Guests of the Ayatollah

1. We Don’t Have The Shadow or Superman

Several weeks into the hostage crisis, American television networks broadcast film of hostage Jerry Miele (he was not identified by name) being led blindfolded to the front gate of the embassy, where the bloodthirsty crowd vented its rage from behind the tall iron gate. Miele was then paraded around to another location for more of the same. It was the first glimpse of a hostage since the day the embassy had been taken, and it galled millions of Miele’s countrymen who saw it. The film clip accompanied the first reports that some of the hostages were being mistreated—beaten and interrogated—and it fed a mounting national rage.

In a report from the State Department, CBS reporter Marvin Kalb described the mood at Foggy Bottom, but he might as well have been talking about the entire country: “There is a very deep, deep frustration,” he said, “a feeling that the United States is helpless to determine the outcome…that we have tried everything and most of our efforts have not borne fruit.” The United States of America was stymied. Kalb quoted an unnamed State Department official, who said, “We don’t have the Shadow or Superman in our employ.”

Walter Cronkite, the veteran, influential CBS anchor, delivered daily reports on the crisis with thinly disguised contempt, noting the “stark, depressing reality” of the standoff and itemizing each day’s new insult and outrage. More than any foreign policy episode in American history, the Iran hostage crisis would be shaped by television. In any age, the capture of several score Americans in an obscure world capital would have been a big story, but one that in time would have faded. Prior to the television era, those directly interested in the story would have followed it in newspapers and magazines, of course, but for the masses of Americans concern over the captives’ fate would have diminished and eventually dropped off the front pages.

But this was a story made for television, particularly at a time when satellites had enabled instant reporting of events from almost anywhere in the world. It was a suspenseful, unfolding story, a real-life cliff-hanger, and it tapped an insatiable appetite for political intrigue, scandal, military analysis, drama, and pathos. It was a huge story for newspapers and magazines, too, but the tube was in just about every living room in America. The story grabbed the nation by the neck and held on. The United States was being publicly humiliated, goaded, maligned, and insulted on an international stage. The students themselves were media savvy, and with regular press conferences and dramatic pronouncements made sure the story didn’t fade. Reporters from American newspapers and the big three TV networks were allowed to set up in Tehran and file daily reports—ABC’s were delivered nightly by future anchorman Peter Jennings. The constant torrent of demeaning images and disturbing rhetoric from this obscure and exotic land was both frightening and fascinating. Why did they call Americans devils? Why did they assume all the diplomats and marines they held were spies? Some of the questions they raised seemed plausible. By 1979 most Americans knew that their country was not above undermining the internal affairs of small foreign countries. Were these accusations true? Did the hostages deserve what was happening to them?

On a national level, the Carter administration appeared to have badly blundered by admitting the shah. Why had the embassy not been closed first? Weren’t the consequences entirely predictable? Every night a wide range of experts was invited to interpret each mystifying new twist of the drama. Why couldn’t the United States respond militarily? How could we let these Iranian hotheads get away with this? The story had another thing going for it. Each of the sixty-six Americans in captivity had hometowns, families, relatives, friends, and coworkers. Every local news outlet in the country had a local angle. Hundreds of city TV stations were used to just taking the network feed for breaking national and international stories, just as its newspapers tapped wire services, but with this one they could break their own stories and view the crisis through their own fresh and emotionally powerful lens. Over the first weeks, local reporters scrambled to learn the names of the hostages—with some diplomats still hiding in Tehran, the government refused to release a complete list of names—but gradually the identities of all of the Americans were revealed. Reporters and cameras descended on quiet neighborhoods in just about every state. The hostages’ families found themselves at the center of a media storm. Every word they uttered, every tear they shed, was suddenly news. Stations in local markets vied for access to them. Dorothea Morefield, the poised, articulate wife of consul general Dick Morefield, who had undergone the terrifying mock execution, became a regular on San Diego television. “My heart aches,” she told a reporter there, watching new film of the hostages on the day of capture. The mother of marine Billy Gallegos wept for cameras in Colorado, one of many hostage family members who broke down for local newsmen. State Department communicator Bill Belk’s wife told the camera, “There are no words to explain how I feel.”

The crisis was a ratings dream, a conundrum, a scandal, and a tear-jerker, with no clear resolution in sight. Every day brought new provocative twists. Some Iranian students on college campuses in the United States defended the embassy takeover and were confronted by crowds of angry American students. There were isolated acts of retaliation against Iranians living in the United States, fear of oil shortages, signs of military maneuvers, and countless gestures of citizen support for the captives. Cable television and the advent of the twenty-four-hour news cycle were still a few years away, but the decade-long ratings success of the CBS weekly news show 60 Minutes had awakened the networks to the commercial success of news programming, and here was a story that stretched the potential of the medium from an exotic foreign capital to their own neighborhoods. America was riveted.

The networks extended their newscasts and packaged hourlong specials in prime time to update and analyze the story, but despite all the hours of television time devoted to the crisis very little effort was made to understand why there were mobs of fist-waving Iranians massed outside the Tehran embassy, or why the students had been motivated to take Americans hostage. The students were referred to as “militants” or extremists, and their action was seen as a wild, inexplicable act of fanaticism. There was little or no explanation of the role played by the United States in overthrowing Iran’s government more than a quarter century earlier, or any of the other reasons for Iranian anger or suspicion. Iranian rage was presented as something incomprehensible, something mad. Americans were no longer surprised by Third World hostility; the sentiment “Yankee Go Home” seemed to require no explanation. By the end of the 1970s America had come down hard from its post–World War Two fantasy of invincibility; it had weathered the tragedy and humiliation of Vietnam, the Watergate scandal and concurrent revelations of CIA and FBI excesses, the long lines at gas stations that resulted from the OPEC embargo. While still ostensibly the leader of the “free world,” the nation suddenly seemed powerless, corrupt, inept, and despised. Many of the bad things people said about us had turned out to be true. A seized embassy and scores of American officials held hostage was just further confirmation of a depressing new reality. The images on television reinforced a decade of American disappointment.

For the Carter administration, this confluence of story and medium was pure disaster. Already Jimmy Carter had demonstrated a gift for making Americans feel bad. His effort to introduce morality and concern for human rights in foreign policy was seen by more bellicose citizens as a strategy of compromise and retreat. In the most ill-considered idea in the history of public relations, Carter had devised the “misery index” to gauge the national mood, as inflation and rising oil prices battered household income. His decision to give back the Panama Canal, while entirely defensible, was seen as yet another retreat, as was his prudent call for Americans to conserve fuel, which he called “a real challenge to our country, a test.” He was right, even prescient, but it was stern medicine, delivered by a homely, preternaturally sad-looking man in a somber, earnest monotone. In his bad-news mode, the very folds of the president’s face and the hang of his heavy lips seemed a mask of disappointment. The leader of the free world looked whipped. And now this. The hostage crisis seemed designed to complete the unfair image of Carter as a weak, apologetic leader. A rabble of college students seizes an American embassy, holds his countrymen hostage, sends daily taunts, insults, and accusations across the ocean, and the president of the United States does…nothing. At least it seemed that way. On just a moment’s reflection, though, it was easy to see that anyone in his position would have been hamstrung, but no one else was in Carter’s position, and the longer it lasted the more he seemed somehow to deserve it.

Everyone wanted Carter to do something, but there were few good ideas about what it should be. Public sentiment ran in favor of striking back at Iran, but ran just as strongly in favor of taking no action that might harm the hostages.

In a speech before Congress, Representative George Hansen, a Republican from Idaho, called for Carter to be impeached “if he doesn’t do something,” and referred contemptuously to the administration’s “weak-kneed nonpolicy.” He offered no suggestions.

Senator Frank Church, a Democrat from the same state, whose committee hearings had famously exposed CIA excesses just a few years before and prompted severe restrictions on intelligence-gathering methods, now complained about the dearth of intelligence. “It’s extremely frustrating and difficult to find the [Iranian] government or determine who speaks with authority.”

“Carter should get off his duff,” said one man stopped on the street in Dallas for a TV interview, expressing a widespread feeling.

“What do you think he can do?” the reporter asked.

“I don’t know,” said the man.

A woman stopped on the same sidewalk said, “Force should be used.”

“But what if responding militarily would mean that the hostages would be harmed?” she was asked.

“No, then we shouldn’t use force,” she said. “I don’t want them to be harmed.”

Americans had long enjoyed the luxury of neither knowing nor caring about the grievances of small foreign nations. Suddenly, the Third World had found a way to compel their attention. Where was Iran? Who were these “militant” students? What was an ayatollah? Why did they hate us so much?

ABC aired a long interview with Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, chain-smoking and looking gloriously bored, whose insights were close to the mark.

“I believe the crowd is in control of Khomeini,” she said. “When I saw that Ahmad was going to the embassy, I was very surprised…. He is a little more open than his father. I was surprised.” Americans who called for a punitive military strike against Iran were, she said, “as irresponsible as the Iranian crowd.”

“What should the United States do?” she was asked.

“Don’t send the marines,” she said.

2. Forgive me, Oh Imam

On a chilly Thanksgiving morning in Tehran, Marine Sergeant William Quarles was taken to breakfast, as usual, and when he was finished the guards didn’t rebind his hands. That was a first.

“Hey, aren’t you going to cuff me?” asked the big marine, holding up his hands.

His guard made a gesture as if to say, Don’t worry about it.

From the first day Quarles, an African-American, had been treated slightly differently by his captors. He had been kept bound and confined to a mattress in one of the cottages, like everyone else, but his captors always made a point of acknowledging his blackness and conveying a sense of solidarity with his presumed second-class status. If he wanted more food they would always bring him extra portions. If he asked for a cigarette, someone would run out and bring him a full pack. Once, when a glass of water was placed on the table between him and one of the white hostages and the white hostage took it and drank from it, the guards confiscated the glass and lectured the offending white hostage about American oppression of black people. Quarles was startled, because he had assumed, as undoubtedly the white hostage had, that another glass was on its way. Instead, Quarles was presented with a full glass of ice water and the white hostage was denied anything more to drink.

From the beginning, a few of the student leaders visited him to explain at great length the reasons for their actions. They talked to him about their kinship with what they wrongly supposed to be millions of black American Muslims, and the special place for black people in Islam. They showed him albums of charred and tortured bodies and explained the horrors of life under the shah. One of the older ones, a round, bearded man, told Quarles of the torture and execution of his father and other family members under the shah and broke down crying.

Again and again they stressed that they identified with him as a member of the “oppressed” races of the world. They brought him documents they had seized during the takeover and explained that the memoranda, which Quarles didn’t read and couldn’t follow, proved that America had been interfering with Iranian society and was working to undermine their revolution. Quarles had little interest in the fine points of Islam, history, or international politics. He wanted to avoid being shot and, if at all possible, to go home. He knew that his captors were trying to indoctrinate him and, for the most part, he let what they told him travel in one ear and out the other. But some of the more moving things, some of the photos and heartfelt testimony of a few guards, touched him. He was inclined to believe that his country was responsible for much of the suffering in Iran, and found it easy to believe that the United States was working to undermine their revolution in hopes of maintaining control over the country’s oil. But when the captors circulated a petition asking for the shah’s return, the young marine had refused to sign it.

After breakfast on Thanksgiving morning the uncuffed Quarles was led into a room in the motor pool building. In an adjacent room he saw fellow marine Sergeant Ladel Maples, who was also untied. Quarles considered trying to bolt. The men guarding him were much smaller than him. But he thought better of it. Even if he got free of the compound, where would he go? His skin color meant there was no chance he could blend into a Tehran crowd.

Then, one after another, a procession of his captors came in the room to lecture him again in English about the rightness of their action, the sins of America—beginning with slavery and genocide against the American Indian—and the glory of Islam and Khomeini. Quarles began to suspect that he was going home. The lectures struck him as preparation; they were prepping him for the press attention he would get on his release. Later that evening he and Maples, also an African-American, were put together in the same room.

“Goddamn, man, you think we’re getting out of here?” Quarles asked.

“I don’t know,” said Maples. “We just might get out of here. I don’t know what the hell is going on.”

“You think anybody else is getting out?”

“I hope so.”

The lectures continued. They were served hamburgers, potato chips, and pickles for supper. Clearly, their captors were trying to make a good impression. When they were led outside, Quarles felt blinded by the television lights. He had trouble walking. He had been sitting for so many days that it was hard for him to keep his balance. He and Maples and an embassy secretary, Kathy Gross, were led into a large room next to the commissary before hundreds of reporters, American and Iranian. Quarles felt frightened. He needed help putting on a slight green jacket, and he was shaking; he didn’t know if it was from the cold outside or from fear.

“Nobody is going to hurt you,” one of the guards told him. “These are just some people who want to see you.”

Quarles realized that he was part of a publicity stunt. He didn’t know what was going on, but he knew that the lectures he had been getting were to prepare him for this attention. He sat on a stage with the two others before a giant poster of Khomeini and some writing that he didn’t understand. The reporters had all been assigned numbers, and one of the Iranian students called off the numbers and allowed some of them to ask questions. In response to one, Quarles said:

“In the past, I had heard something about U.S. imperialism, but as an American marine I had always dismissed them out of hand. But after having heard the other side of the story I now believe these people might have some legitimate complaints…. I learned a lot from what I read and saw, and was very saddened by some of the things going on under the shah. I think the American people have to turn around and look at—and there are always two sides—and I saw the other side of the story. The other side of American imperialism.”

What he really wanted to say was, Hey, get me the hell out of here, I’m tired of this shit. But he felt obliged to get across the points that had been hammered into him for weeks. He knew if he played along he might get to go home.

Quarles told the reporters that he had been kept in the living room of one of the staff cottages for most of the time. As for the embassy being a “den of spies,” he said, “The Iranian people felt that it was not an embassy.” He said that he had no knowledge of any American spying, then added, obligingly, “Under their ideology, I’m sure they’re right.”

“Why didn’t you sign the petition?” a reporter asked.

“I didn’t want to put my signature on something that might be derogatory to my government,” he said.

The event seemed to last forever. Quarles felt like he was in a state of shock. He couldn’t wait to be taken out of the room. When he was, he was led into a small room to face an Iranian camera and a beautiful Iranian TV reporter.

“Do you have any regrets?” she asked.

Quarles said something about being glad to be going home, although he wasn’t sure yet that was happening.

As he was being led out of the room, still frightened and bewildered, one of the students whom he had come to know, a small man who had always treated him gently and as a friend, told him, “You know, you are going to be a very big man when you go back to America.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, you will be. Very, very famous.”

He and Maples and Gross were taken out to a Range Rover and driven to the airport. Quarles’s small Iranian friend hugged him.

“Come back to see me,” he said.

Behind Quarles in the van was a guard with an Uzi. Quarles didn’t trust the gun; he knew it had a hair trigger, and as their car darted erratically through traffic he and Maples worried that it would go off. He felt more frightened than at any point that day. His stomach felt fluttery and he was glad when they arrived at the airport that he was given a chance to sit alone for a few moments and collect himself.

As they were being led to the plane, an Iranian baggage handler went berserk. The man had to be restrained from coming after Quarles and the others.

“What’s the matter with him?” Quarles asked.

“The shah killed his family,” a guard said. “He’s very upset with Americans.”

It seemed to Quarles that every Iranian he met had lost someone to the shah. The image of the berserk baggage handler stayed with him a long time.

Quarles, Maples, and Gross were the first of thirteen black and female hostages Khomeini had ordered released as a gesture to oppressed African-Americans and as a demonstration of the “special status” accorded women under Islamic rule. The students had high hopes for this gesture. They had long believed that black Americans would identify with their struggle and take to the streets all over the United States in support; they felt sure this release would help spur such demonstrations. Ironically, among the blacks released was Air Force Captain Neil Robinson, one of the most important intelligence officers at the embassy. There was racism in the Iranian assumption that blacks and women would have held only menial jobs. Charles Jones, the only African-American hostage who was not released, had forfeited his status as an unimportant black man by having been caught inside the communications vault on the day of the takeover. There were only two women left behind: Ann Swift, who had announced her own importance, and Kathryn Koob, whose directorship of the Iran-America Society had marked her for certain as a spy.

Joan Walsh, the political section secretary, was among the ten released the next day. She was allowed to shower for the first time in two weeks and was given a clean pullover shirt and slacks. She and the others were seated in a row beneath a large, hand-lettered sign condemning the United States for sheltering the shah. It read, “America is supporting this nasty criminal under the pretext of sickness.” The hostages sat before a long, low row of tables set with microphones. Orchestrating was the wiry, bushy-haired Hussein Sheikh-ol-eslam, who instructed the gathered members of the press that while they were not allowed to ask any questions of an individual hostage; they could ask general questions. The microphone would be passed down the line, he said, and each question would be answered by the hostages in turn.

“And I will tell you the name of the hostage as the microphone gets passed along,” he said.

“Can they also tell us their name and hometown?” one of the reporters shouted. Walsh flushed with pleasure to hear an American voice. She felt more comfortable.

Walsh was led back with the other women to one of the cottages after the press conference, and the Iranian women there were suddenly bubbling with excitement and friendly, as though they were supervising a sleepover. Walsh did her best to stare right through them. She wasn’t inclined to forgive and forget.

They were put in vans and driven through the hostile mob at the gates. Cameras recorded them smiling and waving as they drove away from the embassy and to freedom.

The release of the thirteen black and female hostages was accompanied by a kind of media blitz within Iran. The same day that Quarles, Maples, and Gross were flown out, the imam himself granted interviews to all three major American TV networks. Robert MacNeil, of the PBS news program The MacNeil/Lehrer Report, flew to Tehran but returned home when he was informed that the three commercial networks would get to interview Khomeini first.

Mike Wallace of the CBS show 60 Minutes got to go first and spent an hour questioning Iran’s supreme leader. Sixty-five million American viewers saw the grim, white-bearded ayatollah easily parry the reporter’s extremely respectful questions—“He [Anwar Sadat] called you, forgive me, imam—his words, not mine—a ‘lunatic.’” The imam didn’t flinch. The hostages would be released when the shah was returned. The hostages were spies. They had been caught red-handed.

“As long as Mr. Carter does not respect international laws, these spies cannot be returned,” he said. Khomeini said that releasing the hostages after the shah’s return would be a kind gesture on his part, not a quid pro quo. “In reality, these spies should be tried.”

“Is Iran at war with the United States?” Wallace asked.

“What do you mean by war?” Khomeini answered. “If you mean our armies going against the United States armies, no. There is no such war. If you mean, it is a battle of nerves, it is Carter’s doing. We are against war. We are Muslims. We desire peace for all.”

Taking a stab at unofficial diplomacy, Wallace tried to extend the interview with a question that had not been submitted in advance.

“As one human being to another,” he asked. “Is there no room for compromise?”

The interpreter balked, but the correspondent prevailed on him to put the question to the imam. Khomeini refused to answer it.

The interview was watched at the White House with great interest. No matter how fruitless, the TV network had gotten a lot further in establishing a dialogue with Iran than had the administration. Jody Powell found Wallace’s deference to the ayatollah appalling. The press had become openly contemptuous in Washington; reporters were beating up the Carter administration daily and pitilessly for its handling of the crisis, yet the chief kidnapper was questioned with what sounded like obeisance: “Forgive me, Oh Imam, his words not mine” became a frustrated laugh line in the White House.

The release of the thirteen was accompanied by a chilling threat. Khomeini announced that the remaining Americans were going to be placed on trial “soon” as spies. It was precisely the scenario Carter most feared. He publicly ordered the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk to sail from waters near the Philippines to the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Iran. At a press conference in the East Room of the White House, an especially dour president said Iran had created an “unprecedented” situation. “For a government to applaud mob violence and terrorism,…to participate in the taking of hostages, ridicules the common ethical and religious heritage of humanity,” he said, and added that the United States would employ “every means available” to deal with it.

ABC reporter Sam Donaldson asked the president whether the United States would be willing to let such an outrage continue “indefinitely.”

“It would not be advisable for me to set a deadline,” said Carter, who added, “any excessive threat…might cause the deaths of the hostages, which we are determined to avoid.”

3. Only Whores Go Without Underwear

As winter settled over Tehran, a season of short days, rain, and occasional snow, the trappings of imprisonment began to feel more permanent. The students who had planned the takeover of the embassy receded from daily view, replaced by a rougher breed of guards, many from the ranks of Revolutionary Guards, who hadn’t been students since attending the shah’s secondary schools. Most of the male hostages were moved to a large rectangular room in the basement of the warehouse. It had once been used to house electronic equipment that analyzed data from the Tacksman sites but had been emptied months before. There was a row of pillars in the middle of the space, and because it was windowless and damp, perfect conditions for growing fungi, it was christened the Mushroom Inn. Its white acoustical ceiling tile was high, almost fifteen feet up, and the space was starkly lit day and night by recessed fluorescent bulbs. Diesel engines were used to generate power for electricity and the sickly sweet fumes hung perpetually in the air. Hostages were assigned places on the floor, and each had a thin foam mattress. In time the guards used empty bookshelves to divide the space into separate cubicles so that, unless he stood, a prisoner could see only the man directly opposite him.

There was some comfort in being surrounded by the others. Golacinski had Vice Consul Don Cooke to one side and marine Greg Persinger to the other. Directly across from him was the assistant defense attaché, Lieutenant Colonel Dave Roeder. In a side room the guards rolled in a TV set and played some tapes of American shows, escorting small groups of hostages in on an irregular schedule. Golacinski’s group watched an episode of The Carol Burnett Show, and then an old baseball game. When the “Star-Spangled Banner” was played before the game he felt a powerful pride welling up and noticed that the others in the room were smiling and winking at each other. Because Golacinski was familiar to so many of his captors due to his role on the first day, he was one of the few to whom they would speak. One, a medical student, told him that President Carter was sending Ramsey Clark, the former attorney general, as an emissary to Tehran to negotiate for their release. Golacinski asked if he could tell the others. He was taken to a corner of the room and told that he could say that Clark was coming, but nothing else.

Golacinski stood and got everyone’s attention. He announced in a loud voice that Clark was coming to start discussions, which created a stir. “Are there any questions?” he said, and when he was promptly pulled from the chair the big room echoed with laughter.

Light moments like this were rare. All of the Americans had been threatened repeatedly with execution, and they took it seriously. Golacinski and Roeder had been handcuffed together one night and, with blankets thrown over their heads, taken upstairs and outside, where they were told to stand against the wall.

“Nothing will happen to you,” the guard told him reassuringly, and then added, less so, “It will be quick.”

The guard didn’t speak English well, so he probably meant that they would not be left standing there long, but the expression had chilling implications. Golacinski doubted that they would be shot, and the longer he stood there he doubted it more. It turned out that they were just being moved to a new spot.

Richard Queen, the gangly vice consul, felt himself slipping into depression. He knew the symptoms. Long hours of sleep, a general listlessness, a chronic sense of despair and hopelessness. Tehran was his first assignment as a foreign service officer. He had grown up in suburban New York and distinguished himself as a middle-distance runner on his high school track team, fast enough to be among the better runners in the state, but not fast enough to compete beyond that level. Running suited Queen because it was a solitary pursuit, and he was in all things a solitary, precise man with extraordinary patience for detail work. He loved, for instance, a Civil War board game that came with a set of instructions that totaled more than three hundred pages, and which took months to play. His interest in war and history prompted him to apply to West Point, where he had been accepted, only to be turned away because of poor eyesight, a disappointment that had led to what he considered the happiest four years of his life at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, where he had majored in history. He had gone on to earn a master’s degree at the University of Michigan and had been proceeding halfheartedly toward a Ph.D. when he had taken the foreign service exam and done surprisingly well. Making history, traveling to exotic places on a government payroll, sounded a lot more interesting and secure than teaching it at a community college somewhere, so when the job was offered Queen grabbed it. He liked Tehran, despite the hardships. The work itself didn’t appeal to him, but he enjoyed the informal, fraternal atmosphere, which he imagined was like soldiering together in a besieged fort. He also liked going to work in blue jeans.

Even before he was taken hostage, Queen had come to dislike Iranians. He fought against it, because he knew such a feeling was unfair, but in his visa work he had spent long parts of every workday interviewing applicants, who one after another lied to him. It was a desperate time for many Iranians trying to escape the ongoing political tumult and violence. His job was to avoid giving visas to those who were looking only for an excuse to get to the United States, who had no intention of coming back. So-called students would bring school records with them that were obviously forged—Queen would hold the paper up to the light and see through the smudges and erasures. He had begun to believe that cheating the American consulate was a national pastime. It seemed every Iranian he met, on or off the job, wanted him to help them get a visa, if not for themselves then for a family member or friend.

Once, returning from a small party in north Tehran, he and fellow vice consul Mark Lijek had been stopped at a roadblock manned by a motley crew of Revolutionary Guards. The diplomatic license plates on their car prompted questions, and their American citizenship earned them a trip to the guards’ local headquarters. Queen had been drinking enough that it showed, and the session there began with a pious official berating them for violating the “Islamic purity” of the nation. One of the guards in the room had sat spinning an automatic pistol around his finger. They were lectured about America’s sins and asked what their jobs were at the embassy. When Lijek said that they worked at the consulate, the tone of the session abruptly and dramatically changed.

“Can you help us get a visa?” the official asked, and out came a familiar tale of woe.

They heard the same sob stories often, as if there were stories circulating on the black market that were guaranteed to unlock the stone heart of American officials. He got so tired of hearing them that he found himself rewarding the occasional applicant who appeared honest. One young woman told him that she needed a visa because she wanted to attend high school in the United States.

“We don’t give visas for high school,” he told her.

“Oh.”

She appeared ready to leave it at that, which was so refreshing that Queen had pressed on.

“Why do you want to go to high school in America?”

“I’d like to go because my parents are arranging a marriage for me and I don’t want to get married.”

Queen was startled by her candor. This sounded like an honest reason. It wasn’t up to the usual standards for granting a visa but Queen was impressed.

“What happens if you don’t get the visa?”

“Then, I don’t get the visa,” the woman said simply, shrugging. Here was someone looking for a way out of a difficult spot.

“Okay,” he had told her. “You’re honest. You get the visa.”

As a captive now, he passed most of his time in slumber so heavy he felt drugged. Even when he was awake he spaced out. He worked at remembering and imagining the pretty girls he had known in college, some of whom he had admired urgently from a distance but never approached, and he kicked himself for his lack of gumption. This stint in Tehran had enriched his appreciation for girls, particularly American girls, with their laughter and their gorgeous long legs in tight Levi’s and clean sneakers and beautiful white teeth. Why hadn’t he approached one of them when he had the chance? They surely wouldn’t find him appealing now. He was unshaven, his hair hung down over his ears, and he reeked. He had not been allowed to shower or change his clothes in weeks. His underclothes were filthy. When he was finally allowed to take a shower, he washed out his clothing and was given a clean pair of underpants, only they were in a boy’s size. His complaints were shrugged off. Feeling humiliated, he stretched the underpants and squeezed himself uncomfortably into them. Better discomfort than disease. He became obsessive about cleanliness, policing the space around his mattress for every mote of dust or crumb of food. It gave him something to do that had a marginal claim of importance.

The two remaining female hostages, Kathryn Koob and Ann Swift, were kept apart from the men and watched over for the most part by female guards.

Like Queen, Koob’s response to solitude and boredom was to turn inward, but for her the experience was spiritual, and exhilarating. On the second night of her captivity she experienced something that, the more she thought about it (and she had plenty of time to think), seemed to be a miracle. She had been sleeping on a bed in one of the staff cottages under a cape her grandmother had made for her years before when she was awakened by someone sitting down next to her on the bed. There was no sound, and no one touched her, which was the way her older sisters would sometimes gently awaken her at home when she was a child. One or the other would sit on the bed beside her and, instead of poking or shaking her or even speaking to her, would wait patiently for her to stir. As Koob surfaced from sleep, she realized that this “sister” was surely one of her Iranian guards. She opened her eyes—What does she want now?—and there was no one there.

In that moment she no longer felt alone. She believed she had been visited by an angel, her guardian angel, and was reminded of the constant presence of God, and after that she increasingly found solace in prayer. She had been raised on a farm with her five sisters in the Lutheran tradition her German great-grandparents had brought with them to Iowa. As a girl she had worked at a local Lutheran church to earn a scholarship to little Wartburg College, the Lutheran school. Her original ambition had been to become a high school drama teacher, and she taught speech and drama until she earned a master’s degree from the University of Denver in 1968, where she first learned about the foreign service. It had appealed to a part of her that had no obvious antecedent; the wanderlust seemed hers alone. Years of travel had pulled her away from her family, her religion, her roots. Now, ironically, alone in captivity, alone with her thoughts day and night, she felt herself more than ever before surrounded with love and family. Emotionally, she had rediscovered home.

It gave her a sense of calm and of purpose. She set about disarming her guards’ hostility with submission and kindness, as a novitiate in a nunnery might submit joyfully to religious discipline. When they insisted on binding her hands with a strip of cloth during the night, removing it in the morning, she took the cloth strip and neatly folded it like a bandage and tied it with a few unraveled threads. When the guard came looking for the cloth strip to tie her the following evening, she handed him the tidy bundle and he held it in his palm with wonder. He laughed and took it off to show the others, and didn’t come back. In the first few weeks she got to know the young women who guarded her in shifts. They loved to talk and to practice their English. They were all romantic and excited and completely transported by their cause, by the rightness and importance of it. One of the girls—they were all in their late teens—was happily expecting to be killed.

“Obviously, the United States will send its military people in and we shall all die, and I shall be a martyr,” she said.

“No, no,” Koob protested. She said the United States would not want any of them to die, hostages or students.

The Iranian girls were surprised that Koob had never married. They asked her question after question about things that she regarded as strictly personal, and Koob did her best to give them answers. She was moved in the second week to the living room of the ambassador’s residence, the same room where they had gathered for a Halloween party weeks ago. Jack-o’-lanterns leered down at her from the walls. She felt dumpy and ragged. She had been living in the same green wool dress for weeks. It was limp and shapeless. Her stockings had runs in them and, with a needle and various colors of thread given her by the guards, she stitched them back together. She had not been allowed to bathe, and when her captors agreed to take her underwear and launder it, they didn’t bring it back. She waited for a day or two and then complained.

“They are being washed,” said the imperious young woman who had taken charge of guarding them. Koob called her “Queenie.”

“Can you find me some in the commissary?”

“Miad,” said Queenie, a word meaning “it is coming,” used much like the Spanish word “mañana.”

“You said that two days ago. In my country, only whores go without underwear. I would like some panties and a bra. I am as embarrassed to go around without underclothing as you are to go out in public without your chador.”

She got clean underwear that day.

Eventually, Koob and Swift roomed together in the residence’s library, a small room painted yellow with pale blue drapes. It had been vandalized by the invaders, furniture had been heaped in the corners, much of it broken, and the walls were spray-painted with the usual revolutionary slogans. The room filled up at night with the female guards. They stretched out, twenty or thirty of them, and slept between their shifts. If a male guard came to the door before all the women had had a chance to throw chadors over their blue jeans and shirts the girls would scream in mock horror. They were clearly having fun.

One day, when Swift was taken off to the bathroom, Queenie questioned Koob about their professional relationship.

“What do you report to Miss Swift?” she asked.

“I don’t report to Miss Swift. I report to Mr. Graves, my supervisor,” she said.

“Miss Swift said you report to her. What kind of things do you tell her about?”

“I don’t report to her.”

“She says you do. Are you calling her a liar?”

Koob said she didn’t understand why Swift would have said such a thing, if in fact she had. Swift had held a higher-ranking position at the embassy, so in that sense she “reported” to her, but not literally. Their exchange ended when Swift returned.

On Thanksgiving night Swift was taken away.

4. World-Devouring Ghouls

Perhaps because he seemed so listless and beaten, Richard Queen was the first hostage asked to sign the petition the students had drafted demanding the return of the shah. The young vice consul actually thought Iran had a good case for demanding the former monarch’s return, but at first he refused to sign.

“I thought your country was a free country,” the student with the petition asked. “If you agree, why don’t you sign it?”

“I don’t want to,” said Queen.

When he was shown the same document the next day with thirty hostage signatures at the bottom, he relented.

“It doesn’t make any difference anyway,” he said.

He signed his name so illegibly that they demanded he print it alongside the signature, and he managed to do that so imprecisely that later reprints of the document would identify him as “Richard Owen.”

Thirty-three hostages signed the petition, more than half of those in captivity. Most saw it as meaningless, clearly a document signed under duress, and that under the circumstances no one would take it seriously at home. But the petition caused a sensation in the United States. Written in awkward English ostensibly in the voice of the hostages, it called for the shah to be returned immediately.

“In this way, we will be free,” it said.

It had been carried out of Iran by the Swiss ambassador. The White House dismissed it summarily. State Department spokesman Hodding Carter said that it could hardly be accepted as a freely expressed appeal under the circumstances.

“If such a document does exist and if it’s authentic, it’s understood that statements made under duress have absolutely no validity and their only impact is to reflect adversely on the captors,” said Jody Powell.

“Everyone ought to understand that such statements or petitions will have absolutely no bearing upon the actions of the United States. They simply do not exist.”

Public opinion in America was at a boil. Television coverage was unrelenting. The three networks focused on the crisis as though nothing else of importance was happening in the world. It wasn’t simply several score American citizens held hostage, it was “America” held hostage, as if every part of the government had been paralyzed. And journalists continued to receive more access to Iranian leaders and the captors than anyone in officialdom.

A reporter from the University of Dayton’s radio station, WHIO, scored a minor coup by phoning the occupied embassy and, through an Iranian student translator, spoke for nearly an hour with the Iranian occupier who picked up the phone. The voice on the phone in Tehran identified himself only as “Mr. X.”

“Will you release the hostages once you have made your point?” the reporter asked.

“We cannot at this time, but we will have a statement later,” stated Mr. X, who said the students would not negotiate with the United States government.

The reporter suggested that they release one hostage as a show of good faith.

“We’ll think it over,” said Mr. X.

Most Americans wanted to strike back, and there was no shortage of ideas, everything from severe economic sanctions to nuclear weapons. Senator Barry Goldwater, the former Republican presidential nominee well known for his hard-nosed approach to foreign crises, proposed that the U.S. Air Force destroy Iran’s oil industry, “and let them sit there and starve to death.” A message hung on the front of the Chronicle building in San Francisco read, “Expel all Iranian students.” Those Iranians who dared rally in the United States in support of the embassy takeover were challenged by large, unruly crowds. After a number of violent incidents around the country, shows of revolutionary solidarity by Iranian students in America came to a halt. One group in Washington obtained a permit for a march, but when the day came for the march no one showed up. An Iran Air flight to New York had to be diverted to Montreal when union workers at JFK International refused to service the plane. Long-shoremen were refusing to load or unload any ships flying the Iranian flag.

Protesters burned the Iranian flag before that country’s consulate in Houston. In Riverside, California, an Iranian student was found shot to death, “execution style,” according to the police. At St. Louis University, a man with a shotgun was disarmed after he walked into an administration building demanding to know the names of Iranian students attending the school.

A small portion of the anger was directed at the White House. Some blamed Carter for creating the circumstances that led to the takeover, others for failing to take immediate military action. Conservatives saw America’s restraint as a sign of weakness—“Keep the Shah and send them Carter” read a placard carried by a protester in Texas.

National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski advocated a series of steps that would gradually tighten a noose around Iran, only to encounter resistance from within the administration at every turn. He proposed an immediate naval blockade on Iran, shutting down all of its imports and exports, a move that would have had the added benefit of pressuring European allies who relied on Iranian oil. It was opposed by the State Department, which felt it would do more to harm American alliances than to end the crisis. The president did act. Over the concerns of the Justice Department, Carter ordered most Iranian diplomats to leave, began deportation proceedings against all Iranians in the United States illegally, and banned oil purchases from Iran. He also froze the billions in Iranian assets in American banks.

Rescuing the hostages, furnishing the episode with a Hollywood ending, appeared to be nothing more than a fantasy. The isolation of Tehran, the location of the embassy compound in the heart of a city on fire with anti-Americanism, the easy opportunity for retaliation against the hundreds of American citizens living there—reporters, expatriates, spouses of Iranians, businessmen—all made it a very unattractive option. At the highest levels of government, Secretary of State Vance and his deputy Warren Christopher were dead set against any military effort to rescue their colleagues, and at that point in mid-November even the men secretly planning hard to create that option regarded it as foolhardy. Colonel Beckwith himself set the probability of success at “zero.”

The cover story of Time magazine on November 19 weighed the possibility of a rescue mission by interviewing “two dozen experts in and out of government,” and the consensus was that such an effort would be self-defeating and probably suicidal. Said Elmo Zumwalt Jr., the former chief of naval operations, “I think it’s pretty much out of the question…. Surprise is so difficult to achieve because U.S. planes would be detected as they neared Iran.” Zumwalt said approvingly that the Carter administration “has never seriously considered the military option.”

Inside the White House, there were two schools of thought about how to deal with the crisis. They were represented by Vance and Brzezinski, who were increasingly at odds. Vance was a patrician lawyer and a gentleman who placed a great deal more faith than the national security adviser in the rationality and decency of his fellow man. His formative experience in public life had been the Vietnam War, which he had originally endorsed as President John F. Kennedy’s secretary of the army, but which he turned against late in his tenure as President Lyndon B. Johnson’s deputy defense secretary. He had been a member of the American delegation to the Paris peace talks in 1968. Experience had made him a strong believer in negotiation, and that, along with his direct responsibility for the State Department employees held in Tehran, led him to place paramount importance on their safe return. Brzezinski thought more in terms of vital national interests and the importance of America’s world stature. If the United States and its diplomats could be attacked and hog-tied with impunity by a rabble of Iranian amateurs, then could American officials be considered safe anywhere in the world? For his part, the secretary of state cited the restraint with which President Harry Truman had handled a hostage-taking incident in 1949, when Chinese officials arrested Angus Ward, the U.S. consul general; Ward was eventually released and deported. Vance was meeting regularly with the families of the hostages and had taken Carter to one of the sessions five days after the takeover.

The first big session was held at the State Department in late November. The families, who traveled at government expense, were escorted into the building through the grand marble lobby beneath its colorful forest of flags. For those with little experience in official Washington—spouses of the marines and lower-level embassy staff personnel—it was exciting and intimidating, and they were grateful that the country’s most important officials were taking the time to brief and reassure them. But to the more experienced family members of foreign service officers, the hidden agenda of the meetings was clear. Barbara Rosen, a tough-minded Italian Catholic woman who taught school in the Bronx, had known from the first solicitous calls from Washington after the takeover that the unspoken message was not to break ranks and criticize the president or the administration.

That was not the sentiment for most in the room. All of the family members were under siege by local and national press; whatever they said was printed and broadcast across the country. Rita Ode and her captive husband Bob were retirees; he had taken the Tehran assignment as a temporary fill-in position, with the promise that he would be home for Christmas. They were building a retirement home in Arizona. When would he be home now? Dorothea Morefield, whose husband Richard was the embassy consul, believed strongly that the embassy should have been evacuated and closed before allowing the shah to enter the United States. Now she was at home in San Diego with four children, wondering if they would ever see their father again. Barbara Rosen considered Carter’s response to the takeover to be flabby and indecisive; she felt strongly that the United States should have immediately cut off all ties with Iran, and refused to deal with them until her husband Barry and the others had been returned. But these were not the sentiments the department wanted aired. Except for the parents of the young marines, the wives and families of the military and CIA hostages seemed to be more at peace with the predicament; an element of risk was assumed in their work. Many of them were ready to accept the need for the United States to act militarily, and some were disappointed that Carter had not done so already. But many of the spouses and families of the foreign service officers, and those of the two stray civilians trapped at the embassy, California businessman Jerry Plotkin and school headmaster Bill Keough, were indignant. They and their husbands had not signed on for something like this. Why had Carter not closed the embassy and evacuated American personnel before permitting the shah to come to the United States? This response should have been foreseen.

Penne Laingen, the chargé’s wife, was asked to write a letter welcoming everyone. It had been copied and placed on all the chairs in the auditorium. Mindful of the anger felt by many, she urged that such feelings be set aside. Dwelling on the administration’s mistakes was unhelpful, she explained. What was needed was to rally behind the president. As she took her seat, she noticed that the young women next to her, daughters of Bill Keough, had drawn dark lines through much of what she had written. One of them stood, held up the letter, and made a show of tearing it into small pieces. Laingen would later hear herself denounced by some family members as “a State Department stooge.”

Despite an official desire to keep the session private, some of the family members carried tape recorders and would deliver recordings of the session to reporters waiting outside. Journalist Robert Shaplen of The New Yorker was in the audience taking notes and would file a detailed report of it in the magazine.

Vance opened the session, promising the families that the government was doing everything in its power to bring their loved ones home safely. He urged them all to keep writing letters to the captives, although it was doubtful any would be delivered. More reassurance came from Under Secretary of State David Dunlop Newsom, who pledged to hold meetings of the families whenever they felt the need.

“I want to know if they’re being brainwashed. Are their feelings being deformed?” asked one wife.

More challenging questions followed. Even Vance’s request for them to write letters was challenged.

“I don’t want them to get hold of my handwriting,” said one woman. Captain Neil Robinson, one of the hostages just released, was present at the meeting, and he said he had been reluctant to write his wife from Tehran because he didn’t want the Iranians to know where she lived.

A heated discussion sprang up over the point Penne Laingen had wanted to avoid, namely, Why had the shah been allowed into the country when it was known that doing so would place the embassy at risk?

Newsom talked about the assurances they had received from the provisional government, and about America’s long “friendship” with the shah. “It was a difficult decision to make,” he said. Those in the crowd were not in a forgiving mood. Many had received reassurances about the assignment that had proved hollow, and their loved ones were paying the price. Why hadn’t they at least warned the embassy staffers beforehand, given them a chance to come home before the storm hit?

Penne Laingen spoke up.

“It was poor judgment, a monumental mistake, but we have done nothing wrong morally or legally,” she said.

“I felt betrayed by the United States government,” said Captain Robinson. “What happened should have been anticipated. Attacking Carter, though, will just make it more difficult now.”

Penne Laingen told the crowd that she had been fortunate enough to speak regularly with her husband on the phone at the Foreign Ministry in Tehran and that he had urged everyone to be patient and to support the efforts of the State Department. A recent cable from the chargé was read aloud.

Many of the families weren’t buying it. Some were panicky.

“People are getting angrier,” said one.

“We’re heading for another Vietnam War,” said another, fearful of the use of military force.

One of the women asked if paying a ransom had been considered. Newsom said that was not under consideration. “The last thing to do is pass money around,” he said.

Shaplen wrote: “The meeting broke up shortly after a discussion of the press, which some of the wives condemned for overpublicizing the militant captors and further arousing passions in America. ‘We’re very conscious of the level of hysteria,’ Newsom said, in conclusion. ‘For that reason, we’re trying to step up visits to the hostages, to make them feel more secure and quiet things down here.’”

In the earlier session with just a few of the families that Carter had attended, the president had pledged not to “take any military action that would cause bloodshed or arouse the unstable captors of our hostages to attack them or punish them.” Those present had been heartened by the words “our hostages.”

At that meeting, Rosen had taken advantage of a brief moment with the president to hand him snapshots of her two daughters, and told him, “If you consider using guns, I hope you will think of the chance Barry will have.” Carter put the photos in his pocket.

For his part, Brzezinski avoided those meetings. He did not want the emotions to interfere with his judgment, or, perhaps more to the point, to interfere with his ability to advocate placing the national interest above the lives of the hostages. Vance urged the president to get the shah out of the country, something the dethroned monarch had graciously volunteered to do already. Brzezinski counseled that such a move amounted to pure capitulation.

At a foreign policy breakfast with the president on November 9, the national security adviser had warned against allowing the crisis to “settle into a state of normalcy.”

“If you do, it could paralyze your presidency,” he had said. “I hope we never have to choose between the hostages and our nation’s honor in the world but, Mr. President, you must be prepared for that. If they’re still in captivity at Thanksgiving, what will that say about your presidency and America’s image in the world?”

Vance continued to urge patience. He mentioned President Johnson’s calm handling of the Pueblo incident.

“But that went on for a year!” said Brzezinski.

“And Johnson wasn’t in the middle of a reelection campaign,” said Jordan.

Brzezinski’s position gained strength when the U.S. embassy in Islamabad was overrun by a mob and burned on November 21, killing two Americans and two Pakistani employees. A few weeks later, a mob in Tripoli attacked the U.S. embassy there and burned part of it, along with the cars parked outside. The fourteen Americans at that mission escaped unharmed. Vance told TV reporters that he did not see a pattern in these events, but he was probably the only one who didn’t.

Carter was determined not to let his hopes for reelection dictate his handling of the matter, and no matter how it played politically he trod a careful line between his two advisers. The fact that it was virtually impossible to rescue the hostages made the decision easier. He had little choice but to pursue a negotiated solution, and to find ways to put more pressure on Iran, but every move seemed simply to worsen matters. There was apparently no way to even initiate dialogue. The crisis was at a complete impasse.

Carter’s anger was kept under tight rein in public, but it showed in private. He ordered the military to draw up detailed plans for air strikes against Iran if and when the hostages were released.

“I want to punish them,” he said. “Really hit them. They must know that they can’t fool around with us.”

Such strikes in advance of getting the hostages home safely might mollify public opinion but would only worsen matters. Brzezinski played out the scenario in his head: Iran would certainly retaliate by giving the hostages show trials and executing some of them. Apart from the appalling personal tragedy that would entail, it would compel an even more aggressive American response, which might bring the Soviets in on the side of the Iranians and lead to an uncontrollable conflict. No matter how much America cared about the hostages, their fate was not worth the risk of an all-out nuclear exchange. Such thoughts sketched out the recklessness of Iran’s behavior.

The dilemma centered on one of the most basic and Gordian questions of democratic society: Which was more important, the individual or the state? Should Carter’s priority be the larger national interest, or should national interest take a backseat to the fate of several score American citizens? These were, most of them, volunteers who had sought out hazardous postings. Brzezinski and Vance ably represented both sides of this question, but Carter was, above all else, a pragmatist. When possible, pragmatists avoid confronting the hardest questions. For a nation like revolutionary Iran, which saw itself as divinely inspired, the question was easy. The will of the state was the will of Allah. Millions might be blithely sacrificed in His name. But for America there could never be a clear answer. The preeminence of the individual was a bedrock principle of the state, yet all but the most fanatical libertarians knew of instances, say, in times of war or natural catastrophe, when the government was compelled to disregard it. Carter did not yet face war or catastrophe. He told his staff that so far as he was concerned the interests of the state and the well-being of the American hostages in Iran were one and the same, so there was no dilemma. The only sensible option was to wait and see if somebody in Tehran was willing to talk.

Waiting might have big political costs for Carter. The image of a timid, hog-tied president was too tempting for his political enemies to resist. Kennedy flailed around rhetorically, probing for a way to capitalize on Carter’s predicament. He held a press conference to denounce the shah’s regime, exaggerating its sins, criticizing Carter for allowing him into the United States, and calling for an “open debate” over America’s role in propping up and sustaining his regime.

“The shah ran one of the most violent regimes in the history of mankind,” Kennedy said. “How do we justify the United States on one hand accepting that individual [the shah] because he would like to come here and stay here with his umpteen billions of dollars that he has stolen from Iran, and at the same time say to Hispanics who are here illegally that they have to wait nine years to bring their children into this country.” Kennedy said the administration should have known that admitting the shah would lead to a confrontation with the revolutionary leaders of Iran.

His comments were front-page news in Tehran and were warmly received, but they proved a bad miscalculation of the American mood. Iranian applause was political poison at home, where it smelled like capitulation, and Kennedy was criticized from every quarter. Stung, he promptly withdrew his proposals and said that a long conversation with Secretary of State Vance had convinced him that they were premature.

Henry Kissinger, whose advocacy on behalf of the shah had helped precipitate the crisis, surfaced on The Dick Cavett Show to urge that the shah be encouraged to stay in America as long as he wished. He advised his fellow Americans to “keep cool.”

“This is a situation where we are all obliged to support the people handling it,” he said, in a somewhat tepid endorsement of Carter, and then, dodging his own role in the affair, “There is no point in second-guessing it.” He finished with a subtle stab at the White House, hinting at presidential timidity. “When this is over we should find out what it is that makes foreign leaders think they can deal with the United States in this manner.”

Journalist Stephen S. Rosenfeld wrote in the Washington Post that the real error made by the Carter White House was not in admitting the shah but in pursuing “a constructive link with the new Iran” instead of cutting ties.

He wrote: “The administration’s real vulnerability, I think, lies in its expectation—hardheaded in pursuit of oil, softheaded in its pursuit of Third World favor—that things were settling down in Iran, that the moderates were prevailing; that the extremists could be trimmed to size; that the United States could gain more from betting on the future (by providing its presence, arms, grain, heating fuel, schooling, etc.) than from cutting itself out of the game…. I sense a new rage, a disgust, building in this country against the president. He will pay.”

Even though the polls did not yet bear out Rosenfeld’s prediction, Carter knew that unless something happened they would. In a staff meeting at Camp David near the end of November, he reviewed all of the military options at his disposal and settled upon a broad strategy of ratcheting up pressure on Iran. First he would condemn, then threaten, then break relations, then mine three harbors, then bomb Abadan, and, if all this failed, put up a total blockade.

The president, at Brzezinski’s urging, also authorized a private message to be conveyed through an intermediary to Iran’s foreign minister, making a point of saying that the contents would not be made public so that there would be less danger of it being perceived as an empty threat: If one hostage was killed or seriously harmed, the United States would respond as though all the hostages had been, and the response would be swift and harsh.

On the last day of November, a Friday, Bruce Laingen watched as the day unfolded outside the tall third-floor windows of the Iranian Foreign Ministry’s formal reception suite. Thanksgiving had come and gone and there was no change in the crisis. Initially, he, Tomseth, and Howland had stayed on at the Foreign Ministry out of solidarity with their colleagues, but their voluntary stay had evolved into something that, for all practical purposes, was imprisonment. Partly out of a sense of duty, partly out of loyalty to their captive colleagues, and partly out of respect for the other foreign missions in Tehran, the three were stuck, suspended in a bubble of increasingly awkward protocol.

It was a holiday in Iran, Ashura, a celebration of the martyrdom of Imam Hussein. The ministry building was empty except for the “security guards,” who over the previous three weeks had begun to seem less like protectors and more like jailers. On this day Laingen noted that they seemed more nervous, with huge street demonstrations planned throughout the city. If a mob decided to storm the ministry and seize the despised American “spies,” there was no way it could have been held off by such a small force.

Laingen watched as clumps of demonstrators moved in the streets below toward Tehran University for the Friday prayer meeting, center for the day’s celebrations. Many carried homemade placards and posters. The whole nation was in the grip of Islamist fervor, a kind of mass hysteria. Abolhassan Bani-Sadr had lasted only a few weeks as foreign minister, ousted apparently by mullahs who felt he was insufficiently pious to represent the nation overseas, and when Laingen heard a helicopter approach and land in the ministry’s garden, he recognized the figure stepping out as Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, the replacement, back from an overnight visit to Qom, the real seat of power now in Iran.

Ghotbzadeh seemed an unlikely choice, a suave, dapper, clean-shaven man who did not wear religion on his sleeve. He was a thickset, swarthy man with small, deep-set eyes and a great broad nose, whose face seemed bottom heavy, with a wide mouth and the chin and jaw of a cartoon boxer. Ghotbzadeh was a smart, ambitious nationalist who had earned a degree of flexibility in an increasingly rigid Iran by dint of the friendship and alliance he had formed with Khomeini in Paris. Still, today was a day that demanded a show of reverence. He stepped right into a waiting Mercedes, no doubt hurrying to the Friday prayers, a great public show of faith held weekly on the grounds of Tehran University. It was now mandatory for all high officials.

The prayer meeting was on the radio. Laingen had been to them often enough—most recently with Henry Precht—so he could picture the whole scene, which he recorded in his diary, something reminiscent of old Nazi newsreels or the images in George Orwell’s 1984, only with an Islamic cast:

After Montazari’s performance, a representative of the now celebrated Muslim Students Following the Imam’s Line, heroic conquerors of the American fortress at the heart of the capital, urged the millions to march on the “den of spies.” Hateful rhetoric about the United States was developing a florid lexicon. Americans were “world-devouring ghouls,” who “skinned alive the meek ones” and “stripped nations of their resources.”

“Carter is vanquished!” came a shout from the crowd.

“Khomeini is victorious!” came another.

Symbols had replaced reality. It was as though taking hostage sixty-six unguarded Americans amounted to a great military victory.

Laingen wrote:

To conclude the day’s festivities, Khomeini had called on everyone in Tehran to go to their rooftops and shout, “Allahuakbar!” for fifteen minutes. Outside the embassy walls the cries rose all over the teeming city, especially from the seemingly endless expanse of low gray and brown structures of the crowded slums to the south. Over and over and over again:

“Allahuakbar!”

“Allahuakbar!”

“Allahuakbar!”

5. Davy Crockett Didn’t Have to Fight His Way In

Immediately after wowing the brass at Fort Stewart in early November, and then staying up almost all night with Beckwith to celebrate, Major Logan Fitch had taken his newly certified Delta Force squadron for a week of skiing in Breckenridge, Colorado. He called it “winter warfare training” but the trip was primarily a reward, a chance to blow off steam. They all had been working for two years without a break. Fitch was an expert skier himself, and he hired some local instructors to assist him. They spent their days on the sunny slopes and their nights in the resort’s bars and restaurants. But before the week was up, Fitch was summoned back east. He was flown back alone to the CIA “Farm” in southern Virginia.

There he met with Beckwith and the rest of the unit’s commanders, and within two days, joined by his squadron and the one under Schoomaker’s command, he began training to rescue the American hostages in Iran. None of the men had been given a chance to go home on a quick stopover at Fort Bragg to gather up their gear, and none was allowed to contact family members to explain where they were and what they were doing. Fitch’s men had left for what they thought would be a week in the high Rockies and instead had disappeared into the sprawling acres of the Farm, a “secure, undisclosed location.” It would be Christmas before they would have permission to visit home.

Less than a month after it had gone to work inside the secret suite on the inner rim of the Pentagon, the small group of unorthodox military planners had made substantial progress. Delta had the luxury of not worrying about how they were going to get to Tehran and back, so they concentrated on what they called “action at the objective,” how to most effectively take down the embassy compound and free the hostages. The release of thirteen hostages had provided a bonanza of detailed information. Debriefing the released blacks and women, they learned a lot about who was guarding the Americans, what kind of weapons they had, where they were positioned inside and outside the embassy gates, and what kind of reaction they might expect when they stormed the compound. The fact that the guards appeared to all be untrained amateurs was good news. They learned roughly where the hostages were being held, in which buildings, and in what parts of those buildings, at least as of mid-November. The fact that the captors had created more or less permanent holding areas for large groups of hostages, such as the Mushroom Inn and the chancery basement, was more good news. Still, pinpointing and keeping track of where the captive Americans were being held would be a consistent problem.

At the Farm, an elaborate eight-by-eight-foot model of the compound was built, with the buildings reproduced in exact detail. There were two separate take-apart models of the chancery and warehouse. The roofs could be lifted off and upper floors removed so that the men could memorize the layout of each floor. The models, along with blueprints of the buildings and up-to-date satellite surveillance, allowed them to know the compound better than they knew their own homes. The drawings revealed the location of circuit breakers, where they could cut the electricity and black out the entire compound during their assault. From television they learned about how the compound and each building inside it was guarded on the outside. To practice storming the compound they used engineering tape to lay out a silhouette on the grass of the main buildings and outer walls, and then they timed themselves storming in from various directions, looking for the fastest way in and out. The tape would be taken up whenever Soviet surveillance satellites were known to be passing overhead. They spent hours and hours on scenario training, practicing moving into rooms and hallways and confronting guards, all the while fine-tuning their force structure. They did a lot of weapons training. Of great help was Captain Robinson, the intelligence officer unknowingly released by the Iranians simply because he was black. Robinson was able to answer a myriad of small practical questions. Do certain doors open out or in? What material is it made of? How thick? How thick were the walls in various places and how were they constructed? How thick was the brick wall around the compound? In the warehouse, the only access to the Mushroom Inn on the blueprints was a narrow staircase that led down to a long hallway. This meant the raiding force would have to move to the bottom of the stairs and then race down a perilous length before bursting into the rooms where hostages were being held, allowing the guards potentially disastrous seconds to grasp what was happening and react, possibly by shooting hostages. From one of the freed hostages, Delta’s planners learned that the wall at the bottom of the steps that separated the holding rooms from the hallway was flimsy and could easily be knocked down. So the raiding force could break directly into the rooms, saving precious seconds and adding the shock and confusion Delta needed to create in the attempt.

They planned to enter the compound stealthily, coming over the back walls and using weapons equipped with silencers to shoot guards who got in their way, but on the way out they planned to blow a hole in the wall big enough to walk all of the hostages out. So they built brick walls of identical thickness and practiced blowing holes in them.

It was an intricate maneuver that would require careful choreography; when Schoomaker likened the raid to a ballet one day he heard guffaws, but that’s what it was. One of the men promptly produced a cartoon showing a fully outfitted Delta operator wearing a tutu and dancing on tiptoe. The men were broken into three teams—Red, White, and Blue—one to deal with matters outside the embassy walls, and two to conduct the takedowns inside. The Blue element, the smallest, was led by Major Jerry Boykin, and its primary responsibility was to cover the gates to the compound once the raid had begun and to storm, take, and hold the soccer stadium across the street to the compound’s north. Inside the walls, the hostage takers had placed obstacles on rooftops, tennis courts, and any flat places where helicopters might land. Because of this the plan called for the hostages and rescue force to rally inside the soccer stadium, where the choppers would land, load, and leave. Boykin’s force employed sniper teams with machine guns to prevent any Iranian force from entering the compound or stadium. Fitch’s White team had the biggest job, assaulting the ninety-room chancery, which had been “hardened,” outfitted with barred windows, sandbags, and heavy doors prior to the takeover. If the hostage takers utilized the defensive measures, the main building was going to be a damn hard target. Schoomaker’s Red team was going to assault the warehouse that contained the Mushroom Inn. There were also two command elements, a primary one led by Beckwith himself and a backup led by Burruss.

They were constantly fine-tuning the ballet. They had chosen to go over the walls to begin the raid by ascending ladders from the outside and then jumping down six feet to the tennis courts. One day, Intelligence Sergeant Gary Moston made a surprising discovery poring over satellite photos. Examining the shadows around the tennis courts, he noticed that they were sunken; they were twelve feet from the top of the wall, not six! So the assault force would have jumped in the dark expecting to drop only six feet, and instead would have fallen twice that far. Burruss could picture his men in a helpless pile with broken ankles and legs, and with more men raining down on top of them. They chose a different spot for the ladders.

If things went wrong and the helicopters couldn’t make it in, they practiced alternate scenarios to evade capture and escape by driving trucks into either Turkey or Afghanistan, three hundred to four hundred miles distant. Delta built portable facades that could be placed inside a vehicle so that if its back doors were opened it would look like it was loaded with canned goods or boxes—the hostages and rescuers would be hidden behind. The unit practiced dealing with customs questions and learned some key phrases in Turkish and Afghan. The military combed its ranks to select volunteers who spoke fluent Farsi to join the force as truck drivers.

By the end of November, Delta was basically ready to storm the compound, but the problem of delivering them and getting them out remained. It was determined that the only helicopters large enough for the job, with enough range and with folding tail booms that would enable them to be stored secretly belowdecks on an aircraft carrier, were navy RH-53D Sea Stallions, which were used primarily for minesweeping operations. The choppers would have to be hidden below decks because the Soviets flew regular reconnaissance over the American fleet, and they would surely notice eight additional choppers. The model could also be outfitted with additional external fuel tanks. The Sea Stallions had good range, but nowhere near enough to fly from the Persian Gulf or neighboring countries to Tehran and back without refueling several times, and the military lacked the capability of refueling them in the air. So they needed to establish a remote refueling point somewhere in the desert south of Tehran. In the Pentagon suite, one group set about finding a suitable desert location, while another worked on plans for delivering the fuel.

An early scheme was to package the aviation fuel in rubber bladders big enough to hold five hundred gallons each and drop them from aircraft to the refueling spot. Parachutes would slow the multiton blivits’ descent, and the forces aboard the choppers would then roll them into position to transfer the fuel with manually operated pumps. This would avoid the necessity of landing large fixed-wing aircraft in the desert, a risky maneuver.

It proved easier said than done. At a complete dry run of the mission staged in the Arizona desert outside Yuma at the end of November, Burruss was standing with General Phillip C. Gast, Fitch, and Boykin when a practice blivit-drop was attempted. It was a clear desert night with a full moon and they could clearly see growing black blobs against the dark blue sky as they descended. Major Schoomaker was looking up with night-vision goggles, expecting to see a neat row of pallets come flying out of the plane at intervals, then blossom with parachutes, and instead saw what looked like an airplane vomiting something off its back ramp. It was immediately apparent that some of the blobs were falling much too fast, plummeting actually. Something about their squishy bulk had played havoc with the rigging and their parachutes had failed to open. They streamered in, great black hurtling, truck-sized watermelons that hit the desert floor with a gigantic cracking sploosh! The air was suddenly pungent with the odor of splattered aviation fuel. More followed.

“Jesus Christ, I hope none of them is coming my way,” said Fitch.

Cigarettes were hastily extinguished.

It was sploosh! after sploosh! as the blivits crashed in. Three of the ten blivits landed safely, but moving them across the uneven desert ground proved more difficult than imagined. Eventually the riggers would lick the problem of landing the blivits softly, but the time it took to move them and pump fuel from them, along with the unforgettable experience of hearing them crack into the desert floor, permanently soured the mission planners on the method. So it was back to the drawing boards.

The dry run had disclosed other serious problems. The navy chopper pilots were especially unimpressive. They were accustomed to flying relatively low-stress minesweeping runs over water. This mission would call for something much harder. The choppers were going to be loaded right up to their maximum carrying capacity—Delta had carefully calculated how much ammunition and water each man could carry in order to make sure they stayed just under the limit—which made them difficult to maneuver in the best of circumstances. The pilots would be flying in blacked-out conditions wearing night-vision goggles, which were a technological miracle but which sharply reduced range of vision and could be worn for only thirty minutes at a time before causing severe eye strain. The pilots had to take turns wearing them on a long flight. Entering Iran stealthily called for maneuvering in darkness through mountain ranges flying low enough to avoid radar, which was often hair-raising. Landing and taking off in the desert stirred up dust storms that often meant flying blind. After the first dry run, one of the pilots begged off the mission. Beckwith wanted him court-martialled, calling him a “quitter” and worse, and though the pilot was not punished, he was forced to remain in isolation, for fear of leaking information. Eventually the entire navy squadron was replaced by marine pilots who lacked experience with the Sea Stallions but who had more experience flying missions over land, and in combat. This did not completely placate Beckwith and his squadrons, who had worked with veteran air force special-ops pilots whom they trusted and greatly respected. But this was a “joint op,” and the air force already had its piece of the mission, flying the fixed-wing aircraft. Beckwith suspected, rightly, that the marines were given the choppers to fly to satisfy their need for a role. The marines believed their pilots were at least as good as the air force’s, if not better, but there was no convincing “Charging Charlie.” As far as he was concerned, he was getting second-string pilots because the brass was less interested in success than in keeping things collegial in the Pentagon dining halls. This suspicion, that Pentagon politics was being given a higher priority than excellence, would continue to influence morale. Delta believed the men recruited to deliver them and fly them out were not in their league.

The biggest problem remained intelligence, specifically what in tactical parlance was called EEI (Essential Elements of Information). There was no CIA presence in Iran—the three agency officers were being held hostage. In a message to General Vaught after the Yuma exercise, Beckwith produced an alphabetized list of concerns.

As problems were identified, the number of mission planners at the Pentagon kept growing. They were crammed into a relatively small space, along with tables, chairs, filing cabinets, maps, and displays. Room 2C840 was off the chairman’s corridor, a ceremonial stretch of hallway lined with portraits of the lengthening line of men who had served as chairman of the joint chiefs. There was a cipher lock on the door to enter the outer office, and a second steel door inside with another cipher lock that led to the inner sanctum. It was a classic boiler-room environment, windowless, crowded, and noisy with conversation and ringing phones. The space was so cramped that it resembled the inside of a submarine, with exposed wires and pipes in the ceiling and wall-to-wall desks, safes, files, maps, and people. The air-conditioning didn’t work well, and about half of those in the room smoked. Briefings were held every morning and every afternoon for the chairman of the joint chiefs and the secretary of defense, Harold Brown, and in the afternoons Brzezinski usually sat in. Sometimes Hamilton Jordan stopped by. Brzezinski dominated the meetings, going on often at sometimes infuriating length about theoretical things that the nuts-and-bolts men in the room found irrelevant. The chairman, General Jones, was so soft-spoken and deferential that even when he spoke the men in the room sometimes couldn’t make out what he was saying. Brown would fiddle with his glasses and sometimes look at Jones imploringly, as if to say, Tell me what to do here. The goal was always to reach a point where Jones and Brown felt comfortable that the mission had a reasonable chance of success, and day after day it was clear that they were still a long way from that goal.

The mission posed problems that seemed insoluble, but giving up was not an option. Early on, one of the officers involved tried to capture the improbability of the exercise with a list of “requirements” and “conditions,” all of them true.

Beckwith did away with the fifth of the “requirements.” At one of the early briefing sessions, as he outlined the plan for assaulting one embassy gate, a high-ranking navy officer asked, “What about the guard?”

Beckwith was startled by the question and leaned his imposing mass across the table in the questioner’s direction, looking him squarely in the eyes.

“He will be taken out,” he said.

“You mean killed?” asked the officer, who seemed shocked.

Beckwith growled at him, “I’ll shoot him right between the eyes and then do it again just to make sure.”

The failure of the blivits meant that they would have to land large fixed-wing aircraft in the desert, which meant finding a location with hard enough soil and flat enough ground to serve as a makeshift runway. Some thought was given to simply seizing an airport outside Tehran, but that would have blown the surprise critical for Delta’s success.

By the end of the month a mission was taking shape. Sea Stallion helicopters would fly off the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk in the Arabian Sea. They would cross over into Iranian airspace at locations known to be uncovered by that country’s radar intercept system—Americans had designed it and built it, so they knew its weaknesses. Six choppers would fly to Desert One, an as yet unidentified rallying point in the desert. At the same time, six MC-130 transports equipped with sophisticated navigation and electronic countermeasure devices would fly from Wadi Kena, an airstrip in a remote corner of Egypt that had been built by the Russians a decade before. They would use the same secure flight path and land on a rudimentary strip that would have to be prepared by a clandestine mission in advance. The transports would carry Delta Force and the fuel bladders that had failed the drop test.

At Desert One, the spent choppers would be refueled from the bladders and boarded by Delta. The transports would take off and fly back out of Iran to prepare for return flights the following night, and the choppers would fly to secure locations outside of Tehran where they and the Delta assault force would be parked and hidden throughout the next day. Securing these hide sites was only one part of a mission that would be completed by Delta Force and CIA agents who would sneak into the country days before the rescue attempt.

On the second night, Delta would be driven to the embassy compound on trucks and carry out their assault. At the same time, a ranger company would take a little-used airport outside the city. A separate army special-forces unit would raid Iran’s Foreign Ministry to free Laingen, Tomseth, and Howland. Overhead, two fixed-wing, four-engtine AC-130 Spectre gunships would provide heavy firepower over the embassy to suppress crowds or any military force that scrambled to counter the raid. Once the raiding force and freed hostages had crossed the street to the soccer stadium, the choppers hidden through the long day before would fly in and carry them out to the seized airport. Big C-141 transport jets, one configured to provide emergency medical care, would land at the occupied airport, load up Delta, the rangers, and the hostages, and fly out of Iran with a fighter escort. The choppers would be destroyed and left behind.

It was as inelegant as a Rube Goldberg contraption, with parts borrowed from everywhere. Everyone, including Delta, was going to be attempting something they had never done. Any operation this complex, with this many difficult and critical pieces, was a sitting duck for Murphy’s Law. Success was a long shot at best. None of the senior commanders at the Pentagon believed it would be successful. Those preparing for it did so with a sense of fatalism that waxed both grim and cheerful.

“The only difference between this and the Alamo is that Davy Crockett didn’t have to fight his way in,” quipped Captain Wade Ishimoto, Delta’s assistant intelligence officer.

Not the least of the problems faced by the rescue force was maintaining secrecy. The planning effort at the Pentagon alone now numbered more than forty-five. Because the rescue force had no budget, it simply took what it needed. During the dress rehearsal in Yuma, local commanders complained about planes and helicopters gobbling up aviation fuel without accounting for it. They were silenced by a call from the Pentagon. It was a challenge to assemble all the night-vision goggles needed by the operators and mission pilots. The amazing goggles, which illuminated the darkest night in monochromatic shades of green, were new, expensive, and rare, and the units who had them were loathe to part with them. They had to be commandeered without explanation. To cover the absence of Delta Force, which was spending most of its time at its “undisclosed location” in Virginia, a skeletal undeployed staff at its Fort Bragg “Stockade” worked overtime to maintain the appearance of normalcy, answering phones, driving out to the firing range and shooting off enough rounds to make it sound like the unit was doing its usual practice sessions, moving vehicles around to maintain the appearance of normal workday comings and goings. The staff did its best to handle the volume of phone calls, but one persistent general insisted on speaking to Beckwith himself. The colonel ignored him until the general became abusive to the staff, at which point Beckwith asked General Vaught to get rid of the caller.

By the end of the month six Sea Stallion helicopters had been moved on one pretext or another to the Kitty Hawk, where they were now stashed safely belowdecks. Not even the carrier’s commander was fully aware of their purpose. An alert reporter for a local newspaper had noticed the choppers being loaded on a giant C-5 Galaxy transport to be ferried to the carrier and speculated in print—with pictures!—that they might be on their way to a staging area for a rescue mission in Tehran. Fortunately, no one else picked up on the story.

The assault force rehearsed its violent ballet over and over again. There was so much about the mission that Beckwith couldn’t control that he was determined to get his piece of it perfect. At Camp Smokey, life settled into a routine. The men studied in the daytime and rehearsed at night. When they weren’t working they had permission to shoot deer, so they practiced with their expensive sniper rifles and their cook prepared venison dinners. Late at night many of them drank. For men who liked this kind of life, it was pleasant and without stress. Despite the seriousness of the planning and training, few believed they would ever be deployed.

Fitch was convinced of it. He put his heart into the work—the tactics they were perfecting had lots of potential applications, so none of the effort was wasted—but he believed that the chance something this risky would be attempted by this president was about nil. He didn’t believe Carter had the balls.

6. The Corrupt of the Earth

In early December, John Limbert was placed in a van and driven off the embassy grounds. Initially, he was elated; he was wired that way; his first instinct was always hope. Maybe they were being released! He knew he would make quite a picture on the evening news. He had lost weight and was unshaven and haggard. On the morning of the takeover he had wanted to get a haircut, now his thick dark hair was so long he doubted his wife, Parveneh, and their two children would recognize him. But it was soon clear that he wasn’t going home.

Instead he was led into a large private home with marble floors and a grand foyer with a high ceiling from which hung an enormous, gaudy chandelier. At the center of the house was a wide, curved staircase, which led up to a carpeted landing with hallways leading off in several directions. It was luxury abandoned in haste. Limbert and his two new roommates, State Department communicator Rick Kupke and the ICA chief John Graves, found expensive clothes still hanging in the closet. It must have been the home of someone important in the royal regime. The windows in their upstairs room had been sealed shut and blackened. They soon perceived that other hostages were there too. Dave Roeder and Bob Ode were down the hall.

Limbert took this move as bad news. It suggested a higher level of coordination and resolve and felt like a long step away from freedom. They were watched over by a guard they dubbed “Two Shirts,” because his wardrobe alternated invariably between a pink one and a green one. Two Shirts had no sympathy for his captives’ physical discomfort. He accused them constantly of surreptitiously communicating and ordered all three of them to face different walls. This meant Kupke and Graves had to lie in bed for the guard’s entire eight-hour shift, in the same position, staring at the tan walls. Limbert, who conversed with most of the guards at length, had such contempt for Two Shirts’ inflexibility that he would turn his back to him every time he came in the room. The other guards sometimes took pity on them. Kupke and Graves were allowed to sit up and place their feet on the floor, and once or twice they were allowed to stand and walk around the room, but not often.

Limbert spoke to the guards in Farsi, while Graves, a tall man with a full graying beard and a mustache he waxed and drew out to points at each end, seemed calm and aloof, puffing away obsessively on his pipe. Kupke retreated into hours of reverie, imagining himself as the star in football games he had watched as a boy from the stands, or taking long walks down Main Street in his hometown of Rensselaer, Indiana, stopping to chat with people in every store. Passing the hours on his mattress on the floor, Limbert finally let go of his expectation of early release, reconciled himself to open-ended confinement and uncertainty, and began the routines that would see him through the ordeal.

The goal was to structure this ocean of time and use it productively. He had read that keeping fit and clean were two simple things that passed time and fostered health in confinement, so he commenced doing sit-ups and leg lifts. He avoided working up a heavy sweat, because he was allowed to shower only once every few weeks and he didn’t want to smell worse than he already did. Meals came regularly, and the food was edible, but he was still dropping weight. His pants swam on him.

Day and night he read. Because he knew Farsi he had more options than the other hostages, and he made a point of asking the guards for books about their revolution. They were eager to oblige. They brought him first the writings and speeches of Ali Shariati, the intellectual father of the revolution, and then other books by revolutionary leaders. Limbert’s erudition and fluency intrigued his guards, and he made an effort to engage them in conversation whenever they came to the room. Kupke and Graves listened silently to long conversations they couldn’t understand. Limbert knew that hostages who made a connection with their captors had a better chance of surviving, so while steering away from political topics he asked the guards an endless stream of questions about themselves. Most of them were young, naive, and far too polite to tell him simply to shut up. When he asked a question about their religion, such as, “Explain martyrdom to me,” they would typically oblige with a lengthy and spirited answer, seeing an opportunity to enlighten the infidel spy. Limbert would listen patiently and ask still more questions. He had nothing but time. Drawing his captors out relieved his boredom, helped satisfy his curiosity about them, and had an element of self-preservation. He was determined to see his guards as individuals, and for them to see him as one, too, as someone with feelings and ideas rather than just another Yankee imperialist. It was a survival tactic. If he fell ill and needed help, it would be a lot easier to ignore someone you didn’t know or like. After a month, all of the hostages were devising their own strategies to cope, and his was conversation. If there was a rescue attempt, then the guard in the room with him might have thirty seconds to decide whether to shoot him. If he hesitated, even for only a few seconds, it might spare his life. So Limbert chatted with them and drew them out as though his life depended on it.

It wasn’t always easy or pleasant. Most were shockingly ill-informed and uneducated, and if they were abusive or arrogant it was easy to dislike them. Others he felt sorry for. He believed they were being manipulated for reasons they couldn’t begin to understand. He recognized certain types of young Iranians from his years of teaching in Shiraz. They were confused kids living in a bizarre society that for reasons of religion or tradition closed off most of the usual avenues of growth and self-improvement. It produced young people who were restless and ignorant, ripe for a demagogue, and in Khomeini they had found their man.

There was one young guard, a teenager, who spoke with such a pronounced Turkish accent that Limbert could tell he was from a provincial town in the Azerbaijan region. Clearly the most thrilling, important thing this young man had ever been asked to do was guard these American devils, and his excitement and anxiety were both evident. Limbert asked him at one point, “What part of Azerbaijan are you from?” The young man was shocked that his captive knew this about him. Afraid that he would be chastised for giving information to a hostage, but too polite to refuse an answer, he wrote down the name of his village on a piece of paper and handed it over. Limbert counted such small interactions as victories.

The captive diplomat had first visited Iran in 1962 as a young man stirred by the rhetoric of President Kennedy. A recent Harvard graduate, he had wanted to help less fortunate people and he wanted to travel, explore, and learn. Some of the guards told him that the only other Americans they had met were Peace Corps volunteers like himself, teaching in secondary schools in small towns. Several even said how much they had respected these teachers. It made Limbert want to laugh. These were, in effect, his students. This wasn’t how things were supposed to have turned out. But, then, he had never seen things accurately through Iranian eyes. How unprepared he had been to teach children in a culture and language entirely foreign to him! But if it had been difficult for him, then what must it have been like for his students? How patient they had been with him! If Kennedy had expected the Peace Corps experience would build political and cultural bridges to the Third World, he had underestimated the complexity of such a task. A bridge requires firm foundations on both sides of a divide. The Iranians he met and worked with had no desire to build a bridge to the United States. They were perfectly capable of liking and admiring him and the other volunteers personally, but they were distrustful and increasingly angry with the American government, its values, and its policies. He remembered listening to the radio in the summer of 1965 as President Johnson announced his decision to send more troops to Vietnam and then to bomb Hanoi. Many of his Iranian friends had been angry about that then, but it had never interfered with their warm feelings toward him. He was an American, yes, but he was first and foremost himself, a caring, decent young man, someone in love with all things Persian, a human being trying to do the right thing with his life. The personal and the political ran on separate tracks. It took something like a revolution to push these two tracks together, to make Iranians take out their anger with the U.S. government on individual Americans—which is what had so dramatically happened here. Afire with their new political power and visions of remaking the world, all their stored antipathy and resentment had demonized him. It was shocking, and yet when he had reflected on it more he concluded that it was something he should have seen coming a long time ago.

Things had taken a turn for the worse when he was in Shiraz finishing work on his Ph.D. in the late sixties. At first he recognized the usual undercurrent of anti-Americanism in his students and colleagues, but still it rarely surfaced, and it didn’t color their appreciation of him. By that time Limbert was fluent in Farsi. He was, in effect, the ideal Peace Corps graduate, an American who had fully blended with his host country. He had met and married Parvaneh; they were at that point as much Iranian as American. He considered Shiraz as much his home as any place in America. The college where he taught had a contract with the University of Pennsylvania and was becoming an international English-language university, with faculty from all over the world. It was as cosmopolitan as the student body was provincial. Most of Limbert’s students came from small towns and cities that were religious and very conservative, and the values he confronted on campus and in the classroom clashed sharply with his own. Some of the students, a few, threw off their past and embraced the newer Western world, but other students—looking back now he realized it was most of them—rejected the secular, tolerant, gender-equal ways of their professors. One of his pupils, a good student, was killed when a bomb he was making with some of his friends in the dormitory had blown up prematurely.

There was another incident that came to mind, and which now assumed more meaning. An American teacher had founded a modern dance troupe at the university. Male and female dancers in tights performed together in shows that were commonplace in the West. The troupe had performed for the queen when she was in Shiraz for an arts festival—the shah and his wife vigorously encouraged things modern and Western. After the royal performance, arrangements were made for the dance show to be performed for the student body. The same routines that elicited enthusiastic applause in the earlier show provoked a riot. The troupe was unable to finish. To most of the students, undraped female forms cavorting on stage with undraped males was an outrage. It was alien and unwelcome and they didn’t like it one bit. Limbert remembered the distress, confusion, and disbelief of the American woman who had started the troupe. She could not fathom how something as benign and beautiful as a dance could provoke such violent rejection.

These were the kinds of things entirely missed by American policy makers, who dealt only with the shah and assumed that anyone who disagreed with him was backward and would remain powerless, not worth their attention or concern. America tallied up the number of machine guns in the shah’s arsenal and felt comfortable but failed to consider that a machine gun is useless if the man behind it refuses to shoot. The undercurrent wasn’t visible to those who visited Iran for a few days or weeks. You saw it only when you immersed yourself in the country, as Limbert had, and even he had misjudged it.

There had been things about the shah he disliked, but he accepted the monarchy because historically Iran (or Persia) had been ruled by kings. He disdained the royal security policies, and he knew there was corruption at the highest levels of the regime, but like most of his Iranian family and friends he considered these things simply a fact of life in the Third World, something that required the slow progress of modernization to change. As the revolution demonstrated, however, sometimes change can come fast, and in an unexpected direction.

He still didn’t understand how it happened. Historians say that revolutions come in a country not when things are at their worst but when they begin to improve, when an entire generation has been well fed, sheltered, and educated so that it feels its strength in a way previous generations, ignorant, ill fed, and unhealthy, did not. Some blamed the revolution on Carter’s liberal policies; his insistence on human rights reforms in Iran had weakened the shah enough to make him vulnerable. Others blamed the administration’s hard-line policies, epitomized by Brzezinski, who had encouraged the shah to crack down more violently against protesters once the upheaval began, which proved to be too little too late, and which had only fueled the flames. Some blamed the shah for being timid and vacillating. Limbert knew that none of these explanations was sufficient. Iran had been long spoiling for change. There had been two major currents of opposition, the nationalists, who owed their loyalty historically to Mossadeq and who were divided between those who wanted a Western-style democracy and those who wanted to establish a Marxist-style state; and the Islamists, a new totalitarian strain rooted firmly in centuries of tradition, who wanted to return Iran to some dimly remembered utopian past where clerics ruled like philosopher kings. The shah had played these two currents off each other skillfully for years. The nationalists viewed an Islamist state in the same way the Western powers did, as a hopeless anachronism, a giant step backward in time. The shah was able to say to them, Look, you may not like me but I am your bulwark against these primitives who would undo all of the technological and social progress that we have made. The Islamists viewed the nationalists as infidels, heretics, and sellouts. But for some reason that Limbert didn’t fully understand, the two currents had abruptly joined in 1978. The mullahs had their own sophisticated mosque-based organization, but suddenly they had the support of otherwise secular civil servants and white-collar workers, who could shut down overnight government offices, banks, and even the military; one of the turning points of the revolution had been the support of thousands of mid-level military officers and technicians, who had short-circuited the shah’s response to the threat.

The postrevolutionary struggle was between the victors: the nationalists and the Islamists. They had united to throw out the shah but were now locked in a struggle to shape the new Iran. Limbert saw that he and his colleagues had become pawns in this struggle; they were being used by the fundamentalist mullahs to finish off their former nationalist allies and even moderate clerics who opposed a totalitarian theocracy. The simple black-and-white logic of religious rhetoric spoke powerfully to the young who, like Limbert’s own students a decade earlier, came from small-town, traditional backgrounds. Anti-Americanism was the right tool in this fight, because nationalists like Bazargan, although personally religious, shared Western democratic values. The goal of this new phase of the revolution was to bury the passion for freedom and democracy under fears of an American-led countercoup. America was the Great Satan, and Iran-loving, former Peace Corps volunteer Limbert one of its lesser devils. He had come to Iran almost twenty years ago to change the world. Well, it had changed all right.

He did not know exactly what was happening in the larger world, or what efforts the United States might be making to win their freedom, but he understood that President Carter had few options. At first he had thought that Khomeini, as the ruler of a state, could not allow a diplomatic mission to be arrested and held hostage. Now it was clear he had either overestimated or underestimated him. The part Limbert did not know was how this embassy stunt was affecting the local political situation. His perception was, in a way, stuck back in the heady first few days and weeks. But as the weeks wore on the stated purpose of the takeover—demanding the return of the shah—had receded, and an underlying purpose was becoming more clear.

Taking the embassy had toppled the provisional government, and as the country voted to endorse the language of a new properly Islamic constitution, the students and their extremist political allies were using documents and testimony wrung from the embassy staff selectively as propaganda. Most of the papers seized at the embassy were historical and did show the close relationship between the U.S. embassy and the shah’s regime, but many of the most recent filings were biographical. In their effort to make sense of postrevolutionary Iran, the staff collected information about many newly prominent Iranians, most of it gleaned from newspapers or other innocuous sources. Many of the files included little more than a name, age, job description, and contact information. But for some time it had been the policy to routinely classify even the most cursory file as “Limited Official Use,” if for no other reason than to help keep the collection together by restricting its distribution. In the climate of runaway suspicion that caused the embassy seizure, that designation of secrecy was enough to label any Iranian in the file as a collaborator or spy. As the weeks went on, the students and their clerical advisers would begin to produce some of these documents to discredit politicians and even religious figures they opposed. Any hint of a “secret” association with the Great Satan was enough to destroy a career, at the very least. It could also lead to prison and execution.

Limbert hadn’t known either Kupke or Graves, and because they were not allowed to speak he didn’t get to know much about them in the three weeks they would spend together. Day after day he did his small exercise routines, read, ate his meals, slept, and talked with his guards. He and his roommates could hear birds outside and the voices of children playing in nearby yards. They were able to convince some of the guards to leave one window open a crack to get some fresh air. For some reason, Graves was kept supplied with tobacco, and the smoke from his pipe hung in the air day and night. Through the walls they sometimes heard other American voices, but usually only a few words. The only break in the routine came when they had to use the toilet. A guard would blindfold Limbert and lead him down a flight of steps—he counted thirteen, and remembered it, in case he would ever have to go down them himself in the dark and in a hurry. In the bathroom was a shower, an unbelievable luxury, which he was allowed to use twice during his stay there. He thought a lot about escaping, but even though his mastery of Farsi would have given him an edge over most of his colleagues, it was winter and he had no shoes, no warm clothes. If he managed to slip out of the house, where would he go? Who would help him? Like most of the hostages, Limbert had concluded that the United States was not going to make a rescue attempt. If they had the capability or will to do that, it would have already happened.

It was in this room that Limbert pieced together from bits of radio reports that drifted in from down the hall that thirteen of their colleagues had been released.

7. The Largest Thefts and Exploitations in History

It would be hard to tell which came first, the unrelenting press attention or the public obsession. The story of sixty-six Americans held hostage by a distant, forbidding theocracy provoked indignation but also piqued the country’s imagination. Scott Miller, the station manager of KOBL in Oberlin, Ohio, had himself locked in a recording studio with only a sleeping bag. He spent part of every day tied to a chair, telling listeners he wanted to share the experience of the hostages.

At the National Cathedral in Washington, bells tolled each day at noon, once for each day of the lengthening captivity. In Lawrence, Massachusetts, all of the churches around its city hall sounded their bells fifty times each day at noon to remember the American captives. In Columbus, Ohio, protesters marched to express their anger at Iran, chanting, “Nagasaki, Hiroshima, why not Iran!” A popular country tune of the radio, “Message to Khomeini,” predicted that Iran would be turned into “an oil slick.” A man from Flushing, New York, climbed to a dangerous perch atop a West Hollywood billboard to protest American inaction, and ten thousand cabdrivers in Manhattan drove for a day with their lights on to express their solidarity with their captive countrymen and -women.

It was not hard to see where all this anger was heading. Carter’s public support was still high but voices of criticism and blame were already being heard. A former CIA director, Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger, criticized the president for not immediately setting a deadline for the hostages’ release, although he was vague about what consequences there ought to be for failing to meet the deadline. Ronald Reagan, likely to be one of the leading Republican challengers in the 1980 election, had already blamed Carter’s “weakness and vacillation” for causing the crisis in the first place, and dropped larger and larger hints that if he were in power America would not be pushed around by a “demented dictator” and his “rabble.” In his own party, Carter was cruising high in the polls ever since Senator Kennedy had shot himself in the foot with his conciliatory remarks, and although the Massachusetts senator was in the race to stay he would never recover.

Carter was considering tough options. In an exchange of memos with Brzezinski on December 21, the president directed that the National Security Council “list everything that Khomeini would not want to see occur and which would not invite condemnation of the U.S. by other nations.”

By now the families of many hostage members were becoming regulars on nightly news programs around the country, and so far there was not a negative word to be heard from them about the administration’s actions. They knew nothing of a possible rescue mission, and most were reassured by the president’s promise to take no action that might jeopardize their loved ones. Penne Laingen, the chargé’s wife, was seen as an unofficial spokesman for the families, and her comments on TV were uniformly supportive and upbeat—she might as well have been working for State Department public relations. Dottie Morefield and her family were so conspicuous in San Diego that they were invited by the owners of the city’s pro football team to be special guests at a Monday Night Football game between the Chargers and the Miami Dolphins.

Mindful of the promise to those families, and his department’s responsibility to its employees, Vance continued to argue against applying any pressure on Iran. He consistently counseled patience, pointing out that Iran was a nation in turmoil, its future course still uncertain, and new opportunities arose nearly every day to reopen diplomatic channels.

“Cy, you always have another diplomatic channel,” said Brzezinski.

On the tenth of December, NBC-TV aired an eighteen-minute interview with marine hostage Billy Gallegos, the first with a hostage broadcast in the United States. Clean-shaven and wide-eyed, he looked like a frightened, big-eyed boy.

Before this, the only other hostage voice heard was that of Jerry Plotkin, the middle-aged Californian who had come to set up a personnel agency—matching American workers to jobs in Iran—and had made the mistake of stopping by the embassy on the morning of the takeover. He had been allowed to speak on the phone for seven minutes to a Los Angeles radio station in late November, delivering remarks that had obviously been written for him, right down to the standard Islamic preface, “In the name of God.” He had also called for the return of the shah, and went on to woodenly read, “Let the world know no tyrant or dictator can ever find safe harbor in the United States. I am well both mentally and physically. We have been treated humanely. The students treat us kindly and with respect. The quality of the food is adequate and we are given three meals a day. The hostages’ living area is clean and each of the hostages has a mattress, blanket, armchair, and table.”

So far, the students seemed to see the American press as an ally. It made for a strange situation. The United States was, in effect, in a stalemated state of war with Iran, but while fifty-three of their countrymen were being held prisoner, dozens of American journalists moved freely in Tehran, scrambling to get access to the compound and the captives. ABC’s Peter Jennings was among them, wandering the streets to solicit the opinions of random Iranians and doing feature stories about post-revolutionary life. The other networks had their own regular correspondents on the scene, as did most major American newspapers, and it was clear from some of the footage shown on TV that they had established a rapport with the dapper foreign minister, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, who made himself available daily. Yet the United States government, by all appearances, was unable even to start a dialogue with the country’s rulers. Many of the TV correspondents would set up for their nightly broadcasts immediately outside the embassy gates, surrounded by Iranians chanting “Death to America!” and “Death to Carter.” Rarely was this rhetorical hostility directed at the American journalists personally. Thomas Fenton, a CBS correspondent, was confronted once outside the embassy by an Iranian who shouted at him accusingly, “CIA!”

“No, CBS!” Fenton retorted, which got a laugh.

No one had succeeded in getting access to the hostages, so when the major TV networks were approached with an offer to participate in the Gallegos interview, their executives were eager. But the students demanded that all questions be submitted in advance, that the interview be aired in prime time in its entirety with no editing, and that the students be allowed to ask questions and make statements on the film. None of the networks accepted the initial terms, but the big three, ABC, CBS, and NBC, were eager to bargain. Eventually NBC came to terms. They would be allowed to question the hostage with their own correspondents, Fred Francis and George Lewis, and they did not have to clear their questions in advance. A student would be allowed to make an opening and closing statement. Nilufar Ebtekar was chosen by the council, because of her fluent English and because the council liked the idea of having their arguments presented by a woman. At first, Ebtekar was reluctant to appear on camera, but she agreed when it was decided to identify her only as “Mary.”

She and the other hostage takers had been mystified by the lack of American support for their action, particularly the lack of sympathy from American blacks and other “oppressed minorities,” and had concluded that their problem was media censorship in the United States. The American government was blocking and distorting their message. One effort to break through this supposed censorship was a half-page ad in the New York Times (the Washington Post refused to run it) calling on Americans to “Rise Up Against Oppression,” referring to the hostages as “spies” and placing Carter in “the vanguard of the world’s oppressors.” The Gallegos interview was part of this publicity campaign. The students demanded that Ebtekar’s remarks be presented unedited and in their entirety. In fact, the justifications and complaints of Iranian hostage takers had become tiresomely familiar to Americans, but when NBC proposed trimming her harangue by about two minutes the students held fast. Ebtekar interpreted the request to edit her speech as proof that there existed a secret U.S. government rule prohibiting, as she would put it, the broadcast of any “anti-government declaration lasting longer than five minutes.”

Her chubby frame draped in dark robes and her head wrapped in a powder blue scarf, Ebtekar lectured the American people in her perfect American English about the evils of their government and accused the shah of “the largest thefts and exploitations of history.”

Gallegos sat in the chancery library beneath a portrait of Khomeini. He had agreed in advance not to describe where he was being kept on the embassy grounds or to describe the security procedures. The young marine was one the students’ favorites. He was chosen for the interview by their governing council because of his “honesty and simplicity,” which suggested he was not likely to be unpredictable, because his behavior had been docile, and because his background was “Latin.” In the interview the young marine spoke of his impatience and argued for handing over the shah.

“I think he’d get a fair trial and if he is guilty he is guilty,” Gallegos said. “If he is innocent, he is innocent. Nothing has been done for our release and it’s been over a month now. I think the shah should be returned and that is not only my feeling, that’s the feeling of all of the hostages…. I am in good shape but my mental condition is as good as expected in a situation like this, kind of on my nerves…. Before this I knew nothing of any spies, but it seems like the students have uncovered quite a few documents indicating people as being spies in Iran.”

To Gallegos’s parents, who were watching before cameras in the studio of a network affiliate in Denver, he appeared thin and pale, with telling dark rings under his eyes, but otherwise healthy and unharmed. The cocky young man who had volunteered for the most dangerous postings, and whose eagerness for confrontation with America’s enemies was sometimes a concern to his fellow marines, had softened his outlook considerably in captivity. He said that he and the other hostages had not been mistreated by their captors, nor brainwashed, and were surprised by their country’s refusal to hand over the shah. He said they resented being held captive to protect a dictator who deserved to be put on trial and punished, and managed to imply that even his own role as an embassy guard might have had a clandestine side.

“I’d give my life for any American,” he said. “I can’t see it now. In some ways, I don’t see this as a good cause…. The students have been really good to us. It’s hard to believe, I know, but we haven’t been asked any questions about what really our job was.”

Yet the young marine was still loyal to his country.

“We’re relying on his [Carter’s] decision, no matter what,” he said. “I’m leaving it up to my country and my people. I have great faith in them.”

When Gallegos had answered the last question, one of the interviewers turned to Ebtekar and asked if he might direct a question to her.

“No you may not,” she said. Ebtekar regarded the question as a violation of the agreement.

The program aired in full, but the students still felt betrayed when NBC intercut images of Gallegos’s parents watching.

Carter was furious with the network for airing the interview. The flood of reporting from Iran during the crisis had been both aggravating and helpful; the nightly reports were being scrutinized carefully in the Pentagon for scraps of information about how the gates were guarded, what kinds of weapons the students carried, etc., but apart from this practical value, the constant network focus on the crisis played into the hands of the hostage takers. The more attention they got, the more convinced they were of their own importance, and the more pressure was put on the White House to react, either to give in to this infuriating extortion or to lash out at Iran in a way that would almost certainly make the situation worse for the hostages, if not kill them. There was no danger of “Mary’s” lecture finding sympathetic American ears. A small woman dressed like a nun hectoring the American people in their own living rooms about the sins of their government made for a unique national TV event that no doubt swelled the ranks of those who preferred to nuke Tehran and be done with it. What Carter needed most was for this story to fade off the front pages, so that the students could be isolated as a troublemaking fringe and sensible people in Iran would again dare to assert control.

House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill condemned the network for airing Iranian “propaganda.” Ford Rowan, NBC’s Pentagon correspondent, no doubt getting an earful from his military sources, resigned in protest.

Psychologists were enlisted by the networks to explore the concept of brainwashing, and military and intelligence analysts pored over Gallegos’s remarks for clues about where and how the hostages were being guarded. They were especially intrigued by one of the marine’s brief comments in passing. Near the end of the interview, Gallegos had been asked about which Americans he had been housed with.

“I was with a couple of political officers before we were up here in some of the houses,” he said. They understood that by “houses,” he meant the staff cottages on the embassy grounds. “I was with them and, after that, we were moved down to this other place, the mushroom…”

Mushroom? What had he meant by that?

Delta knew. They had learned of the nickname from the released hostages. It reminded the analysts of the old soldier’s lament, “I must be a mushroom because they keep me in the dark and feed me horseshit.”

Given the bewildering variety of news reports, it was impossible to sort out fact from fiction or, as intelligence analysts put it, information from noise. Every day there was a break in the saga from somewhere in the world, sometimes hopeful and sometimes alarming. The hostages were going to be released, or the hostages were going to be put on trial; the hostages were going to be tried by the students themselves and then executed, or the hostages were going to appear before a revolutionary tribunal and then be released. Some of the hostages were going to be released for Christmas, then none of the hostages would be. Iran’s terms for releasing them varied, depending on who was speaking. Iran was an enigma because no one appeared to be in charge. Everyone said Khomeini was, but the old prophet stayed aloof from the day-to-day workings of the state. He kept to his spiritual regimen in Qom and spoke only at intervals and rarely about specifics. Those known to be close to him, clerical figures and politicians who advised him and interpreted his words, were singing different songs, some of them confrontational and some of them conciliatory. The tune seemed to change daily. In a speech days before Christmas, Khomeini said the American captives convicted of spying “might not” be executed.

Feeding the confusion was the competitive scramble for scoops by every news agency in the world. There was no shortage of people to interview. One of the favorites was Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the most unlikely of Iranian public officials in the postrevolutionary period, a Chaplinesque little man with a peculiar pompadour, thick-rimmed glasses, and a carefully trimmed little mustache. He had been dumped as foreign minister by the Revolutionary Council but had not gone away. Khomeini had promptly named him economic minister, and as the weeks of the crisis wore on Bani-Sadr grew more and more openly critical of the embassy takeover. Originally he had spoken in favor of it, but by early December he had changed his mind. He told a French reporter that he opposed trying the hostages because such a step would violate international agreements that protected diplomats, as though taking them hostage itself wasn’t violation enough. Days later he told a Beirut correspondent that Iran ought to drop its demand for return of the shah, that the tactic had failed, and then a few days later he called for the hostages’ release. Ibrahim Yazdi, his predecessor as foreign minister, who had resigned the position after the embassy was overrun, now spoke out in favor of putting the Americans on trial, saying that such a step would provide a “strong motivating force” for the Iranian masses to rebuild their society. Ghotbzadeh, Bani-Sadr’s successor as foreign minister, set off a storm of confusion by suggesting that one step toward resolving the crisis would be to create an international grand jury to investigate U.S.–Iran relations. The proffer was promptly rejected by a spokesman for the students, who in typically colorful language suggested that Ghotbzadeh was a traitor—“On occasion he has spoken irresponsibly and led the enemy to his filthy and satanic whims.” This provoked the Ayatollah Mohammed Behesti, chairman of the Revolutionary Council, to defend Ghotbzadeh, pointing out that the foreign minister spoke not only for himself but for the council and thus for the imam himself. Dustups like these raised all sorts of questions in the White House. Who was really in charge? Who could be taken seriously? With whom should they be negotiating, the students? The Foreign Ministry? The Revolutionary Council? Khomeini?

Sadeq Khalkali, the revolution’s bloodiest ayatollah, most notorious as a “hanging judge,” told one interviewer that none of the American hostages would be executed, and then told another, weeks later, that only those convicted of spying would be sentenced to death. Then, later in December, he called for the hostages’ release.

“Every embassy has spies in it,” he said. “We cannot execute any spies according to Islamic laws. They will only be executed if they were directly responsible for ordering a murder. Even if we try the hostages, we do not want to condemn them. We want to condemn Carter and the American government.”

When the shah attempted to defuse the crisis in mid-December by leaving New York for Panama—an arrangement worked out by Washington with the obliging dictator Omar Torrijos—Khalkali announced that Iranian hit squads would assassinate the shah there, setting off weeks of anxiety throughout Central America, as nations scrambled to locate the assassins. Khomeini quickly pronounced the shah’s move to Panama meaningless, portraying it as nothing but a public relations maneuver and calling the small nation an “American puppet.” He wasn’t far from right. Hamilton Jordan had worked out the move, assuring the shah and the princess that their children could stay in the United States and continue their education, and even arranging for a mobile medical team to deliver to his new tropical home the same care the shah enjoyed in New York. Jordan also promised to help find Pahlavi a more permanent home, but soon learned how much of a pariah the former Iranian ruler had become. Only Panama and Egypt were willing.

As the stalemate dragged through its second month with no sign of solution, rumor became news. The Libyan dictator, Moammar Qaddafi, told Oriana Fallaci, “I have bad news. There is movement in the American military in Europe. The Americans are preparing parachutists and arming with armored vehicles, missiles, gas, neutron bombs, and other materiel.” He predicted the coming of World War Three. On December 11, both UPI and ABC-TV falsely reported that President Carter had set a ten-day deadline for the release of the hostages, which seemed to coincide with a statement from Tehran by Ghotbzadeh, who had called for an international tribunal to consider Iran’s grievances against the United States in ten days. It was implied that if the hostages were not released by that deadline America would launch some sort of punitive strike. An article in Pravda, the Soviet Union’s mouthpiece newspaper, reprinted under bold headlines in Tehran’s newspapers, suggested that the United States was preparing to use nuclear weapons against Iran. The article was signed “Alexei Petrov,” a well-known pseudonym for the highest-ranking officials in the communist state. A Kuwaiti newspaper had its own scoop from Tehran. The hostages were all going to be released before Christmas as a gesture of Islamist goodwill, and that in return Carter was going to make a televised address praising Islam and Iran and condemning the shah. Another Kuwaiti newspaper reported that the United States was planning to attack Iran on Christmas Eve.

The confusion mirrored events in Iran, where Khomeini’s efforts to consolidate power were being severely challenged. The nation voted in early December to approve a new Islamic constitution that handed Khomeini supreme power for life, but there were reports that large numbers of Iranians had refused to vote in protest. The persecuted secular leftists who had allied with the mullahs to overthrow the shah were now openly warring with the emerging religious regime. The hostages heard nightly gun battles in the streets. There were organized uprisings in the ethnic regions of Baluchistan, Kurdistan, and Azerbaijan, where rebel forces briefly took control of the city of Tabriz until driven out by Revolutionary Guards. The rebelling Kurds rejected a proposal by the Revolutionary Council for “self-administration,” demanding full autonomy. Many of those battling Khomeini loyalists were followers of Ayatollah Kazem Shariatmadari, one of the premier clerics in Iran, who had publicly condemned the hostage taking. Purges in the Foreign Ministry resulted in the sacking of forty-five of its diplomats, all but three of them ambassadors, from Iranian missions around the world.

Iran was not just confusing, it was confused. The only common article of faith in the country was hatred and suspicion of the United States, which was just as strong among the Shariatmadari enthusiasts as their Khomeiniite rivals. The imam blamed all the upheaval on Carter who, he said, was fomenting unrest in order to distract the world from his own crimes. On December 19, the English-language newspaper Kayhan printed as its “Thought for Today” the following: “U.S. is hatching a plot against the Islamic Revolution every day. Don’t forget that U.S. is your worst enemy. Don’t forget to chant, ‘Death to U.S.’ along with ‘Death to Saddam.’”

Hatred was a useful emotional rallying point, but the country had not yet figured out how to govern itself. No formal government was in place. There were sharp divisions on the Revolutionary Council about how to respond once the shah left the United States. They debated the question for four hours without reaching an agreement. One option considered was simply to release the hostages, since the departure of the shah from America would render moot the demand for Carter to return him. This was rejected as too humiliating. Another alternative was to immediately put the embassy “spies” on trial, to punish America for not complying with the students’ demand. But this was a step that would invite further international outrage and a likely military attack by America. Increasingly, the imam seemed to be taking his cue not from the circle of mature leaders who had come to power with him but from the young hostage takers, whose popularity with the masses gave their statements political weight.

At the White House Brzezinski and Vance continued to spar. The secretary of state was resolutely in favor of restraint and the pursuit of peaceful means, while Brzezinski leaned toward the old Cold War approach, exploring the feasibility of toppling the Islamist regime and urging the State Department in a December 4 memo to feel out foreign leaders to see which “alternative leaders and rival groups within and outside Iran” they might be willing to support as alternatives to Khomeini. President Carter stuck with a middle line. Public opinion polls so far showed strong support for his handling of the crisis, the typical surge of solidarity following a threat to the nation, but the president knew the boost would not last. Early in December he had held an interagency meeting to discuss ways that the United States might bring economic and/or military pressure on Iran, but there were few new ideas. Economic sanctions depended on worldwide cooperation, which was hard to make happen even after both the UN Security Council and the International Court of Justice at The Hague officially called for the hostages’ immediate unconditional release. Both the resolution and the order were shrugged off by the student captors and Iran’s revolutionary leaders. Carter’s call for a review of every visa held by an Iranian in the United States—there were about 50,000 of them—was quickly challenged in court and halted, at least temporarily, by a federal judge. Every move the president made just seemed to underscore his impotence.

In a series of speeches in mid-December, Khomeini mocked the president.

“The Americans don’t simply want to free these spies, all this crisis is to help Carter get reelected…Carter doesn’t understand more than this. He doesn’t attach any importance to human beings…he has suffered a political defeat in the eyes of the world. This ‘humanitarian’ thinks he can mobilize the whole world into starving us. Unfortunately for Mr. Carter, his secretary of state went round but nobody took any notice of him. They all turned him down. This ‘humanitarian’ intends to expel fifty thousand of our young people for one reason or another…. Recently we heard that a judge had pronounced this to be against the law.”

Despite his promise to the hostages’ families, Carter was inching reluctantly toward military action.

The president was briefed daily on the progress of planning for the rescue mission. Despite the fact that at least a dozen of the hostages, maybe more, had been moved off the embassy compound, a fact well known enough in Iran for there to be crowds around some of the north Tehran residences where they were being held, the complex assault plan remained focused on the embassy. A ten-man squad was going to hit the Foreign Ministry to free Laingen, Tomseth, and Howland, but the other, scattered hostages were off the radar.

Delta Commander Beckwith kept adding men to his assault force; the original sixty men became seventy-five. As the number grew, so did the need for helicopters. Two more Sea Stallions were added to the mission plan and began making their way to the Kitty Hawk in the Persian Gulf. Intelligence analysts had located an airstrip, a thirty-minute helicopter flight from Tehran, that the rangers would seize for the final evacuation of the hostages and rescue force. It was an unoccupied asphalt strip at Manzariyeh that had been part of a bombing range and that was apparently manned now by just a small unit of Iranian army engineers. A company of rangers would seize the strip at the same time Delta was hitting the embassy. It was determined that the runway was long enough and flat enough to receive the C-141s that would carry everyone out.

Reliable intelligence remained the biggest challenge. In mid-December the CIA managed to place an agent in Tehran. It had called out of retirement an elderly World War Two–era spy of eastern European origin called “Bob,” a tall, thickset man in his sixties with leathery skin who had been living in South America. He spoke a variety of languages from that region, but not Farsi. He agreed to enter Iran as a businessman, along with two friendly Iranians, one who was sick with cancer and thus fatalistic about the risks and the other a young Iranian-American air force crewman code-named “Fred,” who had family there. They scouted out the possibilities for obtaining a warehouse and trucks—the warehouse to hide Delta Force through the long day preceding the assault, and the trucks to deliver the force from the hiding place to the embassy. Bob landed on a commercial flight at Mehrabad Airport and breezed through customs; Delta Force noted with surprise the ease of entry.

Beckwith’s concern for secrecy closed one potentially rich avenue of information. A West German special forces unit offered to let Delta place several of its men with a TV crew that was being sent to Tehran, ostensibly to report for one of that country’s television networks. The students often allowed TV crews other than American, particularly German ones, fuller access to the embassy. But Beckwith did not want the military of any foreign country involved, even a friendly one.

To solve the fuel blivit problem, it was decided that two C-130s carrying the rubber bladders inside would have to land at the first night-chopper refueling point, which meant they needed to find a patch of desert large enough, flat enough, and solid enough to support the large aircraft. The only way to make sure about the firmness of the ground—loose sand would bog down the big planes—would be to send someone into Iran to inspect the location, so plans were put in motion to send a small, daring reconnaissance group to the Iranian desert.

The president canceled his annual trip home to Georgia for the Christmas holidays in order to remain in the White House and deal with the crisis. He ordered that the lights on the White House Christmas tree be left dark.

8. The Cure Is an Airline Ticket Out of Here

On the embassy grounds, in the basement of the warehouse across a narrow hall from the Mushroom Inn, vice consul Richard Queen shared a room with warrant officer Joe Hall. The fluorescent overhead lights hummed day and night, casting enough light to be annoying when they wanted darkness but not enough to comfortably read. Nothing could be heard through the warehouse walls, and it was constantly cold and clammy.

As Christmas approached, they were let outdoors to walk in small circles in the walled courtyard of the ambassador’s residence. Hall was so moved by the fresh cold air, by the direct sunlight, the newly fallen snow, the crows circling in the blue sky overhead, that he wept, but when Queen was offered the same chance he declined. Hall was amazed that anyone would refuse an opportunity to go outside, but his roommate said that for some reason he had begun to feel woozy.

Queen experienced wide mood swings in captivity. He understood some Farsi, and he spent a lot of time eavesdropping on the guards, but he understood only about half of what was spoken and in his anxiety he tended to draw dramatic conclusions, good and bad. Once he thought he had heard two guards discussing plans to shoot all the hostages. He didn’t share the information with Hall, sparing his roommate the fright, but the prospect tormented him night and day. When the guards took away their shoes and replaced them with Iranian-made plastic sandals—with images of elephants embossed on the soles—Queen threw a fit. Hall didn’t understand why his roommate was so upset, but Queen had this image of being lined up in front of a firing squad wearing goofy plastic slippers. The day he had feared passed without incident.

When he thought he’d heard good news, Queen did share it. One day he was convinced that the guards had been discussing the purchase of plane tickets to fly the hostages home. He was sure he’d heard the airlines Alitalia and Lufthansa mentioned. He told Hall and their excitement grew.

As the day approached, Queen was counting down the hours. He woke up on the appointed morning filled with joy. As he returned from his morning wash, he whispered happily to a hostage passing him in the hall, “We’re going home!”

When he got back to the room he asked a guard, “When are they going to take us out?”

“Take you out?” said the guard. “What do you mean?”

“When are we going to be released?”

“You aren’t,” the guard said.

Queen was crushed. He spent the better part of that day motionless on his mattress, his face turned to the wall. He cursed himself for letting his hopes get so high and concluded that the guards were doing it to him on purpose. They knew he spoke some Farsi, but not a lot, and was convinced they were toying with him.

While some of the guards were petty and even cruel, others were kind, in particular a tall, slender guard with a long hook nose, mustache, and sideburns named Akbar. He dropped by and asked Queen and Hall if they would like anything from their apartments. They both made lists. Queen wrote down blue jeans, changes of underwear, his beloved, well-traveled “War Between the States” board game, a Lord of the Rings game, pipes, and tobacco. Hall made up his own list. Weeks later Akbar brought Queen two pairs of jeans, two shirts, a blue sweater, and much-appreciated clean well-fitting underpants—the long-suffering vice consul had been wearing the undersized drawers for weeks. There was nothing for Hall. As he had surmised weeks before, his apartment had been ransacked and all his possessions had vanished. Queen sorted his bounty and shrugged apologetically at his roommate.

The young vice consul wrote a letter to his parents and his brother Alex: “This past week I was hoping, praying, pleading to God so hard that I would be able to return home to you in time for Christmas, but I guess to no avail.”

Queen didn’t mention something troubling that had occurred shortly before Christmas. In the shower one day he noticed that his left arm and hand felt numb, a peculiar sensation he had never felt before. He thought it was probably because he had slept on that side and had curled his arm under his body in an awkward way. When it didn’t go away he mentioned it to Hall.

“You ever have numbness in your hand?” he asked.

“You mean like pins and needles? Like when your circulation is cut off?” said Hall.

“No, more like what you’d feel if you plunged your hand in snow and kept it there for a very long time.”

Hall thought he should ask to have it checked out.

Queen decided to wait. Maybe it would go away. He didn’t connect it with his occasional bouts of wooziness and took neither symptom very seriously. He had no reason to suspect his body would betray him in an important way. He didn’t look it, but Queen was an exceptional athlete. In high school his tall, lean frame had breezed through subminute quarter miles like clockwork. Ailments and injuries had always gone away quickly. But this felt truly odd, unlike anything he had experienced, and over time it didn’t diminish; it worsened. Finally he told a guard about it and they sent a young pharmacy student to look at him. The druggist-in-training diagnosed the numbness as a reaction to a draft coming from a vent over Queen’s space. He arranged to have his mattress moved to a warmer spot and for him to be left unbound—the guards were still using torn bedsheets to tie his hands day and night. When none of the changes helped, Queen was visited by a middle-aged Iranian doctor who claimed to have been trained in the United States. Queen found him unimpressive.

“It’s nothing, it’s nothing,” the doctor said after a cursory examination. He diagnosed a “twisted spine” and predicted that the symptoms would soon vanish. On his way out he asked Hall how he was doing.

“I’m sick, too,” Hall said. “Homesick. The cure is an airline ticket out of here.”

The Mushroom Inn had settled into a dull routine broken only by changes of guard shifts and trips to the bathroom. The shelves that divided each hostage’s cubicle were remnants of the library at the old Iranian-American high school, where in happier days the offspring of embassy workers attended classes, and the books to that library, hundreds of them, were also stored in the basement in boxes. When Queen asked, he was given permission to unpack them and operate a lending library. He brought to the task his delight for careful detail, sorting the hundreds of books by subject matter. There was even a catchall stack of books Queen believed no one would find interesting. Within each subject category he broke them down further into fiction and nonfiction. The fiction was sorted by author, the history chronologically. He arranged the books in vertical piles of fifteen on the floor, with a sign atop each indicating what subject it was.

Overseeing this effort was Hamid, a slight man in a green army jacket with a fair, angular face, reddish brown hair, and a sparse beard, who because of his propensity to cheerfully mislead his captives was dubbed “Hamid the Liar.” His hair and skin color were untypical for an Iranian, which he seemed to compensate for with an overabundance of zeal. Intensely suspicious, he had been the one on the second night of the takeover to warn Kathryn Koob against sending messages with her eyes. He was both ignorant and arrogant, traits which for the hostages seemed to sum up the revolution. When Hamid the Liar played checkers, he jumped over his own pieces on the board as if they weren’t there, a clear violation of universal rules, and when his opponent complained he would cheerfully explain, “In Iran we always play this way. These are my men and if I choose to jump over them it is up to me!”

Hamid had earned his nickname by routinely lying about the mail, telling the hostages that none came when everyone knew (from the other guards) that mail from the United States arrived daily in sacks. When he did hand out letters, he played favorites, rewarding some hostages and punishing others. He was, of course, ready to believe any theory of American malevolence, no matter how wild. When one letter arrived making the case that World War Two had resulted because Adolf Hitler was determined to prevent America from seizing the oil supplies of Peru, Hamid was so impressed that he photocopied it and passed it around. In his role as library supervisor, Hamid permitted books to be borrowed only after he had checked personally to make sure they weren’t “CIA”—even though his English was rudimentary at best. Returned books had to be given first to him, so he could check to make sure no secret messages had been written or inserted in them. In his fractured English, he wrote out rules:

Given the borrowing limit, fat books were especially prized. Don Sharer read War and Peace and Moby-Dick. Barry Rosen began a steady diet of prison literature, beginning with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, MacKinlay Kantor’s Andersonville, Billy Hayes’s Midnight Express, the autobiography of French prison-escape artist Henri Charrière, Papillon, and James Clavell’s King Rat. He took comfort in the knowledge that he was not the first innocent man imprisoned, and that he and the other Americans were comparatively well treated. Marine Greg Persinger tackled one of the volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica, working his way through alphabetically.

Many of the bored, confined Americans began improvising exercise routines in their cramped spaces, though some had not worked out in years. Bill Royer, the assistant director of the now defunct Iran-America Society, was attempting a yoga move, lying flat on his back, raising his feet and reaching up to touch his toes, when he felt a sudden stab of pain in his chest. He thought he was having a heart attack at first, but the pain was in the wrong place, and very localized. After complaining to the guards a medical student gave him a cursory exam and reassured him that his heart was normal. It took weeks for the sharp pain to subside. He learned much later that he had broken his rib.

Enforced silence was defeated by a tap code, a system where letters of the alphabet were arrayed on a grid and words were spelled out painstakingly by tapping out numbers indicating each letter’s horizontal and vertical position. A diagram of the tap code was drawn on the inside of a chewing gum wrapper, which was balled up and then tossed from space to space. Sadly, there wasn’t much news to share. A hostage got one that, after much decoding effort, asked, “When do you think we’ll get out of here?”

Some of the hostages just ignored the petty procedures. When big Bill Keough needed to use the toilet, he would stand up, announce “Toilet,” and start in that direction. The guards would scurry behind him, more like his entourage than his captors. Traffic to the bathroom was constant, given that it was the only time the captives got to stand, walk, and leave their space. The guards must have been impressed by American dental hygiene; everyone brushed at least three times a day.

They were beginning to look ragged. Clean State Department and military faces sprouted stubble and then full beards; well-trimmed hair grew shaggy and then long. Beneath the oppressive boredom was constant tension, which sometimes boiled up. Colonel Chuck Scott, who had endured a difficult interrogation before his captors decided he was not the supposed CIA agent George Lambrakis, blew up after being served a supper of what had been billed as “chicken soup.” It consisted of a cup of lukewarm water with a partly dissolved bouillon cube floating in it. He threw his cup across the room and loudly complained and was immediately surrounded by guards with automatic weapons. Scott began venting a stream of angry Farsi—“You people treat us worse than dogs!”—when Golacinski looked across at the recently returned Dave Roeder and, without a word, they stepped between the angry colonel and the guards. Golacinski tried to calm Scott down. When guards demanded that Roeder and Golacinski go back to their places, they refused.

“As long as you’re pointing that weapon at me, I’m not going to move,” said Roeder. “I’m not going anywhere. Point your gun down and I’ll go, but I’m not moving until you do.”

The guards backed down. They lowered their weapons and Roeder and Golacinski returned to their cubicles. By that time Scott had calmed down, but he continued berating the guards.

One of them said, “Many people in Iran are eating less than you. This is not a hotel. You cannot order anything you want. You are a hostage, you have no rights. If you do not shut up and stop complaining, you will be in much trouble.”

The guard then vented his own anger at the Americans, claiming that all they did was eat, sleep, and make love. The standoff ended with Scott and the guard glaring at each other silently from across the room.

9. Escape

Bill Belk had been moved away from the medic Don Hohman only after the guards were convinced he wasn’t going to stop breathing again. He was shuffled around from week to week and wound up in a small upstairs room in the ambassador’s house with Malcolm Kalp, the CIA officer. So far the highlight of Belk’s captivity, apart from nearly dying of an allergic reaction to an insect bite, was the day he had inadvertently received two cans of beer with his lunch. The guards always put two cans of soda on the table in his cubicle in the Mushroom Inn, where he had stayed for several weeks. Apparently they didn’t realize the difference in the cans of soda and beer. He said not a word and calmly savored his first alcoholic beverages since the takeover.

Mostly Belk felt bored, and stiff. Some days the only time he stood up was to go to the bathroom or to go eat. For the first month, every time he heard a helicopter his heart leapt. Is this it? Are they coming for us? By mid-December he was convinced no one was coming.

He and Kalp had mattresses on opposite sides of the room and were not allowed to speak. A guard sat outside the door. Passing notes back and forth, they began to plan an escape. Kalp said he wanted to go, but he didn’t want to hurt anybody doing it. Belk argued with him in the notes.

“That’s no way to feel!” he wrote.

Belk said that if they tried to go, it would have to be all-out, “us or them.” If he had to hurt or even kill somebody, he was ready to do it. The more he thought about it, the more determined he became. He was going to try and, if necessary, he told Kalp, he was going to go alone. If Kalp was going to shrink at jumping a guard, he didn’t want to have him along.

One of the guards always fell asleep soon after his shift started. Two days before Christmas, Belk waited until he nodded off, bundled his blanket on the mattress to make it look somewhat like he was wrapped in it, and walked out the door. He tiptoed down a back stairway toward the kitchen but he heard voices, and peering through the crack of the door he saw that it was full of Iranians. So he walked back up the stairs. From a window in the hallway he could look out over the back of the residence. The first-floor roof extended from the wall out toward a patio and swimming pool. Weeks earlier he had pried off a small blade from a Gillette shaver and hidden it in his shoe. Now he took off the shoe and retrieved it, using it to cut a neat hole in the window screen. He crawled out onto the first-floor roof.

Immediately he was struck by two things he hadn’t considered. It was bitterly cold and the compound was brightly illuminated by spotlights from front to back. It wasn’t usually like that at night, but for some reason, on this night, every damn light was ablaze. He could see armed Iranians walking all over the compound. His heart sank and he considered crawling back inside. He sat there, on the roof over the crowded kitchen, watching his breath trail off in gusts of steam, pulling his sweater tighter around him, expecting alarms to sound and people to shoot at him, but nothing happened. None of the Iranians looked up. So far so good. He decided to push his luck. He scouted around the edge of the roof and found a place where he could lower himself into the back patio by stepping down on an air-conditioning unit that protruded from a window. There were some large gas bottles on the ground beneath that fed the kitchen stoves and he dropped among them and squatted out of sight. The bottles were warm, so it was comfortable. He stayed there for about an hour.

The patio was enclosed by high walls. If he tried to climb over he would immediately be spotted. The gate was padlocked and the only other one had a guard posted alongside. He figured that gate was his only way out. He waited until a group of about six students emerged from the kitchen and proceeded through the gate, laughing and talking, absorbed in their conversation, and with his heart pounding Belk stood up and fell in behind them, drawing his sweater up over his head like he was pulling it on and adjusting it as he passed the guard. He stepped out of the gate and turned immediately to his right and kept walking.

He followed a fence that ran from the back of the ambassador’s house over toward the warehouse. There was a break in the fence ahead that opened into the spacious pine woods in front of the residence, and he was making for them when he heard over his shoulder, “East!,” which meant, “Stop!”

It was a female voice, one of the guards. He turned and saw her standing right over him on a small platform, pointing a rifle. She repeated excitedly, “East! East!”

He grabbed her and her weapon, twisting the barrel up and reaching for the switch that released its ammo magazine. The guard got off one shot into the sky before Belk managed to eject it. He knew she still had one more round in the chamber. She fired that one into the air, too, and Belk ran.

He headed back toward the residence, then heard another shot. Someone else was now shooting! He sprinted across the compound toward the tennis courts and a point on the back wall where there were steps leading up, a place where he could climb up and look over the top. He heard another shot snap, the round passing close as he bounded up the steps. He planned to pull himself up and over the wall, but when he peered over it he saw two policemen in the alley who had obviously been alerted by the shots inside. He stopped himself so abruptly that he lost his balance and fell off the stairs and twisted his right knee when he hit the hard ground. When he stood the knee buckled. He couldn’t run. Right beside the stairs was a metal container, about the size of a big ice cooler. It didn’t look large enough for a man to hide inside but Belk had no choice. He raised the lid and wiggled his six-foot frame inside.

It was filled with ice-cold water. The lid to the container didn’t close tightly, so he could see out across the compound, where guards were now running toward him from all directions. When they got close, they split up and fanned out to search back across the compound without bothering to look inside the cooler. Belk sat there in the freezing water trying not to breathe. He tried to raise himself to climb out once the guards had left that spot, but now his knee hurt even worse and he was also frightened. He thought if he raised the lid and tried to climb out he would be shot. So he stayed.

Soon a group of twelve guards reconvened at the stairs carrying flashlights and began conferring in rapid-fire Farsi. Belk could have reached out and touched them, they were that close. If they would just move again, Belk thought, maybe he could summon the strength to climb out and over the wall. The icy water had numbed him so he no longer felt any pain in his knee. He would head for Bert Moore’s house at the end of the alley immediately outside the compound. Maybe he could hide there through the day, and then hijack a car and drive toward Turkey. Or maybe he would try for the British or Canadian embassies. He stayed still for several long minutes until one of the guards looked down and noticed something.

“Oh!” he said, and jumped backward. Immediately all the guards pointed their weapons at the cooler. Belk slowly opened the lid and tried to stand. He was grabbed under both arms and hauled out. One of the guards slapped him and then pulled the wet sweater up over his head, pinning his arms. Then he clapped his arm around Belk’s head in a wrestling hold. The others slapped and kicked at the captive and hit him with their guns. He couldn’t stand because of the knee, so he was dragged to a car, thrown in the backseat, and driven to the chancery, where he was hauled into a first-floor room, what had been Bert Moore’s office. They threw blankets over him, handcuffed him, and began to berate him and to question him.

“There is no escape!” one of them told him. “Allah is against you!”

“You are CIA and you were taking a message for Malcolm Kalp,” his questioner said. “Who were you going to see?”

“No way,” said Belk. “I was just going home for Christmas.”

“What is your code name?”

His questioner reached down and tightened his handcuffs and then leaned on them, digging the steel into his wrists.

“It hurts!” Belk protested.

“It doesn’t matter,” the interrogator said.

Belk was left alone for the remainder of that evening. The cuffs were so tight his hands swelled and ached. In the room next door he heard Joe Subic and Kevin Hermening talking. It sounded like they were planning some sort of Christmas party and talking about getting out their Christmas cards! One of them was working a typewriter. It seemed weirdly incongruous to Belk, who was wet, cold, frightened, and in pain.

The next day six students came in and questioned him again, asking him about Kalp and where he had planned to go. When Belk told them the truth, that he had left by himself and didn’t know where he was going to go, they kicked his injured leg and hit him several times over the head.

“People that try to escape get shot,” one of them said.

One put a .45 caliber pistol to his head and pulled the trigger. Belk heard the hammer snap and at that point didn’t care. He begged them to remove the handcuffs. His hands had turned a faint blue and the pain was intense.

Finally, one of them loosed the cuffs. He was taken to another room in the basement and tied with nylon ropes hand and foot to a straight-backed wooden chair. He was untied only to eat and use the toilet. This is how he spent the Christmas holidays.

The approach of Christmas was a very emotional time for Kathryn Koob, who felt both joyful and sad. Like the rest of her colleagues, she stood accused of being a spy and had been told to expect a trial and what seemed like a strong chance of execution. Since she had been moved from the ambassador’s residence in early December to a small room on the top floor of the chancery, what had been the political section’s library, she was much closer to the chanting multitudes outside the compound’s front walls, and because she understood at least some Farsi it meant living with calls for American blood—her blood!—ringing in her ears day and night. In the crowd she could also hear vendors circulating drinks and snacks. It was bizarre, an ongoing festival of death and revenge. Her greatest fear, even greater than trial and the hanging judge, was that her captors would give her to this mob.

Ever since Ann Swift had disappeared after Thanksgiving, Koob had been held alone. She spent her days sitting in an armchair reading novels under the watchful eye of the punctilious female guard she had dubbed Queenie. Koob ate sparingly and savored what she was given at mealtimes, and she could feel the excess pounds she had accumulated over years falling off rapidly. She was still wearing the green wool dress she had on the day of her capture, although she also had a pair of slacks and a pullover shirt that the guards had brought from the embassy co-op. After weeks of such rigid confinement, she decided that she needed some sort of exercise regimen to supplement the ten minutes a day she was allowed to stand and do calisthenics. She worked out isometric routines she could do in the chair, stretching, lifting herself by pressing down with her hands, pushing her hands together, alternately flexing and relaxing sets of muscles. As she grew thinner she also grew stronger and despite the restrictions felt herself becoming more flexible. On the wall opposite her chair one of the students had spray-painted the words, “Down With the Carter,” and some weeks later another had brought in an idealized portrait of Khomeini and tacked it over part of the slogan, so she now faced the imam’s portrait under the words “Down With.” Since none of her guards spoke English very well, nobody noticed the ironic juxtaposition, and she was silently amused by it. It symbolized for her the intellectual clumsiness of this whole terrifying exercise.

She, too, contemplated escape. There was a good chance that an Iranian family she knew who lived only a few blocks from the embassy would hide her if she could get there. A woman in Iran had a better chance of staying hidden than a man, because she could drape herself from head to toe in a chador and move around with relative freedom. Her Farsi was limited but serviceable. She tried to remember exactly how far it was from the ambassador’s house to the wall. There were trees along the inside of it. With her newfound agility, she might be able to pull herself up to a low branch, which would give her the step up she would need to get over. All she had to do was wait for her guard to fall asleep, which happened often enough.

But she had never tried it. Partly because the attempt would have been risky and bold, Koob always found a reason, or was given one, to delay. Then one day a young woman named Sheroor, who was the kindest of her guards, allowed her to spend a few minutes on the front porch of the residence. It was the only time she had been allowed outside since the day of the takeover. Standing in the clean winter air, savoring blue skies and the sweet odor of the pine grove that filled that side of the compound, admiring the glimmer of moisture on the grass from a recent shower, Koob also scouted for an escape avenue. She was dismayed to see that the wall was much higher and farther from the house than she had remembered. None of the trees had branches low enough for her to reach, and the inside perimeter was busy with armed guards. There was no chance she could escape in the way she had imagined.

When the interrogation sessions ended after the first days, Koob concluded that the documents in her office at the Iran-America Society had confirmed her stories and quashed any remaining suspicions of her work in Tehran. But then she noticed Queenie surreptitiously taking notes after they spoke. Her chief guard would seize upon some comment or phrase and twist its meaning into something sinister. Chatting one day about the Iran-America Society, her efforts to revive the Cultural Center in Tehran, Koob mentioned that she had been interviewed from time to time by reporters about the organization’s events or plans. Queenie seemed particularly interested in this.

“How did you relate to them?” she asked. As Koob described how she had tried to be helpful with the reporters, how she had welcomed the publicity and tried to encourage their interest and coverage, she noticed that her chief guard was scribbling furiously behind a stack of books. It dawned on her that Queenie had a completely different take on what she was talking about.

So she asked, “Hahnum, when you were just talking about reporters, you were talking about Iranian reporters who came to me to find out about American things, right?”

“No,” said Queenie, and she explained that she had been talking about American reporters. Koob suddenly understood. Queenie had the idea that the “reporters” were actually spies, who reported the information they had gathered about Iran to her. Koob explained that this was not at all what was going on and Queenie dropped the subject. It consistently surprised Koob to glimpse such deep-rooted, unshakable suspicion.

She coped with her isolation and boredom by imagining her confinement as a religious retreat. The comforting miracle of her sister’s presence that she believed she had experienced on her first night in captivity fired her religious convictions. She had often wondered about and admired Catholic women who entered convents or contemplative communities to live in self-imposed isolation, silence, and prayer. She began to emulate what she knew of such lives, creating for herself prayer schedules and disciplines. Her captivity was a chance to direct the ambition and energy she had poured into her career into spiritual pursuit. It was hard work. She found it difficult to sustain prayer; anything more than a simple request for strength or deliverance or blessings on her family and friends challenged her patience and creativity. So she created categories, morning, afternoon, and evening devotions, and assigned different objectives for each. In her morning devotions, she set aside Mondays to pray for church institutions, Tuesdays for human crises around the world, Wednesdays for her family, and so on. To sustain prayer for her family she sought divine favors for each member individually, one by one, beginning with her parents in Iowa and then moving around the United States to each of her siblings and kin. She designed a worship ceremony for herself and began to see her religion not just as a backdrop to her life but as a practice, something that demanded mindfulness and effort at every moment. When she was allowed to keep an armed forces hymnal she’d found on a shelf in the residence library, she memorized the songs and sang them to herself. Later she was given a Bible.

In the weeks before Christmas, Koob had felt all of these currents coming together, her fear, her sadness, and her joy in the new religious life she had built for herself. Surrounded by hatred, she was determined to turn herself into a beacon of Christian love. She talked to her guards about the way her family celebrated Christmas at home, the cookies, candies, the oyster stew they always ate early before setting out for evening services. Given a branch from an artificial tree, she placed it upright in a flag holder and turned it into a Christmas tree. She tore pink routing slips she’d found in a desk drawer into strips and fastened them together with tape to create a chain she wrapped around it. She folded sheets of white and brown paper into snowflake designs, and shaped one sheet into a small cross and placed it on top. Then she got more ambitious, creating a whole manger scene complete with Mary, Joseph, and the Christ child and even an angel to hover over the scene. Her guards were so intrigued by her labors that they began imitating her, fashioning their own paper ornaments and hanging them on her “tree.”

10. Captivity Pageant

On Christmas morning, marine Kevin Hermening was given a clean turtleneck sweater and he, Joe Subic, embassy administration officer Steve Lauterbach, and Jerry Plotkin were taken to an office at the motor pool where TV cameras were waiting.

Their captors wanted them to make a statement on camera as part of the Christmas party they would hold later that day. Over in the Mushroom Inn, unbeknownst to Hermening, his fellow marines had refused. He had been separated from the others several days earlier after threatening a guard and tearing the startled Iranian’s schoolbook in half. Locked in a basement room for nine hours, blindfolded, cuffed, and tied to a chair, the nineteen-year-old marine, the youngest of the hostages, had broke down and sobbed until he fell asleep.

He had been awakened by a voice speaking to him in perfect English.

“So, Mr. Hermening, I understand you’re giving the guards a little bit of trouble?”

“No, sir,” he said. The situation felt like being chewed out in boot camp, only he was more frightened this time.

“Well, do you think you want to talk about it a little bit?” his questioner asked.

“I sure would.”

His blindfold was removed and before him, to his great surprise, had been Subic, the army sergeant, just a few years his senior. He didn’t recognize him at first, because Subic had grown his hair long and had a full beard. He was wearing a winter coat and had sweaters on underneath.

“Joe, what are you doing?” Hermening asked.

Subic explained that the students had come to him complaining that Hermening had been causing trouble and asked him to help.

“I told them I would talk to you and try to resolve things,” Subic said. He added that he might be able to help Hermening understand what was going on.

The young marine was shocked, not only by Subic’s approaching him on behalf of their tormentors but because he was so bundled up. Warm clothing was scarce. Most hostages were wearing the same now ratty clothes they had been wearing on the day of the takeover, with a single change of underwear or socks if they were lucky.

Subic and the guards walked Hermening across the compound—it was the first time the marine had seen an American walking outside without being bound and blindfolded—to the first floor of the chancery. In this room Subic had snack foods, Fritos, peanut butter, peanuts, ketchup, salt and pepper, potato chips! He told Hermening that he had raided the commissary and gone on a spree, without explaining why he had been allowed to do such a thing. Then he said he was planning an escape, which would probably take place early in the new year if they were still captive—they were all waiting to see if they would be sent home over the Christmas holidays. In the meantime, Subic said that he was putting together, at the guards’ behest, a Christmas party. He was their “consultant” for the party, he said, and had helped them decorate for it. Subic’s room also had a desk and a telephone that he said he had used on occasion to call out to other embassies in Tehran. All of this apparently with the guards’ permission!

Hermening helped with some of the Christmas decorations and wrote Christmas cards to his mother and other family members, coached by his student guards.

“Since we have been hostages, we have been shown many documents, pictures, and other information which has convinced us that the ex-shah did indeed commit many crimes in Tehran,” Hermening wrote. “We believe that the students’ demand for the ex-shah’s extradition is justified and we urge all Americans to write to their senators and congressmen and ask them to do all they can to bring about the return of the ex-shah to Iran and obtain our release. The Iranian students are positive that the ex-shah will be returned to Iran and are willing to wait as long as it takes to accomplish this. They have only one demand with no negotiation possible…They will never back down or give in.”

This letter was mailed to twenty American newspapers. When he was asked to make a statement on Christmas morning before the cameras with the others, Hermening said he would say something, but he didn’t want to have to do anything “controversial.”

He was excited about being on TV. Maybe his family would see him. This ordeal was making him famous, he was sure, and with that fame would come opportunity. At the motor pool he met Ebtekar and fell into easy conversation with her. Hermening told her that he was surprised a woman held a position of such importance. He said if she were so successful already, maybe someday she would be a big leader in Iran.

“If I ever get back to the United States, and get into politics, maybe I’ll become a leader there,” he said. He joked that the two of them, years from now, would be shaping world events. Ebtekar laughed gaily at the idea.

The four captives performed precisely as their captors wished. Each read a statement critical of the United States. Both Hermening and Lauterbach read the statements in a flat monotone; Lauterbach had not seen the statement beforehand. The foreign service officer, his hair long and his beard untrimmed, seemed particularly pained to be participating. Plotkin seemed more comfortable but Subic, who sat at the center and held the microphone, appeared to be relaxed and speaking in full earnest.

Some of the statements Hermening read had been prepared for him, and some of it was what he had written, about getting letters from home and receiving medical care when it was needed. The students had added lines about how the American government had sold fertilizer to Iran that killed all its crops. Hermening read on. The statement went on to summarize the American-led coup that unseated Mohammed Mossadeq in 1953, before he was born, and how the United States had placed the shah on the throne and that he and the other hostages were suffering because America refused to own up to its crimes and return the shah.

“It hurts us to have to say that, but that is what we believe to be the situation,” he said. “We will always be Americans and still pray that they make the right decision as soon as possible.”

Clean shaven and neatly groomed, his hair trimmed and parted down the middle, Hermening looked hale and fit, towering over the guards in the room, and despite his wooden performance he did not seem like a man being forced to do something against his will. Although he felt awkward about reading the statement even as the words came out, he figured, Who is going to believe this? Clearly it was being made under duress. So he didn’t worry about it. Maybe his family would see him on TV!

Plotkin read with apparent feeling: “Why is the ex-shah given protection and sanctuary in the United States of America? He is an accused criminal and admitted his abuses of power on Iranian TV before he was dethroned. Why isn’t he extradited like any other alleged criminal would be? The Imam Khomeini and their new government have promised a fair and open international trial with all nations and churches invited to see that justice is done.”

Only glancing at the prepared statement, Subic offered the most dramatic personal testimony. He said that in his short time of traveling in Iran with Lauterbach before the embassy was taken, he had begun to see the evils of the American-supported shah. “We started to see more and more poor people, people without homes, food, education. I asked myself what had the shah done? My thinking started to turn around. My eyes and mind were starting to awake to the truth.”

Subic then stepped around to the front of the table, holding the microphone in one hand and in the other displaying a “special” Christmas card that “the hostages” had made for Khomeini. Smiling, he read from the card: “A Christmas wish especially for you, Imam Khomeini. Merry Christmas. May Christmas bring you lasting joy and lovely memories. Merry Christmas, the American Hostages, 25 December 1979. Tehran, Iran.” If he was aware of how he would appear to his fellow Americans, seething at this prolonged international extortion, Subic showed no sign of it. He seemed proud of himself, cheerful, sincere, and entirely at ease.

In what the students regarded as a “major concession,” they allowed three American clergymen to visit and celebrate Christmas with the captives. All three were chosen, according to a spokesman for Iran’s Revolutionary Council, because of “their militant history against imperialism.” Most famous was the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, the celebrated senior minister of New York City’s Riverside Church. Coffin was a large man with sloped shoulders and long curly dark hair that was retreating fast toward the crown of his head but which still fell thickly over his ears. He did not seem ministerial, with his up-from-the-streets New York accent, earthy humor, and background as an officer in the army and then the CIA, but he had seen the light, left the agency, and entered the ministry, achieving prominence as the chaplain of Yale University and for his civil rights work long before he became nationally known for his often eloquent opposition to the Vietnam War. Accompanying Coffin were the Reverend William Howard, a tall, urbane, dignified African-American minister who headed the National Council of Churches and was a noted civil rights and anti-apartheid activist, and Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, an activist Catholic leader from Detroit famous for his advocacy of liberal issues inside and outside the church. Coffin had defended the hostage takers in public statements in the United States, saying, “We scream about the hostages, but few Americans heard the screams of tortured Iranians.”

Together with the Catholic cardinal of Algiers, they presided over a series of holiday services for hostages who were brought to them in small groups throughout Christmas Day. In session after session, wearing flowing maroon-colored robes, Coffin warned against the vice of “self-pity,” and encouraged the captive Americans to sing along with him as he played the piano and led them in carols. The ceremonies were held in a back room of the warehouse, which Subic had helped decorate, along with the usual wall decorations of anti-American, prorevolutionary slogans. Cameras and lights recorded the event for Iranian TV as armed guards lined the walls looking on happily, convinced they were making the saintliest of gestures, allowing these infidels a Christian celebration. Khomeini, in response to President Carter’s call for Americans to ring church bells in remembrance of the hostages, called for his countrymen to “ring the bells in support of God.”

Many of the hostages were appalled by the event, at being made part of what they saw as a propaganda stunt, but Rick Kupke set aside his resentment when he spotted the treats laid out on the table—brownies, nuts, apples, and oranges. There was even a roasted turkey on a plate! Marine Paul Lewis was impressed enough with the goodies to go through the motions during his ceremony, but ignored Coffin’s exhortation to hold hands with his fellow hostages and sing. Many of the marines refused to sing, and a good number of the hostages showed little emotion or enthusiasm. Coffin hugged each one at the end of the ceremonies, and when he came to Lewis the young marine whispered to him, “It’s all bullshit.” In a brief conversation with Bill Keough, Coffin remarked, jokingly, that he had often longed for an extended period of quiet where he could read and think and contemplate. Keough smiled grimly. It was the remark of a man who had never been taken hostage in a foreign country and threatened daily with trial and execution. At the ceremony he attended, Golacinski leaned over to Reverend Howard and whispered, “Don’t believe what you are seeing. We’re being treated like animals.”

“So I gathered,” said Howard.

The Baptist pastor managed to convey to each group that all of America was intensely concerned with their fate, not just their own families and friends. At each of the sessions, hostages were allowed to write a brief note on a card to their families, which for many would be the first communications since the takeover.

Forbidden to talk about politics or their own situation, Colonel Scott asked Howard, “What’s the price of gasoline in America today?” Scott had thought long and hard about what question to ask if he got the chance, and decided that the current price of oil would help him gauge how events in Iran were playing around the world. Howard looked at the gallery of armed guards and asked them, “I don’t suppose I should answer that question, do you?” Scott was annoyed. Why couldn’t he just have blurted out an answer? Why was he bending over so hard to be helpful to these bastards?

Seeing Scott’s anger, Howard tried to lighten the mood. He said he noticed in looking over the lists of hostages that Scott was from Georgia and began a story about the difficulties he had faced as a young African-American traveling in that state. This further angered Scott, who felt as though the preacher was blaming him for the racism he had encountered.

For some of the hostages, however, the ceremonies were rich with feeling. The songs, no matter how off-key, and the decorations, no matter how impoverished, brought back memories of family and of past Christmases and gave them a fleeting sense of connection with home.

Kathryn Koob fought to hold back tears during her ceremony. She was profoundly sad to be cut off from her world, and yet somehow as a prisoner, isolated from her family and any community of Christians, from familiar Christmas music, the swirl of shopping, cards, parties, and gift giving, the holiday if anything became more meaningful to her, so that as she stood, reunited for the first time in a month with Ann Swift before Bishop Gumbleton, she felt herself trembling so violently that it took all her strength not to break down before the cameras. She balled her hands into fists so tight that her nails cut into her skin.

Several days after the Christmas celebrations, a nearly hourlong film was released and portions played on the big three American TV networks and in Iran. The film had been offered the week before, but the networks balked at paying $21,250 and promising to air the film in full. After a few days, the students dropped the demands and handed over the film. Their propaganda show was meaningless if no one saw it.

On the third floor of the Foreign Ministry, where the three trapped Americans Laingen, Tomseth, and Howland were allowed to watch television, the chargé was shocked. He wrote angrily in his diary that evening, “I think tonight I have learned to hate.”

If the students felt such images were going to affect public opinion in the United States, they were right. Americans were horrified. There was an outpouring of sympathy for the hostages. Bishop Gumbleton explained in press conferences at home that the four men had clearly been forced to make the statements. He told reporters that while the men were reading the statements, one of them [Hermening] had whispered to him, “This is just a put-up job. Don’t pay any attention to what you hear.”

Gumbleton said he had asked, “Aren’t you afraid of what might happen if I report that when I return?”

“Just tell the truth, sir,” the hostage told him. “That’s all we care about.”

Laingen didn’t need the bishop of Detroit to tell him that. He knew what kind of stress his colleagues were under and felt guilty that his own circumstances were so much more comfortable. On Christmas Eve they had been delivered a gift basket from the Spanish ambassador, a wicker basket stuffed with various kinds of Iranian candy, and a visit by the British ambassador, who brought sturdier fare, a basket with a variety of meats and snacks and a bottle of “cough syrup,” which contained a lovely red wine—all the more delicious with dinner that evening after such long deprivation. Coffin, Howard, and Gumbleton paid them a visit, and they talked with the clergymen for hours. Tomseth was impressed with Howard and Gumbleton, whom he found to be sincere and there purely for humanitarian reasons. He was suspicious of Coffin, who had the air of a grandstander about him. It seemed to the veteran diplomat that the famous leftist preacher was playing to his home audience. In one glib aside he had remarked, “This situation is much too serious to be left in the hands of professionals!”

The minister seemed not to appreciate that he had just insulted three foreign service professionals.

“You are being absolutely silly,” Laingen told him.

When they left, Laingen hoped that their visitors, whatever their motives, had been appropriately shocked by the zealotry of the students and the new strange political contours of this land. Islamic fundamentalism posed a threat that transcended the traditional liberal-conservative polarity that had defined Western politics for generations. There was a natural tendency of liberals like Coffin, Howard, and Gumbleton to seek dramatic change and to see any revolutionary as ideological kin, but they needed to be careful in this case about who they were cozying up to. The world was a more complicated place than they imagined. A new form of totalitarianism was taking shape, a religious variation on an ugly twentieth-century theme.

In the end, Coffin, Howard, and Gumbleton would fly home with their own sketchy notions of what was going on in Iran, while Laingen and the others were left behind as its captives.

Vice consul Bob Ode stewed over the Christmas party for days afterward. In the brief chance he had to speak to Coffin—the minister knew he was the eldest of the hostages and had sought him out to ask how he was doing—Ode had said, “If you are under the impression that the students are being kind to us, then you are mistaken.”

Ode’s wedding ring had been returned, but he had not been given back a ring that his parents had given him when he’d turned twenty-one and that he had worn his entire adult life. The naked finger reminded him every day of the injustice. Several days after Christmas he asked for paper and a pen and wrote numerous appeals, each in neatly printed capital letters. He wrote to Coffin, politely thanking him for coming, and then spelled out his misgivings about the ceremony and the minister’s apparent misplaced sympathies. He wrote another to the Washington Post, and others to President Carter and several other likely candidates for president in the coming year.

In one of his letters, Ode expressed thanks for the various cards that had been sent to him and others by strangers from around the United States, all of them promising to pray for their release. “I don’t mean to be unappreciative,” he said, “but what we need most is action—not prayers.”

Despite its obvious propaganda value, John Limbert felt that the Christmas event had also been a genuinely kind gesture by at least some of the students. He found that comforting. It seemed unlikely that after such a public display of charity they would be marched out to be shot any time soon. Even more reassuring was the visit several days after the holiday by Ayatollah Montazari, a chubby, often jolly middle-aged cleric who was reputed to be the first in line to eventually succeed Khomeini. The students were very excited and nervous about the visit. Montazari arrived at the Mushroom Inn with a TV crew in tow and addressed all of the hostages in the basement prison in a calm, friendly way. He was known among the hostages as “Screaming Monty,” because of thundering, feverish orations that drove the devout to great exertions of public prayer and denunciation. In person he was a short man with a face full of blackheads and sprouts of hair projecting from both ears. He reiterated the students’ demand for the return of the shah, and spoke to the hostages of his own years of imprisonment under the old regime, assuring them that they, too, would survive and prosper. When America relented, he said, they all would be released.

Colonel Scott, though relieved to hear that they would eventually be released, found the speech depressing. The bottom line, as he saw it, was that the Iranian clergy were holding fast to the students’ original demand that the “criminal shah” be returned for trial, which meant, as far as he was concerned, a very long stay.

When he finished speaking, Montazari walked around the crowded basement room and shook hands with each of the hostages.

When the cleric approached Limbert, the hostage took his hand and reminded him in Farsi, “We have met before.”

“Yes, I remember,” Montazari said, surprised. “You came with Mr. Precht to see me.”

It was an important moment, Limbert thought, because he knew the students were accusing anyone who had met with Americans from the embassy of spying. Those in the ayatollah’s entourage were visibly shocked. The meeting had taken place weeks before the takeover, and Limbert had accompanied Henry Precht as an interpreter. He had liked the cleric, who seemed less rigid than others he had met. He was impressed by the fact that Montazari seemed to harbor no grudge against the shah, this in a country where grudges seemed the guiding spirit of the day.

Montazari stopped into the room where Hall and Queen were being kept. Hall noted with displeasure that the great man’s entourage was wearing muddy boots. The ayatollah spoke to Hall and Queen through a translator.

“How are you?” he asked.

Hall was never sure what to say or how to act in this situation. Should he curse at the cleric or behave politely? He wanted to conduct himself with dignity, as a professional and an adult, but under these circumstances how exactly was that to be done? He saw some of his colleagues take perverse pride in treating their captors with nothing but scorn and bile, while others had become sickeningly meek and submissive. Some, like Subic, were actually trying to be helpful. He saw himself as somewhere in the middle. So how should he respond? Both he and Queen told Montazari that they were fine, but in a way that made it clear that they were anything but.

“Oh well,” said Montazari, “I stayed in one of the shah’s prisons for two years and I came out alive, and so will you.”

It was meant to be encouraging, but all Hall could think about when he left was, two years?

To butter them up for the ayatollah’s visit, most of the hostages were given mail. Limbert got a letter from his sister and her family, but most of the others weren’t so lucky; they were handed mail addressed to them from perfect strangers who had responded to the plight of their countrymen by writing in a show of support. The embassy was inundated with them. “Dear hostage,” these letters typically began. It was a sweet gesture, and the TV networks at home enjoyed airing pictures of schoolchildren all over America leaning over their desks, pencils working away, sending love and good cheer to their captive countrymen. They arrived at the embassy in sacks piled on pallets, another picture the American TV cameras loved. The gesture created such a flood of mail, however, that real letters from the hostages’ loved ones got lost. Golacinski was somewhat luckier; he received a letter from a young woman he had helped in Morocco, thanking him, but it had been written and mailed before the takeover. It was nice, but in the present circumstances, when he longed desperately to hear some news from home, he was crushed.

Michael Metrinko spent the holiday as he had spent all of his days since the first week of the takeover, locked in a windowless basement storage room by himself. He had been invited to the Christmas party but he wanted no part of a propaganda show. His guards brought him a gift from the ceremony, a plate of turkey and stuffing, cookies, and decorated marshmallows. Metrinko was hungry, and the food was tempting, but he was galled by how self-congratulatory his captors seemed, how generous and noble and proudly Islamic. He accepted the plate, and when they left him alone to eat it he sat staring at it for a long moment.

Then he knocked on the door and said he needed to go to the bathroom. When the door opened, holding the gift plate before him, Metrinko marched down the hall and dumped the contents into the toilet. He made sure the guards saw him do it.

They were furious with him. The gesture prompted a fit of screaming. He had insulted their hospitality and kind intentions. He was crazy! When they shoved him back in his room and slammed the door behind him, Metrinko felt a momentary pang about losing the meal. What a glorious pleasure he had denied himself! But the remorse was nothing next to the pleasure he took in delivering the insult. It had hit home and wounded them and that was something he could take pleasure in for far longer than the food.

Metrinko fed off his anger. It kept him going. Ever since he refused a cigarette on the day of the takeover, the pattern of his captivity was set. He would not accept any rationale for the way he and the others were being treated. It was wrong by every measure, by the standards of international diplomacy, by the cultural standards of Iran, and by common decency. Going cold turkey on his two-pack-a-day cigarette addiction helped, in a perverse way. It fed his irritability and rage. He worked up a whole philosophy of anger. His sense of outrage was his last connection to dignity. A man had to hang on to his capacity to protest, to express his anger, to move up a few steps into the faces of his oppressors. It made him feel better about himself. In time, it was the only thing that did.

As Ebtekar, the hostages’ spokesman, would later put it, Metrinko “hated everyone and was hated in return.” And what he got in return was continued isolation. Metrinko spent hour after hour, day after day, month after month, locked in his tiny storage room with the fluorescent light buzzing overhead through day and night, with no fresh air and no companionship. Boredom was no longer an occasional state of mind; it defined him. He often had books, but one could read for only so long. He fought to find something to do to pass the time and frequently lost. He spent hours sitting and staring at the walls, brooding, lost in fantasy.

Now and then, one of his captors would come into his cell just to talk. They were convinced, of course, that Metrinko was evil. He was a foreigner, an infidel, an American, and they were certain he was “See-ah.” So the conversations were one-sided. They avoided listening to him in the way one would avoid listening to the devil himself. They were there to enlighten him about the evils of the United States and the shah, the terrors of SAVAK, and the virtues of their own revolution—to which Metrinko was in sympathy although they would never believe it. Since he had known many of the leaders of the revolution personally, and knew how many had used the tumult simply to enrich themselves and exact revenge on their enemies or rivals, his sympathy for the ideals of the revolution was laced with cynicism.

For a man who lived to collect information, analyze it, and report it to others, solitude was a particular torment. He began doing calisthenics to fill the time and to wear himself out enough to sleep. He lost all sense of day and night. He would sleep for an hour or so, wake up, prop the big air mattress against the wall, and run in place and do sit-ups for an hour or so—he was doing hundreds of sit-ups a day. His time was spent alternately sleeping, running in place, doing push-ups and sit-ups, reading, brooding, going to the toilet, and waiting for food. He seized on any opportunity to break the tedium. Given some colored pencils, he began drawing on the walls. Using his food bowl, a glass, or a dish, he would trace interlocking circles, forming elaborate patterns, and then carefully color them in. He began a mental project. At home in Olyphant, Pennsylvania, his family owned a huge building, a onetime inn, with more than fifty rooms. He loved the place, and decided to completely renovate and decorate it, room by room. He remembered every corner of it vividly from his childhood. He tore wings off the building, stripping it down in his imagination to its original structure, then rebuilt the wings from scratch. He picked out colors for the walls, furniture, and rugs, redesigned the kitchens…

Books were the only consistent diversion from his own thoughts, and he devoured them. He read Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War, a massive nine-hundred-page volume, in two days, then opened the first page and began again. He read the Bible and reread the New Testament several times. He pored over the Psalms, committing certain favorites to memory. Poetry was a source of great pleasure, because he could read and reread it with increased enjoyment. In a pile of books he was shown, he found The Book of Living Verse and A Little Treasure of American Poetry and never returned them. He practically wore them out. He read Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and found its myriad accounts of men coping with captivity very useful in dealing with his own. He was pleased to read, for instance, that in captivity Solzhenitsyn thought mostly about his stomach. A myth about imprisonment is that isolation and deprivation incline men to great spiritual and philosophical insights, that in solitude the mind settles into great thoughts. Metrinko obsessed about food. He would think about lunch for three hours before it came: What will they bring for lunch? How long until they do? Will it be hot or cold? Then he would savor the memory of the meal for two hours after it was eaten, at which point it was time to start thinking about dinner. He felt guilty about the smallness of his thoughts and was relieved to read that he was not alone. The food was not bad, lots of rice and bread, occasionally a stew, but Metrinko’s weight plummeted. He dropped thirty pounds in the first month of captivity. His jeans drooped badly and his captors had taken away his belt. He bunched up the waist in front and fastened it with a paper clip.

He welcomed the interrogation sessions and drew them out for as long as he could. Anything was a welcome break from his solitude and boredom. Even the prospect of being put on trial and executed didn’t disturb him. He found himself perversely looking forward to it. The trial would at least be interesting. Months of sitting alone had made him desperate for any kind of stimulation, even death.

When he lashed out at his interrogators or guards, he would be punished. Sometimes he was dragged out into the basement hall and beaten. Once, after a particularly vicious outburst in which he had insulted the Ayatollah Khomeini and refused to wear a blindfold, he was handcuffed for two weeks. It was misery. His wrists were clamped in metal at his front, and after a day or so they rubbed his skin raw. Any movement that disturbed the cuffs became painful. He couldn’t sleep comfortably. There was no place to put his hands that felt natural, and when he changed position he was shocked awake by the pain. When he moved his bowels he could not wipe himself clean, so he developed a painful rash. It was hard to eat. His food would come in a bowl, and he had a spoon, but it was difficult to put the spoon to his mouth without spilling it back into the bowl.

He endured this for two weeks.

11. Invasion and Opportunity

Charlie Beckwith decided to give his men a break for Christmas. Delta had been preparing for the rescue mission nonstop for more than a month, and the basic plan was in place, despite lingering problems with fuel delivery and hiding choppers and men outside Tehran on the second day of the mission. The Delta major from Texas, Logan Fitch, and his men had been completely out of touch with their families since they had been summoned home from their “training” on the ski slopes in Colorado.

Fitch’s wife, Sandi, was nine months pregnant. She knew that the nature of her husband’s work meant he would simply drop off the face of the earth from time to time, and accepted it, but under the circumstances he was enormously relieved to have permission to return to Fort Bragg. None of the men was allowed to discuss where they had been or what they were doing, but nearly everyone around them understood.

Two other things happened on Christmas Day that would have important consequences for the hostage crisis, one of them shockingly public and the other a well-kept secret.

The public event was the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan, the nation that shared Iran’s eastern border and that, with Iran, lived in the Russian shadow. Concerned about a growing Islamist fundamentalist movement in that country, about four thousand Russian troops had seized government buildings in Kabul and installed a new, Soviet-approved leadership. It was news enough to chase Iran off American front pages and posed an entirely new, threatening, and unexpected twist to the confusion in that part of the world. There had been fears of Iran’s clerics cozying up to the Soviets in the previous weeks, but they would certainly respond with alarm to this assault on Islam and the implied threat of an expanded Russian presence along their border. With ethnic unrest in provinces along the Soviet border to its north, and with mounting military probes by the Soviet-backed regime of Saddam Hussein to their west, Iran’s world of trouble had just grown darker.

As had America’s. The Soviet invasion altered the strategic map. Iran and the United States were no longer officially on speaking terms, but where the Soviet Union was concerned they had shared interests. Resistance to the Soviet putsch would come from the region’s Islamic fundamentalists, which meant that there was not only less danger of Iran falling into the Soviet sphere, but incentive to form a tactical alliance with the West. The stakes were high. Brzezinski had long feared that Moscow would take advantage of Iran’s confusion and lack of American backing to make a move on the Middle East, and Afghanistan looked as if it could be just a first step. In the White House, they war-gamed what the United States would do if the Soviet army pushed into Iran, bearing down on the valuable oil fields to the west. If it came to that, Iran’s relationship with the United States would be irrelevant. The Soviets would have to be stopped. There was even discussion of employing tactical nuclear weapons to close potential gaps in the Zagros Mountains and bottle up a Soviet thrust.

The other significant event was the arrival of two men, Hector Villalon, a wealthy Argentinian expatriate and Cuban cigar distributor living in France, and Christian Bourget, a French lawyer and human rights activist, at the international airport in Panama City. They had flown there to deliver a formal request from Iran to Omar Torrijos, asking his government to extradite the shah and send him back to Tehran to face revolutionary justice. It was at best a perfunctory gesture. Torrijos was not about to send the shah back to Tehran, but that was the visitors’ only announced purpose. What they told Marcel Saliman, a Torrijos assistant, was something else. They said they knew that there was no chance Panama would return the ailing shah, but the formalities might serve as a pretext to cover secret negotiations to free the American hostages. Iran was ready to talk.

Both men were friendly with Foreign Minister Ghotbzadeh, who, they explained, was officially hamstrung by the radicals who had seized the embassy. He and other moderates were being driven out of power by these young militants, who with their weekly press conference and “disclosures” were plucking them off one by one, exposing them as “traitors” and spies because they had met at one time or another with an American official. Ghotbzadeh wanted the sideshow to end. Sending the hostages home would disband the students and effectively end their reign of political terror.

Villalon and Bourget wanted to know if Torrijos could arrange a secret meeting with Hamilton Jordan. Why Jordan? They said that Ghotbzadeh did not trust the U.S. State Department, which he believed was controlled by Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller, and knew that through Jordan they would have the president’s ear.

In the second week of January, Hamilton Jordan, the president’s chief of staff, was contacted by an old friend in Panama, who urged him to meet privately and soon with an aide to Panama’s dictator Torrijos. He wouldn’t say what it was about, but Jordan was intrigued enough to fly down to Homestead Air Force Base, twenty-five miles south of Miami, on a mystery mission. Negotiations to hand over control of the Panama Canal in 1977 had built close ties between the Torrijos regime and the Carter administration, and the dictator had recently done the administration a favor by agreeing to accept the shah.

In a nondescript brick office building Jordan was introduced to Marcel Saliman and to Villalon and Bourget. Since his initial meeting with the men, Saliman had flown to Tehran and seen Ghotbzadeh, confirming for himself that the link promised by the two French-speaking visitors was real. Despite all the public rhetoric to the contrary, Saliman now told Jordan, Iran was eager to begin quiet talks about the hostages. What the two unofficial emissaries from Paris had suggested was that Iran be permitted to file legal papers in Panama seeking the extradition of the shah. The request would go nowhere, Saliman promised, but the process would provide cover for the secret negotiations.

It was a slender thread, but the Carter administration had few other prospects. The new year had begun with bewilderment and disappointment. The president had turned his efforts in December to the United Nations, where the administration had mounted a full-court diplomatic press on Iran. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim had agreed to personally intervene, and with the prospect of draconian economic sanctions in the balance it was hoped that Iran would bow to the weight of world opinion. Hopes were also high because the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan seemed to powerfully illustrate the threat posed by the great bear to the north, and now east. Soviet forces could easily push into Iran and grab the rich oil fields of the Persian Gulf; that had always been a big part of the logic in making the shah’s army and air force effectively a regional branch of the U.S. military. Now, without American help, Iran’s only ally was Allah.

These threats amounted to nothing in the febrile atmosphere of Tehran, however, where the alliance with Allah was considered very real and entirely sufficient. Instead of a breakthrough, the dignified Austrian diplomat, despite being wreathed in the prestige of the world body, had encountered nothing but suspicion and hostility. One Iranian observed the gaunt secretary-general “trembling like a leaf in the autumn wind” on an enforced tour of a graveyard to view the plots of those martyred in the revolution. He was escorted around Iran as a prop in the ongoing propaganda war. One morning on TV he was shown meeting “victims of SAVAK torture sessions,” a room filled with the disabled and deformed, many of them victims not of the secret police but of accidents and birth defects. Death threats, angry denunciations, and riots chased Waldheim from Iran a day before his mission was supposed to conclude. He had met with the Revolutionary Council, but Khomeini refused to see him. Waldheim returned to New York shaken and empty-handed—“I’m glad to be back,” he said, “especially alive”—even though from the White House’s perspective he had all but groveled before the mullahs. That impression would be reinforced weeks later when administration officials received a tape recording of Waldheim’s session with the council; in a memo to Carter, Hamilton Jordan would describe the secretary-general’s presentation as “apologetic, defensive, and at points obsequious.” The students, holding forth from their conference room at the so-called den of spies, called the secretary-general’s visit “a vague and suspicious trip,” and denounced him as “an American pawn.”

“We are not afraid of economic sanctions,” a student spokesman said. “They are not important for us or our people. We can stand it.” His comments apparently reflected the public mood accurately. On January 5, an estimated one million Iranians marched in Tehran to demonstrate steadfast support for the students. The hostages would go nowhere until the United States handed over the shah.

It was a sentiment shared by at least some Americans. A group of ministers from the United States had visited Iran seeking a “spiritual resolution” of the crisis and returned home in January with words of encouragement for the captors. The Reverend John Walsh of Princeton, New Jersey, called for the shah to be returned to Iran immediately for a show trial and what would be certain execution.

“Let justice roll,” he said.

Having thumbed their nose at the prospect of punitive sanctions, Iranian revolutionaries then had the pleasure of watching international willpower swoon. Waldheim himself argued to Carter that sanctions would only strengthen Iranian resolve. When Khomeini threatened to cut off oil exports to any nation that voted for sanctions, oil-dependent Japan quaked. The Soviet Union then twice vetoed the measure at the UN Security Council. Thus did the world organization dedicated to diplomacy acquiesce in the kidnapping of diplomats. When Carter proposed an economic boycott outside the auspices of the toothless UN, this, too, met with a cool reception. European nations found one reason after another to back away from holding Iran accountable. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, the captive American foreign mission was expendable.

The only bright spot came at mid-month, when Iran’s Revolutionary Council decided to expel all American reporters from the country, accusing them of “biased reporting.” As far as the White House was concerned, any easing of the media’s fixation on the story was a relief.

So Jordan was more than ready to grasp at this straw from Panama. A burly Georgia lawyer with a round baby face and a youthful crop of dark hair, he had signed on years earlier as a driver in Carter’s first, failed campaign for governor of Georgia. With a combination of native shrewdness and mutual loyalty, his role had risen with the candidate’s political fortunes, becoming Carter’s chief political strategist and managing his successful campaign for the White House. Unpretentious, informal, and blunt, his impatience for the niceties of wielding power in a tripartite government had made him few friends in the capital, where he was regarded by some as an arrogant amateur. But Jordan was a skillful behind-the-scenes horse trader, a man willing, despite his relatively provincial background, to throw himself into the most complicated matters, always with the complete trust of his boss.

Jordan told Saliman that even beginning an extradition process might spook the shah.

“If he gets scared and asks to come back to the States, we’d have to accept him,” he complained. Jordan had worked hard to ease the ailing former monarch across the border.

“Don’t worry,” said Saliman, promising that the extradition process would be purely for show. “Besides, I don’t even think the Iranians want him back.”

He explained that the return of the shah to Iran, a year after his departure, would set off a big fight among Iranians over what to do with him. “They wouldn’t know whether to torture him, shoot him, or hang him,” he said.

Six days later, Jordan was in a London hotel room meeting again with Villalon, who explained how the embassy seizure had strengthened the hand of religious extremists in Iran against more moderate, democratic elements, who were eager to see it ended. Bourget arrived later that day from Tehran, and the two men—Villalon, a dandy with jet-black hair combed straight back on his head, and Bourget, who looked like a hippie lawyer, his head framed with bushy shoulder-length hair and a long thick beard—delivered their message for obtaining the release of the hostages: “Return the shah to Iran.”

Jordan’s hopes deflated.

“It is absolutely impossible!” he said, visibly irritated. Among those around Carter, Jordan had been the one most sanguine about this clandestine avenue. Now he felt duped.

The more they talked, however, Jordan realized that the demand had been offered only as a necessary opening gambit. Again, Villalon and Bourget explained that the remnants of Bazargan’s crowd and the more secular men who had worked for Khomeini in Paris prior to the revolution were still in the fight. Though Abolhassan Bani-Sadr had been removed from the Foreign Ministry, he still held an important post and was a serious candidate for president, as was Ghotbzadeh, who had once been his boss in Paris. Under the new constitution, the president of Iran held considerably less power than the equivalent position in the United States, because the entire new government would remain subordinate to Khomeini, but the office was still important. Both Bani-Sadr and Ghotbzadeh, they said, privately deplored the taking of hostages but had to be careful about expressing that opinion publicly. The best they could do was applaud the takeover and suggest that the point had been made, as Bani-Sadr had already done. Ghotbzadeh was not prepared to go that far, but he was ambitious. An American concession of some kind might improve his standing prior to the vote, which could lead to a breakthrough. The moderates were, in any event, willing to talk. But before even considering a release of the hostages, they were demanding an international commission to study the crimes of the shah.

Here was where a strategic retreat by the White House might break the stalemate, they suggested. Carter had already said that he would not oppose such a commission, but only after the hostages were released. If he were to back off that position and allow the UN commission to visit Iran and meet with government officials, the student captors, and the hostages, there was a chance that the situation might improve.

The meeting ended with an agreement to continue talking. Bourget impressed Jordan with his access to Ghotbzadeh by picking up the phone in the hotel room and promptly getting the Iranian foreign minister on the line. The French lawyer tried to convince Ghotbzadeh to speak to Jordan, but the embattled Iranian declined. Talking directly to American officials had become a dangerous business in Iran.