“I Had Left One America and Come Home to Another One”: First‐Person Accounts of Captivity During the Iranian Hostage Crisis

Abstract

Introduction In a May 1981 New York Times retrospective on Iranian hostage crisis, reporter John Kifner wrote that President Jimmy Carter described his feelings during 444 days of capture as similar to impotence that a powerful person feels when his child is kidnapped (101). As hostage crisis progressed, both press and president portrayed United States as held hostage. Writers for Newsweek explained that hostages were received as heroes upon their arrival home because that had been held vicariously captive with them for 444 days embraced them as heroes anyway, because they were home-and because they were us (Goldman et al. 27). Whether captured on American territory or abroad, from seventeenth until midtwentieth century, capture, anguish, and eventual release of Americans has enthralled American public and invariably touched on larger questions of foreign policy. As Kathryn Derounian asserts, Indian and deliverance define[d] journey of New England soul and society toward redemption (86). Likewise, as Susan Jeffords has observed, in contemporary foreign policy, captivity narratives, protection, and national have been central as well (210). Nowhere is story of more prominent than in Iranian hostage crisis. After flight of Shah of Iran in January 1979 and brief occupation of American embassy in Tehran on February 14, 1979, number of embassy personnel had been scaled back considerably. After learning of Shah's impending visit to United States for medical treatment of cancer, students and other revolutionary activists scaled walls of embassy on morning of November 4, 1979, and refused to surrender their control over building or personnel until Shah was returned to Iran.1 In a gesture of solidarity toward minorities and women, Khomeini announced release of seven white women and ten black males on November 18; after that, for next 444 days (with one exception), American embassy personnel were held hostage in Iran. The covers of major news magazines showed pictures of blindfolded hostages with captions such as Blackmailing U.S. (Time, November 19, 1979), while New York Times published a lengthy series of reports on May 17, 1981, four months after release of hostages, with title America in Captivity. Once again, that sturdy genre of captivity, as historian Jill Lepore calls it, framed a foreign policy crisis so pervasively that it provided answers to a series of larger questions that Americans had at dawn of Reagan era about legacy of Vietnam, appropriate response to Third World revolution, and their identity as Americans (145). The extant secondary literature on American narratives is useful for analyzing Iranian hostage crisis. One role that captives have played is that of informant. Readers of stories are given an insider's account of workings of unfamiliar. Historian D. R. Sewell has argued that stories of serve as ethnographies that reverse upper hand temporarily enjoyed by captors: the captors may have controlled brute events, but captive controls story telling (42). For reader, culture of enemy is created and presented in an authoritative voice through chronicling of events that took place in captivity. The captive brings a privileged observational stance to culture of other. Often unable to understand language spoken, and finding politics and culture distant, readers rely on captive to interpret. While captive himself is often unable to speak local language and often does not have specialized knowledge of local scene, trauma of capture gives a certain legitimacy to captive interpretations that otherwise would be held suspect. Capture, in other words, trumps specialized and linguistic expertise. …