Unfaded memories: 444 days of captivity

WASHINGTON - A yellow ribbon -- ceramic to withstand the passage of time -- still hangs from the old oak tree in L. Bruce Laingen's front yard, a 30-year-old reminder of the Minnesota farm boy's ordeal as the highest-ranking diplomat among 52 U.S. Embassy workers held hostage in Iran for 444 days.

It dangles by a string as frayed as the memories of that Iranian hostage crisis, which introduced the United States to militant Islam.

To Laingen, now 87, little has changed in America's relationship over those years with that autocratic regime. As the 30^th anniversary of the embassy takeover by radical Iranian students approaches Wednesday, three American hikers -- one who grew up in Minnesota -- are being held there without charges.

Laingen decries the regime's continuing failures: June's tainted elections, the brutal repression of protests and subsequent show trials.

Despite all of that, Laingen remains as certain as he was three decades ago that engaging with Iran is the right approach for the United States.

"I've been an advocate of engagement with Iran since the hour I left," Laingen said in an interview last week in his suburban Bethesda, Md., home. "I meant it then and I've said it ever since. I'm deeply grateful now that we're beginning to maybe talk to them."

To Laingen, ever the diplomat, that's not a slam on the more hawkish stance of former President George W. Bush, who included Iran in his Axis of Evil.

But in Laingen's view, the Iranian Revolution of the late Ayatollah Khomeini remains a work in progress, and the renewed stirrings of a new generation of Iranian youth present an opening that the U.S. president should encourage -- from afar.

"I believe in regime change, but conducted internally, by them," Laingen said.

He remains uncertain about the widely suspected nuclear ambitions of Iran's current Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the controversial government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But his advice to President Obama is the same either way.

"Find a way to talk on that issue, too," Laingen says.

'Persian psyche'

Among those on the other side of the debate is his 48-year-son, Chip Laingen, who heads the Defense Alliance of Minnesota, a network of defense contractors in the Twin Cities. The younger Laingen, who was a Navy ROTC student at the University of Minnesota during his father's captivity, says their differences stem in part from their professional perspectives.

"The way my father approached his entire professional life was in diplomacy," said Chip Laingen, now retired from the Navy. "It's a core belief for me that there are some people you just can't find common ground with. He and I go round and round on that."

The elder Laingen was the U.S. charge d'affaires in Tehran when the U.S. Embassy was overrun amid rising tensions over the deposed shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who had been admitted to the United States for medical treatment.

The subsequent impasse, which dominated the final year of the Carter administration, dragged on until the inauguration of President Ronald Reagan in 1981. By then, the Foshay Tower in downtown Minneapolis had been draped with a massive yellow ribbon, a giant echo of a symbol started by Laingen's wife, Penne, on the oak in their front yard.

The intransigence of the Iranians was no surprise to Laingen, who had served previously in Iran in the 1950s, after a U.S.-aided coup that brought the shah to power.

But combined with that unflattering assessment -- which would seem to preclude constructive talks -- Laingen has always possessed an abiding optimism, which he attributes to his farm upbringing outside Odin Township in southern Minnesota.

"I grew up in the dust storm days of the '20s and '30s in Minnesota," Laingen said. "You need a lot of optimism to cope with that situation. You have to be an optimist to farm in southern Minnesota even today."

'I was angry a lot'

Laingen's memories of his long captivity remain sharp. "An experience like that, of being a hostage, doesn't totally fade," he said. "It leaves a considerable impression on your psyche, your mind and your heart. But I don't live it."

His sense of the injustice of it all is still palpable, though rendered in the somewhat even-tempered tones of a son of stolid Norwegian farmers.

According to his son, the violation of the embassy compound didn't change Laingen's faith in diplomacy. Rather, he said, "it intensified his natural tendencies."

Finally boarding the plane that would fly the hostages to freedom, Laingen recalls encountering one of the senior hostage-takers. Laingen's parting words: "I look forward to the day your country and mine can have normal diplomatic relations."

Nearly 30 years later, Laingen still looks forward to that day. Meanwhile, the original fabric yellow ribbon that once decorated the Laingens' oak tree now resides in the Library of Congress.