Tug-of-War over the Hostages

A week of conflicting signals ends in an Iranian standoff

"To prevent any misunderstanding, we declare that the Revolutionary Council should take the hostages, or the American spies, from us and do with them what they think best..."

With that surprising announcement, broadcast over Iranian television and radio, the militants at the U.S. embassy in Tehran last week declared that they were now willing to turn their 50 American hostages over to the ruling Revolutionary Council and newly elected President Abolhassan Banisadr. That was still a long way from saying that the hostages would be released immediately, though it sounded like the best news the U.S. had heard from Tehran since the hostages were seized more than four months ago. But the Carter Administration reacted to the announcement with extreme caution--and, as it turned out, the caution was amply justified.

Word of the prisoners' possible transfer to government custody defused some of the criticism aimed at the White House for its handling of the hostage crisis. Specifically, the critics had charged that Carter had given in to the militants by approving a special United Nations commission proposed by Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim. The job of the five commissioners--lawyers from Algeria, France, Sri Lanka, Syria and Venezuela--was to investigate Iranian grievances against the deposed Shah and his U.S. supporters, and also to check on the health and safety of the American hostages.

In the beginning, the U.S. had thought that the commission's visit would lead to the freeing, or at least the moving, of the hostages. On arrival in Tehran, the commissioners discovered that the militants were locked in a bitter power struggle with President Banisadr and Foreign Minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh. For ten days the militants did everything they could to prevent the commission members from seeing the hostages; they argued that the visit had not been approved by the ailing spiritual leader of Iran's revolution, Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini. But then, as the commissioners prepared to leave for New York City, their mission a failure, the students suddenly announced that they would surrender control of the hostages to governmental authority.

Ghotbzadeh quickly cautioned against assuming that the release of the hostages was imminent. "You are jumping too far ahead," he told reporters. Nonetheless, as a Western diplomat in Tehran noted, "Once the hostages are in responsible hands, a big obstacle to a final settlement of the dispute will have been removed." In Washington, the White House and the State Department remained uncomfortably silent, as if they feared that the slightest American enthusiasm could wreck the deal. They were weary from reacting to all the contradictory stop-and-go signals that have characterized the crisis and were waiting for a sure sign of progress. They were also fairly certain that Banisadr, who is believed to be anxious to get the matter settled once and for all, would be unlikely to free the hostages until Iranian public opinion had been prepared for so dramatic a move.

At the beginning of the week, the Revolutionary Council had decided that the commission should be allowed to see the hostages. The militants simply vetoed the idea. "We should have been consulted," they said imperiously. Later they proposed that the commission should first publish its report on the evils of the Shah and his American friends. If they liked the report, said the militants, they would allow the commissioners to return to Tehran and interview the hostages. Alternatively, they suggested that the commissioners talk only with the 14 hostages whom their captors have accused of espionage.

Day after day, Banisadr and Ghotbzadeh promised that the meeting between commissioners and hostages would take place, but nothing happened. On Wednesday evening, the commissioners announced that unless a meeting could be arranged soon, they would have to head home. Ghotbzadeh rushed to the Tehran Hilton from a midnight session of the Revolutionary Council, saying he would soon tell the commissioners the time for the proposed meeting with the hostages. Once again, nothing happened. Next morning, as the commissioners were packing their bags for their return flight to New York, Ghotbzadeh invited them to the Foreign Ministry to discuss "important new developments." The commissioners reluctantly accepted the invitation; in the meantime they sent their luggage to the airport and instructed the pilot of their Gulfstream jet to be ready for a 3 p.m. takeoff: Instead, Ghotbzadeh talked them into postponing their departure. Less than half an hour before their plane was scheduled to depart, the startling announcement by the student militants was broadcast to the nation.

The students repeated their view that the commission's proposed visit to the embassy was a condition "imposed by the criminal government of the U.S.," and that Iranian government leaders did not really want the visit to take place. Nonetheless, they said, the Iranian government had been exerting "intolerable pressure" on them. "The government leaders harp on the theme that we are weakening them and that we are a state within a state." So, said the students, they were washing their hands of the whole affair. "Our responsibility for the hostages is over. We will turn over the spies to the Revolutionary Council."

The Council quickly responded by naming a committee to handle the transfer of the hostages to another location, probably under military jurisdiction. Banisadr met with Khomeini Thursday morning. The Ayatullah did not explicitly instruct the militants to obey Banisadr, but after their meeting he reaffirmed his faith in the new President and in the Revolutionary Council.

At the embassy compound, the militants seemed bitter and uncommunicative, especially as to why they had suddenly reversed themselves. Presumably they were waiting for Khomeini to endorse their actions, as he had done in the past. On Friday they demanded the right to address the Iranian people on radio and television, a privilege they enjoyed in the early days of the embassy siege. They also declared that, whatever happens to the hostages, the embassy compound had become their "home," and they would not leave it--nor would they surrender the embassy files.

Part of the militants' current anxiety clearly stems from the fact that the focus of political power has been shifting in recent weeks to the 13-member Revolutionary Council, where Banisadr is believed to have a bare majority. The Council is divided into two main factions: a secular group led by Banisadr; and the militant clerics, led by Ayatullah Mohammad Beheshti, who are fighting to retain their influence in the regime. Beheshti's faction sees its best chance of regaining power to be a failure by Banisadr to tackle the country's basic problems of inflation, unemployment, instability and agricultural and industrial stagnation. Banisadr is anxious to get the hostage crisis settled so he can address those very problems.

The Beheshti group has taken some encouragement from the fact that Khomeini has delegated the final decision on release of the hostages to a new National Assembly, which will be elected this month and convened in April. The Beheshti group is hoping that the Assembly will be dominated by clerics who will stage a long-running debate on the hostage issue, thereby preventing Banisadr from governing effectively.

That, however, is not what Khomeini seems to want. When he left a Tehran hospital last week, at the end of six weeks of treatment following a heart attack, he called on his countrymen to participate in the elections and get on with the task of building the country. Says a Tehran politician: "He increasingly snubs government leaders who ask him to intervene to break stalemates. He would like to have a working government, not a bunch of helpless toadies."

Khomeini also took this kind of indirect approach in dealing with the militants. He never criticized them openly, but apparently expected them to understand that he wanted them to work through Banisadr and the Revolutionary Council. Misreading the signals, the militants thought they had several more weeks of free rein. They even defied Khomeini's son, Seyyed Ahmed, who had said that he thought the U.N. commission should visit the hostages.

But if the militants misread Khomeini's signals, so, apparently, did Ghotbzadeh. He repeatedly stressed that the transfer of hostages had been approved by Khomeini himself. Apparently he went too far in invoking the Ayatullah's name, since Khomeini has been trying to dissociate himself from any compromises on the hostage dispute that may be forthcoming. Accordingly, his office announced that Khomeini had taken no stand on the transfer question and still wanted the whole matter settled by the National Assembly later on.

That was all the militants needed. They had promised to hand over the hostages late Saturday afternoon to representatives of the Revolutionary Council. But after Khomeini's announcement, they denounced Ghotbzadeh as a "liar" and said they would no longer deal with him. As a step toward a possible compromise, the Council then issued a statement saying Khomeini had previously agreed to a "probable meeting" between the U.N. commission and the hostages. The students said that if this were true, they would let the commission visit the embassy.

After the latest disappointments, Jimmy Carter was plainly dejected about the pace of progress in Iran. At week's end he mentioned to reporters the possibility of making some sort of public expression of U.S. concern--short of an apology--over past events in Iran as a step toward resolving the long-running crisis. Whether that would work was unclear. As always, there was only one man who could bring a quick resolution to the dispute, the Ayatullah Khomeini, and he wasn't talking.

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