SEELEY LAKE – Seeley Lake resident Patrick Constantinides knows some interesting inside information about the final stages of the Iran Hostage Crisis of 1979. Constantinides was the Assistant General Manager of one of the American banks in London during the time the hostage negotiations took place.
A quick and vastly oversimplified background to the situation goes something like this: On Nov. 4, 1979, supporters of the Iranian Revolution overwhelmed the American Embassy in Tehran and captured 52 American diplomats and citizens. In retaliation, President Jimmy Carter froze all Iranian assets held in American banks. Months of on-again-off-again negotiations failed to affect a release of the prisoners, as did a disastrous U.S. rescue attempt.
After 444 days, a hostage release was brokered through the intervention of Algeria. Among the provisions of the Algiers Accord of Jan. 19, 1981: The U.S. agreed not to intervene politically or militarily in Iranian internal affairs and also agreed to remove the freeze on Iranian assets and trade sanctions.
Constantinides became part of the drama because his bank held some of the frozen funds. Though he worked the night shift and was not usually a direct negotiator, he was kept apprised of the on-going talks. He explained “unfreezing” was not a simple matter of handing over a check. There was the question of how much interest had accrued, a not insubstantial issue on deposits in the billions of dollars.
From 1979 to 1981, interest rates had fluctuated, sometimes dropping below what another bank had offered. If they had the option, quite possibly the Iranians would have chosen to withdraw all or some of their funds to place them with another institution offering higher interest. How much did they potentially lose because they were not allowed to manage their own money? These and other headache issues had to be negotiated.
Constantinides related one story that he found especially amusing during the diplomacies in England.
“The men would be discussing some issue and all of a sudden the doors would open and their wives would come in with all these shopping bags. And the negotiations would stop while the contents of the shopping bags were being examined. Then the meeting would break up and it would take place again in a week or 10 days or whatever and it would be a different crowd of people that would turn up. And you’d be negotiating with them and then a similar sort of thing would happen – in would come the wives with western shopping bags.”
Another fact Constantinides shared concerned deliberate delays in the actual release of the hostages.
Constantinides said, “During the [hostage] negotiations, every time they got near to a resolution or agreement, the [telephone] line to Tehran would go dead. Then you’d get somebody else on the line and he would say he didn’t know what had been agreed before. So you had to start all over from the beginning. It was kind of obvious there was no way agreement was going to be reached until Reagan had taken the oath of office.”
Though the Algiers Accords were signed on Jan. 19, the prisoners were not released until Jan. 20, which was the day Reagan was inaugurated as U.S. President and Carter officially relinquished the office.
Constantinides said, “President Carter was very keen to leave office with [the hostages] released – understandably. But the Iranians weren’t going to give him that pleasure.”
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