Money Is the Bottom Line for Hostage-Takers : Lebanon: Westerners have been kidnaped for political causes--but for no political purpose. To get them back may take as much as $3 million each.

Perhaps the most surprising and puzzling aspect of the whole hostage-taking experience is that President Hashemi Rafsanjani of Iran was right when he said recently that to take hostages was not only “a mistake” and “an inhuman act” but that it had “no political outcome.”

The only political result of the detention of Western hostages in Lebanon is that it has earned Iran, and to a lesser extent Syria, the disapproval, steadily diminishing with time, of the Western home countries of the hostages.

For instance, what possible political impact could the abductions have on the Middle East policy of Switzerland or Italy or Ireland, whose nationals are being held, or on far distant South Korea, one of whose citizens was held and released? This lack of political purpose is evidenced by the fact that for some of the hostages no ransom demands have been made, at least not publicly, and if a ransom is not demanded publicly it has no leverage or bargaining power. This is as true of the well-known Terry Waite and Terry Anderson as it is of Jack Mann, an obscure octogenarian British pub owner.

Last week, for example, pro-Iranian kidnapers said they would kill three American hostages in Lebanon unless the United States meets their demands. However, the group--Islamic Jihad for the Liberation of Palestine--did not specify its demands.

But if, according to Rafsanjani, the hostage-taking has had “no political outcome,” did it have political causes? In the case of the U.S. hostages, yes. The humiliation of the United States was the name of this horrid game, showing that the Iranians and pro-Iran Shiites in Lebanon could control the lives--and deaths--of citizens from one of the two great powers and that the United States could do nothing about it, not even achieve a rescue.

In terms of force the captors have always held the whip hand, because even a 60-second or 30-second warning of a rescue attempt would give time enough to ensure the hostages’ execution. It was a good thing for the hostages in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran that the enormously clumsy American rescue attempt failed.

It was clear that the national humiliation of the United States was a main Iranian motivation. Americans and American institutions were the principal targets; in Tehran, one had to walk on the Stars and Stripes painted on the pavement outside the main embassy gate; on the telephone or in direct conversation, it was obligatory to refer to the embassy as “the nest of spies.” Humiliation is still a motivation, as shown by the Iranian gloating over the recent incident in which a hoaxer tricked the President of the United States into thinking he was speaking to Rafsanjani on the telephone.

A vicious circle developed. Once the hostages were taken, they were held indefinitedly, precisely to deter any rescue attempt or any large-scale invasion of the country involved--in this case Lebanon. Displays of the aero-naval strength of U.S. or French armadas off the coast of the Levant were always mere displays, because everyone knew that the hostages would be the first victims in case of attack.

Above all, this hostage business is about money. The one, firm realistic demand made by the Iranians has been their claim on $12 billion of Iranian government deposits in U.S. banks. It was money that opened the gates of the Tehran embassy. And it is surely not just coincidence that Iranian spokesmen began to condemn hostage-taking last November after the United States, as a first installment, returned $567 million to the Bank of Iran.

It is taken for granted in Lebanon that any or all of the hostages will have to be paid for, however strenuous the denials of a deal. All the hostages released so far have been paid for, whether Americans or French or Germans, or the South Korean. The going rate could be as high as $3 million a head.

Otherwise the ignorant and brutal young men who do the actual “lifting” are not going to throw away the chance of acquiring a lot of money. Recent reports from Beirut indicate that Tehran itself may be negotiating a “loan” to Hezbollah, which would be used to ransom the hostages from the factions holding them. Having thus bought their freedom, Iran would expect its assets in the United States to be unfrozen and Western funds to be made available for reconstruction.

Against the specific reality of the financial demands is the curious unreality of some of the other demands. The Iranians keep asking for a couple of their diplomats captured by the Maronites in 1983, men who cannot possibly still be alive. The Lebanese Shiite groups keep asking for the release of 16 of their militants jailed in Kuwait, even though Kuwait has made it amply clear that, whatever the cost to itself, it will not give them amnesty.

The more conciliatory the statements on the hostages from the pragmatic leaders in Tehran, the more obdurate become the hard-liners. A few days after Iran’s chief justice, Ayatollah Mohammad Ali Yazdi, condemned hostage-taking and hijacking as contrary to Islam, the most prominent radical, Ali Akbar Mohtashemi, defiantly advised the captors of the hostages in Lebanon not to free them.

Since Mohtashemi founded Hezbollah in Lebanon--which, directly or indirectly, holds most of the hostages--his word will count more than words emanating from the moderates. What does it matter to an impoverished Shiite youngster in the slums of South Beirut that Rafsanjani wants the hostages released, so that Iran can raise from Western sources the funds needed for reconstruction? Once again, the money motive.

Still, there are some who are optimistic, perhaps blithely so, like former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. He paused in Damascus during a Middle East tour, and on Friday offered this assessment: “When it’s no longer necessary for Lebanon to be fragmented, with different milita groups jealously guarding their weapons and their prerogatives, then I think it’s very likely the hostages will be released.”

The predominant impression of the hostage experience, even though the Western world has been obsessed by it, is that it has been a pointless exercise in man’s inhumanity to man.