George Hansen’s Passport & the Iran Hostage Crisis

The Congressman Who Flew to Tehran on His Own Passport

A U.S. passport issued in 1975 gives no hint of the diplomatic storm its holder would cause four years later. This one belonged to George V. Hansen, the Idaho congressman who used his own passport to fly into Tehran in the middle of the Iran hostage crisis and talk his way in to see Americans that trained State Department negotiators couldn’t reach.

A Congressman Built for Headlines

George Vernon Hansen was not a man who blended into a room. Born September 14, 1930, in Tetonia, Idaho, he served in the Air Force, graduated from Ricks College (now Brigham Young University-Idaho) in 1956, and worked as a teacher and insurance salesman before turning to politics. At six-foot-six and around 300 pounds, he was physically impossible to overlook, and his political instincts matched his frame. First elected to the House as a Republican in 1964, he went on to serve seven nonconsecutive terms, losing Senate bids in 1968 and 1972 before winning back his House seat in 1974.

He built a career as one of Capitol Hill’s loudest critics of federal overreach, taking on the IRS (he published a 1980 book on the subject, To Harass Our People: The IRS and Government Abuse of Power), the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and OSHA. To supporters, he was a folk hero standing up to Washington. To colleagues in both parties, he was frequently a liability.

An Ethics Problem, Early

Three months into his 1975 term, the same year the passport pictured here was issued, Hansen pleaded guilty to two counts of violating post-Watergate campaign finance reporting laws. His attorney’s defense was memorable: his client was “stupid but not evil.” A judge agreed enough to reduce jail time to a fine, but the episode set a pattern of financial and ethical entanglements that would define the rest of his career.

A One-Man Diplomatic Mission to Tehran

Hansen had a habit of freelancing as an unofficial diplomat, making trips to Taiwan and Nicaragua on his own initiative. Nothing matched the scale of what he did in 1979. As the Iran hostage crisis unfolded (Iranian students aligned with the Muslim Student Followers of the Imam’s Line seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979, beginning a 444-day standoff that held 52 Americans until January 20, 1981), Hansen flew to Tehran unauthorized and secured meetings with hostages that official U.S. negotiators had been unable to arrange.

It was a genuine breach of diplomatic protocol, and Washington reacted accordingly. White House press secretary Jody Powell argued the trip violated the constitutional separation of powers and risked prolonging the hostages’ captivity. Representative Millicent Fenwick of New Jersey called Hansen’s freelance diplomacy dangerous and irresponsible. Hansen, characteristically, responded by threatening to launch impeachment proceedings against President Carter over the crisis. He was also an outspoken opponent of the Panama Canal treaty and of abortion rights, positions that kept him a fixture in the era’s ideological battles.

The Silver, the Debts, and a Historic Conviction

Maintaining his public profile came with a cost Hansen’s congressional salary (57,500 dollars in 1977) couldn’t cover. When the Federal Election Commission wouldn’t let him solicit donations for personal expenses, his wife Connie sent mass mailings asking supporters to help pay down debt. In 1983, a federal grand jury indicted him on four counts of filing false financial disclosure statements, accusing him of concealing more than 245,000 dollars in loans and 87,000 dollars in silver speculation profits, much of it registered in his wife’s name under Idaho’s community property laws.

Hansen called the prosecution selective and politically motivated. In 1984 he was convicted on all four counts, becoming the first member of Congress convicted under the 1978 Ethics in Government Act. He was sentenced to five to fifteen months and fined 40,000 dollars, and he kept his House seat anyway, losing reelection that year by just 170 votes out of more than 200,000 cast.

Prison, a Hunger Strike, and a Vacated Conviction

After the Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal, Hansen entered federal prison in Petersburg, Virginia, in 1986. He went on a hunger strike during his six months there, his weight dropping from 326 to 250 pounds. Released, he then violated parole terms by traveling outside Virginia without permission and missing financial reporting requirements; federal marshals arrested him in Omaha and returned him to Virginia in restraints, a level of treatment that drew criticism from commentators across the political spectrum.

Hansen ultimately served an additional six months and never received the presidential pardon he sought. Vindication of a kind came in 1995, when the Supreme Court ruled that the 1978 Ethics in Government Act applied only to the executive branch, not to Congress. Hansen’s conviction was vacated and his fine returned. By then, though, he had already been convicted on 45 counts of bank fraud tied to a multimillion-dollar check-kiting scheme in Idaho and served 40 months for it. Even so, nearly 100 people he had defrauded signed affidavits asking the court to spare him.

A Final Chapter, and a Passport That Outlasted the Controversy

Hansen continued fighting legal battles into his final years, appealing a default judgment from the bank-fraud case until 2009, when the Idaho Supreme Court ruled he owed more than 700,000 dollars to a couple who had invested in one of his schemes. He died August 14, 2014, at a hospital in Pocatello, Idaho, at age 83; his wife of 60 years, Connie Camp Hansen, had died the previous year.

What makes a document like this one worth studying isn’t the paperwork itself. It’s what a passport represents: the legal instrument that let a private citizen turned congressman insert himself into an international hostage standoff, against the wishes of his own government, and walk into a room in Tehran that trained diplomats couldn’t get into. That’s the strange power of the passport as an object, and why one issued in 1975 to an unremarkable Idaho Republican ended up tangled in one of the defining foreign policy crises of the twentieth century.

 

Tom Topol | Passport Historian & Author
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