Hostage-takers a threat — to the Iranian regime

CAIRO, Egypt —

Mohsen Mirdamadi was applauded as a hero by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini for helping lead the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Iran 30 years ago today.

He is in prison now, an accused enemy of the state.

Mirdamadi's crime was his work as a leader of the reform movement, specifically as general secretary of the Islamic Iran Participation Front, the largest reformist party.

But he hardly is alone among former hostage-takers. As Iran today marks the 30th anniversary of an event that helped define its political identity, many former hostage-takers and their allies are committed to the political opposition, and therefore pose a particularly credible threat to the leadership's legitimacy, political analysts said.

"The fact that so many of the students of '79 eventually came to a reformist position in Iranian politics is not such a mystery when you remember that the reformist position in Iranian politics is not necessarily a pro-Western position," former diplomat Michael Axworthy said. "What they're after is what they thought the revolution was about, ... representative politics in the Islamic context."

The perception that the hostage siege — once the signature event in the founding of the Islamic Republic — has developed into a domestic liability is especially true this year. Ever since the protests and ensuing crackdown after the disputed presidential election last summer, opposition supporters have seized on public anniversaries as a chance to take to the streets, as they are expected to do today.

Most telling, and perhaps most damning, said Iran expert Rasool Nafisi, is the reformists' increasingly popular slogan, expected to make an appearance today.

It says, simply: "Iranian Republic." Not: "Islamic Republic."

"The threat of falling off course and losing the spirit of the Revolution looms over us," Masoumeh Ebtekar wrote in her blog Persian Paradox, in June, after the election. She was the public face of the siege, serving as spokeswoman for the hostage-takers. She provided updates on the 52 American hostages she called "guests of the ayatollah."

Today, she informally represents the views of many former hostage-takers. Hundreds of students were involved. Among the leaders, there tends to be a consensus on certain points, Iran experts said.

While they are not pro-Western, they support engagement. They often talk about the original ideals of the revolution, including justice and freedom, which they say the state has abandoned — especially in its violent crackdown on election protests, which echoed the harsh actions of the Savak, the shah's hated and feared secret police.

The 1979 takeover was led by a group that called itself the Muslim Followers of the Line of the Imam. They were politically radical, mostly leftists and anti-Imperialists, as well as Islamists. The three leaders of the central committee in control of the embassy were Mirdamadi, who is in prison; Ebrahim Asgharzadeh, now a leader of a small reformist party called Solidarity; and Habibollah Bitaraf, who served as a minister in the reform government of President Mohammed Khatami.

In later years, the brain trust of the reform movement emerged from the ranks of the hostage-takers. Among them were Abbas Abdi, a chief adviser to the reformist Khatami and subsequently jailed for two years; Saeed Hajjarian, a journalist and reform leader released from prison in October after months behind bars; and still-imprisoned Mohsen Aminzadeh, a deputy foreign minister in the Khatami years.

"We have to ask why students who were called national heroes by the Imam are now suffering these circumstances," Ebtekar said Tuesday in her capacity as a member of the Tehran City Council.

The political turmoil after Iran's election has highlighted how power politics have evolved since the popular uprising that ousted the shah. Ayatollah Khomeini consolidated power in the hands of the Islamists in the early years, but power has shifted to a new generation associated with the Iran-Iraq war and the Revolutionary Guards, a military force mandated to take the necessary steps to protect the revolution.

That new political elite often is at odds with the founding fathers, from the former president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, to the government's most outspoken critic, former presidential candidate and two-term Parliament speaker Mehdi Karroubi.

"Mirdamadi is now sitting in jail and, of course, this again more than anything testifies to how that initial consensus in Iran of 1979 and 1980 has broken and has dissipated," said Mehrzad Boroujerdi, a Syracuse University political-science professor and expert on Iran.

Another prominent student leader, Abdi, said in 2006 that he and his fellow radical hostage-takers knew exactly what they wanted to dismantle — the rule of the shah and the Savak. What they had not considered, he said, was what they wanted to build up.

Abdi has kept a low profile lately, offering little publicly except some support for the Green Movement of the other main reform leader, Mir Hossein Mousavi.

Like other hostage-takers, Abdi did not apologize for the embassy takeover. He said he thought it was necessary — at the time.

But he was filled with remorse for what had come of it.

"It is despotism," he said in 2006. "No despot admits he is one. They usually claim they are democrats."