing of the Revolutionary Guards, stormed the British Embassy and Ambassador’s residence in downtown Tehran. The staff was forced to flee. Buildings were ransacked; computers and documents were stolen. Britain closed its embassy and expelled Iranian diplomats in London. “Iran is a country where opposition leaders are under house arrest, more than five hundred people have been executed so far this year, and where genuine protest is ruthlessly stamped on,” the Foreign Secretary, William Hague, said. “The idea that the Iranian authorities could not have protected our embassy or that this assault could have taken place without some degree of regime consent is fanciful.” The embassy was not reopened until 2015. In 2016, Iran protesters stormed the Saudi Embassy in Tehran and the Saudi consulate in Mashhad. The embassy was set on fire. The attack was sparked by Saudi Arabia’s execution—by beheading—of a popular Shiite cleric. Iran’s Supreme Leader subsequently condemned the attack as “very bad” and “detrimental to Islam,” but Saudi Arabia broke off relations. They have yet to be restored.

On Friday, in the run-up to the fortieth anniversary of the storming of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, a prominent Iranian cleric called on Iraqis to seize the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Since October 1st, Iraq has witnessed waves of protests demanding jobs, public services, an end to endemic corruption, and a new government. More than two hundred and fifty people have been killed. “The honorable Iraqi people must know that the American embassy in Baghdad is the cornerstone and center of strife in Iraq,” Ayatollah Mohammad Saidi, the Supreme Leader’s representative in Qom, said at a Friday prayer service. But the protesters have also focussed their anger on Iran’s influence in neighboring Iraq. On Sunday, they set tires on fire around the Iranian consulate in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, pulled down the Iranian flag, and hoisted the Iraqi flag in its stead. Iran, in turn, has blamed the United States for the unrest in Iraq.

Speaking for the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Saidi urged Iraqis to do as the Iranians had forty years ago. “Right now, the only way for salvation, healing, and release from the American strife in Iraq is for the Iraqi people to draw the lesson from the successful experience of Islamic Iran”—and take over the American Embassy there. The crowd responded with chants of “Allahu akbar!” (“God is great!”) and “Death to America! Death to England! Death to the hypocrites and the infidels!”

It was the same rallying cry invoked by students when they seized the American Embassy in Tehran four decades ago. All these years later, nothing seems to have changed. And it’s hard to see that it will.

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