I’m on the phone with Oliver North, the man who may have indirectly cost my father an additional four years in captivity. He doesn’t seem sorry.
“There are a lot of conspiracy theories, Sulome, and most of them are baloney,” he tells me, mispronouncing my name. “There was a lot more incompetence than there was malevolence, and misfeasance rather than malfeasance . . . I was just the guy told to carry things out.”
I am talking to North because of two notorious words inextricably linked to the hostage crisis: Iran-Contra, the scandal that almost brought down the Reagan administration.
From the moment I began my own investigation into the circumstances surrounding my father’s captivity, I have been immersed in a quagmire of spooks, shady middlemen, and covert arms deals. I find it nearly impossible not to follow the billion or so leads I keep running into “down the rabbit hole,” as one of the people I interview puts it. Chasing down obscure information, trying to find the piece that explains it all—that’s what reporters do. But it soon became obvious that Iran-Contra was a mess of epic proportions, and my father and the other hostages had been unfortunate enough to be at its center. North is right about one thing: conspiracy theories accumulate around this event, and it’s incredibly difficult to separate fact from fiction.
Iran-Contra is a Gordian knot compounded by the difficulty of getting government officials and politicians involved to talk about it with any sort of transparency. The debacle left egg on the faces of dozens of established figures, many of whom still hold influential positions in Washington.
The scandal shaped the way Americans viewed my father’s captivity. It was part of the reason he was front-page news for so long, but as I discover, the publicity surrounding my father may have been some of the impetus for the affair in the first place.
I can’t stay away from Iran-Contra; I’m drawn to it inexorably. I start at the very beginning—with the facts, which I get from the findings of the Tower Commission, assembled by Reagan as soon as the scandal erupted: in November 1986, Ash-Shiraa, a small newspaper in Lebanon, broke a huge story. It revealed that the United States had been trading military equipment with Iran in an attempt to obtain the release of U.S. hostages held in Lebanon by the Islamic Jihad, a terrorist group believed to have close ties to the Iranian regime. After some digging by the U.S. attorney general, it became apparent that proceeds from the arms transfers were being diverted to assist the Contras, U.S.-backed rebel forces in Nicaragua. Since the Contras were controversial and notoriously ruthless in their methods, this compounded the scandal and exposed those involved in Iran-Contra not only for breaking the laws of their government, but for going against the policies they had always publicly espoused.
That’s what everyone already knows, though, and just the bare facts aren’t going to cut it. I need to talk to people who were there. I spend months investigating, traveling to Washington and talking to dozens of people, some of whom were at the center of Iran-Contra. I learn quite a bit, and even begin to wonder if the U.S. government’s actions during the scandal might have contributed to the length of my father’s captivity.
Digging around for information on people who were directly involved in Iran-Contra, I focus on the first one I can find who seems to have had strong opinions on the situation as it was unfolding. Robert Oakley was the State Department’s head of counterterrorism when my father was abducted. I interview Oakley, now well into his eighties, in D.C., where he lives with his wife, Phyllis, herself a former assistant secretary of state, in a sweet, tidy little apartment at the end of a cul-de-sac. Every now and then, she interjects to clarify a point.
Oakley says that at the time he believed the arms deals had ceased soon after they started, and that when he found out they hadn’t, he resigned his position in objection to what he saw as a dishonest and illegal practice.
“We were told it would stop until we realized it was still going on,” he tells me in his soft voice. “Then I had enough. If it couldn’t be stopped, I wasn’t going to be a party to it, even an unwilling one.”
“So you knew about it while it was happening?” I ask.
“Bob said he smelled it,” says Phyllis.
“They were pretending to do it so we could spot the good guys in Tehran and use them against the ‘Communist takeover.’” Oakley sounds bitter. The United States always had a preoccupation with combating the Soviet Union’s influence in the Middle East. There were rumors that Iran might have been displaying Communist sympathies at the time, although it seems to me that the religious nature of the Islamic revolution makes that scenario unlikely.
“I heard that,” I muse. “That the Soviets might have been gaining influence over Iran. I don’t know how true that was—”
“Bullshit, is what it was,” Oakley interrupts me. “But that was the lie they were feeding the president.”
The fear of Soviet influence was still very real in the 1980s, but it’s also true that the timing of the hostage abductions posed a problem for the United States. The pro-Western shah of Iran had been deposed in 1979, replaced by a theocratic Islamic regime with the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini at its head. The new government’s violent anti-Western rhetoric, as well as its capture and imprisonment of sixty Americans who worked at the U.S. embassy in Tehran, resulted in escalating tension between the two countries. The hostages were released in 1981, just minutes after Reagan was sworn into office, and it gave the new president a boost in prestige and a reputation for freeing hostages.
Things were different back then. The strategy of kidnapping Americans wasn’t as commonplace as it’s now become, and the idea of U.S. citizens being held by terrorists shocked the public. In the year before my father was abducted, a number of other Westerners had been taken hostage in Lebanon. Supposedly, Reagan was extremely affected by the plight of my father and the other captives. Their family members, most notably my aunt Peggy Say, were publicly calling for something to be done for their loved ones.
“Your aunt was the political glue that made it happen,” a journalist who worked at the AP at the time tells me. “She was the one who provided the political energy for Reagan. He wanted to do something for the hostages. The hostages were personified by Terry Anderson, aka Peggy Say.”
I’m startled to hear it.
“Cameras followed Peggy around,” he goes on. “The media loved her because she was very articulate, she was very calm, she looked into the cameras and she pleaded for President Reagan to do something.”
Growing up, I barely had any interaction with my aunt Peggy, who remained a distant figure to me until quite recently. She and my mother had fought; I was never quite sure over what, although now I realize at least some of their conflict must have revolved around Peggy’s penchant for publicity. My mother would often say Peggy was addicted to attention—a sentiment echoed by many of our family friends and my father’s colleagues, who worried her public appeals would endanger my father by making him more valuable to his kidnappers.
A few years ago, I visited her in Tennessee a couple of times. She wasn’t the coldhearted bitch my mother had always made her out to be. In fact, she seemed kindly, even grandmotherly, although I could sense the steel beneath her smile.
“Difficult” was how my father described her, usually with some fondness.
But my mother’s disdain for Peggy meant my father kept her at arm’s length after he was released, which I believe wounded her deeply. She also wrote a book, Forgotten, about her efforts to free her brother, which provoked a sigh from most of the AP men I interviewed. “Self-glorification” was how one of them put it. Sadly, I will never learn the truth about my aunt, at least not from her, because she just died of lung cancer brought on by years of chain-smoking. It’s my personal belief, though, that Peggy was a complex person, as many brave, “difficult” women are. Much like the bravest, most difficult woman I know: my mother, with whom she had always been at odds.
In any case, Peggy posed a problem for Reagan, who had been publicly
emphasizing that the United States did not, under any circumstances, negotiate with terrorists. But during the summer of 1985, a few months after my father was taken, Israel entered into the mix and changed the approach. David Kimche, director general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, met with Robert McFarlane, Reagan’s national security adviser, at the White House a number of times. He suggested a convenient tit-for-tat deal, with Israel as intermediary. If the United States agreed to replace them, Israel would sell Iran one hundred TOW missiles, and all the American hostages in Lebanon would be freed. Improbable as it may seem now, in those days Israel was, if not exactly chummy with the new Islamic Republic, certainly an ally of convenience. At the time, the Israelis, led by then–prime minister Yitzhak Shamir, viewed Iraq as a more dangerous enemy, and the Iran-Iraq War gave the two future nemeses some common ground. Israel had also been trying to develop a “periphery policy” by strengthening ties to non-Arab Islamic states almost since it was founded.
When Kimche approached McFarlane, he had a go-between in mind, an Iranian they claimed was well connected there: Manucher Ghorbanifar, who would become notorious as the quintessential double dealer in Iran-Contra. Having had previous dealings with Ghorbanifar, the CIA considered him “untrustworthy,” according to the Tower Commission’s report, and had blacklisted him.
Don Mell, the former AP photographer who was in the car with my father when he was kidnapped, has a more colorful way of describing Ghorbanifar. He laughs when I bring up the mysterious middleman in the arms transfers. “The guy was a creep show. It’s like you’re using the Kardashians to do diplomacy, so they got what they paid for.”
For whatever reason, McFarlane agreed to work with Ghorbanifar. And to run point on the operation McFarlane picked Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, a member of the National Security Council. At the time, North was also involved in providing covert assistance to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. Congress had tried to limit U.S. support of the Contras, but the Reagan administration saw them as an ally in the fight against communism in Latin America.
I won’t get into the complex, insider-baseball details of the subsequent arms deals. The end result was the release of three hostages in 1985 and ’86: Reverend Benjamin Weir, Father Martin Jenco, and David Jacobsen, all of whom were held with my father at one point. The Iranians were pissed off by the quality of the Israeli weapons they received, and wouldn’t—or couldn’t—free the rest.
“The Iranians were complaining they didn’t get as much weaponry as they were promised, and the Americans were complaining they weren’t getting hostages at the rate that they were promised, so nobody was really happy in this,” Mell tells me. “We were resupplying the Israelis, and the Israelis were giving them these shitty weapons. It’s like going into Costco and buying peanut butter past its expiration date and selling it to someone else.”
Iran was also fresh off a revolution, so it was divided into competing factions. It wasn’t clear which faction had influence over the Shia Lebanese kidnappers, or indeed, if any of them had had much influence to begin with. Furthermore, the U.S. officials made some spectacular blunders—there’s an unconfirmed anecdote that, on one trip to Tehran, McFarlane and North brought the Iranians a Bible inscribed by Reagan, for instance. Allegedly it was also North who decided proceeds from the Iranian arms deals should be funneled to the Contras.
Finally, the shit hit the fan. In November 1986, someone in Iran leaked information about the arms deals to a small newspaper in Beirut, Ash-Shiraa, a publication said to have ties to certain factions in the Islamic Republic as well as the IJO. Ash-Shiraa is still around, and has been accused of being everything from a mouthpiece for Syria to a Mossad asset. I track down the contact information for its editor. He’s still in Beirut, and I plan to get in touch with him when I go back.
At the time he was taken, my father was still married to his first wife, Mickey, with whom he had a daughter—my half sister, Gabrielle, who lived with her mother in Tokyo. According to what I’ve been told, Dad and Mickey’s marriage was troubled and he was trying to convince her to get a divorce when he met my mother, fell in love, and she became pregnant with me.
I never learned much about Mickey growing up, although Gabrielle would sometimes come visit us after my father was released. Now in her late thirties, she’s a lawyer—intelligent, sweet, but still highly reserved in a very Japanese way. Her fury at my father was always extremely palpable to me, though, beneath her good manners. I always wanted to tell her how sorry I was that he had abandoned her, and how guilty I felt because I was the daughter he chose to have near him, but I could never find the words. I sensed that we shared the same angry befuddlement at Dad’s actions and behavior, but I can only imagine what it feels like to know your father cast you and your mother aside for a new wife and daughter. The last time I saw her was during Hurricane Sandy, which happened to coincide with one of my less successful medication changes. We were stuck in my apartment in Tribeca with no electricity for a week, during which I sobbed uncontrollably for pretty much her entire stay, the poor woman.
At some point, I told her through my tears how sorry I was that my father had been so dismissive toward her growing up, and how guilty I felt that I had been the one to take her place.
“Sulome,” she said with a sigh, her own eyes filling up with tears—something I had never thought I’d see from someone so obviously uncomfortable with public displays of emotion. “I used to think I was the unlucky one, because he didn’t want me. Now I see you, and I think you had it worse.”
In any case, Dad’s marital situation did pose a problem for the AP, not just because of the publicity surrounding his kidnapping but because they had to figure out how to take care of both families. I believe what the company ended up deciding was to split Dad’s salary in half between my mother and Mickey, thus ensuring that we’d all be able to get by in his absence.
“You know, I can just see Lou Boccardi [president and CEO of the AP at the time] sitting there, saying, ‘Okay, this happened to my guy in Beirut,’” Don Mell tells me, laughing. “ ‘Oh, and there’s this other problem, you know, the other problem is that his real wife is in Japan with his daughter, but there’s this other woman who’s pregnant with his other daughter, oh jeez.’ I mean, they basically tried to cover up your existence for a while.”
“Wait . . . what?” I’m shocked to hear this.
“Well, don’t you remember there was this thing in the news where you were like two or three years old and you were lighting your father’s birthday cake? There was so much discussion about whether they were even going to allow that to happen.”
“Huh,” I respond after a minute. “Actually, I don’t remember ever seeing a camera before I was three. That makes sense.”
“You know, they were always trying to shut down everybody. So they tried to shut down your mom. And Mickey, they had to shut her down. So some Japanese guy went to her family and said ‘be quiet,’ and that was the end of that . . . then all of a sudden Peggy comes out of nowhere.”
It’s pretty jarring to hear that my father’s former colleagues might have tried to pretend I didn’t exist when I was a baby. These are the men I grew up around, practically my uncles, and I had always believed them to be champions of my family’s cause. It hurts to learn this particular detail, but I try to be objective and consider the difficult position they must have been in. I still believe they sincerely did everything they could to free my father.
At a conference room at the AP office in New York, Lou Boccardi explains that they were faced with a difficult situation when my father was taken.
“We tried to the best of our ability to do the right thing in three directions,” Boccardi explains. “One was obvious—you and your mother. You know, the focus was on Madeleine and Sulome, but there was another family, and we felt that was an enormous obligation. Even from the perspective of thirty years ago, or twenty-five years ago, I think we did that right. In a painful situation like that, there was just no w
ay to relieve the pain and the suffering . . . but that was one direction. Terry himself was another, and what we could do about that. Then sort of the AP staff, the public, and the rest of the world, it was kind of a third piece.”
“What about the government?” I ask.
“The government was an interesting experience for us,” he replies. “I was in places I never thought I’d be . . . We found some people who seemed to be very conscientious and as concerned as we were. We’ve found some others who I wouldn’t apply those words to. We did what we thought was right. There wasn’t a class about this at Columbia when I was there . . . you know, this was a new kind of challenge. Unhappily, since then these kinds of horrors have become more familiar, but at the time, there was no place to turn except to the AP’s own conscience.”
And the AP thought it was best not to publicize my father’s captivity. But they couldn’t stop the media feeding frenzy that surrounded him, and apparently, both he and the press chose my mother and me over Mickey and Gabrielle. We became the media family; they were the family that didn’t exist. I haven’t thought about that aspect of their experience before: the news treatment must have made things that much more painful for them. But learning these details about how the press and the government handled the situation also makes me somewhat proud of my aunt, who by all accounts was a dynamo in an otherwise sluggish process.
When Iran-Contra finally broke, the public went wild. Not only was the American government illegally aiding a rebel group, it was doing so with money generated from illicit arms deals with a known sponsor of terrorism, against all previously stated U.S. policy. Stories were aired, investigative commissions were formed, indictments were sought . . . and in the end, no one involved had to do an hour of jail time. Some were presidentially pardoned, others just weren’t prosecuted, and Reagan was largely absolved of responsibility. According to Oakley, that’s because many in the government didn’t want to see another president brought down so soon after Richard Nixon.
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