American Experience: "Taken Hostage," part 2 (WGBH, PBS, aired November 15, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 9 I watched part two of Robert Stone’s two-part documentary on the Iranian hostage crisis, “Taken Hostage,” on PBS’s long-running series American Experience. Stone’s film had the interesting subtitle, “The Making of an Enemy,” and it has a two-fold meaning: how Americans came to hate Iran and how Iranians came to hate America. Actually, part one did a quite good job of explaining how Iranians came to hate America – it had to do with the CIA-sponsored coup against Iran’s democratically elected leader, Mohammed Mossadegh, in 1953 after Mossadegh and the Iranian parliament dared to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. At the time Iran was technically ruled by Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, but he was little more than a British-style figurehead and the real power rested in the democratically elected legislature and its cabinet. Once the CIA and MI-6, its British counterpart, got rid of Mossadegh the Shah determined to become a hands-on ruler and eventually a dictator. He recruited the CIA to train Iran’s own secret police force, SAVAK, and sent SAVAK agents out into the population to root out dissent and crush it brutally. The Shah also decided to “modernize” Iran by fiat, including ending the restrictions on the roles of women in society. Women were encouraged to get educations and work in the upper echelons of Iranian society on the same basis as men. They were also allowed to drive and to dress in Western-style clothes instead of the traditional chador. In fact, SAVAK agents would go out in the streets and literally rip off the chadors of Iranian women who still wore them, and it was apparently that which incensed the cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to declare himself the leader of a revolutionary movement aimed at overthrowing the Shah and turning Iran into an “Islamic republic.”

At the time, few people had any idea what an “Islamic republic” meant, but in practice it meant that Khomeini (and his eventual successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who took over after Khomeini’s death in 1989 and is still in place as Supreme Leader of Iran) would exercise veto power over all candidates for elective office in Iran and would disqualify them from the ballot if he decided they were “un-Islamic.” It also meant an abrupt reversal in the rights of Iranian women, who were once again treated as second-class citizens and forced not only to wear the chador but to give up professional careers – though the latter was not enforced with the same fervor as it was in Afghanistan under the Taliban. In fact, when the Iranian students took over the U.S. Embassy their principal spokesperson was a woman, Masoumeh “Mary” Ebtakar, who was chosen largely because she had been a science student in the U.S. and was therefore fluent in English. What’s more, after the hostage crisis ended she served two non-consecutive terms as vice-president of Iran (1997-2005 and 2013-2017) and has continued to work as a post-graduate science professor at an Iranian university. One of the quirkier aspects of the Iranian hostage crisis and one reason it lasted as long as it did (14 ½ months) was that the hostages became pawns in the power struggle within Iran between the moderates and liberals who hoped to replace the Shah’s rule with a true democracy and the hard-liners whose idea of an “Islamic republic” was heavy on the Islam and light to nonexistent on the “republic” part.

I’d read elsewhere that when the student activists who actually took control of the U.S. Embassy and held the hostages did so, Ayatollah Khomeini was shocked and immediately ordered them released, only to change his mind when he realized that the students had handed him an invaluable tool in his struggle against the secular revolutionaries in Iran. In this show, Stone claims that within two days of the hostage-taking Khomeini’s son was caught trying to climb the wall of the U.S. Embassy; he lost his turban in the process of scaling the wall, but his presence on the scene was the first hint the hostages had that the seizure had Khomeini’s personal approval. One of the most tragic figures in the story was Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, who emerged in the early months of the hostage crisis as Iran’s point person in international negotiations over their fate. Ghotbzadeh had been an associate of Khomeini’s during Khomeini’s exile in France, and had helped coordinate the strategy of sending cassette tapes of Khomeini’s sermons to Iran, where they were clandestinely distributed. (It was essentially the late-1970’s version of social media.) Ghotbzadeh returned to Iran with Khomeini and worked behind the scenes to build a liberal democracy in Iran. He also fell in love with a U.S/. journalist named Carole Jerome, one of the interviewees on Stone’s documentary, who in 1988 wrote a book about their relationship – both professional and personal – called The Man in the Mirror: A Story of Revolution, Love and Treachery in Iran. But every time Ghotbzadeh thought he had cut a deal to set the hostages free – including arranging for a United Nations commission to visit Iran, collect evidence of the Shah’s crimes, and return to the West with the hostages in tow – Khomeini sabotaged it. In November 1980 Carole Jerome received word that Ghotbzadeh was about to be arrested on charges of being a CIA agent and she was also to be arrested as his alleged CIA “handler.” She fled the country and later learned that Iranian agents had gone to her apartment in Tehran just three hours after she left it.

Ghotbzadeh emerges as one of the truly tragic figures in this documentary, essentially the Alexander Kerensky of Iran – the leader who tried to short-circuit the building of an Islamic theocracy in Iran and salvage the hopes of a multi-party democracy – only unlike Kerensky, who escaped the vengeanceof the Bolsheviks and fled to the U.S. (where he lived until 1968 and became an icon of the American Right), Ghotbzadeh was ultimately executed as a CIA agent in 1982. (Actually he was released from his first arrest in November 1980 on Khomeini’s order, but he was arrested a second time in April 1982 and charged along with several Army officers with a plot to assassinate Khomeini. He was put on trial in August 1982 and executed in September.) Also among the interviewees were Barry Rosen, one of the hostages, and his wife Barbara, who became a spokesperson for the hostages’ families. Rosen ridiculed the idea that the U.S. Embassy in Tehran was a nest of CIA spies, as the Iranians claimed – the former Embassy building is now officially called the “Den of Espionage Museum” and is what passes for a tourist attraction in Tehran. According to Rosen, only three of the Embassy staffers actually spoke Farsi, the Iranian language, and surely if the CIA had wanted to plant agents to work in Iran, they would have sent more people who knew the country’s native tongue. Elsewhere I’ve read that quite a number of the hostages spoke Farsi, and they worked hard to conceal that fact from their captors because they didn’t want the hostage-takers to know that the hostages understood what they were saying. A few of the hostage-takers caught on that some of the Americans spoke Farsi, so they started speaking to each other in Turkish – which many of the diplomats at the embassy also knew. It’s common knowledge that the CIA operates out of just about every American embassy in the world. It’s standard practice for each country that has an international intelligence service to embed its agents inside embassies posing as diplomats, and countries more or less accept that as part of the price of having diplomatic relations at all.

The documentary spent a significant part of its running time on the spectacular failure of the U.S. attempt to send in a special-operations team to Iran in April 1980 to liberate the hostages by military force. The plan was an unusually complicated one which depended for its success on landing two sorts of aircraft – big transport planes flown from an island base off the coast of Oman, and helicopters flown from the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Nimitz in the Persian Gulf – on two presumably isolated patches of Iranian desert, which were called “Desert One” and “Desert Two.” Unfortunately for the plan, the location of “Desert One” had been picked by the CIA, and the agents had ignored the fact that an Iranian side road ran through it and at least one vehicle per hour passed by the site. As (bad) luck would have it, three vehicles passed by “Desert One” just after the U.S. planes landed there: an Iranian bus with 40 passengers aboard who were detained by the Americans, a fuel truck and an accompanying pickup. Also, the planners of the mission had ordered eight helicopters to fly to “Desert One” and had stipulated that at least six of the helicopters would be needed to ensure the mission’s success. Alas, two of the helicopters never made it into Iran and the pilot of one of the six that did lost control of his aircraft and crashed it into one of the two transport planes that were supposed to fly the hostages out of Iran. With fewer than six helicopters available, the on-site commanders had to call the White House for permission to abort the operation, and reportedly President Jimmy Carter gave the order personally. The show features a clip of Carter accepting responsibility for the failure – quite a surprise in our current historical context, especially given how our most recent former President, Donald Trump, has resolutely avoided taking responsibility for anything (he’s even gone on record to a Right-wing Web site saying that if the Republicans had won the sweeping “red wave” in the November 8 election he’d deserve the credit, but he’s not at all to blame for the Republicans’ disappointing performance).

It also features an interesting analysis from Barbara Rosen arguing that the ignominy of the failure doomed Carter’s chances for re-election in 1980. According to Rosen, if the mission had been a success and the hostages had been liberated, Carter would have won easily; if there had been a pitched battle in the streets of Tehran, the Iranians had prevailed and the hostages (including her husband) had died, there would have been such a savage burst of anger on the part of the American people that Carter would have won; as it was, Carter got the worst of both worlds and the ignominious failure, which led to the pointless deaths of eight American servicemembers, just contributed to the reputation for fecklessness and hopelessness that doomed Carter’s chances. The hostage crisis ultimately ended as a result of one of the unlikeliest dei ex machina in world history: Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Saddam decided to launch an all-out invasion of Iran in September 1980, apparently figuring that Iran’s government was in such chaos he’d score an easy victory – though what his war aims were is still unclear. All of a sudden the Iranian government needed the estimated $12 to $25 million in assets in U.S. banks, which the U.S. government had frozen in retaliation for the hostage-taking. As things turned out, the Iranians only got about $3 million – the rest was skimmed off as bankers’ fees for making the transfers – but it was enough to persuade the Iranians to set the hostages free at last. Despite having lost the election to Ronald Reagan (the documentary shows silent footage of Reagan getting ready for the inaugural ceremony but the only time he’s heard to speak is in his bellicose address in April 1980, right after the hostage rescue failed), Carter spent the remaining 2 ½ months of his Presidency negotiating literally day and night for the hostages’ release. For the last few days of his term he actually slept in the Oval Office, and the hostages finally were set free on January 20: the day Reagan became President and therefore got the political credit for the deal Carter had made.

One of the most interesting interviewees was Gary Sick, a member of the Carter administration who worked the Persian Gulf beat for the White House from 1979 to 1981. Robert Stone included Sick as one of the interviewees for this program, but did not ask him about his allegations that the Reagan campaign team actively lobbied the Iranians not to release the hostages until after the November election, for which the Iranians were allegedly rewarded with a large supply of arms from their sworn enemy, Israel. A House of Representatives investigating committee later found that the evidence Sick presented was lacking, but given what we now know about the subsequent deals the Reagan administration tried to cut with Iran and Israel to get arms to Iran and raise money for the Nicaraguan contras, it sounds believable to me. Certainly the Iranians seem to have been conscious that as long as the hostages were still in captivity, Carter was politically vulnerable and likely to lose his re-election bid. Barry Rosen recalled that after the failed rescue attempt, the Iranian government had taken custody of the hostages and moved them from the Embassy to various Iranian prisons. Rosen himself ended up in Evin, the most notorious political prison in Iran under both the Shah and Khomeini, and the first intimation he had of the Iran-Iraq war was when the crowds outside the prison stopped chanting “Death to America!”and started chanting “Death to Saddam Hussein!”

The show also explained that Khomeini used the war with Iraq to eliminate the last vestiges of political dissent; he drafted anti-clerical Iranians to fight in the war, sent them into battle without weapons, and thus ensured they would be killed as part of the so-called “human wall” around the Iranian defenses. In the end, the hostages were released and suffered the predictable post-traumatic stress disorders, and the U.S. and Iran stayed on a course of mutual misunderstanding that has continued to this day. Khomeini’s and Khamenei’s success at eliminating any vestige of a liberal political movement in Iran has left the country in the hands of an aging theocracy with little or no understanding of the modern world, and the most recent challenge to the regime’s authority – the rebellion of Iranian women against the dreaded “morality police” over the beating to death of a 20-year-old woman whose “crime” was wearing a chador that did not completely cover her hair – seems to have petered out without achieving any lasting change. The outcome of the political and social struggle in Iran should serve as a warning for the significant number of Americans who want a theocracy of their own, a so-called “Christian nationalism” in which abortion and Queer rights are suppressed and government massively intervenes in the personal lives, especially the sex lives, of its citizens.