Americans held hostage in Iran 30 years ago get millions

Compensation for American diplomats held hostage for 444 days in Iran more than three decades ago was hailed Thursday by the former captives and the lawyers who for years fought Tehran and Washington to get a measure of vindication.

A provision buried in a spending bill signed by President Barack Obama last week will give up to $4.4 million to each of the 37 surviving hostages - including one from Iowa - or the estates of 16 others who died in the years since their release.

The sum works out to $10,000 for each day of captivity and will come from a $9 billion penalty paid by the French bank BNP Paribas for violating sanctions against Iran, Cuba and Sudan.

'Iran is not paying the money, but it's as close as you can get,” said Thomas Lankford, an attorney who represented the former hostages and their families in a lengthy battle that continued even after the courts and the U.S. government repeatedly denied their requests.

One of the two female hostages held was Kathryn Koob, now 78, who retired from her adjunct professor position at Wartburg College in Waverly and lives in Waterloo. In the years after she was released, she gave lectures and talked to schoolchildren about her ordeal.

'When they study history, they need to know it happened to real people,” she told the Waterloo Courier in an interview last year.

In 1969, Koob had gone to work for the U.S. Information Agency and served in Africa and Romania before going to Tehran in 1979 as director of the Iran America Center, a cultural center near the American embassy.

Only about four months later, she was taken hostage.

She did not immediately return a message Thursday from The Gazette.

The financial settlement approved by Congress also provides potential benefits for victims of other terrorist attacks, including the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in East Africa and the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The compensation for the hostages held in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran between November 1979 and January 1981 brought some closure to the victims of one of the defining foreign relations crises of the 20th century. It fractured relations between Iran and the United States and ultimately pitted the former hostages not only against the authorities in Tehran, but also against their own government.

They were barred from taking legal action against Iran under the 1981 Algiers Accords, brokered by Algerian diplomats, that led to their release. U.S. courts, the State Department and presidents all opposed their attempts to sue. So lawyers turned to Congress for help.

Some hostages said they thought the push to reconsider the claims came after the Iran nuclear deal, which angered many members of Congress, and the Ben Affleck film 'Argo,” a thriller about the CIA's rescue of six U.S. diplomats in Tehran.

'I think ‘Argo,' followed by the Iran nuclear accord, was very instrumental,” said Joe Hall, 66, who was an Army chief warrant officer and operations coordinator for the U.S. defense attache at the embassy.

When Lankford told Hall and other hostages in a conference call that the compensation had been enacted, Hall said, 'I had the phone on mute and sat in shock for a few minutes. It was an emotional moment, by myself in the woods.”

The part of the bill that brought them vindication was introduced by Sen. Johnny Isakson, R- Georgia, chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee who counts three former hostages, including Hall, among his constituents. He had introduced compensation legislation for the Iran hostages every year since 2013.

The law, first reported by USA Today and signed by President Barack Obama on the day he left for vacation in Hawaii, also authorizes payments of $600,000 for each close relative of a hostage.

'The Iran hostages sacrificed mightily for our country, and I'm delighted that these brave men and women and their families are finally getting some semblance of justice and closure for what they went through,” he said in a statement.

Many of the hostages, held by students who overran the embassy on Nov. 4, 1979, were treated horribly. They endured mock firing squads and beatings with rubber hoses and were hung over elevator shafts and forced to run blindfolded into trees. The emotional toll on them, and their families, was severe, and in some cases they suffered depression and ruptured personal relations after their release on Jan. 20, 1981, as President Ronald Reagan was being sworn in to office.