Iran hostage crisis goes on

For a month or two we've been speculating and guessing what American policy might be if this happened or that happened. Nobody's been more of a victim of this waiting game than President Carter himself.

If the hostages in Iran were not released, what would he do? If the United States did well or badly in the Olympic Winter Games, how would this affect the American boycott? Or, I should say, the administration's recommended boycott of the Olympic Games in Moscow. If Senator Kennedy won the New Hampshire primary, would we be more or less likely to have wage and price controls which the senator has been campaigning for since we got the shocking news that our inflation rate is now running at over 18 per cent a year?

Well, I won't say that we've ticked off any milestones in the conduct of American policy on either the domestic or foreign front but we have disposed of at least two guessing games: the Olympic Winter Games are over, the New Hampshire primary is over. The hostages remain and I should guess are likely to be an aching problem for some time to come.

I thought of talking about them last time but then the President of Iran accepted the United Nations' commission and I stopped myself commenting on that just in time for suddenly the commission was delayed in Geneva for three days and the newspaper story at the time was that certain details about their terms of reference, their agenda, had to be worked out. But the truth was worse than that.

Just as the commission was about to take off for Tehran and the networks and the papers were excitedly predicting that the hostages would be out by the end of February, the stark word came from within the United Nations that what had still to be ironed out was something much more intractable than agenda details. It did not become clear, until the commission had actually landed in Tehran, that the Iranians thought they were receiving a commission to look into the crimes of the Shah and American interference in Iranian affairs, especially the means by which the United States had imposed the rule of the Shah on his country.

On the other hand, the Americans thought the commission was being received first to look into the crimes of the Shah but also to look into the violation of international law committed in the seizure of the hostages. When the commission got there, the Iranians said the hostages had nothing to do with the commission's work. it was a separate matter to be gone into some time in the future.

The prospect as seen from here is a grizzly one, a parade of armless men and beaten-up boys and people with their eyes gouged out, victims, that is, of Savak, the Shah's notorious secret police. I have heard a diplomat, an old friend of the Shah's, always hasten, if somebody mentioned the secret police, to correct the speaker. I believe he'd say, a little nervously, 'I believe you mean the Shah's secret service?' And, as guests of this old diplomat, we would politely deflect our eyelids.

But a few weeks ago I talked with another diplomat, an American now retired from the service who was assigned for several years to a high post in Tehran. When I brought up with him the performance of Savak, he was uncomfortable. He talked about the many ambitious and even socially enlightened things that the Shah had done for his country, he expounded at length on the Shah's essentially military character but as I got to know the man better, he confessed that at the end of his service he was constantly embarrassed by the all-too-obvious existence of Savak. His wife did some social work among the people of Tehran. Time and again, he said, she would come home in the dumps; some lively young man, some assistant, didn't show up one day and would never show up again, or another would appear with a broken arm or black eyes. They'd been given the treatment.

'I suppose,' mused this old American, 'that if you have a secret police, you're bound to recruit sadistic types and bullies and I suspect that the Shah preferred to look the other way when he heard of these brutalities. At the end,' the man said, 'I was not sorry to leave Iran.'

So it seems we'd better brace ourselves for ghoulish parades and recitals of horror stories and in the meantime – and unless the Ayatollah Khomeini is overcome by a bout of magnanimity he's never led us to expect – the hostages will remain.

The hostage problem is pertinent to the progress of the presidential primaries since President Carter said in November and has gone on saying ever since that as long as the hostages are in captivity, he could not and would not leave the White House to go on the campaign tour. In 1976 he went everywhere and his win in the New Hampshire primary then was the first firm sign to the country that an unknown peanut farmer and former governor of Georgia was an actual presidential threat to the big and well-known men who were running.

Well, there've been two caucuses and one primary and Mr Carter has won them all. Not that he's stoically pretending that the presidential election can wait. On the contrary, he's had his wife and his closest presidential aides off in the snows of New Hampshire. More pragmatically, he's done there what he did so successfully in Florida. He's discovered that he is suddenly overcome with a deep and generous concern for the financial welfare of the state.

You know, a sitting president has millions and millions of dollars authorised by the Congress to be used at his discretion, but not appropriated for a particular state institution or other beneficiary. He can thus do something that makes the other candidates turn green with envy and purple with rage. While they are all, including the president, bound by law to spend no more than a certain stated amount for actual campaign expenses, for the buttons and bows and placards and travel and hiring halls and so forth, the president has this vast pork barrel he can dip into. So, a week or two before the New Hampshire primary, he dispensed much largesse by way of money for schools, for farmers, for hospitals and the like.

As an actual campaigning technique, he kept saying how much he'd love to be up there holding or shaking hands and meeting the people but his duty was to stay on the bridge and watch the hostages in Iran, the Russians in Afghanistan, the latest reports of the Department of Commerce about soaring wholesale prices, the advice of the Federal Reserve Board on what to do about it.

Meanwhile, Senator Kennedy has raged at this technique, has challenged the president to come out fighting like a man. It hasn't worked. The president has preferred to sit in the White House, like a president.

A month or two ago, the president and all the pundits conceded that Senator Kennedy would win New Hampshire. It is, after all, his home ground, one state removed. There was even talk some time ago that the president wouldn't even enter the Massachusetts primary, which comes up on Tuesday, because Massachusetts if the home state of Senator Kennedy and in Massachusetts the Kennedys are gods.

I made a slip there, only half-consciously, in saying the Kennedys, instead of Edward Kennedy. It's a slip that the Kennedy team has depended on, the assumption that the good memories of Jack and Bobby Kennedy and the legend of Camelot were inseparable from the person of Senator Edward Kennedy.

Well, from all reports, that too is not so. Senator Kennedy, exposed since he was a boy to the Kennedy political know-how and the Kennedy rhetoric, has failed to revive the Kennedy magic. All he's done is to make too many people recognise how far he falls short of that magic. One thing now seems pretty certain. If he achieved the unthinkable next Tuesday, if he lost the primary in his own state, the desertions from his candidacy – and I mean the desertions round the whole country – would be like the retreat from Moscow. Even though he has elevated his bulldog chin and sworn he's in the primary races to the end, his own lieutenants are saying that a defeat in Massachusetts would be the end of his run.

Of the six Republicans who ran in the New Hampshire primary, one has already fallen out and it's a pity. He is Senator Dole of Kansas, almost unknown, I should guess, outside the United States – I say 'almost' because there may be foreign buffs of the presidential game who recall, just, that he was Gerald Ford's vice-presidential running mate in the 1976 election. I say it's a pity not because Senator Dole is a big gun, a powerful orator, an original statesman, a spellbinder; he's none of these things. He's at once a wit and a humorist. He has a twinkling eye and a forked tongue, a humorist so droll – droll Dole – that he makes you wonder why and how he could ever have got caught up in the solemnities, the ringing pretensions, of politics.

Of the remaining five, it seems there are only two who are going to have to fight it out until the Republican convention: George Bush – former congressman, former ambassador, former CIA head, 56 years of age, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and the man who reversed the Iowa result and beat Bush badly in New Hampshire, Ronald Reagan – former governor, former film star, former New Deal Democrat, perennial scout master now smiling hard and holding his head high to disguise the turkey gobbler neck and the fact, the indisputable fact, that he's just entered his 70th year. The Reagan victory was a shocker and since neither he nor Bush can explain it, it is not for us to analyse what they find un-analysable.

As for the Olympics, the dazzling five gold medals of Heiden and the astounding success of the American hockey team sent the country into euphoria and President Carter into a headache. He received the hockey team at the White House and while he was all teeth and happiness in their presence, the winter results have left him with a problem. To the rest of the world, some of the Olympic committee say the American victory was a boost for American morale and a blow to the Russians. Might not the same thing be true in Moscow?

The president's escape hatch is the clause in the charter of the International Olympic Committee which says that its members promise not to be diverted from their service by racial, religious or political motives. If they stay with the Olympics, the American committee may field a team and the president can then righteously swallow a sigh and say, 'I did the best I could.'

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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