Guests of the Ayatollah

1. A Prison-like Place

On the day after the failed rescue mission most of the hostages were moved from the embassy and scattered around Iran. Stunned by the audacity of the American rescue effort, and alarmed by how vulnerable they had been, the student hostage takers quickly corrected the major mistake of keeping all of the hostages in the same place.

Without knowing why, the Americans were hustled out of Tehran in cars and vans, bound and blindfolded, sometimes taken for drives that went on straight through the night. Bill Keough, Bill Royer, Cort Barnes, and Charles Jones were driven to an airport and flown to a southern city on a commercial airliner. The hostages, who had grown accustomed to being shuffled around for no apparent reason, sensed that something important had happened. The guards were all wearing gas masks and seemed especially skittish. They carried more weapons than usual and seemed unwilling to look the hostages in the eye. Kevin Hermening guessed that his chances of going home with his mother were dashed. His roommate, embassy security chief Al Golacinski, wondered if there had been an attempted coup d’état.

After a long drive through the night, CIA station chief Tom Ahern was deposited in an empty room in what appeared to have once been a large private residence or a small school. There was a giant bush outside filled with birds, hundreds of them. At first the chirping of this mob entertained him, but gradually it became annoying. He still had his music sheets and one or two books and resumed his solitary routines. He would be there for more than a month.

Speeding along in the back of a different van, John Limbert could tell that the landscape was flat, which indicated he and the others with him were being driven south, since to the north were mountains. He knew that part of Iran well from many drives he had taken back and forth between Tehran and Shiraz during his years as a teacher, so he could picture the small towns and open spaces even though he couldn’t see. They drove for seven to eight hours. He was glad he had eaten and gone to the toilet not long before they’d left. When he could see the light of dawn glowing at the edges of his blindfold, they came to a stop in what he figured was Isfahan.

Limbert was left in a room by himself again, which he did not like, but there was a bay window in which he could sit and look out into a large garden. He was doing that on his first evening when he saw Colonel Lee Holland standing in a window across the way. Holland didn’t see him and Limbert didn’t dare call out. But it was the first American he had seen since February.

Michael Metrinko bounced blindfolded in the back of a van for two hours, and was then led up some stairs and left in a prison cell with, to his delight, two other Americans, CIA technician Phil Ward and army Master Sergeant Regis Regan. It was the first time the embassy political officer had been out of isolation since the previous November. Metrinko recognized Regan, although he didn’t know him well. They had been together once escorting a group of visitors on official embassy business. He had no memory of Ward and thought he might be a plant. But Regan vouched for him, and soon the pleasure of having company overcame any sense of caution. The three men sat up all night talking. It was the first time Metrinko had spoken more than a few words of English in almost six months and it felt wonderful. The cell was very hot and had iron cots with thin, soiled mattresses on them. They knew they weren’t in the mountains because it was too warm, and they concluded that they had been driven south. The taste of the water was extremely sour, which was peculiar to just a few places, and they heard the whistle of a train. They finally concluded with certainty that they had been driven to the holy city of Qom, the Ayatollah Khomeini’s home base.

When one of the guards asked if they knew where they were, Metrinko told him, “Of course.”

“Where are you?” the guard asked.

“I will tell you if you will go out and get us some sohan [an oily and brittle yellow candy peculiar to Qom].”

The guard laughed and confirmed the deduction.

Ward was taken away without explanation soon after they arrived. Metrinko and Regan were moved to better quarters, an old art school. They were given a bigger room that had mattresses on the floor and a new roommate, Dave Roeder.

CIA officer Bill Daugherty was one of the last to be moved after the rescue attempt. Late in the afternoon that day he noticed a peculiar quiet had fallen over the embassy. Usually things picked up before dusk, when the day-shift guards were replaced by the night shift. When he pounded on his door to be taken to the toilet no one came. In the hall outside he could hear only what sounded like a news broadcast on the radio. He sensed that something had happened, or was about to happen, and in his experience such changes were almost always for the worse. Instead of his usual well-rounded dinner he was brought just a thin bowl of chili. In the middle of the night, guards entered his room, cuffed his hands, and slipped a canvas bag over his head. He was led to the back of a van, where he joined several other American captives similarly bound and hooded, and taken on a silent drive that lasted only a half hour. Daugherty was escorted into a building—he had the sense that he was passing through a huge room—up several flights of metal stairs, and into a room, where he was told to remove his hood.

It was a prison cell, an oddly shaped room about six by eight feet, with a stainless steel toilet in a corner. The entrance to the room was a steel door with a slot at the bottom big enough for a food tray and a small window at eye level that was closed by a sliding panel on the outside. Some light filtered in from a small window high above, but otherwise the cell was lit by a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, fifteen feet up. Daugherty was furious. One of his persistent fears was of being hauled off for trial and execution, and being placed in a prison cell seemed a big step closer to that fate. No one responded when he banged on the door, so he began pacing back and forth—three steps forward, turn, three steps back. About the only reassurance he had was that he had arrived with other captives, and he had heard other doors slamming nearby, so at least he wasn’t here alone.

One of the student leaders paid him a visit the next morning. He seemed calm and he assured Daugherty that he and the others had been moved “for their own safety.” He told Daugherty that he was not in a prison but “a prison-like place.” He would learn later that he was, in fact, in Evin Prison, the most notorious of the jails in Tehran. Set in the foothills of the snowcapped peaks north of the city, Evin was an ugly, self-contained city of incarceration, a sprawling complex of older, dungeon-like buildings and more modern administrative ones surrounded by high stone walls that climbed and dipped with the steep contours of the landscape. The color and construction of the walls varied from brown to brick, reflecting the patchwork nature of the place, which had been expanded, renovated, and rebuilt over its seventy-five-year history.

On his second day there, for the first time since being taken hostage, Daugherty got a cellmate. Bruce German, the embassy’s budget officer, introduced himself. The two men had seen each other in the embassy but had never been acquainted. German had spent much of the previous night sobbing and weeping in a cell in another part of the same building, which may be why the guards decided to put him in with someone else. The two men compared notes about where they had been and who they had been with. Daugherty had precious little to contribute to the conversation. He had been held alone for nearly the entire time and had not been able to communicate with any of his former colleagues, much less anyone at home. German shared some of his experiences, but not all. He had been allowed to send letters home and had received mail and had even been allowed to speak on the phone with his family in the Maryland suburbs of Washington. He didn’t mention this to Daugherty, and even after the CIA officer said, “I heard somebody talking on the phone with their wife,” German didn’t mention that it might have been him.

Daugherty noticed that German still had his watch, which surprised him. All of his own possessions except the clothes he wore had been taken on the first night, along with those of everybody else as they sat around the big table in the ambassador’s residence. The two men were together very briefly. German was taken away after only four hours, and Daugherty did not see him there again. He had felt uneasy about German—he wondered if he was helping their captors—and the episode reinforced his preference for solitude.

It was early spring, but the mountain altitude was chilly. Several times Daugherty was taken out to a tiny enclosed space for “exercise.” It was no bigger than a large dining room table, surrounded on four sides by brick walls reaching up nearly twenty feet. He was allowed to stand in this space for about a half hour. He was so cold that he followed a small patch of sunlight around the space.

Kathryn Koob and Ann Swift were told to pack on the day after the rescue attempt, but when they were finally moved, after waiting anxiously all day, they were simply taken to another room in the chancery. It had been home to three male hostages, one of whom had written on the wall “Khomeini Hilton, 176 days.” It was so dirty the women immediately asked for buckets, mops, scrub brushes, and a vacuum.

They had no sooner cleaned it than they were moved again, across the hall. They pleaded with Hamid to let them stay in the room they had laboriously scrubbed and improved, but to no avail. They were marched across the hall to a room that was just as dirty as the first. They scrubbed and vacuumed this one, too.

The women were not the only ones who stayed behind. In another room in the big, now mostly vacant office building was Bob Ode, who when he heard the demonstrations and saw the other hostages being taken off assumed that an agreement at last had been reached between Iran and the United States. He and Bruce German had packed expectantly, but when only German was taken away Ode’s disappointment and anger erupted. He swore a blue streak at the guards, dredging up language he hadn’t used since he was a sailor in World War Two. It was a full-fledged temper tantrum, pointless and probably self-destructive, which Ode understood but could not contain. He screamed at them until a senior guard named Akmed came into his room and upbraided him.

“Older men should have more dignity,” he said.

Dignity was the last thing on Ode’s mind. His disappointment ached. He assumed that German was being taken home, and he was not, because he had misbehaved. The notion seemed confirmed when the next morning he was taken from the room but not even out of the building. He was moved down the hall into a room with Don Hohman, the embassy medic. The rest of the building had grown quiet as a tomb. When Ode complained that the new room wasn’t as comfortable as the old one, where he had everything set up, Hamid told him, “It is because you cursed at the students.” Besides, said Hamid, the new room was larger.

“But the other room had a desk with drawers where we could keep our things, and two chairs, and was brighter,” Ode pleaded.

“This will be your room from now on,” said Hamid.

“How long is ‘from now on’?” Ode asked.

Hamid told Ode that he complained too much.

2. Any Possibility of Failure Should Have Ruled It Out

Barbara Timm was awakened at the Intercontinental Hotel Friday morning in Tehran by a team of angry students, who accused her and her husband of having come as part of the “secret invasion.” That was how the mission was being portrayed in Iran. The United States had attempted a military invasion of Iran but had been dealt a crushing defeat. One of the students suggested that the Timms and their lawyer had been sent by the U.S. government as a distraction.

“You tricked us,” one of them accused her. “You lied to us. We believed that you were just a mother coming to see her son.”

She had seen Kevin on Monday, and the days between then and the rescue mission had unfolded like absurdist theater. First they had been visited by, of all people, the comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory, who had come to Tehran threatening to fast outside the occupied embassy until the hostages were released. Timm had also met and lunched with a freelance American journalist named Cynthia Dwyer, who had come to Tehran to research an article. They had met at a restaurant in the huge hotel lobby. To further complicate matters, the young Iranian woman who was acting as their interpreter had taken them to meet Iranians who were opposed to Khomeini and the taking of the embassy. They had also attended a prayer service and heard calls of “Death to Carter” and “Death to America.” It was all so strange it was hard to know what to think. What sustained Timm was the hope that she might get another chance to visit with Kevin and perhaps even rescue him from this place. She had passed the long days of that week filled with anxiety, confusion, and hope.

Now this, some kind of American attack. The Timms were dismayed. She knew any hope of taking Kevin home was gone and began to fear arrest and detention herself. She had long opposed any use of force to resolve the standoff. Why had Carter done this while she was in Tehran? What if the hostage takers now blew up the embassy and killed the hostages, something they had threatened to do if the United States attacked? Ken Timm had seen what looked like plastic explosives at various places around the outside of the chancery. In this state, Timm got a panicked international phone call from Bonnie Graves, the wife of hostage John Graves, who was angry and distraught and who urged an immediate public apology to Iran. In hopes of sparing her husband what was to come, Bonnie urged Barbara to specifically mention the “family of John Graves.” McAfee also urged her to make the statement, as a way of clearing any suspicions about her and her husband and as a way to head off a possible bloody response by the hostage takers.

So Timm went before the TV cameras in the hotel lobby and read a statement drafted by McAfee.

“On behalf of my family and the family of Bonnie Graves, we deeply regret there has been military action taken,” she said. She was more vehement in answer to reporters’ questions. “I am very angry that the president of our country would do something so stupid, something that we’ve been told for five months could be so disastrous and could not in any way bring about good results. As a result of trying to make a military move I believe it is time the American people see that President Carter and his advisers are not capable of handling this crisis and that it should be turned over to the people, turned over to the Congress.” She lied and told reporters that she did not fear for her son.

On the same day, as Iranian army investigators pored over the wreckage at Desert One and gathered the charred remains of the eight dead members of the failed rescue mission into plastic bags, Timm attended a presidential press conference in Tehran, where Bani-Sadr lambasted her country. Rumors ran high in Iran, and Iranians of course did not believe President Carter’s statement about the nature and scope of the mission. The passengers on the arrested bus were quizzed repeatedly about their miraculous escape from peril. Some claimed to have seen at least a dozen helicopters and four hundred to five hundred American soldiers. There were reports that at least forty Iranians, some of them former students of the U.S. Air Force Academy, had been allied with the plot, which was not just a rescue mission but a full-scale invasion and an attempt to murder Khomeini and destroy the revolution.

At Bani-Sadr’s side, a sobbing Timm addressed the world press.

“I am going to tell you and the people of Iran that our family and another family of one of the hostages, the Graves family, deeply regret the action our president took yesterday. We’d like to apologize for that action.”

Gloating over the American “defeat,” Khomeini chastised Carter for his “foolish maneuver” and warned that any further military action by the United States would prompt the immediate execution of all hostages. His threat actually came as a relief to the White House and hostages’ families, who remembered earlier such threats by the student captors. It appeared to mean that, perhaps because of the complete ignominy of the mission’s failure, there would be no executions this time.

A cruel and macabre press conference was held the next morning at the embassy, where remains of the dead crewmen were put on display. Attended by the imam’s son and grandson, it was orchestrated by Ayatollah Khalkali, the hanging judge, who opened the session by expressing condolences to the families of the dead and then unzipped one of the plastic body bags and withdrew a blackened severed hand and forearm to show off its military-style wristwatch. He insisted that twenty-nine Americans had perished, and then claimed to have nine skulls in the bags before him, not eight—one might have belonged to the driver of the exploded fuel truck, who had not escaped the blaze as was thought. Khalkali joked, “I can show you nine skulls. Perhaps Carter can explain how some American soldiers have two heads?” He said evidence recovered from the site—they had found a driver’s license in a wallet left behind by one of the mission participants, Stanley E. Thomas—showed that at least one of the invaders had been African-American, which proved, said the ayatollah, that the American invaders had been compelled to participate since no black would volunteer for such a thing.

Barbara Rosen had been in Bonn for her meeting with Chancellor Schmidt when news of the rescue attempt broke. She closed herself in her hotel bathroom and cried. She was terrified about what might now happen to her husband Barry and the rest, appalled at the display of American military ineptitude, and felt personally betrayed by Carter’s decision; did he still have the photos of her and Barry’s daughters she had given him in that first meeting with the families in December? But when she faced a large crowd of reporters later at the American embassy she took Schmidt’s advice and bit her lip. She declined to criticize the president or the military. She met up with the other members of the FLAG European mission in Paris the next day and together they went to Rome for an audience with Pope John Paul II. They had hoped to talk with the pope and solicit his aid in resolving the crisis, but instead they were put in a long line of ceremonial visitors and were ushered before the pope only for a few moments. He told them he would pray and work for the hostages’ release and gave each a set of rosary beads.

The Timms were not allowed to leave Tehran on Friday as scheduled. Barbara spent a long and difficult Saturday wondering if she and her husband would ever be permitted to go. She was further shocked to learn that an angry reception now awaited them at home. Phone calls from Milwaukee revealed that her “apology” had set off a furor in the United States. Threatening phone calls had come to their house and there were police stationed outside it. Timm felt that she was at the center of a colossal worldwide misunderstanding, and whatever she did or said just seemed to make it worse. She kept playing over in her mind the moment Ebtekar had said, “Time’s up,” and her son had been pulled from the room.

Permission to depart came on Sunday, and when their plane lifted into the air Timm collapsed into tears. She felt helpless and angry and guilty and terribly relieved all at the same time. As she cried, a journalist on the same flight took a picture of her. McAfee lost his temper, grabbing the camera and tearing the film out of it.

They stopped in London and ignored the press there, and when they landed in Chicago the next day there was another press mob waiting. It was not friendly.

Most Americans heartily approved of the rescue attempt, and were saddened and disappointed by its failure, but they did not condemn the president. Polls taken in the days afterward showed that while a substantial majority disagreed with the handling of the hostage crisis overall—Ronald Reagan called it “a national disgrace”—a full 66 percent agreed with the president’s decision to launch the mission. His approval ratings for handling the hostage crisis fell, but not precipitously, from 47 percent to 42 percent. Overall, Carter still led Reagan in the polls.

In the final meeting before Carter had given the go-ahead to the mission, Brzezinski had brought up the possibility of failure. He had suggested, in keeping with his aggressive posture, that the military draw up a plan that would, in a way, cushion the blow. If it became apparent that the mission was going to fail, then the United States should attack Iran from the air, destroying key oil facilities. The president could then go on television, Brzezinski said, and announce that his patience with Iran had been exhausted by its blatant disregard for international law and its refusal to negotiate in good faith and, as a result, he had authorized a hostage rescue mission and a variety of retaliatory air strikes.

“Then you could say, ‘I regret to say that the rescue mission has failed, but we have struck and destroyed the Abadan oil refinery,’” Brzezinski offered. “You could then warn Iran that if any harm comes to the American hostages, ‘This is just a foretaste of what is coming.’”

Carter had dismissed the suggestion. “We’ll discuss that later,” he told his national security adviser and had not followed up. Now there was just the cold fact of failure to report, and the president’s stolid, grim face appeared on television screens to deliver the news straight.

Across a wide, disappointed nation, the president took a predictable beating from the pious second-guessers of the nation’s editorial pages.

The News-Tribune of Tacoma, Washington, boldly concluded, “It may be too early to make a judgment, but first impressions are that the U.S. badly bungled the rescue mission. Further, although Carter certainly deserves the benefit of the doubt at this point, it appears he failed miserably in judgment and leadership.”

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch predicted that the mission’s failure would deepen Iranian distrust of the United States, and that it “cannot have beneficial consequences for ending the hostage situation. To be sure, they now know that Mr. Carter is capable of rash action, but America’s failure is more likely to strengthen the Ayatollah’s hand than to persuade him to bring the crisis to an end.”

The Phoenix Gazette accused Carter of undermining the mission by trying to manage it himself from Washington instead of leaving decisions to men in the field. The Baltimore Evening Sun offered the remarkable opinion that authorizing the mission had been wrong because there was a chance it might not succeed: “Any possibility of failure should have ruled it out. We remain unconvinced…that the decision to resort to military action was in fact a wise one. On the evidence thus far, it was not.” The paper presumably remained solidly behind missions entailing no risk whatsoever.

The San Diego Evening Tribune objected to the unilateralism and secrecy of the mission: “Military action may ultimately become necessary. But it should not be undertaken without full consultation with Congress, with our allies, and with other nations in the Middle East.”

The Daily Mail of Charleston, West Virginia, was bewildered: “It is incredible, in the first place, that the president ever supposed that a commando raid into downtown Tehran would ever have a chance…. How could Mr. Carter, who for nearly six months has done virtually nothing to obtain the hostages’ release, attempt such a foolhardy operation as this? Having failed to consult with Congress, as the War Powers Act would appear to require, he can scarcely share the responsibility with anyone else…. Mr. Carter has contrived to make matters worse.”

The New York Daily News complained that the mission “entailed risks out of all proportion to the likelihood of success.” In Chicago, the Sun-Times editorialized, “In his aborted effort…President Carter shockingly overcame the charge that he is super-cautious. He is exposed instead as a crap-shooter, willing to gamble away the lives of Americans and the security of the country and its allies to reassert U.S. power against long odds. Before the failure, the U.S.—in the eyes of our friends as well as our enemies—was merely frustrated…. Now it has been demonstrated to be impotent.”

The Chicago Tribune was one of the only newspapers to offer unqualified words of support: “We believe, and the nation must believe, that President Carter made the right decision in sending the rescue team to Iran. It is wrong to criticize him now for making the decision. It is wrong to criticize him for failing to consult in advance with Congress or with the allies…. There are but three proper emotions for Americans in the tragic aftermath of the mission’s failure: gratitude to the brave volunteers who undertook it; grief for the eight who died in it; and intense disappointment over the bad luck that aborted it.”

There was a mixed response from the families of the hostages. Those who had become outspoken critics of the administration, like Timm and Bonnie Graves, were publicly appalled. “Eight deaths for what?” said Bonnie Graves. “I hope to God the Iranians are capable of restraint.”

“It’s a bumbling error by the president,” said Zane Hall, the father of Joe Hall. “We didn’t approve of it. We don’t know what this could lead to.”

Richard Hermening, Timm’s former husband and Kevin’s father, who just weeks earlier had lamented Carter’s slowness to act and lack of follow-through, now criticized the president’s “timing.”

However, most of the families, who had a ready and waiting press audience for their every utterance, were sympathetic to the president and respectful of the courage and sacrifice of those who had made the effort.

“I understand why he [Carter] had to go to this point in time,” said John W. Limbert, the hostage’s father. “He had to take action.”

A grieving but proud George N. Holmes, father of the Pine Bluff, Arkansas, marine crewman who had perished at Desert One, told reporters, “I think it was fine. It was a risk worth taking. That’s what I thought beforehand. I don’t change it now.”

It was a dejected group of Delta soldiers who reassembled at Wadi Kena after the mission, and none was more depressed than Beckwith, who treated his pain with booze. The colonel realized that the chance of his lifetime had been blown, badly, and he was liberal and unsparing in apportioning blame. He let it be known that he never again wanted to work with the mission’s commanding general, James Vaught, and in one tirade he placed the primary responsibility for the mission’s failure on the marine pilots, whom he called “cowards.” He was particularly scornful of Colonel Chuck Pittman, the ranking officer on board the relatively undamaged chopper that had given up in the second haboob and returned to the Nimitz. For some reason—it was not immediately clear why—Beckwith also regarded the Iranian-American drivers and translators as “cowards.”

Dick Meadows, the courageous Delta point man in Tehran, weighed his options the day after the mission failed. He could try to drive across the Turkish border, or drive down to Abadan on the Persian Gulf coast and use his satellite radio to request pickup by helicopter. He chose a third, less dramatic course. He simply drove to Tehran’s international airport on Sunday, the same day as the Timms’ departure, and while the country was still in an uproar over the American “invasion,” he presented his Irish credentials, fully expecting at any moment to be stopped. He was allowed to board a commercial flight to Ankara. The false passports of the other agents also held up; they were able to fly out of the country in the days after the disaster—one, the young Iranian-American airman code-named “Fred,” slipped out weeks later.

Given the uproar in the media at home, it was decided to fly the rest of Delta Force from Egypt to the Farm in Virginia, keep them sequestered there for a few days, and then allow them to fly home to Fayetteville and enjoy a vacation. Alert reporters spotted some of the men arriving at the airport in North Carolina days later, but the only public comment they got was one from an unnamed arriving passenger, probably not a member of the rescue force, who grumbled about not being allowed to “finish the job.”

The men who had taken part knew that “finishing the job” had not been an option. Their humiliation had already felt complete when, before they departed Egypt, Beckwith gathered both squadrons in a hangar. Apparently drunk, at first it seemed he had just wanted to console them and buck up their spirits. He began by telling them how proud of them he was, and how professionally they had prepared for the mission, and how in his mind no part of the blame was theirs for the debacle.

As he spoke he grew more and more worked up and emotional, and his remarks began to wander, until he was telling the men that he was disappointed in them for only one thing, for having left their weapons behind when they scrambled out of the burning C-130. Technically, of course, he was correct. A soldier is taught from day one that his weapon is his life, that to lose it or misplace it or leave it behind is a cardinal sin in soldiering. Most of the men had left their weapons and their gear, including the thousands of dollars in American and Iranian cash they had been issued in case they had to find their own ways out of Iran. But given the circumstances—some of the men had been asleep when the accident happened, and had only seconds to evacuate in an inferno—it was certainly understandable.

“You guys, as you came off, should have reached up and grabbed something,” Beckwith said angrily. “Goddamn, a lot of money burned up in there.”

The men took it badly. They were just getting used to this disappointment, one that they knew well they’d wear for the rest of their lives, which many had escaped with only narrowly. They had felt the flames and had seen men on fire. Many were injured. They were in no mood to be chastised by someone who had watched the inferno from a safe distance. A sergeant major interrupted Beckwith.

“Sir, we were lucky to get off with our asses,” he said.

“Well, some of you picked up your weapons. Why in the hell didn’t all of you?” Beckwith asked.

The sergeant major began, “Sir—,” but the colonel lost it. “Shut up!” he shouted. “You’re all just a bunch of goddamn cowards.”

“That’s not true, sir,” Fitch said sharply, grabbing the colonel by the arm and hustling him out of the hangar before things got uglier.

Beckwith would later regret this outburst and asked Fitch to convey an apology to the men, but he never softened his assessment of the other service branches involved in the fiasco.

The mood had been glum on the long flight home. When Fitch’s squadron landed at an airport outside Washington, they transferred to a C-130 for a short flight to Virginia. Welcoming them into the plane was a veteran air force sergeant who, having no idea who this motley assortment of hairy apparent civilians were, assumed that they were unfamiliar with the C-130 and so, upon takeoff, launched into an especially spirited performance of the standard safety briefing for passengers—something ordinarily abbreviated or forgone entirely for military passengers. The plane was virtually identical to the one the mission members had flown into Iran just days before. They sat obediently through the meticulous and thorough safety presentation, then stood up (against instructions) and gave the bewildered sergeant a spirited ovation.

3. S-E-N-D-N-E-W-S

After the rescue attempt, Bruce Laingen noticed a change in his keepers on the third floor of the Foreign Ministry building. Gone was the easy banter that had characterized his relationship with most of them, and some of the guards had become outright hostile. There were accusations that the chargé and his roommates, Mike Howland and Vic Tomseth, had known in advance about the mission, given their occasional phone calls and telex contacts with Washington and visits from foreign ministers. In the garden below their balcony, the army unit assigned to the ministry still spent every spare moment playing pickup games of soccer, but they no longer waved and joked with the Americans looking down from the high windows. Some glared up at them with what was clearly hatred.

Unlike the other hostages, the three in the Foreign Ministry learned of the rescue mission in breathless local press reports as soon as the rest of Iran did. Laingen wrote in his diary on the evening of April 27:

It was galling for the three to watch the gleeful press coverage in Tehran, where the failure of the rescue mission was seen as nothing less than divine intervention and a heavenly blessing on the gerogan-girha, the hostage takers. Allah had dealt the Great World Devouring Satan a terrible blow. At night, to celebrate the “victory,” thousands of Iranians had again taken to their rooftops to shout over and over, “Allahuakbar!”

Laingen spent long portions of his days now watching the pigeons that roosted in small gaps in the brickwork of the ministry garden walls. They lived on the ledges of the windows outside the third floor and roof, periodically swooping down to the large fountain in the middle of the courtyard and then back. He also watched the swallows, which appeared at dusk to flit crazily around the sky catching bugs. They reminded him of the barn swallows he had watched as a boy on the family farm in Minnesota. He worried about becoming lazy, after so many months of idleness. Laingen was an energetic and ambitious man, and having little to do besides eat, sleep, read, and work crossword puzzles ate away at his sense of himself. He worried that he would find it hard to resume the pace of work and family and wondered admiringly at the industry of his wife Penne, who had for so long now managed everything at home by herself and yet had emerged as a leading activist and voice of the hostage families.

At long last the Majlis convened at the end of May, fanning faint hopes that the hostage issue would be resolved. Laingen noted in the local press that his old friend Ibrahim Yazdi, the foreign minister on the day of the takeover who had resigned with the rest of the provisional government when it was clear their authority had been usurped by a gang of students, was now a member of the legislature calling for public trial of the hostages as a way of taking the United States to task for its “interference” in Iranian affairs. Laingen wondered if his friend ever thought of him locked away where he had left him six months before.

John Limbert enjoyed his garden view for only three days before being taken to a villa more in the center of Isfahan, near a river that he knew to be the Zayandeh. His new room had no view nor any good light, but he could overhear bits of radio reports that drifted in from somewhere outside, and it was here that he first caught snippets of a broadcast about a rescue attempt. The sound faded in and out, and he heard only bits, but that’s what it had sounded like. A mission, unsuccessful, and American casualties. This was confirmed when, on a visit to the bathroom, he found a week-old newspaper that one of the guards had used to line the top of a shelf. It carried a wire service story about the mission, so Limbert became the first of the hostages other than the three at the foreign ministry to learn that his government had tried a daring rescue and had failed. He wasn’t sure how to feel about it. On the one hand, it showed that he and the others had not been forgotten by President Carter and their countrymen, which lifted his spirits and filled him with hope and pride. On the other hand, it had failed, which meant that the prospects of being saved by military action, always remote, were now nil. He also felt a pang of sorrow and gratitude for his countrymen who had tried, especially those who had died in the effort.

As the long summer dragged on, Limbert was beset with boredom, loneliness, and despair. Occasional letters from his wife and two children helped sustain him. The children mailed their school report cards, and the fact that they were doing well heartened him enormously. He received, months late, a Valentine the children had made at school. Just to know that they were safe and thriving eliminated one of his biggest worries. He had been concerned early on that his wife Parvaneh might try to come to Iran to lobby for his freedom, which, given the present atmosphere in her home country, might well have landed her in jail. He worried whether his daughter and son would recognize him when they saw him next, whether they would remember him and whether he would be the same person he was when he had left. In his own letters (most of them never made it home) he left coded messages in the text. Counting on the students’ generally poor English, he constructed sentences with strings of words that barely made sense, but which, if you took the first letter of each, spelled out his message. For instance, he wrote, “Shervin [his son] every new defenseman needs energy with savvy.” The first letters of each word spelled out “s-e-n-d-n-e-w-s.” When Parveneh received the letters she knew that there was a code embedded but could not figure it out. She turned it over to the State Department and the CIA and neither of these agencies figured it out either.

Limbert was not the only one whose code scheme failed. In dozens of letters to his wife, Navy Commander Don Sharer spelled out secret messages, choosing the first letter of each paragraph so that when put together they would read, “TORTURE,” or “STARVING,” which wasn’t exactly true but which conveyed the message that things weren’t all hunky-dory. Years earlier he had told his wife about that code, which had been employed by some prisoners in Vietnam, and was sure she would be looking for it. Once, just to throw his captors off, he reversed the pattern, spelling out the hidden message backward. This, as it happens, was the only letter his wife received from him. She looked for the code, but because it was backward, she didn’t find it.

Eventually Limbert discovered that Malcolm Kalp, one of the embassy’s three CIA officers and the one he knew least, was in a room separated from his by a shared bathroom. Limbert tore the top off a paper box of raisins one day, wrote the word “hide” on it, and left it in a conspicuous spot on the toilet. He figured that if one of the guards found it they wouldn’t know what to make of it and if the person on the other side of the bathroom found it he could know what it meant. Kalp found it and understood immediately. He wrote, “Inside the Ajax container” on it and left it where he had found it. There was a box of powdered soap in the bathroom. Kalp figured that an American who left the note would know what “Ajax” was but that an Iranian would not. Sure enough, when he used the bathroom next there was a note from Limbert in the soap box. Later they found that there was a space between the washbasin and its pedestal that would serve even better. They passed messages four times a day. Limbert informed Kalp of the failed rescue mission, and it was Kalp who told him that Bill Belk, Kevin Hermening, and Joe Subic were also in the villa. In one of his notes Kalp wrote that he had not been mistreated but that he had been kept alone for a long time.

Summer turned suffocating in the windowless room in Qom where Michael Metrinko, Dave Roeder, and Regis Regan were imprisoned. They spent hours each day exercising, three pale, shaggy, bearded men in ill-fitting clothes bouncing up and down, running in place for hours at a time, then dropping down to do push-ups. The downside was that they would sweat heavily and, because they could shower only occasionally, their room reeked like a dirty gym locker. Regan was withdrawn, but Metrinko and Roeder hit it off. Metrinko admired Roeder’s sly military sense of humor, and Roeder admired the political officer’s intelligence and unyielding toughness. Metrinko taught Roeder how to swear in Farsi, more particularly, how to grievously and obscenely insult the guards. He still missed no opportunity to aggravate his captors.

One day they were visited by Ahmad Khomeini, the imam’s son, who greeted the three as “guests.” The false hospitality disgusted Metrinko, who had bottomless contempt for all of Iran’s new “spiritual” rulers; to him Ahmad just seemed a fat, greasy young man in robes and a black turban. The guards, however, were awestruck. Clearly anxious about hosting such an august figure, they had urged their three captives to say nice things about them.

“What can I do for you?” the cleric asked beneficently. “We want to make you more comfortable.”

Metrinko told him that they wished to be released. They were being treated worse than animals, he said, and their captivity was an insult to Islamic values and Iranian traditions.

“I haven’t been outside for several months,” Metrinko told him. “I want to see the sun. We need air. We would also like to have some meat with our food.”

Khomeini seemed shocked and the guards were chagrined.

“They haven’t been outside?” he said, turning to the guards, who looked panic-stricken. “They must go out every day!” he said.

“Oh, yes, your Excellency,” the nearest guard said. “Yes, sir, we will arrange it immediately.”

After that, Metrinko was taken to a courtyard, a standard feature of an Iranian house, and for the first time he had a better sense of where he was imprisoned. It was a fairly large building that had once been some kind of art school. The walls were covered with propaganda, mostly drawings of Khomeini and others in the new pantheon of Islamist leadership. Metrinko had no knowledge yet of the attempted rescue mission, but it was apparent that his guards had been spooked by something. After months of growing more and more lackadaisical, suddenly they were vigilant out of all proportion. They had been holding him now for six months and he had not made the slightest move to escape, yet in the small courtyard where he was permitted to stroll he was surrounded by more than a dozen armed guards who eyed him so warily it was comical. He ignored them and gave himself over to the rare pleasure of being outside. He basked in the sunshine, smells, and sounds. Metrinko had never considered himself a great lover of the outdoors, but in his captivity he discovered in himself a deep need for it. He had begun to fantasize about taking long walks in the woods, watching sunsets, drinking great gulps of glorious fresh air. In the little courtyard he walked back and forth aimlessly inside the circle of armed guards. It occurred to him that if he made a sudden move in any direction and they opened fire, they would probably all inadvertently shoot each other. It might be worth getting shot himself just to see it happen. His outdoor stroll lasted ten minutes. Despite the admonition of the imam’s son, he and the others got to go outside once more in the next two months.

It was sometime in July when the three were taken back to Tehran and placed in a cell at Qasr Prison, another of the shah’s notorious lockups. It was modeled after 19th century “panoptican” prisons, a central hub with arms that projected outward. They were placed in a large cell, the first genuine prison cell they had inhabited. It was concrete and clean, with a thin carpet stretched over the floor from wall to wall. It had one barred window, too high on the wall for them to look out. The door was made of solid iron and had a transom with a barred window that they could reach by gripping the top of the door and pulling themselves up. It afforded nothing more than a view of the empty hallway. Given a mattress and a pillow, they chose their spots and unpacked their few belongings.

It was summer but the concrete walls and floor were cool. The guards allowed them to listen to music. Every few days they would bring in a portable tape player with cassettes of classical music and they were permitted to listen for an hour. On occasion they were led down the hall to a room with a television, where they watched videotapes. One of the tapes was of a press conference in the United States by Darrell Rupiper, the radical oblate missionary who had visited Iran in the spring and come away favorably impressed by the revolution and the embassy takeover. Metrinko and the others were appalled. The hostages, Rupiper said, were being treated well by their captors, whom he believed were justified in their action. America, he said, owed Iran a big apology.

4. Moral Sadness

At home during the late spring and summer of 1980 the hostage drama went flat. Jonathan Schell, writing in The New Yorker, wrote of “a numbness, an emotional fatigue” that seemed to settle over the nation in the weeks after the failed rescue mission. Throughout the previous winter and spring there had been dramatic developments to keep the story moving, the takeover itself, the threats, the secret negotiations that, in the words of ABC’s Ted Koppel, would come “so tantalizingly close” again and again, only to repeatedly collapse. In the weeks before the rescue mission there had been a mounting expectation of war; the crisis was like a festering boil, and the prospect of ending it violently engendered not so much dread as relief. The spectacular failure at Desert One had lanced the boil. It had a peculiar and unanticipated effect: the fever seemed to lift. For a few days afterward the hostages’ families, the Carter administration, and the rest of the country waited anxiously to see if the Iranians would make good on their threat to retaliate by killing hostages, which would have provoked a furious American military response, and when they did not it was as though Iran had earned, for a time, a respite. Both sides backed away from the precipice. The angry rhetoric from Washington cooled. Word got back that the hostages were being scattered around Iran, which killed any prospect of a second rescue effort. Congress settled in to investigate Beckwith’s disaster and to assign blame for it, but the hostages themselves receded from television and the front pages. The story had exhausted itself. It seemed there was simply nothing to be done about it or, perhaps, that too much had been made of it.

Commenting in the June 2 issue of The New Yorker, Schell speculated that the abrupt change had more to do with the news media itself than world events. “In an instant, the frantic urgency about [the hostages’] release dissipated, and they seemed to disappear from the face of the earth,” he wrote. “Gone were the interviews with their friends and relatives, gone the impromptu delegations of clerical would-be peacemakers, and gone the sideshow of freelance meddlers…. Gone, too, were reports of the ‘rising impatience’ of the American people which was thought to have so much to do with the decision to launch the rescue mission.” Schell noted the tendency of television news to leap from one short-lived obsession to the next, in “obedience to a rhythm…which seems to have more to do with the world of entertainment than the world of international affairs,” and concluded, “In part, however, the news media may have abandoned the hostage issue because of a well-founded if largely unarticulated suspicion that their own disproportionate coverage of it, together with the presidential campaign, had generated a terrifying vortex of political pressure that brought on the tragic rescue mission and came near to dragging the nation into a catastrophe.”

Some of the hostage families had reached similar conclusions, which helped explain why they suddenly vanished from television. All had grown savvy about news coverage, particularly about cameras, and so became more wary. Barbara Rosen was annoyed with herself for not having caught on sooner. Like most of the other spouses, parents, and siblings, she had assumed that the more attention given the plight of their loved ones the better, but her conversation with Helmut Schmidt in Bonn had stayed with her. “Get the story off the front pages!” he had said. She now saw the wisdom in that advice. The great swirl of media attention in the months after the takeover had fed the crisis. She had fed the crisis. She regretted having allowed TV cameras into her home over the Christmas holidays the year before, and winced at the memory of her children telling America how much they missed their daddy. Those snippets of family life had tugged at the heartstrings of her fellow countrymen and people of goodwill everywhere, which, she now realized, was precisely what her husband’s kidnappers wanted. Now she refused to go on TV. When reporters showed up she would sometimes agree to talk, but declined to do so on camera. When a New York studio lured her with an offer to see the latest film released from Tehran, she went to the studio but refused to allow them to film her watching it. When a producer insisted, Rosen picked up her bag and started out of the building. The producer chased her down and let her watch the film in private.

In light of the obvious heroism of the men who attempted the rescue, it was predictable that efforts were made to hang the mission’s failure on the White House. Some reports suggested that Delta Force had been pressured to launch against its will by an overeager president, or that it had been prevented from going all out by presidential timidity. Colonel Beckwith stepped forward to bluntly deny both claims. He said that he and his men had been eager to launch and still believed they might have succeeded. He dismissed speculation that the raid had been undermined by micromanagement from the White House, that Carter had aborted it in an excess of caution over the objections of the men in the desert. Beckwith said he had aborted the mission himself and would do so again, and called reports that said otherwise “pure bullshit.”

“I’m not about to be party to a half-assed loading of a bunch of aircraft and going up and murdering a bunch of fine soldiers,” he said, indignant, his eyes blazing under his dark eyebrows. “I’m not that kind of man.”

Carter himself pushed the hostages out of the news by abandoning his strategy of camping in the White House and looking presidential. He declared world events more “manageable” and hit the campaign trail, failing even to mention Iran in two major speeches.

Americans took grim satisfaction in May when Iran’s own embassy in London was seized by six Iraqi-trained Khuzestan separatists, who took hostage two dozen Iranian diplomats and staffers. The situation, according to Iranian president Bani-Sadr, was “in no way comparable” to the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. This was “an unjust hostage taking,” he said, because Iranian diplomats, unlike American, “had no other duties but to represent their country.” They had been kidnapped by “a group of hired and deceived terrorists,” as opposed to the patriotic heroes who had kidnapped American diplomats in Tehran. But the parallel was obvious and there for all the world to see. The British government demonstrated how responsible nations protect foreign missions on their soil by storming the embassy and rescuing fourteen of the sixteen hostages—two Iranian diplomats were killed by their captors, and five of the six terrorists were killed by the British SAS forces, several of them apparently executed on the spot. Without a trace of irony, Bani-Sadr praised the British government for upholding its obligations as a host government under international law.

It did nothing to alter the standoff in Tehran. A “Crimes of America” conference kicked off there in June, attended by representatives of many small nations and by a ten-person delegation of Americans led by Ramsey Clark, who had failed to win permission to enter Iran as a special emissary of the president the previous November, and who now attended in defiance of President Carter’s ban on American travel to Iran. The TV networks showed the tall, lean former U.S. attorney general listening and lecturing at the conference, faulting both sides of the dispute. He admitted the imperiousness of America’s foreign policy—“The United States still clings to the idea that it can control the government and destinies of other people,” he said—and he denounced the embassy takeover and the holding of hostages. Clark’s public criticism of the hostage takers in Tehran was courageous, but his presence there conferred a trace of legitimacy to an event designed for only one purpose, to embarrass and insult his own country. When Khomeini addressed the conference, he suggested that Carter’s travel ban showed how much he feared what Americans might learn. He urged those attending to return to their homes in the West and tell the truth, because the mainstream press portrayed Iran “as a jungle filled with crazy people.”

He wasn’t far from the truth. Months into the crisis there was still very little effort, particularly on television, to dissect either the Iranian revolution or the American policy that had preceded it. The typical American saw images almost daily of angry Iranians waving their fists and denouncing the United States, but with few exceptions—Ted Koppel’s Nightline program each evening was one—saw little to explain what had prompted such anger and hatred. Clark’s willingness to speak unpopular truths to both sides earned him little praise or admiration. He was condemned as a traitor at home and many called for him to be prosecuted. Radio Tehran called him “the vilest of CIA spies.”

Neither Clark’s trip nor any of the other news out of Iran suggested hope for a resolution. As summer wore on, the presence of fifty-three captive Americans scattered throughout Iran had become a fact of life. Bani-Sadr pronounced the crisis “unsolvable,” and suggested that the responsibility for drawing it out rested with the United States.

“America has not changed its hostile policy and has not changed anything in it,” he said. “The Americans think Iran is their private property…and that it should remain American property forever. If they can’t have it today, they want to take over Iran tomorrow, and they are using [the hostage crisis] to add on pressure in order to topple us from inside. So we are going to live here and resist. We will live with the hostages.”

Despite the dearth of news, the months of intense coverage on television had made many of the hostages’ families into national figures, even patriotic icons. Dorothea Morefield, wife of the captive American consul, had become a regular on television news shows in San Diego and was often featured on national news programs. Always meticulously coiffed and groomed, well spoken, calm, and cheerful, this prim middle-aged housewife in oversized glasses was steadfast in her support of the administration’s handling of the crisis. When their son had been murdered in Washington, D.C., years earlier, she and her husband had been impressed by some of the reporters who had covered the tragedy with compassion and dignity. So when the embassy was seized she had decided to open her cheerful home to reporters. She was motivated initially by a desire to counter some of the maudlin, weepy scenes in the homes of other hostage families, and in the ensuing months she had developed an easy rapport with a whole group of local and national reporters. She presented the patriotic, smart, determined image that Washington felt would be most helpful in the long run. She was, in fact, angry with the State Department for many things, first for not closing the embassy and evacuating the staff prior to admitting the shah into the United States, and also for doing so little to keep the families informed. She thought the family outreach effort of the Iran Working Group was laughable, a clutch of untrained, gossipy spouses. But she kept those feelings to herself in public, working to represent her husband and the others as professionals and kidnap victims. Her resolve rarely wavered, but as the crisis became more and more noticeably a back-burner issue for the White House, now fully engaged in a reelection campaign, it wobbled ever so slightly. She did not share the view that publicity only made matters worse and worked hard to keep the story in the news. She bristled publicly at Carter’s use of the word “manageable.”

“It may be manageable, but I don’t know in what way,” she told a TV interviewer. “One hopes that there is something more going on behind the scenes.” It was a subtle criticism, more like a plea. She proceeded to defend the president’s decision to get out and campaign, and said that it would be wrong for the nation to be held captive to every new twist and turn of the story. Yet she clearly felt more needed to be done.

“Do you know where your husband is?” she was asked.

“I have no idea,” she said. “I haven’t heard from him since the rescue attempt.”

“Do you have any reservations about the way it’s being handled?”

“Well, we don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes,” she said. “I would like to see a little more publicity about the hostages themselves.” She said the attention helped keep the pressure on Iran, because the more Iranians understood how much all of America cared and was watching, the less likely they would be to harm the captives. She faulted the world community for not doing more to help the United States put pressure on Iran, but unlike Barbara Timm, who had gone to ground after returning from her controversial apology in Iran, and the outspokenly critical Graves family, Morefield presented a concerned but stoical face. She was the honored guest at that year’s municipal Fourth of July celebrations and asked a crowd at an air show at Miramar Naval Air Station to “say a prayer” for their countrymen who were being deprived of their God-given freedom.

The Fourth of July flushed more of the hostage families into the limelight. Marine Rocky Sickmann’s parents were the featured guests at an Independence Day ceremony in their hometown of St. Louis, and Harry Metrinko, Michael’s father, appeared at the ceremonies near their home in Hermitage, Pennsylvania, where a new flag was added to a growing forest of Stars and Stripes for each day of his son’s captivity. The rhetorical thrust of these events and others like them was that America would never forget or forsake its kidnapped diplomats, but it had been a long eight months, and the very need to so publicly pledge mindfulness showed that the issue was dimming in the American mind.

By August the “crisis” had faded almost completely away. There was a rote, unexceptional tone to the nightly reminders on network news shows of the days of captivity, which was nearing three hundred.

Even the death of the shah in Cairo failed to produce the slightest change in the standoff. The former ruler succumbed in late July to pneumonia that had set in after another round of chemotherapy for liver cancer. An extended ABC News review of Pahlavi’s life referred briefly to Mossadeq, and even showed a black-and-white film clip of the old political figure, but only to say that he had angled to remove the young Pahlavi from power. There was no mention in the program that Mossadeq had been an elected figure, which left the impression that his efforts had just been part of a typical Third World power struggle, decided in favor of the shah by American intervention. The exiled monarch was buried in a state funeral in Egypt, a ceremony to which the United States sent only its ambassador. Carter, who just three years earlier had effusively toasted the dictator in Tehran, dared not send a more prominent representative for fear of aggravating the hostage situation.

The president remained unsparing in his criticism of Iran’s leadership, whom he called “kidnappers and international terrorists.” When he characterized its government as divided and its politics as “chaotic,” it just underscored his bewilderment. Carter was, in so many words, agreeing with Bani-Sadr. The matter appeared unsolvable. As August turned to September, the crisis had not so much disappeared from public consciousness as it had become simply a fact of life, a chronic, low-level annoyance. Near the end of summer, ABC correspondent Peter Jennings concluded, “The United States and Iran are on different wavelengths…no better able to understand each other than on the day of the takeover.”

Eventually even family members who shunned the media began to feel that no news was as bad as too much. Worried that her husband and the rest of the hostages were slipping off the country’s political agenda entirely, Penne Laingen and Dottie Morefield wrote a public letter to both the Republican and Democratic Parties urging them to mention the hostages in their platforms, to refrain from making their captive family members an issue during the campaign, and to oppose any agreement that called for the United States to apologize to Iran. A group supporting the hostages began a billboard campaign to remind the American public that their countrymen were still trapped.

The billboards read, “Have you thought of the hostages today?”

The obstinacy of their plight wore hard on the hostages. Imprisoned chargé d’affaires Bruce Laingen was amused in midsummer when he received the results of a Red Cross medical assessment conducted months earlier. Delivered by a Swiss emissary, the report found all three of the Foreign Ministry captives otherwise fit but afflicted with “moral sadness.” In Laingen’s case, it was “moral sadness, with some nervousness.”

His moral sadness had been aggravated by the participation of Ramsey Clark and other Americans in the “Crimes of America” conference. How could Clark, who had long been a respected figure in the United States, participate in such a propaganda pageant at any time, much less while his hosts were holding dozens of his countrymen hostage?

All summer long, dry, hot desert winds blew through the open windows of the stuffy third-floor of the ministry building, giving little relief. Despite the cramped, uncomfortable circumstances, Laingen, Tomseth, and Howland still got along with one another remarkably well. They had lived together in the same rooms for months now, day and night, and in all that time Laingen could not remember an angry word being spoken. This he attributed to their temperaments; all three were polite and by nature easygoing and friendly. None of them was overbearingly opinionated. They also shared a sense of victimhood, which made them each more tolerant of the others. The fact that they were being held in such spacious quarters helped. They came together when they wished and whenever one of them wanted solitude, the size of the reception area and dining room enabled them to effectively get away for hours. They spent their long days writing, reading, exercising, or working crossword puzzles, which arrived in the mail and as gifts from diplomatic visitors in a steady stream.

“How do you spell ‘chaos’?” Howland asked one day.

“I-R-A-N,” deadpanned Laingen.

The cockroaches that invaded their quarters came in two sizes, large and extra large. The three called the smaller ones “mullahs” and the larger “ayatollahs,” and took some pleasure in crunching them underfoot.

Chocolates, books, and occasional packages from home were delivered by their most faithful visitor, the Swiss envoy. On one call he passed along, laughing, an official request from the home office in Washington. It was standard procedure for the heads of embassies to produce annual employee evaluations for the department’s files. Even though the entire Tehran staff was detained under fairly remarkable circumstances, the efficient bureaucracy of Foggy Bottom still wanted its annual “fitness reports.”

For the next few days, Laingen and Tomseth worked up assessments of their colleagues. At the end of each they wrote, “This is being written in Tehran. The recipient of our report is not here because he’s being held hostage. So he cannot have any direct input.”

They sent the reports back with the Swiss envoy on his next visit.

It was more apparent every day that the one unmistakable consequence of the embassy seizure had been to tilt the balance of power in Iran toward the clergy. At the time of the revolution it was unclear how the new Iran would shake out, but voting for the Majlis in May had produced an overwhelming victory for religious hardliners and had further isolated such secular leaders as Bani-Sadr and Ghotbzadeh, whose powerlessness had been fully exposed by their failure to get all the hostages transferred to government custody. The new leader of the Iranian legislature, Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, dismissed the hostage issue as a low priority, and stated that it would not even be discussed until July.

The only contact between an American and Iran’s leadership that summer occurred when an audience with the imam was granted to Dick Gregory, who had dropped forty pounds fasting for the hostages’ release. The comedian/activist advocated a solution that would bring the majority of the Americans home, leaving only the most “suspicious” behind to stand trial as spies. Bani-Sadr, for his part, believed that President Carter was still plotting to destroy the revolution and saw conspiracies everywhere. Despite their political differences, both the embattled Iranian president and his radical religious opponents imagined a White House completely obsessed with Iran. Since they considered the United States not just amoral but evil, they developed stunning hypotheses of American deceit. Bani-Sadr accused the United States of sending teams of assassins to find and kill its own captive countrymen in an effort to bring further ignominy on Iran. Increasingly, he blamed America for the whole mess, and, in time, would convince himself that the United States had actually planned and instigated the takeover of its own embassy, and that the Muslim Students Following the Imam’s Line were either dupes or directly employed by the CIA.

When Bani-Sadr had said, “We will live with the hostages,” it alarmed Laingen. With religious authority clearly entrenched, there were regular reports of sweeping executions—dozens of “coup plotters” or “spies” were dispatched at a time. Ayatollah Khalkali held multiple public executions on the streets of Tehran, and boasted that he had personally dispatched to Allah in just three months a thousand “counterrevolutionaries” and four hundred common criminals for drug violations. Victims were put to death for homosexuality, adultery, and drug dealing as well as political crimes. Troops opened fire on thousands of leftist demonstrators as they marched in the street toward the U.S. embassy on June 12, killing five and injuring three hundred. These vicious excesses went well beyond the crimes of the shah, and the purges were just beginning. Khomeini issued an ominous call for a “cultural revolution” to rid Iran of remnants of monarchical and Western influence. Iranians from all walks of life were denounced as spies or collaborators, and many were shown “confessing” their crimes on television prior to their executions. Laingen wondered what possessed a clearly doomed man to do such a thing. Why would even a real enemy of the regime give his captors the satisfaction of admitting everything before execution? Did he do so in the hope that it would earn him clemency or protect his family and friends from arrest or persecution? It was a subject of more than just casual interest to him. Many in the Majlis were still calling for trials of the American “spies.” What would he do when his turn came?

All this was accompanied by increasing talk of putting at least some of the hostages on trial. Ever since the failed rescue attempt, spy fever had seized the country. Dozens of military men were executed for their alleged role in aiding the planned American “invasion.” One woman turned in her husband, who she said had confessed to her that he worked for the CIA. There was new outrage in Iran in June when a young man walked into a Tehran police station and announced that he had just hung his twenty-three-year-old younger sister, Amaz, because his family had discovered that she was five months pregnant by Sergeant Mike Moeller, one of the embassy marines being held hostage. Moeller had been questioned in detail about the woman on Easter Sunday and admitted he had known her. Amaz was a regular at parties the marines had held in the small house Moeller was renting—they were not allowed to have alcohol on the embassy grounds, and the marines had not yet been moved to the Bijon apartments behind the complex. Moeller knew that several marines had engaged in sex with Amaz but denied that he was one of them. The authorities claimed that the unfortunate woman had specifically mentioned Moeller in her diary, and the marine suggested it was only because the parties had been held at his house. The brother who killed Amaz received an outpouring of public sympathy; Moeller faced charges for engaging in an “illegal sexual affair.”

The episode fed the predatory image of Americans, and thus served an important political purpose. Facing increasing opposition from ethnic minorities and secular factions, and having discovered an apparently well-organized military plot to overthrow the revolutionary government, Khomeini resorted to a familiar tactic. He blamed all opposition and betrayal on secret American meddling and whipped up anti-American displays. On July 4, hundreds of thousands of Iranians marched in Tehran to protest continued American efforts to undermine their revolution.

Countrywide celebrations marked the death of the shah three weeks later, but for the hostage takers his passing was irrelevant; indeed, for most of the students the demand for his return had been purely rhetorical from the beginning. “Larger issues have taken his place in the negotiations that have yet to begin,” Laingen wrote. More than a year after overthrowing the shah’s government because of its brutality, an even more brutal boss was on the throne, proclaiming his own version of divine right. Laingen wrote:

It seemed clear to Laingen that this consolidation of power was not just happenstance, and because the embassy takeover had so strengthened the hands of the mullahs, it must have been engineered, or at least steered, by them.

Laingen still struggled to keep up appearances. He was, after all, the highest ranking American official in Iran. From time to time, in his official capacity, he hand-printed letters to Iran’s officials, if only to remind them that he and the other hostages were still there.

At the end of June he wrote Bani-Sadr.

For all his anti-American pronouncements, Bani-Sadr and his foreign minister, Ghotbzadeh, remained publicly opposed to further holding hostages. Laingen figured that in their position they saw every day the damage being done to Iran’s standing in the world and to its internal security. All the ambitious construction projects under way when the shah fled were still suspended—the great empty cranes on the city’s low skyline were rusting—and all forms of international credit had virtually dried up. The true believers didn’t care, of course; Allah would provide. The imam said he would rather see the country return to donkey transport than make the smallest concession to the Great Satan. And Allah was providing. The great dragon of anti-Americanism loose in the land was devouring all the enemies of the turbaned class. Practical men concerned about Iran’s place in the world, and who looked to more earthly solutions, ran the risk of being branded traitor or incompetent. Cherished Western ideals became subversive, and no one criticized the emerging regime without fear. Ghotbzadeh had been attacked in the government-controlled press and had been summoned to appear before the Majlis to explain his “mis-handling of the ministry.” Khomeini himself blasted Bani-Sadr for failing to adequately cope with the country’s mounting economic difficulties. The president, of course, blamed America, which, by refusing to resolve the hostage crisis, was trying to “sink me in trivial issues so that I fail to battle against U.S. economic pressure.” Still, the Iranian president reserved some ire for the student captors. At the end of August, he was quoted in the newspapers two days in a row speaking critically of the hostage takers. He said the Americans ought to be released, that the continuing standoff had, in effect, “made Iran a hostage of the United States,” because American influence around the world ensured that the new Islamic republic was seen as a pariah. Whatever their reasons, these two primarily secular men were taking a huge risk opposing the hard-liners.

Still, nothing changed. The death of the shah, the seating of the Majlis, the opposition of the president and his foreign minister…the hostage issue bobbed like a cork in a restless sea of change. Laingen had come to suspect that they might not see the end until after the coming American elections and what looked increasingly like Carter’s eventual defeat.

After all these months of isolation in the ministry, the three Americans were still regarded as a threat. On the first day of July, one of the guards barged into their room with a soldier and the two men stood scrutinizing one of the windows overlooking the garden, apparently convinced that a coded message had been written there by the captives. What they had seen were just a few random splashes of bird droppings.

In mid-August, the ministry guards suddenly delivered a big plastic bag filled with Valentines that had been mailed almost six months earlier. Most were from schoolchildren.

One suggested, “I hope you can sneak out of Iran when the people go to bed. Then you can go back home.”

A girl wrote Laingen, “Hi, Dream Boat. I wish you a lot of luck. I am going to give you a plan to get out. Number one: Cry for food, then hit them in the face and run out. If this isn’t a good plan, hear [sic] is another one. If there is a key by there, all of you should each get a sock and try to throw the sock and get the key. Try your own [idea] if it doesn’t work.”

5. I’m Going

Others responded to the continuing ordeal of captivity very differently. The irrepressible CIA officer Malcolm Kalp had always been a man whose motor ran fast, and being confined to a small space made him increasingly desperate to escape. Confined to the same villa in Isfahan as John Limbert, with whom he regularly passed notes in their shared bathroom, he tried to enlist the gentle embassy political officer in his plans. His first involved overpowering a guard and taking his weapon.

“Then what are we going to do, shoot our way out?” Limbert wrote back, to which Kalp responded, “Is that something you are willing to do?”

Limbert wasn’t. He didn’t think he could. Besides, there were many armed guards, not just one or two. If they knocked down a guard and took his weapon, they would soon have to use it. On reflection, Kalp agreed that trying to shoot their way out would be suicidal, but he continued to scheme. Perhaps they could sneak out. Limbert noted that even if they were able to slip outside the villa, the area immediately surrounding it was patrolled by a guard dog and encircled by a wall. Beyond the wall were floodlights that turned night into day. Assuming they made it over the wall and across the floodlit area beyond, what would they do then, without money, ID, or proper clothing? Kalp suggested looking for a foreign consulate, or perhaps finding someone sympathetic on the street. Limbert wondered how many people like that there were in Isfahan, Iranians so sympathetic they would risk their lives to help them. None of these entirely sensible obtacles deterred Kalp in the least. He was going, Limbert was not. The political officer admired his colleague’s determination and ingenuity but wondered at his sanity.

Kalp had a nine-inch-long hacksaw blade he had scrounged from the chancery basement and kept hidden in his shoe, and he had been using it to saw through the iron bars over his window. Whenever there was a loud demonstration or the lawn mower started outside, Kalp sawed furiously.

It took some time, but eventually he cut completely through one of the bars before his guards, inspecting his room, noticed. Then they bricked over his window.

“No more windows for you,” the guard told him.

A lesser man would have given up.

One morning in June, Kalp was led out and placed in the back of a station wagon with Bill Belk and Joe Subic, who had been kept in another part of the same villa. He knew Belk was sitting in front of him because the State Department communicator had asthma and wheezed. Kalp recognized the sound. He didn’t learn until later that the other American was Subic. There were three Iranians in the front.

All he could think about, sitting in the back, was that this was the perfect time to escape. There were just three Iranians and three Americans, and Kalp liked the odds. He didn’t know if the guards had weapons but he felt that, if the three of them moved fast, it wouldn’t matter. Without the cooperation of his colleagues it wouldn’t work, and he had no way to enlist them without alerting the guards. As soon as they got to the new place, again with a shared bathroom, this one painted and decorated totally in pink, Kalp wrote a note saying that, if they were moved like that again, he would cough and that would be the signal to attack.

On the way, the guards had promised them that the new place would be cooler, but it wasn’t true. The air-conditioning units were shot. The days were brutal. Kalp immediately went to work on the locks on his room’s windows. He might have been a spy, but he had never learned to pick a lock. It was something he had always wanted to know how to do but he’d never gotten instruction, and whenever he had tried as a boy he had failed. Now, with nothing but time on his hands, he spent hour after hour probing the mechanism with a pin until, much to his delight and surprise, he popped it open. He eased the window up and looked out. They were three stories up in what looked like a middle-class neighborhood. There were no guards in sight, but chained beneath the window again was a big dog. Beyond the dog was a wall that he could easily climb.

Kalp placed a note in the pink bathroom announcing his intention to break out.

“We have to be careful not to hurt any of the guards, because if we hurt them they are going to shoot us for sure,” Kalp wrote.

Belk’s previous escape attempt in the first days of the takeover had ended badly. He remembered the beating and punishment he’d suffered after he was caught, and he had determined that if he ever saw the chance to run again he would not be taken alive. He had stolen a heavy metal drain stop, which, wrapped in his fist, could do serious damage. Kalp, however, had taken Limbert’s caution to heart and had reverted to his earlier position, he had ruled out attacking any of the guards. So Belk told him no. If attacking the guards was not part of the plan, he would stay put and wait for an opening that suited him.

Belk’s roommate Joe Subic, on the other hand, whose days of cozying up to his captors had long since stopped paying dividends, told Kalp he was game. The CIA officer now had the knack of picking locks, so when he was allowed to visit Belk and Subic he unlocked their window. To prepare for his break, Kalp kept careful watch out of his own window through the night. One problem was a floodlight that illuminated the yard outside all night. Kalp pulled out a wall socket in his room and played with the wires, crossing this one and that, until all the lights in the house suddenly went black. This was not unusual. There were frequent blackouts in Isfahan so the guards weren’t surprised. When they realized the short had occurred only at their location they reset the circuits. That, Kalp noted, was a trick that would come in handy.

The next problem was the dog, but he had an answer for that. He convinced the guards that he had a nervous condition that required regular treatment with Librium and Valium, and then hoarded the pills. He was not allowed to eat meat—a punishment from some earlier transgression—but Belk and Subic were, so Kalp got a hot dog from them. His plan was to stuff the hot dog with his pills and then throw it to the dog about half an hour before going out the window. With any luck, the animal would be unconscious, or at least mellow.

Still exchanging notes in the pink bathroom, Kalp and Subic decided at last that all was ready and set the time for their break at three o’clock the following morning. Kalp would tie the sheets from his bed into a rope, lower himself to the ground, check around to see if the coast was clear, and then, using a red lens he had scrounged, signal Subic to climb down. Kalp opened his own window a crack early that evening to check out the yard, and for the first time he saw a guard walking underneath. He quickly shut the window, asked the guard in the hallway to take him to the bathroom, and left a note for Subic that said, “Cancel.”

Another week of discussion ensued. By now it was late June, and the news—mostly what Kalp had learned from Limbert at the other house—was that the Majlis planned to vote on the hostage question in July. Subic wanted to wait for the vote but Kalp was through with waiting.

“To hell with it,” he wrote. “The 27th of June I’m going.”

Subic reluctantly agreed to go along. Kalp would throw the spiked hot dog out, then wait for the dog to eat it and fall asleep. Then he would drop to the ground, signal Subic, wait for him to climb down, and the two of them would cross the yard, scale the wall, and drop down into the neighborhood outside. They would hide nearby until morning and wait for someone to start the motor on his car—neither knew how to hot-wire a vehicle. They would jump the driver, hit him over the head with a brick or stone, and drive the car in the direction of the Persian Gulf, hundreds of miles away, where they would steal a boat and row or motor themselves out to where American warships patrolled. Kalp figured he had about a fifty-fifty chance of getting over the wall and about a five percent chance of making it to the gulf. After eight months, it was chance enough.

At the last moment he decided not to use the rope he had painstakingly made. He could tie it down inside his room and it would serve nicely for descending, but he couldn’t figure out a way to then pull it down behind him. If it were left hanging, a guard might spot it and alert the others before he and Subic had a chance to scale the wall and find a good hiding place outside. Their best chance was to slip out without anyone noticing until the guards came for breakfast. That would give them a good four hours of darkness to flee the house and hide. Instead of climbing down, Kalp decided he would simply hang from the window, which was about eighteen feet from the ground, and drop. He figured he was five-ten, and his arms extended fully gave him another two feet, which meant about a ten-foot drop, which wasn’t too bad. He saved himself some of the pills just in case he hurt his ankle or legs in the jump.

On the night of June 26, he threw the stuffed hot dog down to the dog, but it landed in a place where the tethered animal couldn’t reach. Again he wrote “cancel.” He asked for another hot dog and left the note in the bathroom for Subic.

On the following night, he asked the guard to shut his door. Usually they left it open but the guard obliged. Kalp threw out the new spiked hot dog, and this time the dog gobbled it up and appeared to fall immediately asleep. Kalp stuffed all the things he wanted to take with him into his pillowcase—his pills, a bottle of water, some food he had scrounged, a change of clothes, and some letters from his family. He was doing this when a guard abruptly reopened the door to his room. Kalp was crouched in a far corner of the room with his bag, the mattress on the floor stripped and empty, but the guard just took a quick look, shut the door, and did nothing! Kalp couldn’t believe it. The best he could figure is that the guard was so bored with making bed checks he no longer actually looked.

At the last moment he decided not to carry the stuffed pillowcase. He worried it might throw off his balance, so using a long piece of string—Kalp collected things all the time in hopes they would come in handy—he gently lowered it out the window. When it touched ground he hesitated for a moment. Once he let go of the string and the bag was outside, he had to go. He knew his chances were slim, but he had been a soldier and CIA officer for a long time without ever having taken any truly big risks. You’ve been training for this for twenty-odd years, you gonna do it or not? He let go of the string. Then he opened the window fully and eased himself out. Hanging from the window ledge the eighteen-foot drop looked a lot more daunting than he had convinced himself it would be. He saw a ventilation ledge about two feet below him to one side and he managed to swing himself over there and lower himself farther. Still, it was quite a fall.

It was at this point that the dog suddenly sprang fully to life, lunging up at him from its chain, barking furiously. Kalp let go and landed hard on the balls of his feet. He rolled quickly away from the dog, badly scraping his elbows and knees. Bleeding now, with the dog raising holy hell, Kalp got to his feet. He had been lucky. His decision to move over the two feet to the ventilation ledge meant he had landed just out of the dog’s reach.

With the animal still making a racket, he sprinted down to peer around the corner of the building, where he saw no one, and then ran back the other way, beneath Belk’s and Subic’s window. Subic wasn’t there. The army sergeant had been waiting by the window, fully dressed, but when he heard the dog start to bark he had run back across the room, peeled off his shirt, and crawled back under the covers.

“I told you. I told you,” said Belk bitterly. “Now you’re going to get us both in trouble.”

Kalp was beneath their window, reaching in his pocket for the red lens, when a guard appeared, leveling a gun at him and shouting angrily in Farsi. Kalp jerked his hands up, but noticed that his pants were falling down. He instinctively reached to hike them up, then realized that a move like that could get him shot. He jerked his hands back into the air. The guard with the gun was screaming, the dog was raising a racket, his pants were falling down, and he was soon surrounded by irate Iranians.

He smiled sheepishly. “Good morning,” he said. “Good morning.”

Bound and blindfolded, he was led first up a long winding staircase, and then the guards changed their minds and brought him back down to the first floor and placed him in a bathroom. They stripped him, screamed at him, and then two began beating and kicking him.

When Kalp pleaded and protested the guards told him to shut up and kept up the beating. Subic and Belk could hear his cries and figured they were next, but the guards never came for them. Their room was checked, but no one took notice that Subic was fully dressed and that he had several full water bottles in a bag by his mattress. They also didn’t notice that the window was unlocked.

When they had finished beating Kalp, he was led back upstairs and placed in a chair with his hands cuffed behind its back. Then they tied his elbows together and bound his feet. Two strips of cloth were tied over his eyes and pulled so tight that a corner of the lower one dug painfully into his left eye. Kalp spent a day and a half like this with no food or water. Guards led him to the toilet at long intervals. They finally removed the outer blindfold, which eased the painful pressure on his eye. Sometime later they untied him, cuffed his hands in front, and took him to the basement. He felt that the worst was over. They probably wouldn’t shoot him. How mad could they be at him? He hadn’t hurt anyone and even the Geneva Convention, he thought, recognized that prisoners of war were entitled to try to escape.

In the basement he was questioned about the note-passing system, which he denied. Then he was beaten again. His head was smacked against the concrete wall and he was kicked in the groin. They showed him a note he had left for Subic and Belk. He denied that he had written it, even though it was clearly his handwriting and on paper he had brought with him from the embassy in Tehran. Next he was asked about his escape plan.

“I was going to go into Isfahan and find a Westerner,” he told them.

“Why did you think there would be Westerners there?” he was asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t been out of here. I don’t know who is in Isfahan.”

They brought him back upstairs and kept him tied to a chair for a few more days, and then they threw him into a car and returned him to the villa where he had been staying before the move. They took away his knife and fork.

Kalp went quietly to work with the spoon, scraping away the mortar between the bricks.

Both Belk and Subic were punished for Kalp’s attempted escape. When the guards found braided sheets in their room they were separated.

Belk responded by refusing to eat. When they brought him tea on the first day there was no sugar. He asked for some and was told no. So he refused the tea and everything else. He took only water for nine days, and then decided to stop even that. He soon discovered that it is a lot harder to stop drinking than to stop eating. Inside of one day his mouth was like cotton. He gave up and started eating his meals again.

All John Limbert knew was that one day Kalp had disappeared, and then, about a week later, he was back, with a note describing his adventure. Kalp had hidden a ballpoint pen in his room months ago and was delighted to find it still there when he returned. His escape had ended as Limbert thought it would, but he admired Kalp for trying.

Limbert said he had wondered what happened to him, whether he had been moved to a different place or just to another part of the villa, and Kalp promised that in the future he would make a small soap mark on the mirror whenever he used the bathroom. If the mark was gone, he was gone. In the next few days they exchanged notes about the possibility of another rescue attempt. Kalp knew more about the military’s capabilities than Limbert and corrected him when the diplomat speculated that the United States could not reach far into Iran on helicopters. Kalp explained that there were many different ways to refuel en route.

Clearly, another American raid was on the minds of their guards. Limbert overheard a number of them discussing the possibility one night. He heard one say, “Well, if something happens, make sure the explosives are placed right.”

He had seen no explosives at the villa and figured if they were around, he would have noticed them. He suspected the conversation had been staged for his benefit, although for what reason exactly he could not fathom. Apparently the guards still feared their captives were secretly communicating with Washington.

For three days after his return Kalp was kept handcuffed in his room and was denied reading material. He easily picked the lock on the cuffs, refastening them quickly when a guard approached. To pass the time, he began trying to count to a billion. He had read somewhere that if a person tried counting to a billion, his whole life would pass before he finished. He was up somewhere around 20,000 when, on the night of the third of July, a guard gave him a tranquilizer to swallow, removed his glasses, and then took him, blindfolded and cuffed, to a van, where five or six other Iranians and a group of hostages were already waiting. He was handcuffed to Belk—he heard the wheeze. They had agreed that the next time they were together on a move, they would jump the guards and try to escape, and on the long drive he felt Belk trying to pick the lock on the cuffs, though by this time Kalp knew they didn’t have a prayer. They were outnumbered, the guards probably had weapons, he was woozy from the tranquilizer, and without his glasses he couldn’t even see. He patted Belk’s hand gently and whispered, “No, no, no.”

The drive took ten hours. The guards played loudly a tape of their revolutionary songs, which to Kalp felt like torture.

The logistics of moving the captives around the country strained the resources of their student captors, who had to arrange guard shifts, food delivery, and other services wherever their charges were housed. In the month after the rescue attempt they shuffled hostages from place to place, trying to get the makeshift new system to work, but by midsummer they had begun driving them all back to Tehran, to several of the city’s old prisons, which were designed to hold captives and could be heavily fortified against assault. The students took pains to disguise these shifts, mindful of how vulnerable they had been in April when the rescue mission was attempted. When marine Jimmy Lopez was taken from a country house, where he had been kept all summer, the guards kept his guitar, and every evening at the same time Lopez normally practiced one of them stayed behind to pluck at the strings so that anyone listening from outside would think the hostages were still there.

Among the first to be moved were Joe Hall, John Graves, and the marines Greg Persinger and Steve Kirtley. On June 18, they were being driven from Isfahan when their transport van had a severe accident.

The four were blindfolded and handcuffed in the back—Hall to Persinger and Graves to Kirtley—and had ridden for hours through the night when they were awakened by violent bumping, and then were suddenly thrown wildly into the walls of the van as it left the road at high speed and rolled several times before coming to a stop. They were tumbled inside like markers in a Bingo hopper. Hall blacked out. He came to with his blindfold off, lying in thick dust at the bottom of the van, staring at Persinger. Both had bloody faces and were twisted in awkward positions. They untangled themselves slowly, checking for cuts and broken bones, and then crawled outside. Surveying the battered remains of the vehicle, Hall noticed a leg that looked bent in a peculiar position, and his first thought was, Somebody has lost a leg! Then the leg moved and was followed by the intact body of Kirtley, who pulled himself from the van and dragged Graves out behind him. Graves had hurt his back and the marine’s shoulder ached.

There was no sign of the guards. All four had been riding for so long that they had to urinate urgently, so the two shackled pairs ran off a short distance to do that. When they returned, neither guard nor driver had emerged from the battered front of the van.

Kirtley’s first thought was, Now’s our chance! But they were standing in the middle of nowhere. Nothing but sand stretched off in all directions. They all turned slowly in a complete circle, thinking the same thought. Which way should they go? The van was going nowhere.

They were gaping at it, wondering at their good fortune in having escaped with only minor injury, when the guard they called Big Ali, who had been riding shotgun in front, emerged slowly from the wreckage with his gun. He had apparently just come to. It was the first time Hall had seen Big Ali with a weapon, and the Iranian gruffly ordered them to do what they had already decided.

“Stay here,” he said.

Not long afterward an ambulance arrived; it had been coming along the same road a distance behind them. Big Ali told them to climb in, where they were surprised to find hostage Jerry Miele on a stretcher. They were squeezed in around him, and when Big Ali told them to put their blindfolds back on, which he had retrieved, they all refused. He and the other guards were too shaken and distressed to push the issue—the hostages learned later that the driver of the van had been killed—so the hostages had an opportunity to talk freely for the rest of the drive.

Miele’s head was bandaged. He was particularly surprised to see Kirtley again. They had been together until a few days earlier, when Miele had made a bizarre and futile attempt to kill himself. He was known to be CIA—he was a communicator, a technician—and the guards constantly harassed him about it. They had told him repeatedly since the day of the takeover that, once the trials began, he would be the first to be killed. A short, bald man with a long hooked nose and protruding eyes with deep dark circles under them, Miele looked ill, old, tired, and broken. He was naturally withdrawn, and over months of captivity he had grown increasingly silent and sullen, convinced his life was over. The method most frequently mentioned was electrocution, and on one occasion the guards had rigged a chair with wires to drive home the threat. Occasionally Miele would mutter fearfully, “They were going to plug me in.” Before the rescue attempt, Miele had regressed to an extent that was alarming to his fellow hostages. Sometimes he would just curl up in the corner and shake. Kathryn Koob had been shocked one evening to see Miele, whom she did not know, sitting curled up like a child, asking meekly, “Bathroom? My turn? Bathroom?”

In the dispersal after the failed rescue, he had been placed with Kirtley in Isfahan, where one afternoon, when Big Ali was bringing lunch into the room, he became agitated and started pacing rapidly.

“I hope when this is all over the real truth comes out,” he said, and then ran himself head first, with as much speed as he could muster in such a small space, into the edge of the opened door. The blow knocked him cold and carved a deep eight-inch cut in his scalp. Kirtley ran to him and tried to wake him up. Blood poured out over Miele’s face. The marine put his head to Miele’s chest and heard his heart still beating.

“Call an ambulance, Ali!” he shouted.

Kirtley inspected the wound carefully, looking to make sure that there were no visible pieces of dirt or stone inside, and then folded the loose flap of scalp back over Miele’s slick, bleeding forehead. He took a towel, one that he had washed and hung to dry, and pressed it against the top of his roommate’s head. He leaned on it, applying steady pressure.

Miele awakened. He opened his eyes and looked around the room and said nothing.

“Jerry! Jerry! Wake up! Say something!” urged Kirtley.

Miele didn’t speak. An ambulance came quickly, but then it sat for a long time while the two attendants debated about what to do. Kirtley kept shouting at them to get Miele to a hospital, but they ignored him. Finally they wrapped some gauze around his head. Kirtley retrieved Miele’s Bible and gave it to the ambulance men to take with them. After what seemed like hours, they drove off.

This was the first Kirtley had seen him since then, and Miele seemed better, no worse off than the four of them. Graves was the most severely injured; his back would trouble him for the rest of his life. Hall had noticed blood in his urine and presumed he’d bruised his kidneys. He also had a gash on his right ankle. Persinger and Kirtley had deep cuts. When they arrived at Qom, just a fifteen-minute drive from the site of the accident, Hall washed the cut on Persinger’s back and asked the guards for a disinfectant, but they didn’t have any and refused to find some, so he used toothpaste. Fluoride was supposed to kill germs; at least that’s what all the commercials said. Nobody knew for sure. Persinger said it stung when it was applied, which they figured was a good sign.

Kathryn Koob and Ann Swift were given a remedy for tedium in late June when Akbar, their new guard supervisor, asked them if they knew how to cook. They were brought to the chancery kitchenette, where they proceeded to take charge. They were told to cook for six, which meant somewhere in the cavernous building were four of their male colleagues. There was a working oven, two burners, and a hot plate. They thoroughly scrubbed down the kitchen and threw themselves into making creative dishes out of the ingredients at hand. There was a huge store of frozen vegetables, cheese, and canned food. The students kept them supplied with fresh eggs. The women captives put cans of flour and grains in the freezer and then sifted out the frozen bugs and larvae.

One night they found a tiny message of thanks under a dish on a returned tray, signed “The Boys in the Back Room.” That set them searching for clues to who their mystery diners were. Swift ran into Bob Ode on one trip to the bathroom, and on another they found discarded wrapping in the waste bin from a package addressed to Don Hohman. Eventually they were able to determine that the remaining two diners were Richard Queen and Jerry Miele, who had been returned to the chancery after his suicide attempt.

Koob knew that Hohman was a vegetarian and worked hard to provide him with interesting dishes, including an attempt at huevos rancheros. The empty dishes now routinely carried notes of thanks and requests. Chocolate chip cookies? Peanut butter cookies? Pumpkin pie? Most of the ingredients came from the vast stores in the embassy commissary, but occasionally the students were talked into making shopping trips to local markets. They provided a steady assortment of fresh fruits.

On Independence Day Koob and Swift baked a chocolate cake and decorated it with four fake firecrackers they had fashioned out of cardboard covered with brightly colored paper and topped with a piece of silver tinsel for a fuse. The feast included fried chicken and potato salad. In the bathroom, a few days later, they saw three of the four firecrackers lined up in a row on the floor behind the wastebasket. It was a message. One of their diners was gone.

Queen, Miele, and Ode were placed with Hohman so he could keep an eye on their health. Queen’s mysterious symptoms had worsened, Miele was on suicide watch, and Ode’s condition was worrisome just because he was the eldest and seemed so frail. At first, Queen and Ode had hit it off, but in time their personalities clashed. Ode was bitter and angry about his circumstances, while Queen tended toward irrational optimism, and because he spoke a little Farsi and could eavesdrop on the guards he tended to rush to conclusions about things that were later proved wrong. As Queen’s optimistic predictions failed to pan out again and again, Ode wrote him off as a Pollyanna. In time, the older man couldn’t be around him without arguing with him.

More and more, the lanky, bearded vice consul retreated into himself. The numbness on his left side had spread to his right, which both troubled and confused him. If his problem had been caused by a slight stroke, that explained why the loss of feeling and strength affected only one side of his body, but why was he now experiencing it on the other? He noticed that he was having trouble hearing with his right ear and with keeping his balance. What did that mean? Hohman told him that it was possible he had suffered another slight stroke on the other side of his brain, but the medic said it was unlikely and confessed that he was out of his depth. Queen explained his symptoms to Akbar, who was also baffled. Hohman guessed that the dizziness and hearing loss might indicate an ear infection, so Queen began taking antihistamines to dry out his ear. It had no effect.

The dizziness worsened until it was so bad that Queen couldn’t stand without getting sick. He tried turning off his air conditioner, thinking maybe something he was breathing was making him nauseous, but that made no difference. The vomiting grew worse. Even when he didn’t eat he could not stop retching. By the Fourth of July, as nearly a million Iranians were outside marching in protest against the United States, Queen was literally flat on his back, unable to move without growing dizzy and throwing up.

His roommates were alarmed and angry. His condition was bad enough to intrude even on Ode’s typically self-obsessed diary entry.

Hohman was worried. He believed Queen was dying and complained bitterly to Akbar about the lack of medical care. He told Akbar that he personally was “killing” Queen, and that unless he did something quickly they were going to have a dead hostage on their hands. “How’s that going to play?” Hohman asked. Akbar agreed to send for help, and the next day Queen was visited by both a student doctor and an ear specialist. When the student doctor walked in, Queen turned his head to look at him and that slight movement made him so dizzy he vomited. The ear doctor quickly surmised that the problem was not an ear infection. He promised Queen a visit to the hospital the next day.

Ode noted:

That night, Ode and Hohman sat up beside Queen until late, talking to him and trying to cheer him up. When it was time to sleep, Ode gave him a broom handle and told him to hit the door if he needed anything. Queen lay awake that whole night. He was afraid to fall asleep for fear he might try to turn over, which would make him vomit again. The retching had bruised his insides and become extremely painful.

The next morning he was half carried to a passenger van. Queen felt he was dying. He lay supine in the vehicle’s backseat, his long, skinny legs bent at a sharp angle. After being locked up for eight months it was his first trip off the compound, and he lacked the strength or will even to lift his head and look out the windows. Inside the hospital he was helped to a bed. His head was swimming and the heat and odors of the place aggravated his nausea. The hospital, renamed Martyr’s Hospital after the revolution, was not up to Western standards. The bathroom in his room was unclean. Cockroaches ran on the walls. There were flowers alongside his bed, and when Queen asked Akbar about them he was told that they had been sent to the Ayatollah Sadeq Khalkali, the revolution’s notorious hanging judge, who had been treated in that same room earlier in the day for injuries from an auto accident. Queen noticed that Akbar had a .45 shoved under his belt, the first time he had seen him armed. He asked what they were worried about, since he couldn’t even sit up. Akbar said they weren’t worried about him trying to escape, they were worried that a rival group might kidnap him.

Queen observed that Akbar and the other guards were despised by the hospital workers, especially the women. When one of Queen’s armed student guards sat in a chair in his room, a nurse tending Queen snapped at the young man angrily, “Can you get rid of that thing,” pointing at his weapon. “This patient is not going anywhere.” The guard took a towel and wrapped it around his weapon. The nurses complained to Akbar about the white head scarves they were now required to wear, arguing that they interfered with their ability to work.

“Why do you torture us with these new requirements?” one nurse asked.

Queen was surprised by their anger and by the fact that they saw Akbar as responsible, which meant they saw him as an important man. The afflicted young American amused himself by softly singing old marching songs he had learned in the military. There was nothing else he could do. The doctors tried several treatments, which just made him feel worse. One set of shots caused violent spasms of the muscles in his head, causing it to turn violently from side to side. He began grinding his teeth uncontrollably.

“Akbar! Look what’s happening!” he cried fearfully. When he put his tongue between his teeth to stop the grinding, he involuntarily bit into it.

Five days of tests and various treatments led finally to the surprising announcement, by Akbar, that Queen was going home. The hostage assumed he meant back to the chancery.

“With all this?” he asked, horrified, nodding at the tubes plugged into his arms.

“No, you are going home. To your home,” said Akbar.

Queen still looked mystified.

“America,” said Akbar. “Ayatollah Khomeini has decided to release you to your parents.”

Later that day Gaptooth, Hussein Sheikh-ol-eslam, the student captors’ black-bearded leader, came into his room for a last political harangue.

“My people and the American people get along well,” he said, “but the government…the CIA is trying to destroy our revolution. No one tried to harass or kill the Americans who were leaving Iran at the time of the shah’s overthrow. The people had nothing against America, but the United States is trying to destroy the revolution. When you go back, speak the truth.” He apologized for any misbehavior by Queen’s guards, particularly in the first two months. “We tried to treat you well. The first two months were chaotic here—it was so disorganized.”

Hours later, Richard Queen was being carried off a plane in Zurich, Switzerland.

6. The Braying of Donkeys

On the night of July 27, John Limbert heard car horns honking all over Isfahan. At first he thought it was a wedding. Iranians often celebrated by honking horns, but it was Ramadan, and there usually weren’t weddings during the holy season. Besides, the horns seemed to be sounding not just in one place but all over the city. Out in the yard the students had a television in a tent, and at night sometimes they would sit around it and turn it up. Limbert could stand by his window and pick up bits and pieces of the report. He heard the phrase, “vampire of the age,” and “bloodsucker.” Later, when one of his guards came in, a young man named Mohammed, Limbert asked about the car horns.

“It’s a wedding,” Mohammed said.

“Really? A wedding during Ramadan? These people must have been in an awful hurry to get married.”

Mohammed spent a lot of time talking to Limbert. He was twenty-two, and Limbert judged him to be a pretty good student. He was thoughtful, well spoken, and eager to learn. Most important, he didn’t seem to have a completely closed mind as so many of the other young Iranians did. They had struck a deal: Mohammed would play chess with Limbert in exchange for English lessons. They discussed religious ideas, and Limbert asked Mohammed to tell him about some of the characters in Iran’s long history. Once the guard asked a question that intrigued Limbert.

“Whenever you leave us here and go home, what are you going to say about us?”

“I will tell people that some of you were decent human beings and that some of you are filth,” he had said and then explained that, no matter how many decent individuals were involved, their action would be remembered in the latter category.

The offhand assumption behind the question intrigued Limbert, however, and gave him a sense of hope and relief at a time when he desperately needed it. It showed Mohammed was concerned that Americans not get the wrong idea about him and the other hostage takers, because he hadn’t given up hope of visiting and studying in the States.

“After all this is over, do you think I could get a visa?” he asked.

Not a chance in hell, Limbert thought, but said, diplomatically, “Well, Mohammed. All you can do is apply.”

Mohammed caught his captive’s drift and seemed crestfallen. That suited Limbert fine. He hoped he would worry about it.

On reflection, Limbert realized that he knew why horns were honking, and why Mohammed had been thinking about an end to this ordeal. His mind had assembled the clues—celebration, “bloodsucker,” “vampire,” and Mohammed’s unexpected question. The shah was dead. But what did it mean? That had been the pretense for holding them, but it had been apparent for months that the shah wasn’t coming back. Still, his death removed an important obstacle. The students would have had a harder time releasing him and the others if the shah were still lounging on a beach somewhere.

There was another demonstration in Isfahan during Limbert’s long summer. It was a Friday, the day of communal prayers in Iran, and after the usual chanting and singing outside, a group of young people, some portion of a local khomiteh, gathered to read off a windy umpteen-point political statement. Limbert was surprised to hear in this one a call for Type A blood for loyal soldiers hurt during fighting in Kurdistan.

“I understand you need Type A blood,” Limbert told the next guard to come by his room. “I am Type A, and I’d be perfectly happy to donate some if your soldiers in Kurdistan need it.”

His offer upset the guard. Limbert was not supposed to know of the fighting in Kurdistan or the need for blood. He was concerned about a breakdown in their security system at the villa.

“How did you know?” he asked.

“I just know,” Limbert told him unhelpfully. What he wanted was for the guard to think that one of his own had been talking. He kept renewing his offer to donate blood but was ignored.

Mohammed brought him a fresh towel, some comfortable Iranian-style pajama pants, and a small cassette tape player with recordings by Gordon Lightfoot, classical Iranian music, recitations of classical Persian poetry, and, for some reason, music by Mikis Theodorakis from the sound track of the movie Serpico. Limbert especially liked the old Iranian songs, which had been pronounced passé by the new regime, so were out of favor, but which had an irresistible pull even for the young guards. He noticed how they drifted in when he was playing them.

Eventually Limbert was moved to another room with its own bathroom, so he lost his message drop and all communication with Kalp. Each afternoon at about two, the guards would turn up their radios and listen to a broadcast sermon from a zealous cleric who ranted on and on, usually for nearly two hours, spouting bizarre revisionist history, spreading lies and distortions, condemning the late shah and denouncing everything about America and the West. It called to Limbert’s mind an old saying, “Against stupidity the gods themselves labor in vain.” For many weeks he had no contact with anyone other than his guards. He began to worry that something had happened. Had everyone else been released? Had he been left behind? Had the others been killed?

Then one day a guard asked him to define some English words that he didn’t understand.

The words were “raghead,” “bozo,” “motherfucker,” and “cocksucker.” Limbert laughed. It warmed his heart. Someplace nearby his captors were still coping with the United States Marine Corps.

Limbert made it a point to get along with everyone, but for some of the hostages it was a trial just getting along with each other. Colonel Chuck Scott found it difficult to share space with the sullen, white-bearded Bob Blucker. The colonel had initially been thrilled months ago at the chancery when, after a month in solitary, the middle-aged budget officer was led into his room. Blucker immediately told the guard that he didn’t want to stay. He said he preferred his own room across the hall, where it was cooler and there was no smoke. The guard refused to reconsider and Blucker stayed, but right from the start Scott was offended and disappointed. Though from time to time his new roommate had made an effort to indulge the colonel’s need for conversation, most of the time he was distant and sullen. Now, forced again to cohabit, their relationship worsened. Little things Blucker did or refused to do irritated Scott. For instance, after eating, if the colonel used the bathroom first he would scoop up all the dirty dishes on the way out and wash them in the bathroom sink. When Blucker went out, he took only his own dishes. If a guard dropped a treat, nuts or dates, into Scott’s bowl, the fussy Blucker declined to take one—he would eat only out of his own bowl, as if the colonel’s had not been adequately cleaned.

One morning, after months of being locked indoors, a guard announced as he served breakfast that they must eat it quickly because in fifteen minutes they would be allowed to exercise outdoors. Scott was delighted. He ate fast and donned his slacks and shirt. Blucker continued to pick slowly at his food.

“Bob, you better hurry,” Scott said. He was worried that if they both weren’t ready, neither of them would get to go outside. Blucker said he couldn’t care less.

“I’m not going to hurry through my breakfast just to go outside.”

They argued for a few moments, and Scott pleaded, “Come on, Bob, we’re in this thing together. I know you prefer to be alone, but give me a break.”

Blucker refused to hurry and Scott lost his temper. He grabbed hold of his roommate’s shirt and pulled him to his feet. He was going outside if he had to drag Blucker with him. They were arguing loudly when the guards intervened. Blucker claimed that Scott had hit him. Scott denied it.

As punishment, the colonel was left alone in a small, dark room, where he sat stewing over his roommate’s lack of basic consideration. He was angry at himself for losing both his temper and the trip outdoors, where the weather had turned warm. After an hour of cooling off, Akbar came to retrieve him.

“Mr. Blucker is afraid that if he is left with you that you will kill him,” he said. “He says you are crazy.”

Scott was placed in a new room with different roommates, which he found a vast improvement, and soon afterward he was summoned to an unusual session with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, one of the state’s most powerful clerics (and the eventual successor to the imam as supreme leader). In his capacity as military liaison, Scott had met Khamenei almost a year earlier. The ayatollah was in charge of Iran’s military, and the colonel had sought him out to discuss outstanding defense contracts. As the colonel saw it, no matter how hateful its bluster, Iran had an overwhelming interest in opening such discussions because there were still billions of dollars of Iranian money deposited in trusts to pay off military purchases, money that was earning interest in American banks. It was not unusual for payouts from these accounts to total $750 million per quarter. Evidently ignorant of the trust fund, Khamenei initially told Scott that he was wasting his time; Iran was not interested in doing business with the United States anymore, under any circumstances, and that any outstanding debts would not be paid.

“So, let me get this straight,” Scott had said. “If after all the contracts are paid out the fund still has a few hundred million dollars in it, we should just donate it to the U.S. Treasury?”

At that point the ayatollah became interested. This was the work Scott had been doing when taken hostage. It turned out that if Iran wanted to keep its air force flying, it had to continue doing business with the United States. In the weeks before the takeover, Scott had arranged for the first official purchase by revolutionary Iran from the U.S. military, a $10 million order of tires for their fleet of F-14s and F-5 fighters. All that now seemed like it had happened in a different world.

In the months since he had last seen Khamenei, Iran’s geopolitical position had grown more precarious. Saddam Hussein had become increasingly belligerent along its western border and just weeks before had executed a revered Shia leader. Ever since, Iran had been both mourning and girding for war. So it came as no surprise to Scott that Khamenei’s interest in American parts would be stronger than ever. He had come looking for the American colonel who had sold him aircraft tires. Delivery of that order had been frozen, along with the rest of Iran’s considerable assets in the United States, since the takeover of the embassy.

Sitting cross-legged on the rug, puffing on a pipe, wearing a fat gold Rolex on his wrist, Khamenei asked the colonel, “If we were to release all of you now, without any conditions, how long would it be before you could begin to supply us again with spare parts for our military forces?”

“You’re asking the wrong man,” said Scott. “I have had no contact with either my government or the American people since I became a hostage. I’ve been kept in the dark by your people.”

“But you have served in your army for many years. What do you think? How long would it take?”

“Frankly, my guess is that it will be a long time before you get any cooperation on spare parts from America, after what you have done and continue to do to us.”

Khamenei insisted that neither Scott nor any of the other hostages had been harmed; they were being “protected,” he said, and then explained how the United States had just sent commandos to Iran in a failed attempt to assassinate them. Scott quickly scrutinized this remark through a well-honed rhetorical filter—what Iran called an “assassination squad” would have to have been…yes, a rescue force! So there had been a rescue attempt! Scott now understood why they had all been so suddenly moved. He told the ayatollah that he doubted American troops would have been sent to kill him and the others. If Carter was that cavalier about their fate, he would have leveled Tehran months ago.

“You are lucky to be alive, don’t you know that?” Khamenei said, annoyed.

When the ayatollah departed he left instructions that the prisoners’ diets be improved, but despite this concern all three men fell ill with dysentery. On July 12, still weak from the illness, Scott, Don Sharer, and navy petty officer Sam Gillette were driven back to Tehran and locked in Komiteh prison. A single lightbulb dangled from the ceiling of a room about fifteen feet square, furnished with three Styrofoam mattresses, three wooden chairs, and a table. Their guard turned out to be Ahmad, the squat, balding man who in the Mushroom Inn had taken such pleasure in tormenting them. He told them that they were being placed in prison for their own safety.

“You know about the mission that was sent to kill you?” Ahmad asked.

They said they had heard the whole bullshit story, and then complained about being locked in a prison, reminding the guard of the repeated assurances that they were not “prisoners” but “guests.”

“This is not a prison,” said Ahmad. “It is only a place to keep hostages.”

By the end of summer all of the hostages were in Tehran prison cells.

John Limbert’s at Komiteh was about fifteen feet wide and twenty feet long, with two mattresses on the floor and a high window that admitted some light. It reminded him of Jack Benny’s “vault”—a standing joke on the famous comic’s TV program was that he was so miserly he kept all his money in a vault, which he would visit periodically on the show, passing through a series of huge, clanking doors draped with chains and locks. Komiteh was like that; it was so prison-like that it seemed over the top to Limbert, complete with echoing stone walls, and creaking steel doors with a lip on the bottom like those on naval vessels.

There was a center courtyard and outside the cell door was a long hallway. He could hear other American voices talking in cells up and down. The bathroom was at the end of the hall, and other prisoners were frequently escorted down it past his door. One of them was obviously a marine, because he invariably whistled “The Halls of Montezuma.” At all hours of day and night Limbert could hear from somewhere else in the prison the voice of an Iranian woman singing patriotic songs and talking loudly to herself. He imagined it was some poor prisoner who had lost her mind.

Despite the gloominess of the new place, Limbert was happy. He was surrounded again by his colleagues, which was reassuring, and there were two mattresses! He had a roommate, Lee Holland, the embassy’s army attaché. Holland was a small fireplug of a man who was nicknamed “Jumper” because he had enrolled and passed jump school at Fort Bragg relatively late in his career. He was more than a decade older than Limbert, with thinning straight hair that now hung limply around his broad forehead. He had grown a gray beard. Holland had also spent some time in Tehran before the revolution, so both he and Limbert remembered the country in what they considered better days. They dubbed their new home the “Hitler Hilton.”

After seven months of being alone, Limbert was thrilled to have company, and he found Holland to be especially pleasant. The first few days they were thrown together they sat up until the wee hours every morning conversing—so much that a guard came in and complained, “Don’t you people ever sleep?” They talked about their lives, their families, their children, and what they knew about their situation. Holland had not heard about the rescue mission and had not learned of the shah’s death. Holland told Limbert about his experiences since the day of the takeover, and about his past, about his service in Vietnam and in Germany. They played cards. Holland taught Limbert to play euchre, and Limbert taught him to play casino. Limbert was impressed by Holland’s imperturbability. He was a gruff, steady man, not easily impressed or frightened, who treated his captors with steadfast contempt without deliberately courting trouble. A little of Holland’s defiance rubbed off on the pliant political officer.

Limbert recognized that small acts of defiance preserved the prisoner’s sense of self-worth and remembered how good it had felt when he had been listening at night to his stolen radio, putting one over on the guards.

He began practicing this new, measured belligerence on their guard, a young man named Gholam Reza, who was so perpetually glum that he had been nicknamed “Smiley.” He was one of the true believers, someone who in Limbert’s eyes embodied Iran’s “New Man,” appalling ignorance combined with absolute conviction. He found Reza too high-strung and impassioned to argue with directly, so he began leaving him mocking messages on the walls. In one, he wrote in Farsi:

Limbert made posters and drew cartoons. In one, he contrasted in Farsi the perfect Muslim state described in the Koran with the kind of system created by the radical students, comparing the generous historical acts of Muhammad with the students’ authoritarian methods. Muhammad, for instance, had freed all of the prisoners after one battle, had not bothered the people of Mecca after his conquest, and treated foreigners in his country as honored guests. The students, on the other hand, had attacked defenseless people, harmed those in their protection, and had stolen from them. Reza began writing responses on the wall when Limbert went to the toilet. It got so that every time Limbert left for the bathroom he would return to find something new Reza had added to his wall drawings. The guard never spoke to him about it. For instance, in response to Limbert’s point about visitors being treated as honored guests, the guard wrote, “Islam protects diplomats, not spies.” Limbert then wrote, “For example, a businessman and a nurse are spies, like those you have taken hostage.” This went on until his posters were so defaced that Limbert put them in a corner, hung clean paper in another part of the room, and labeled it “Free Speech Area.” Reza continued the dialogue there. They never spoke to each other but carried on this written exchange for weeks.

In the hallway, the guards often played revolutionary songs. Limbert was a lover of old Persian folk music and regarded the new songs as dreadful. The words to one tune just repeated the familiar “Magbar A’mrika” (Death to America).

He teased Reza by replacing the lyrics with a loud singsong, “Hee-haw! Hee-haw! Hee-haw!”

7. Buy Iraqi War Bonds

Summer is long in Tehran. It was still sunning weather in early October when Mike Howland, stretched out on the balcony over the ministry garden one afternoon, was approached by a new guard named Isfahani, who asked the embassy security officer if he would show him how to field-strip his Spanish pistol. Howland had done so for some of the others. The big embassy security chief liked Isfahani. He was a slender reed, a slight, inoffensive man whose commitment to the pieties of Islam was suspect—he had asked Howland once if he could get him special American sunglasses that would enable him to see through women’s robes.

They sat together on the third-floor balcony, just under the eave of the roof, and Howland broke down the weapon, explaining as he went. The hardest part about putting the .45 back together was holding down the recoil spring cap as you locked it back beneath the gun barrel. More than one trainee had injured himself by letting the spring cap slip and having it fly up into his eye or forehead. Howland demonstrated the tricky maneuver with his thick thumb pressed hard on the spring cap. Then he handed the pistol to the guard to try it himself.

“Isfahani, you’ve got to be careful or that thing will fly off and hit you,” Howland warned him.

“Bali, bali, bali,” the guard said (“Yes, yes, yes!”).

Isfahani’s thumb slipped. The cap missed him, flying high into the air and landing on the upper roof, where it rolled down and came to rest in the gutter high overhead. The young guard went white with panic. How was he going to explain breaking his own gun or letting his hostage take his weapon apart? He was so beside himself that Howland took pity on him.

“Okay, Isfahani,” he said. “Come with me.”

The other guards were sleeping. Howland led the panic-stricken Iranian quietly into the kitchen and, much to the guard’s amazement, slipped open the key box and removed the key to the attic.

“Shhh,” Howland told him, a finger to his lips.

There was a dormer near the point on the roof where the spring cap had landed, and Howland led the amazed guard up the stairs and into the attic. He took him to the window and pointed down to the place in the gutter where he would find the cap.

The guard said he was too afraid of heights to climb out on the roof. Howland looked down. There were guards in the garden below.

“Bullshit, Isfahani, I’m not going out there,” he said. “Those guards down there see me, they’re liable to start shooting. You’re going to have to go out there.”

He showed him how he could hang on to the dormer on his way down and use it to help pull himself back up when he had retrieved the spring cap. Howland promised to stand in the window the whole time and direct him.

He was standing in the window, encouraging the trembling guard as he eased his way down toward the gutter, when suddenly they both heard explosions in the distance. Howland was shocked. He knew the sound; he remembered it from Vietnam. It sounded like an air strike, coming from the direction of Mehrabad Airport. Off to the west he saw rising columns of smoke. Isfahani looked back up at Howland, stricken and confused.

Just then a MiG-23 fighter bomber flew right past the window. Howland was at eye level with the pilot. The jet turned, hit its afterburners, and shot away from them. Howland braced himself for a bomb to hit but nothing happened. The startled guards below, looking up, saw Isfahani on the roof.

“Isfahani, get the goddamn cap and get back in here!” Howland shouted. Suddenly spry, the guard eased himself down to the gutter, scooped out the cap, and made it back to the window. He was so happy that he hugged and kissed Howland when he got back inside. Then the American helped him put the pistol back together. Isfahani had a perfect excuse for being on the roof. He told his comrades that he had reacted quickly when he heard the jets and had climbed out to shoot at it. His fellows were tremendously impressed with his alert and fearless response.

Laingen saw two jets. While Howland was watching Isfahani out on the attic dormer, the chargé had been sitting at an open third-floor window below, painting. The explosions to the west turned his head and at once he saw two low-flying MiG-23s with Iraqi insignia move directly over the ministry. They were less than a thousand feet from his window, and the angle of their approach made them seem to be moving slowly. One was trailing a drag chute, presumably deployed in error. They seemed bigger than Laingen imagined they would be and, in their apparent leisure, appeared to be flaunting their presence in enemy skies. “As they crossed over us, they swung to the west slightly and then gunned their speed as we watched their afterburners,” he wrote later in his diary.

Holland and Limbert were together at Komiteh prison when they heard the roar of jet engines pass low overhead, a powerful swoosh!, which Holland recognized as the sound of two fighters on a shooting run, and then the burp of their electric cannons. In the distance a bomb exploded, followed by a second much larger boom that vibrated the floors and walls. The guards were shouting angrily outside.

“Goddamn, John! They’re playing our song!” Holland said gleefully.

“What is it?” Limbert asked.

Holland explained that Tehran had just been attacked from the air. A siren began to scream just outside their window.

In a nearby cell, Chuck Scott and Don Sharer went right to work on the sounds. The jet engines sounded like something Sharer had heard once at an air base in Nevada.

“Chuck, I think those were air-dropped bombs, and that jet was a MiG,” he said, referring to the Soviet-built fighter.

Five minutes later two more jets passed over.

“What were they?” asked Scott.

“J-79 engines, must be F-4 Phantoms,” said Sharer. The Iranian air force’s F-4s were one of the models he had come to Iran to discuss with the new government. “Somebody has attacked somebody.”

Then all the lights went out. Antiaircraft guns opened up loudly nearby.

“That was a hundred-twenty millimeter,” said Scott.

Sharer beat on the door, shouting, “I have to go to the head!”

“Can’t go, can’t go,” the guard answered through the door.

“I have diarrhea!” Sharer lied.

The door was opened and he was taken to the bathroom, where he could stand on the toilet and look out a window. It confirmed Scott’s assessment. He could see tracers arcing skyward from nearby rooftops.

They deduced that the likely culprit was Iraq, because other than the Soviet Union it was the only country close enough with MiGs. If the Soviets were attacking it wouldn’t be just two fighters streaking over Tehran. It had to be Saddam Hussein.

In his cell, Daugherty arrived at the same point by a different route. The distant explosions and jets made him believe for a moment that President Carter had launched an attack…then he thought better of it. He sat on the floor of his darkened cell watching the flashes of what he assumed were antiaircraft guns in the small window overhead, trying to figure out what was going on. If Carter were going to attack Iran, it would have happened months ago. The Russians would have no reason to bomb Tehran. The most logical conclusion was Iraq. Saddam Hussein had always been at odds with Iran, even under the shah. Maybe now he sensed weakness and realized he could get some support—under these circumstances, even the United States might be helping him.

Daugherty felt good about it. He wasn’t frightened. He reckoned that if he was going to sit through an aerial assault, few places were better than a prison. Its walls were many times thicker than a normal building. It was probably the safest spot in all of Tehran. At one point the guards opened the door and poked their heads in his room. They looked terrified. Daugherty figured they were checking to make sure he wasn’t secretly communicating with the planes. They were watching when the large whump! of an explosion sounded in the distance. Daugherty smiled at them and clapped.

In a nearby cell, Metrinko and Roeder heard bombs falling close enough to rattle the walls.

“That’s incoming,” said Roeder.

Metrinko asked what was exploding.

“I can’t tell,” Roeder told him.

“You must know,” said Metrinko. “You were in Vietnam all those years.”

“Yeah, but all I ever heard was the sound from the top going down, not on the ground listening to them coming in. I’ve never been on the receiving end.”

Roeder knew his jets, and listening intently to the sounds overhead he told Metrinko that they were MiG-23s, Soviet-built fighters. It took him just a few seconds to figure Saddam was behind the assault.

A panicked guard burst into their cell and asked if they were “weapons trained.” Both men said they could handle a weapon.

“You might be issued weapons to help defend the prison,” the guard told them.

Metrinko was shocked at the suggestion that he and Roeder might be asked to help their guards defend the prison.

“Please give me a gun,” Metrinko said. “I’ll use it all right.”

Blaring loudspeakers spelled out the story for Limbert, who translated for his roommate Holland. Iraq had invaded Iran. Thirty-five people had been killed at the Iran National Works, where the bombs had exploded. The broadcasts urged citizens to postpone going to hospitals except for emergencies.

Suddenly, Iran was at war. At the various prisons guards began enforcing strict blackout rules and distributed candles. On the first night of the blackout, looking out the large windows that had framed his world for so long, Laingen had never seen such blackness since the moonless nights of his boyhood in rural Minnesota. There seemed to be universal compliance with the new blackout regulations. The city was not just black but silent, dead. Nothing was moving. The events of the day shook the chargé d’affaires out of hostage mode and back into gear as a foreign service officer. He recorded his analysis of the situation in his journal.

Laingen went on to describe the 1975 Iran–Iraq border accord, which Saddam Hussein had signed with the shah, and surmised correctly that, with Pahlavi dead and with Iran having cast off its alliance with the United States to pursue its divine destiny, Saddam had seized the moment to grab contested lands along the Shatt al-Arab (the Arab River) and possibly steal some of Iran’s oil-rich territory in Khuzestan. The attacks prompted a surge of patriotism and calls for glorious martyrdom from Khomeini—“Everything we are doing is for Islam. What matter if we die? We shall go to Paradise.” The imprisoned American, even with his professional objectivity, couldn’t help but express a little satisfaction over Iran’s predicament.

There was evidence that at least some Iranians recognized this. One of the kitchen workers delivering a meal told Tomseth, “All this mess is Khomeini’s fault.”

“Yes, and someday the people will recognize that,” said the American.

“Ha!” scoffed the Iranian. “The people—they are cows!”

What Iran lacked in military force it was making up for with its zeal. One night early in the war, Tomseth translated a plea heard on the radio:

“Heroic people of Tehran, especially those living in the vicinity of Mehrabad Airport. Please allow the aircraft to land. The aircraft is one of ours. Stop shooting at it!”

None of the hostages guessed that this outbreak of war might prolong their captivity. In Komiteh prison, John Limbert knew that Iran’s relations with Iraq had been deteriorating, and that its new isolation made it vulnerable, so he felt a certain satisfaction in knowing that the country had finally paid a price for thumbing its nose at the rest of the world.

When there was an air attack, the guards at the Evin prison would run from room to room shouting, “Turn off your candles!” Bill Belk wondered, How do you turn off a candle?

After the first few days the attacks tapered off, then stopped. Several days and nights had passed with not a sound from the sky when one afternoon a lone jet streaked in low over the city and launched a rocket. It was a daring assault; a single aircraft had penetrated the city’s air defenses by flying close to the ground to deliver a single large weapon, which exploded somewhere near the prison with enough force to shake its walls. From up and down the gray corridor on the hostage wing of Komiteh came sounds of delight. There was clapping, cheering, and shouting.

“Give ’em hell!” said one.

“Buy Iraqi war bonds!”

At the near-empty chancery, Kathryn Koob and Ann Swift were terrified when they heard the eruption of ground fire that accompanied the first raid, thinking that the guards were fighting off angry mobs who were coming after them. They were reassured by one that the shooting was only “practice air raid drills.” The immediate assumption was that they were anticipating an American assault. Koob and Swift had learned months earlier about the failed rescue attempt in a letter that had slipped past the censors from a Vermont schoolgirl, who had written, “Dear Kathryn, How are you? My name is Jennifer Wilcox. I am ten and in the fourth grade and I’m writing this letter to cheer you up. I’m sorry that the rescue attempt didn’t succeed. I hope they try again. I have no pets…”

During the night they could see shell bursts in the air and hear bombs dropping. There was a rhythm to it. The sounds of jets, antiaircraft fire, and then the guards unloading their weapons into the air for long stretches.

“You have to understand,” one of the older guards explained. “These kids have been carrying guns for a long time with no excuse to use them.”

During the day their windows were now draped with black plastic, which blocked the view of the snowcapped northern mountains. Outside there were air-raid sirens and the broadcast of martial music. Koob and Swift were delighted one day when a rousing rendition of John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” blasted out over Tehran.

They didn’t learn what was going on until the chief hostage spokesman Nilufar Ebtekar inadvertently informed them. She stopped by to chat in her flawless English and complained that the “Iraqis” had stooped to an all-time low. They were dropping fancy table napkins over the city contaminated with a virus that would cause cancer. Swift and Koob were shocked that she would believe such a thing, which was both wildly impractical and technically impossible, but delighted with the information. So Iran was at war with Iraq.

The window to the cell at Evin shared by Al Golacinski and Dick Morefield was painted black, but whoever had done the job had applied the paint on the inside, so Golacinski could scrape a little from one corner to peek out. Morefield wasn’t that interested in looking out, but Golacinski spent hours with his eye pressed to that tiny portal, peering out over a gray stone courtyard and at the sky. At night he saw antiaircraft fire.

One morning there was a commotion below. A group of armed guards assembled and formed themselves into a line, and a bedraggled, bearded prisoner was dragged out and left standing alone against a wall before them. He was a young man, very thin, wearing what looked like rags. He was blindfolded and his hands were tied behind his back. He was violently shaking.

Then he was shot. It happened just like that, no final words, no ceremony, no swell of music like in the movies. The weapons cracked sharply and their echo bounced around the enclosure for a few moments. The victim slumped lifelessly to the ground and the firing squad walked off. Blood pooled on the pavement beneath the lifeless form. Golacinski watched dumb-struck. It had happened in less than a minute, a loud crack and a life abruptly ended. He could see it happening to him, just like that.

A few hours later two men in gray clothes came into the courtyard, one of them pushing a cart. They lifted the body and tossed it on the cart and rolled it out. The blood on the pavement dried black.

Tom Ahern was being kept in an administrative building of some kind on the outskirts of the Komiteh prison. In the next room were Don Sharer and Chuck Scott, who tried to communicate with him using a tap code. Ahern didn’t know the code.

One day, to the CIA station chief ’s amazement, his guard began allowing him to visit with his military colleagues. He spent the week playing cribbage with Sharer, whom he especially liked. His relationship with Scott was testier. Scott was surprised when Ahern told him about the information he had given up in interrogation. The ramrod army colonel had endured what he considered great hardships trying to protect Ahern, Daugherty, Kalp, and whatever he knew about their efforts. That Ahern himself had, as he saw it, “rolled over” came as a shock.

Ahern felt very conflicted about how he had handled himself, but he did believe he had done the best he could, and he felt sure he had held out long enough to allow his Iranian agents to flee. The old name-rank-serial-number approach to interrogation was unrealistic, he felt, and he was gratified when both Sharer and Scott reassured him that he had done fine—Scott kept his reservations to himself. They agreed that his interrogation had been the worst, and Ahern took comfort in it.

The hiatus ended abruptly about a week after it had started. An older Iranian guard appeared one day in the open doorway staring at the three of them. He turned without saying a word and walked away. After he left a guard came and removed Ahern from the room and placed him back in solitary.

One sweltering night in late September, Bill Keough banged on his cell door in Komiteh because he had to use the toilet, or what the hostages called the “Khomeini Hole.” No one answered. He banged again more loudly. Nothing.

“Esspeak more esslowly,” one of the marines called out, imitating the guards who would say “slowly” when they meant “softly” and would not accept correction from American devils.

“Who’s that?” Keough asked.

“Where in the hell is the guard?” called out the marine.

“He’s right outside the door,” Keough answered, apparently having pulled his tall frame high enough to look down into the hall, “but he’s dead.”

Everyone laughed. This got everyone’s attention, and prisoners began pulling themselves up to the transom to see into the hall.

“Christ, he’s fallen asleep out there!” someone else said.

The guard, one of the youngest and smallest, was sprawled with his head down on a table in front of his chair. Suddenly the hallway was alive with conversation. Each of the prisoners knew only who was locked up with them in their own rooms. Some had heard no news of their friends and coworkers since the day of the takeover. Questions and information started flying back and forth.

“Hey, what do you know?”

“Did you hear that the shah died?”

“Did you hear about the rescue attempt?”

CIA officer Bill Daugherty was alone in his cell, standing on a chair and looking out the open vent over the steel door. When he whispered out there was a momentary hush. Everyone was surprised to hear his voice. Some thought he might have been executed.

“How are you, Bill?” several shouted happily.

“I’m okay,” he said. “Keeping myself very busy. The only thing is the food. Is there still something in the world to eat besides bread?”

Barry Rosen heard his old roommate Dave Roeder’s voice and they exchanged greetings.

Information was pooled in those minutes of hurried, hushed conversation. Limbert explained to those who had not figured it out that the jets dropping bombs were Iraqi, and that Iran was now at war with Saddam Hussein. In overlapping whispers hostages compared notes about whom they had seen, what they had heard. Daugherty was delighted to find his friend Colonel Schaefer in the cell directly across from his. Schaefer told Daugherty all about the failed rescue attempt, which explained why they had been so suddenly moved and scattered in April. He told about Richard Queen’s serious illness and his release. Daugherty was enormously pleased to hear that at least one of them had gotten home, and was both stunned and heartened by news of the rescue effort.

One of the men asked, “Hey, did any of you guys see that film of Rupiper, the one that priest did?”

Everyone had. The guards were especially proud of it and showed it repeatedly.

“They must have given him a blow job before he made that film,” the voice said, and everyone collapsed into laughter.

Then the guard woke up.

“No speak!” he shouted, and silence returned. Moments later, Keough started banging on the door. He still had to use the toilet. For some reason everyone up and down the hall started to laugh.

The guard Abbas liked to debate with his captives and instruct them in language borrowed from the common rants about the evil practices of the United States.

Vice consul Donald Cooke looked up once from his book and said, “You know, Abbas, you’re right. Even before I was born my parents decided that what they wanted me to do was to become a ruthless exploiter of the oppressed people of the third world. And from the time I was small I can remember them teaching me how to be a ruthless exploiter of the oppressed people of the third world. And when it came time for me to decide what kind of job I was going to get, I said to myself, I know what I want. I want to become a ruthless exploiter of the oppressed people of the third world. And here I am. I got a job with the United States government as a ruthless exploiter of the oppressed people of the third world and my parents, they’re so proud of me they thank God every day. They get up in the morning and say thank you Lord for making our son a ruthless exploiter of the oppressed people of the third world.”

Even Abbas was laughing by the time he was finished.

“I see we are being facetious today, Mr. Cooke,” he said.

When Abbas lectured about racial, ethnic, and religious oppression in the United States, Cooke went off.

“Abbas, you have got to be kidding me,” he said, and asked the guard, “In your embassy in London, how many Jews do you have serving there? How many Christians? How many Baha’i?” In contrast, Cooke noted the ethnic and racial mix among the embassy employees they had kidnapped. “My embassy looks like my country,” he said. “Do your embassies look like that overseas?”

Abbas had to admit that they didn’t.

Wound up now, Cooke described the fear he had seen in the eyes of visa applicants who had lined up by the thousands before the embassy seizure to apply for visas to escape Iran. “These were people trying to escape,” he said.

“Tell me there’s a long line outside of the Iranian embassy in Washington of blacks and Indians or Hispanics and whatever, seeking to try to escape the United States in order to come to Iran, you know, for their protection. Well, by God, there was a line half a mile long outside of my embassy the day we opened, of people who were just that. Religious and ethnic minorities trying to escape your government. Real oppression. Firing squads, executions.”

As time wore on in the prison, Abbas was among those guards who became openly disgusted with their role in this hostage taking. He admitted that the whole standoff had gotten tiresomely bogged down. He said he and the others who had been involved from the beginning were weary of it and powerless to end it. He complained that the students had lost control of the protest right at the start, and that ever since they had become nothing more than jailers, trapped in a crisis of their own devising.

Not long after the attacks, Michael Metrinko was taken away from Dave Roeder and again placed in solitary in a basement cell at Qasr prison. The combative embassy political officer was always picking fights with his captors. Every time things started to feel a little bit too chummy, Metrinko would lash out. One night, after several had lingered in his cell for a long time lamenting how badly the war with Iraq was going, Metrinko suddenly announced: “You know, the imam is not a man.”

The words immediately stilled the conversation. After a stunned moment, one of the guards asked, “What?”

“The Ayatollah Khomeini, he is not a man,” said Metrinko.

“He is a man,” said one of the guards.

“He is not a man,” said Metrinko. “He does not have a wife.”

“He does have a wife.”

“No, he doesn’t,” Metrinko said. “The Ayatollah Khomeini does not have a wife.”

“He does have a wife,” one of the guards insisted. “There are pictures.”

“The only pictures I have ever seen of the ayatollah with anyone else are always pictures of him with a small boy beside him,” said Metrinko.

The guards caught his drift; he was suggesting that their imam was a pederast. Metrinko was grabbed by the hair—it had grown quite long—and dragged from the room. The angry guards took turns kicking and punching him. He was thrown into a cell at the end of the hall where a blanket was draped over him and he was beaten some more. Then they locked the door and left him there and refused to bring him food for three days. Then he was driven to Qasr, where he was placed alone in a “punishment” cell. They took away his watch and his glasses and left him. The room was dark and cold. At first he upbraided himself for provoking the guards, but he also felt good about standing up to them. He would pay a heavy price.

When they saw how much time Metrinko spent reading, they took away his books for days at a time. For two weeks he was left alone in the cell, freezing. They fed him bread and water. He spent his days and nights shivering in his blanket, pacing or jogging in place to keep warm, and brooding. After some time, he was visited by several of the student leaders.

“You have insulted the guards, who have complained that they can no longer bring you food or take you to the toilet,” the head of the group explained.

Metrinko was eventually taken back to Evin and placed again in a cell by himself. Now and then he was let out into a small courtyard to exercise. He walked in circles in the yard, just like prisoners in old Hollywood movies. Sometimes there were others walking in circles with him. That was how he discovered which hostages were being kept in that part of the prison, a discovery he found disconcerting. They were all embassy workers with the most sensitive jobs. There was Swift, the second-ranking political officer; Thomas Ahern, the CIA station chief; CIA officer Bill Daugherty; Lee Holland, an assistant defense attaché, and his boss, Tom Schaefer, the military attaché; and others. If the students were planning to put any of the hostages on trial, this would be the group.

He still lived with the guards’ special enmity. One day one of them entered his cell with a stack of letters.

“These are from your family,” he said. Metrinko had received mail from his family only a handful of times since the day of the takeover. Sometimes the letters he received seemed to have been chosen at random. One had appeared out of the blue from an old girlfriend whom he had not seen for eight years. He had devoured the letter, and was glad to get it, but had no way to respond. He wrote letters to his mother and father frequently but suspected they were not being sent (he was correct). So the sight of a pile of letters from his family was a thrill.

Then the guard tore the letters in half and walked back out of the cell with them.

Akbar was the only guard who took pity on him. When he took over at Evin, the mood of the place lifted. Even Metrinko grew to like him; he found him well educated and kindhearted. Akbar spoke some English and was fluent in Turkish and Farsi. He was not an innocent. He had taken part in the assassination of a government official ten years earlier, and at one point had been arrested by SAVAK and thrown in jail. He and Metrinko often conversed in Turkish, which few of the other guards understood. Metrinko found him to be a true believer in the revolution but not a fanatic. He would actually listen in conversation and carefully weigh what was said.

Akbar told Metrinko that he, too, had been trapped by the embassy takeover, caught up in events that he could no longer control and which he no longer agreed with. He shared some of the prisoner’s contempt for his jailers; they, after all, were warm and comfortable and still basking in praise from the great mass of Iranians. For many of them this would be the most important accomplishment of their lives, and they delighted in remaining at the center of such worldwide attention. But what kind of attention? It pained Akbar to know that because of what they had done they were considered thugs all over the world, and he admitted to Metrinko that even in Iran there was now a growing criticism of the ongoing standoff. He and many others now believed the effects of taking and holding diplomats hostage were bad for his country and were going to get worse. He stayed, he said, because he felt partly responsible for putting the Americans in this position and felt obliged to do what he could to ease their captivity. When Metrinko told him he had not been able to communicate with his family, Akbar brought him a letter from his parents and offered to hand-carry his own letter out of the prison and mail it for him. Metrinko sat down right then, filled with skepticism about Akbar’s promise, and wrote a typically uncompromising one-page letter in a tight but clear script.

Akbar kept his word. The letter arrived a week later in Olyphant, Pennsylvania, the first his family had heard from him in more than a year. His parents read the letter out loud over the phone to an official at the State Department, and it further confirmed their fears that at least some of the hostages were not being treated well.

One day, without explanation, Metrinko was handed several new paperback science-fiction books. He was a big fan of science fiction and the books were like manna. Then, in the TV room, he discovered a box with dozens of similar volumes, all of them new, published in 1980. Adding to the mystery, as he poked through the box, he discovered one of his own books, which had evidently been removed from the shelf of his apartment—the first proof that his apartment had been invaded and looted. Looking with even more interest now, Metrinko found that one of the new paperbacks was inscribed, “Hope you enjoy the books, Michael,” and that they had been sent from Cooperfield’s Bookstore in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He had no idea how the box had found its way to Evin prison. He never asked, and no one explained, but Metrinko felt an enormous debt of gratitude toward the bookshop. He plunged into the books.

Reading was only a partial cure for the boredom, however. At times, Metrinko’s spirits sank. The worst prior moments for him had been the two weeks in the chancery basement, handcuffed day and night, and then, more recently, the two weeks of cold, dark, and loneliness in the punishment cell. In those circumstances Metrinko’s despair was salvaged by the pride he took in defying his captors. But time and tedium eroded even the defiance that sustained him.

One fall night, alone in his cell at Evin, the moist walls peeling paint, Metrinko listened to the muffled booms of bombs exploding in the distance. Then the walls and floor of his cell began to shake. It had announced itself first as a great rumbling sound that grew louder and louder as it approached. It was an earthquake. The shaking lasted only a few seconds, and after that he could hear sirens and horns outside. It made him feel small, hopelessly alone, stranded, vulnerable, and insignificant. Part of him wanted to laugh out loud. It was such a travesty of disasters. Here he was a pawn in a great struggle between nations over matters that neither Iran nor the United States fully understood, trapped on a battlefield between two nations fighting over something else, and in an instant all of it could be rendered irrelevant by some blind, unthinkably powerful tectonic shrug. The futility of his predicament mirrored the absurdity of life itself. He was going to sit in this miserable cell until the day he died and it didn’t matter to a soul, his life was forgotten and meaningless, all his dreams were illusions, and when he was dead and gone the great idiot pageant would keep on rolling right along, heedless, pointless, and cruel.

8. It Has Become a Quagmire

Iraq’s invasion of Iran was a direct consequence of Khomeini’s revolution and of the embassy seizure, and it would take a horrendous toll on both nations over the next eight years.

It was hard to disguise the tone of satisfaction in American TV reports on the outbreak of the war, just as the hostages had cheered the pounding of Tehran. But Saddam’s aggression had derailed, at least temporarily, an agreement for their release.

Two weeks before the bombs started falling Sadegh Tabatabai, a mid-level official in the collapsed Bazargan provisional government and the brother-in-law of the imam’s son Ahmad, had initiated secret talks with the United States to resolve the crisis. A chain-smoking dandy who wore expensive suits with colorful matching silk ties and pocket handkerchiefs, who combed his brown wavy hair into a pompadour and had more than one hundred varieties of tulips in his personal gardens, Tabatabai was a highly unlikely figure to be a member of Khomeini’s inner circle. He had run unsuccessfully for president in the last election. For almost two decades before the revolution he had lived in Germany—indeed, documents seized at the embassy suggested that the CIA regarded him as a German spy—and he had the appearance and manner of a sixties-era Western playboy. But his marital connection and kinship with Ahmad Khomeini gave him a unique opportunity to speak unpopular truths.

There had been a number of worldly, well-educated, well-placed Iranians who considered the hostage taking to have been a mistake from the beginning. Tabatabai was a veteran diplomat and knew well that the documents seized at the U.S. embassy revealed nothing more than the routine, prudent espionage conducted at diplomatic missions everywhere. Now, as the one-year anniversary of the embassy takeover approached, as Soviet troops built up in Afghanistan, as world opinion continued to condemn Iran, as economic sanctions, although hardly crippling, began to have a noticeable effect, and as Saddam Hussein’s military might massed on the nation’s western border and increasingly menaced Iranian forces inside their own country—a helicopter carrying President Bani-Sadr would nearly be shot down by Iraqi fighters in mid-September—it was all too clear that Iran would only become further isolated and vulnerable if the hostage standoff continued. While popular opinion still responded enthusiastically to anti-Americanism and calls for trying the hostages as spies, more practical elements in the country’s leadership, including some in the clergy, realized they could no longer afford to indulge in this warm bath of popular anger. Unlike the most devout of the mullahs consolidating power, these men were not entirely willing to leave their future in the hands of Allah. Iran had, for instance, started buying those desperately needed parts for their American-made jets from Islam’s presumed archenemy Israel.

Speaking with his brother-in-law Ahmad Khomeini one evening early that fall, Tabatabai again expressed his impatience with the hostage crisis. He admitted storming the embassy had had its purposes, but that “it has become a quagmire. I would like to try and end it,” he said.

“What is your idea?” Ahmad asked.

“If you endorse me, if you support me, I can find a way.”

Tabatabai said that he was friends with Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the West German foreign minister, and that through him he could arrange for private talks at the highest level of the American government. It was critical that the talks remain secret, because any public move toward an agreement with the Great Satan would trigger the wrath of Iran’s religious conservatives and could bring down catastrophic reprisals. Only someone with connections like Tabatabai’s would dare to initiate such discussions. Even he was frightened.

“What do you want?” Tabatabai asked his brother-in-law. “What should we expect America to do for us in return for releasing the hostages?”

Ahmad said that his father would be satisfied if the United States would express remorse or apologize for its historical role in Iran, unlock Iranian assets in America and withdraw any legal claims against Iran arising from the embassy seizure, and promise not to interfere in the future. This represented a significant retreat from the long-standing demands for the return of the shah and all his wealth. Tabatabai invited the West German ambassador to his house in Niavaran, an affluent suburb in north Tehran. The Iranian host dismissed his bodyguards early so that there would be no one to note the coming and going of the Germans. He asked the ambassador to quietly convey the new list of demands through Genscher to the White House.

Ever since the failed rescue mission, Carter had been at a loss about how to approach Iran. The debacle had, in the peculiar logic of this crisis, placed the United States on the defensive. There was little or nothing for Iran to gain by holding the hostages, especially with the shah dead and buried. Most of the monarch’s wealth had been moved from American banks, so the demand for the return of his wealth was moot. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance was replaced by Senator Ed Muskie, and the United States waited for Iran to make the next move. Even the slightest hint of a feeler got immediate and serious White House attention.

As Carter would note in his diary on September 10, “Ed Muskie called, and said he must see me immediately and alone. I told him to come over. He brought Chris [Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher] and I called in Zbig [Zbigniew Brzezinski]. We had a message through Genscher from Iran, to which I responded affirmatively.”

The proposal seemed to Carter designed to succeed. It represented a significant shift in Iran’s position, and other than the insistence on an apology the demands really did nothing more than undo the steps taken by the United States in retaliation for the hostage-taking. But who were they dealing with? Who was this Tabatabai? Even if the Germans vouched for him, what did that mean? Their earlier dealings had been with the elected president of the country and its foreign minister, neither of whom, it turned out, had any real power over the situation. Hard experience had demonstrated that there was only one Iranian in a position to deliver the hostages, and that was Khomeini. If Tabatabai could prove he spoke for the imam, the United States would take the proposal seriously.

In Tehran, the brothers-in-law knew they had Ayatollah Khomeini’s support, but even with that there was still the chance that the newly empowered Majlis would dig in its heels. In an effort to forestall an ugly public battle, they set about building a quiet consensus for the initiative. They visited Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, the speaker of the Majlis, and found that he was delighted by the idea.

“Can you give me a guarantee that you can sell these things to the Majlis?” Tabatabai asked.

Rafsanjani said he could.

So Tabatabai met again with the West German ambassador inviting him once more to his home at night and dismissing his security guards, and told him that the Americans should listen to a broadcast speech by Khomeini scheduled for three days hence. In the speech, the imam would mention the same four conditions Tabatabai had conveyed.

Three days later, Khomeini gave a long, rambling speech, at the end of which he enunciated Tabatabai’s four conditions for ending the hostage crisis. Journalists around the world correctly interpreted Khomeini’s conditions to be a major shift on Iran’s side of the impasse, but the White House played down the importance of the remarks. America was suffering a kind of hostage fatigue. Dick Gregory had just returned from Tehran, fifty pounds lighter from his months-long fast, and after outlining his own solution to the crisis, which essentially called for Carter to capitulate to every one of Iran’s demands, he began a doctor-supervised one-man march on Washington. His skeletal frame—he was down to under one hundred pounds—symbolized the country’s exhaustion and sense of futility over the matter. According to polls, Carter and Reagan were running neck and neck in the upcoming election, where the country’s attention was increasingly focused. Carter dispatched Deputy Secretary of State Christopher to meet secretly with Tabatabai in Bonn at Schloss Gymnich, a private palace owned by the West German Foreign Ministry.

Christopher was shocked to discover a tall, slick, urbane man in a well-cut tweed jacket who spoke with none of the overheated rhetoric they had come to expect. Nothing about the encounter with Tabatabai was what he and his entourage had expected. This emissary was pleasant, agreeable, and unfailingly polite. As they moved into a room for formal discussions, both Christopher and Tabatabai offered to let the other go first, and then the Iranian noted that the room they were about to enter had a Persian rug and took Christopher’s hand, “Let us step on this Persian carpet together, hand-in-hand…. Let us forget the past, start from now, and go into the future.”

His German was fluent, and he spoke to Christopher through a German translator because he had not dared bring a Farsi interpreter with him from the Foreign Ministry in Tehran—there was too much risk of a leak. It was hard to believe that this man with manicured fingernails, who held his cigarettes gingerly in the old theatrical manner, between the thumb and first two fingers, was a representative of the fierce mullahs governing Iran. There didn’t seem to be an ideological bone in his body; he was strictly pragmatic. Tabatabai was particularly interested in opening the gates for spare military parts and wanted that to be part of the deal. Over the next two days they hammered out an agreement to end the crisis, one that met all the new demands save one: the United States would not be issuing an apology. Both men agreed to take the proposals home for approval.

Tabatabai was excited. He prepared an eight-page account of the agreement in preparation for the flight home. He had flown to Bonn on a private plane owned by Iran’s Foreign Ministry, but when he arrived at the airport for the flight back to Tehran he was told his plane could not leave. War had broken out.

Saddam’s bombs crushed Tabatabai’s initiative. Iranian officialdom immediately blamed Iraq’s aggression on the United States. For nearly a month, the Carter White House waited for word from Tabatabai but there was none. It started to look as if the hostages would have to wait out this war.

As the American presidential campaign moved into the home stretch, it was watched with great interest from Iran, by both guards and hostages. Early on, the public had rallied around Carter, and his poll numbers were high, but they had begun to decline in early 1980 and, following the rescue attempt, they had plummeted. People seemed to feel sorry for him, which translated into respect but not support. His stewardship took on a sickly cast, with a number of events and issues combining to make the humble engineer from Plains, Georgia, seem well intentioned but yielding and ineffectual. His concern for human rights and his willingness to reevaluate foreign policy on those terms rankled those who believed that containing the larger evil of communism occasionally demanded unsavory acts and alliances. The decision to cede the Panama Canal back to that tiny Central American nation was both pragmatic and inevitable, but it gave America-firsters the charge that Carter was a pushover and an apologist for the nation’s power. Rising oil prices throughout his tenure dramatically revealed the United States’ growing dependence on oil imports from the Middle East and a vulnerability to decisions over which Washington had only limited influence. Ever since the 1973 OPEC embargo the world’s markets had been jumpy, and Iran’s decision to bar oil exports briefly in 1978 had panicked investors globally, even though the country accounted for an insignificant portion of oil supplies. The seizure of the embassy created more concern, and then OPEC raised oil prices 50 percent in 1979. Carter’s perfectly sensible call under the circumstances for Americans to conserve oil and gas, reasoning in his button-front sweater before a White House fireplace, produced one of those iconic images that permanently brand public figures. Here was a critical natural resource that the United States could no longer cheaply supply, controlled by suppliers it could no longer direct or even influence. It was an admission of impotence. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan at the end of 1979, it aggravated the sense of American weakness. The hostage crisis confirmed the impression. It was a prolonged national humiliation, painted in ever worsening detail by the majority of the news media, from the parading of blindfolded American diplomats before angry crowds to a series of failed diplomatic initiatives to the military ineptitude at Desert One. The previous three and a half years seemed marked with Carter’s sad, puffy face on a TV screen, earnestly administering another dose of bad news.

Ronald Reagan, whose familiar chiseled features recalled an era of seemingly limitless American potential, skillfully played off Carter’s powerlessness. The Gipper’s broad-shouldered, cinematic swagger alone was anodyne to Carter’s “malaise.” America had received enough doses of bitter medicine from the peanut-farmer president and was eager to sail off into a dreamworld of patriotic bliss. Reagan deliberately dithered when pressed for specifics, but his well-articulated dreams were rooted in the country’s fondest fantasy of itself. Arriving in a blizzard of brilliant red, white, and blue, the Republican convention was a restorative to the country’s sagging spirits, and it gave Reagan a big enough boost to overtake the president in most polls. Carter gained ground during the Democratic convention in late summer, but Reagan’s appeal and the stubborn presence of Representative John Anderson in the campaign, whose small percentage of the vote would come primarily from former Carter voters, kept the Republican candidate on top. In the final months of the campaign, Reagan refused to debate the president on television unless Anderson was included, which would likely broaden the third-party candidate’s exposure and pull.

In Tehran, the guards at Evin prison took a straw poll one evening to see who the hostages would elect for president. Limbert selected Carter. Most of his colleagues wanted Reagan, as did the guards, who considered the hated Carter’s electoral woes a great victory for Iran and glowed with satisfaction that their actions were shaping big events in the United States. They were convinced that anyone other than Carter would understand their reasons for seizing the embassy and would admit the great wrongs America had committed in Iran.

Lieutenant Colonel Dave Roeder asked one of them, “Do you know who Ronald Reagan is?”

“He was a movie star,” the guard said.

“Do you know what will happen to Iran if Reagan wins the election?” Roeder asked. The white-haired prisoner with the deep-set eyes and heavily lined face leaned forward dramatically, made a sudden expanding gesture with his hands, and said, “Boom!”

All through October, as Election Day in the States approached, rumors swirled about the hostages’ imminent release. The Majlis finally took up the issue toward the end of the month, and after days of private debate there were strong signs that the country was ready to give up the hostages. In what the Associated Press termed “rampant worldwide speculation,” there were reports from a variety of sources about a secret deal to free the hostages before Election Day, the first anniversary of the takeover. Ever since the coincidence of the Wisconsin primary, when Carter was unfairly accused of having deliberately stirred expectations for a breakthrough in the crisis to improve his chances, the White House had been under suspicions that Carter found particularly wounding. His critics made mutually contradictory accusations, that he was powerless and incompetent but also that he was somehow manipulating the crisis to his benefit. The Republican campaign all but conceded that the president was likely to produce an election eve solution to the crisis. Suspicion went both ways. There were also rumors, although less widespread, that Reagan’s campaign was somehow conspiring to prevent a hostage release before Election Day. For his part, Carter and his staff repeatedly stated that rumors of a secret deal were baseless.

They were not entirely so. Early in October, the amateur botanist Tabatabai had employed a horticultural metaphor in a secret message to Warren Christopher, reporting that the terms they had worked out in Bonn before the outbreak of the Iran–Iraq war “had fallen on fertile ground.” This message had been conveyed to Carter at a campaign stop in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

After a secret debate in the Majlis, Rafsanjani had made good on his guarantee, winning a 100–80 vote in support of the agreement despite last-minute minority efforts to scuttle it by walking out. In a speech at the end of the month, Khomeini announced that the conditions under consideration were “just,” and no less a figure than the hanging judge Ayatollah Khalkali, who only a few months back had toyed on TV with the charred corpses of American airmen killed in the rescue attempt, predicted that the hostages would soon be released, citing Iran’s desperate need for the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of military contracts that the country had purchased before the embassy seizure—the same contracts that imprisoned American military men had brought to the revolutionary government’s attention more than a year earlier.

“We want to free the hostages before the election,” Khalkali said. “We know the war with Iraq will be long. Many will die if the United States doesn’t give us the weapons we have already bought. We need the reserve parts now.”

On the last day of the month, Radio Tehran tried to put the best face on this change of heart. It announced that a “just method” for the hostages’ release had been worked out by the Majlis, emphasizing that the conditions would force the United States to make “concessions.” Iran, it seemed, was ready simply to declare victory and send the American hostages home wrapped in great clouds of cant.

Matters reached a head in the days before the American elections. In Tehran, buses were parked outside the U.S. embassy, a Swedish plane poised to fly the hostages out, and medical teams assembled to receive them at the American military base in Wiesbaden, Germany. For their part, the student captors informed the Iranian government that this time they were prepared to comply with the agreement and release the hostages.

If the hostages came home, it might provide Carter the margin of victory. The hostage crisis was now all over television again as reporters got wind of a possible settlement. There were pictures of the waiting buses and plane, interviews with the hostage families, and long recapitulations of the whole sorry story as the first-year anniversary of the takeover approached. Poised, ever cheerful Dorothea Morefield, wife of the captive embassy consul, was everywhere. “They [the Iranians] want to resolve it, want to bring it to an end,” she told one reporter, gazing out softly behind her big-rimmed glasses. “I think they [the hostages] are coming home and I don’t think it will be too much longer.”

A half-hour-long special on the hostage crisis, “A Year in Captivity,” punctuated by passages from letters written by Dick Morefield to his wife and children, aired on CBS just days before the election. The special suggested that an end to the crisis was at hand, perhaps too much at hand, with moderator Dan Rather commenting, “There are questions whether the deal is being rushed too hastily for election campaign purposes.”

Suspense over the election and the hostages rose toward a crescendo on election eve. Once again the nation was poised for a happy ending…and nothing happened. The Iranian leaders had apparently expected Carter to grab at the chance to save his presidency; they had demanded that he simply announce his acceptance of the deal on television. To his credit Carter didn’t bite. He coolly issued a statement calling the proposed deal “a good and constructive move,” but said that his actions would not be governed by the press of the campaign or his desire for a second term. There was still a filament of hope that the Iranians would go through with the release and complete the negotiations afterward. The president would note in his memoirs, “Now my political future might well be determined by irrational people on the other side of the world over whom I had no control.”

There were complex legal issues involved. Probably the most difficult conditions were the requests that Iranian assets be unfrozen and that legal claims against the country be dropped. There were about $10 billion in assets at stake, which included securities, gold deposits with the Federal Reserve, and money in the U.S. Treasury and in American banks both at home and abroad. At least $500 million was being held by American companies. Lodged against that fortune were lawsuits over debts incurred by the shah’s government that had gone unpaid after the revolution, including a $175 million bill from Sedco, a Texas oil equipment firm, a $93 million bill owed the E. I. Du Pont Corporation for a synthetic textile plant it had built in Iran, and an unpaid $85 million bill to the Xerox Corporation. The most hopeful part of the proposal was Iran’s suggestion that Algerian diplomats mediate final discussions.

Instead of a breakthrough, however, Carter’s beleaguered face appeared on TV to announce yet another in a long series of disappointments. The result was immediate. With typically cold calculation, Carter wrote in his diary that evening, Monday, November 3:

On Election Day, Carter returned to his home in Plains, Georgia, to cast his vote. He told reporters, coyly, “I asked my wife who she was voting for, and I voted the same way.” When reporters asked him what he planned to do in the event that he lost, he demurred, saying that he expected to win, but he already knew the truth. In a moment rare for him, the president lost his composure thanking the gathered friends and family from his hometown. He said he felt “more encouraged than I have in the past” about winning the hostages’ release, and, asked about the impact the hostage crisis had on his reelection campaign, Carter said with conviction tinged by a trace of wistfulness, “I’d have to say it was a negative factor, but we acted properly.”

In the end, the third-party candidate Anderson wasn’t even a factor. American voters making up their minds at the last minute decided in favor of the Republican candidate, giving Reagan and his party an overwhelming victory. The former movie star and California governor took almost 10 percent more of the popular tally and a landslide of electoral votes—489 to 49. He carried forty-four of the fifty states.

There was widespread rejoicing in Iran over Carter’s defeat. It was regarded by many as another sign of Allah’s hand in world affairs, although no less a local hero than Mousavi Khoeniha, spiritual adviser to the student hostage takers, was less sanguine. Referring to Reagan, he told a reporter, “The yellow dog is brother to the jackal.”

On the first anniversary of their captivity, some of the hostages were awakened in Evin prison by radio broadcasts in English. Apparently the students wanted to spread the news, and had tuned in to a BBC station and cranked up the volume. Some of the report concerned the Polish uprising against its Soviet masters, and then came the news that Ronald Reagan had defeated Jimmy Carter in the American election.

Most of the hostages were delighted. They assumed that Reagan’s election meant something was going to happen. They had done such a good job convincing their guards that the “something” would not be good for Iran that Joe Hall felt the need to reassure a fearful Big Ali that nothing would happen right away.

“In the American system, Reagan will not take office until the end of January,” he explained.

Even those hostages who preferred Carter were heartened. They had known nothing of the deal for their release that had seemed so close as the election approached, so this news was the first in months that suggested change. Everyone, hostages and guards, started counting down the days until Reagan’s inauguration, January 21, 1981.

After Reagan’s victory, talks over the hostages cooled. For Laingen, Howland, and Tomseth, the only captives who were in a position to follow the process closely, it was maddening. Perhaps most distressing was the absence of continued American outrage. Somehow during the year of captivity, the threats and counterthreats and the failed rescue mission, the capacity for anger seemed to have exhausted itself. Negotiations proceeded through November, with overtures and responses, as though America were hammering out a trade agreement, not dealing with a criminal regime. Carter welcomed the conditions demanded by the Iranian kidnappers. Reagan, after the election, pledged to abide by whatever solution was reached. It seemed that American blood could no longer boil. Clare Boothe Luce, the elderly former journalist, ambassador, and conservative congresswoman, commented sarcastically, “The United States will end up apologizing to Iran for its having declared war on us.”

The passion had also drained out of Laingen’s writings. In the early months of captivity, his journal and long letters home were filled with repetitive railing against the flagrant injustice and folly of Iran’s policies. But he had emptied that well. Like a man who wakes up to a green sky, he had worn himself out trying to get other people to notice that something was wrong and now had given himself over to simple observation.

He wrote in his journal:

Still, there was that “scorn.” Most revolutions are driven at least in part by fantasy, the belief that a certain class or tribe of people is special or chosen, that some idea represents the permanent apex of human thought, if not God’s own. Never was this more evident than in Iran. The rhetoric of the revolution was arrogant and self-righteous to the point of parody, and from his third-floor perch, monitoring the local TV, radio, and press, Laingen had heard about all he could stand. “Sanctimonious” was the word he used for it in his journal. It resembled the doublespeak of Orwell’s 1984, where the word “freedom” was simply assigned a new and opposite meaning—religious oppression was true freedom, a twist that could be appreciated only by donning the green-tinted glasses of Islam. “It is not freedom of the kind known in Western countries and termed liberalism,” explained his holiness the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at one Friday prayer meeting. “Freedom in that liberal sense is license to follow any sort of desire, passion, or corruption. Freedom under Islam lies within the framework of Islamic principles,” as determined of course by him and the other mullahs.

Month by month the clerics’ double-talk was becoming more institutionalized, more the official vocabulary of the state. If it were not totally clear that the religious extremists were in control, it became so when Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, the dapper official who had stepped down as foreign minister to make way for an appointee more acceptable to the ruling clerics, was briefly arrested in mid-November. Among other heresies, he pronounced in a TV interview, “Iran is governed by a group of fascist extremists who are driving this country to disaster.”

It sounded like something Laingen himself had written a year earlier.

9. Weren’t You Fed Amply?

In the interregnum, as Reagan began putting together his administration and Carter and his team prepared to move on, it appeared as if the hostage crisis was hastening toward some kind of ending, but it wasn’t clear what sort. Negotiations through Algeria had continued with Carter after his defeat, and once or twice more hopes of a settlement were fanned by news reports only to vanish again. Washington and Tehran traded final offers, and shortly before Christmas it appeared as though the talks had failed. Ayatollah Mohammed Behesti, Secretary of the Revolutionary Council, held a press conference in which he answered many questions in calm, correct English. He said that it was likely the hostages would be brought to trial, and those convicted of spying would be dealt with accordingly. Stansfield Turner, the CIA chief, advised the president on the first of December that the talks “offered little prospect of success.”

As the hostages entered their second year of captivity, the rain and cold had come again to Tehran, and the jubes once more were filled with swift-flowing mountain water. Another year of rust had formed on the great cranes poised on the skyline over now forgotten construction projects. The hostages had become little more than an afterthought. The country was at war. Iraq was raiding the pipelines and refineries of the country’s oil industry. It had set fire to the great works in Abadan during a siege of that city, doing precisely the kind of damage that American warplanes might have a year earlier if Carter had yielded to calls for punitive air strikes. Kurdish rebels backed by Saddam Hussein were fighting pitched battles against Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. The death toll that would ultimately reach a million had begun to grimly accumulate, and the country wore the gray pallor of hardship. Internally, the religious rulers continued their bloody purges of political opponents; any criticism of the regime was now treason. Gasoline and kerosene were being rationed. Many of the students involved in the takeover had left to defend their country against Saddam, a more urgent and tangible threat than the Great Satan.

Those who remained behind to supervise the hostages were no longer the darlings of the revolution and were weary of the task. The shah was dead and buried. All but the most ardent true believers had long ago concluded that the assassinations and countercoup they had imagined forming behind the embassy walls didn’t exist. Study of the “Spy Den documents” had revealed details of the considerable influence the United States had had over the shah—the embassy’s files contained records that went back decades—and showed that after the revolution the CIA and American military had tried to cultivate spies within the new regime, but this was hardly surprising. Such was the work of embassies the world over, including Iran’s. Still, the protest had served a purpose. It had helped leverage the mullahs into long-term power, a result that not all of the student planners had desired or foreseen, and it had, as public theater, spectacularly underscored an end to the nation’s old vassalage. As a show of defiance, it had been a yearlong, televised Boston Tea Party. If the past twelve months had proved anything, they had demonstrated how powerless the United States was to influence anything in the new Iran; if the embassy takeover had done nothing else, it had broadcast Iran’s total independence to the world. It had produced unforgettable images of America humbled: blindfolded hostages, burning flags, and the charred remains of airmen and helicopters in the desert, dead even before striking a blow. But Iran was now paying a terrible price in the real world for its symbolic triumph.

Of what use were the hostages now?

Carter had tried to conduct his handling of the hostage crisis from the beginning without concern for his political future, and now there was no future even to consider. It gave him solid footing for the next ten weeks of offers and counteroffers. When one of the many voices from Iran’s leadership at one point demanded a one-word answer from the president to its latest offer, Carter obliged.

“No,” he said.

They could deal with him, or they could wait and deal with President-elect Reagan, who publicly scorned the process. Reagan said little about the standoff, except to repeatedly deplore the taking of hostages, and he even refused to be briefed on the secret negotiations. Here was a man with none of Carter’s fluency on policy details, but who intuitively understood the role of theater in world politics. When he did speak, in an interview shortly before Christmas, standing with his wife, Nancy, before a Christmas tree, his face became a steely mask of contempt, the virtuous cowboy confronting Black Bart. He said that like most Americans he felt, deep down, “anger” at the very idea that demands were being made of America by “criminals and kidnappers.” Days later he said, “I don’t think you pay ransom for people who have been kidnapped by barbarians.” Both the president and the president-elect made it clear that Reagan would not simply pick up the process when Carter left office. His term would start with a clean slate, and in the brutal calculus of popular concern the hostages were an old and tired story. Throughout the campaign the Republican candidate had expressed nothing but disgust for the whole travesty, hinting that were he president nothing of this sort would be allowed to happen. With Carter it was taken for granted that he would do nothing rash, but there was no such certainty with Reagan, who with a large popular majority behind him might well consider swiftly ending the standoff. Many Americans would applaud a bold, punitive move by the new administration, even if it was a bloody one. By any calculation, most of the blood spilled would be Iranian. Thus the election results imparted a new urgency to the talks.

Carter had accepted Algeria as intermediary. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher led a delegation there after the election to present America’s formal response. It accepted all four of Iran’s demands in principle: 1) stop interfering in Iranian affairs; 2) unfreeze Iranian assets frozen after the embassy was seized; 3) remove sanctions and block legal claims resulting from the takeover; 4) block remaining assets of the shah from leaving the United States. The United States countered with a fifth demand that all of the above was contingent on the hostages’ safe return. Christopher then outlined to the Algerians the major sticking point: Iran had overestimated the shah’s missing fortune by a factor of a thousand—Iran put the figure at between $20 to $60 billion and the United States said it was closer to $20 to $60 million. There were also legal constraints on what an American president could do about the shah’s private holdings and to what extent he could interfere with the courts.

Christopher pointed out that although America could not legally seize the Pahlavi family fortune, Iran might sue for its return. The United States government also could not bar corporations from suing to recover money owed on unpaid contracts. To avoid having to convince American judges to rule in their favor, Iran responded by suggesting that the United States simply repay from its own Treasury money looted from the Iranian people. The White House acknowledged this line of reasoning, but it was unwilling to concede that the shah’s fortune was lawfully Iran’s. Carter had immediately rejected it.

In mid-December, Iran added a new demand, one that was particularly revealing and that amounted very nearly to an admission of wrong-doing. It wanted indemnity. It wanted the United States to forfeit any future claims against Iran by the hostages or their families. Since private lawsuits against foreign countries very rarely succeed, it was not a major concession, but Carter knew that such a step would close for the victims of this outrage their only legal avenue for redress. Carter directed that the hostage family organization, FLAG, be consulted, but the families were hardly inclined to hold up a deal that might bring their loved ones home. The White House accepted the demand.

What followed over the next month in Algiers was like haggling over a rug in the Tehran bazaar. The bargaining eventually boiled down to the amount of Iranian wealth deposited in American banks that Carter had locked in place the year before, weighed against the country’s outstanding debts, most of them for military hardware. Iran first demanded $14 billion in frozen assets and $10 billion in cash guarantees, then a day later suggested that the United States could expedite the release by depositing $24 billion in Algeria as a guarantee against whatever the assets proved to be, a sum that the president called “ridiculous.” Iran was, in effect, demanding $640 million per hostage. A few days before Christmas, it appeared as though the talks had broken down, until State Department officials with experience in the Middle East encouraged Carter to make a lowball counteroffer.

Christopher secretly proposed $6 billion.

And that’s where negotiations stalled. Cornered by a pack of reporters outside a grocery store in Plains, where the Carters were paying a pre-Christmas visit, the president didn’t sound hopeful.

“We explained our position very clearly through the Algerians,” he said, “and either they [the Iranian authorities] decided to ignore what we said or they have deliberately decided to make demands that they know we cannot meet.”

The Carters then climbed on a tandem bike, a Christmas gift from their hometown, and pedaled off down Main Street, looking positively carefree for the first time in more than a year.

At the end of November, the student captors began relocating the hostages to the Tehran mansion of onetime SAVAK chief Teymour Bahktiari, who had been assassinated by Iranian agents in Iraq after a falling-out with the shah in 1970. His extravagant home had been converted by the shah into a sumptuous guesthouse, and though it had fallen into disuse and some disrepair after the revolution it was, to the hostages, sheer luxury. There were working bathrooms with tubs and showers and hot and cold running water. Many of the rooms looked out over spacious gardens, which, while bare and sometimes snow-covered as winter closed over the city, and while the windows had been fitted with wire mesh or bars, it afforded for many of them the first steady view of the outdoors in over a year.

As usual, they didn’t know why they were being moved, but there was a growing sense even among the hostages that the long drama was nearing its end. They had very limited access to news, but there were subtle signs of a breakthrough everywhere, and the hostages missed none of them. In early December, still at Evin, Colonel Chuck Scott and his roommates had not seen the kindly guard supervisor Akbar for several weeks when one day he showed up with a bag of fresh pistachios. He announced that he was no longer involved with supervising hostages, that he had taken a job with PARS, the Iranian news agency. The whole situation, the standoff, the shah’s death, the war, had grown so complex and difficult that he said he no longer wished to be involved.

Scott was angry with him. The two had developed a friendship over the yearlong ordeal, and he was the one Iranian whom the colonel felt he could trust and even respect. Ever since the previous summer, Scott had seen Akbar’s enthusiasm for the exercise waning. The young Iranian still defended the action but acknowledged that nothing had worked out the way he and the others had planned. Scott had told him once during the previous summer in Tabriz that if he helped him and his roommates escape, he would see to it that Akbar would be paid for his efforts and set up in America or wherever he wanted with a new identity. He had been surprised by the guard’s response. He did not get angry nor did he dismiss the idea out of hand. “Be careful of what you say,” he had advised the colonel. It had always been reassuring to know that Akbar was there; many times he had interceded to pull Scott out of solitary or to calm tensions with guards and fellow hostages.

“Now you tell me that you’re tired of it?” Scott said.

His disgust wounded Akbar, who acknowledged a trace of betrayal in his departure. But after a few moments of conversation Scott’s anger melted. No one could understand better than he the desire to escape this dismal ordeal, and the fact that Akbar had stayed with it for so long despite his ambivalence started Scott thinking that there might be more behind his young friend’s departure than he was free to tell.

“Do you still think I will ever get home?” he asked.

“In my heart, I am sure you will live to see your family again,” Akbar said. “When you are released, if it is possible, I will come to say good-bye.”

Still alone, CIA station chief Tom Ahern delayed taking off his blindfold when he was first brought to the guesthouse. He had been placed in a very cold room in an overstuffed chair. He had a powerful sense that what he saw would finally reveal his fate. Was release near or death? He was certain that if the surroundings were worse than those he had left then he would never get out of Iran alive.

The upholstered chair was a good sign. He began reaching around and felt some kind of soft wallpaper, something fancy with padding behind it. He finally inhaled deeply, untied the blindfold, and discovered that he was sitting in an elegantly furnished room, and for the first time in fourteen months he was filled with the conviction that this ordeal was going to end well. He felt it in his bones. He was going home.

As part of the general improvement, his guards were now encouraging him to write letters. He thought it unlikely that any letter he wrote would actually be mailed, but he was certain that his captors would read it, so primarily for their eyes he wrote a long letter to his wife. It was a contingent good-bye letter. He wrote that Reagan’s election made it certain the United States would attack Iran and destroy the revolution. “If Reagan comes and gets them,” he wrote, “I won’t survive it. So let me say good-bye and I love you just in case.”

He hoped that would make them think.

Laingen, Tomseth, and Howland were finally moved from their spacious quarters at the Foreign Ministry, but not without a scuffle. When a group of students first showed up to take them, Howland got in a shoving match with the leader, kicking him in the groin, and the three had been escorted back upstairs at gunpoint. They were left alone in their rooms and, after a few minutes, a deputy foreign minister appeared looking shaken.

“This is not Iran,” he said, as if trying to convince himself. “This is not Iran. What has happened to us?”

“This is the first time in my diplomatic career that I have had a pistol pointed at my head,” said Laingen.

The three were successfully removed some days later and locked in prison for several weeks before being moved to the guesthouse.

Kathryn Koob and Ann Swift could scarcely believe their eyes when they arrived. They had been brought to what appeared to be a large, luxurious hotel room suite with a fifteen-foot ceiling. It was clean, with a closet, beds, a bathroom with hot and cold water, and a tub! At the center of the room was a large, gleaming mahogany table with two straight-back chairs, and hanging from the high ceiling was a pewter chandelier. The walls were papered with a textured material, and one whole wall was a floor-to-ceiling window covered with pale blue drapes. Koob and Swift were astonished. The suite was so large they could now actually run from room to room instead of running in place, as they had for most of the year. They jogged for almost an hour late that night, waiting for their bedding and possessions to arrive. Both were fit and had lost a lot of weight. Koob especially. She had dropped so many pounds that she had made Christmas presents out of the wide strips of material she had cut from the seams of her blue slacks. She used them to make bookmarks, on which she embroidered small designs. Reed thin for the first time since she had been a little girl, Koob was now virtually unrecognizable to those who had known her only as big, soft, and wide-hipped. She was now all sharp angles, the hard lines of her face ill suited to her wide-framed plastic glasses.

She and Swift counted this as their thirteenth move since the day they were taken prisoner. Koob took out her Christmas ornaments, some of them saved from the previous year, and set about decorating the enormous space. When the sun came up they were allowed to pull back the blue drapes and their rooms were flooded with sunlight. What a pleasure! They looked out over a snow-covered garden with a backdrop of mountains, a thrilling view after their months of close confinement. Koob marveled at the simple things, the feel of sunlight on her skin as she sat near the window, the way the tinsel and foil in her Christmas decorations twinkled. Yet the new home was harrowing in the evenings, as Iraqi air assaults on the capital continued. When the planes came over they moved to the entryway of the suite, as far away from the broad window as they could get.

The guards asked them to prepare their room for a holiday party. They received an artificial tree and strips of bright red and white ribbons and—of all things—yellow bows. The women wondered if their guards knew the significance of yellow ribbons back home and decided to put one big one front and center, where the cameras would not miss it. When it came time for the party, to their disappointment, they were led out. Women were forbidden to worship with the men, the guards explained. So they sat forlorn in a chilly room down the hall and listened to chorus after chorus of “Silent Night” as the male hostages were led into their suite in groups.

For the hostages’ second Christmas in captivity, the students and the Iranian government decided against allowing a visit from American clergy. Instead they arranged for ceremonies at the Foreign Ministry guesthouse to be conducted by priests and ministers from Tehran’s small Christian community.

Film of the celebrations, which resembled the one made a year earlier, was shown throughout the world.

Joe Hall stuffed his pockets with candy and pastries and asked if he could say something to the cameras for his wife Cheri.

“I’m still out here, honey, and I can hold on if you can, kid.”

Greg Persinger told the camera, “Mom, Dad, I just want to say Merry Christmas and I send you my love…. Take care. I hope I see you soon.”

When his turn came before the camera Bob Ode said, “I would like to send a message to my wife, Rita Ode, who is living in Sun City West, Arizona. I want to tell her how much I miss her, especially now at Christmas, and I love her very much.” He also sent greetings to his brothers and sister.

Barry Rosen sent his love to his wife and children and parents, and added, “I’d like to thank all the people in the United States who have written to us and sent books and other materials. I’m sure I speak for the other hostages when I say that the support and concern shown toward us by our fellow Americans has been of immeasurable value to all of us…God bless all of you and God bless America.”

They were given gifts. Hall got some clean underwear and a green sweatshirt, which he felt went nicely with his lime green pants, the ones he had worn every day now for nearly fourteen months, and packages from both his wife and his sister filled with goodies. Hall particularly prized a pair of new insulated slippers.

Michael Metrinko decided to attend this year’s Christmas party, if only to make trouble. The night before, he had been brought to the guesthouse and had been placed again with Dave Roeder, this time in a large room with real furniture, even real beds. There was wall-to-wall carpeting, a beautiful chest of drawers with ornate inlaid woodwork, a crystal chandelier, damask wall coverings and drapes, and—luxury of luxuries!—their own bathroom. Metrinko stood for a long time beneath the flow of hot water, basking in it. It was heaven. They were given new clothes, blankets, and even the food was tolerable. The guards were acting strangely. They had become warm and friendly, joking with the hostages as if this whole ordeal had just been a great adventure they had shared. They complained about how much time they had to spend caring for them, and talked about how much they would love to someday visit the United States. Something clearly was up.

The next day they were taken to the party. One of the guards showed up at the door wearing a fancy cowboy shirt with pearl buttons and intricate stitching.

“Where did you steal that?” Roeder asked him.

The guard protested that the shirt had not been stolen.

“It is a Christmas present gift from my sister who lives in Texas,” he said.

Roeder didn’t know which was stranger to believe, that the man had stolen it from the belongings of a fellow hostage or whether this devoutly Islamic young Iranian who had helped hold him and the others prisoner for more than a year to protest the Great Satan United States had a sister who chose to live in America and send her hostage-taking brother a cowboy shirt for Christmas, a holiday that wasn’t on the Islamic calendar.

At the ceremony, Metrinko confronted in Farsi the Iranian clergyman who was there to conduct the service.

“It’s disgusting that you would collaborate with these people,” he told him. “How could you do it?”

The clergyman was insulted.

“I don’t have to be here,” he said. “I could be at home celebrating the holidays with my wife. I had to go through a lot of trouble to arrange this for you…”

Metrinko was openly ungrateful. He found the man obnoxious, a fraud who was there in order to be photographed being a “good Christian.” After a round of dispirited carols—the camera caught the Americans singing “O Come All Ye Faithful”—Metrinko, Roeder, and the others were instructed to pour all the candy and goodies they had scooped up on their plates back into the big bowl. They were, however, given gifts that they were allowed to keep. Some of the other embassies had sent over presents. Metrinko got an exercise warm-up suit. There was also mail from home. Metrinko received a small package sent by a woman in North Carolina with vitamins, candy, and some books. Roeder was given a Christmas package from his wife. It had been opened and rifled. Some of the contents had been removed, including clean underwear, which he very much would have liked to have had. There was candy in the box, a toothbrush, and eight dinner mints, a private Christmas joke from his wife—a little tradition they honored. There were new socks, a Christmas ornament that his daughter had made at school, and a picture of his daughter with her arm in a cast. There was no explanation of how his daughter had broken her arm.

When Metrinko and Roeder were back in their room, two Algerian diplomats were shown in, the ambassador and an aide. They explained that an agreement for their release was very near, and the two hostages began to entertain a flicker of hope.

Kathryn Koob and Ann Swift forbade their guards to speak of their imminent release. They had heard such stories so often that they no longer dared to get their hopes up. One morning in mid-January a guard entered their room and announced, very pleased, that they were to have a “special visitor.”

Into the room walked the familiar, short, round, draped figure of Nilufar Ebtekar. Koob wondered how the guards had ever gotten the idea that they would be happy to see her again. They regarded her as a liar and something of a dupe, and disdained the way she and the other educated Iranian women showed such reverent deference to the men. When they coolly exchanged the standard greetings in Farsi, the two hostages invited Ebtekar to sit down.

Ebtekar had no sympathy for the rumpled, frail-looking women before her. She still suspected Swift of being a spy, and even though she knew Koob was not, in her mind the American cultural emissary shared the collective guilt of all Americans for her country’s sins against Iran and for that reason alone was a suitable candidate for revolutionary justice. Ebtekar was not an empathetic woman. She saw the whole episode through the lens of her own difficulties; even though it had turned her into a national hero of sorts and a notorious international figure, to her it had meant hardship, even though she had met during the previous year the man she would marry, one of the leaders of this action, Mohammad Hashemi. She thought that the women especially had been treated with heroic restraint in captivity, with genuine Islamic kindness. She and the other student captors had worked long and hard to ensure their safety and relative comfort. The business of housing, guarding, and feeding them had been a huge undertaking, all the more difficult for having been unforeseen. Even during the hardship of war, the students had held faithfully to their assigned mission. If she expected anything from the hostages, particularly these two relatively coddled women, who had been treated throughout with all the appropriate Islamic concern for modesty and respect, it was gratitude, especially for the news she was bringing.

“We are not one hundred percent certain that you will be released, but let me tell you that it has never been so close and so real,” she said. “Negotiations are under way, and the possibility exists that you will be released.”

Koob and Swift listened in polite silence and thanked Ebtekar for the information as she left. Later that same morning they were led out of their suite, waited in the same chilly room where they had sat out most of the Christmas celebrations, and then were brought back to the suite, which had been rearranged and equipped with a camera and microphone. Two chairs behind a small table with one of their small Christmas trees at the center had been moved in front of the camera, and Ebtekar sat with her back to the camera facing the table. The two women sat in the chairs.

“We’d like to talk to you about your treatment while you were here,” said Ebtekar. “We want you to tell us about the food, about the care you received, and how you were treated, what your feelings were like.”

Ever since the giggly Easter interview, which both Koob and Swift immediately regretted, they had prepared themselves for another propaganda session like this. They were determined to be truthful, but to project nothing but the grim reality of their predicament and to utter nothing that would give Ebtekar and the other students satisfaction.

“Physically we have been treated quite well,” said Swift. “We have had plenty of food to eat, we are warm. But we have been afraid the entire time we’ve been here. We have not always had the mail from our families that you told us we would have. Sometimes months have gone by without letters from our parents.”

Both women complained of their constant confinement, the weeks of not seeing sunlight, the inability to regularly exercise, the poor access to bathrooms and infrequent opportunities to bathe, and the isolation from their colleagues.

“You are being very negative,” Ebtekar scolded them as a new tape was put in the camera. “You might talk about some of the positive things that happened.”

“Can you tell me one positive thing about being locked up?” asked Koob.

Ebtekar shrugged. This was a thing that could not be helped.

“But what about the treats?” she asked. “What about the nuts? What about the goodies?”

The interview went on for forty-five minutes. Both women felt confident they had given Ebtekar nothing she could use to make the case that they had been happy “guests” of the ayatollah.

One by one, the hostages were led in to be questioned by Ebtekar before the camera. Informed that their release might depend on their answers, most of the hostages tried to play along amiably without giving Ebtekar the satisfaction of praising their captors. Ahern just glared at her contemptuously. Regis Regan waited until the camera was turned on and then lewdly insulted her. He was hauled out and beaten. Metrinko glared at her and refused to speak. Ebtekar asked Dave Roeder, “Weren’t you fed amply? We know this was a bad situation, but didn’t everyone try to work together to make the best of it?”

“Turn off your camera,” Roeder told her. “I’m not going to say anything like that.”

The camera was turned off. Ebtekar suggested to Roeder that they do it again.

“If you do not cooperate, you will not be released with the rest of your colleagues,” she said.

Roeder refused.

Dick Morefield, the embassy consul whose wife Dorothea had become such a public figure at home, enjoyed the chance to talk politics with Ebtekar.

“We have made a decision that we are going to release some of you,” she said. “Wouldn’t you like to be released?”

“I understand that I will be released no sooner or later than when you come to the conclusion that it’s to your advantage. There isn’t much I can do that will either speed it up or delay it.”

“Have you been mistreated?” she asked.

“Do you mean, have I been tortured?” he asked. “No. I’ve been held in very close confinement under very difficult stressful conditions for a very long period of time. I have been through mock executions. But have I been beaten or tortured? No.”

She asked him what he had learned from the experience, and with the camera rolling he lectured her.

“One of the things that I didn’t learn was what you were trying to accomplish,” he said. “You were the first social revolution in history that didn’t have to compromise from the very first moment for lack of money. When you took over, you had all the money you needed to make Iran back into part of the fertile crescent. If you wanted to do reforestation, if you wanted to reinstitute the underground irrigation systems you once had…anything at all. Anything was possible because you had the money, and you threw that away.”

Ebtekar argued that all revolutions required a period of cleansing, of wiping away corrupt influences, such as Iran’s ties to the United States.

“All I’ve got to say is that nothing we could have done to you in our wildest dreams is half as bad as what you’ve done to yourselves,” Morefield said. “Your children and your grandchildren are going to curse your name.”

Bruce Laingen recorded his session in his diary.

10. We Don’t Do Stuff Like That

Before Laingen and his roommates were removed from the Foreign Ministry, where they could listen to news broadcasts and receive visitors, he had learned enough to be convinced that the impasse had been broken. He had heard with pleasure the refreshingly blunt statements of the president-elect, whose use of words like “criminals,” “kidnappers,” and “barbarians” stood in marked contrast to Carter’s measured public comments. Reagan’s tough talk set off a scornful crescendo of renewed anti-American rhetoric from the pulpits of Tehran and alarmed Tomseth and Howland, who felt it didn’t help with the delicate negotiations they all knew to be under way, but Laingen felt it was a dose of exactly what was needed. Carter and Reagan, perhaps intentionally, were working a classic good cop/bad cop routine. Reagan’s words would make the powers in Iran think hard about blowing the remaining weeks they had to make a deal with the very reasonable Jimmy Carter.

This was more of the chargé’s constitutional optimism, to which he clung even now when he had lost all sense of what was going on. For the first time since the day of the takeover he was cut off from all sources of outside information and from any sense of why things were happening, but his instincts were solid.

If the students believed the televised Christmas greetings they had allowed many of the hostages to make would earn them goodwill in the United States, they had miscalculated. The images of scrawny, unkempt American diplomats, held prisoner for more than a year, once again inflamed American anger and put the hostages back on the front pages. The Christmas tree at the White House remained unlit for the second year, although Carter allowed it to be illuminated briefly for a ceremony that remembered the hostages. There was renewed pressure on Washington to do something, and speculation flared over what military steps Reagan might take when he assumed office in less than a month. There was blood on the horizon. More than 60 percent of Americans polled at the end of the year said they expected Reagan to attack Iran in some way. When all the lights were turned off in Times Square for a full minute on New Year’s Eve in honor of the hostages, the darkness and quiet seemed ominous.

At first, Radio Tehran seemed to welcome the coming clash. In a broadcast on the first of the year, it reported that Iran would be rid of the hostages soon. Either the United States would accept the country’s demands for their return or they would be tried as spies and executed. Carter took the threat seriously. He instructed his staff to prepare a declaration of war if trials began. Iran’s assets would be permanently frozen and some form of military action would proceed.

Despite the gathering clouds, or perhaps because of them, the bazaar-style haggling had resumed behind the scenes. Although he’d tendered a “final” offer weeks before, toward the end of December Carter dispatched a new initiative. In a Camp David meeting the week after Christmas with the Algerians, the president made another counterproposal that still fell way short of paying up the $24 billion Iran had demanded but that offered something new: “All claims by American institutions and companies against Iran in U.S. courts will be cancelled and nullified.” The immediate effect of that provision, which Carter once again labeled a “final offer,” would be to free Iran of the almost $3 billion in claims by Sedco, Du Pont, Xerox, and other corporations. The proposal also contained a new wrinkle, which proved to be key in surmounting opposition from Iranian hard-liners: Any agreement ending the crisis would be made with the country of Algeria, and not directly between Iran and the United States. After a weeks-long silence, Tehran responded favorably, and by January 6 the talks in Algiers had resumed.

Now, as the countdown to Reagan’s January 20 inauguration proceeded in the United States, television reports about the change of power competed with news about a hostage agreement. Reagan announced that he was setting up a special team to take over the talks, but that he might decide to keep Warren Christopher and several other members of Carter’s team in Algiers for a time to ensure continuity.

Iran countered with some modifications to Carter’s “final” offer, but Christopher and the head of the Majlis’s special negotiating committee, Bezhad Nabavi, were ironing out the details of an agreement that still essentially followed the outline achieved by Sadegh Tabatabai and the American emissary months ago in Germany. The United States would promise not to interfere with Iran; it would return $9.5 billion in Iranian assets frozen after the embassy takeover; it would freeze the shah’s assets in the United States to enable Iran to mount a legal effort to reclaim them; and it would nullify all lawsuits presently filed against Iran (referring the large corporate claims to binding arbitration before an international tribunal) and bar any such actions in the future.

With neither side trusting the other, a complex scheme of money transfers was worked out to trigger the hostages’ release. The United States would wire money to a bank in England, and only after it was safely deposited would the Iranians release the hostages. The British bank would not release the funds to Algeria until the hostages had departed Iran. The deal was all but done.

“Iran is not getting one dime of U.S. money,” said State Department spokesman James Trattner, explaining the deal to reporters. “The basic exchange is we’re getting back what they took from us and giving back to them what we took from them.”

In the final hours of his presidency, Carter had become obsessed with finishing the matter before stepping down. He believed he had lost his office because of his determination to preserve the hostages from harm, so securing their release and safe return before leaving office was on some level a satisfactory bargain. He feared that the negotiations under way in Algiers might not survive the transition, and what Reagan would do was anybody’s guess. It might be many months before the hostages came home, if they ever did. To lose the presidency only to see all his efforts on their behalf unravel was a disappointment he dreaded.

The Iranians were deliberately stalling. They had agreed to accept the deal and to send the hostages home, but they had also decided to deny Carter the satisfaction of seeing it happen on his watch. Such pettiness didn’t enter the president’s thoughts. He pushed Christopher to finish the deal and made plans to fly to Germany to greet the hostages on their return as the final act of his presidency. Then he would fly back to Washington and take his place on the inaugural stand behind Reagan with a sense of completion and accomplishment.

Two days before the inauguration, there was a knock on Bill Daugherty’s door in the Tehran guesthouse basement. He was startled. He couldn’t remember the last time that had happened—his guards always just burst in. Even his friend Mehdi, when he came by with food or to chat, just walked right in. When Daugherty overcame his surprise and opened the door, he found himself face-to-face with a young man wearing a white jacket and carrying a tray. Had a waiter come to take his order for dinner? The tray held a hypodermic needle, and Daugherty submitted to having blood drawn from his arm. He took this as proof that he and the others were actually going to be released, and, indeed, just after midnight he was blindfolded and taken to a large room for a medical exam. Two of his embassy colleagues were already on tables, men he had not seen in more than a year. They did nothing more than exchange silent hellos and hopeful smiles. An Algerian doctor gave him a quick once-over and pronounced him fit.

It was only the first in a cascade of signs that they were at last going home.

Back in his room, Daugherty was visited by the black-bearded, gap-toothed Hussein Sheikh-ol-eslam, who said he had come to say goodbye. The tall, slender young Iranian slipped to the floor and leaned against the wall. He was wearing his usual sweater and dirty blue jeans, his feet thrust into a pair of unlaced athletic shoes that he wore like sandals, with the back ends crushed under his heels. To Daugherty he seemed weary but pleased with himself. Iran, he told the CIA officer, would at last be free of outside interference and Iranians would build the country based on their own culture and values. Daugherty told him that he foresaw more trouble for Iran, years of oppression and isolation. For any country to thrive, he argued, it had to give its citizens room to breathe. Any government that did not was ultimately doomed. Sheikh-ol-eslam said that an Islamic government had great respect for the rights of its citizens, provided they obeyed the rules. For instance, he said, a newspaper would be free to publish whatever it wished so long as it didn’t say anything “prohibited.” Daugherty was amazed at how this intelligent, sincere young man could so blithely embrace such a striking contradiction.

If Sheikh-ol-eslam had hoped for an amicable parting, he wasn’t going to get it. He wished Daugherty well, then hesitated before leaving, waiting for a response. Daugherty just shrugged and his former interrogator departed.

Sheikh-ol-eslam also had one more session with Tom Ahern. The CIA station chief was led into a room where his old interrogator was seated alone behind a desk. Stretched across the desk was a long piece of cord.

Sheikh-ol-eslam lectured Ahern about how well he and the other hostages had been treated, and explained why it had been necessary to shame the United States and to reveal the insidious plotting that had been going on. Ahern listened silently. He had heard it all before. He was eyeing the rope. The best he could figure, Sheikh-ol-eslam was going to use it on him again. Instead, Sheikh-ol-eslam started explaining that the beatings Ahern had received were really not indicative of his own values or those of Islam.

“As a token of my sincerity in this, I invite you to use this rope to do to me what I did to you.”

Ahern looked at the rope and then at Sheikh-ol-eslam.

“We don’t do stuff like that,” he said.

John Limbert fought a losing battle against his rising hopes. He had heard snatches of a report on TV when he had been taken for his physical, and the announcer had been talking about an agreement, about money and conditions, so he knew that something important was afoot. But he also knew that any number of things could happen at the last minute to abort all this. Months earlier there had been talk of turning all the hostages over to the government, and that had come close and then fallen apart. Limbert was aware of the time difference between Tehran and Washington and knew that it was drawing close to Reagan’s inauguration.

The guards told everyone to expect to leave on the nineteenth, and throughout the guesthouse the anxious hostages waited through the entire day and night. Nothing happened. Limbert and his roommates then sat expectantly through another long day on the twentieth, and again nothing happened. At dusk, he decided that the deal must have fallen apart. It was already approaching noon in Washington, which meant Carter’s term, and his power to make the deal, would soon expire. If it fell through, it seemed fairly likely to Limbert that they would never go home.

Then, just as the sound of evening prayers began to crackle through loudspeakers in the neighborhood, came the roar of big guns. It wasn’t the usual sound of antiaircraft fire, which the hostages had grown accustomed to hearing. It sounded more like heavy artillery, and it was going off at regular intervals, like a salute. Holland said that it sounded like they were celebrating some great victory.

Only then did a guard appear.

“Pack up,” he said. “We’re going. One sack.”

Koob and Swift were instructed shortly before six to “Get ready. We are going.”

“Going where?” asked Swift.

“To the United States. Get your things ready.”

Neither woman assumed it was true. They pulled on several layers of clothing, because they had learned that the things they packed were often lost in transit. They packed their possessions in bags and waited. When the guards came they were led blindfolded down a hall and some stairs and then outdoors.

“Be careful,” said Koob’s guard. “There is ice underfoot.”

They were ushered into a van with rows of seats and sensed immediately that it was full of people. Koob slid over next to a man.

“How are you?” the man asked quietly.

“Fine. Who is it?”

“Kalp.”

“It’s Koob.”

For the first time since the morning of the takeover, Al Golacinski heard the voice of his assistant, Mike Howland. Golacinski was shocked. He had assumed long ago that Howland, Bruce Laingen, and Vic Tomseth, whom he knew had been at the Foreign Ministry on the day of the takeover, had gotten out. On that day a year ago, Howland had accompanied Laingen instead of Golacinski. The embassy security chief had no idea where his assistant had been for the previous year, but he assumed it had not been spent in prison.

“Mike, that’s the last time you and I are going to have a shift change,” he said.

Kevin Hermening was sitting on the bus when the guards pushed Bob Ode down to the floor. The youngest hostage stood and gave the eldest his seat.

Laingen argued with the guards who tried to take away his small blue bag.

“Don’t you trust us?” one of the guards asked.

Laingen laughed scornfully, but sensing that now was not the time to mount a struggle over insignificant possessions he handed it over.

Marine guard Rocky Sickmann was squeezed into a small place that turned out to be some kind of radiator. He had a hole in the seat of his pants—he had spent most of the past year sitting on a mattress—and suddenly felt a sharp pain in his rump. There was no place for him to move. So he fidgeted on the hot plate. If the bus was taking him home, he could cope.

Michael Metrinko heard people behind him whispering.

“Shut up!” shouted Akmed in English, and then cursed all of them in Farsi.

Metrinko responded in Farsi, “You shut up, you son of a Persian whore.”

The bus ground to a halt. Metrinko was grabbed by the arm and felt himself being pulled from the bus.

He shouted in English, “This is Metrinko and they are taking me off the bus!” Outside he kept bellowing loudly as he was beaten. Metrinko wanted everyone on the bus to know what was happening. The blows didn’t hurt much. The past fifiteen months had toughened him up.

State Department communicator Rick Kupke felt angry at Metrinko. Here he was thinking that he might live through this after all, and this hard case has to pick a fight! He prayed that his colleague would just shut up.

Hermening had to smile. Metrinko was still giving them shit, but then he worried about him. It was the wrong time to rock the boat. The young marine kept trying to tilt his head and see out the bottom of his blindfold. All of them were hopeful but still a little worried. They wanted to believe that this was it, but wouldn’t do so until they were at least in the air on their way out of Tehran.

Golacinski heard the voice of Ann Swift. Feelings were running high. Golacinski could tell this was it and suggested loudly, “Let’s take off our blindfolds.”

He and a number of the others did. Golacinski looked around and saw a large number of his embassy colleagues for the first time in more than a year, and what a worn-out, hairy, ill-clad group they had become! The sight filled him with joy.

“What are you doing?” asked a guard they called Bozo, who was carrying a pistol in each hand.

“Fuck you,” said Golacinski, feeling brazen. “You’re not going to screw this up. We’re on our way.”

He was dragged off the van by Bozo and several other guards and thrown up against a wall. He stood there for a few minutes and then heard the motors start. All of sudden his brazenness drained away.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” he shouted, pleading. He was placed back aboard.

Limbert’s bus was so crowded that he had to sit in the toilet stall. When it started to move he was surprised that it didn’t stop. In Tehran’s insanely congested traffic, with mobbed traffic circles and jams at every intersection, driving through the city was always stop and go. The smooth movement of this bus suggested that it had some kind of escort, which implied government authority. They were on their way.

Carter had reluctantly abandoned his plan to fly to Wiesbaden before the inauguration in order to greet the returning hostages, but as the final hours of his presidency ticked away he remained determined to bring the crisis to a satisfactory end on his watch, to exit the White House announcing that the hostages were on their way home.

Christopher and Nabavi finally initialed the agreement very early in the morning on Tuesday, the twentieth. Carter and his staff had been up all night in the Oval Office, its walls stripped bare and the outgoing president’s books and papers in boxes that were being removed, waiting for word that it was done. The Federal Reserve Bank was to transfer the first portion of Iran’s frozen assets to an account in London as soon as the banks opened for business there, and then the Bank of England would move that money into an escrow account controlled by the National Bank of Algiers. When the White House received word about the agreement shortly after five o’clock, Carter immediately placed a call to Reagan. The president-elect, he was informed, did not wish to be disturbed.

The president took the news to the American people. He appeared behind the podium in the White House press room—“looking tired,” as the CBS correspondent noted—to make the announcement. The signatures had just put the release process in motion and, given the dramatic reversals of the previous fifteen months, nobody was going to celebrate yet. Until the hostages were actually aboard the Algerian commercial jets waiting for them on the runway of blacked-out Mehrabad Airport in Tehran, winging their way home, there was still a chance it would all fall apart again.

As a sunny, cold inauguration day dawned over the temporary stage set up in the back porch of the Capitol building, the two stories unfolded simultaneously. Carter maintained a vigil at his desk, fretting to his aides that some last-minute glitch might still derail the process and leave the sensitive matter in his successor’s hands. “I can just see the Iranians delaying for another day, Reagan saying something inflammatory, and our deal going down the drain,” he said. Reagan did call after seven to ask for an update and Carter explained exactly what was going on. When he hung up, Hamilton Jordan asked, “What did he say?”

“What hostages?” Carter quipped.

The departing first couple met the Reagans on the front porch of the White House a few hours later. Carter had cleaned up and sat for a haircut. “We think the Reagans will enjoy their new home,” he told the reporters on the front steps. The two couples sat together for the traditional inauguration morning tea, and Carter was surprised that the president-elect didn’t ask him a thing about the tense situation that had kept him up for the past forty-eight hours. It was as though Reagan wanted nothing to do with it, as though the whole mess belonged to Carter and was going to be swept away with the change of administration. As they rode together in a car to the Capitol, Reagan told jokes.

Carter sat wrapped in a tan trench coat through the pomp of the swearing in, as Reagan stepped out on a bright red carpet and looked out over a sea of spectators, to the grand promenade of the East Mall and the Washington Monument.

“No arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women,” Reagan said in his address. “It is a weapon our adversaries in today’s world do not have. It is a weapon that we as Americans do have. Let that be understood by those who practice terrorism and prey upon their neighbors.”

Carter wasn’t listening. He was waiting for news from Tehran.

Mehrabad Airport was blacked out because of the Iraqi air raids, but the tarmac where the buses stopped shone under the glare of television lights. The hostages were led one by one off the buses and through a jeering gauntlet of students who had formed two long parallel lines from the buses to the plane.

“Magbar A’mrika!” they shouted, and then, something new, “Magbar Reagan!”

Sickmann was grabbed from behind by one of the guards and pulled toward the plane. One of his sandals slipped off, and the marine resisted for a moment, stooping to adjust it, then ran toward the plane. He was the first one up the steps. A pretty stewardess greeted him with a smile at the top and he choked up with emotion.

“Yankee go home!” one of the Iranians screamed in English at Hermening. He thought, From your lips to God’s ears.

When they let go of him at the foot of the stairs, Hermening ran up into the plane. It crossed his mind that someone might take a shot at him as he went up, and he practically flew up the stairs.

Bill Royer in his rumpled tweed sport coat felt a sense of pride and satisfaction as he was escorted to the airplane down the jeering corridor. Whatever the arrangements had been, and he didn’t know what they were precisely, he was confident that his captors had not gotten what they’d wanted. They didn’t get the shah back, for one thing, and that had been their primary demand.

Farsi-speaking Vic Tomseth toyed with the idea of shouting out his own slogan as he was led through the gauntlet, something along the lines of “Magbar Khomeini,” but he thought better of it. I get to leave, he thought, these poor suckers have to stay here. So he walked silently and happily through the gauntlet to the plane.

Koob was frightened but made an effort to walk through the gauntlet with her head up. She was led up the stairs of the plane and steered down the aisle, where she saw Laingen and, beside him, her boss John Graves. Before them sat Barry Rosen and her assistant Royer. She slipped into the empty seat between them and they both recoiled with surprise to find her just a slender remnant of her former hefty self.

John Limbert heard the doors of the bus open and he was led out into the night air, where his blindfold was finally removed. The guards took the sack he had packed and searched and removed everything from his pockets.

“Steal, steal, and steal again,” Limbert said, and kept repeating the phrase.

Stripped of even this small horde of possessions, skinny and shaggy, Limbert walked happily across the tarmac toward the plane. The insults shouted at him were more disappointing to him than threatening. They have no sense whatsoever of decency or style. If they had any class at all they would have sent him and the others off with a human gesture, some flowers, a handshake, a “Nothing personal” or “No hard feelings.” Just this ugly, meaningless display, beyond all reason.

Laingen saw Limbert’s face first when he reached the top of the stairs. To him, the political officer looked like he hadn’t changed a bit. They embraced and laughed with joy on seeing each other again.

Joe Hall just ignored the crowd. He kept his eyes fixed on the stairs leading up to the plane, and once he was on board he took a seat and held on for dear life.

Bill Belk raised his middle finger and responded to cries of “Magbar A’mrika!” with “Magbar Khomeini!”

Colonel Chuck Scott made a point of marching through the gauntlet. He had come to Iran as a soldier and he was going to leave it like one. He regretted that Akbar, the guard he had come to admire, had not been able to say good-bye.

Jimmy Lopez looked down at the watch on his wrist. It was the self-winding kind and it had worked perfectly through the entire captivity. He wondered if he might get to make a commercial for Timex watches when he got home.

On the bus, awaiting his turn to leave, Dave Roeder sat wondering what was happening to his friend Metrinko. Had he been taken off the bus? Was he being left behind? He felt helpless and angry, at both the Iranian guards and his friend and roommate. Didn’t the man know when to keep his mouth shut? He admired his friend’s constant pugnacity, but there were times when it crossed over into pure stupidity.

Metrinko had had much the same thought when he heard the bus move off. His heart sank. How stupid can I be? But then an apparently higher-ranking guard approached and angrily demanded of the others, “Why did you take him off the bus?”

It was explained that he had shouted an insult.

“You have to get him to the airport,” the guard said angrily. “He has to get out of here with the others. They all have to go.”

Metrinko had been placed in a car with Lee Holland, a white Mercedes. His blindfold was removed. Evidently they did not want to attract attention on the roads by having a blindfolded man in the backseat. Metrinko watched with fascination as they drove off through the city. It was the first time he had been able to see Tehran in over a year.

At the airport, waiting for his turn, Metrinko watched as his colleagues were led through the gauntlet. To him it all seemed rote, like a summer camp initiation ritual. The guards no longer had their hearts in it. Everybody was exhausted by this game.

Metrinko finally walked through the jeering crowd in a cloud of joy and disbelief. He felt none of the slaps or jabs and heard none of the insults. More than a year of near constant abuse coated him like a shell. As he reached the end he was pleased to see armed, uniformed Algerian guards. He mounted the steps and entered the plane and there, arrayed in seats on either side, were all the embassy workers he had barely known and the few, like Roeder, Regan, and Ward, whom he had come to know well in captivity. Everyone looked skinny, poorly dressed, and shaggy—long hair and long beards. It felt wonderful to see them, all of them. People reached out and touched him as he passed down the aisle. It was like a reunion he had just happened upon, and for the first time in more than a year he felt surrounded by countrymen, by warmth and friendship.

For all the joy of reunion, the plane stayed silent. People sat together not in the groups that might have formed according to the hierarchy or job descriptions at the old embassy, but in the random groupings of their imprisonment. This was partly because the various roommates had grown close during their captivity, but also because they did not yet feel free. So long as they were still in Tehran, they were still hostages.

Only when the plane taxied down the runway and its wheels left the ground did the great weight of fear begin to lift for the fifty-two Americans on the plane. There was still some disbelief. Billy Gallegos thought it entirely possible that the Iranians would let them take off and then hit them with a surface-to-air missile.

Real celebration didn’t begin on the plane until the Algerian pilot announced they were out of Iran. The freed hostages went wild with happiness. Shouting, cheering, crying, clapping, falling into one another’s arms. Hall fell into an embrace with Jerry Plotkin, whom he didn’t know and had never seen before. Champagne corks popped and half full plastic cups were passed around the plane.

There was something more complicated than joy in the hours of celebration that ensued. There was a sense that they had weathered an extraordinary adventure, had all involuntarily participated in an historic ordeal, but they had not done so together. Many of them had not known one another before the takeover, and were strangers still. Yet they would always be tied together now. Those who had been forced to live together in close quarters for months and months had seen each other at their best and at their worst, and they would forget neither. Colonel Scott, who still burned over the time his onetime roommate Bob Blucker had refused to hurry his meal so that they could go outside for a walk, was not the only one who harbored anger toward the prickly economics officer. Dave Roeder hung a sign on the back of Blucker’s seat that read, “I’m an asshole.” Many of the passengers eyed Army Sergeant Joe Subic with scorn and made resolutions to report his behavior when they got back. Nearly all of them had done or said things over the past fifteen months that made them feel proud, or that made them feel ashamed. How would their behavior in captivity be assessed? Few felt heroic. The experience had been in many ways humiliating. Some of them were ashamed of things they had done or said, secrets they had named, weaknesses they had revealed. There was no sense yet of the frenzied national welcome that awaited them at home, the reunions with families and friends, the crush of press, the ticker-tape parades, the speeches, the gifts, the great smothering embrace of American sympathy fully aroused.

Rick Kupke finally had a chance to confront Tom Ahern over something that had been bugging him ever since the day of the takeover, when he had been soundly beaten after being stranded on the roof of the chancery.

“Why did we surrender?” he asked the CIA station chief. “I wanted to stay there in the vault for two weeks and force the United States government to make a decision—we still had a phone line open—whether to come save us or not.”

Ahern said that the decision was his responsibility, his best judgment at the time.

“So why did you open the door when I was on the roof?” Kupke asked. “When I came down, they just kicked the hell out of me!”

Ahern explained that they had Golacinski outside the door with a gun to his head.

“Tom, couldn’t you have at least taken a head count?” complained Kupke. “You left me. I had guns scattered around. I was on the roof by myself, only to find out there was a bunch of Iranians down there when I decided to come down.”

“Well, Al convinced me they were going to shoot him,” Ahern said, “and Al promised me that they wouldn’t hurt anybody.”

Metrinko was at peace with his own behavior. He had fought his captors and insulted them every day, right up to the ride to the airport, and he had fresh scrapes and bruises to show for it. His fifteen months in captivity would be summed up many years later by Ebtekar: “We thought [him] to be deranged; [he] hated everyone and was hated in return.” Always the loner, he sat quietly and contentedly in the midst of the celebration taking long swigs of champagne. He felt different, and he tried to define to himself how. It was partly the champagne, but that alone didn’t account for the luxurious sensation that seemed to settle him deeper into his seat. Then he realized what it was. It was a feeling he had almost forgotten. For the first time in four hundred and forty-four days, he felt relaxed.

President Reagan made the announcement. He stood up in the Capitol Rotunda, where he was the guest of honor for a congressional luncheon, and raised a glass of champagne.

“The plane bearing our prisoners has left Iranian airspace,” he said to the cheers of the revelers. Then he took a long gulp of bubbly.

Carter made the same announcement in soft rain on a platform erected to welcome him home to Plains, disappointed not to have been able to make the announcement to the whole nation but relieved nevertheless.

He said, “Just a few moments ago on Air Force One, before we landed at Warner Robins, I received word officially for the first time that the aircraft carrying the fifty-two American hostages”—and then his voice broke and tears choked his words; he took a second to swallow and continued—“has cleared Iranian airspace. Every one of the fifty-two hostages is alive, well, and free.”

After that Carter smiled, the crowd cheered, a band started playing, and the former president slipped his arm around his wife’s waist and they started to dance.