‘We were American hostages in Iran – this war is insane’
Barry Rosen and John Limbert were among 52 people held at the US embassy in Tehran for 444 days.
If anyone should be celebrating Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei being killed, it’s John Limbert and Barry Rosen. They were among 52 American hostages held by the regime in horrendous conditions at the US embassy in Tehran between 1979 and 1981. The experience scarred many of the captives for life.
The two men, now both 82, refuse to glory in Khamenei’s assassination. They remain too diplomatic for that. But Rosen admits: “I was certainly not unhappy concerning his death.”
Limbert, who was visited by Khamenei during the embassy crisis, says with a wry smile: “He’s not my favourite character, I’m not terribly sorry to see him gone.”
When asked about the wisdom of Donald Trump’s war on Iran, however, the diplomacy stops there. The pair, who live in New York and remain friends, both think it is foolish – with little chance of the regime collapsing and a possibility of it becoming even more dangerous.
“The decision to bomb Iran is absolutely insane,” says Rosen, who was a press attaché at the embassy and is a founder of the campaign group Hostage Aid Worldwide.
He hates the regime, and not just for what it put him through. “I deplore what it has done to the Iranian people,” he says. “I don’t know how Iranians live every day… Life is miserable.”
But he says Trump’s encouragement for the population to seize power is “absolutely moronic”, after so many were “murdered by the regime in gruesome ways” during the security crackdown on protests just two months ago.
Rosen doubts the military or the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps will stage a coup against the country’s hardline ruling clerics. “They are living off this regime, they totally control the economy. So why would they? They are going to fight to the bitter end.
“This regime will be able to sustain itself. The deep state is very deep, and it will constantly replace whoever is killed.” Limbert, who continued to serve as a US diplomat until 2007, would love Iran to become a humane democracy.
“We want to see an Iran that treats its own people decently, that doesn’t massacre them in the streets, that doesn’t jail them for asking inconvenient questions, that doesn’t kill its women because they didn’t dress according to some standard,” he says.
Yet he believes the chances of Trump and the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, achieving this through air raids are “pretty damn remote”, agreeing with Rosen that the attacks are a “huge screw-up”.
Iran’s tyrannical rulers have “survived war, they survived sanctions, they’ve survived their own incompetence”. He fears they will survive this war, too – whichever of the surviving ayatollahs they pick to become the new supreme leader.
Both men developed a deep love of Iran in the 1960s, when they served as community volunteers there for two years. Limbert married an Iranian woman and their children’s first language was Farsi. Rosen and his wife, Barbara, gave their daughter a Persian name, Ariana.
Many Iranians disliked the US. The CIA instigated a coup in 1953, which overthrew their democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, who had nationalised American and British oil operations in the country.
And in January 1979, the American-backed Shah was ousted after months of protests against his corrupt and autocratic rule, his ruthless secret police and his efforts to westernise the nation. When the them US president Jimmy Carter allowed the Shah into the US to receive cancer treatment in October that year, it provoked outrage.
On 4 November 1979, hundreds of angry, young, bearded men, and women dressed in traditional black Islamic chadors, began protesting outside the embassy, climbing over the gates and entering the compound.
Limbert went outside, hoping to defuse the situation, but was taken captive by the crowd who threatened to shoot him unless the door was opened.
The staff, who tried to burn and shred documents, were beaten and blindfolded. They assumed Iran’s new figurehead, Ruhollah Khomeini – who would soon become the regime’s first supreme leader – would release them within a day, as had happened after a similar incident earlier that year. This time, though, the ayatollah realised the value in keeping them hostage.
Eight men and five women were released after 16 days in a propaganda move. Six others, who escaped on the day of the raid, were evacuated in January 1980 by posing as a film crew in a secret operation by Canada and the CIA, depicted by the film Argo. But another rescue mission failed in April when a Delta Force helicopter crashed in the Iranian desert.
The remaining 52 hostages, including Rosen and Limbert, would remain in captivity for 444 days.
Those 52 people would later tell of how they were locked in dark rooms with their hands tied and blankets over their heads, some in solitary confinement. They were strip-searched and endured violent interrogations, accused of being spies. They were put through mock executions, where they would hear rifles click and would expect to be shot. Guns were held to their heads and guards played Russian roulette with women who were secretaries at the embassy. They were forced to wear the same clothes for their entire captivity.
Khamenei, a key ally of Khomeini, visited the embassy in April 1980 and met Limbert in the room where he was being held in solitary confinement. “I didn’t berate him, I didn’t curse him out, as tempting as it was,” says Limbert. “I took on my persona of the diplomat… I offered him a seat. I apologised for not having anything to offer him.”
Limbert wanted to use Iran’s famous pride in generous hospitality to highlight how the “outrageous” treatment of hostages had broken “every rule of your own society”.
“I don’t know if he realised I was taunting him,” he says.
Khomeini eventually agreed to a release deal – on the day Ronald Reagan became president – in exchange for the US releasing billions of dollars in frozen Iranian assets. All 52 hostages arrived home in January 1981.
“I had to start my life all over again and rebuild my family,” says Rosen. “The trauma of that time is part of my DNA… Throughout the years, I’ve been fighting that battle within me all the time.”
He is proud to have met one of his former captors – Abbas Abdi, who had become a reformist – in 1998.
The trauma of that time is part of my DNA. I’ve been fighting that battle within me all the time
The pair hoped to help improve bilateral relations between their countries, but that failed. Abdi was later jailed by the regime.
Things remain tough for Rosen. “As I get older, the trauma seems to stay with me more so than when I was younger,” he says. “It dwells more on me… I get more involved in what was going on in my past life and in captivity itself.”
The US launched its attacks on his 82nd birthday. He had a family lunch planned but “it was hard for me to smile”, he says. Distressing memories came flooding back. “My life is just upside down right now”.
For Limbert, the experience meant that for the rest of his diplomatic career, “I was a real pain in the ass about security”. He chuckles: “I drove my colleagues crazy.”
His wife, Parveneh, fled Iran with the family after the revolution. Yet he says even they feel conflicted about the current war when they see “innocent people being killed, schools being bombed… It’s really hard for them.”
If the regime falls, he would love to take his grandchildren to Iran. But he worries about violent reprisals in a power vacuum and a terror group like Isis establishing itself there. “Are we going to be faced with an Iran that breaks apart? Do you want to turn Iran into another Libya?”