Interview with a hostage

     Thirty two years ago I was a talk show producer for The Laura Hall Show on KAYO AM in Seattle. Aside from my salary ($700/month) it was my dream job. I was only required to be at the station for five hours a day, but I loved the job so much I worked twelve hours most days.
     Being a talk show producer meant that I had two essential jobs: book the guests and screen the nutjobs who wanted to get on the air every night. Every Monday, Laura and I would sit down and she would tell me who she wanted me to book for the upcoming weeks. 
     Starting in August of 1980, Laura started telling me to set up an interview with "one of the hostages being held by the students in Iran."  It got to be a running joke between us. The hostages had been seized the previous November and there had been no media contact with them since then.
     I like to think that anything is possible, and the impossible just takes a little longer. So, I started working on setting up that interview. Of course, I ran into one roadblock and dead end after another. After three months of fruitless calls, I called another in a long series of numbers that turned out to be a wrong number. This wrong number turned out to be a business. A bar, in fact. When I started to speak English instead of Farsi, the phone got handed off to a gentleman with a strong British accent. I told him the story of how I had gotten the wrong number and who I was looking for. He told me that he was a reporter from England, and that he thought he had a number that would ring in to where the hostages were held. For no good reason that I can think of, he dug around in his pockets, found the number and gave it to me.
     My fingers trembled as I dialed that number, sure that my destiny was about to unfold. The phone rang, someone answered in a language I didn't understand, and when I spoke they immediately hung up the phone. Over the next few weeks, I dialed that number every night we were on the air, but never got farther than speaking one sentence before they hung up.
     One night I got the bright idea to try a little subterfuge. As soon as I heard the voice on the other end of the line, I said "Hello, this is the overseas operator, I have a Person to Person call for Mr. Bruce Laingen." For those of you born after 1980, a Person to Person call was a more expensive type of call placed with operator assistance where you didn't get charged unless you reached the person you were calling.
     Instead of just hanging up like they had every other night,  I heard the phone set down with a clunk. I sat at my desk, straining to hear anything, hoping to get anything that I might report on the hostages. Long distance calls from America to Iran were very expensive in 1980, so I could feel the meter running as I sat there on virtual hold.
     After five minutes or so of silence, the phone was picked up and I heard a tired-sounding voice on the other end say "Hello?" I was stunned, but not silent. 
     "Is this Bruce Laingen, the  chargé d'affaires  of the American Embassy?"
     "Yes?"
     My heart nearly beat out of my chest. Tedd Koppel and ABC's Nightline was devoting half an hour every night to the hostage crisis, and I had the head diplomat ON THE PHONE.
     "Mr. Laingen, this is Shawn Inmon with radio station KAYO in Seattle Washington. Would you be willing to come on the air with us right now?"
     "Oh, I wouldn't be comfortable doing that. The negotiations for our release are at a critical juncture, and I don't want to do anything that would endanger that."
     "I understand that Mr. Laingen, and we wouldn't want to do anything that would endanger you in any way. At the same time, people all over America are worried about you and praying for you. It would mean so much to them if you could just come on the air and say 'This is Bruce Laingen and the sun is shining in Tehran today."
     There was a long pause on the other end, then "OK. I'll come on the air with you."
     I was exultant, but realized that the only way I could connect with Laura in the other room was to put the call on hold. I said a quick prayer of my own that our hold system wouldn't accidentally hang up. I pushed through the swinging door into the studio so hard it slammed back and bloodied my nose. I didn't even notice. I ran up to the control board, hung up on the caller Laura was talking to on the air, put a 30 second PSA into the cart machine and hit Play.
     "I have Bruce Laingen on the line and he's agreed to talk to us on the air. You have 20 seconds to prepare for the biggest interview of your life."
     I realized I had done everything I could, and it was all in Laura's hands now. I walked slowly back to my desk and slumped down in my chair when a stray thought occurred to me: was anyone recording this for posterity? I ran to the newsroom around the corner and saw the reel to reel tape machine slowly turning, recording the conversation. The newsman on duty that night looked at me with his jaw hanging open a little bit.
     That short, two and a half minute interview marked the only public words spoken by any of the 52 hostages during their 444 day captivity. Laura did a wonderful job with the interview with almost no preparation. She was calm and cool and got everything she could out of her time with Mr. Laingen.
     My life for the next 48 hours was a blur. I was contacted by every major news service for an interview, including ABC, NBC, CBS, The Associated Press, United Press International, and the BBC. I was interviewed by two very serious men in dark suits and sunglasses who wanted to know how I got the number that reached the hostages. I don't think they believed me when I told them a half-drunk British journalist gave it to me. President-elect Ronald Reagan's Press Secretary James Brady called to congratulate me. The biggest deal of all was that Walter Cronkite said my name on the CBS Evening News when my Mom was listening. 
     Laura and I had some other good moments at KAYO - I located and set up an interview with Abby Hoffman while he was still on the run from the law - but nothing approached the feeding frenzy of the hostage interview. If everyone really does get to be famous for fifteen minutes, those were mine. 
     If you'd like to hear the same story from the other end of the phone line, Bruce Laingen wrote about it in his autobiography Yellow Ribbon: The Secret Journal of Bruce Laingen.
     That's not quite the end of the story, though. Twenty six years after that interview, I sent Mr. Laingen a letter. I felt I owed him an apology. In my youthful enthusiasm I was so intent on procuring the interview that I didn't ever stop to think about the possible human cost. In my letter I apologized for that thoughtlessness. 
     In his return letter, Mr. Laingen was very kind, telling me that no apology was necessary and that he knew exactly what he was doing when he came on our airwaves. Even twenty six year later, it felt nice to be able to let go of that small guilt I had carried around.