The Hostages in Danger

Carter increases pressure against threat of spy trials

For five long weeks they have been held under threat of death in the U.S. embassy in Tehran. Their arms have been bound, and they have been forbidden to speak to one another. Their captors have subjected them to intense questioning, and even threatened some of them at gunpoint. All the while, crowds of fanatical followers of the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini have demonstrated outside the embassy walls.

Last week a climax to the hostages' ordeal, by either their trial or release, seemed closer. Iran's Foreign Minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh told Western reporters that "as soon as possible" the government would announce the hostages' fate. Many will be released, he said, but an undisclosed number will be tried as spies. The trials will be conducted by the same revolutionary tribunals that have sentenced some 630 Iranians to execution. Said Ghotbzadeh: "Those who can be proved not to have consciously engaged in espionage will be freed." Asked if any of the hostages convicted would be sentenced to death, Ghotbzadeh replied: "I hope we don't reach that point. But on the face of the earth, anything is possible."

Whether Ghotbzadeh, and presumably the Ayatullah Khomeini, can pull the militant students holding the hostages into line with this pronouncement was not known for certain. Just who is in control of the situation in Tehran has never been clear. For the moment, the students defied the Foreign Minister, vowing in a statement: "We will release nobody, nobody at all." But to calm fears in Washington that the Americans were being mistreated, the students did release photos of healthy hostages exercising on the embassy grounds.

In any event, Washington took Ghotbzadeh's announcement of the trials with the utmost seriousness. "Outrageous," declared State Department Spokesman Walter Ramsay. "They had no business taking them hostage and they have no business putting them on trial." At the White House, Press Secretary Jody Powell repeated President Carter's warning that the U.S. might resort to "other remedies"--meaning military action--if the captives were harmed.

The threat of imminent trials capped a week in which the Carter Administration waged a fierce campaign to focus the world's attention on the hostages, hoping that this might help to ensure their safety. Explained a top Administration official: "We are trying to say, 'Look, world, nobody has seen the hostages. We don't know what is happening to them.' " Vice President Walter Mondale complained that "even prisoners of war are guaranteed certain standards of human treatment, but these standards are being dragged in the dirt." Rosalynn Carter voiced the same refrain in campaign appearances for her husband in Washington, New York City and Jackson, Miss., calling the captives "hostages of a mob and a government that have become one and the same." Secretary of State Cyrus Vance demanded that Iran permit neutral doctors to examine the hostages. Ghotbzadeh did relent a bit on this point, saying that the government had decided to allow some foreign journalists to visit the Americans.

Meanwhile, Carter opened a new and even more aggressive diplomatic offensive to end the stalemate, and for a time there were signs that events might finally be shifting in favor of the U.S. in at least two ways:

--In the United Nations, representatives of Communist and Third World countries, as well as traditional U.S. allies in Europe, denounced Iran for holding the hostages and demanded their "release immediately." The unanimous 15-0 vote in the U.N. Security Council was a rare show of support for the U.S. The Khomeini government's initial response was unexpectedly positive. After discussing the resolution with the Ayatullah, Ghotbzadeh complained that it did not deal with Iran's demand for the return of the exiled Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi but nonetheless represented "a step forward." U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim thereupon began private negotiations to carry out the U.N. request.

--In Iran's northwestern city of Tabriz (pop. 1 million), tens of thousands of Azerbaijani Turks, the country's largest ethnic minority, revolted against Khomeini's rule shortly after a referendum had made him a virtual dictator for life. The rebels are followers of Ayatullah Kazem Sharietmadari, who is both Khomeini's leading religious rival and Iran's foremost Muslim moderate. They demanded autonomy for Azerbaijan.

This upheaval contributed to a sense in Washington that time might after all be on the Administration's side, that Iran was sinking gradually into chaos and that Khomeini might be more willing to listen to the President's basic message: Let's make a deal. The Administration, however, carefully avoided raising public expectations that a settlement was in sight. Said a high State Department aide: "I am more optimistic this week than last, but only by 5%."

One reason for the caution was that U.S. installations and personnel remain vulnerable to mob attack, as was demonstrated so visibly once again last week in Libya. Spurred on by pro-Khomeini slogans from sound trucks, 2,000 demonstrators stormed the U.S. embassy in Tripoli. While all 15 Americans escaped through a side exit, the crowd set fires that heavily damaged the embassy's first floor. The U.S. has rejected Libya's apology as inadequate, and suspended embassy operations--a step just short of breaking diplomatic relations. The State Department complained that the Libyan government had ignored repeated American requests for extra guards (only one was assigned to the embassy).

Still, the events at the U.N. and in Iran seemed to offer the U.S. an opening, and Carter tried to take advantage of it. Soon after the U.N. vote on Tuesday, he met at the White House with his national security advisers to outline ways of increasing the diplomatic pressure on Tehran.

Just what he has in mind remained a tightly kept secret, but the strategy could include such moves as a formal economic embargo on various shipments to and from Iran. Such a step, applied by the U.S. and its allies or possibly by the U.N., would demonstrate to Iran that it is regarded as an outcast by most of the world. Some of the measures could be escalated as the situation demanded.

Does the U.S. really have support from its European allies for strong economic action against Iran? Europe depends far more on Iranian oil than the U.S. does. Under Secretary of State Richard Cooper and Under Secretary of the Treasury Anthony Solomon led a delegation of six high State and Treasury Department officials on a whirlwind tour last week of London, Paris, Bonn, Berne and Rome. The Europeans disclosed few details of the talks but indicated that the U.S. was soliciting their support for coordinated economic retaliation against Tehran. Said a high West German official: "Washington is seeking our cooperation, and we cannot let the cat out of the bag." He added that Bonn was "generally receptive" to the U.S. proposals.

This week Vance was to travel much the same route to plead with heads of government for support of U.S. efforts to free the hostages. He will wind up his trip at a previously scheduled NATO meeting in Brussels, where the Iran crisis will receive another airing. Said a U.S. official: "The Europeans have told us not to do anything rash. We are now going to ask them to help us not do anything rash"--meaning military action, which Carter is still ruling out for the time being.

Many U.S. officials thought the U.S. should put much more pressure on the Soviet Union to stop playing a duplicitous role in the Iran crisis. Moscow supported the U.N. Security Council resolution calling for the hostages' release. But then the Communist Party newspaper Pravda, which reflects Kremlin policy, denounced the U.S. for intensifying the crisis. U.S. officials regarded the attack as part of a Soviet effort to take advantage of the situation and extend Soviet influence to the Arabian Sea (see WORLD). But the Administration's main concern was that the Soviet policy would give the Iranian radicals a false sense that the international community was not united behind the U.S. on the hostages issue.

In the midst of this gravest international crisis of his presidency. Jimmy Carter went through with his long scheduled formal announcement of his candidacy for reelection. It would normally have been a gala occasion--there were a dozen fund-raising dinners, including ones in Atlanta, Austin, Chicago, New York and Washington. The President canceled his plans to appear at five of them, and sent Vice President Walter Mondale, Rosalynn Carter and Administration officials to represent him.

His announcement itself was a muted, nine-minute affair, staged before relatives, Cabinet members and staff workers in the White House East Room. "I have made some mistakes and I have learned from them," he said. "I carry some scars and I carry them with pride." Then he returned to the issue that preoccupied the nation: "The overriding fact is that 50 of our fellow Americans have been unjustifiably thrust into agony and danger."

The Iran crisis has brought Carter's involvement in the campaign to a total halt. Except for weekends at Camp David, he has not been outside the Washington area since Nov. 4, and only half a dozen times has he even emerged from the White House. But although he has canceled five political trips and done no personal fund raising at all during the crisis, it has proved an enormous help to his re-election chances. Not only have Americans instinctively rallied behind the President at a time of national emergency, but almost all of them credit him with skillful handling of the crisis. After months of floundering and indecision, Carter has appeared both prudent and dynamic--in short, a leader. Polls that showed him trailing Senator Edward M. Kennedy by 2 to 1 just two months ago have changed dramatically. The ABC News-Harris poll last week showed him within four points of Kennedy among Democrats, and when independents were included, the poll actually showed him ahead.

Kennedy himself helped that process substantially last week by blurting out to a TV interviewer the charge that the exiled Shah was one of the most violent dictators in history. Not only was the accusation absurdly exaggerated in itself, but it was quite predictably hailed in Tehran as evidence of a split in American determination not to surrender the Shah for the hostages. For that poor judgment, Kennedy was roundly rebuked by the Administration, numerous political leaders and the press.

Again and again during the week, Carter declared angrily that the issue for the U.S. was not the Shah but release of the hostages. Said the President during a meeting with several hundred State Department employees: "I am not interested in whether the Shah was a good or bad leader. I am not interested in debates over the history of Iran. I do not want to confuse the issue by bringing such debates into this situation. It only delays the day when we will see the American hostages come home."

While trying to free the hostages, the Administration continued canvassing the world in search of a haven for the Shah. So far, South Africa, the Bahamas and Panama have been ruled out. Fruitless pleas have reportedly been made to Austria, Switzerland and Argentina. Cairo is publicly willing to admit him, but both the U.S. and the Shah fear that his presence in Egypt might cause too many problems for his old friend Anwar Sadat. Said a White House adviser about the Shah: "We've got to send him some place where he is not going to topple the government."

If all else fails, the Administration may have to let the Shah stay in the U.S.--While the U.S. tried to find a refuge for him, the convalescent Shah remained in seclusion at Lackland Air Force Base, ten miles west of San Antonio. The base was closed to reporters, and its gates were patrolled by military police. The Shah spent his time reading, playing chess and talking over the phone with his children and friends. From time to time, he emerged from his two-bedroom suite into the balmy 70DEG weather to watch his wife play tennis. He went strolling over the base's golf course with a favorite dog, a great Dane that he had kept at the family's New York apartment while he was undergoing medical treatment.

Armed guards accompany the Shah wherever he goes. Last week in Paris, his nephew Shahriar Mustapha Chafik, 34, was shot to death by an assassin on orders of the Ayatullah Sadegh Khalkhali, head of Iran's Islamic revolutionary tribunal. Vowed he: "This will continue until all these dirty pawns of the decadent system have been purged."

In Tehran the Shah's bearded successor was trying to solidify his power with an ironfisted election strategy. First, he delayed distributing the final version of his 175-article Islamic constitution until 14 days before the referendum, which limited the opportunity for Iranians to debate its merits. At several polling places in Tehran, reporters for the state-owned TV station found that nine out of ten people had not read the document. But they knew how to vote. Day after day, Khomeini had warned that for Iranians not to back the charter "would be a sacrilege to the blood shed by the martyrs." During the two days of voting, Khomeini stationed mullahs and armed revolutionary guards at the polling places, ostensibly to keep order. But they were also able to keep a close watch on the open voting. The ballots had two tabs: red slips for no votes and green ones, the color of Islam, for yes votes.

The outcome was predictably overwhelming approval for Khomeini's constitution. Almost all of his opponents, including non-Persian ethnic minorities and most moderates and leftists, boycotted the referendum. With about half the returns recorded, the government claimed that the constitution had been backed by 10,650,911 to 65,754--i.e., 99%. Rigged as the election may have seemed to Westerners, Interior Minister Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani declared it a "turning point in Iranian history, the juncture at which Iran becomes an Islamic republic in fact as well as in theory."

But Khomeini's control was far from complete, even over his followers on the governing Revolutionary Council. The majority faction on the 15-man council was led by Ghotbzadeh, who apparently agrees with the Ayatullah that at least some hostages should be held until the U.S. turns over the Shah. But Ghotbzadeh's predecessor, Abol Hassan Banisadr, who was ousted as Foreign Minister two weeks ago because he seemed too willing to negotiate with the U.S., kept up a drum roll of criticism of Ghotbzadeh's hard-line policies. The pair clashed repeatedly during the council's secret sessions in Tehran. Three times, according to an intimate, Khomeini had to intervene personally and order one or the other to calm down.

Neither one is exactly a moderate, but Banisadr, who is still Iran's Economic and Finance Minister, is regarded as more flexible. In an interview with TIME Middle East Bureau Chief Bruce van Voorst, Banisadr said that Ghotbzadeh's fundamental mistake is keeping the hostages at the center of the crisis. Instead, said Banisadr, he should try to shift the world's attention to "the complicity of the U.S. Government, through its support of the Shah, in all the corruption, repression, torture and massacres that our nation has suffered in the past three decades."

If he had remained Foreign Minister, said Banisadr, he would not have boycotted the U.N. Security Council debate but would have shown up with a pile of documents to make Iran's case against the U.S. and the Shah. Said he: "My idea was to open the file of the Shah's regime to the inspection of the whole world as a documented case of the consequences of American domination."

During the interview, Banisadr provided some revealing glimpses into Iranian leaders' misconceptions about Americans. He insisted that by exposing the "entire network of corrupt dealings and ties between the Shah and U.S. Government officials," he might have caused Americans to turn on the Carter Administration. Said he: "It is only this policy that can persuade Americans to push for a different regime." He claimed that the Administration was playing a cynical game with the lives of the hostages. Said he: "I don't think that the Americans are concerned very much about the fate of the hostages. They have seized this opportunity to isolate our revolution. If they achieve this objective at the expense of the hostages, they will have paid, from their viewpoint, a bargain price."

To buttress their claims that the embassy was a "nest of spies," the students released a copy of a purported cable to the State Department. It indicated that a William Daugherty and a Malcolm Kalp, who the militants claimed were among the hostages, were CIA officers. The document also implied that there were two other CIA operatives on the embassy staff who were not named. In addition, the students displayed a faked Belgian passport and detailed instructions on how it was to be used with a set of forged immigration stamps to give the appearance that the passport bearer had gone in and out of Iran. The militants said the faked passport belonged to a hostage named Thomas Ahern Jr., who they said was the embassy's narcotics-control officer.

The existence of CIA officers in the embassy would be no surprise. Indeed, intelligence experts were puzzled that the U.S. apparently had so few. The Soviet embassy in Tehran has a far larger complement of KGB operatives. The U.S. reduced its CIA staff in Tehran after the revolution to lessen the chances of antagonizing the new government. In any event, the accepted practice is to expel foreign diplomats suspected of being spies, not put them on trial.

With the referendum behind him, the next step for Khomeini was to name the members of his new government. But this process was suddenly interrupted by the revolt of the Azerbaijani Turks, who follow the leadership of Iran's second most powerful ayatullah, Sharietmadari. They number about 13 million out of Iran's total population of 35 million, and have long sought autonomy. When Sharietmadari expressed mild reservations about the new constitution--he wanted some checks on Khomeini's power--and said that he would boycott the polls, most of his followers in Azerbaijjrfi followed suit.

Two days after the referendum, trouble broke out in Qum, where Khomeini, Sharietmadari and most of Iran's top Shi'ite leaders live. Several hundred Khomeini supporters gathered in the bazaar, shouting slogans against Sharietmadari, and then marched on his house. Among them were young men in black shirts, beating themselves with chain flails--the traditional Shi'ite expression of penitence.

They clashed with a group of Azerbaijanis who had made a pilgrimage to Qum to see Sharietmadari. Pro-Khomeini guards fired into the air and used tear gas to disperse the crowd. Later, an unidentified sniper killed one man guarding Shariet-madari's house. Subsequently, an Iranian soldier was killed and nine people injured.

The shootings prompted a march by 30,000 Sharietmadari followers in Tabriz, the capital of Azerbaijan province, and the march quickly turned into a full-scale revolt. The insurgents seized control of government buildings, the governor's mansion and the local headquarters of the national radio and television station. They sent Khomeini's officials fleeing with the admonition: "You return, you die!" The rebels were joined by local units of the Iranian army and air force and the police, in both Tabriz and the nearby towns in the rugged mountains of the western part of Iran, near the borders of Turkey and Iraq. From Qum, Sharietmadari appealed to his supporters to remain peaceful. He pointedly did not criticize their revolt, but he did rule out secession. Said he: "We want to establish the framework for giving full liberty [meaning self-rule] to Azerbaijan, but it is part of Iran."

Khomeini also reacted cautiously, pleading that Iranians cease fighting among themselves and concentrate "on the confrontation with the U.S." But he acted quickly to forestall trouble in the province of Kurdistan, to the south of Azerbaijan. The 4 million Kurds, who revolted unsuccessfully against Tehran's rule last summer, had boycotted the referendum too. Late last week Khomeini's revolutionary guards that were supposed to pull out of Kurdistan stayed on. The Ayatullah also faces potential trouble among Iran's other minorities, particularly the Baluchi tribesmen in the southeast, Turkomans in the northeast and the Arabs in the southwest.

Another problem facing Khomeini is the declining state of the Iranian economy. Nationalization of banks, insurance companies and large industrial firms has caused virtual chaos. About a third of the country's work force is unemployed, and inflation is running at 40%. Nonetheless, support remains strong for Khomeini and the principles of Iran's Islamic revolution.

In the U.S. there has evolved a similarly firm nationwide determination--that the hostages must be freed. Some Administration officials see not just deadlock and frustration in the events of the past weeks, but an opportunity too. They interpret the national mood as marking the end of the Viet Nam decade of doubt about America and its role. They forecast a substantial increase in the U.S. armed forces and a willingness to make it plain that these forces would be used to defend America's just interests.

*U.S. officials were still complaining last week that they had been doublecrossed by the Mexican government, which on Nov. 28 assured Washington that it would make the Shah welcome and then on the following day changed its mind. The Mexicans apparently feared that admitting the Shah would be regarded as a sign of weakness by the Third World.

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