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Incredibly, Carter was still a captive of the ever unpredictable Iranians through a second virtually sleepless night. Before dawn, he knew that final agreement on the technicalities for release had been reached. The money had been deposited in the Algerian account at the Bank of England for transfer to the Iranians. At 8:06 a.m. his red phone rang. He was told by Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher that two Air Algerie Boeing 727 jetliners had been cleared for takeoff at Tehran's Mehrabad Airport. One was to carry the Americans, the other the Algerian doctors who had examined the hostages in Tehran to certify that they were all in good physical health. A jubilant Carter asked Mondale to tell congressional leaders that release was imminent. But then, hour after hour, the flight to freedom failed to take off, apparently because the Iranians wanted to hand Carter one last insult.
Carter's spirits sank. Dismayed, angry and frustrated, he had to be helped physically by his aides as he walked from the Oval Office, past the Rose Garden, to the upstairs family quarters to get ready for the Reagans. "He was as near despair as I have ever seen him," a top aide recalled later. "It was incredible agony."
Meanwhile, Navy Captain Gary Sick, the Iran expert on the National Security Council, kept two phone lines open; one was to Christopher in Algiers, the other to Carter. If there was no word of takeoff by noon, Carter had joked to the officer, "Captain Sick will be Lieut, (jg) Sick."
But all through the morning, Sick relayed the bad news to Carter, which was that there was no news about takeoffs in Tehran. He called him away from coffee with the Reagans in the Blue Room, rang him as Carter and Reagan rode together to the Capitol in the black presidential limousine, reached him again at a phone in the Capitol Rotunda. During Reagan's Inaugural speech, Carter briefly closed his red-rimmed eyes, a moment caught by television cameras. He had been praying for the hostages, he later told aides, who had wondered if he had fallen asleep.
Some 6,350 miles away in Tehran, the Americans were enduring a final episode of psychological abuse. Most, if not all, had been assembled by Iranian revolutionary guards at an undisclosed site in northern Tehran, probably the opulent mansion once owned by Hojabr Yazdani, a wealthy cattle breeder and industrialist who is now a fugitive from Khomeini's regime. They had been examined by the Algerian doctors, but the hostages had not been told that they were to be released. Ahmad Azizi, the Iranian government's second-ranking spokesman on the hostages, claimed later: "It would have been too painful for them if the negotiations had somehow broken down." Even when they were finally told that they were going home, said Azizi, "they did not believe it. They moved about like sleepwalkers."