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One deputy in attendance was the Ayatullah Sadegh Khalkhali, the notorious "hanging judge" who has ordered more than a hundred people executed. He, like most of the senior mullahs, supported the deal. Cursing the organizers of the boycott as "truant kids," he pounded his fists so hard on his desk that his turban fell off The session was then adjourned until Sunday. Said Khalkhali: "This Majlis is incapable of solving the hostage problem. The Imam [Khomeini] should solve it himself."
A last-minute intervention by Khomeini might have produced a solution: most of the holdouts in the Majlis swear obedience to him, but he showed no inclination to act. On the contrary, in a major speech to the nation on Thursday, Khomeini reiterated his absurd charge of U.S.-Iraqi complicity in the invasion of Iran, but he pointedly ignored the hostage issue, an indication that he intended to leave their fate up to the Majlis.
On Friday the signs turned hopeful again. The Iranian government announced it had drafted a "just method" for effecting the hostages' release. A U.S. Air Force ambulance plane was standing by in West Germany. Khomeini's heir apparent, the Ayatullah Hussein Ali Montazeri, called on the Majlis to work out a settlement. Said he: "This shirking of duty may not be condoned by the revolutionary people of Iran."
But the Carter Administration, by now quite fatalistic, warned against another burst of optimism. The basic U.S. position, as summed up by a State Department official: "We don't know what's happening, because the Iranians don't know what's happening."
At the climactic Sunday session, the diehards tried to attach some new conditions. One would have required the U.S. to grant Iranian parliamentarians free television air time to explain their grievances to the American people. But the deputies beat back this and other attempts to stave off, or at least further complicate, the negotiations. Then came the Majlis vote approving the basis for the hostage release.
Even if this were not the week of a U.S. presidential election, the handling of the hostage crisis would present the U.S. with enormous problems. Coming to terms with Iran and sending along military supplies, even of the nonlethal variety, could seriously complicate American relations with the conservative Arab states of the Persian Gulf that are backing Iraq in the war. Last week Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates warned that they might reduce oil production if the U.S. resumed military supplies to Iran.