Hostage aims to bridge gap with captors

John Limbert, one of the 52 US diplomats held hostage in Iran for 444 days, has returned to the state department and is trying to talk to his former captors.

A generation of US diplomats has had almost no contact with Iran since the US embassy was taken over after the 1979 revolution but Mr Limbert, then a political officer, exchanged words with Ali Khamenei, now supreme leader. 

Nevertheless Mr Limbert, who is married to an Iranian, faces the dilemma that lies behind Barack Obama’s entire push for engagement with Tehran.

He wants direct contact to end what he describes as a “30-year relationship of futility” in which “US policy has consisted mostly of figuring out how we can be mean to the Iranians”.

Yet the political turmoil in Iran, triggered by the supposed re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad as president last June, makes dialogue more difficult, says Mr Limbert.

It creates doubts over whether Tehran is able to make conciliatory moves and raises the question of whether support for the opposition, rather than talks with the regime over its nuclear programme, should be the top priority.

Mr Limbert sees parallels between the demonstrations that toppled Shah Reza Pahlavi in 1979 and today’s protests against Iran’s clerical rulers. “Both movements started small; they started with limited demands; they were going up against what appeared to be hopeless odds,” he says. “In both cases, the authorities have not been able to suppress, eliminate, silence the opposition.”

Interest groups in both countries oppose any improvement in relations. Mr Limbert also notes a “kind of diabolical coincidence at work, [so] that just when you appear to be making some progress, something comes along to turn it back, such as the election in June of last year and then the aftermath”.

Mr Limbert’s own role – the reason he was called back to the state department last year after retiring in 2006 – is to facilitate contacts with Iran. In particular, his task is to make sense of Iranian actions and advise colleagues on how Tehran is likely to interpret moves by the US.

Aside from a brief meeting in October between William Burns, the senior US diplomat handling relations with Tehran, and his Iranian counterpart, there have been no contacts.

Meanwhile, the US has decided to press for another round of United Nations sanctions, with the possible support of Russia, although China remains reluctant.

One of the few bright spots, say US diplomats, is that Iran’s nuclear programme appears to be experiencing technical difficulties that might provide more time for a diplomatic solution.

Patience is the virtue Mr Limbert emphasises above all others. “You have to get creative, you have to be very patient and sometimes you have to know when to wait when you have played out a string,” he says.

Asked whether Tehran today is any position to strike a deal, he says US diplomats such as himself simply “don’t know that much about the internal workings” of Iran.

In a nod to his time as a hostage, Mr Limbert says: “If we could never come to an agreement with the Iranians on anything, because they’re simply too divided among themselves or too dysfunctional, then I and my colleagues could still be sitting in Tehran.

“For us, it was difficult, it was frightening, it was uncomfortable,” he says. “Still, the real victims of that event were not us but the Iranian people because what they have endured in terms of brutality, in terms of a very harsh regime, in terms of international isolation...much of it is traceable to those events.”