After thirty years of frosty relations, the United States and Iran appeared to make incremental progress during nuclear negotiations in Geneva on October 1. ...

John W. Limbert, who was a hostage in the U.S. embassy in 1979-81, says the road ahead is uncertain. It is possible, he says, that the way is being cleared for an eventual dialogue between the two nations, as China and the United States had in the 1960s when envoys met in Warsaw, but nonetheless urges caution in elevating expectations. ...

As a mid-level diplomat you were one of the hostages confined for some 444 days between 1979 and 1981 in Tehran. Since then, you have been a strong advocate of the United States and Iran resuming a serious dialogue. Were you surprised by the fairly upbeat reports that have come out of the meetings between the Security Council plus Germany and Iran on Thursday ?

Not entirely. I think that by the way the meetings were set up, it was clear that the parties were going in with serious intentions. There was a lot of punditry that said, "Don’t expect anything ; expect these things to fail." But in general, if you go into a negotiation expecting to fail you will, and I think people went in with some serious intentions on both sides. A lot of the results are on the level of the symbolic, but right now the symbolic is very important.

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Where do you think we now stand on the nuclear issue ?

The problem is, if you make the nuclear issue and all the technical parts of it the only issue you talk about with the Iranians, you’re not going to get anywhere. You’re going to fail. Why is that ? Because the Iranians have made that issue a matter of right and respect and dignity. This particular enrichment procedure via the Russians and French seems to fall into the category of something that the Iranians can do that will respect their rights. In other words, by doing this the Iranians argue that they have not surrendered any of their rights to have a peaceful nuclear program, and we have not surrendered any of the rights that we have to put controls on the overall enrichment procedure.

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The parties are supposed to meet again before the end of the month. In an optimum situation, what would you expect to happen ?

I’d like to see some symbolic kinds of gestures. Now, the Iranian foreign minister was in Washington. This is the first time this has happened in some thirty years. The reason given was that he was there to look at the Iranian Interests Section attached to the Pakistan embassy. But for him to come here took a positive step by the United States because he had to get permission to travel beyond New York. I would be very interested to see if some American official would be able to go to Tehran and visit the American Interests Section in the Swiss Embassy. We’re dealing at the level of symbols, but at this point symbols become substance. The president says we’re not having talks just for the sake of talks, but in fact having meetings where people don’t yell at each other is in itself, I think, very significant.

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