Freed British sailors head home from Iran

In announcing his intentions on Wednesday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said that although Iran had every right to try the Britons on charges of trespassing in Iranian territorial waters, it would instead forgive them and allow them to go home.

The captives met with the British ambassador to Iran late Wednesday night, the Foreign Office said. But a spokesman said they were still in Iranian custody and that their travel arrangements were still being made.

About 7 a.m. Thursday in Tehran (4:30 a.m. in London), the Britons arrived at the airport in a convoy and almost an hour later boarded a commercial flight bound for London, Reuters reported.

On Wednesday, Iranian state television showed the president smiling, chatting and shaking the hands of some of the captives. Dressed in ill-fitting clothes apparently issued by their captors, the Britons waited in line to meet the president, looking almost as if they were a visiting sports team. "We are grateful for your forgiveness," one said to Ahmadinejad, seemingly off the cuff.

News of the planned release, after days of behind-the-scenes diplomatic maneuvering, brought a peaceful, almost anticlimactic end to a crisis that began on March 23 when the Britons were seized in the disputed waters of the Shatt al-Arab waterway, just north of the Persian Gulf.

In London, Prime Minister Tony Blair suggested that the resolution was a vindication of Britain's two-pronged strategy of conciliation laced with toughness.

"Throughout, we have taken a measured approach, firm but calm, not negotiating but not confronting either," Blair said. Britain bore no ill will toward the Iranian people, he told reporters, and respected Iran's "proud and dignified history."

Officials denied that concessions were made for the Britons' release. But on Tuesday, an Iranian diplomat held by Iraqi forces for eight weeks was released, and on Wednesday, American officials said they were reviewing an informal request from the Iranian government for an envoy to visit five Iranians imprisoned after an American raid in northern Iraq in January. [Page A8.]

Neither Iran nor Britain admitted to backing down. Iran has argued throughout that the Britons strayed into its territorial waters; Britain has said that the group — seven marines and eight sailors, including one woman — was conducting a routine, United Nations-sanctioned operation in Iraqi waters.

Throughout the crisis, Iran vacillated between pugilistic statements and conciliatory ones in a seeming reflection of internal power struggles. British officials said that when Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, went on British television on Monday and intimated that Iran was looking for a diplomatic solution, the balance seemed to have tipped.

"We got the sense that the Iranians were sort of taking stock during the course of Monday and Tuesday," a government official said, speaking on condition that his name not be used, according to British government policy.

A flurry of activity on Tuesday culminated in a breakthrough phone call Tuesday night between Larijani and Sir Nigel Sheinwald, Blair's top foreign policy adviser, the official said. The Iranians also appeared to react positively to comments Tuesday night by Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett in which she ruled out a military solution.

In the end, both countries achieved what they wanted, up to a point. Britain got the promise of its crew back unharmed and, at least to outward appearances, was not forced to make the apology that Iran had originally demanded. Instead, it agreed only to disagree with Iran about exactly what had happened.

For its part, Iran had the chance to look magnanimous and found a graceful way to avoid an escalation.

"I think Iran was becoming increasingly aware that what they had done was a mistake and that the longer they held these people, the more the whole thing began to resemble the ugly hostage crisis of 1979," Wayne White, former deputy director of the State Department's Middle East intelligence office, said in a telephone interview.

"In addition, in the context of the ongoing nuclear impasse," White said, "the last thing Iran needed was to become involved in yet another affair that furthered the impression — particularly in the West but also in some regional capitals — that Iran was dangerous and could be dangerously irresponsible in its behavior."

Almost from the start, Iran seemed unsure of how to handle the captives. It showed them on television along with poignant handwritten letters from the only woman in the group, Leading Seaman Faye Turney, saying she wanted to go home and confessing, possibly under duress, that the Britons had been trespassing. One Iranian official said that Turney would be released; another said she would not.

For the first few days, it appeared that there was little movement on either side. But in addition to seeking the support of the United Nations Security Council and the European Union, Britain also reached out to Turkey and to many of Iran's neighbors, the government official said, and things began to improve last weekend with an exchange of notes between the sides.

Still, the British government was apparently taken by surprise Wednesday by Ahmadinejad's announcement, which came in the midst of a long, elaborate and rambling news conference. There was a disapproving lecture about American and British foreign policy, a discussion of the Security Council (equally disapproving) and a burst of lavish praise — and a medal — for the members of the Revolutionary Guards who seized the Britons in the first place. Then, almost as an afterthought, came the announcement.

Even in Tehran, there were signs that the detention had been unpopular and a blow to the influence of Ahmadinejad, who is vying against the country's pragmatists for more influence over Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader.

"Iranian leaders never imagined the consequences when they seized the sailors off Iranian or Iraqi waters," said Mehrdad Serjooie, a political analyst at the Center for Strategic Research, part of a group run by Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president and a challenger to Ahmadinejad.

"The televised confessions of the sailors provoked sympathy from the international public opinion, and such conditions were pushing Iran further into isolation," Serjooie said in an interview.

Hossein Rezamanesh, an Iranian shopkeeper, said that the Britons had been innocent victims of "a political game" in which the British and the Iranian governments were equally at fault.

"They gave an official description of this incident, but they were settling their scores on other affairs," Rezamanesh said in an interview, referring to the two governments. "Moreover, international pressure increased on Iran and the Iranians were afraid of horrible consequences. Thank God, our people were spared."

In London, Meir Javedanfar, co-author of "The Nuclear Sphinx of Tehran: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the State of Iran," said that the resolution was a victory of sorts for the country's pragmatists, chief among them Larijani.

"It just goes to show that the Iranian regime is prioritizing its needs, and that the priority is a nuclear program and trying to have an economic program and to avoid further sanctions," Javedanfar said in an interview. "This has not been very helpful in international circles, where Iran is already isolated."

By Sarah Lyall

/The International Herald Tribune/