Was Iranian Leader a 1979 Hostage Taker?

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 who were held hostage said he was a key figure in their 444-day 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.

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

“We need to get the facts,” Hadley told reporters.

The president-elect’s staff on Thursday denied that he had any active involvement in the embassy standoff. An aide, Meisan Rowhani, told Associated Press that Ahmadinejad 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 Polytechnic University, stormed the embassy 10 months after the ouster of the shah of Iran, protesting his admission to the U.S. for medical treatment. Some accounts said the students were apparently spurred by concern that the 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 release of all of the hostages.

In Iran, the allegation that Ahmadinejad might have been a hostage taker is unlikely to spark public outrage. Some participants in the embassy takeover went on to hold key positions in the government and parliament.

Some have become reformists, speaking out against the Islamic regime led by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who inherited Khomeini’s position of supreme leader.

But for Americans, the hostage crisis was one of the most painful public dramas in recent times and still influences Iranian-American relations. The countries have had no formal diplomatic ties since the takeover.

It was not immediately clear how the former hostages’ allegations might affect 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 hard-liners who want to isolate Iran and others who believe the U.S. should improve contacts with the regime to soften Tehran’s anti-American policies.

This year, Bush decided to support European efforts to negotiate an agreement with Tehran over its nuclear program. The talks offer 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 says it needs the enriched uranium for a peaceful nuclear power program, although it has tried to conceal sensitive aspects of its efforts.

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 this week with the release of photographs taken during the hostage crisis that show a man resembling Ahmadinejad among the captors.

Associated Press quoted five former hostages as saying they were certain that the person in the photos was Ahmadinejad.

Reached by The Times at his Savannah, Ga., home, one of the five, William J. Daugherty, 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 standoff.

In the first days of the crisis, the captors brought various dignitaries through to observe the hostages, including the papal nuncio, and representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross and Palestine Liberation Organization.

“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 captors.

“I saw the picture and I don’t remember him, but they didn’t actually introduce themselves to me,” said John Limbert, who heads the American Foreign Service Assn. 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 was 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 became close friends during months of captivity with one of the other hostages, Dave Roeder, who has said he recognizes the new Iranian leader as one of the captors.

“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 was a member of a student group called the Office to Foster Unity, which was initially formed to win support for Iran’s new Islamic Revolution among skeptical university students.

In Tehran, two of Iran’s most prominent former hostage takers said Thursday that Ahmadinejad was not among the students who stormed the U.S. Embassy. They said, however, that he had attended meetings at which students plotted the 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 embassy standoff 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.

Massoumeh Ebtekar, who was the spokeswoman for the students, 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 hard-liners. As the decades passed, Mirdamadi and his wife evolved into outspoken critics of Iran’s hard-line clerics. Mirdamadi was the director of a reformist newspaper, Norouz, which was shut down by the regime.

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