The Fluke That Became a Nightmare : Hostages: Co-opting the opponent was more effective in winning the release of American captives than either confrontation or concessions.

It started in 1979 almost as a political lark. Worried that their revolution was unraveling just 10 months after the shah’s ouster, some 80 Iranian students, mainly from Tehran’s Polytechnique University, plotted to stage a sit-in at the U.S. Embassy.

They agreed to mobilize other youths so they could hold out three days, five if possible--just long enough to demonstrate the strength of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s forces at a time his former leftist and nationalist allies were defecting in droves and even the prime minister was dissenting.

The vote on a new constitution--to institutionalize the world’s only modern theocracy--was less than a month away. Prominent Iranians were already threatening a boycott to protest its proposed laws. The prime minister warned of a “dictatorship of the clergy” if the constitution passed.

Demonstrations at the embassy were always guaranteed attention-grabbers, capable of tapping into the wellspring of anti-American feeling among many sectors of society. This, the youths hoped, would get the vote--and public sentiment--back on track.

It did. But, unintended by the original captors, their takeover was to engulf the United States and three American presidencies in a low-intensity war with Iran, and eventually its Lebanese surrogates, for the next 12 years.

The story-behind-the-story in both Iran and Lebanon offers a host of lessons about diplomacy and terrorism that, unlike the hostage ordeal, are not over. Indeed, the lessons may have even more importance today, since the kind of alien and dizzying change--and accompanying instability--that uprooted Iran in 1979 seems to be sweeping many parts of the world, albeit in different forms.

Exchanges during the first hours of the embassy takeover, which often bordered on theater of the absurd, reflected how both sides thought it would soon be resolved.

After seeing the cutouts of witches, skeletons and goblins hanging in the ambassador’s residence, one Iranian began to suspect the Americans of satanic worship. When a U.S. diplomat tried to explain the recent Halloween festivities, the captor responded incredulously, ‘You do this for your children ?”

After a chador-clad female captor went into a frenzy over U.S. policy in Iran, a U.S. press officer poured a belt of scotch to calm her down. Alcohol is anathema to devout Muslims.

But two days into the crisis, to the surprise of both captors and captives, Radio Tehran announced that the ayatollah would not move to end the seizure--as the government had done when the U.S. embassy was seized 14 days after the revolution. During that first takeover, Revolutionary Guards had fired at the young zealots to force them to leave. And the imam’s personal representative had later come over to formally apologize to the American ambassador.

This time, however, Khomeini sanctioned it. He recognized the opportunities presented by the takeover. Sure enough, the regime’s moderate and secular first premier, who had become an irritant, resigned. The opposition was effectively silenced. The constitution won 99% approval from almost 16 million voters. And, most important, revolutionary fervor was revived.

The 52 hostages’ fate was sealed for 444 days--until, in 1981, they were no longer of use in realizing the Islamic leadership’s domestic agenda and, after the outbreak of war with Iraq, the cost-benefit ratio of keeping them was spent.

The first round of abductions in Lebanon was even more of a fluke. On July 4, 1982, a car carrying four Iranians with diplomatic credentials was stopped at a roadblock by a right-wing Christian militia; diplomatic immunity was rarely honored by Lebanese gunmen. The four Iranians disappeared.

The incident--and subsequent demands from Tehran for the envoys’ freedom--went virtually unnoticed. Lebanon was then otherwise preoccupied with Israel’s month-old invasion; U.S. mediators were scrambling to end the siege of Beirut.

Fifteen days later, David Dodge, the gentle acting-president of American University of Beirut and the highest-ranking U.S. civilian left in Lebanon, was seized as he strolled home at dusk. The first American hostage in Lebanon was the only U.S. captive ever taken to Tehran.

Few media chronologies include this tit-for-tat exchange. In fact, however, it set the precedent for the subsequent kidnapping, in Lebanon, of 56 other Americans, as well as more than 70 other foreigners from 22 countries.

After exactly a year, Dodge was freed. In a unique break, U.S. intelligence learned that he had been secreted through Syria by his captors--without telling Damascus. Washington pressed an angered and embarrassed Rifaat Assad, brother of the Syrian president and then a power in his own right, to press Iran for his release.

Beholden to Syria as its only Arab ally and dependent on Damascus as a transit and supply post for Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon, Tehran complied.

But the hostility had not ended.

Iran remained embittered by the U.S.-orchestrated campaign born out of the Tehran hostage crisis, including economic sanctions, the cutoff of military supplies and political ostracism. As Tehran fought a war it hadn’t started, it blamed Washington for the lack of a major U.N. response, specifically a resolution condemning Iraq.

Like their Lebanese brethren, Iran also viewed the U.S. role in Beirut--first diplomatic, then military in the form of peacekeepers--as pro-Christian and anti-Muslim. U.S. warships opening up on a Muslim militia on behalf of the besieged Lebanese Army, led by Christians in a Christian area, didn’t help. Finally, the U.S. refusal to publicly address Tehran’s own hostage trauma played right into the centuries-old Shiite belief in their persecution by the outside world.

Each did far more to anger Iran than the past U.S. relationship with the by-then deceased shah.

In fact, U.S. diplomats sent messages, more than once, through intermediaries informing Iran that its envoys had been killed by Christian militiamen. But without bodies or proof, Tehran was unconvinced.

The war then, literally, turned deadly as Lebanese suicide bombers--encouraged, trained and supplied by Iran, although motivated by their own rage--struck an American embassy and the U.S. Marine compound in 1983.

The terrorism spectaculars claimed more than 300 lives. But the perpetrators miscalculated the impact of their tactics. The victims, they discovered, were buried--and, in short order, relegated to history. And within five months, U.S. troops simply departed.

The “victory” was far from decisive. So the tactics shifted.

America’s greatest strength is the value it puts on individual life. But, as Iran and its allies learned during the 1979-81 Tehran episode, that’s also its greatest vulnerability.

So, in February, 1984, Frank Regier, an American engineering professor at American University of Beirut, was abducted. Three more Americans, including the CIA station chief, disappeared over the next three months--beginning an ordeal that didn’t end until this week.

The yellow ribbon, converted from a song into a symbol during the vigil for the Tehran-52, once again went up across the country. The haunting imagery of the living--chained to radiators and isolated from humanity--turned out to be far more effective than fading memories of the dead.

The Reagan Administration won freedom for three Americans during the calamitous 1985-86 arms-for-hostage swap. But three new hostages soon took their places.

Once again, there was a story behind the story. Revolutions, not only in Iran, are like onions. Layers of moderation are peeled away until a central core of leadership survives. The first layer was removed during the Tehran hostage ordeal, when the first group of secular technocrats departed and the mullahs began to gain what would eventually become a monopoly on power.

In the mid-1980s, when Oliver L. North and Robert C. MacFarlane journeyed to Tehran, the process was at a pivotal juncture. Hashemi Rafsanjani, then Parliament’s speaker and now president, symbolized the group of mullahs who, after six years of ruling one of the region’s most complex countries, had learned a fundamental fact: For their revolution to survive, the state had to survive. And, in isolation, it couldn’t.

They were opposed by ideologues who didn’t care what amount of suffering Iranians had to endure to keep the revolution pure. To tarnish Rafsanjani and, they hoped, peel away that layer, they leaked news of the U.S.-Iran negotiations. The ideologues then orchestrated the new abductions with Lebanese who shared their views.

Since then, it has taken five years to reach a point, as during the Tehran hostage episode, that the political climates in both Iran and Lebanon stabilized and that the costs of keeping the last Westerners outweighed the benefits.

Along the way, Khomeini’s death and the formal passage of leadership to Rafsanjani, the humbling of Iraq during Operation Desert Storm, the end to Lebanon’s 15-year civil war, and the upheavals in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union contributed. U.N. Secretary General Javier Peres de Cuellar and his special envoy, Giandomenico Picco, deserve enormous credit for mediating a mechanism for the 10 releases since August. But they couldn’t have done it if the environment hadn’t changed. And it has.

Shortly before the last burst of releases, Rafsanjani made a dramatic speech at a summit in Tehran of 128 developing states. Iran, he announced, was moving toward a free-market economy. Currency and production controls were lifted. Foreigners were invited to invest. Banks were deregulated. Tehran will even soon open a stock exchange, he said.

And, after more than a decade of propagating export of its revolution, Rafsanjani said Iran’s foreign policy now centered on “respect for territorial integrity as well as the social and religious values of other peoples.”

Fortunately, global change coincided with the settling down of Iran’s revolution. In the end, just like U.S. dealings with the Soviet Union, co-opting the opponent turned out to be more effective than either confrontation or concessions.

The restoration of U.S.-Iranian relations is still a long way off. The next stage will be a period of cold, and probably even bitter peace. But, with Terry A. Anderson’s long-awaited release, the war is, at least, finally over.