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American officials in the know insist that much of this story is sheer invention intended to make the U.S. look ludicrous. What really happened, they say, was this: McFarlane, North and two bodyguards did visit Tehran, but their passports were neither U.S. nor Irish. Also, they carried no Bible, cake or guns. They stayed in Tehran four or five days and managed to meet a number of Iranian officials, possibly including Rafsanjani, although accounts differ on that subject. Stories vary too on what, if anything, the mission accomplished. Some say that McFarlane's contacts with the Iranians were amicable, others that they were rudely aborted.
Fanciful though it was, Rafsanjani's tale ended any U.S. hope of preserving secrecy. Together, he and Al Shiraa had introduced all the main elements of the story: the secret meetings between U.S. and Iranian officials, the arms transfers and the negotiations about the hostages in Lebanon. Al Shiraa did not mention the hostages, but Rafsanjani did. He said that if the U.S. and France met certain conditions, among them the return of frozen Iranian assets and freedom for so-called political prisoners held "in Israel and other parts of the world," then "as a humanitarian gesture we will let our friends in Lebanon know our views" about the release of American and French hostages.
But freedom for Journalist Terry Anderson and Thomas Sutherland, the acting dean of agriculture at Beirut's American University, now looks far away. The White House had once hoped that both would be released, along with Jacobsen, on the eve of last week's congressional elections, giving the Republicans a big plus. As it turned out, Jacobsen was let go a day early and Anderson and Sutherland not at all. Says a senior Administration official: "This ended the possibility, at least for now, of two more releases. That possibility has dried up."
Terry Waite voices more or less the same view. The Anglican envoy returned to Britain last week grumbling angrily that international power games were complicating his efforts to win freedom for Anderson and Sutherland. Waite said he intends to disappear into the English countryside for a while and wait for some indication that a return to Beirut would be productive. He may have to wait quite a while. And it does not seem likely that the U.S. can soon resume contacts with Iranian officials of any rank concerning geopolitical questions. Iranian Prime Minister Mir Hussein Mousavi sneered last week that renewed contacts between the U.S. and Iran would be like "relations between the wolf and the lamb." Later Rafsanjani said the U.S. was "using every channel to beg Iran to accept establishing a dialogue with it."
The revelations of the secret talks with Iran put Secretary of State George Shultz in a particularly uncomfortable spot. What he knew about them is uncertain. He was surely aware of the meetings between National Security Council officials and Iranian representatives. As a member of the NSC, he was privy to a presidential memorandum in February summarizing the meetings to that date and directing that they continue. According to some reports, he heard about the arms shipments and protested vainly against them to the President. Some of Shultz's subordinates, however, think the Secretary did not learn about the arms transactions until the rest of the world did.