WASHINGTON – For 444 days, Iranian militants held 52 Americans hostage in Tehran, leaving emotional scars for them and their loved ones — and dooming Jimmy Carter’s presidency.
The revelation that five months before their release, former Texas Gov. John Connally encouraged Iran to prolong the ordeal left hostages bitter.
“444 days,” Rocky Sickmann, a 22-year-old Marine guard when the U.S. Embassy fell, said Monday. “I will never regain those lost days. ... Each day you didn’t know if you were going to live or die.”
Ben Barnes, a protégé of Connally who served beside him as lieutenant governor, told The New York Times about a three-week trip they took to Middle East capitals during the crisis.
Connally, angling to impress Republican nominee Ronald Reagan in hopes he’d be named secretary of state or defense, asked leaders to send word to Iran not to release hostages before Election Day.
With Carter, 98, receiving end of life hospice care, Barnes told The Times, he needed to unburden himself of the secret.
“History needs to know this happened,” Barnes, now 84, said. “Carter … didn’t have a fighting chance with those hostages still in the embassy in Iran.”
To survivors, the revelation was more appalling than stunning. Democrats and hostages suspected the Reagan camp had a hand in prolonging the ordeal, given the obvious political benefits.
“It’s just typical. Politicians do all sorts of things to achieve whatever political agenda they have in mind,” said William Royer Jr., now 91 and a resident of Katy in suburban Houston.
On Nov. 4, 1979, when militant college students overran the embassy after the fall of the U.S.-backed shah, Royer was an English teacher at the U.S. Information Agency.
Over the years he’s recounted the torture — being stripped naked and forced against a wall in front of a firing squad, testing his faith that he was more valuable alive than dead.
“I have a lot of respect for Reagan and his policies. And I thought he was a great president,” Royer said, calling Carter “one of the few relatively honest men” to hold the job. “I have a great deal of appreciation for President Carter. He had a bad deal.”
David Roeder, a 41-year-old deputy Air Force attaché when the ordeal began, said Tuesday he was “baffled” that anyone went out of their way to make him and his colleagues suffer longer than necessary.
“It’s hard for me to understand how any American can do that to any other American,” Roeder, now 83 and a retired Air Force Colonel, said from his home in Pinehurst, North Carolina.
He still has the utmost respect for Reagan, whose knowledge or involvement in Connally’s moves may never be proved or disproved, given that most of those involved died long ago.
His regard for Carter has grown in light of Barnes’ revelations. As for Reagan, he said, ”I can’t accept the fact that he would be involved in something like that.”
‘Traumatic’
The crisis spawned ABC’s Nightline, providing a nightly update on Carter’s inability to end the humiliation.
Politically, Election Day — Nov. 4, 1980 — was the deadline to save his presidency.
“If we had gotten the hostages home, we’d have won,” Carter’s White House communications director, Gerald Rafshoon, told The Times in response to Barnes’ account. “It’s pretty damn outrageous.”
Thomas Lankford, a lawyer for the hostages and their families since 1999, said Monday that delaying the release could only have inflicted harm.
In the last four to six months as captives, many “deteriorated physically and mentally,” he said. “You don’t want to add even a day to that kind of treatment.”
The first 30 days, Sickmann was tied to a chair and forbidden to speak outside of interrogations. He spent more than a year in a room with two others, often subjected to physical and mental abuse. Until his release, he only went outside seven times.
Rumors circulated among the hostages that they’d become victims not only of the militants but of domestic U.S. politics. Sickmann refused to believe that anyone could do such a thing to fellow Americans — diplomats, military personnel and civilians — no matter the prize.
“If it did happen, we must make sure that this never happens again,” said Sickmann, now 66 and a resident of St. Louis, where he works for Folds of Honor, a group that provides scholarships to families of fallen and disabled service members.
“It was traumatic for a hostage, but it was traumatic for my poor family and everybody else involved,” he said. “We as America, we’re much better than this.”
‘What people are capable of’
Barnes did not respond to a message left at his office by The Dallas Morning News.
Records dug out by The Times showed that he and Connally left Houston on July 18, 1980, on an oil company jet. The trip included stops in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel. They returned on August 11.
The Times report included a photo provided by Barnes of a meeting with President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt. It’s unclear who else they met with, or whether the message reached Tehran.
The hostages remained captive another five months and nine days — until Reagan took the oath of office on Jan. 20, 1981.
Barnes said he only realized the purpose of the trip after the first meeting with an Arab leader.
Connally’s message to each, he recounted to The Times, was: “Look, Ronald Reagan’s going to be elected president. And you need to get the word to Iran that they’re going to make a better deal with Reagan than they are Carter. It would be very smart for you to pass the word to the Iranians to wait until after this general election is over.”
Connally, who died in 1993, served two terms as Texas’ chief executive. He ran Lyndon Johnson’s campaigns in Texas and served briefly as secretary of the Navy under John F. Kennedy before running for governor. He’d held the job for 10 months when Kennedy was assassinated in downtown Dallas. Connally, in the front seat, was badly wounded.
In 1971, President Richard Nixon named him treasury secretary. Two years later he switched parties and as a Republican, sought the nomination for president in 1980. When he dropped out that March, he threw himself into helping Reagan.
Barnes told The Times that he’s certain Reagan’s campaign chair William Casey, later CIA director, knew about the mission to undermine Carter’s efforts to free the hostages, because they met just after the trip, at an American Airlines lounge at what was then known as Dallas/Fort Worth Regional Airport.
Casey, who died in 1987, wanted to know whether “they were going to hold the hostages,” Barnes recalled.
Kathryn Koob, one of two women among the hostages and a 42-year-old embassy cultural officer at the time, said Monday that “if someone felt that that was important for them to do at that time, I feel sorry for them, that they would use other people’s lives in that way.”
By phone from her home in Iowa, Koob — who penned an account titled Guest of the Revolution — said she’s not interested in recriminations against Connally or anyone else.
“We’re home safe and that’s the important thing,” she said. “When you’ve been through something like that … you realize what people are capable of doing, and you move forward with your life. … It happened and it’s over and anything we say today is not going to change what happened.”
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