American diplomat in the US Foreign Service who was one of the 66 staff members at the American embassy in Tehran taken captive in what became known as the Iran hostage crisis. A militant Islamist student group called the Muslim Student Followers of the Imam’s Line held him and 51 other Americans as hostages from 4 November 1979 for 444 days, until negotiations for the remaining captives being held hostage were concluded with the signing of the Algiers Accords on 19 January 1981, with their release coming the following day.
On 4 November 1979, Morefield was in the American embassy in Teheran, where he was serving as the United States consul general to Iran. He was one of a group of six Americans who was at first taken to a school in Tehran, where they were placed in a shower room and had rifles pointed at them, marking the first of three mock executions he would ultimately face.
After the Algeria Accords were signed on 19 January 1981, Morefield and the other captives were given medical examinations and were released the next day, placed on buses surrounded by crowds shouting “Bad, bad, America’s bad” and leaving the country on an Algerian airplane. He called his wife after they landed in Germany and told her that “those people tried to break us”, but that “we beat them”.
Morefield was assigned to head the State Department’s Office of Caribbean Affairs and was assigned to Mexico where he served as consul general in Guadalajara and as the economic counselor in the American Embassy in Mexico City, his final posting.
Morefield died on 11 October 2010 at age 81 in Raleigh, North Carolina due to pneumonia. He was survived by his wife, Dorothea, as well as by a daughter and four sons. His son Rick had been killed in 1976 by a gunman during a robbery of a Virginia restaurant. Morefield recalled that the experience of dealing with the death of his son had given him greater strength to make it through the hostage crisis.
Link to Wikipedia biography