ARGO II
1. THE FUNERAL
On a crisp winter’s morning in 1989, many of Wellington’s most influential diplomats, bureaucrats and consultants met in Old St Paul’s Church to farewell a dear friend. The man they were there to mourn was not a household name. But to the assembled gathering, Richard Sewell was a legend.
Six feet tall, with sharp features and a sweep of dark hair, Sewell had been a glamorous presence among the sallow figures of official Wellington. People found him charming, although they seemed to see different things in him. A “bon vivant”, one former colleague recalled: “The image of him is with a jersey slung around his shoulders and tied in front, with his hand to one side with a cigarette in it.” To another friend, he seemed more like a man straight out of the American Old West, with his firm handshake and the way he looked at you straight from his twinkling eyes. Sewell had such a rich social life that one attendee at the funeral almost expected his brick-like mobile phone to start ringing from inside the casket.
A few weeks before his death, Mattie Wall, a friend and former colleague at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT), had run into Sewell in a doctor’s waiting room. “I can’t get rid of this damn cough,” Sewell told her, she says. “And next thing he was in hospital.” she says. Sewell was among the first wave of people in New Zealand to be diagnosed with HIV/AIDS —only three years after male homosexual sex had been decriminalised, at a time when misunderstanding and prejudice about the disease was rife.
Even while confined to his bed in Wellington Hospital, Sewell tried to remain buoyant. He discussed with friends what his funeral should be like and what music would be played. He asked his close friend Chris Beeby, a colleague from New Zealand’s embassy in Iran from 1978 to 1980, to deliver a eulogy.
If Sewell was the model of a debonair diplomat, Beeby delighted in confounding expectations. “He fell outside my mental image of what an ambassador should look like,” says one person who encountered both men in Iran. “I always thought that Beeby was what the pirate Redbeard would have looked like in real life.” His craggy face was often partly obscured by a thick beard and framed by a wave of long red hair that sprouted at the crown of his head. Early in his career he represented New Zealand in the Gilbert and Ellice islands (now known as Kiribati and Tuvalu), navigating a boat through treacherous reefs around the atolls to attend important meetings. In his spare time, he was an avid fencer. He regularly eschewed the standard diplomatic uniform of a pinstripe suit in favour of a pair of jeans with circles of belt loops all the way down the pant legs.
Standing at St Paul’s carved wooden pulpit, Beeby praised Sewell’s diplomatic skills and his loyalty as a friend and gossiped about his capers overseas. When he came to their shared time in Iran, however, he was uncharacteristically restrained. “There’s stuff we can’t talk about at this point in time,” he said. “But when the history is written of the evacuation of the Americans from Iran, great accolades will be paid to Richard for his role.”
Beeby was referring to one of the most dramatic episodes of the latter 20th century. In 1953, America and Britain helped the Shah of Iran to overthrow the country’s democratically elected government. For 25 years American diplomats essentially controlled the increasingly repressive monarchical regime. In 1978, popular resentment finally erupted and the Shah was overthrown. Massive crowds of revolutionaries began gathering daily outside the American embassy in Tehran to chant “death to America”.
At 10am on 4 November 1979, a handful of university students began scaling the embassy’s 10-foot walls, including young women with bolt cutters hidden beneath their chadors. The embassy’s locked gates were broken open from the inside; US Marines couldn’t fire for fear of provoking a full-on war. One group of revolutionaries swiftly captured the compound’s main buildings and took dozens of American
