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

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