Video Transcript

L. Bruce Laingen—Tehran 1979:

We evolved into a working relationship with the provisional government, knowing full well that the power was really behind the scenes.  Making do if you will.  The Shah had been ousted in February, in the context of the revolution, and was moving around Morocco and North Africa into Latin America.  At that point, in November 1979 or October 79, he was in Mexico and clearly in need of medical assistance.  So he was admitted into the United States in late October 1979 – against my advice, against the advice of me and my embassy.  We thought it was too soon to do that.  We dealt with that situation to the extent we could for the next couple of weeks, because the sentiment in Tehran was very much against admitting the Shah – concerned that admitting the Shah would restore him to power as we had done twenty-five years ago in the crisis of 1953.  Student sentiment was particularly strong.  So suddenly we found our situation where I was in the Foreign Ministry that day – November 4, 1979 – but students, militant students – we called them terrorists – they were militant, they were students – the bulk of them decided quietly among themselves that they would seize upon the situation on the streets, enlist a broader number of students and attack the embassy, occupy it, at that time they assumed for several hours, to make the point that the Shah must be returned to Iran to stand trial for what he had done against Iran.

I was informed by my deputy, who was with me, Victor Tomseth, and one of my security officers down in the courtyard of the Foreign Ministry, – when we got down there on the way out – that the Embassy was under attack, and that it was being occupied, and that we should seek help.  So I bounded back up the stairs, seeking the Foreign Minister or someone in authority to whom, with whom, I could counsel for the kind of security response that government was obligated to provide under all rules of international law.  I spent the day doing that.  By midnight there was no help, and the provisional government was still in power at midnight, but destined to fall the next day.  It was unable to provide the security we needed.  The Foreign Minister with whom I had been speaking up to midnight said, “We’ll have it resolved by morning,” and asked me where I was going to stay.  I said to him, “Yeah, where am I going to stay?  Where are you going to put me?”  I stayed in the Foreign Ministry that night and for the next four hundred days, roughly, until I was taken to solitary confinement in a prison towards the end.

Response

So yes, we were confident the first morning after the seizure of the embassy that it could be coped with – “It isn’t going to last too long - the same people are on the scene.”  It became clear that day and into the next that we had a very different situation – that the provisional government was out, that we were stuck in the Foreign Ministry, that we had no authority.  I was sort of suffering with a “captain of the ship syndrome.”  I was captain, but I couldn’t do a damn thing to help my staff over on the other side of town.  And that was my abiding concern, my pain if you will, throughout that crisis.  I was there, seemingly with authority, as charge d’affaires, but I could do nothing to help my colleagues.

In a situation like that you pray a lot.  Start with that.  You cross your fingers and think, “Maybe it isn’t going to be as bad as it sounds.”  For the next four hundred days, I wrote a good deal of messages to the government to which I was still accredited as charge d’affairs.  

We found ways to convey our views to the government in Washington, to the State Department, through the Swiss Embassy, which had become our protecting power.

We are often referred to as sort of semi-hostages, not really hostages, held within the Foreign Ministry in a room there.  But we did not forget and no one should ever forget what every hostage in whatever condition he is in is denied the fundamental human right of freedom.  That was denied to the three of us throughout that time.  We were not free.  We knew that.  We sensed it.  We lived with that pain, that anger, that frustration.  That’s what hostages do, wherever they are.  The students who took the embassy and held the hostages, all 66 of them from the beginning, 13 released early, 53 for the duration – all of them we knew were unavailable to us.  We knew that the students that were holding them were anxious to get hold of us.  They tried several times – knocked on the doors of the Foreign Ministry.  Access to us was denied them every time until toward the end, the last three weeks, when they got into the Foreign Ministry, and took us blindfolded and bound to solitary confinement – to Komiteh Prison Number Three.  I know that prison cell very well, because many of my colleagues had been in and out of that cell, as hostages, during those four hundred days.  We were held for about three weeks in solitary confinement, and I don’t recommend that to anyone.  Thank God it lasted only three weeks. 

Personal Qualities

I had to rely on myself, my own conviction, my own experience in life.  I had served in World War II as a naval officer, landing on a variety of beaches in the Philippines during that campaign.  I developed in that time a core creative confidence in myself – self confidence if you want to put it that way, a conviction that I was right, and my adversaries were wrong, a conviction that I could weather it.  I also relied on my own deep personal religious experience, which I did not then and I do not now wear on my sleeve.  But I think every hostage, like every victim of foxholes in World War I, eventually decides maybe, just maybe, there might be some help from a higher quarter.  I did a lot of that kind of reliance on a “higher quarter” and that helped me a great deal.  I had confidence that my family was with me in a moral and personal sense.  I had confidence in my staff, who were on the other side of the city.

All of us in Tehran, on our return said the real heroes were our families, particularly our spouses, those of us who had them.  But all of our family members.  They are the real heroes in any terrorist hostage situation.  They don’t know everything.  They don’t know precisely what they can do and cannot do.  They invariably believe that their government is not giving them all the information that they need and that they deserve and should have.  Unlike us in Tehran – we knew our confines, we knew where the walls were.  We knew what he could do and not do.  Family members back home are essentially adrift.  They can’t speak directly to their family members held hostage.  They have to cope on their own.  They reach out in many ways.  Invariably, I think, over a length of time family members come together and unite in some way, as the ones in Washington did at the time.  They founded an organization, founded by my wife, called the Family Liaison Action Group, or FLAG.  They also found ways to symbolize the situation.  The term “yellow ribbon” needs to be mentioned.  The yellow ribbon began its life as a symbol in the Tehran crisis.  My wife decided one day that there needed to be some kind of symbol that would be a way for family members and the public at home to unite behind something.  Rather than be mad at Iran and the students, she hung up a yellow ribbon – and it became a symbol of caring throughout the crisis, and is today the universal symbol of caring for Americans in distress overseas.

Advice

I counsel every potential victim of terrorism, which is everybody today in the Foreign Service, let’s face it – no matter where you are – to look at yourself, to consider what strengths are within you to cope with the situation, a potential situation like that.  We all have strengths of one kind or another.  And we all appreciate, as former hostages, that there is a lot more in there, in terms of the strength of the human spirit, than you ever imagined.  You don’t sense that until you come up abreast against frontally a hostage situation like that.  I counsel everyone in terms of advice for the future, for the Foreign Service today – I’ll put it in three words – know your country.  Know your own country and know the country in which you are serving.  Know your own country.  Know your own country’s policy.  Know why you’re there, in that particular spot.  You have to begin with that.  You have to understand why you’re there, what policy purposes you’re serving.  Every member of an embassy should have some idea of that.  And I think they get that at least to begin with here in the Foreign Service Institute.  Know our strengths.  Be a patriot, for God sakes!  Be proud of your country.  You got to start with that you’re flying our flag out there, representing your country.  You should never forget that.  Know the country in which you are serving.  Know its history to the extent you can.  Know its culture.  Know its people.  Those who served most effectively, I think, the strongest in that crisis in Tehran, were former Peace Corps Volunteers who were there now as Foreign Service officers.  They knew the country.  They knew it better than anyone else.  I had served in Tehran myself, 25 years earlier, in a different assignment.  That earlier assignment, 25 years earlier, gave me a perspective about that country – its people, its culture, how they tick, how they ticked at that time – that helped me a great deal.