Word: bourguet
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...Akbar Mohtashami announced that the French embassy had been cordoned off and that some of its officials would be arrested for spying. His threat quickly raised fears that the French diplomats might be seized in an ugly replay of the U.S. embassy hostage nightmare of 1979-81. Warned Christian Bourguet, a French lawyer who helps represent the Iranian government in Paris: "The risk now is that the crowds in Iran might do something like what happened to the Americans. That is to say, a veritable invasion of the embassy...
Carter had used his aide Hamilton Jordan to work with two secret emissaries, Argentine Businessman Hector Villalon and French Lawyer Christian Bourguet, in conducting covert negotiations with Iranian officials for freeing the Americans. The talks had often looked promising, but repeatedly failed when the erratic Khomeini refused to order that control of the hostages be transferred from their militant captors to his government. After the rescue attempt, little progress was made until Algerian diplomats agreed to serve as official intermediaries between the U.S. and Iran. Through this channel, complex legal questions involving the disposition of the frozen Iranian assets were...
...toppled in 1955, Villalón remained a trusted adviser on foreign affairs during Perdón's exile in Spain. During the past few years, Villalón has operated out of Paris, where he deals in oil and commodities. One of his associates is Christian Bourguet, a leftist lawyer who in the 1970s became a close friend of Foreign Minister Ghotbzadeh, then an exile in Paris. Bourguet introduced Villalón to Ghotbzadeh. They soon became friends...
More recently, Bourguet has served as a legal adviser to the Iranian government. He helped prepare the extradition papers that Iran sent to Panama in its effort to capture the deposed Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, an effort that prompted the ailing Shah to flee to Egypt three weeks ago. In the course of his work for Tehran, Bourguet met in Paris on at least one occasion with Carter's closest aide, Hamilton Jordan...
Jordan also has had contact with Villalón but when and where is not known. The Argentinian apparently accompanied Bourguet to Tehran in March, where he tried his hand at negotiating an end to the crisis. According to White House officials, Villalón was acting on his own in drafting the purported message from Carter to Khomeini, though a senior civil servant in Iran insisted that Villalón did it at the White House's request. (The day of Powell's denial, a high-level member of Carter's National Security Council said that...