Exercise in Terror : Former Tehran Hostage Stages Simulation of Kidnaping as a Teaching Tool

It was 11:15 a.m. and like most of Los Angeles, 28-year-old Hamid was sweating. But unlike most of Los Angeles, Hamid, a Sunni Muslim from the obscure Middle East republic of Keibar, was sweating with fear.

Within 15 minutes, the doctor-turned-terrorist would decide the fate of 11 American hostages, who sat blindfolded and also sweating in an air-conditioned hotel room near Los Angeles International Airport. And much to Hamid’s dismay, instead of acquiescing to his demands, the President of the United States was threatening Keibar with armed invasion.

So it went Saturday during a sometimes shocking, always riveting simulation of a terrorist kidaping developed as a teaching exercise by Moorhead Kennedy, who spent 14 months as a hostage after Iranian revolutionaries seized the American embassy in Tehran in 1979.

Kennedy and his partner, Martha M. Keys, developed the two-hour “Hostage Crisis” program to “make foreign affairs less abstract,” said Kennedy, who at the time of his abduction was the third-ranked official in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.

The exercise starts in an imaginary Middle East country and unfolds globally as the Oval Office, the international press corps, the hostages and the terrorists all joust for control.

Kennedy and Keys have staged their program more than 60 times since its debut in late 1987 to groups that include churches, travel industry representatives and foreign policy think tanks.

The participants “learn how to negotiate,” Kennedy said. “They learn to make decisions that are pretty agonizing.”

On Saturday, “Hamid” was actually El Camino Real High School student Chip Huisman from Woodland Hills and the President of the United States was Servite High School student Darryl Bryan of Anaheim. Pragmatic Cabinet members, hawkish army officers, idealistic terrorists, jittery international businessmen, telegenic TV reporters and terrified hostages were played by 41 other Southern California students. The occasion was the annual convention of the Junior Statesmen of America, a 55-year-old program for high school students interested in politics and government.

The silver-haired Kennedy, a lawyer with a specialization in Islamic law, served in the foreign service for 20 years in Yemen, Greece, Lebanon and Chile. He calls “Hostage Crisis” an open-ended exercise that stimulates discussion about global politics, shows the need for flexible negotiations and, in some cases, all too graphically illustrates the potential for violence.

“We only ask that the players justify their actions. We’ve had some tremendously creative solutions,” Kennedy said, citing a case in which negotiators agreed to try the terrorists in a United Nations court.

On the other hand, “There can be a slaughterhouse. We’ve had that, too.”

Most of all, however, “Hostage Crisis” succeeds as a learning experience.

“We read the news every day about what’s going on in Lebanon, in Israel,” said 16-year-old Shawn Landres from Santa Monica, who played a 23-year-old, left-wing college dropout and Shiite Muslim named Husayn. “This gave me incredible insight into what it means to be so committed to a cause. As terrorists, we were lashing out because we were completely powerless and that was the only option that looked viable.”

Seventeen-year-old Kristen Shepos of Anaheim, who played the hard-line U.S. secretary of state who urged an invasion by the Delta Special Forces, said she was amazed to find herself manipulating public opinion through the media.

Covering Up

“What we said to the press and what went on in the Oval Office were two different things. I found myself covering up,” Shepos said.

For the 58-year-old Kennedy, “Hostage Crisis” is the outgrowth of a decade of rumination.

During his 444 days in captivity in Tehran, he asked his captors for pen and paper and wrote “The Ayatollah in the Cathedral, Reflections of a Hostage.” He then memorized it, paragraph by paragraph, because he correctly surmised that the Iranians would destroy the manuscript before releasing him.

The mental calisthenics proved useful when Barbara Walters interviewed him shortly after he stepped off the plane to freedom in January, 1981.

“She asked a question and out came perfectly formed paragraphs,” Kennedy said.

For Kennedy, writing and subsequent tours on the lecture circuit worked as a catharsis, an intellectual exorcism.

“When you’ve been through a horrible experience like that, you want to make sense of it,” he said. But it also led him to the conclusion that American foreign policy needs major revisions.

“We can no longer control events the way we think we can,” Kennedy said. “We’ve got to begin to understand other cultures.”

Participants in the workshop are given a basic script and told to fill in the blanks. They are briefed on U.S.-”Keibar” relations: The United States gives military and financial aid to Keibar’s archenemy and neighbor “Needak,” which has occupied the Keibar coastal zones and claimed them as its own. Meanwhile, 10 Keibar terrorists languish in jail.

The exercise kicks into gear when Keibarian terrorists hijack a Western airliner, forcing it to land at “Keibar International Airport,” where they hold the Americans hostage and threaten to kill them unless their coastal lands are restored and the “Keibar 10” terrorists released.

Each student plays a character that has been fleshed out by Kennedy and Keys. Typical is “Betty,” the 43-year-old housewife and peace activist. Betty has protested against capital punishment and U.S. support for the Contras and set up a nuclear freeze group. Now, she finds herself facing death at the hands of a Third World group with which she sympathizes.

At the beginning of Saturday’s exercise, the captors sheepishly blindfolded their hostages and some students giggled with embarrassment. But as the morning wore on, sobriety replaced the smiles and once-hesitant, play-acting voices took on tense tones of anger and authority.

“After they tied us up and put us in isolation it got real serious,” said 16-year-old Michael Harun of Westwood, who played a military man taken hostage.

But over at the White House, seriousness reigned from the start as the President plotted a secret invasion. Toting video cameras, the press shuttled between Washington and Keibar International Airport on interviews and broadcast the resulting half-truths on television.

The U.S. President, as played by Bryan, proved particularly cold-blooded and mainly concerned with whether a commando raid resulting in hostage deaths would tarnish his image.

“You’ve gotten to the heart of this issue, which as you know, is my reelection,” he told an adviser.

As the terrorists’ deadline neared, the negotiations approached a fever pitch. Characters who previously had held rigid views now began to crack, to compromise, which Kennedy said is a common occurrence.

In the end, the U.S. government launched a bloodless invasion and promised not to kill the terrorists, while the terrorists also agreed to avoid bloodshed.

Would that have happened in a real hostage situation? The Saturday morning terrorists thought so.

“We thought a lot about the morals of what we were doing,” said Landres, who played “Husayn.” “I was surprised at the moderation, but a lot of our hopes and wishes came through.”