Former hostages allege Iran's new president was captor
Thursday, June 30, 2005 Posted: 1603 GMT (0003 HKT)
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is shown in a 1979 photo from his Web site, left,
and in a June 2005 photo.
Manage Alerts | What Is This? NEW YORK (CNN) -- A quarter-century after
their 444-day ordeal at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, several former
hostages say Iran's hardline president-elect, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was
one of their captors.
"As soon as I saw the face, it rang a lot of bells to me," Don Sharer,
of Bedford, Indiana, told CNN. He had served as the embassy's naval
attache when the hostage-taking occurred.
"...Take 20 years off of him. He was there. He was there in the
background, more like an adviser."
The November 4, 1979, embassy takeover followed protests demanding that
the United States return the shah to Tehran for trial. He had been
overthrown by the Islamic revolution 11 months prior and was receiving
cancer treatment in New York at the time.
The embassy seizure resulted in a botched rescue mission that left
eight U.S. soldiers dead and the severance of U.S.-Iranian ties ever
since.
The Associated Press reports the White House is taking the allegations
seriously.
"I think the news reports and statements from several former American
hostages raise many questions about his past," White House press
secretary Scott McClellan told the AP. "We take them very seriously and
we are looking into them to better understand the facts."
"I saw his picture in the Washington Post on Saturday morning,
recognized it immediately and then sent an e-mail out to some of my
former colleagues ... telling them what I thought and seeing what kind
of responses they might have to it," said William Daugherty, a former
CIA officer who now lives in Savannah, Georgia.
Iranian officials deny Ahmadinejad took part, and members of the
student group involved in the takeover -- some of whom now support
reformist President Mohammed Khatami -- told CNN that Ahmadinejad was
not part of it.
The AP, in its archives, has a series of photographs showing a student
hostage-taker that some of the former hostages believe to be
Ahmadinejad.
But Iranian officials deny it, and, while there is a resemblance, that
resemblance is not definitive.
Ahmadinejad's official biography says that as a student at the
University of Science and Technology, he was a member of the Office for
Strengthening Unity, the student organization that planned the
takeover.
Ahmadinejad joined the Revolutionary Guards in 1980 and served in the
Iran-Iraq war.
Daugherty said he remembers "seeing him acting in a supervisory or
leadership capacity during the first ... 2 1/2 weeks (but) on the 19th
day, I was moved into solitary confinement and had limited contact with
even my Iranian guards after that."
Sharer said he was 99 percent sure Ahmadinejad was involved.
"In one incident he just called (Army attache Col. Charles Scott) pigs
and dogs and we deserved to be locked up forever," he said. "When
you're placed in a life-threatening situation of that nature, you just
remember those things."
The AP reports that one person who did not recognize Ahmadinejad as a
captor was senior defense attache at the time, Col. Tom Schaefer. The
AP reported him being more concerned about the return to power of
hardliners in Iran than by the thought Ahmadinejad might have been a
hostage-taker.
Asked about Schaefer's recollections, Daugherty and Sharer said memory
works different ways for different people.
"We were all in different circumstances," Daugherty said. "We were
exposed to some of the Iranians more than others. So, you know, if Tom
was actually quoted correctly in saying he didn't remember, again
that's not the same thing as the guy not being there."
The hostage crisis ended after intense negotiations. Minutes after
Ronald Reagan was sworn in as U.S. president on January 20, 1981, the
52 hostages were released.
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