1.

FORMER U.S. EMBASSY HOSTAGES SAY IRAN'S PRESIDENT-ELECT ONE OF THEIR CAPTORS
By Russ Bynum

Associated Press
July 1, 2005

http://www.cbc.ca/cp/world/050630/w063024.html

SAVANNAH, Ga. -- An American held hostage in Iran for 444 days says "there's no question about it" -- the country's new president was one of his captors a quarter-century ago. But others are not so sure.

Watching coverage of Iran's presidential election on television dredged up 25-year-old memories that prompted four of the former hostages to exchange e-mails. And those four realized they shared the same conclusion -- the firm belief that president-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had been one of their Iranian captors. Associates of Ahmadinejad deny any such link.

"This is the guy. There's no question about it," said former hostage Chuck Scott, a retired U.S. army colonel who lives in Jonesboro, Ga. "You could make him a blond and shave his whiskers, put him in a zoot suit and I'd still spot him."

Scott and former hostages David Roeder, William Daugherty and Don A. Sharer told the Associated Press on Wednesday they have no doubt Ahmadinejad, 49, was one of the hostage-takers. A fifth ex-hostage, Kevin Hermening, said he reached the same conclusion after looking at photos.

Not everyone agrees. Former hostage and retired U.S. air force Col. Thomas Schaefer of Peoria, Ariz., said he doesn't recognize Ahmadinejad, by face or name, as one of his captors.

Several of the hostage-takers also said Ahmadinejad did not participate, as did an aide to the president-elect.

Student militants seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran on Nov. 4, 1979, and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days to protest Washington's refusal to hand over the U.S.-backed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi for trial. The shah fled Iran earlier that year after he was overthrown by the Islamic Revolution.

Ahmadinejad was a member of the Office of Strengthening Unity, the student organization that planned the embassy takeover, but that he personally opposed the idea, his associates said.

The aide, Meisan Rowhani, told the AP from Tehran that Ahmadinejad was asked during recent private meetings if he had a role in the hostage taking. Rowhani said he replied, " 'No. I believed that if we do that the world will swallow us.' "

Mohammad Ali Sayed Nejad, a longtime friend of the president-elect, said that in 1979, "Ahmadinejad had focused his fight against communism and Marxism and he was one of the opponents of seizing the U.S. Embassy. He was a constant opponent."

Some former hostages couldn't be sure about their captors. Paul Lewis of Sidney, Ill., a former marine guard at the embassy, said he thought Ahmadinejad looked vaguely familiar when he saw a picture of him on the news last week.

But "my memories were more of the gun barrel, not the people behind it," he said.

Ex-hostage Alan Golacinski also said he couldn't be certain.

"I can't identify this individual as one of my interrogators because I was blindfolded during all of my interrogations," said Golacinski, who was an embassy security officer. However, Golacinski said, "He did look somewhat familiar."

A memory expert cautioned that people who discuss their recollections can influence one another in reinforcing false memories. Also, it's harder to identify from memory someone of a different race or ethnicity, said psychologist Elizabeth Loftus of the University of California, Irvine.

"Twenty-five years is an awfully long time," Loftus said. "Of course we can't say this is false, but these things can lead people down the path of having a false memory."

However, Scott and Roeder both said they were sure Ahmadinejad was present while they were interrogated.

"I can absolutely guarantee you he was not only one of the hostage-takers, he was present at my personal interrogation," Roeder said in an interview from his home in Pinehurst, N.C.

Daugherty, who worked for the CIA in Iran and now lives in Savannah, said a man he's convinced was Ahmadinejad was among a group of ringleaders escorting a Vatican representative during a visit in the early days of the hostage crisis.

"It's impossible to forget a guy like that," Daugherty said. "Clearly the way he acted, the fact he gave orders, that he was older, most certainly he was one of the ringleaders."

Ahmadinejad, the hardline mayor of Tehran, was declared winner Wednesday of Iran's presidential runoff election, defeating one of Iran's best-known politicians, Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani. The stunning upset put conservatives firmly in control of all branches of power in Iran.

In a first-person account on the British Broadcasting Corp. website, world affairs editor John Simpson said he, too, recognized Ahmadinejad, saying there was something "faintly familiar" about him.

"I realized where I must have seen him: in the former American Embassy in Tehran," Simpson wrote.

Scott, Roeder, Daugherty and Sharer said they have been exchanging e-mails since seeing Ahmadinejad emerge as a serious contender in Iran's elections.

Scott gave a detailed account of the man he recalled as Ahmadinejad, saying he appeared to be a security chief among the hostage-takers.

"He kind of stayed in the background most of the time," Scott said. "But he was in on some of the interrogations. And he was in on my interrogation at the time they were working me over."

Scott also recalled an incident while he was held in the Evin prison in north Tehran in the summer of 1980.

One of the guards, whom Scott called Akbar, would sometimes let Scott and Sharer out to walk the narrow, six-meter-long hallway outside their cells.

One day, Scott said, the man he believes was Ahmadinejad saw them walking and chastised the guard.

"When he found out Akbar had let us out of our cells at all, he chewed out Akbar. I speak Farsi. He said, 'These guys are dogs, they're pigs, they're animals. They don't deserve to be let out of their cells.' "

Scott recalled responding to the man's stare by openly cursing his captor in Farsi. "He looked a little flustered like he didn't know what to do. He just walked out."

2.

World

U.S. SEEKS ANSWERS ON IRANIAN LEADER'S PAST
By Tyler Marshall and Paul Richter

Los Angeles Times
June 30, 2005

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-usiran1jul01,0,7898052.story

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration demanded Thursday that the Iranian government clarify the role of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the 1979 siege of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran after several former hostages declared that they recognized the president-elect as one of their captors.

U.S. officials also pledged to conduct their own investigation into Ahmadinejad's past after several of the 52 Americans held hostage said he was a key figure in their 444-day long ordeal.

"The Iranian government . . . has an obligation to speak definitively concerning these questions that have been raised in public," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters at a regular briefing.

McCormack, White House spokesman Scott McClellan, and national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley said in separate briefings that the United States would launch its own efforts to determine if Ahmadinejad had a role in the crisis.

"We need to get the facts," Hadley told reporters.

On Thursday, the president-elect's staff denied that he had any active involvement in the embassy standoff. An aide, Meisan Rowhani, told the Associated Press that Ahmadinejad had recently said he had been against targeting the U.S. Embassy because he "believed that if we do that the world will swallow us."

Dozens of students, mainly from Tehran's Polytechnique University, stormed the U.S. facility 10 months after the ouster of the shah of Iran. Some accounts said the students were apparently spurred by concerns that that their Islamic revolution was already unraveling.

Rowhani said Ahmadinejad dropped his opposition to the embassy takeover after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the revolution, approved it. But Ahmadinejad did not participate in the hostage-taking or the events that followed, Rowhani said.

The crisis ended with the freedom of all 52 Americans.

In Iran, the allegation that Ahmadinjed might have been a hostage taker is unlikely to spark public outrage. Some hostage takers went on to hold key positions in the government and parliament. Some have become reformists, speaking out against the Islamic regime led by the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who inherited Khomeini's role.

But the hostage crisis marked one of the most painful public dramas in recent U.S. history and still influences Iranian-American relations. The two countries have had no formal diplomatic ties since the takeover.

It was not immediately clear how the former hostages' allegations might impact the debate within the Bush administration about how to deal with Tehran.

Since President Bush took office five years ago, the administration has been divided between hardliners who want to isolate Iran and others who believe improving contacts with the regime is the best way to soften Tehran's anti-American policies.

Earlier this year, Bush decided to support European efforts to negotiate an agreement with Tehran, offering economic incentives and security guarantees in exchange for abandoning uranium enrichment that U.S. officials and others believe is part of a quest for nuclear weapons.

Iran claims it needs the energy for a peaceful nuclear power program, although it has tried to conceal sensitive aspects of its development program.

Hadley said Thursday that, whatever the truth of Ahmadinejad's actions in 1979, it would not alter U.S. views about his new role.

"Obviously, though, this man has now been elected by the Iranian people," Hadley said. "It is an election that we think is less than free and fair; we've been very clear about that. But he will step into that government."

Questions about Ahmadinejad's role in the embassy takeover surfaced earlier this week with the release of photographs taken during the hostage crisis that shows a man resembling Ahmadinejad among the captors.

In an Associated Press report, five former hostages said they were certain the person was Ahmadinejad.

Reached by the Times later Thursday at his home, one of the five, William J. Daugherty of Savannah, Ga. said he was "absolutely" sure that Ahmadinejad was among the group of older, more experienced Iranians who supervised the detention of the hostages in the first days of the embassy takeover. Ahmadinejad is 48 and would have been in his early 20s during the crisis.

In the first days of the crisis, the hostage-takers brought various dignitaries through to observe the hostages, including the papal nuncio, the International Committee for the Red Cross and Palestinian Liberation Organization representatives.

"They were escorted by people who were obviously the leaders and this guy was among them," Daugherty said. "His hatred came through. You could tell from his whole manner that he was more or less repulsed by the fact that we were alive."

Two other former hostages reached by the Times said they could not identify Ahmadinejad as one of their hostage takers.

"I saw the picture and I don't remember him, but they didn't actually introduce themselves to me," said John Limbert, a former hostage who now heads the American Foreign Service Association in Washington, which represents about 26,000 active and retired U.S. diplomats. "I heard what my colleagues said. They certainly seem certain and I respect their opinion, but I just don't remember that face. I can't look at him and say, 'I saw him there.' "

Another former hostage, Barry Rosen, said in an interview from New York that he had been taken away by the captors before one of the photos now being broadcast had been taken.

"I have never seen him; I can't say one way or another" whether Ahmadinejad is the man others remember, he said.

Rosen said he had become close friends during months of captivity with another of the hostages, Dave Roeder, who said he recognizes the new Iranian leader as a hostage taker.

"If Dave says it, I believe it," Rosen said.

It is widely known that Ahmadinejad helped to plot the embassy's seizure in November 1979 and that he belonged to a student group called the Office to Foster Unity that was initially formed to win support for Iran's new Islamic revolution from skeptical university students .

In Tehran, two of Iran's most prominent former hostage takers said on Thursday that Ahmadinejad was not among the students when they stormed the U.S. embassy. They said, however, that he had attended meetings at which students plotted the embassy takeover.

"He was only there in the first couple of planning sessions," said Elaheh Mojarradi, a former hostage taker. "Not the actual event."

Mojarradi met her husband, Mohsen Mirdamadi, during the embassy takeover. For the couple, like many of their revolutionary colleagues, the hostage crisis was the beginning of a life of privilege and power. Mirdamadi became a prominent reformist lawmaker, head of the Iranian parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Committee and a close aide to outgoing President Mohammad Khatami.

The radical students' spokeswoman, Massoumeh Ebtekar, became vice president for the environment. She was the first woman in the Islamic Republic to be named to the presidential cabinet.

The students eventually became voices of reform and moderation against Iran's hardliners. As the decades passed, both Mirdamadi and his wife evolved into outspoken critics of Iran's hardline clerics. Mirdamadi was the director of a reformist newspaper, Norouz, which was shut down by the regime.

--Special correspondent Nahid Siamdoust in Tehran and Times staff writer Megan K. Stack in Cairo, Egypt, contributed to this report.

3.

Breaking News

International

HOSTAGE-TAKERS: IRAN LEADER HAD NO ROLE
By Ali Akbar Dareini

Associated Press
July 1, 2005

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-5110322,00.html

TEHRAN -- Iran's new president was a member of the hard-line Islamic student group that seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979, but he opposed the takeover -- preferring instead to target the Soviet Embassy, friends and former hostage-takers said Thursday.

The former students who carried out the seizure and held the Americans for 444 days said Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had no role in taking the embassy or guarding the hostages.

In the turbulent early days of Iran's Islamic Revolution, Ahmadinejad was more concerned with putting down leftists and communists at universities than striking at Americans, they said. During the long standoff, he was writing and speaking against leftist students, they said.

Six former U.S. hostages who saw the president-elect in photos or on television said they believe Ahmadinejad was among the hostage-takers. One said he was interrogated by Ahmadinejad.

The White House said Thursday it was taking their statements seriously. President Bush said "many questions" were raised by the allegations.

The flap could add another layer of mistrust between the United States and the former Tehran mayor, who was elected president last week with the backing of some of the most hard-core members of the Islamic regime.

Leaders of the radical Islamic student group that carried out the Nov. 4, 1979, takeover of the embassy, said Ahmadinejad was not among the hostage-takers.

"He was not part of us. He played no role in the seizure," Abbas Abdi, one of six leaders of the group, told the Associated Press. Mohsen Mirdamadi, leader of the students who swept into the embassy, also said Ahmadinejad was not involved.

Abdi and Mirdamadi are now leading proponents of reform that would support democratic changes and are at loggerheads with Ahmadinejad.

Mohammad Ali Sayed Nejad, a friend of the president-elect, said he and Ahmadinejad unsuccessfully argued in favor of seizing the Soviet Embassy at the time, and Ahmadinejad told colleagues in a recent meeting he opposed targeting the American mission because it would bring international condemnation down on Iran.

"I believed that if we did that, the world would swallow us," he said, according to his aide Meisan Rowhani.

Ahmadinejad dropped his opposition to the U.S. Embassy takeover after the revolution's leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, expressed support for it, but he never participated, said Rowhani.

Rasool Nafisi, a Middle East analyst who studies conservative groups in Iran, said Ahmadinejad may have frequented the embassy as one of the thousands of the students who camped out or were involved in protests there.

Former American hostage David Roeder and others told AP that after seeing Ahmadinejad on television, they were certain he was one of the hostage-takers.

"I can absolutely guarantee you he was not only one of the hostage-takers, he was present at my personal interrogation," Roeder said, though he added, "It's sort of more mannerisms.'

William J. Daugherty and Don A. Sharer, two other hostages, said they believe Ahmadinejad is shown in two AP photos taken a few days after the embassy was seized.

Abdi and several other former hostage-takers were shown the same photos and said they did not believe the man was Ahmadinejad.

Members of Ahmadinejad's office refused to look at the photos or comment on the allegations.