Angry Attacks on America

Khomeini's tirades spur outbreaks of mob hysteria--and bloodshed

The rancorous quarrel between the U.S. and Iran darkened and expanded last week into an ever more perilous confrontation.

From the U.S. came a warning of military force, from Iran an appeal to mob violence. Such violence broke out from Turkey to India, most seriously in Pakistan, where the first American blood was shed. And by this time Iran's fire-eating Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini had become so extreme, so demagogic, so streaked with irrationality that serious diplomats wondered how the breach could be repaired. "This is not a struggle between the United States and Iran," Khomeini declared. "It is a struggle between Islam and the infidels." He repeatedly threatened that the 49 American hostages held in the captured U.S. embassy in Tehran would be tried as spies, and possibly executed, if the U.S. does not send back the deposed Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi from the hospital in New York City.

The White House, supported by widespread American indignation against the Iranians, responded with a warning that "the consequences of harm to any single hostage will be extremely grave." President Carter backed up that warning by ordering the 80,000-ton carrier Kitty Hawk and five escorting warships to speed from Subic Bay in the Philippines to reinforce the carrier Midway arid twelve other ships already in the Persian Gulf area. Until last week, the White House had emphatically ruled out all talk of using military force against Iran; now it just as emphatically warned that while it was seeking a peaceful settlement it had "other remedies available."

"Why should we be afraid?" jeered Khomeini. "We consider martyrdom a great honor."

Khomeini's inflammatory rhetoric played a major part in the wave of Muslim fanaticism and anti-American violence that swept far beyond Iran. In Saudi Arabia, possessor of the world's greatest reserves of oil and American dollars, a band of extreme religious zealots seized the Sacred Mosque in Mecca, the holiest shrine in all Islam (see WORLD). In Pakistan, a mob enraged by radio reports claiming that the U.S. had inspired the attack on the Mecca mosque stormed and set fire to the U.S. embassy. They left the modernistic, 30-acre compound a gutted ruin. Two Americans were killed; 90 others were rescued after seven hours of horror (see following pages). Angry crowds also threw rocks through the windows of a U.S. consulate in Izmir, Turkey; another crowd chanted "Down with American imperialism!" outside the American embassy in Dacca, Bangladesh; demonstrators in Calcutta stoned the U.S. consulate and burned President Carter in effigy.

Khomeini's reaction to the embassy attack in Pakistan was "great joy" and a call for all Muslims to join in an uprising against Western influence.

Indeed, even while the Pakistani attack was going on, Khomeini's office made a statement over Iranian radio blaming the Mecca violence on "criminal U.S. imperialism." It added: "The Muslims must. . . expect this kind of dirty act by American imperialism and international Zionism." There was not a shred of evidence for the accusation, and U.S. State Department Spokesman Hodding Carter promptly described it as an "outright, knowing lie." Indeed, the assailants were fundamentalist Muslims whose opposition to all Western influence is similar to Khomeini's archaic views. But though the U.S. has no quarrel with Islam, the report of U.S. complicity was widely believed in Islamic countries.

For the U.S. the immediate issue remained the 49 hostages in Tehran. Concern about their fate far overshadowed any relief about the return of the 13 hostages--five white women and eight black men--who were freed by their captors and who made it home for Thanksgiving dinner. As the 13 stepped off the C-135 military jet that brought them into Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, dozens of relatives who had been flown there from all over the country rushed to embrace them. But the official welcoming could not be jubilant. Said Secretary of State Cyrus Vance: "Our relief that you are safe is muted by our concern for your colleagues who remain." A day later, White House Press Spokesman Jody Powell announced after Carter conferred with his top aides at Camp David: "The last American hostage is just as important to us as the first."

Khomeini's original threat against the 49 was conditional: "If Carter does not return the Shah, it is possible that the hostages may be put on trial," but his intentions seemed clear. The prisoners, Khomeini said, were not diplomats but people "whose acts of espionage have been proved on the basis of evidence." If the hostages are tried, he added, "Carter knows what will happen." Iran's Deputy Chief Islamic Prosecutor Hassan Ghaffarpour was explicit. If the hostages are found guilty of espionage, he said, they would be "executed by firing squad."

The trials presumably would be held before an Islamic revolutionary court. Like many other acts in the Muslim world, the proceedings there begin with a prayer: "In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful." But compassion and mercy have scarcely been noticeable in Iran's revolutionary trials. They are often held at night, and the accused have never yet been represented by a defense attorney. They may speak in their own behalf, but members of the audience also may, and frequently do, step forward to add accusations of their own to those presented by the prosecutor. When the sentence of death is pronounced, as it has been this year against more than 600 Iranians accused as officials and agents of the Shah, it is usually carried out within hours.

It is possible that any Americans found guilty would be sentenced to prison rather than executed, or perhaps simply expelled. But the chances are that only some lower-level employees would be acquitted. To Western reporters, Deputy Prosecutor Ghaffarpour last week defined espionage as "the gathering of information for use in hostile operations, military, economic, political and psychological, etc., against the Islamic community." That is broad enough to cover nearly all the intelligence-gathering functions that just about every major embassy in the world carries out.

The students holding the Tehran embassy last week provided some ominous indications of the kind of "evidence" that might be produced against the Americans. In a courtyard decorated with portraits of Khomeini, students chanting "Allahu Akbar!" (God is great!) publicly interrogated in two groups the 13 hostages who were eventually freed. Secretary Joan Walsh was quizzed about embassy correspondence with Shahpour Bakhtiar, the Shah's last Prime Minister, who is now in exile in France. Bakhtiar asked for material support and intelligence on events in Iran; the embassy denied his request, but expressed a wish to "maintain the dialogue." As the chants continued, Walsh said the exchange was "not normal embassy correspondence," though it seemed quite normal to Western diplomats in the crowd. The questioners implied that the U.S. was helping Bakhtiar encourage separatist movements.

The students also asked pointed questions about millions of dollars in counterfeit American greenbacks, deutsche marks and Iranian rials that had been found in the embassy. They had been brought there by an Iranian, and the embassy apparently was trying to track down the counterfeiters.

Student interrogators implied that the embassy had been attempting to undermine the Iranian economy. "Oh heavens, we weren't involved!" exclaimed Walsh. The English-language Tehran Times, nonetheless, bannered a headline the next day: HOSTAGES REVEAL "PLOT" TO HIT IRAN'S ECONOMY.

Could any of the hostages actually be CIA employees? The U.S. is saying absolutely nothing about that possibility, but all major countries do have intelligence agency personnel that work out of their embassies. It is a worldwide practice, as the Iranians know.

Trials of any of the hostages would be an absolute violation of international law. Accredited diplomats have immunity against being tried by the host country. If they are suspected of espionage, the normal procedure is to declare them persona non grata (unwelcome) and order them to leave the country.

President Carter, who has put aside almost all other business to concentrate on the Iranian crisis, was in a state of fury. He took care not to let it show in public, but he did not conceal it from his aides. "He's in an ice-cold rage," reported one. "That look in his eyes can just chill you solid." Carter reacted to the first threats of spy trials for the hostages by authorizing Press Secretary Powell to release a statement asserting that "worldwide outrage . . . would be greatly heightened." Then he received a full CIA translation of

Ayatullah Khomeini's speech, which included an incredible taunt. The President, said Khomeini, "knows that he is beating an empty drum. Carter does not have the guts to engage in a military operation."

When the President heard that, said one aide, "he clenched his teeth so tight that his jaw turned white." The reaction went far beyond personal pique: Carter and his aides took the speech as a sign that the Ayatullah had misread U.S. restraint as an indication that the nation was afraid to take any action. They agreed that he must be disabused of that notion. The President, who was spending Thanksgiving week at Camp David, returned immediately to the White House by helicopter for a late-afternoon meeting with the Special Coordination Committee, which has been meeting twice a day to plan strategy.

By the time the President strode across the White House lawn, head held defiantly high, the State Department had drafted a statement posing the military threat obliquely but unmistakably. Secretary Vance argued against issuing the statement immediately, on the ground that it might further inflame the mobs in Tehran. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and others insisted that the Iranians had to be warned of the dangerous consequences before they actually put any Americans on trial.

Carter approved the issuing of the statement, with one change: he personally rewrote the key sentence to remove any possibility that the U.S. would need authorization from the United Nations to use force. The six-sentence statement, as handed to reporters 45 minutes later, warned that the "other remedies" available to the U.S. are "explicitly recognized in the charter of the United Nations."

The reference was to Articles 42 and 51 of the charter. Article 42 empowers the Security Council to authorize "demonstrations, blockade and other operations by air, sea or land forces" of member nations to restore peace and security. Article 51 recognizes "the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a member of the United Nations" before the Security Council has time to respond. Under international law, an embassy is considered part of the territory of the nation maintaining that embassy; thus the Iranian seizure of the embassy in Tehran could be considered an armed attack on the U.S. itself.

Shortly after issuing the statement, Carter ordered the naval reinforcements to the Persian Gulf area from the Pacific. The ships should get there this week. The two flattops that will be on the scene carry at least 125 jet fighters and bombers.

The Pentagon has not yet decided just what the carriers should do; Washington's hope is that their mere presence near Iran will deter Khomeini and the street mobs from harming the hostages. If a greater show of force seems called for, one possibility is that the fleet would blockade the narrow Straits of Hormuz, through which tankers carry Iran's oil to foreign markets. A blockade would cut off Iran's international revenues, but it would also produce a serious world shortage of petroleum and a sharp increase in prices.

U.S. allies in Western Europe and Japan would be gravely injured.

The fleet will take no offensive action so long as all the hostages remain alive. But Administration officials suggest that if even one hostage is killed, attacks on Iranian targets would begin speedily. The first assault might well be an air strike aimed at destroying the 77 F-14 jets and Phoenix missiles sold to Iran by the U.S. when the Shah was in power. The rationale:

such an attack on the air bases at Isfahan and Shiraz would not only serve as a show of force against the Khomeini regime, it would also remove any possibility of the jets and missiles eventually falling into Soviet hands--and there would be few Iranian civilian casualties.

Far from inducing restraint, however, the dispatch of the fleet triggered the worst verbal attacks yet. The demonstrators occupying the embassy boasted that they had wired explosives in all the rooms where the hostages were being held.

"Within an instant after hearing the first word of a suspicious movement" by the American ships, they said, they would blow up the embassy and kill all the hostages. Khomeini, on television, added: "I have no doubt that they would."

The military threat happened to coincide with the start of Muharram, a monthlong sacred period for Iran's dominant Shi'ite Muslims, which this year begins the Islamic 15th century. Last year it also marked the start of mass demonstrations that eventually brought down the Shah, and thus it has acquired a revolutionary tinge. Excited by that combination, roaring crowds numbering in the tens of thousands surrounded the embassy. Their frenzy was so great that even the youths occupying the embassy urged the mob through loudspeakers to calm down. Dozens of people fainted in the crush and were passed unconscious over the heads of the throng to waiting ambulances. A number of demonstrators wore the kafan, the Islamic burial shroud, to proclaim their willingness to become martyrs. One group carried a large cardboard effigy of Carter, depicting him as Satan, with fangs, and a scythe dripping blood.

Frustrated in its efforts to win the hostages' release, the U.S. continued its diplomatic efforts to isolate Iran as an outlaw state. Initially Carter was described by an aide as "disgusted but not surprised" by the failure of U.S. allies to condemn Iran publicly. But last week the Foreign Ministers of the nine nations of the European Community denounced the threat to try the hostages and appealed to Khomeini to free them. The French government did too, belatedly, after a public opinion poll disclosed that 64% of the respondents approved Carter's refusal to hand the Shah over to the Khomeini regime. Indeed, half the French people questioned are now sorry that their government granted political asylum to the Ayatullah last year.

Even the Soviets provided some support. Shortly after National Security Adviser Brzezinski called in Soviet Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin for coffee, sandwiches and some blunt words, the Soviet radio station that titles itself the National Voice of Iran broadcast a plea that the hostages be freed as a humanitarian move.

The U.S. tried but failed to get the U.N. Security Council to denounce the Iranian threat to put the hostages on trial as spies. The other 14 members of the Council, noting that Iran had ignored an earlier appeal to free the hostages, doubted that such a statement would do any good. In the Arab world, conservative governments are appalled by the embassy seizure but reluctant to speak out, and some fear that the dispatch of U.S. warships to the Persian Gulf area will inflame anti-American sentiment in their own nations. Said one Saudi diplomat: "The military option is a good thing to have, but a bad thing to talk about having."

One extreme frustration for the U.S. is that it has been unable to establish contact with Ayatullah Khomeini himself. Washington is getting messages to and from some members of the 15-man Revolutionary Council, which supposedly rules Iran, but Carter Administration officials are unsure how much power those members exercise. Indeed, perhaps the most troubling element in the whole situation is the possibility that the mob occupying the embassy and holding the hostages may be beyond anyone's control.

In theory, Khomeini seems to be in complete command. His new constitution, published last week, provides for the establishment of a medieval theocracy. An elected Parliament would be subservient to a Constitutional Protective Council, to be composed of six Islamic clerics and six laymen known to be devout Muslims. They are to be appointed by a faqih, the leading theologian of Iran, who is also designated commander of the armed forces and given veto power over virtually every government act; though the constitution does not name him, the faqih could only be Khomeini. While a few Iranians bravely denounced the constitution as establishing a dictatorship, there is no doubt that Iranian voters will approve it overwhelmingly in a referendum next week. Says one Western ambassador in Tehran: "The furor over the embassy takeover has galvanized the nation behind Khomeini. A Chicago ward boss could not have pulled a more clever political stratagem."

But Khomeini's Revolutionary Council is now disclaiming responsibility for the takeover of the embassy. Acting Interior Minister Ali Akbar Hashimi Rafsanjani told TIME Middle East Bureau Chief Bruce van Voorst: "We never had the intention to move against the embassy. But the ex-dictator's arrival in the United States pushed the people over the deep end. When the attack on the embassy came, it took place so quickly and decisively that, frankly, all we could do was express our support ex post facto. Even if we had tried to stop them, we would have failed." Khomeini himself asserted on Iranian television that if there is a U.S. military attack, "I cannot control" the embassy occupiers.

Though these statements scarcely relieve the government of responsibility for condoning and abetting a violent breach of international law, they might contain some truth. The embassy occupiers, who have begun to talk to Western reporters, hardly appear excessively religious. There is some question whether they really are students, though they are mostly 18 to 24 and give the names of their schools when returning to the embassy compound from outside visits.

Initially, the occupiers seemed to have little understanding of the ramifications of their move, but now that they do, their egos are enormously inflated. They treat Mullah Mousavi Kho-eyni, Khomeini's envoy to them, with ill-concealed contempt. When asked by reporters if they would obey a Khomeini order to release the hostages, most merely shrug.

Radical leftists have sought, with some success, to put themselves at the head of the repeated anti-American marches. Says one Iranian journalist: "If Khomeini tried to back down now, we'd have a leftist takeover tomorrow." One of the demonstrators goes even further.

If Khomeini ordered the release of the hostages and the occupiers complied, he says, the leftist demonstrators outside "would jump over the wall, exterminate the hostages and probably the students as well."

Beneath Khomeini, the Iranian government is a babble of conflicting voices, some sounding bloodthirsty, others somewhat conciliatory. Acting Foreign Minister Abol Hassan Banisadr, who seems torn between two factions, managed to echo both themes at once last week. "If the U.S. Government intervenes militarily against Iran, all Iranians will fight to the last drop of blood," he proclaimed. But he also said: "The U.S., as a land of free people, can neither submit to the humiliation of surrendering a sick man [the Shah] to a regime such as the Islamic Republic of Iran, nor can it take any pleasure in the humiliation of saving the lives of about 50 to 60 of its citizens by turning over this sick man."

While the U.S. is determined not to hand over the Shah to the Khomeini regime, it would be happy to see him leave his Manhattan hospital to return to Mexico, or go to Egypt or Paris--almost anywhere. The Shah himself told ABC's Barbara Walters that though he was not "stupid" enough to go back to Iran, he hoped to leave the U.S. in two weeks.

His doctors imply that he could depart even sooner than that. They completed radiation treatments for the Shah's cancer of the lymphatic system last week, and though he still needs to have a gallstone removed from his bile duct, that does not have to be done in New York.

Says one doctor: "I think we could give the Shah a prescription for Darvon and send him back to Mexico."

TIME correspondents sampling U.S.

public opinion around the country last week found Americans almost unanimously against handing over the Shah to Khomeini. "We'd be groveling if we caved in now," says Boston Lawyer-Author George V. Higgins. But some consider that it was a major blunder to admit the Shah in the first place, even for medical treatment. Above all, there is frustration and anger. Willard Hedrick, owner of a construction company in St.

Louis, has a simple solution for dealing with the Iranians: "We ought to shoot the sons of bitches." Says Bob Brubaker, a wheat farmer in western Kansas: "I'm beginning to think that we should either seize their oilfields or destroy them if we can." Frank McVey, a New York truck driver, would not even wait to see what happens to the hostages. Says he: "We might as well write off the hostages; they're going to be killed no matter what we do. We should bomb the hell out of that country so it will be a long time before anyone else tries the same thing."

Such militant views are still much in the minority (though Marine Corps officials in Chicago reported a 150% increase in inquiries from prospective recruits since the Tehran crisis started), but they indicate the domestic pressure on Carter as he tries to cope with a situation that all but defies a happy resolution.

Some face-saving formulas are conceivable. Rafsanjani, speaking to TIME's Van Voorst, suggested that the Iranians might settle for less than an outright return of the Shah.

Said he: "The Administration can considerably improve prospects for a solution by: 1) acknowledging the presence of evidence sufficient to warrant an investigation into criminal charges brought against the deposed Shah; 2) expressing its willingness to extradite the ex-dictator out of respect for the Iranian people's quest for justice; [then] 3) pleading inability to do this because of legal restrictions. If the U.S. Government makes such an announcement it would, I personally feel, open the way for a solution."

U.N. representatives of some non-aligned countries are exploring another possible compromise: the Shah leaves the U.S., and the U.N. grants Iran a chance to air its grievances against the Shah and begin some sort of international judicial proceedings to determine his guilt and whether he should be forced to return the millions he is said to have taken from Iran. Meanwhile, Khomeini "guarantees" release of the hostages, perhaps handing them over to some third country. The U.S. would insist on outright release of the hostages first, but once that is done it would have no objection to Iran's airing its complaints in international forums and seeking return of the Shah by judicial means.

But the crisis that was triggered by the Shah's arrival for treatment in New York is much larger than the Shah. As U.S. embassies go up in flames, and Americans are killed, it is difficult to see how any compromise on the Shah can provide more than a first step toward a return to civilized relations with Khomeini's Iran.

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