Guests of the Ayatollah

1. They Started It, We Ended It

After his questioners had backed off from beating the soles of his feet with a rubber hose, CIA station chief Tom Ahern was never again threatened with torture. His interrogators regularly promised him trial and execution but, for whatever reason, beating him was a line they would no longer cross. It surprised Ahern, because their revolution was hardly squeamish about such things. But it pleasantly surprised him to discover that his captors had limits…at least so far. He still did not expect to leave Tehran alive.

His chief interrogator, Hussein Sheikh-ol-eslam, seemed convinced that Ahern’s goal had been nothing short of assassinating Khomeini, derailing their holy revolution, and installing another American puppet. They did not just suspect this, they knew it, and what they wanted from Ahern was the whole plot, in detail, along with the names of every traitorous coconspirator and spy.

It was not so much the fear of death that undid him. What finally broke Ahern’s will was the fear of a public death, of a show trial and execution; this the singularly private man found particularly horrifying. It unnerved him. He had seen the grotesque images broadcast and printed in Tehran of the regime’s enemies being shot, hung, or beheaded, particularly the Bahai, a religious minority. He knew the fear stemmed partially from what such images would do to his mother, his wife, and the rest of his family. But there was a deeper personal revulsion that he couldn’t fully explain. It was the thing that worked at him most.

The fear and the pressure wore on Ahern until he schemed how to take his own life, which seemed the only way to escape a grim public spectacle. He played with the idea of electrocuting himself. He had found a paper clip and thought that if he put it into an electric outlet and dipped his other hand in a can of water on top of the radiator, that might do it. He never got to the point of trying it, but he rehearsed it and decided that if it appeared as though they were going to make good on their threats he would electrocute himself first. At one point he gave up eating and drinking for four days but was surprised to discover how hard it was to starve. He was a slender man, and naturally ascetic, so he ate very little anyway. After several days the hunger became uncomfortable, but he hadn’t lost much strength or mental acuity. He decided that well before he died he would become terribly disabled, still at the mercy of his captors but severely damaged. The problem was that he wasn’t suicidal, and couldn’t make himself so, no matter how frightened and depressed he felt. No matter how bad things got, he would rather live and hope.

For some reason, the questions he dreaded most in these interrogations never came. The draft of his cable to CIA director Stansfield Turner, the one he had left on his desk on the day of the takeover, was enough all by itself to condemn him. The paragraph about waiting for the military situation to settle down before finding new allies, and the mention of Ayatollah Shariatmadari, who had emerged as such a rival to Khomeini, was especially damaging. He expected to have the document placed on the desk before him at any moment. In between sessions he would pace his cell working out ways to deny and evade what he had written, ways of limiting the damage it might do. He set detailed priorities of those things he would admit, under duress, those things he would admit only under severe duress, and those things he would try never to admit. Among the latter were names of agents and the secret project under way to purchase land in the mountains and get the clandestine Soviet missile observation project up and running. But his interrogators never brought these things up. They weren’t interested in what he had actually been doing; they were interested only in what they thought he was doing.

At one point he was moved downstairs from his old chancery office to a small windowless closet either on the first floor or in the basement, he wasn’t sure. It rattled him more than he imagined it would. It was a little like being placed in his own coffin. It was then, early in the new year, that he began to buckle.

Early on, Ahern had admitted who he was. He knew that alone probably meant he would eventually be killed, but he saw it as a first step down a long road. He would give in little by little, buying himself time. His identity and role were the most obvious bits of information they already had. That much was clear from the documents they kept bringing him from the State Department files, week after week, and, eventually, some of the restored ones that he and Daugherty had shredded. It was pointless to keep denying the obvious.

The students held a press conference to announce their outing of the embassy’s CIA officers. They displayed Ahern’s false Belgian passport and showed off the copy of Laingen’s cable identifying Daugherty and Kalp by name. In the United States, these documents were displayed on TV along with the allegations without much comment. Network reporters noted that Ahern had been an Eagle Scout as a boy, and that he had attended Notre Dame University before joining the foreign service. Daugherty was shown in his marine uniform. The reports neither denied nor acknowledged that the men were spies and did not explain that it was standard practice for agency officers to work at American embassies under cover of the foreign service.

Despite a national obsession with the story, there was at this point little or no reporting in the United States, on TV or in print, about the revelations in the “spy den” documents. While they contained nothing like the conspiracy theories the students imagined, they were revealing. They confirmed the agency’s presence in Iran, which was hardly surprising, and in many cases unveiled what it had been doing, or trying to do. One of the most significant revelations was the agency’s relationship with Simon Farzami, a Jewish journalist known in the agency files as SDTRAMP. Farzami had been raised in Lebanon and Switzerland and first came to Iran after World War Two with his brother, David, to visit their stepfather’s brother, Ebrahim Hakimi, who later became prime minister of Iran. Both brothers had been hired by PARS, the Iranian news agency, and over the years Farzami had worked for a variety of foreign newspapers and agencies, including the Associated Press and London’s Daily Telegraph. David died young, but Simon had a long career in Tehran, becoming editor of the French-language newspaper Journal de Teheran. He was an avuncular, sophisticated, portly man who had excellent contacts in local power circles, having once served in the Ministry of Information, and played both sides during the Cold War. His connection with the CIA was long-standing, but at times he had been a kind of double agent, undertaking two trips to Israel at the behest of the Soviets to “gather information on Israeli policies,” and to “establish contacts” with Israeli journalists and academics. He was paid 120,000 rials (about $1,700) for those trips, money that, according to one of the reassembled documents, he had been “allowed to keep” by the CIA—suggesting that the agency owned a certain priority of allegiance. Ahern had met with Farzami several times in his four months, a new station chief on unfamiliar terrain reaching out to a long-standing source for general guidance. It seemed to Ahern that the older gentleman enjoyed their orientation sessions. Farzami was not happy with his country’s drift toward Islamic theocracy, and he appeared to be eager to offer whatever help he could. He deciphered for Ahern the byzantine Shiite subculture that had been thrust so unexpectedly into power, and he met with Barry Rosen, the embassy’s press attaché, to discuss setting up an international newspaper in Switzerland that would present, according to one of the documents, “a true image” of Iran’s revolution to the West.

Nevertheless, these relatively benign ties with the agency were enough to spell doom for Farzami unless he had fled. Ahern tried to buy him more time, telling Sheikh-ol-eslam that he couldn’t remember SDTRAMP’s last name, only his first. He said he couldn’t remember the name of the newspaper where he worked. He was helped in this sort of stalling by Sheikh-ol-eslam’s obsession with uncovering a plot to assassinate or unseat Khomeini. This is what the students were determined to find and were convinced existed. So the minor revelations in the documents were sometimes overlooked. In Farzami’s case, however, it was not. Here was a person who had collaborated with the devil. He was arrested, charged with deliberately “mistranslating” government documents and with spying for the CIA. He would be executed by firing squad on December 16, 1980.

There were others. Under further questioning Ahern confirmed the identity of SDROTTER/4, a tribal leader from southwest Iran named Khosrow Qashqai, who had been encouraged and funded by the agency in his efforts to rouse local resistance to the emerging mullah-led regime; Rear Admiral Ahmad Mandani, a former governor of Khuzestan and more recently a losing candidate for president in the January elections; and Amir Entezam, a diplomat who was involved with the effort to establish a Swiss-based Iranian newspaper. Qashqai would be captured in the summer of 1980 and publicly hanged in 1982. Mandani fled Iran and eventually settled in the United States. Entezam was arrested and jailed for life. The documents would reveal, and Ahern would confirm, earlier efforts made by the CIA to recruit Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the current finance minister, who had been helpful to the agency in the past. Ahern’s interrogation assumed a pattern. Instead of pushing him to tell them everything he knew, they would present him with documents and information that in most cases he would eventually confirm. He tried to confine himself to acknowledging only information they already had found on their own.

In time, Ahern rationalized his capitulation in another way. By helping them understand exactly what the “spy den” documents said, it might dispel some of their wilder fantasies about American spying in Iran. The contacts with Farzami and the others had been exploratory at best, and though there was no doubt that the United States was supporting Qashqai’s efforts to oppose the new regime, and had hopes of doing more in the future, they did not reveal the plot the students were looking for.

Ahern’s interrogations gradually ended. There would be days between sessions, then weeks. Finally, Ahern figured they were done with him, and his captivity became a struggle to fill time.

He was kept alone at all times. During the long months of interrogations he used every minute preparing for the next session, working out ways to delay, confuse, or avoid giving his captors information, but once the questioning stopped he was on his own with the four walls. He coped by finding activities that would bring him some lasting personal benefit, so that if he were ever released he could say that he had not wasted his time. He knew how to play the piano and was a lover of classical music, and when he asked his guards if he could have some of the sheet music he had kept in his apartment they shocked him by handing it over within days. He spent hours memorizing Schumann’s Carnaval and piano works by Chopin, playing the music in his mind. He was given access to the library Richard Queen had set up in the chancery, and he chose mostly classics, plays by William Shakespeare, novels by Charles Dickens. He read Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre twice in French, and then, discovering two books of German grammar in the library, he set about teaching himself German, his wife’s first language. It would be something he could surprise her with if he was ever released.

He did calisthenics and high-stepped around the room to simulate jogging, which he found had psychological benefits even greater than physical ones. It raised his spirits. If only to help break the monotony, he skipped the exercises every tenth day. He had always been a light eater, but now found himself voraciously hungry. The guards let him eat as much as he wanted, so Ahern would request three or four hamburgers at a sitting, or multiple servings of chicken. He had always been slender, and it seemed now that no matter how much he ate he did not gain weight. His face had always been slightly concave, and now there were caverns under his cheekbones and his eyes seemed to recede into deep sockets. His thin, straight brown hair grew down to his shoulders. He looked old, worn, harmless. He became emotionally numb.

Mornings were the worst times. He would be awakened early for breakfast, usually flat bread, butter, jam, and tea, and taken to the bathroom; then he would go back to sleep until about noon. After awaking again he would begin his routines—exercising, reading, “playing” music, “watching” a play. Sometimes he would read until three or four in the morning. Late at night was the best time. There were few interruptions from the guards. Ahern could drift off in his books or into his imagination until his eyes fell shut.

Ahern’s colleague Bill Daugherty was making his own compromises, and dealing with the consequences. On the night of Valentine’s Day, Sheikh-ol-eslam brought the CIA officer a standard State Department cable and asked him about the long lists of code at the top.

“It’s just in-house stuff,” said Daugherty. “It tracks where the cable originated, where it was sent, and how it was routed. It’s all very simple.”

Ahern had said the same thing but Sheikh-ol-eslam wasn’t buying it. Daugherty grew impatient with him. He deliberately talked to him like a child. He said that if Sheikh-ol-eslam had ever had any experience with a large organization, he would know that such tracking policies were routine.

“You such a smart guy, why are you bothering me with things like this?” he said.

“You aren’t being very helpful,” the gap-toothed Iranian complained.

“No, I’m not,” Daugherty admitted.

“You don’t like doing this?”

“No, of course not.”

He felt bad about any help he had given them, and when he asked about the fate of Victoria Bassiri, the Iranian woman whom he had met with the previous summer, Sheikh-ol-eslam told him curtly, “She was shot.”

Shot? Daugherty was stunned. He pictured the woman laughing with him over dinner, doing her limited best to help him understand the shifting sands of local politics. She had been killed for that? Why hadn’t she fled the country immediately when the embassy was taken? Maybe she had stayed because of her husband and children. Perhaps she believed her connection to the embassy had been so insignificant that it would never be noticed, or that he would have been able to protect her identity. If so, she had paid for those misjudgments with her life. Daugherty was appalled. She had done so little, nothing of consequence. He had tried hard to convince Sheikh-ol-eslam and the others that Bassiri was not a serious spy, hardly even worth their effort. She had never even been asked to gather sensitive information, assuming she would have been in a position to do so. He felt terrible about it but finally concluded that spies accepted such risks. How could she have been so foolish to stay?

After he had spelled out his real job, Daugherty was left alone for months. While the zealots did their best to spin conspiracy theories out of the mostly pedestrian cables and memos, the documents utterly exploded the myth of CIA omnipresence and omnipotence. They revealed that the agency’s operation in Iran in November 1979 consisted of four Americans (one of the officers had been on home leave when the embassy was taken) who had been desperately knocking on doors and offering cash to anyone willing to help explain to them what was going on. Sheikh-ol-eslam found it incredible that the vaunted CIA had not one officer in his country that could speak Farsi. But the cables confirmed it. Their evil dragon had turned out to be a mouse. Daugherty sensed a palpable feeling of disappointment.

Always a solitary soul, he didn’t mind spending his days and nights alone. When he was a child and his mother disciplined him by sending him to his room, she would complain that it fell short of real punishment because he seemed actually to enjoy it. As an adult he had always valued the time he spent living by himself. When he had gone back to school after returning from Vietnam he was older than most of his classmates and didn’t have much in common with them, so he spent a lot of time alone, studying. In the chancery now there were plenty of books to choose from, and Daugherty was an avid reader. Books made all the difference. In his survival training he heard the story of Private Jacob DeShazer, who had survived the daring Doolittle raid over Tokyo early in World War Two and had been kept in solitary confinement by Japanese troops in China for forty months with absolutely nothing to do but stare at the walls. Daugherty felt that would have driven him crazy. But so long as he could escape into books he was okay.

He read voraciously. To his deep delight he found in the old high school library an edition of the two-volume classic Kelly and Harbison study The American Constitution: Its Origins and Development, which carried him off into his favorite field of study for as long as he cared to read. He used the back of these books to record a diary of his captivity, noting the passing days and, in a personal shorthand, any events that he wanted to remember. He also delved into novels and history books, including many that under normal circumstances he probably never would have read, such as the great novels of Charles Dickens and mysteries by Agatha Christie and Ruth Rendell. He plowed through thick volumes on British and American history and became particularly engrossed in a biography of Blanche of Castile, the wife of French King Louis VIII and the mother of Louis XI, Saint Louis. He resented being held captive, but he was grateful for the long stretches of time he was left alone. He believed that sharing a small space with one or two others would have been far more difficult.

Occasionally, Sheikh-ol-eslam would stop by to chat. Their conversations had become relaxed. He would ask if Daugherty was getting enough food, or sometimes simply ask how he was doing. He seemed to enjoy their exchanges.

One night between Christmas and New Year’s, Sheikh-ol-eslam confessed that he was disappointed in the response their action had provoked in the United States.

“How can we convince the American people that what we’ve done is justified?” he asked.

On previous occasions, Sheikh-ol-eslam had told Daugherty of riots in the streets at home, stories he apparently believed. He had been at Berkeley in the late Vietnam War period when the campus produced some of the most extreme leftist rhetoric, and had come home with the belief that overthrowing the shah would be an important blow in the world revolution. So why weren’t young Americans taking to the streets in solidarity?

“You’re crazy,” Daugherty said. “You want me to help you with your propaganda to convince my countrymen that what you’ve done is right?”

The CIA officer’s days fell into an almost comfortable routine, a breakfast of bread, butter, jam or cheese, and tea. He would then lean his sleeping pallet against a wall and spend several hours pacing back and forth. Ten paces took him from one corner of the room to the other, and he would walk until his feet were sore or he grew tired. The room was never cleaned, so in time his exercise rubbed a smooth path through the layer of dust on the floor. As he walked he developed elaborate fantasies to occupy his mind. He designed houses, imagined them being built, landscaped the yards, furnished the interiors, and chose colors for the walls and rugs. Then he would imagine parties in them, inviting beautiful women. He thought a lot about flying, dreaming up record-breaking challenges for himself, such as breaking the speed record in a turbo-prop plane from Honolulu to Dallas, deciding what kind of plane would be best and how to configure the gas tanks and electronic instrumentation, calculating the speed and fuel-consumption ratios, what altitudes to fly, how best to utilize the prevailing winds, and so on.

Applying the Kelly and Harbison volumes, he invented an imaginary class in constitutional studies with eight students. He was the professor. In his mind, lost completely in the fantasy, he would say, “Okay, today the course is judicial politics and strategies and we’re going to talk about building a consensus on the Supreme Court.” Then he would lecture on a case where initially the court had been divided, not only between conservatives and liberals but where there were opinions all over the map. Then he would explain how the justices hammered out compromises and arrived at an opinion. His imagination improved with exercise and soon he had the sessions fleshed out in extraordinary detail. He had just finished graduate school the year before, so the setting was familiar to him. He gave the students names and personalities, roughly based on students he had known at Claremont. He had a class clown and a student who was very serious, always taking notes, but who never spoke. Other students were frequent questioners, and held differing political philosophies, and there would be arguments and debates that he would moderate and steer. In those months he felt his mind was as sharp as it had ever been. Between the reading, thinking, and imaginary lecturing, he arrived at insights and ideas that had never before occurred to him.

This would occupy Daugherty until lunch, which tended to be American-style food that he assumed had been seized after thousands of American advisory troops had left Iran in the previous years. Some of it had been sitting around for too long. There was plenty of it, but much of it was unappetizing and he had begun to lose weight. He spent some time each afternoon picking the worms out of his powdered milk. He would repeat his morning routines after lunch, which kept him occupied until dinner. He considered how he might handle this crisis if he were president of the United States, drawing on his familiarity with military assets—what U.S. forces could and could not do. It galled him that he and the others were still in captivity as the weeks and months droned by. How could the American government let so many of its emissaries be abducted by these kids? How could Carter have allowed the shah in? And then he’d think of the anti-American graffiti he’d seen on the walls and the insults and he’d work up a slow boil over it. He thought the way to go would be to coerce Iran into backing down. As president, he would summon the Iranian military attaché, bring him into the Oval Office, and say, “General, in five hours I am going to launch all the B-52s and it’s going to take them fourteen hours to fly to Iranian airspace. So that’s nineteen hours. If within those nineteen hours our Americans, all of them, are not out of your country in good health, then the B-52s are going to destroy Qom, Isfahan, and Mashhad, or the oil refineries.”

Then as president he would turn to his chief of staff and the chairman of the joint chiefs and order them to take the Iranian attaché to the tank in the Pentagon and let him monitor the B-52s’ flight so that he could see them taking off and moving out over the ocean. Daugherty imagined the Iranian general watching the bombers reach Europe and then close in on Iranian airspace. He would know that it was not a bluff. Sometimes in Daugherty’s mind the general would rush to a phone and convey the importance of immediately releasing the hostages, and other times he would have him sit and watch as the B-52s dropped their devastating loads on the country’s cities. Daugherty would play through the scenarios in his mind. The one thing he considered too far-fetched for serious consideration was a rescue attempt. He had heard, of course, about the Israeli raid at Entebbe, and figured if commandos stormed the building he would sit with his hands in the air. But Iran was a landlocked country, and the distance from Tehran to any nonhostile border was probably four hundred to five hundred miles. He knew there were no helicopters for a mission like that. Even if they had such choppers, in-flight refueling over enemy territory was generally considered too risky. Rescue was, he thought, practically impossible.

Sometimes in the afternoons he would nap. On the days when they let him take a shower he would step into the water fully clothed, soap up his shirt and pants, peel them off, wring them out, do the same with his underwear, and then wash himself. He had the yellow Brooks Brothers shirt he had been wearing on the day of the takeover and a pair of brown polyester pants, and the guards had brought him jeans, a sweatshirt, and several changes of underwear from his apartment. When he was finished showering he would don the dry set of clothes and carry the wet ones back to his room, where he would stretch them out to dry. After dinner he walked again. It helped tire him out enough to sleep.

Daugherty got along reasonably well with his guards. They tended to be very young men, in their teens or early twenties, and were educated far better in math and the sciences than in history or politics and had absorbed from their religious leaders strong opinions about people, places, and events about which they knew next to nothing. They had wild fantasies about the United States and the CIA. Most spoke little or no English, so even if he had wanted to converse with them he could not. There was little point anyway, he thought. Anything out of the mouth of an American was automatically suspect, and none of the guards he met showed the slightest propensity for critical thinking. Their minds traveled on fixed rails. To think for themselves or critically examine their own paths was nothing less than sinful, a temptation to stray from the One True Path. How do you converse with people like that? For a time, a guard was posted in the room with him twenty-four hours a day. Daugherty would do his best to make the poor young man’s life miserable, offending his sense of modesty by wearing only boxer shorts, breaking wind, or coughing on him. Once, suffering a cold, he went out of his way to spread infection and was pleased to hear some days later that his guard had succumbed to the virus. Mostly, he minded his own business and tried to avoid trouble.

He wasn’t always successful. The room where he spent the most time that winter was on the ground floor of the chancery’s back side; its windows faced the embassy grounds. It had ceilings that were at least fifteen feet high and the windows were accordingly very tall. The bottom of his window was about four feet from the floor. On mild days he managed to open the window a few inches to let in some fresh air. At night he would sit beneath it enjoying the slight breeze and listening to the guards outside laughing, talking, and toying incessantly with the bolts on their rifles. Occasionally someone fired a shot, but given the way they handled their weapons Daugherty assumed that most often it was an accident.

One night, as he lay beneath the window reading, a breeze from the cracked window was bothering him so he shifted the curtain in an effort to block it. From outside, it looked as though he were sneaking a peek outside, which was strictly forbidden. As he resumed reading the door to his room flung open and five or six armed guards stomped in, expecting to catch him in the act.

“What’s the problem?” he asked.

“You are looking out,” said one of the guards in his tentative English.

Daugherty looked up at the window, three feet over his head.

“I am not. I’m reading.” He laughed.

The men pulled him to his feet and approached him with handcuffs and a blindfold. He knew the drill. When a rule was broken he would be cuffed, blindfolded, and left to sit that way for hours. This time, innocent, Daugherty fought back. He pulled the lead guard over to the window and showed him how the breeze moved the curtain.

“I didn’t do this,” he shouted, trying to batter his way through the language barrier. “You just saw the wind blow the curtain.”

He decided that if he was going to be punished this time, he would earn it. He squared off to resist them and just then a gust of wind moved the curtain. The lead guard, looking disgusted, waved the others away from Daugherty and they left the room. He was so pumped up with adrenaline from that encounter that he walked back and forth for hours trying to let off steam.

Once his imaginary games got him in trouble. He was given a pencil and paper by Sheikh-ol-eslam so that he could write a letter home, and after he finished the letter he played with the pencil, sketching out plans on large sheets of paper for an imaginary airport, the terminal, runways, the concourses, the tower, parking lots, garages, the firehouse, and maintenance hangars for three or four airlines. It was something to occupy his mind, and when he was finished he balled the papers up and later threw them in the trash can in the bathroom.

He didn’t think about them again until a suspicious and angry delegation of guards showed up in his room. They accused him of drawing some kind of coded diagram. It took a moment for him to figure out what they were talking about, and when it occurred to him Daugherty laughed.

“Let’s look at this logically,” he said. “First of all, if I’m going to leave messages for the other guys, I’m not going to do it on paper this size and sort of halfway wad it up and stick it in a trash can in a bathroom that you guys use. Do you think I’m an idiot?”

The looks on their faces told him yes, because in their eyes this is precisely what he had done. He realized that part of the problem was that these young Iranians had never traveled, so they were not familiar with airports. His drawings made no sense to their eyes. Daugherty explained and answered their questions until they were satisfied. They gathered up the drawings and left the room. He heard no more about it.

When he was staying in this first-floor chancery room, Daugherty was visited by a representative of the Red Cross, a slender, clean-cut young man about his age, either Swiss or French, who seemed angry when he entered the room. Daugherty was surprised. Having been trained to expect the conditions American POWs experienced in North Vietnam, he had no severe complaints about his own treatment, but this Red Cross man was appalled. He asked how long Daugherty had been isolated.

“Since the first days of the takeover.”

The man sat on the floor and took notes.

“Have you been abused physically?”

“Yes.”

The man’s disgust was evident, and the two or three guards listening to the interview frowned heavily. The students were keen to be seen as benevolent and this was clearly off message. But they didn’t interfere with the interview. The Red Cross man thanked Daugherty before he left and expressed his anger over what he had heard.

Daugherty worried how his comments might affect people in the United States. He was worried they might conclude conditions in the embassy were worse than they really were, which would be hard on them. He wondered if he had done the right thing.

In mid-February, he was moved to the chancery basement. The room looked like it had once been part of a larger space, now halved by a flimsy-looking wall of acoustic tiles fitted to a wooden frame. The wall ran straight into a large air vent, about two feet by two feet, and he discovered that by standing with his ear to that corner he could hear what was going on in the next room. To his delight, he heard the voice of Colonel Tom Schaefer, the defense attaché, and soon the two men were whispering to each other, the first contact either man had had with another American in months.

“When are we getting out of here?” Daugherty asked.

“Let’s make it interesting,” said Schaefer, who proposed a twenty-five-dollar prize for whoever picked a date that came closest to their release. They jotted their predictions on pieces of paper and then passed the notes to each other through the vents. Daugherty picked the seventeenth of April. Schaefer picked the fifteenth of November. Already the air force colonel believed there was no hope for their release until after the American presidential election.

They had to be careful. Daugherty was convinced the guards outside his room were listening, hoping to catch the two violating the rules.

Every time Daugherty moved into a new space, the moment he was left alone he conducted a thorough search. In his new room he found an inch-long stub of pencil and a small piece of broken glass, about twice the size of a fingernail, with one very sharp edge. He put the glass shard to work on a corner of the tile wall behind his sleeping pallet and soon pried a tile loose. He poked around inside the wall and cut loose the tile to Schaefer’s room.

“Check the loose tile in the corner,” he whispered to Schaefer the next time they had a chance to speak.

After that, they limited talking directly to each other to urgent questions and left messages inside the wall. Daugherty used blank pages he tore from the backs of his books. In this way they carried on a running dialogue. Daugherty tended to stay up late into the night and sleep long into the day. After his evening meal and his long “walk,” he got in the habit of sitting with his back against the wall with his legs drawn up to support a book. If anyone peeked in, it looked like he was reading. He would then write notes to Schaefer. When the lights went out, he pried loose the tile beside his pallet and slipped the note into the empty space between the walls. He would retrieve a return message from Schaefer when he woke up—the colonel was an early riser.

Neither man had much news to share, but the ability to communicate greatly buoyed their spirits. Daugherty wrote to Schaefer that when he was in Vietnam he noticed that military officers who became prisoners of war continued to receive promotions. “By the time we get out, maybe you’ll be a general,” he wrote. He made another wager, this one for twenty dollars, that they would be released before Easter, which the colonel accepted…and won. Daugherty asked where they would be taken when they were released, and Schaefer speculated that they would be flown to Wiesbaden, Germany. It was a nice thing to think about.

Sheikh-ol-eslam entered Daugherty’s room one night wearing the same open-collared shirt, blue jeans, and sneakers he had worn throughout the interrogations. He announced that a video crew was coming in to take pictures and interview him. When he left, Daugherty whispered into the vent, “Did you hear that?”

“No,” said Schaefer.

“They’re going to videotape me for something.”

“There’s only one answer you give,” said Schaefer.

“What.”

“No comment.”

When Sheikh-ol-eslam came back with the crew, lugging a big video camera, Daugherty noticed that they had placed and videotaped a hand-lettered sign on the outside of his door that read, “CIA Person.” There were ten other Iranians who had come to either assist or watch—ever since Daugherty’s admitted spy status, he had become an object of intense curiosity. Daugherty stayed on his sleeping pallet as they readied the equipment.

At last, Sheikh-ol-eslam asked, “How long have you been with the CIA?”

“No comment,” Daugherty said.

“Were you a spy here?”

“No comment.”

Sheikh-ol-eslam grew increasingly angry as each of his next ten questions met with the same response. He then turned to the camera and spoke at some length in agitated Farsi. Then he and the whole crew picked up the camera and left, slamming the door behind them.

He was in that same room, listening at the air vent, when Schaefer was questioned by Ebtekar. Schaefer had dubbed her “Miss Philadelphia.” He endured repeated lectures from her about America’s centuries of barbarity and exploitation, the genocide of native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, the slaughter of Vietnamese. Daugherty was listening in one night while Ebtekar lectured Schaefer about the inhuman, racist decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“The Japanese started the war, and we ended it,” Schaefer said.

“What do you mean, the Japanese started the war?” Ebtekar asked.

“The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, so we bombed Hiroshima.”

“Pearl Harbor? Where’s Pearl Harbor?”

“Hawaii.”

Daugherty heard a moment of silence. Then Ebtekar asked, “The Japanese bombed Hawaii?”

“Yep,” said Schaefer. “They started it, and we ended it.”

Thus ended the interview.

2. We Know What Route That Bus Takes

CIA officers Ahern, Daugherty, and Kalp were not the only ones still being questioned repeatedly months after the takeover. Most of the higher-ranking members of the mission were hauled back for repeated interrogation.

John Limbert was awakened in the middle of the night, blindfolded, and marched from the Mushroom Inn through the cold to the chancery. This time he was taken to a room in the basement, where he was placed in a chair. The blindfold was tied sloppily so out of the bottom he could see a man in a black ski mask and Sheikh-ol-eslam’s reflection clearly in the glass. There were other Iranians in the room whom Limbert could not see but could hear. Their pens scratched furiously across paper whenever he spoke. Again, it seemed to Limbert that his captors had read a book about interrogation and had set the stage for this session carefully, trying to intimidate him, but their technique fell short. It was inauthentic. He did not consider himself to be a brave person, and he could readily imagine atmospherics alone that might terrify him, but this didn’t. He, too, had some experience with the literature of captivity and interrogation, and he knew from his reading of Solzhenitsyn that the right way to survive was to play dumb.

Sheikh-ol-eslam started with the same questions Limbert had answered weeks before.

“Who have you met with?” and “What did you discuss?”

The embassy political officer gave the same answers. He wondered why they didn’t just go through his Rolodex and ask him about each person listed, which would have made more sense. This way, asking him to remember names, gave him a chance to protect certain people. By marriage, he had extended family in Iran, but he never mentioned their names, although they were all listed in the Rolodex. When they asked him for an address, including his own, he made one up, knowing full well that the correct addresses were available to them. It all seemed ridiculously inept and he couldn’t take it seriously.

“Tell me about your agents in Kurdistan,” Sheikh-ol-eslam demanded.

Limbert smiled involuntarily.

“I can see you smiling at that,” Sheikh-ol-eslam said.

Limbert couldn’t help himself. It was like living in Wonderland. Limbert understood the reasoning behind the question about his “agents” in Kurdistan. There had been steady fighting in the northwestern part of Iran with Kurdish rebels. So of course Limbert, a high-ranking devil in the den of spies, would have “agents” there. When he smiled at the question, that became further evidence of its truth. It was groupthink, and it was unassailable.

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” he said.

“How do you communicate with your agents in Kurdistan?” Sheikh-ol-eslam asked.

“I don’t.”

“We know you communicate by radio.”

“I don’t know anything about radios.”

“Then how do you communicate?”

“I don’t know what you are talking about.”

He asked Limbert when he had last seen one of the prominent Kurdish leaders, and the embassy political officer said he had never met the man.

“Look, I don’t know anything about Kurdistan,” Limbert told Sheikh-ol-eslam.

Sheikh-ol-eslam lectured Limbert in Farsi. They knew he had friends in Kurdistan and that he had visited there. These things were true and Limbert admitted them. But he had not been to Kurdistan in seven years, and certainly not since he had come to work at the embassy, and his friends had nothing to do with the disturbances there. But just the admission that he had friends there seemed the only part of what he said that Sheikh-ol-eslam heard. He had caught Limbert in a lie. If he had something to hide, he must be guilty.

“It’s just not true,” Limbert said.

“You know what we do with spies,” Sheikh-ol-eslam said. “We can shoot spies.”

“You can do anything you want to me.”

The fear of being executed that had gripped him during the first two days had receded. It was there, but it had become background noise, a constant. Sheikh-ol-eslam’s reminder was unnecessary and didn’t alarm Limbert at all. If he felt anything, it was curiosity. He was so bored during the day that a session like this was a welcome break. The whole situation grew more and more irritating. What ate at him was not simply being held captive, his lack of freedom, his inability to see or communicate with his family, or even the uncertainty. All these things were, of course, deeply troubling, but on another level Limbert felt professionally disappointed—in himself and in his colleagues.

How could they all have been so blind? Just weeks before this had all begun, Limbert had shepherded around Henry Precht, director of Iranian Affairs for the State Department, on his last visit. They had gone to see Ayatollah Montazari, the leader of Friday prayers, and the ayatollah had asked who else they were planning to see. Precht named some of the people on his itinerary, all of them old-line nationalists, and Montazari had suggested that he add to his calendar the weekly prayer meeting at the University of Tehran. Limbert later warned that they would be wading into an unfriendly ocean of Muslims, but Precht liked the idea. So they went, accompanied by a representative of the Foreign Ministry, parking several blocks away from the university and walking in with the crowds. Limbert was content with a spot well outside the large tentlike enclosure where the prayer meeting was held, where they could see and hear at a relatively safe distance, but the Foreign Ministry man insisted they go all the way in. “My job is to get you two into the Friday prayers,” he had said. They had some trouble getting past the armed guards at the front gate but were eventually let in after their minder somehow convinced the young guards that they were distinguished guests from the nation of Senegal! Never mind their white faces. Their escort warned them to avoid speaking English inside. When the meeting got revved up, the crowd began chanting slogans. Someone would step up to the microphone, scream something into it, and then everyone else would repeat it. Limbert and Precht felt compelled to shout along, so they found themselves chanting in Farsi the usual condemnations, including one that went, “Death to the Three Spreaders of Corruption, Sadat, Carter, and Begin!”

“Didn’t that last one say something about Carter?” Precht whispered.

“Henry, just chant and don’t ask questions,” Limbert told him.

Their ministry escort was throwing himself into the work, red-faced with effort, rhetorically raining down the wrath of Allah on America and Israel and all their works, and when they were done he turned to them, the two official representatives of the Great Satan, and asked sweetly, “Would you care to join me for lunch?”

Moments like that had lulled Limbert, had lulled them all, into thinking that the hatred and malevolence was just rhetoric, that polite officialdom was somehow going to continue to control this whirlwind.

When he learned that the provisional government had resigned, Limbert had a better sense of the power shift taking place. Here he was, at the center of an international storm, someone who had trained his whole life to study and report on circumstances like these, arguably one of the Americans best suited for doing so, and he was utterly powerless to do a thing. He could question no one and write no reports. So in an interrogation session like this he at least had a chance to converse and to get some insight into what these captors of his were thinking, and what they were trying to accomplish.

Already he discerned an important shift in emphasis from the first few days of the takeover. At first many of those who took part did so as a kind of lark, a demonstration of youthful idealism, naiveté, and defiance. Their goals had seemed primarily rhetorical, to protest U.S. policies and to demand the return of the shah—a demand no one really expected America to honor. Those orchestrating it were acting out an arrogant youthful fantasy, nothing more. Now, listening to Sheikh-ol-eslam’s detailed questions, he saw something new. The emphasis was now local, not global. They wanted information about Iranian officials that they could use against their political enemies. In the present atmosphere in Tehran, anyone could be smeared with suspicion of treason if it could be shown they had met with American “spies.” Careers could be derailed, enemies brought down. Whoever was running this thing now had a very practical agenda, one that was local and ruthless.

In this context, Limbert also saw the logic in putting him and at least some of the others on trial. If they were going to make the charges against local officials stick, it would help to spell out conclusively the plots emanating from the den of spies. He knew he was not a spy, but he also knew he had to be very careful about what he said. He saw how wording in the documents was being twisted to support all kinds of things. Anything he said could get him shot or hung.

Sheikh-ol-eslam pressed him again to name those he had met with. He was fishing. When Limbert mentioned a name, one of hundreds, Sheikh-ol-eslam quickly asked, “Why did you meet with this person?”

“It was my job,” said Limbert. He explained that his role at the embassy was to seek out Iranians, and listen and learn. “That’s what a diplomat does.”

Sheikh-ol-eslam mentioned that a train had been bombed recently in southern Iran.

“We think that the CIA did that, and you know who the people are who did it.”

“Think what you want.”

From time to time Sheikh-ol-eslam would leave the room and Limbert would sit blindfolded for ten or fifteen minutes. Then he would return with a new question. At the end, Sheikh-ol-eslam simply said, “That’s it.”

Lieutenant Colonel Dave Roeder, a pilot, was questioned—with Ebtekar translating—about the embassy’s C-12. In the embassy files, they had evidently come upon a memo describing the first meeting Roeder had attended in Iran, one with the revolution’s air force officials. During that encounter, Roeder had asked for permission to bring back the embassy’s C-12, a small, two-prop aircraft that was used to ferry embassy officials to meetings around the country. It had been flown to Athens at the time of the shah’s departure, and it had not been allowed back into Iran. Roeder had a personal interest in getting the plane back; it was his best chance of being able to fly regularly.

What he did not know was that there had been an international scandal recently in South Africa when the government there discovered that the U.S. embassy had been using its C-12 to take surveillance photographs around the country. To the Iranian students, Roeder’s efforts to get the plane back proved he was a spy. Ebtekar explained the South African incident triumphantly.

“Did you have that same camera system on the C-12 you were using here?” he was asked.

“I have no idea what you are talking about,” he said. He was lying. In fact, he knew well that C-12s were used for surveillance purposes at U.S. embassies around the world. He had used one himself when he was based in Panama.

“What kind of system is it?” he was asked.

Roeder just stared ahead, silent.

The interrogator stormed from the room and another entered, a small man in a silk jacket. He was well groomed and looked studious. He spoke calmly. He warned Roeder that the first interrogator was a violent man and that he was very angry.

“I’m really worried about what he might do to you,” he said. He told Roeder that they wanted him to sign a statement admitting that the United States had used the C-12 to spy on Iran. Roeder knocked the paper and pen to the floor.

Ski Mask came back and began raging at him. Roeder was taken from the room and led to the building’s cargo elevator shaft. It was freezing. Way up at the top of the shaft they had opened doors to the winter outside and snow gently descended. They chained him to one of the metal bumpers inside the shaft and took away his shoes.

He began to shiver and decided that the only way to stay warm was to move. He had, by now, plenty of practice at exercising in a small space, so he fell easily into his rhythm of jogging in place. Then he would stop and do push-ups against the wall. When his captors tried to prevent him from moving by dragging in a chair and chaining him to it, Roeder picked the chair up and continued jogging with it in his arms. When they found him doing this, his guards brought in a cinder block and chained him to that. Draped in chains, holding the chair in one hand, Roeder defiantly picked up the block and kept moving.

They left him there all night and throughout the next day. Then he was brought back for more questioning. He was taken this time to an embassy living room, placed in a comfortable, stuffed chair, and his blindfold was removed.

Sitting across from him behind a table was another young man with a two-week growth of black beard and Ebtekar, draped in her black robes, smiling politely. On the table was a delicate teapot and glasses, a box of biscuits, and a pack of Marlboro cigarettes.

Okay, here’s the “good guy,” he thought, since the “bad guy” didn’t produce. And, sure enough, Ebtekar asked, “Would you like some tea?”

“No, thank you,” Roeder said.

“How about a cigarette?”

“Yes, I would.”

He lit the cigarette and took a deep drag. He hadn’t had many in the weeks he had been captive.

The young man spoke and Ebtekar translated. “Why are you here?”

“I’m the assistant air force attaché. I’m a lieutenant colonel, my name is David Roeder.”

“We have heard all that,” Ebtekar said translating the questioner’s response, “and we know that’s not what you are.”

Roeder clammed up again. He had told them the truth; if they were going to start playing games he wasn’t going to play.

There was a long period of consultation between Ebtekar and the interrogator in Farsi, and then she said, “You’ve got to answer questions here. We know that you are not an air force lieutenant colonel.”

What Roeder most felt was boredom, and he was genuinely curious about Ebtekar. Here was this young woman whose English was so fluent, and whose accent was so American, that she obviously had lived in the States at some point. She seemed bright and articulate. Why would she want to embrace this fundamentalist crap that denied her gender equal status with men? Why would she want to drape herself in dark robes?

“Why are you doing this?” he asked her.

She looked back at him startled.

“Look at your status as a woman in this society,” Roeder said. “Why would you want this?”

Ebtekar was off like a shot. She launched into her rationale for traditionalism, how it was, in fact, liberating for women. She and her revolutionary sisters were actually much freer than women in the Western world, who remained enslaved by the twin satanic values of commercialism and sexual exploitation. “I believe in the fundamentals of Islam,” she said. “And my faith requires women to do this.”

Roeder argued with her, and she argued back, and the interrogation session came undone. Ebtekar warmed up readily to her standard jeremiad about the evils of America and Western society and the transcendental wisdom of Iranian Islam, Ali Shariati, the imam, the world’s new Third Force. Roeder smoked and listened politely and relished the warmth. He felt sorry for her, and he felt pleased with himself for derailing his interrogation so easily. He thought, What amateurs!

Despite his crusty defiance, interrogators did finally manage to disturb Roeder. He was shown a picture of his wife, son, and daughter. It was a photograph he had kept on his office desk in a frame.

“Is this your wife and children?” he was asked.

“Yes. Where did you get that?”

The interrogator seemed to know a lot about his family. He knew that his son, Jimmy, was disabled. This shook up Roeder, although he tried not to show it. He had never considered that his family in Virginia would be at risk but, of course, there were many Iranians in the United States. His interrogator mentioned the stop where the school bus picked up his son every weekday.

“We know the route that bus takes,” he said.

If he did not start cooperating, they were going to take his son off the bus.

“We will start sending pieces of him to your wife,” he was told.

Roeder still refused to answer questions and was led back down to a cold basement room, but he was distressed. It was the lowest point so far in his captivity. His mind raced over the possibilities. Was his family under surveillance in Virginia? Was the U.S. government aware of this threat? Were they protecting his family? How seriously should he take it?

3. Happy New Year

After more than two months of captivity, the hostages and their guards were getting to know one another well and, in many cases, were getting along badly. One night Gary Lee heard an angry American voice say, “What the fuck makes you right and the whole world wrong?” It summed up perfectly the central complaint. Some of the hostages worked at tormenting their captors.

Marine guards Steve Kirtley and Jimmy Lopez, together in a room at the chancery, kept up a constant torrent of verbal abuse. Early on, Gunnery Sergeant Mike Moeller had begun substituting the word “Khomeini” for every foul word in the English language, and his fellow marines adopted it with relish. When they needed to use the toilet, they would tell the guard, “I need to take a Khomeini.” They tried to remember every Polish joke they had ever heard and substituted for “Polack” the term “raghead,” which they used for the Iranians in the mistaken assumption that they were Arabs. They would make sure to tell each other the jokes whenever a guard who spoke English was within earshot.

“You know how you can tell the shah was a raghead, Steve?”

“No, Jimmy, how?”

“Because he was too stupid to shoot enough of these other ragheads to stay in power.”

When the guards passed around an item from the English-language Tehran Times detailing the abuse of Iranian students in the United States, the two marines made a big show of their delight.

“What’s it about, Jimmy?” Kirtley asked.

“It’s about all the great stuff Americans are doing back home,” Lopez said. “They’re siccing attack dogs on Iranians, running them over in cars, sheriffs in Texas are beating the shit out of them, stuff like that. It’s great!”

When the two marines found a stack of the guards’ plates and eating utensils piled in the bathroom they urinated on them. One night they wrapped a butter knife in a rag and took turns poking it at the exposed wires of their lamp. It shorted out the electricity in the chancery basement. They waited for the guards to replace the fuse and get the lights back on and then did it again. To the marines’ amusement, the guards raced from room to room, convinced they were under attack. Kirtley cultivated a habit of farting loudly whenever he stood close to a guard. It would make them so angry that they would haul him out to another room and shout at him about his bad manners. He would return to his room grinning.

Finally they became so much trouble that they were separated.

Two of the other marines, Billy Gallegos and Rocky Sickmann, played similar games. Gallegos rigged a slingshot out of rubber bands, and he and Sickmann opened their window slightly one night after lights out and shot Geritol tablets at a guard standing outside next to the building’s back wall. When the first pill pinged off a car nearby, the guard jumped. When the next pill hit, convinced he was under attack, he shot off his weapon. Soon there was a small crowd of guards, weapons up, shouting into their radios. Eventually the guards burst into the chancery and searched all the rooms, but the marines had long since closed their window, disassembled the slingshot, and crept back under the covers on their mattresses.

Once, when he was being questioned, Gallegos was asked if he had ever met with a SAVAK agent.

“Yes,” he said, and pointed at the guard who happened to be posted outside his room.

“Him. He’s one.”

The panicked look on the guard’s face had kept the marines laughing for days.

When the guards installed a camera in the bathroom, after catching on that their captives were leaving notes for each other there, the marines made a point of putting on lewd shows before it, offending their guards’ Islamic sensibilities so badly that they gave up and took it down.

Bill Royer, the assistant director of the old Iran-America Society, noticed that antagonistic guards were generally weeded out. He had rubbed one of the guards wrong in the first days—Royer had smiled at the guard inappropriately, teasing him—and the young man had responded by elevating his middle finger. Royer had responded in kind. Two months later, the American found himself guarded by the same young man, who had not forgotten their exchange of ill will, and their mutual animosity resulted one night in the guard making a karate-style kick at the hostage’s head. Later that evening one of the guard supervisors stepped into Royer’s room.

“You seem to have some trouble with my friend,” he said.

“Yes, and if he comes back I’m going to hit him,” Royer said quietly.

“No, no, you can’t do that,” said the supervisor.

“If he comes back I am going to hit him,” Royer repeated.

He never saw the guard again.

Once when Greg Persinger, a marine guard, was being led to the bathroom, ineptly blindfolded, he saw a guard playfully point his pistol at him as he approached. Persinger snatched the gun from his hand as he walked past, twirled it once or twice like a six-shooter, and handed it back.

“Don’t ever point a weapon at me unless you’re going to shoot me,” he said and patted the guard dismissively on the head.

The guard was stunned. He didn’t speak English, so he didn’t know what Persinger had said. He looked around, hoping no one had seen. He wasn’t about to report the infraction. How could he admit that the hostage had just snatched away his weapon? He settled back sheepishly in his chair.

As time wore on, there were many occasions when the marines, in particular, had opportunities to seize weapons from their amateurish guards. Sometimes they would allow the marines to play indoor soccer with them in the large open space that had once housed all the computer equipment for the Tacksman sites. It gave the young men a chance to vent some of their aggression and energy, an opportunity to actually run through space instead of jogging in place. The Iranians were more experienced ball handlers, but the marines saw to it that they collected plenty of bumps and bruises on their way to victory. Once, when they were shedding layers of clothes preparing to play, Persinger stooped to pick up some discarded jackets and move them to the side and was startled to find an Uzi in the pile. What could he do with it? Suppose he took it and pointed it at someone? Eventually he would either have to shoot somebody or surrender it. He was six-one, pale, with reddish blond hair; even if he made it off the compound, how far was he going to get? He scooped it up and put it down with the rest of the pile and then jogged out to play soccer.

Golacinski intimidated the guards because he was tall, muscular, and athletic. When he lost his temper, they shrank from him and raised their weapons. Once, when Don Cooke had laughed loudly after a guard dropped and broke a glass, he was seized angrily and was being led from the room when Golacinski intervened. He had been in the middle of a workout and had his shirt off and was feeling pumped up, so he jumped at the guard and pushed him away from Cooke.

“You’re not taking him anywhere,” he said. “If you take anybody, take all of us.”

It was foolish. The guard was carrying a submachine gun and there were plenty more of them around the room. But in his shock at the sight of Golacinski towering over him, he backed away. The other guards came running with their weapons up.

Roeder and Don Sharer both stood up alongside Golacinski.

“You sit down!” the guards shouted at them.

“No,” said Sharer. “You stop pointing those weapons at us and I’ll sit down.”

One of the guards broke the standoff.

“We just want to talk to him,” he said of Cooke. “We’ll bring him right back.”

“If you don’t, there’s going to be trouble,” Golacinski said.

They did bring Cooke right back, and that was the end of it, but it had made them more wary of Golacinski than ever. After that, for a time, whenever he exercised, they would position a guard directly in front of him. For a few days a guard sat before his space looking bored as Golacinski did his calisthenics. So he start hacking, coughing, sneezing, and deliberately spraying sweat and spittle, and the practice was promptly discontinued.

Kathryn Koob came to know well the young women who guarded her. Despite their traditional garb and enthusiasm for the revolution, they were not especially religious. Koob was a devout Lutheran who had grown up steeped in her faith, and felt she knew sincere piety when she saw it. The girls who fluttered around Koob were surprisingly Western and worldly. Underneath their manteaus they wore trendy jeans and silky colorful blouses. They colored their nails and wore jewelry and makeup. They were caught up in a tide of nationalist idealism that borrowed the rhetoric of the mosques for political purposes. The chadors they wore expressed solidarity and were the opposite of modest; they were worn not to deter but to attract attention. For many, the veil and chador were a rebuke to their mothers, part of a generation that had welcomed the Westernization of Iran under the shah. Koob, who was forty-one, had met many such women her age in Iran, women who loved Western fashion or who openly wore bright colors and uncovered their hair. At universities, middle-aged female professors once considered the vanguard of the new Iran were being fired for refusing to cover their hair, while for their students, some of them the young girls guarding Koob and Ann Swift, the future ran in the opposite direction, toward Islam and village tradition. Ironically, the old ways symbolized the new Iran. Donning the head scarf and chador was as much a rebellion for the new generation as shedding them had been for their mothers and older sisters. The girls who sometimes huddled in Koob’s room would ask her why Catholic nuns in America had forsaken “their beautiful dresses.” Among this crowd were some very serious, modest, religious young women, but very few. The most stern and dangerous of her female captors were the older ones, some of them true zealots. There was one who had instructed the newly armed young women on the first day of the takeover, “If they speak, shoot them.”

One day a female guard came to her door with an old pair of her eyeglasses that Koob had kept in a drawer in her apartment. It upset Koob to be given such blatant evidence that they had broken into her home and rooted through her things.

“You asked for them,” the woman said.

“I did not,” said Koob. “I have my glasses. These are old ones for an emergency.” She knew full well that they had searched her apartment as a follow-up to her interrogation, and because that had violated their own rules—the imam had instructed the students not to break into any more buildings—she knew this supposed request for glasses was a pretext. If she played along, it would validate what they had done.

So she refused to play along. It was one more unprovoked outrage and indignity and she lost her temper. She vented her spleen on the young guard, who endured it silently and then left to fetch one of her older, male supervisors. He spoke to her with false politeness that masked insufferable condescension.

“Hahnum, you must not act like this. You are making the sister most uncomfortable.”

“You make me uncomfortable,” Koob told him. “I am a diplomat. You kidnapped me, brought me here, and now you break into my house.”

“You aren’t a diplomat and you know it,” he said.

“I am a diplomat and you know it. I’ve been accredited by several countries, including Iran, and you have broken all sorts of your own laws with this action. Now you’ve just broken another one, breaking into diplomatic property.”

“You asked for your glasses,” he said. “Besides, in some instances laws don’t matter. There are special cases.”

“‘Special cases’ if the laws don’t suit you.”

“We represent the people,” he said. “Besides, you sent for your glasses.”

“I most certainly did not. I have mine right here. These are old ones I keep for emergencies. You needed an excuse to break into my house and you used these,” she said, shaking the old glasses at him.

“The sister said you wanted them,” he said.

“Which sister? Bring her here.”

“I’ve told you, you asked for them,” he said.

“I didn’t! If I wanted something from my house, it wouldn’t be these. It would be a pair of shoes and a change of clothes. And books!”

The young man glared at her.

“I’ve told you three times that you asked for them.”

And that was that. He had said it three times. He was the captor, she was the prisoner. Unspoken but clear was the assertion: I am a man, you are a woman. End of discussion. It was so because he said it was so.

Not all of the interactions were hostile. Some of the Iranian students were genuinely well meaning and tried to find ways to ease their captives’ discomfort. Mahmoud, a small Turkish-Iranian guard with a boyish round face, announced that he had set up a barbershop in one of the rooms in the Mushroom Inn. Square-jawed Colonel Chuck Scott was one of the first to take advantage. A thoroughgoing army man, he was increasingly distressed with his shabby appearance; his hair was hanging in strings nearly to his shoulders and his beard had grown so long that the guards were teasing him that he was going to outdo the imam.

“I don’t have any money,” said Scott. “It was stolen by your friends.”

“You can pay me when you are free again,” said Mahmoud cheerfully.

When he was finished clipping Scott’s hair and trimming back his beard, Mahmoud handed his customer a cracked piece of mirror to admire the transformation.

“Now, if your people decide to shoot us, at least my corpse will look better,” said the colonel.

Mahmoud was distressed. He assured Scott that he and the others would not be shot, but then somewhat compromised that reassurance by adding, “If you are shot, it will not be our fault, it will be your government that should be blamed.”

Richard Queen decided to keep his beard, but he trimmed it and then sat for Mahmoud’s clippers. He emerged with a ridiculous bowl cut that made Queen look like Prince Valiant. To his chagrin, he was photographed not long afterward, and the pictures were published in Time and Newsweek. He felt not only abandoned, sick, and hopeless but silly. Mahmoud was disappointed that his clipwork had fallen short.

One day, when Bill Belk was standing at the broken window of his room in the chancery basement, looking up and watching snow fall, a young female guard with a G3 assault rifle stepped into his view. She smiled down to him.

“Hello, how are you?” she asked in English, as though they were meeting in a park. “It’s snowing!”

“It’s beautiful,” Belk said. “I wish I could be out in it.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” said Belk, but he didn’t sound convincing.

“Happy New Year,” she said and then rolled a small snowball and pushed it to him through the hole in the glass.

Even Hamid the Liar had his softer moments. One night he delivered a cassette tape with a message from Cheri Hall to her husband, Joe. She had called one of the lines at the embassy that no one answered anymore and left a message on its answering machine in the hope that it would somehow find him, a desperate, loving gesture akin to throwing a bottle with a note into the ocean.

Hall, Queen, and Hamid stood around the recorder and listened to her voice. She started off strong, saying that she wanted him to know she was coping well and that she loved him dearly, and that everyone they knew was missing him and praying for him…and then she began crying. She choked up and found it hard to continue speaking. All of them, hostages and guard, started crying. Hamid let Hall listen to the tape several times.

Queen’s mysterious condition was worsening. He was still bothered by bouts of wooziness and the strange numbness in his arm had spread.

One morning he was holding a plastic cup of tea in his left hand, waiting for it to cool, when, in the next moment, it was on the floor, hot liquid splashing everywhere.

“What the hell happened?” Hall asked, helping to sop up the spill.

Queen said he hadn’t even felt the cup slip from his hand. The symptoms were strange. Why was only his left side affected? Increasingly his left arm felt not only numb but weak. It was growing limp and useless. He also had a terrible itch along the left side of his torso, so bad that at times he scratched himself until it bled. He didn’t know why or how but it felt like parts of his body were dying.

He was visited again by the local doctor who had earlier diagnosed a “twisted spine.” He had nothing new to offer and left Queen with a renewed supply of vitamins. Since he got so little exercise, and spent most of his days reclining or sitting, Queen couldn’t easily dismiss the spine diagnosis. The vitamins did seem to help his mood, but they did nothing for his creeping illness, whatever it was.

4. That’s Illegal!

On January 25, Hamilton Jordan hosted Ghotbzadeh’s two unofficial emissaries in the White House. It was a happy day. News reports that morning said that Carter’s chief Democratic rival, Senator Ted Kennedy, had severely depleted his campaign fund and there was reason to believe that a “major policy address” he had scheduled would include the announcement that he was dropping out of the race. That, coupled with the first real chance of finding a solution to the hostage crisis, gave the administration a glimpse of a break in what had been a long season of bad weather.

The first session with Villalon and Bourget in London had been disappointing, and CIA reports on the two men raised serious questions about whether they could be trusted, but Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, eager for any avenue to resolve the crisis diplomatically, had urged Jordan to pursue it further. He gave the two visitors a tour, and to bolster their own credentials the emissaries gave Jordan the tape recording of Waldheim’s abject presentation to the Revolutionary Council—they said the tape was a gift from Ghotbzadeh.

Then the two secret emissaries delivered good news. They said that Iran’s governing council had authorized Ghotbzadeh to begin negotiations over the hostages, an important step because it indicated that Iran’s government, such as it was, appeared ready to assert its authority over the student hostage takers. It hardly guaranteed a solution, because if the council disapproved of whatever agreement they worked out, it could easily claim the foreign minister had acted on his own. Ghotbzadeh was sticking his neck out, and in postrevolutionary Iran there was no shortage of people willing to chop off his head.

That conversation led to discussions that went on for several days between Villalon and Bourget, and Jordan and Hal Saunders, an assistant secretary of state. The two emissaries outlined a road map to the hostages’ release. The one thing Waldheim had brought home from Iran was a promise by the council to look kindly on the creation of a UN commission to study Iran’s grievances against America. The United States would be encouraged to publicly oppose formation of this panel, because Carter’s opposition would enhance the group’s credibility in Iran, but the administration would have to promise to stop short of blocking its creation. After visiting Tehran, conducting its investigation, and presumably validating that nation’s historical complaints, the commission would then have the moral authority in Iran to condemn the holding of hostages as “un-Islamic,” and, Ghotbzadeh suggested, the imam would respond by letting the Americans go.

Jordan interrupted to complain that even casual UN observers would know that such a commission could not be created without America’s consent.

“Let me finish explaining the idea, and then you and Mr. Saunders can destroy it!” protested Bourget.

Jordan and Saunders said that the United States might play along, provided they had assurance that the commission would lead to the hostages’ release.

“There must be some balance to this,” Jordan said. He explained that the president would be making a major concession.

“I understand,” said Bourget, “but this same commission must win credibility with the Iranians…. Don’t forget the political pressures in Iran!”

“Don’t forget the political pressures here,” said Jordan. “President Carter will have to be able to publicly explain and defend our actions to the American people. Khomeini doesn’t have to run for reelection.”

The second day’s session lasted twelve hours. The two emissaries hammered out a detailed schedule, a formal dance that they believed would lead to the hostages’ freedom. Jordan was excited; he agreed to meet with them again after they returned from another visit to Panama, where they were keeping up the pretense of pursuing the shah’s extradition.

The chief of staff’s enthusiasm was not shared by everyone in the White House. At Brzezinski’s request, council staffer Gary Sick took a hard look at the plan and concluded that it was unlikely to succeed. He saw both Bourget and Villalon as men emotionally invested in the outcome of Iran’s revolution, who knew that the continuing hostage crisis was likely to be a drag on the country for a long time and so were eager to see it end. That didn’t mean they couldn’t be effective, but their analysis of events in that country seemed to him full of “wishful thinking.” Sick was also aware of how easily Ghotbzadeh could be left on a limb. If others decided to backtrack, the foreign minister could end up as scapegoat, accused of collaborating with the Great Satan. Sick wasn’t worried about Iran’s foreign minister, whom he saw as “crafty and very much concerned about his political skin.” In fact, he saw Villalon and Bourget as Ghotbzadeh’s hedge—he could safely back away from the agreement himself at any point claiming that he had never authorized the two. Sick recommended that to make the process work, they would need to get beyond these “well-meaning but possibly naive intermediaries,” and deal directly with both Ghotbzadeh and Bani-Sadr. Brzezinski was even more skeptical. He had a better sense than most in Carter’s inner circle of the emerging reality in Iran, that Bani-Sadr, Ghotbzadeh, and the rest of the “government” in Tehran were nothing more than a temporary dispensation. If Khomeini wasn’t at the other end of the talks, they were irrelevant.

Jordan remained sanguine. When news broke a few days later that six of the American embassy workers, Mark and Cora Lijek, Robert Anders, Lee Schatz, and Joe and Kathleen Stafford, who had been hidden by the Canadian mission in Tehran since the day of the takeover, had been spirited out of Iran, the news there was received with dismay. “That’s illegal!” one of the students at the embassy complained to a Western reporter. Ghotbzadeh had the gall to accuse Canada of “flagrantly violating international law” for helping six accredited diplomats escape being kidnapped and held hostage. The furtive presence in Iran of the six who had escaped capture at the embassy was the reason the State Department had refused from the beginning to announce the correct number of staffers there. One State Department correspondent had complained, “Goddamn it, how can you not know!” There was some concern in the White House that the Canadian coup would derail the secret protocol, but early reports from Bourget and Villalon were good. They had delivered the outline prepared in the White House to Ghotbzadeh and reported back that, despite his public pronouncements, privately Ghotbzadeh saw the ill will stirred up by the escape of the “Canadian Six” as a minor setback.

As the month ended, President Carter’s patience seemed finally about to be rewarded. Bani-Sadr, the finance minister who had been outspokenly critical of the students, won more than 70 percent of the vote for president. Khomeini was admitted to the hospital with heart trouble, and in the speech he gave approving the voters’ choice he appeared to be preparing the people for his passing. “Be without fear, no matter whether a person comes or a person goes,” he said. It appeared as though Iran was on the verge of another tectonic shift. Daily there were new reports from different sources that a solution to the hostage crisis was imminent. Kennedy had not withdrawn from the presidential race, but it looked as if things might finally be breaking Carter’s way.

There was now a steady parade of Americans making unofficial visits to Tehran, ostensibly seeking some resolution of the crisis. The effect of these visits, nearly all of them by leftist activists whom the students regarded as allies, was to validate the hostage taking and legitimize the captors’ allegations.

In early January one of these visitors was Native American activist John Thomas, who would participate in a student-led seminar that branded the United States the major enemy of all the oppressed nations of the world and ended up leading the mob outside the embassy in chants of “Death to Carter,” urging his new Iranian friends to put all the hostages on trial. They were all spies, Thomas said.

In the days before his arrival the possibility of a meeting with the activist was offered to Rick Kupke, because of his Native American heritage. Kupke was told that he first must write a letter to President Carter explaining what he and the others and the embassy had done wrong and urging the president to take the necessary steps for their release.

Kupke was given a pen and a piece of paper. He was less than eager to meet with Thomas—he and his family had never felt much kinship with the native American political movement—but he did like the idea of something to break the monotony, and he worried about what might happen to him if he disappointed his captors, who seemed quite eager to make the session happen. At the time he was being held in the basement of the chancery with Mike Kennedy and John Graves. Kupke confessed to them, “I don’t know what to do.”

Graves, the embassy’s press attaché, was a flamboyant man with a long graying beard, a world-weary but playful air, and a cutting sense of humor. He had worked in Vietnam and had been involved there in the interrogation of Vietnamese prisoners.

“I’ll give you a trick,” he said. “If you pull it off, they probably won’t bother you, but if you get caught you’ll probably regret the day you were born.”

Graves suggested that Kupke write four or five pages of nothing, just doodle verbally, and if they got mad when they read it, tell them, “Okay, bring me more paper, I’ll redo it.”

“Then do the same thing again,” Graves said. “I’ve only known you for two or three months, but if anybody can play stupid, you can.”

Kupke swallowed the insult and took the advice. He decided to write like a third grader. He began his letter, “Dear Jimmy.” Then he wrote, “How are you? I am fine. I find myself laying here on this floor. I’m not sure how I got here, but I sure find myself here a lot. Any way you can figure to get us out of here is good. The way I see things is that a lot of things happened…” It went on like this four pages.

Mailman, one of their guards, returned with the papers, flushed with anger.

“Are you joking or something?” he asked.

“No, no,” said Kupke. “What’s wrong?”

“This is no good.”

“Can I have more paper?”

Mailman gave him more, telling him, “You do a better job.”

“Okay,” Kupke said. “I like doing this.”

And he started another letter. “Dear Jimmy. How are you? I am fine. But there are several things that I’d like to tell you. Above all, it’s just how hard this floor is that I’m sleeping on. And I think there’s things that ought to be done immediately…”

Mailman took his pencil away and Kupke was never asked to write another letter.

Graves’s advice was good, but his superior attitude grated on Kupke. The fifty-three-year-old foreign service officer had actually been held hostage briefly once before in his career, on the island of Fernando Póo off the coast of Nigeria. He saw himself as a modern Renaissance man: he was an avid tennis player, motorcyclist, skier, and scuba diver, the father of six, and an unabashed and unapologetic egotist. He was half-French and leaned toward Gallic in most things. He regarded that country’s style, food, and international acumen as entirely superior to America’s. His children were being raised French, he said proudly, and went on and on about their sophistication, brilliance, and accomplishment—in sharp contrast, it went without saying, to Kupke’s own. Graves had nothing but scorn for the American policies that had created the situation in Iran and regarded the Iranian students’ anger, if not their actions, as entirely justified. He thought Iran did deserve at least an apology from the United States, and held forth at length about the idiots in Washington who had allowed this situation to develop. Graves had other annoying traits. He smoked his pipe constantly, clouding the room with smoke, and chewed with his mouth open, loudly smacking his lips. He was routinely insulting in an offhand way. At one point in his career he had been an English teacher and he had never lost the habit of instruction. Kupke’s usage was strictly rural colloquial and Graves could not curb his contempt.

Once, pacing impatiently as he waited for the single bathroom to open, Kupke complained, “Somebody must have went in there and died.”

“No,” Graves corrected. “Somebody must have gone in there and died.”

“Whatever.”

“I can tell you’re from the Midwest by the way you’re pacing,” Graves said. “Why?”

“Because you drag your heels like a midwestern shitkicker.”

One day Graves came back from the bathroom and his hair and beard, which had been a graying brown, were suddenly completely white. At first Kupke thought the captivity had scared his hair white, but then he realized that Graves had been dying his hair. He’d evidently decided to shampoo in the bathroom sink.

Kupke both admired Graves and was put off by his airs. The marines Jimmy Lopez, Rocky Sickmann, and Greg Persinger loathed him. His Gallic superiority was to them simple anti-Americanism, and they didn’t get his prickly sense of humor. He was less diligent than they about washing himself and his clothing, so he gave off a stench that in such constant close quarters was considered abusive. Like so many of the hostages, Graves had been immediately and mistakenly tagged as CIA, partly because of his age and senior status—the students now had access to the embassy’s payroll records, so they knew how much their prisoners were being paid. Graves’s check was near the top of the list. But they also assumed he was a spy because his name had turned up on a list of suspected CIA agents in a book that was published in East Germany. He had been awakened one night about two weeks after the takeover by a rough-looking Iranian whom he had not seen before. The man showed him the East German book, which had an old picture of Graves and his name.

“That’s not me,” Graves said, lying.

He was hauled off, certain that he was going to be shot. Instead, he was thrown into the back of a station wagon and driven somewhere off the compound, where he was kept for about three weeks and interrogated continually, always at night. He didn’t have much to tell. They all wanted to know about the plot to kill Khomeini. Graves told them it was silly, which convinced them all the more that he was in on it.

Shortly before John Thomas’s arrival, Bruce German, the embassy’s budget management officer who, more than most of the embassy workers, had been ill-prepared emotionally for such a trial and who had spent much of his time in captivity without word from his wife or family, wrote an angry letter addressed to Ben Bradlee, the executive editor of the Washington Post. Thomas carried it home and delivered it. The Post published it after verifying its authenticity and it came as a shock in America. It voiced the fear and bewildered anger of the hostages and German’s startling empathy for his kidnappers:

Lending credence to the student captors’ allegations of secret American plots, German, who would not have been privy to any classified American operations, suggested that the Carter administration was reluctant to return the shah “because of certain things he might reveal, things which could prove to be very embarrassing, to say the least.”

5. A Marvelous Coup

Bill Belk’s combative roommate, the army medic Donald Hohman, undertook a long hunger strike early in the year and, after several weeks, had grown so frail he lay on his mattress all day. He ignored the rule against speaking, talking loud and long to Belk. They were too worried about him to leave him alone; they couldn’t withhold his food and he was too frail to beat. He’d challenge them, “What are you going to do to me? Go ahead and do it right now.”

He had started the hunger strike to get away from Joe Subic, whom he regarded as a traitor and collaborator, but even after he was moved he continued to refuse food. He liked the way it worried his captors. Hohman was a mystery to the Iranian students. Like most everyone else he was considered CIA, and in his case it was a belief heightened by the fact that he had been issued two passports. Yet he was admired for his medical skill. After his dramatic treatment of Belk’s allergic attack in the first days, many assumed he was a doctor. He had been mistakenly identified as such on one of the papers in his personnel file.

Hohman knew the medical conditions of most of the Americans who had been seized, and he would brief the medical students among the guards about what medications and precautions his various patients needed. Charles Jones had hypertension, so he needed his pills. Lee Holland had gout and Hohman taught them how to treat it, and what medications to deliver—“He knows the dosage,” he said. His professional standing, even if he was not an M.D., accorded him a measure of status the others captives did not enjoy. He abused it freely, and because he was admired, his insults stung. When Sheikh-ol-eslam and Ebtekar tried to interrogate him he cut them short.

“I don’t know anything about the CIA. I’m down here TDY [temporary duty],” he told them. “I’m medical. Period.” Ebtekar was so insulted by his demeanor that she slapped his face.

Hohman’s hunger strike flummoxed his guards. At first they were angry, and the medic gave the anger right back, screaming and cursing at them. In time, they were afraid to enter his room. He had hoped others would join him, that it would spread and that all the hostages would stop eating, but none of the others had his willpower. Yet Hohman persisted. He was not suicidal; he saw the hunger strike as a way of fighting back. In a letter to his father in Sacramento, Hohman wrote:

“I’ll come through this no matter what they do to me or how long they keep me. Also, the longer I am held, the more I’ve come to despise my captors and what harm they’ve done myself and all my family by taking my freedom without me ever having done an Iranian any harm. What they forget is that the game can be played both ways. Mentally they can’t get to me because I can go into my mind and lock them out, but physically, with my weight loss and poor diet, they could hurt me. They also, if they push hard enough, could bring on my death. But I don’t think they’ll do that.”

Hohman was taken to see Ebtekar again; she was the resident expert on these peculiar Americans. She had spread out some fresh pistachios and small white candies.

“Try some of that,” she said.

“No, I’m not going to.”

“What do you want?” she asked.

“I want to go home,” Hohman said.

“Well, we can’t do that until the shah is returned,” she said and then launched into the usual litany, starting with the sins of the shah’s father and then enumerating the decades of American-sponsored crimes against simple, honest Iranians. “Don’t you feel sorry for those people?” she asked.

“No,” Hohman said. “You’re keeping me here against my will for something I know nothing about.” He was convinced that this whole ordeal had more to do with the political struggle in Iran than with the “crimes” of the United States.

She resumed lecturing. How were oppressed Iranians to gain the attention of the world when “the whole world system was subjugated to American imperatives?” Their action had forced the world’s media to broadcast their grievances and demands and to realize the suffering the Iranian people had endured. “The decisions of the powerful have never benefited the oppressed,” she said. “If the downtrodden want their case to be considered and their sufferings made known, they must find a new strategy, one capable of paralyzing the existing institutions and mechanisms of domination.” Holding him and the others hostage was designed to do just that. She believed that many of the Americans they held were spies, and that even those who weren’t—and she wasn’t ready to believe that Hohman was not—shared responsibility for the acts of their government. While she admitted that holding otherwise innocent people prisoner apparently was not in accord with “human values,” it was justified in this case by the larger issues involved. He needed to eat not just because his life was still terribly important to his family back home, she said, but because his life was important to Iran—“as a symbol of a country’s legitimate demands!”

She went on and on, repeating the same material in various versions, trying to find the right way of putting it so that it would work its way into Hohman’s hard skull. He listened with both boredom and wonder. She had talent, he concluded. If anyone had to listen to her long enough, he thought, they probably could be convinced of anything. While Ebtekar reasoned on, his eyes wandered to a group of young women across the room who were painstakingly piecing together shredded embassy documents.

“Do you really think there’s anything important in that?” he asked, interrupting, gesturing toward the mound of shredded paper.

Ebtekar left the session convinced she had talked Hohman into ending his hunger strike, but it continued. It lasted twenty-one days. He subsisted on vitamins and drank plenty of water. His clothes hung on him, his skin was pallid and his cheeks sunken. He spent his days sleeping; it seemed to Belk that his roommate had simply turned himself off. He was slowly fading away to nothing. It was difficult for Belk, who after nearly two months of enforced silence and then a month alone chained to a chair had enjoyed having someone to talk to. A companion made captivity more bearable, and besides, Belk admired and liked Hohman. The medic had started him on an exercise regimen when they were first put together, and even though Hohman didn’t smoke he never complained about the clouds that Belk’s habit threw into the room.

One night the medic stood up from his mattress and walked over to pour a glass of water from the pitcher they kept by the window. There was a hole in the window from the break-in, and they had stuffed a rag into it, but enough cold air still flowed through to keep the pitcher chilled. On his way to the window Hohman blacked out.

“You’ve got to eat,” Belk said, helping him back to his mattress and pleading with him. “You’re scaring the hell out of me. You’re going to die here and I’m going to be here by myself.”

Hohman took his next meal.

Next door, Limbert had discovered a small opening where the thin partition wall imperfectly joined the more permanent basement wall. It allowed him to see enough so that he could tell when Belk and Hohman were alone. They didn’t dare speak—the guard outside would have heard them—but Limbert tore blank pages from the front and back of his books and they began passing written messages back and forth, carrying on a running conversation. Limbert told them what news he had and they shared what they knew. He learned of Belk’s attempted escape, and that Hohman had at last started eating. Because they had a window, Hohman and Belk told Limbert what kind of day it was outside.

One day, Limbert received the following message:

“We have a small radio. I guess you can understand Persian. Will this be useful to you?”

Limbert wrote back, “Is the pope Catholic?”

Belk had stolen the radio from one of the guards when he’d dozed off. He slid it deep in the back of a drawer at the guard’s desk—that way, if it was missed and they searched rooms for it, he wouldn’t be caught with it. Apparently the guard hadn’t had the thing long enough to miss it, either that or he assumed another guard had taken it, because the radio’s disappearance seemed to go unnoticed. After a few days, Belk retrieved it from the desk drawer and hid it someplace else. Then he offered it to Limbert.

They arranged for a drop in the bathroom. Late at night Limbert would wait until Belk had gone to the bathroom, and then immediately ask to go himself. That way he was ushered in right behind the tall State Department communicator, who had left the radio tucked behind a radiator on the floor. Limbert returned with it bundled under the waist of his pants. He unzipped the sofa cushion he used as a pillow and hollowed out a small place in the foam. With the radio nestled there, he could lay with his ear close to the speaker and play it quietly enough so that the guards couldn’t hear. To preserve the batteries, he would switch it on for news reports only when he napped at two in the afternoon, at eight in the evening, and then again at midnight.

He wrote Belk a note, complimenting him on his “marvelous coup!”

6. A New and Mutually Beneficial Relationship

With a secret process in place to secure the hostages’ release, the Carter White House subtly changed its tone. There was no more talk of sanctions, blockades, and punitive strikes, and instead came reminders of shared interests, particularly of the danger posed by the Soviet armies just over the border. The threat of a Russian move toward Persian Gulf oil fields was of course a tremendous anxiety, not just in Iran but throughout the Western world. To reporters who knew nothing of the secret talks, the new strategy was, in the words of one pundit, “Talk softly and remind Iran of the Red Menace next door.”

Privately, the pieces seemed to be falling into place. Bani-Sadr was sworn in as president in late January by Khomeini and then named head of the Revolutionary Council. The odd-looking little Iranian with the pompadour, clipped mustache, and black glasses was now, at least on paper, the most powerful figure in the country next to Khomeini. In an early speech he referred to the hostage crisis as a “minor affair,” and suggested that a solution was within reach if the United States would only agree to cease meddling in Iranian affairs.

Patience was the message to the American people, who were still watching the days of captivity enumerated nightly on TV. For the time being, doing nothing was the best strategy, argued Carter’s press spokesman Jody Powell.

“Iran is on the verge of disintegration,” he said in a TV interview. “Nothing is the same from one day to the next. They are paying a terrible price for their fascination, their preoccupation with the hostages. The question arises of who in fact is determining the fate of Iran: Is it the Ayatollah Khomeini? Is it the Revolutionary Council? Is it this small group of terrorists who are holding the hostages? Meanwhile, the economy is in shambles. The military is in many ways nonexistent, and disorder and chaos increase every day.”

In his State of the Union address, President Carter emphasized that the United States was ready to be friends with Iran again, to form “a new and mutually beneficial relationship.”

“We have no basic quarrel with the nation, the revolution, or the people of Iran,” he said. “The threat to them comes not from American policy but from Soviet actions in that region.” Carter suggested that retribution was unlikely if the hostages were returned unharmed, but warned that “our patience is not unlimited.”

Although it now seemed happily less necessary, preparations for a rescue mission progressed. “Bob,” the CIA operative who had flown into Mehrabad Airport and breezed through customs a month earlier, had been in and out of the country several times in the previous month, shuttling from Tehran to Athens and Rome. Working with a wealthy Iranian exile who had volunteered to help, he had rented a warehouse and bought five Ford trucks and two Mazda vans to drive the assault force to the embassy from their hiding place south of the city on the second night of the mission. He had purchased material to form a wall of fake cargo at the back end of the truck in order to hide the force in case the vehicles were stopped and inspected at a checkpoint.

To solve the helicopter-refueling problem, Air Force Colonel James H. Kyle had arranged for three-thousand-gallon fuel blivits to be placed inside C-130s, instead of being dropped from them. This meant that six of the four-propeller workhorses would have to land in the desert on the first night of the mission, refuel the eight helicopters, and then fly back out of Iran. Since the plan now called for the planes to go in ahead of the helicopters, Delta Force could ride into Iran on the C-130s, camped out on top of the fuel bladders, an especially welcome development because Charlie Beckwith’s assault teams had swollen from the original forty-five men to ninety-five, the new counterterrorism unit’s full complement. Those numbers would have badly strained the eight RH-53D Sea Stallion helicopters that were now waiting beneath the deck of the aircraft carrier Nimitz, which had replaced the Kitty Hawk in the Indian Ocean.

Delta had been through several more full-dress rehearsals for the raid in the Utah, Nevada, and Arizona deserts. They were a mob of crusty, sunburned mountain men in blue jeans and T-shirts cadging supplies without explanation from every military unit in the region. All of the men assigned to the mission were given top priority but were not allowed to reveal what they were doing, which created confusing and sometimes very satisfying clashes with the regular military command. Major Jim Schaefer, one of the marine helicopter pilots, was told to report immediately with his crew to the Nimitz to inspect the helicopters. He hopped a military plane to Hawaii and then the Philippines and was preparing to board another flight at Clark Air Force Base to Guam when a naval officer somewhat dismissively told him that he would have to wait for the next plane.

“I have to get the university baseball team on this airplane,” the officer said.

“No, I don’t think you’re going to do that,” said Schaefer.

“Sir, you don’t understand,” the navy man said firmly. “I am the navy liaison officer, and I’m in charge of this, and I have to bounce you off. We’ll get you on the next available flight.”

“You don’t understand,” Schaefer said.

“Sir, the flight is closed. I’m going to have to do this.”

“This flight is not leaving without me,” said Schaefer.

On the airport wall was a poster with the photograph of the base’s commanding general. The poster welcomed all comers to Clark Air Force Base and invited anyone with a problem to call the commanding general directly. Schaefer called.

After a series of conversations, during which certain orders and their priority were clarified, Schaefer was connected to the general at home at three o’clock in the morning.

“This is Major Jim Schaefer,” he said. “I’ve got a little problem down here at the terminal and I saw your sign offering to help. General, would you help?”

The general drove directly to the terminal. He was wearing a flowery tropical shirt, shorts, and flip-flops. He looked, Schaefer thought, exactly as the commanding general of a Philippines air force base should look.

“Who’s Major Schaefer?” the general asked.

“I am, sir.”

Schaefer showed him the letter giving him his orders. The general, suddenly wide awake, told the naval liaison officer, “Lieutenant, release that airplane, now.”

Training sessions in the western American deserts created their own local stir. The region was sparsely populated, and the rescue force did its best to stay out of sight during the day, but there were bound to be run-ins with the locals. Just before the holiday break, one of the helicopters on a night training run had unknowingly tried to snatch a Christmas tree from some local’s roof. The pilots oriented their choppers at night with flashing infrared markers on the ground, and when the training exercise was over they were required to retrieve them. They had a pincer attached to a rope and would hover over the flashing light, grab it, and haul it back aboard without landing. One night, when a pilot searching for his last marker found a blinking light, he hovered and lowered the aircraft over it and, before he could drop the rope, the light moved.

Confused, he decided to set the chopper down for a closer look, and suddenly the landing area was flooded with light. He was about to land on a house. The light had been blinking on a rooftop Christmas tree decoration. The downdraft from the choppers created winds in the 150 miles per hour range, considerably more than any visit by Santa’s nimble-footed reindeer, and the decoration had taken flight and landed somewhere out on the highway. The shocked home owner, no doubt alarmed by the sudden violent storm, had turned on the lights to investigate. The chopper pulled up and flew away. The unit sent someone out to the house the next day with a hundred bucks and an apology.

The Delta “operators,” as they called themselves, were hardly timid souls, but they were terrified by the helicopter rides in darkness. All of them complained about the marine pilots’ skills. The fliers were being asked to do things they had never tried. They were working hard to learn and adapt. When the ever changing plan called for them to land in a soccer stadium in Tehran, they began practicing blacked-out landings at a football stadium at Twenty-nine Palms, the marine base in California. The newfangled night-vision goggles, which enabled them to fly without any lights, were so heavy that after an hour or two it became difficult to hold their heads upright. Everyone in the unit had a stiff neck. Then one of the pilots hit upon the idea of fastening a garter belt to the roof of the cockpit just over his head and latching the goggles to it so that the belt took some of the weight. The garter’s flexibility allowed him to turn and bend his head. It worked so well that the pilots cleaned out the PX at the nearest military base. To practice night flying over a city without land lights, they got permission to practice low-level flights over San Diego.

Beckwith remained skeptical about the CIA’s “Bob” and was unwilling despite CIA assurances to trust his elite, handpicked force to this swarthy, slippery-seeming foreigner. He began making plans to get one of his own men into the city in advance of the mission.

The way things were shaping up, however, it appeared less likely than ever that a rescue mission would be attempted. Iran’s newly elected president had turned up the heat on the students and appeared headed for a showdown with them over the hostages. Bani-Sadr publicly called them “children” who behave “like a government within a government.” When they responded by condemning one of Bani-Sadr’s cabinet as an American spy and had him arrested, the president intervened to have the man released and condemned the students as “lawless dictators.”

The students were feeling the pressure. Near the end of January three of their star hostages were caught trying to escape. Joe Subic had cooked up a half-baked plan to make ropes and climb out of a second-floor window of the ambassador’s house the next time he and his roommates, Kevin Hermening and Steve Lauterbach, were taken for showers. He had a vague notion about stealing a car and driving to Turkey. Hermening was excited about it and helped make the ropes, and Lauterbach, while filled with reservation, went along with the plan. They didn’t get anywhere. On the day of their attempt, all three were caught with their ropes and marched off to stretches of solitary confinement.

Lauterbach was locked in a basement room of the chancery with his hands tightly cuffed. Sitting alone in the darkness for days, his hands aching badly, he grew increasingly despondent. His guards had given him a water glass embossed with the embassy’s emblem, and it began beckoning him. In the deeper sense, he was not suicidal. He loved life and wanted to keep on living it, but not here, not in pain, alone, with no idea of when or if his circumstances would ease. He was angry. Hurting himself was the only way he had with which to lash out at his captors. On the fourth day he stopped arguing with himself, broke the glass, and slashed his wrists.

He didn’t make a sound. When a guard entered his room some time later he found Lauterbach woozy and bloody. He was rushed to a hospital, startled at how alarmed and angry his captors were. There was plenty of blood but the wounds were not deep enough to have severed his arteries. A doctor patched him up, and after that Lauterbach’s treatment dramatically improved. His captors were apparently afraid that word of his suicide attempt would put the lie to their claims of treating the hostages as “guests.” He was given a room of his own on the upper floor of the chancery, one with a couch made up as a bed. His guards became solicitous, even kind.

7. SAVAK! SAVAK!

Inside Iran, the students remained extraordinarily popular. Some were offered positions in the government, others received offers of marriage in the mail. But at least some of the group’s leaders wanted out. Ibrahim Asgharzadeh, the author of the takeover, felt trapped. He believed they had backed themselves into a corner by demanding the shah’s return, a condition they had never seriously expected would be met. Now even if they had wanted to back down they could not, because their continued occupation of the U.S. embassy gave leverage to hard-line clerical elements opposed to the government—no mullahs had been allowed to run for office. With their hostages, the students had become pawns in the battle over the future of Iran.

Their frustration boiled over on the night of February 5, in what would be the most terrifying night yet for the fifty-three American hostages.

John Limbert and the others in the chancery basement were awakened by a sudden clamor. Guards in black ski masks moved through the rooms with weapons, shouting in English, “SAVAK! SAVAK! Everybody up and out! Up and out now! Everybody! Move! Hurry! Now! Now!”

Limbert was awake anyway. He was reading War and Peace after listening to the news on the small radio tucked inside his pillow. He was accosted by two guards in masks.

“Okay!” one of them demanded. “Come on, get out! Get up!”

He stood and was blindfolded and then led down the corridor with the rest.

The scene in the Mushroom Inn across the compound was the same. A masked guard entered the room shared by Joe Hall and the ailing Richard Queen. “Get your hands up!” he shouted, waking them. “Do not speak! Stand up!” Out in the larger room, many of the captives, similarly roused from sleep and used to the rituals of their imprisonment, obligingly tied on their own blindfolds.

Chuck Scott asked for his hands to be unbound so that he could pull on a sweatshirt. “It’s cold,” he said.

“You will not need a shirt or sweater again ever!” one of the masked men said, pushing him out of his room.

Hall walked with his hands up as a guard propelled him along, shouting. One of them kicked him in the buttocks and pushed at his back with a gun.

Those in the Mushroom Inn were led to a cold, empty part of the warehouse basement and ordered to strip to their underwear. Because the numbness in his hand had worsened, Queen had to be helped with the buttons of his pants. It was very cold.

Bruce German felt betrayed. The embassy’s budget officer had sought assurances that Tehran would be safe before he had accepted the assignment just five weeks before the takeover, and he felt bitter about those who had encouraged him to come. Now he could hardly move he was so frightened. His legs were shaking.

In the chancery basement, the hostages stood as instructed, leaning forward with their hands extended over their heads, holding themselves off the wall by their fingertips. One by one, the guards moved down the line, forcing them to drop their pants to be searched. Bob Ode’s legs weren’t wide enough apart and one of the guards roughly rattled the butt of his weapon between the old man’s knees. They pulled on the waist of each captive’s underpants front and back to make sure they weren’t hiding anything. Kupke’s legs were shaking from the cold and from fright. Barry Rosen, whose nerves were shattered anyway, felt his heart pounding heavily. He assumed immediately that he and the others were going to be shot. Everyone was confused. Why were they suddenly doing this? It occurred to Roeder, one of the cooler heads, that the gunmen might be clearing everyone out so they could search the area for contraband.

Rosen heard one of the guards growl to another, “Don’t speak Farsi here,” warning him that the hostages spoke their language. This seemed to confirm Rosen’s worst suspicions. He was shaking so badly he was having a hard time keeping his arms raised against the wall, and when he stooped to pull his pants back up he couldn’t. He was both terrified and ashamed of his terror, of how he looked to the others. He put his arms back up against the wall and when one slipped down again the guard screamed at him.

Limbert thought it was unlikely they would be shot in the chancery basement. He assumed that if they were going to do it, they would take them out to the countryside somewhere, out of the city. The executions he had seen on TV in Iran had always taken place outdoors. He considered these young Iranians’ flair for the dramatic and decided this simply wasn’t for real. But the fear was there anyway; he couldn’t reason it away.

Kupke prayed. He thought about turning around to fight, not being led like a sheep to the slaughter, but saw the futility of it. He prayed that the bullets would kill him quickly, and that he not be left alive, wounded, and maybe paralyzed. Belk just felt numb, as though he was in shock. He did what he was told. Part of him refused to believe it was true, that they might shoot him, that this was it. Hohman didn’t stand close enough to the wall so one of the gunmen pushed his head hard into it. Belk was surprised that his roommate didn’t raise hell. Once he had seen Hohman take off after five guards, kicking and swinging. If Hohman was afraid, then this was for real.

In the warehouse basement, German also prayed. He hadn’t been particularly religious since his childhood but it seemed the only thing to do. He prayed for himself and for his wife and family. He imagined what a shock his execution would be to them.

When he and the others were told to face the wall, Navy Commander Sharer refused.

“If you are going to shoot me, you’re not going to shoot me in the back,” he said.

And, amazingly, the would-be executioners obliged him.

To the rest, one of the guards screamed, “Arms against the walls! Spread your legs! Don’t drop your arms! Do not lower them a centimeter or you will die right now!”

Bob Englemann thought, “Negotiations must have broken down.” Apparently they were going to finish this.

Because of his illness, Queen could not keep his left hand up, and one of the guards kept hitting him with his weapon.

“He can’t get his hand up!” Hall protested.

“Shut up! No speak!” one of the gunmen screamed at him.

Scott’s hands were bound so he could not spread his arms as far apart as demanded. A guard pushed his hands higher up the wall and kicked his legs wider apart. He heard the guards behind him clear their weapons for firing.

Hall was more frightened than he had ever been. Jesus, this is it! They’re going to kill us! He asked God to take care of his wife, Cheri. He felt terrible about leaving her and then thought, I hope I get hit in the back of the head and that it will be over quickly. “God, take care of Cheri. God, take care of Cheri,” Hall kept repeating quietly to himself, shaking. His knees were banging together and suddenly they stopped. His whole body stiffened, as if clenching to receive a final blow.

Queen clenched his teeth and said the Lord’s Prayer.

Scott felt dizzy and ill and began to pray.

Jimmy Lopez wondered what it was going to feel like. He had heard about Iranian executions where they machine-gunned the victim starting with his lower legs and working their way up the body, to prolong the pain. How long would it last? Would it hurt or would it happen too fast to feel anything? He hoped that when they shot they hit his head right away.

Bill Keough stood with his hands held high, filled with disbelief. Like many of the others, his mind raced involuntarily to find some last reason to hope. For one thing, the wall they were up against was made of thin plasterboard. There were plenty of places nearby where there were concrete or brick walls. If they are going to shoot us, wouldn’t they put us in front of one of those? Some foreign ambassadors had just come through, checking to make sure everyone was well. Why would they do that and then perform a mass execution? It didn’t make sense. Still, it was a perilous moment. If one of my colleagues panics and goes after one of them, they might start shooting and that would be the end.

Don Cooke was as frightened as he had ever been. In the first days, when he had been taken out to a residence in north Tehran for a few weeks, he was convinced on that drive that he was being taken away to be shot, and for some reason he had been perfectly calm. Now, he was shaking so badly that he could barely keep himself upright.

“Oh my God!” he shouted. “No! No! No!”

Golacinski told Cooke to shut up. The embassy security chief didn’t want these assholes to see any American buckle in his final moments. He felt curiously calm, as though he were watching himself from the outside, thinking, So this is it. It was not the first time he had felt this way since all this started. And he felt relieved. At last this is over. Shoot straight.

Greg Persinger smelled fear. He had always heard that expression and never believed it, but suddenly he detected an odor coming from himself and knew immediately what it was.

A long moment passed. Then another.

Hall relaxed a little…maybe not? Had they gotten past the moment? Maybe they really weren’t going to shoot.

Jimmy Lopez turned around and sat down.

“I’m tired of this shit,” he said. “If you’re going to shoot me, just shoot me.”

Roeder’s fingers got tired, so he leaned his forearms on the wall, resting on his elbows. A guard smacked him sharply in the ribs and he pushed back out to his fingertips. He, too, looked for reasons not to believe that he was about to be shot. Beyond a certain point, he couldn’t take these guards seriously. They were stupid, but not stupid enough to shoot all of them. He was convinced America would turn Iran into a parking lot if that happened. The guards were acting angry and threatening, but when they cocked their weapons, readying them to fire, one of them let his slip from his hands. It clattered to the floor.

The suspense was broken not by an explosion but by the ringing of metal on the concrete floor. They had ejected the rounds.

“Pull up your pants!” one of the guards shouted at Rosen, who stooped to the task with trembling hands.

When it was over, the shaken hostages were led back to their cubicles and rooms, which had been ransacked.

“Goddamned sons of bitches!” shouted Lopez as they left him and Kirtley back in their chancery room. “Fuck you all!”

Limbert found his room in disarray. They had obviously gone through his extra pants and shirt. They had taken a heavy water pitcher that he had scrounged, and a fork, but they hadn’t taken his paper, nor had they found his hidden pencils and the radio! Kupke’s hidden stash of sugar cubes was gone—he had been hoarding them, stealing one or two extra every day at teatime. The guards had also found and taken a small piece of glass he had saved and hidden, and a stub of a pencil. Their belts were confiscated. In the Mushroom Inn, Roeder’s mattress was upended and a few of the little items he’d hoarded were gone. There were rumors that someone had attempted suicide, which would explain removing the belts.

In the room shared by Bob Ode, Barry Rosen, and Bob Blucker, everything had been upended and some things removed but there seemed to be no logic to it. Ode’s liniment for his sore back was gone but all of his mail was left behind. Rosen’s prized picture of his children was gone. Ode was given back his belt, which he had been forced to remove during the strip-search, but Rosen was not given back his.

Some of Bill Royer’s clothing was missing, a second pair of pants, a shirt, and his tweed jacket! He complained enough over the next few days that they brought back the sport coat.

When it was over, Kupke felt exhilarated. He and Kennedy and Graves were in terrifically high spirits, laughing and joking with one another. They were thrilled to still be alive.

In his room, Ode lay down on his mattress and suddenly felt his heart pounding heavily in his chest. He had a heart murmur and was now certain that he was suffering a heart attack. He believed he was dying. He lay perfectly still, in a cold sweat, terrified, but believing there was nothing that could be done. Gradually, his heartbeat slowed until it felt normal again. He felt the need to urinate, and as the guard led him back from the toilet he said in broken English, “These men not ours. They are very angry.”

The next morning, Hall asked Hamid the Liar.

“What was that shit about last night?”

“Oh, that was just a joke,” he said.

“Some goddamn joke. Why would you do that?”

Hamid said that it wasn’t him or his group, that it was a unit of exterior guards. It was just something they had wanted to do.

The mock execution marked the end of one stage of captivity and the beginning of another. It was the last time Rick Kupke felt threatened by the guards. As February wore on, the weather turned brutally cold and there was still boredom, confinement, hunger, and inactivity to cope with, but for a time things settled into a relatively comfortable routine. He, John Graves, and Mike Kennedy were moved to a room on the top floor of the chancery and were given a heater. Kupke was allowed to make a brief phone call home to his mother. The guards now let them speak. For months, “No speak!” had been the most common expression they and the others had heard from the guards, and though Kupke and his roommates had been talking for months, it had always been in whispers, and always in fear that they would be punished. Now they could talk and laugh freely.

Kennedy asked the guards for a can of coffee grounds from the commissary and proceeded to make what he called “cowboy coffee.” He poured some grounds into the bottom of a pot, added water, and brought it to a boil on the heater. They scooped the coffee from the top of the pot.

Colonel Scott sensed that the mock execution had acted as a purgative, and afterward many of the guards felt guilty about it. At night, he and the others in the Mushroom Inn were allowed to resume playing checkers, something they had not been allowed to do since leaving the house in north Tehran before Christmas. The guards set up a folding table in the hallway outside the large room where the hostages could take turns playing. Scott kept telling the guards he wanted to play with Colonel Schaefer, who had been taken away weeks ago and had not returned. By asking for him, Scott was trying to learn something about what had happened to him.

“It is not possible to play with Colonel Schaefer,” said a guard they called Little Ali because he was the smaller of two guards with that name—neither was very big.

“Why not?” demanded Scott. “We were allowed to play together before.”

The colonel let loose a string of oaths and threats, which caused him to be carried off to a cold room and threatened with a beating. Little Ali waved a length of hard rubber hose and promised that if Scott did not behave he would use it. Left alone, he found evidence that Schaefer had been in the room. It was lined with steel lockers, and in one he found a slip of paper and a short pencil. On the paper in handwriting he recognized as Schaefer’s—they had been passing notes for months—was a list of songs. Scott guessed that his air force colleague had been trying to memorize them. On another slip of paper was a rudimentary calendar, again in Schaefer’s handwriting. One of the lessons they had been taught in survival school was to try to keep track of time. From the scraps, Scott determined that Schaefer had been held in this freezing room for thirteen days, and that he had been moved three days earlier.

He shook with cold. Little Ali had locked him up wearing just a T-shirt and slacks. He realized how pathetic he had become. The guards had refused them razors for fear of a suicide attempt, so his dark beard was long and unkempt and he found there was no way to keep soup drippings and chunks of food from falling into it. Without a comb or scissors he could not trim it or keep it clean. He had lost more than a dozen pounds—his clothes hung on him—and he hadn’t seen sunlight for anything more than a few fleeting minutes in months. He was pale, scruffy, dirty, and his teeth were chattering with the cold.

After a few hours, Little Ali returned, standing a safe distance away from Scott in the doorway, and suggested that the colonel apologize. If he did, he would be allowed to return to his warm cubicle—Scott insisted on calling it a “cell.”

The colonel refused. Whatever he had said or done was a lot less than what had been done to him in the previous months. Little Ali closed the door and left. Later that day, he was visited by Akbar, the kindly guard with whom Scott had established some rapport. The slender, mustachioed Iranian told Scott that Bani-Sadr had been elected president of Iran. Scott told him that he had no respect for a government that treated him and his fellow Americans as they had been treated, and complained to Akbar about the mock execution.

Akbar apologized for it and seemed genuinely chagrined. It had been “un-Islamic,” he said. He then led Scott out of the cold room and back to his cubicle.

“Be good,” he implored.

It was the first time Scott realized that Akbar outranked the other guards.

After the mock execution, mail was delivered more frequently. Most was from strangers, which remained a disappointment. Sometimes it seemed as if all of America had adopted the hostages as pen pals. Many of the letters continued to be from schoolchildren who had written as part of a classroom assignment.

“Dear Mr. Hall. Hi, my name is Jimmy. I am eight years old and I am writing this letter because my teacher says that I have to. What do you eat?” One of the letters was similarly chatty and upbeat and ended with, “I sure hope they don’t shoot you.” Hall received several from a man in Houston who had apparently chosen him as his hostage pen pal. These were cleverer than most and Hall actually enjoyed them. The writer always incorporated short parables that were ostensibly preachy little stories, the kind of thing his Iranian captors liked but which could be relatively easily deciphered to reveal important news developments. For instance, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Hall’s correspondent wrote a story about a large man, whom he likened to a bear, attacking his neighbor and insisting that the neighbor wear a bright red collar with a star on it.

The guards withheld mail to punish prisoners they didn’t like. Colonel Scott rarely received anything, and when he did it was usually from a stranger. Once, Hamid the Liar surprised him by offering to escort him to the mail table.

Behind the table, stacked high with letters, was a guard named Ahmad, a squat, thick, balding, cheerfully abusive man who was at least ten years older than the other guards. He made a pretense of shuffling through the stacks.

“I don’t see anything for you, Mr. Scott,” he said. “Are you sure your wife has not found another man?”

A guard alongside Ahmad handed him several letters, and the colonel found a spot on the floor to sit and read them. The first two were from strangers; one was addressed to “Lieutenant Colonel” Scott, which was annoying to a man very proud of his rank. One was a letter from his sister, and another from his wife, Betty, postmarked October 26, more than a week before he was taken hostage. It was terribly disappointing. Like most of the hostages, Scott worried a great deal about his wife and children and wondered how they were coping with this ordeal. The encouraging letter from his sister also revealed nothing about his family. The last letter was from a precocious grade-school girl in Nebraska, writing as part of a class assignment, who addressed him as “Lieutenant Scott” and confided that she thought it would have been smarter for President Carter to send the shah back to Iran instead of letting him go to Panama—it was the first he had heard that the shah was no longer in the United States. The little girl concluded by noting that Scott was forty-eight and that he was a “lieutenant.” She asked, “At your age, shouldn’t you be higher than that?”

Multiple copies of the comics and sports pages of the Boston Globe were being mailed to the hostages daily by someone from that city, and though the students saw no harm in passing them along, the cartoons and stories often disclosed useful information. Garry Trudeau, the cartoonist, was spoofing the Iranian students in his popular strip Doonesbury, which gave a heartening indication of how intense public interest remained in their plight after six months. When a letter from Bill Keough published in the United States thanked the anonymous sender, the Boston benefactor surfaced. He was a taxi driver who was thrilled to learn that his long-shot effort to help his kidnapped countrymen in Tehran had scored. He sent a card to Keough saying that he regarded the success of his gesture as the only “great thing” he had ever accomplished in his life. He promised to keep mailing the sections, and did.

8. Ham, They Are Crazy

On the same day as the mock execution, forty-nine members of a group calling itself the Committee for American-Iranian Crisis Resolution left New York for Tehran. It had been formed by a professor of industrial relations at the University of Kansas, Norm Forer, who had been active years earlier in efforts to publicize the shah’s human rights abuses and hoped that a dialogue between American citizens critical of their government and the hostage takers might help break the deadlock. He proposed that his group travel to Iran not to initiate a dialogue but simply to listen, to give the hostage takers an opportunity to vent before a group of sympathetic Americans. Many prominent leftist activists sought to be included but Forer, perhaps mindful that his own name would be eclipsed, wanted unknowns, what he called “grassroots.” He polled antiwar organizations for names and selected a cross section of people who shared his political outlook. The student hostage takers, who still felt their message to Americans was being distorted by government-controlled media, smelled enough opportunity for propaganda points to put up the money for the trip. Among those in the private mission were Hershel Jaffe, a rabbi from Newburgh, New York, and the Reverend Darrell Rupiper, an activist Catholic priest from Omaha, Nebraska.

Unlike most members of the mission, Jaffe was not a political activist. He had pushed to have himself included in part because he was something of a publicity hound—a garrulous, energetic man, he was already well known in the Newburgh area as the “running rabbi,” after running in the New York City marathon—and in part because he was concerned about the Jewish hostages feeling neglected. He was interviewed by Forer, who was also Jewish, and a group of furtive young Iranians in a bare room on the west side of Manhattan and explained that he had been following the story closely, and had been struck by the outpouring of Christmas cards for the hostages. It made him feel for the special isolation of Jewish hostages such as Barry Rosen and Jerry Plotkin. Reports of the Forer mission had portrayed it primarily as Christian outreach—Forer was not religious and its co-organizer, the Reverend Jack Bremer, was a Methodist minister from Lawrence, Kansas—and Jaffe felt that the group ought to include a rabbi, so he had volunteered. After Forer invited him, Jaffe arranged to be briefed by two Israeli agents about the situation he would encounter in Iran.

Rupiper, a tall, slender man with long dark hair and glasses, was a member of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, a small order of Catholic priests dedicated to the poor and those on society’s margins. He had been an activist priest for many years, and like many of those in the group he had been sharply critical of American foreign policy in Central and South America. He had been recommended to Forer by the group Nebraskans for Peace, who knew him from several trips to jail protesting at Strategic Air Command bases in that part of the country. Rupiper believed American foreign policy was often criminal and saw the CIA as a tool of oppression. He had been imprisoned in Brazil for protesting America’s actions there.

Forer kicked off the trip with a press conference, at which he saluted the students for seizing the embassy and taking his countrymen hostage.

“We congratulate the students for their bold and courageous effort,” he said. Forer did acknowledge the act as “illegal,” as protests often were, but suggested that fact deserved to be considered “side by side with the anguish of the Iranian people.” Despite the fact the United States had essentially acquiesced in the kidnapping of its embassy and personnel for three months, Forer lambasted “the wanton exploitation of the hostage situation by the warmongers and moneychangers of this country,” describing his group as “the mainstream of American conscience.”

In Tehran, the group spent ten days attending the standard anti-American demonstrations, lectures, and presentations about the crimes of the shah and SAVAK. They visited the martyrs graveyard and saw the wheel-chair-bound “victims of SAVAK.” Jaffe was appalled when the group was taken to meet Yasir Arafat, the PLO chairman, whom he considered a mortal enemy of his people. At one demonstration, protesters pounded on their bus, chanting the usual “Death to America! Death to Carter!”; and the group narrowly escaped serious injury when a rickety reviewing stand erected to hold them at one rally collapsed, crushing some of the spectators below. When in the midst of the confusion of that accident Jaffe grabbed the hand of a female Quaker minister and helped pull her from the pile, they were immediately accosted by veiled Iranian women shaking their fingers with disapproval. At first, Jaffe didn’t know what was going on; then he realized the women were objecting to a man and a woman holding hands. Most of the others in the group seemed to take these things in stride. Jaffe grew increasingly alarmed, frightened, and disgusted by the reactions of his traveling companions. He was particularly struck by Rupiper, who seemed ready to join the revolution.

It was Valentine’s Day when they were finally taken to see the hostages. The members of the group stopped to buy candy and flowers from street vendors on their way to the embassy. They were escorted to a room in the chancery with blankets draped over the windows and decorated with the usual posters of Khomeini and other revolutionary trimmings. The hostages were brought in to see them in small groups before TV cameras.

They spent the longest time with marines Billy Gallegos and Paul Lewis, who was delighted when he saw Rupiper. Lewis had met him before. Gallegos seemed chipper. “I had no idea what was going on,” he said, referring to the embassy takeover. “I thought for sure he [the shah] would be back the second week.”

Lewis said, “I don’t feel that we were going to be taken out in the courtyard and shot. I think they realize that it wouldn’t do anyone any good.”

On his way out, Lewis stopped to chat with Rupiper and Jaffe. He told them that he had met Rupiper when the priest had visited his parish in Illinois several years earlier, soon after Rupiper had been freed from the prison in Brazil. Seeing the same priest in Tehran seemed an amazing coincidence to the young marine. He asked Rupiper to contact his parents, which the priest did not do.

As the last of the hostages left, the rabbi was disappointed because among the handful of hostages brought into the room there were no Jews. He asked the guards where the Jewish hostages were and he was told that they had declined the opportunity to meet with him and the others.

“They are asleep,” another of the guards said.

When the visiting Americans were on their way out, Jaffe was stopped and accused of accepting a note from Lewis. The group had promised going in that no one would accept notes from the hostages, only the letters that had been written for the occasion. Jaffe had received nothing from Lewis and was indignant. It crossed his mind that it was a setup, that perhaps something had been planted on him, and now he was going to be arrested and held with the embassy staff.

“I am here on a humanitarian mission and I will not be treated this way!” he said.

He was escorted to a courtyard and ordered to strip. His clothing was searched thoroughly. He was glad that he had scratched the names of the two Israeli agents out of his address book before the session, because the guards pored over it very carefully. There was no note to be found. Jaffe pulled on his clothing and on his way back to the others he tipped his yarmulke to the guards—they had neglected to look under it. He wanted them to know that if he had been hiding a note, they wouldn’t have found it.

When the Forer group returned home several days later, Jaffe told reporters that the situation in Iran looked bad and predicted that the hostages would be held for a long time.

In Omaha, Rupiper also predicted a long standoff, so long as “the United States refuses to acknowledge its guilt for the abuses of the past twenty-five years.” He said the hostages might be stuck in Tehran “for years.”

There was reason to be more optimistic than that. The White House believed it had mapped out a path for the hostages’ release.

The election of Bani-Sadr by such a strong majority in Iran seemed to bode well for the secret plan, and there were other encouraging signs. Iran’s new president promptly engineered the resignation of Mousavi Khoeniha, the students’ “spiritual adviser,” who since the takeover had been named head of Iran’s Council of National Radio and TV. In an interview with Le Monde, Bani-Sadr said that his government was no longer demanding the return of the shah before releasing the hostages. His remarks dovetailed neatly with the secret negotiations.

In another interview Bani-Sadr said, “If the U.S. government gets away from its past policy of intervention in [Iran’s] internal affairs, and if it accepts the right of the Iranian government to [pursue] the criminals…who have plundered our wealth and accepts in practical terms to help us in that matter, that would be the grounds for deliberation on the hostages.”

As far as the White House was concerned, the United States had no way to significantly interfere in Iran’s internal affairs anyway. The extradition proceedings in Panama appeared to satisfy the second demand. UN general-secretary Kurt Waldheim was putting together the six-man international commission to study America’s role in Iran, and Carter had agreed not to block it. The panel was virtually certain to denounce the United States for the quarter-century-old crime of overthrowing Mossadeq and for propping up the now-despised monarchy, but that was a humiliation the administration was willing to endure if it meant the safe return of the hostages.

Jordan had become fond of the two intermediaries, Villalon and Bourget, whom he had met with again secretly on February 9 in Bern, Switzerland. There they agreed to set up a secret meeting with Ghotbzadeh himself. The plan appeared to be unfolding smoothly, despite the Iranians’ tendency to keep adding new demands. One called for Iran to be able to claim “victory” when the hostages were released. Carter expressed concern about that, wondering how such a joint statement could be made palatable to the outraged American people.

“We’ve got three languages to play with,” said Jordan. “English, French, and Farsi. We can take an English word, find a French synonym that is weaker or even vague, and find a Farsi word that is even more so. We’ll stick with our English word and let them give it their best possible Farsi interpretation.”

“You can play with words all you want,” warned Carter. “But I am going to have to be able to stand up in front of the American people and defend whatever statement I make.”

Despite his misgivings, the president was willing to proceed. He was so hopeful that the process would lead to the hostages’ release that he wrote a note to Jordan prior to the scheduled meeting with Ghotbzadeh:

“If, at any time, the Government of Iran desires to release the American hostages at an earlier date than called for in the mutually agreed plan, the Government of Iran has my personal assurance that the United States will abide by all the terms of that plan.” Carter was fully on board.

Jordan flew to Paris on a Concorde with Henry Precht, with tickets they purchased themselves in order to keep the secret meeting off the books. Wearing a disguise—a wig, false mustache, and glasses—Jordan arrived at Villalon’s luxurious Paris apartment, and shortly after midnight on Sunday, February 17, he was joined by Iran’s embattled foreign minister himself, whose swarthy, thick, pugilistic features looked worn. He had dark lines under his small deep-set eyes. Jordan had been coached by the intermediaries to view Ghotbzadeh as a “rug merchant,” one who liked nothing better than to haggle. The two adversaries chatted amiably; Jordan told him that he was “honored” to be meeting with him. Ghotbzadeh was curious about the Concorde, which he had never flown on.

“We must be sure to do it while we can charge it to our governments,” said Jordan. “It’s very expensive!”

Ghotbzadeh emphasized that the meeting remain secret. If it became public, the foreign minister warned, “First I would lose my job and then I would lose my head!”

Jordan tried to ingratiate himself by telling the Iranian, on behalf of himself and the president, that it would be “terribly helpful” if he would explain the origins of the revolution and help sort out the present situation in Tehran. He listened as Ghotbzadeh recited the familiar story of America’s subversions, dividing his remarks into three periods, 1900–1953, 1953–1978, and the present. The foreign minister spoke reverently about Khomeini and the revolution, with what Jordan later called a “mystical” passion, and while he said he could not condone what the students had done, he regarded it as a small thing compared to the crimes of America and the shah. Ghotbzadeh spoke of the hostility between the United States and Iran sadly and, as Jordan would note later in a handwritten memo to Carter (in which he referred to Ghotbzadeh only as “Mr. S.”), “[with] regret that things between us had gone so far and were in such a mess.” Jordan tried to move the conversation past these differences. He asked for Ghotbzadeh’s opinion of Carter, and when the foreign minister complained that the president seemed to poorly understand his country, Jordan defended his boss, arguing that Carter had resisted pressures to intervene in Iran during the revolution and had ignored demands to respond militarily to the seizure of the embassy. The foreign minister acknowledged that the president had shown restraint.

“Now, let’s talk about the hostages,” Ghotbzadeh said. “I am in a better mood to talk about them since you have heard our case.”

Jordan asked about Michael Metrinko, the one American hostage who had not been seen or heard from since the day of the takeover. Ghotbzadeh said he did not know anything about Metrinko in particular but assured Jordan that all of the captive Americans were still alive. Then he confided, “Only I can solve this.”

Jordan asked how, and Ghotbzadeh’s big face produced a small, conspiratorial smile.

“It is easy to resolve the crisis,” he said. “All you have to do is kill the shah.”

“You’re kidding,” said Jordan, flabbergasted. After all the weeks of negotiations with his emissaries, after hammering out a complex multistepped plan to sort out this mess in a way acceptable to both sides, Ghotbzadeh suddenly introduces the idea of state-sponsored assassination?

“I am very serious, Mr. Jordan,” he said. “The shah is in Panama now. I am not talking about anything dramatic. Perhaps the CIA can give him an injection or something to make it look like a natural death. I’m only asking you to do to the shah what the CIA did to thousands of innocent Iranians over the past thirty years!”

Jordan let the baseless charge against the CIA go and addressed the idea of assassination.

“That’s impossible,” he said. “It’s totally out of the question.”

Ghotbzadeh went into a long explanation of why Iran “hated” both the United States and the Soviet Union, and speculated about being killed himself by either an American or a Russian spy. He eventually came around to discussing the existing plan, and (having apparently dropped the idea of bumping off the shah) suggested that if Carter stuck to the outline drawn up by Bourget and Villalon, the hostages would be released “soon.”

“What is soon?” Jordan asked.

“Weeks,” he said. He assured Jordan that the Iranian government, meaning the Revolutionary Council, would abide by its promises.

“What about the Ayatollah Khomeini?” Jordan asked.

Ghotbzadeh said that the council had approved the plan unanimously, despite some objections from its cleric members, and that he had briefed the imam in Qom.

“And what was his response?” Jordan asked.

“The imam does not often respond,” said Ghotbzadeh. “He listened to our explanation and nodded…. If he had objected to our proposal, he would have said so.”

Thus the fate of this effort hung on the cryptic nod of the sharp-featured, white-bearded, black-turbaned prophet. The two men discussed at some length the future relations between their countries after the hostages were released. Ghotbzadeh promised that the new Iran would prove to be an even better ally against the Soviets than the old.

In his memo to the president about the meeting, Jordan didn’t mention Ghotbzadeh’s suggestion of assassinating the shah—he referred to it only as “Point #1,” and wrote, “I’ll tell you about this in person.” In assessing the meeting, he wrote, “At best, Mr. S. is a deeply committed revolutionary, dedicated to the survival of that revolution and to the integrity and independence of Iran. His ego is enormous, but his devotion to the Imam is genuine. His commitment to the revolution makes the Soviet threat the dominant political concern in his life. At worst, Mr. S. is a devious person whose only source of power is the Imam. Now that the Imam’s health is in question, he is engaged in a number of activities (hostage negotiations, anti-Soviet rhetoric) that he perceives as being in his own best interests. The truth about Mr. S. is probably somewhere in between, but either way, we should use his present attitudes to our benefit.”

Jordan clearly believed the first characterization of Ghotbzadeh to be true. He made no mention in his memo of the ambiguity in Khomeini’s reported response to the plan. He left Paris emphasizing to Bourget and Villalon that Carter would not “apologize” for America’s actions in Iran, and that the hostages could stay in Iran “another ten months or ten years” before the president would make a statement that dishonored his country.

The meeting with Ghotbzadeh, which would have been electrifying news, remained a secret, but the mood of optimism about the hostage crisis continued to build for the rest of the month. All signs pointed to the hostages’ imminent release. A Kuwaiti newspaper reported that a deal had been struck. Ghotbzadeh publicly suggested that if the hostage takers refused to cooperate with the government, then military force might be used by Iranian authorities to retake the embassy. Iran’s ambassador to the UN, Mansour Farhang, said that the students had begun “to lose credibility with the Iranian people,” and had “gone beyond their task.” For their part, the students continued to insist that the hostages would be released only when the imam ordered them released.

Word of the solution Jordan had worked out with Bourget and Villalon began to leak. No one had the particulars, or word that the president’s chief of staff had actually met with Iran’s foreign minister, but the plan’s general outline became public, and the expectant mood in the White House was impossible to hide. A peaceful solution to the standoff not only would bring home the American hostages, it would trump Carter’s critics, particularly his Democratic challenger Kennedy, and no doubt boost both his approval ratings and his standings in the presidential race.

In keeping with the secret protocol, Carter announced on February 13 that he would support the creation of a UN commission to study the crimes of the shah, and announced at the same time that there were “positive signs” about the hostage standoff. To savvy Washington watchers, there was clearly a connection. The president’s surprising retreat on the commission, which would certainly reach conclusions critical of the United States, coupled with this suddenly optimistic assessment, strongly suggested that a deal had been struck. As anticipated, the good news eclipsed criticism of the concession.

One way that would-be important men advertise their proximity to power is to predict events. In Tehran, Ayatollah Mohammed Behesti, secretary of the Revolutionary Council, declared that the crisis would be resolved soon, and Secretary-General Waldheim, after announcing formation of a five-man commission—a French lawyer, diplomats from Algeria, Syria, and Venezuela, and the former president of Bangladesh—told reporters that he had received “general assurances” that the hostages would be released soon after the group met.

Christian Science Monitor reporter Louis Wiznitzer wrote that the hostages “can be expected to return home at or near the end of the month,” citing sources at the UN, and gave credit for the agreement to Waldheim. He reported that the UN secretary-general had worked out the basic outline of the agreement in January, but that his efforts to sell it to the White House had at first been “rebuffed” by an administration bent on responding to the Iranians with “pressure.” No doubt the secretary-general saw it that way but, in fact, Carter’s initial refusal to support creating the commission had given the United States the key bargaining point and concession. Otherwise, Wiznitzer had it right. He reported that first the hostages would be removed from the embassy and transferred to the custody of Iran’s revolutionary government, probably to the Foreign Ministry, where Laingen, Tomseth, and Howland were trapped. Two days later the Washington Post reported that the president had obtained “a commitment in principle,” and editorialized that the frustrating episode seemed to be reaching “its final chapter.”

Those following the story closely saw plenty of evidence to support this optimism. The State Department asked a federal judge in Manhattan to delay legal proceedings aimed at seizing $1 billion of Iranian assets to cover defaulted loans. The government asked a publisher to delay release of a book by Kermit Roosevelt about the CIA’s role in the 1953 Iranian coup.

Bani-Sadr kept insisting that the United States had to “apologize,” but the White House seemed to feel it could finesse that demand with Jordan’s linguistic artifice. The Iranian president formally invited the commission to Tehran and said it would be allowed to speak to all of the hostages. American TV networks latched on to the commission’s trip as the likely endgame to the months-long story, and its every move led their reports. Hostage families were interviewed from all over the country and all were visibly glowing with hope. In an interview, Vice President Walter Mondale said on the nineteenth that the crisis was nearing an end.

“We think progress is being made, but I don’t want to characterize the chances,” he said at first, but then hinted that a release was imminent. “When they [the hostages] return, people will see the whole story, and I think they will be appreciative.”

In Tehran, the student captors were still insisting that the hostages would not be freed until the shah was returned, but they seemed to be swimming against an overwhelming tide.

Then Khomeini, upon whose silent nod this whole scheme turned, finally spoke. He pulled the rug out from under Ghotbzadeh and his allies and upended the fragile agreement. In a radio speech he praised the students, and once again demanded the return of the shah. The occupation of the American embassy had “dealt a crushing blow to the world-devouring U.S.A.” He said the fate of the hostages would be decided not by Bani-Sadr and the Revolutionary Council but by the Majlis, Iran’s parliament, which had as yet not even been elected. That meant the earliest the hostages could be released was at least a month away, probably more. It also meant that the deal negotiated in secret with Ghotbzadeh was worthless.

Jordan was at home on Saturday morning when he received a call from Camp David, where he knew the president was staying that weekend. Ordinarily, an operator placed the call and the president picked up the line after a short delay. This time Carter evidently had dialed himself.

“Ham, what the hell is going on?” he demanded.

Jordan had not heard the news from Tehran.

“Well, I just got a call from Cy Vance,” said the irate president, “who said that Khomeini had made a statement this morning that the hostages would be dealt with when the Iranian parliament assembles!”

“Oh, my God, no,” said Jordan. “That’s terrible. I don’t know what to say.” He promised Carter he would call Villalon and Bourget immediately.

“Please do,” the president said. “And let them know they are playing with fire. The commission is probably already on the way to Tehran now, believing that we have an agreement…and now this! It makes us all look foolish. It’s starting to look as if the only person involved is Khomeini!”

It got worse. The UN commission very publicly left for Tehran with the private deal already collapsing, and with well-informed reporters covering its every move anticipating its futility. The imam instructed the students to turn over incriminating documents seized at the embassy to the UN commission, but when the students attempted to deliver a box of the files to their hotel the commission members refused to accept it, fearing that it contained a bomb. Despite a unanimous ruling from the Revolutionary Council and the public backing of Ghotbzadeh and Bani-Sadr, the students, emboldened by Khomeini’s speech and sensing that the commission was the linchpin of a plot to release the hostages, refused to allow its members to meet with the captive Americans.

Jordan summarized these events for the president in a memo, and Carter sent it back with the scribbled note, “Ham, they are crazy.”

The panel lingered in Tehran, hearing testimony and getting the graveyard and cripple tour, waiting for a chance to interview the accused American spies. The commission’s presence in Tehran intensified the struggle between the government and the students, with Ghotbzadeh denouncing the students as “Zionists and Communists,” and paying a visit to the embassy to confront them personally. At one point TV cameras caught the embattled foreign minister locked in heated argument with the unknown Hussein Sheikh-ol-eslam, the bearded, gap-toothed student leader, who was seen pulling the collar of an army field jacket up around his neck and jabbing a hectoring finger at the older man. Accused of collaborating with the American government, Ghotbzadeh began to receive death threats, as did Bourget and Villalon. The foreign minister offered to resign, but though Khomeini would not support him in the showdown, he refused to let Ghotbzadeh go. For the first time, the shape of the ongoing struggle between moderate secularists and religious conservatives in the new Iran spilled fully into the open, with the maverick role being played by the students on full display. The sight was confusing to most. All parties swore allegiance to Khomeini, but the imam projected not leadership but ambivalence. Finally, the commission gave up its efforts to see the hostages, suspended its inquiry, and flew home. The deal had fallen through.

In his nightly roundup of events in the hostage story on ABC, which would soon evolve into the program Nightline, Ted Koppel summed up the diplomatic disaster, still perceived primarily as Waldheim’s folly: “From the first the commission was a body born of despair, nurtured by frustration, and fueled by the absence of any alternative.”

The commission members were pictured boarding a plane in Tehran. The hostage families were back on TV at home with long, worried faces.

For his part, Bani-Sadr immediately scurried back into the radical camp. The same students he had called “self-centered children” and “dictators” weeks before, he now praised as “young patriots,” and argued that the label “moderate,” which had been applied to those trying to compromise over the hostage issue, certainly did not apply to him. Carter’s hopes were dashed and, worse, he appeared to have been snookered. All that had come of it was the creation of a UN commission that seemed certain to find fault with the United States.

“I am amazed at the naiveté of the American authorities,” said Bani-Sadr.

Carter was fed up. He was an extraordinarily patient man, but in him that virtue was now nearly exhausted. The government officials he was dealing with in Iran were powerless. He felt the last chance to free the captives peacefully had failed. Polls taken immediately after this disappointment showed that a majority of Americans believed the administration’s Iran policy had failed. Brzezinski sent a memo to Carter reporting this latest indignity, and the president scribbled in the margin, “The polls are accurate.”

Near the end of February, a guard named Mohammed told Joe Hall and Richard Queen that he was leaving. Mohammed had always treated them well, allowing them to whisper back and forth when it was forbidden to speak and sometimes bringing them candy and extra helpings of a dinner they especially liked. He told them that he was tired of the thing. It was going nowhere, and he had lost too much time away from his studies.

“I don’t believe anymore that it is the right thing to do,” he told them.

And then he was gone.

9. Fie on Them All

Bruce Laingen, his deputy Vic Tomseth, and security officer Mike Howland were still walking in circles on the third floor of the Foreign Ministry, involuntary “guests” of the Iranian government. Their hair had grown long and their clothes looked worn and wrinkled. They were able to shower—Laingen noted in his diary on January 2 the first hot one since the day he had arrived. Toward the end of the month they were finally given mattresses, and now they no longer had to sleep curled up on the lumpy sofas in the reception dining hall. Both Laingen and Howland had taken up watercolor painting and stood for hours by the big third-floor windows painting the views north toward the mountains. Tomseth spent most of his time reading, grabbing for the thickest books he could find. He got lost in novels set in faraway places and times.

Howland was still secretly exploring every corner of the old ministry building. He had started sneaking around at night in the nude; knowing how squeamish Iranian men were about nudity, he figured nakedness would give him a momentary advantage if he were discovered. One night he had crept downstairs to a foyer when two guards surprised him, and he hid beneath a table just a few feet away, his heart beating so loudly he felt sure they would hear it. They had passed on without noticing him.

Gradually, Howland expanded his range, and in time he had explored the whole building. He found a phone in a VIP waiting area that he used to call friends in north Tehran and to place calls to the British and Danish embassies, which gave them a line of communications that, unlike the phone in their quarters upstairs, was probably not monitored—at least no one suspected the Americans of having access to it. With the British ambassador’s office he worked out a system for passing coded messages keyed to the page numbers and lines of a book they agreed upon. This gave them another secret line of communication if they needed it. In fact, the Swiss ambassador was able to carry messages in and out of his meetings with them without being searched, and Laingen was already using that method to send private messages to Washington. Howland’s girlfriend Joan Walsh, one of the women among the thirteen hostages released in November, sent him a small file buried in a packet of pipe tobacco; she also sent him a hacksaw blade hidden in the spine of a book. Howland used the file to whittle down the blade of his pocketknife into a shim, which he then used to break into the guards’ key box in the kitchen and steal a key to the attic door.

There was nothing for him up there except for the feeling of having put one over on his captors. Howland did these things as much for personal amusement as for any practical reason. He thought a lot about what might happen if the American military tried to rescue them and planned for that contingency in part by disabling the pistols carried by their interior guards. One afternoon, sitting with two of the guards in their small kitchen, Howland offered to show them how to field-strip their Spanish-made pistols. He broke them down and put them back together quickly, and then set about teaching them how to do it themselves. It got so they felt comfortable enough to leave him alone with them for brief periods when they were disassembled.

Howland borrowed Tomseth’s toenail clippers and cut the recoil springs on the weapons, which meant they could fire one round but then the pistol would fail to successfully chamber a second round.

They watched Iranian TV with Tomseth providing a running translation, listened to the Voice of America and BBC broadcasts, and devoured the local newspapers and magazines. Their hopes had soared when the UN panel arrived in Tehran and then were dashed when its mission came apart. They pored over every statement from Qom, Washington, and Tehran like runes, trying to divine what was taking place behind the scenes. Tomseth, who had met his wife during his first State Department assignment in Thailand, would speak with her in Oregon periodically on the phone in fluent Thai, a language he felt sure would not be understood by the Iranians who monitored their calls. So he had yet another unfiltered source of information about what was going on in the United States.

When Khomeini fell ill with a heart ailment in January, there were stories of Iranian zealots offering to give up their lives in order to provide the imam with a fresh heart. Tomseth wrote a letter to the editor of a Tehran newspaper endorsing the idea, but suggesting that the wrong organ was being offered. Khomeini already had demonstrated by his behavior after the embassy takeover that he could function perfectly well without a heart, but “he could do very nicely with a new brain.” He showed the letter to Laingen, and they thought better of it. Tomseth tore it up.

The ordeal was a special strain on the idealistic Laingen, who every day suffered a fresh outrage. Nothing angered him more than Americans like Thomas, the native American activist, or the Kansas activist group headed by Forer, people Laingen felt were lending sympathy to his kidnappers. In America they were free to criticize and oppose, but how could they travel to a foreign country where America itself was under attack and applaud its enemies? How long would their defiant free speech and oppositionist politics last in a country ruled by the imam? By the third month of the standoff, even Iranians were beginning to sour on the young radicals holding the embassy, with their nightly telecasts revealing “spy documents,” which gave them a national platform to denounce the nation’s highest officials on the basis of revealed “contacts” with the American embassy, usually casual and routine. The students were very selective in these denunciations. Laingen knew well that plenty of the top clerics in the country, heroes of the revolution, had precisely the same kinds of contacts with the embassy, some of them more than routine, but their names never surfaced in the press conference. Exposing those ties was not politically advantageous. The increasingly embittered chargé saw that the students, unable to find any evidence for the most outlandish of their theories, had found another more cynical use for their treasure of stolen paper. The documents and revelations were being used to cow and ruin moderate politicians who threatened their vision of a “pure” Islamist state.

He wrote in his diary:

Former prime minister Mehdi Bazargan was quoted in a newspaper complaining, “Now the country is run by a bunch of kids, and this is regrettable. It is not correct to devote the TV screen to the most shameful accusations against people without asking the other side to defend themselves. You jeopardize the honor and nobility of the people with this.”

Precisely at this moment, Forer’s group appeared in Tehran seeking “reconciliation,” and effectively endorsing the takeover. The Kansas professor’s words were gladly reproduced in Tehran newspapers.

Laingen found Forer’s use of language from the New Testament especially galling, rhetorically linking the American government and diplomatic mission to the Pharisees and venal usurers of the ancient Jewish temple and, by implication, comparing the students to an angry Jesus Christ the Lord himself, chasing blasphemers from God’s house. And Forer was Jewish! Did he realize how anti-Semitic this new regime was? What could he be thinking? From his third-floor prison, Laingen wrote, “Good grief, if that is the way he interprets U.S. restraint on this issue, he isn’t fit to teach kindergarten.”

All pretense of keeping the three for their own protection was gone. They were now treated simply as hostages, with the doors to their living space chained and padlocked. They slept on the dining room floor and washed their socks and underclothes in the bathroom. Laingen discovered that the best way to clean his sheets was to soak them in the washbasin in soapy water and then, with the wet, soapy sheet draped over his shoulders in the shower, rinse it. The sheet could then be wrung out and hung up to dry, which didn’t take long in air so free of moisture. When the weather grew warmer they were allowed outside to exercise for an hour each day in the minister’s spacious garden. Laingen walked for ten minutes, jogged for thirty, and then did ten minutes of calisthenics. They were given a Ping-Pong table to help pass the time. Archbishop Hilarion Capucci, the Greek cleric, sent them a record player and a cassette player, along with some music—including the song “Tie a Yellow Ribbon,” which had become an anthem of sorts to the hostages thanks to Laingen’s wife Penne’s yellow ribbon campaign. That and the tunes of Elton John could be heard echoing in the cavernous chambers.

It was a strange existence. On the first day of March, looking out the window across the gray city toward the mountains, Howland spotted Laingen’s Italian cook and his Iranian driver on the sidewalk outside the ministry building looking up. They had evidently driven over hoping to catch a glimpse of their former employer, and when they caught Howland’s eye, and he brought Laingen and Tomseth to the window, they waved back and forth vigorously for a few moments until the Americans, worried that the ministry guards would see, gestured for their friends to get back in their car and leave.

They watched and listened as Bani-Sadr and Ghotbzadeh staged a vain last-ditch effort to salvage the previous month’s negotiated solution.

In a flurry of activity, the ministry staff had actually begun preparing the third floor to receive all of the hostages. President Bani-Sadr and his foreign minister Ghotbzadeh were such intense political rivals that they would not speak to each other, but in this effort they were together. They pressed to get formal custody of the hostages, realizing that so long as the captive Americans remained in the hands of the students at the occupied embassy, where they could rally public demonstrations of support that swayed Khomeini, there was no way the newly formed government could release them. It was a straightforward power struggle, and the new government was confident that Khomeini would not twice undercut them so blatantly. Ghotbzadeh told a reporter from the Washington Post on March 7 that “the hostages would be turned over to the Revolutionary Council in two days,” and added, “Maybe they [the students] will make little obstacles, but not major ones.”

Laingen watched with excitement when Ghotbzadeh, accompanied by the chief of the Revolutionary Guards and a security escort, conducted an inspection of the upper-floor rooms. It was clear they were evaluating the space as a holding area for all of the hostages. That surmise was confirmed later in the morning when Ghotbzadeh asked to see Laingen and explained what was going on. The Revolutionary Council had instructed the students to hand over the hostages. He said those Americans being held at the embassy would be sharing space with Laingen and the others within twenty-four hours. The foreign minister said that he would need Laingen’s help in managing the group and caring for them, which confirmed for the chargé the wisdom of the decision he, Tomseth, and Howland had made early on—that they would stay in the ministry in the hope that they might become useful to their colleagues. Laingen was ecstatic. Ghotbzadeh did not say how much longer they would all be held. The imam had stated that the hostages’ fate would be decided by the Majlis, which would not meet again until May, but prying the hostages from the hands of the students opened up all sorts of possibilities. Fifty cots and steel lockers were delivered to the large dining hall. The three longtime Foreign Ministry wards drew up a schedule for using the three bathrooms on their level.

But then a student spokesman announced that before handing over the hostages to the government, the hostage takers demanded a “hearing” before the Iranian people. Crowds formed outside the embassy walls, as thousands of religious hard-liners expressed their opposition to the move. As the number of demonstrators swelled, so did the students’ defiance. Scrambling to save face, the Revolutionary Council agreed to give them another twenty-four hours to comply. Another day went by, and the students still refused. Then the imam spoke again.

Laingen, Tomseth, and Howland listened to the radio on March 10, as Khomeini, in his cryptic way, doused the last embers of hope for an early solution.

“The crimes of the shah and America need no proof. We fight against America until death,” he said. “We shall not stop fighting until we defeat it and cut its hands in the area and lead weak people to victory…. We are sure of victory because right always is victorious. Be careful. There are long years of struggle ahead because the big powers scheme daily to pounce on you.”

Ghotbzadeh was crushed and went on television to denounce the students for sabotaging an agreement that he said was clearly in Iran’s best interests. Laingen was disappointed and angry and guessed that the same mood prevailed in Washington. The chargé’s mood was darkened further by new televised propaganda statements from Joe Subic, the renegade sergeant who, by all appearances, had gone fully native in captivity. On a day when the students threatened to kill all the hostages if America took any military action, Subic appeared on a late-night Iranian TV show to confirm that the embassy had, indeed, been a den of spies. Laingen wrote in his journal:

Ministry officials from time to time made a show of treating Laingen and the others as official emissaries, despite their de facto hostage status. Observing from the windows on the evening of March 22, Laingen saw a steady stream of limousines arriving at the ministry flying flags from various nations, and watched as formally dressed diplomats filed into the building. There was obviously a formal diplomatic event that evening. How could Iran and other nations maintain the pretense of diplomatic normalcy with the U.S. embassy forcibly occupied, its staff imprisoned, and the head of the mission held hostage upstairs?

Later that evening, however, Ghotbzadeh sent for the three, and they were escorted, with shaggy hair and rumpled clothes, before eight of their dapper colleagues and allowed to sit and talk about their predicament for more than an hour. Laingen later wrote in his journal:

America’s highest-ranking diplomat in Iran, still washing his socks and underwear in the Foreign Ministry bathroom every morning, assembling jigsaw puzzles, reading books, and walking up and down a closed staircase for exercise, composed yet another futile, angry letter to the president after seeing news reports of Bani-Sadr giving a speech from the outer wall of the occupied embassy.

He was repeating himself and he knew it. Laingen sent off the letter, signed “Chargé D’Affaires ad Interregnum,” feeling like the one sane person in a world gone mad.

10. The Atmosphere of Restraint Cannot Last Forever

On March 13, in a hotel room in Bern, Jordan wrote out a three-page letter to Bani-Sadr in his cramped handwriting, a blend of cursive and printing. He discarded the third page and rewrote the final three paragraphs to get them right.

It was not a bluff. The pressure was growing on Carter to act. His approval ratings had fallen sharply in polls, down to 40 percent, and Ted Kennedy had picked up several early primary victories. Indiana Republican senator Richard Lugar charged that the president was bungling the crisis and called for an immediate naval blockade of Iran and the mining of its harbors. Republican presidential candidate George H. W. Bush, a former CIA director, accused Carter of “pussy-footing around” with the ayatollah, and of “appeasement.” Ronald Reagan, the governor of California and front-runner among the Republican candidates, offered his own homespun analysis of the Iranians, suggesting that it was a waste to pursue diplomacy with such faithless negotiators: “They keep slicing the salami up. They lead us to believe that if a certain thing is done, the hostages will be released, and as soon as we say, ‘That’s fine,’ then they add another term, another condition. As long as we are willing to negotiate these additional conditions, then they’ve got a reason for keeping the hostages.” Asked what he would do instead, Reagan said he didn’t know, that he was “waiting for a miracle.”

Days after the UN commission returned to New York, Brzezinski, long an advocate for more forceful measures, suggested to the president that power in Tehran was so confused there was little point in continuing to work with Ghotbzadeh and Bani-Sadr. He found the plans of both would-be leaders, despite their official titles, had “an unrealistic quality,” because neither Iranian seemed to fully comprehend all the forces at work. Days later, Brzezinski complained further about Iran “diddling along” the United States, and urged the president to issue an ultimatum. The administration had considered blockading Iran and mining its harbors, but Carter was fearful that such a step would lead to a much broader conflict. So Brzezinski proposed another approach. Why not seize Kharg, an island in the northeastern Persian Gulf about sixteen miles off the Iranian coast that was the world’s largest offshore crude oil plant and the principal sea terminal for Iran’s oil industry? It would be a limited military strike, self-contained, and the island could be held until the hostages were released. That way, the decision to escalate the conflict would be Iran’s.

Brzezinski’s dramatic idea was not adopted, but clearly the mood in the White House was testy. When Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher worried that daring Khomeini to broaden the conflict might just feed into the Shiite “martyrdom complex,” Harold Brown, the defense secretary, noted, “A man with a martyr complex rarely lives to be seventy-nine.”

In a long Saturday meeting at Camp David, with participants dressed casually before a roaring fire in the stone fireplace, the president approved a secret, very risky reconnaissance trip into Iran to put the final piece in place for a rescue mission. Brzezinski and General Jones, chairman of the joint chiefs, both argued that the rescue mission could work, provided no word of it leaked in advance. When Secretary of State Vance objected to further discussion of military action, which he had adamantly opposed from the start, Carter’s shifting mood showed.

“Should we wait another year then?” he asked Vance.

Vance agreed to support the reconnaissance mission because it made sense even from his perspective; if it ever became necessary to rescue the hostages, if Iran started show trials and executions, the better prepared Delta Force was, the more likely it could succeed.

On March 23, the ailing shah flew from Panama to Egypt, despite administration efforts to prevent it. President Anwar Sadat of Egypt offered the shah permanent sanctuary. The official reason for the move was that he needed surgery to remove a cancerous spleen. A Cairo newspaper reported that he had fled Panama when he learned of a secret American plot to poison him.

11. I’m Not Going to Answer Questions from Anyone Wearing a Dress!

On March 19, Richard Queen and Joe Hall were told that they were going to be moved later that day.

“We are going to move you to a better place,” the guard said. “This is a good thing. You should be very happy.”

They were not very happy. Like the others, both men found that change flung them into fear and uncertainty. Both dreaded the move, especially when they were told they were going to be separated.

“You are going to be with some very important people,” Queen was told. “I don’t want to go with any important people. I want to stay with Joe. We get along well. We want to stay together.”

They packed up their small stash of toiletries, letters, books, and Queen’s Civil War game that Hall refused to play—one look at the thick book of rules and instructions and he had backed down. Later that day they were led outside with blankets over their heads and placed in a car. They were driven around for about half an hour, mostly in circles. Both Hall and Queen knew they were still on the compound when they were let out. They were led inside a building and told to sit on the floor. From beneath his blanket Hall could see feet moving back and forth, shod guard feet and sandaled hostage feet. Then he was moved and told to sit someplace else, then someplace else. At last he was taken to a room and the blanket was removed…and standing across from him was Queen. They had not been separated after all. The room was on the top floor of the chancery, one that had been trashed on the day of the takeover and left that way. The smell of tear gas still clung to its walls like a bad memory. They asked for some supplies and set about cleaning. The guards gave them two big leather chairs, perfect for reading, and a table with a lamp. But no matter how bright and clean and pleasant the room was—they were both especially thrilled to have a window and actual sunlight—the lingering tear gas continued to sting their eyes. It got worse and worse until finally the guards moved them out to another room down the hall, a nicer one, which they promptly cleaned and arranged to their liking, hanging their snapshots and keepsakes on the walls. Then they were moved again.

This time they were placed in a basement chancery office that had belonged to Bruce German, the embassy budget officer. It was an ugly space with walls that had been stained by a burst pipe. This was where marines Jimmy Lopez and Steve Kirtley had given the guards such fits months earlier. They had drawn and painted slogans all over the walls. Lopez had written out patriotic lines in Spanish and drawn a giant eagle. Hamid the Liar brought them a big gum eraser and instructed the new tenants to remove the drawing, which had been done in thick pencil. Hall went to work on it, but found that the eraser wasn’t doing the job.

“Do it yourself,” he told Hamid.

“If you don’t remove it, you will be taken back to the Mushroom,” he said.

“In the warehouse there’s lots of paint and brushes,” said Queen. “Could you bring us some?”

They were given buckets of white paint and they went to work. They applied several coats, and before long the room looked clean and bright. The guards gave them a vacuum cleaner. They were given back the big leather chairs and a desk with a glass top with some shelving on it. Guards got into the spirit of the redecoration and supplied a few paintings they had earlier taken off the walls. Queen asked for a poster of Alaska he had hung in his office months earlier and they even found and delivered that. A table lamp provided soft light in the evenings. They had windows to let in sunlight and fresh air. They could hear birds outside. When spring came they left the window open to let in cool air at night but discovered that Tehran bred swarms of nasty mosquitoes. Killing them became a nightly competition.

The only downside was the protesters. All light and sound had been shut out of the Mushroom Inn, but now, restored to the surface world, the protesters, somewhat less in number but with no noticeable diminution of zeal, remained outside. It was as if the students needed to have a massive audience at all times. The demonstrations were supplemented by audio-tapes of earlier gatherings, and sometimes the tape would get stuck and the sound level would drop, revealing the relatively small size of the crowd. The guards hustled to fix it as though they were all living in a balloon that had just sprung a leak.

Hall and Queen were at last allowed to speak. They spent days going over everything that had happened since the takeover and every scrap of information they had about what was happening in Iran and the world. They reviewed all the things they and the others had done, or hadn’t done, and critiqued everything and everyone, including themselves.

With the holidays gone, there was nothing tangible to look forward to. The holidays had carried the hope of release, and once they were over their captivity stretched open-ended into the future. The change of scenery and the freedom to converse helped Queen rally from his post-Christmas depression, even with the worsening numbness of his left arm and side. He started an exercise program, walking around the room and doing calisthenics as well as he could, taking a cold shower afterward, and then plunging into his books.

Hall and Queen argued—no two men locked in the same room for months together could be entirely free of discord—but their disagreements never ran deep enough to last. With some of the hostages the arguments got ugly and occasionally turned into out-and-out fights and deep-rooted bitterness. Given the cramped and overall unsettling circumstances, and the constant discomfort, Hall and the gangly, bearded, ailing consular officer got along famously. After dinner each evening was the smoking hour. Hall had never been a pipe smoker, but Queen gave him one of the pipes Akbar had brought from his apartment and now Hall was hooked. When the lights went out they would switch on a soft lamp on their table and sit smoking and sipping tea and talking into the night.

Their pleasant routine was haunted, however, by Queen’s mysterious illness. Ever since the day when he dropped the tea, his symptoms had gradually worsened. He lost sensation in his left hand completely, and then his legs grew weak. They would wobble when he walked. Hall had to help him button his shirt. Then his vision began to go. He was so dizzy that whenever he stood it would make him nauseous.

Queen felt himself slipping further and further into a kind of dream world. At the Christmas party he had been given a songbook, and on the back was stamped “The Brooklyn Savings Bank”—he guessed the books had once been a bank giveaway. His father had been born in Brooklyn and he had fond memories of the place. Inside the book was the hymn “We Three Kings,” which he set about memorizing. He would sing the song to himself, realizing that this was not behavior he would consider normal under other circumstances. But he found himself increasingly, and with increasing comfort, retreating from the basement room, from the discomfort and uncertainty of his illness, into his own rich inner world. He stopped straining to overhear conversations and the radio. He felt better off for it. He felt calmer and more accepting, even more charitable toward the guards. He knew the situation wasn’t improving; in a letter home in late January he told his parents he was living “in a timeless void of a world,” but he was coping better.

He brushed aside Hall’s concern for his worsening physical symptoms.

“I’ll get over it,” he said. “It’ll go away. At least I’m still alive.”

Hall thought Queen was remarkable, and was increasingly influenced by him. Queen was quietly but devoutly religious, and that, too, began to rub off on his roommate. Hall’s parents had not raised him to be a regular churchgoer and he had grown up considering himself agnostic, at least as he understood the term; he did not believe in a God who listened to men’s prayers or in divine justice being meted out in an afterlife. But in this open-ended confinement, with the threat of execution lurking offstage, he began trying to pray. He read two or three chapters of the Bible each morning. He went through the entire book once, then started a second time. He had some bad feelings about it. He knew he was only flirting with religion as a way of covering all bets—hey, if there is a God, maybe He could get him out of Iran. He assumed the traditional posture, down on his knees, and clasped his hands together as he saw Queen and the others do. He knew it would greatly please his wife, who was devout and distressed that he was not. If only for her sake, he wished he could believe. But Hall never felt anything or any closer to God. At night he would sometimes pull the blanket over his head and “talk” to his wife, whom he missed terribly, and there were times when he felt that he had actually made a connection with her. He definitely felt closer to her in those moments than he’d ever felt to God.

Hall was also hesitant about any visible display of religious interest because his captors were so obnoxious about their own faith. The guards would routinely call him and the others infidels, and note that America was doomed to fail in the long run because Americans did not pray to Allah and live according to the dictates of the Koran. Most of them liked to have an audience for their prayers. Hall didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of seeing him undergo a foxhole conversion.

Hall ended his effort at finding God with one last prayer: “God, if you exist I will make a deal with you. You take care of my wife and family, and I will take care of myself, and won’t ask anything for me. You take care of them because they are true believers.”

He knew his wife would be praying for him. It seemed to him a better avenue of approach.

John Limbert was moved in Iran’s New Year, March 21, to a room on the top floor of the chancery. The move came after Hohman and Belk had slipped a note into Limbert’s room when he was taking a shower. Not realizing a guard had stayed in his room, they knocked on the wall to get his attention and the guard had found the note, which asked for news about Waldheim’s visit. If the guards were surprised at how much they seemed to know about what was going on they never said a word. They simply moved Limbert. Again the embassy’s political officer experienced the trauma of being torn from the relative security of his routines and colleagues and forced to face a new and uncertain situation. They would not let him take his pillow with him and so he lost his radio. He tried hard to keep it.

“Can’t I take my mattress and pillow?” Limbert pleaded. “I’ve gotten used to them.”

The new room had a window that had been bricked up, and the walls were thick and solid. This time he really was alone.

He fell back on his routines, eating, exercising, reading, sleeping, talking to the guards. He sorely missed the radio. He stretched out his meals as long as he could, reading old magazines, trying to savor each mouthful slowly enough to make the food last through an entire magazine. At one point he managed to accumulate a stack of old Fortune magazines and read one with each meal.

He made himself a deck of cards, and when he was playing solitaire with it one day the guard took pity on him and brought him a real deck. Over the next ten months he wore out six or seven packs. He used pistachio shells to re-create football and soccer plays, and then acted out whole games, and he worked on translating some of the works of Shariati into English. The guards were pleased enough about this to bring him a typewriter. When he was finished with one set of essays he gave it to the guard.

“If anybody is interested, they can have them printed,” he said. “If they make any money, just give it to charity.”

He translated some of C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters into Persian.

One Monday afternoon, a TV crew swept unannounced into his room with Red Cross representatives and Ali Khamenei, the powerful cleric who had been named chief of Friday prayers in Tehran, a very prestigious position. With the cameras rolling, Limbert talked briefly to Khamenei, telling him that his own living conditions were passable and complaining jokingly that Persian hospitality was so aggressive that “they refuse to let the guests go.”

When Khamenei spoke of the shah’s criminality, Limbert acknowledged it dismissively, as a thing that no one disputed.

The interrogations of Michael Metrinko had ended early in the new year. The authorities had not given up their theory that he was a master spy, but they had gotten nothing out of him. Metrinko knew that any association with him, no matter how innocent, might mean a jail sentence or even execution for an Iranian. So he was alarmed in early spring when he was led from his basement cell to be questioned again and found himself in the presence of Mousavi Khoeniha, the nearsighted, portly mid-level cleric and architect of the takeover. He was wearing a turban and clerical robes. Standing beside Khoeniha was Ali Sharshar, an acquaintance of Metrinko’s from better days. Metrinko had taken judo lessons arranged by Ali’s brother Behrouz, a former police colonel and a well-known martial arts teacher.

Earlier in the year, the embassy political officer had helped arrange for Ali and his wife to travel to the United States with their daughter, who needed open-heart surgery. When the family had returned home afterward, Ali had brought a gift to the embassy to thank Metrinko for his help, a tie and a bottle of cologne. It was awkward for Metrinko. He was not allowed to accept gifts, so he had called his friend Behrouz and asked him to return the gift to Ali and explain that he meant no offense by refusing it. Behrouz had invited Metrinko to dinner with his brother.

The Sharshar family was a distinguished one, and both Behrouz and his younger brother, a helicopter pilot, had served the shah. They were a well-educated, Westernized family—Behrouz and Ali’s sister, Fereshte, had married an American journalist and was living in Philadelphia—and they had nothing but contempt for the so-called religious leaders who had seized power. They were Muslims but they were appalled by the hypocrisy of many mullahs, who they saw as more interested in worldly wealth and power than in religion. They had been living in fear of the revolutionary government ever since the shah’s departure. Behrouz had been fired from his police job. At the dinner with Metrinko, Ali had made some harshly critical comments about Khomeini and his circle. Metrinko, as he always did, had written up a report of the dinner and had included an account of the conversation. Evidently this report had fallen into the hands of the hostage takers. Metrinko’s heart sank when he saw Ali in the room with Khoeniha.

The previous weeks had been a nightmare for the Sharshars. Ali had been denounced by the students at a routine press conference in the embassy, and Metrinko’s “spy document” had been produced as proof. Much had been made of it in the press. Ali had been thrown in jail for nineteen days until his father, a former governor of Qom, successfully pleaded for his release. But after his release some of the mullahs complained that Ali was being let off too easily. Behrouz and Ali had been summoned before a meeting with a high-ranking ayatollah, a friend of their father’s, who explained that not everyone was convinced of their innocence. Hotheaded Ali had defiantly told the cleric, “All mullahs are filth.” Behrouz felt like slapping his brother and did his best to smooth over the insult, but the upshot of the meeting was that they were ordered to an interrogation session at the “den of spies,” where Ali, in particular, would have to explain his comments and his relationship to Metrinko.

It was a delicate matter. The Sharshar brothers had friends and family connections that still mattered in the new Iran, but Ali’s effrontery and his documented connection to one of the embassy’s most notorious “spies” demanded some kind of response. On the appointed morning they were driven to the embassy in a windowless van with several of the students, along with Khoeniha.

Behrouz felt confident. He knew he had said nothing compromising, and he trusted that his clever American friend would say nothing to make matters worse. He was kept waiting in the hallway of the chancery when his brother was led inside for questioning. It was sad; the once airy and stately halls of the building were littered with trash and its walls covered with graffiti and slogans. While he waited, he saw Metrinko being led down the hallway and into the room. He could hardly believe his eyes. At first he wasn’t sure the ragged, spectral figure he saw was his American friend, but then he recognized him in the gaunt, bearded face. Metrinko was wearing a green nylon shirt and oversized pants that were gathered and bunched together into a ball at the waist and clamped together with a paper clip. His flip-flop sandals smacked against the hard floor with each step. Behrouz thought Metrinko saw him but his friend made no sign of it. As soon as Metrinko was led into the room where they had taken Ali, Behrouz heard Metrinko start shouting.

“Why have you brought this guy here?” he demanded.

Khoeniha ignored the question. He glowered behind his desk, oddly digging a fork into the palm of his hand, as though working to control his anger.

“What was your relationship with this man?” Khoeniha asked. “How did you know him?”

“His brother is a judo master,” Metrinko said. “His brother-in-law is from Philadelphia. I know him. And he works for a newspaper.”

Khoeniha raised an eyebrow. They were getting somewhere. He asked about this brother-in-law.

“I’m not going to answer questions from anyone wearing a dress,” Metrinko said, contemptuously.

“Shut up, you motherfucker,” one of the students barked at him.

Metrinko exploded. “You are the motherfuckers! The real motherfucker is Khomeini. Fuck him and fuck you all!”

The guards beat him. Behrouz was appalled. He wanted to help his friend but knew he could not. He loathed the scruffy, bearded “students,” and he felt ashamed for his country. So he sat, fighting the urge to run from the building, for as long as the kicks and blows continued and until Metrinko was dragged back down the hall, his head down, still muttering defiance.

One of the students, still clearly angry, brought Ali out of the room and then he and Behrouz and the others left. The students were concerned about what the brothers had seen. They had made a big public show of how gently and respectfully they were treating their “guests” at the embassy.

“If you talk one bit about what you have heard,” one of them told Behrouz, “we’ll stand you up before a firing squad.”

In the coming days, both Sharshar brothers fled Iran. Both ended up in the United States. Behrouz visited Metrinko’s parents in Olyphant. Of all the hostages, Metrinko was the only one the State Department had heard nothing about. There had been no pictures of him at any of the staged events, and none of the hostages who had been released knew what had happened to him. There had been no letters from him, and there was serious concern that he had been killed. Metrinko’s mother sobbed when Behrouz told her that he had seen him alive. He described how he looked but didn’t mention the beating.

Back in his basement cell, bruised and scraped, Metrinko worried about his Iranian friends and was pleased to have escaped from the session without further compromising them. He was confident that they would find their way to safety. And insulting Khoeniha to his face? That was simply delicious. He replayed the moment in his mind with increasing satisfaction. It was well worth the beating they’d given him. He found that as he grew leaner he was also growing tougher; the blows didn’t bother him as much as they had in the past. He knew he must have presented a frightening picture to his old friends, a ragged, dirty, pale, hairy ghost of his former self, captive and pathetically vulnerable. But inwardly he glowed. All in all, it had been the most interesting thing to happen to him in months.

12. I Think We’re Ready

As the month of dashed hopes came to an end, a small CIA plane took off from a desert airstrip in Oman and, with the eyes of America’s most sophisticated tracking system watching carefully, threaded its way through Iran’s radar defense systems, flew across half the country in darkness, and set down on the spot being considered as a staging area for Delta Force’s rescue mission. The president had given authorization for this reconnaissance flight only days before, along with permission for Colonel Charlie Beckwith to slip two of his men into Tehran. To the men who had been planning and practicing a hostage rescue for months, it was a sign that the White House was getting serious about sending them in.

Aboard the CIA plane, a Twin Otter, was Major John Carney, an air force combat controller known as “Coach,” because he had once coached football at the Air Force Academy. He was a big, rangy man dressed completely in black—jeans, sweater, and knit cap—carrying a 9mm automatic pistol with a silencer, more to make himself feel better than out of any realistic hope it would save him if he were discovered. The pistol would do about as much good as his lame cover story, that he and the pilots were geologists. To make that work he’d have to quickly ditch the gun. Carney was stretched out in the back of the plane on a metal fuel tank that provided extra gas for the long flight—four hours in and four hours out—and between that and his Kawasaki dirt bike there was barely room for him to sit up. Beckwith had never even asked Carney about undertaking this mission; he had just volunteered him. The veteran air force man would not have turned it down, but he was surprised not to have been consulted about it. That was Beckwith’s way. Carney saw it in football terms. The colonel was the kind of man who figured if you showed up with a helmet, you’d damn well be ready to play.

They landed in an empty quadrant of the vast emptiness of the Dasht-e Kavir salt desert. The nearest town, Yazd, was more than ninety miles away. There was a “road,” more like a well-worn path, used very occasionally by trucks and buses traveling north from Qom to Meshad, a town on the northeastern border of Iran and Afghanistan. Ninety days of satellite surveillance had observed only two vehicles. It was here that six C-130 transports carrying fuel blivits and Beckwith’s men—now nearly a hundred—would land on the first night of the two-day mission. The eight Sea Stallion helicopters from the aircraft carrier Nimitz would meet them here, refuel, load the Delta operators, and then fly off to their prearranged hiding places outside Tehran. But before this complex rendezvous could be attempted, the mission planners needed to know whether the soil was firm enough to enable large fixed-wing aircraft to land and take off without getting stuck in the sand.

Carney nervously disembarked into darkness suffused with moonlight, unloaded his dirt bike, and went to work. The ground seemed plenty firm enough; it was hard-packed sand as smooth and solid as a pool table. He drilled several soil samples that he would carry back to Washington for more detailed analysis. Then Carney measured out a runway and painstakingly dug holes with his K-bar knife to chip away at the soil and bury small infrared beacons at intervals to define it from the air. He set up four lights to outline the box into which the plane would land, and then planted another about three thousand feet farther on to mark the end of the runway. The beacons were virtually invisible to the naked eye but showed up brightly through night-vision goggles. He connected the lights to batteries, and attached them to a trigger he had removed from a garage-door opener he had picked up at Sears. With the garage-door remote, one of the pilots would be able to turn on the runway lights on his approach on the night of the mission. He also paced off the ground inside the lights to make sure there was no debris, stumps, dips, or bumps big enough to damage a wing or harm the plane’s landing gear.

Because he had some difficulty at first orienting himself, the work took fifty minutes, ten more than he had estimated. Twice while he worked vehicles came roaring past. The landscape was so flat that he could see the headlights coming from a long way off, and Carney just lay flat, pressing himself to the ground. They passed so close by that Carney watched the truck driver casually light a cigarette as he passed. One of the pilots, Bud McBroom, had come out to help Carney align the runway lights, and as they lay flat he told a long joke about Roy Rogers, concluding with a silly punch line he sang to the tune of “The Chattanooga Choo-Choo.” “Pardon me, Roy, is that the cat that chewed your new shoes?” It made Carney laugh.

Both men and the other pilot were armed, but the last thing they wanted was a confrontation in the middle of the desert. It could scotch the whole mission. Apparently neither passing vehicle had spotted them or the plane. When, exhausted and relieved, they returned to the plane with the soil samples, tools, and motorcycle, they found the other pilot, Jim Rhyne, standing at the nose of the plane with his M-16.

On the long flight out of Iran, the pilots noted an electronic indication that the plane had been picked up by radar. They were near the southern coastline, just minutes from the Persian Gulf, and fearing that one of the country’s defense radar stations might have spotted them, the pilot changed his course and the indicator went off. Later analysis showed that the radar had come from a commercial vessel in the gulf, not from Iranian defenses. When they landed back in Oman, Carney immediately boarded another plane for London, where he was met at Gatwick Airport by two CIA agents who escorted him to the Concorde lounge. Feeling out of place in his dirty jeans and sweater, still ripe from his days of travel and night of work in the Iranian desert, with traces of camouflage paint still on his face and hands, he passed on the complimentary champagne and asked for a beer. Later that same day he was in the office of General James B. Vaught, the mission commander. His soil samples, analyzed at nearby Fort Belvoir, showed that the “Desert One” location was suitable. There was some concern over the trucks that had rolled past; it indicated a much busier road than surveillance had led mission planners to believe, but that was dismissed as an anomaly.

Carney’s bold scout mission did more than test the soil and lay out a runway. It confirmed that it was possible to slip into and out of Iran without detection. Satellites watched Desert One carefully for several more days until wind had erased all traces of the marks left by the Twin Otter and Carney’s dirt bike.

Over the same days, Beckwith’s operatives had slipped separately into Tehran. Led by Major Dick Meadows, they were the Iranian-born U.S. airman and several special forces soldiers who spoke fluent German, posing as German businessmen. Meadows went under an Irish passport and had apparently summoned enough of a brogue to satisfy the customs officer at Mehrabad Airport.

Over the next few days, Meadows and the rest of the team double-checked all the arrangements put in place by “Bob,” the CIA agent Beckwith didn’t completely trust. They checked the hide sites and spent time observing the embassy from outside, noting the number of guards and the kinds of weapons they carried and also their habits. Nights were still cold in Tehran at the end of March, and the guards could be seen leaving their posts to duck periodically into shelter.

The German-speaking team managed to pay a visit to the Foreign Ministry building where Laingen, Tomseth, and Howland were being held. Their assessment of the security precautions there prompted mission planners to increase the size of the separate force planning to rescue the diplomats from their gilded cage on the third floor.

Confidence in the mission was now high. The planes and choppers and Delta had conducted their sixth full-dress rehearsal at Twenty-nine Palms, the Marine Corps base in California, in the last week of March, and it had gone well. Delta’s operators knew their moves so well they could practically do them in their sleep. Yet Beckwith still fretted over the unforeseen. There were so many things that could go wrong that, if you let yourself think about it for too long, it induced paralysis. His men were trained to quickly scan hands when they entered a room, and to direct their fire at those with weapons. What if, in the confusion, some of the hostages jumped guards and seized their rifles? He worried about what would happen if, after his men had taken down the embassy and herded the hostages into Amajadieh soccer stadium across the street, the Iranian police or army counterattacked with armor. Delta was strictly light infantry. They could not hold out long against tanks or any kind of armored assault vehicles. The answer to those worries were the AC-130 gunships that would be flying that night over the city. They would destroy any Iranian armor that moved toward the rescue operation as well as any Iranian fighters on the runway at Mehrabad Airport.

By the beginning of April the colonel was convinced Delta Force was as ready as it was going to be. His men had been sequestered for months, training endlessly. Major Pete Schoomaker, one of the squadron leaders, had simply vanished from his fiancée’s life. He had not been allowed to tell her or anyone else what he was doing, where he was going, or when he might be back. She canceled their wedding several months after he left, having heard nothing from him. At night the men would watch Ted Koppel’s new program on TV, Nightline, America Held Hostage, which every night would list the number of days since the embassy takeover. Somebody hung up a sign in their barracks that read “Delta Force Held Hostage” and every day upped the number of days. As spring approached in Iran the nights grew shorter, robbing the mission of precious minutes of darkness.

General David Jones, chairman of the joint chiefs, visited Fort Bragg not long after these secret surveillance trips were completed. He and Beckwith pulled off on a muddy trail near one of Delta’s practice sites and had a long conversation in the car. Beckwith looked Jones in the eye and told him his men were ready.

“We’ve got to do it,” he said.

The colonel explained how many times his men had practiced, and how often they had been told to get ready to go only to be stood down.

“Sir, I can’t get these troops up one more time,” Beckwith said. “If we’re going to go, this has got to be it.”

“I would agree with you,” said Jones. “I think we’re ready.”