Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (11 page)

Laingen brought up Yazdi’s contribution in February, as though nothing had changed. Yazdi was tactful. He tried to explain.

“Then, there was a risk of violence,” he said. This situation, from all accounts, was peaceful. It involved university students. It would take a little time, he said, but the situation was at least “under control.” To Yazdi, living in a world of firing squads, a sit-in at the American embassy was not a crisis.

He allowed the Americans to use the phones at a table in his own office. Laingen got on the line with the small group of his colleagues still holed up in the vault, and to his superiors in Washington. Yazdi was also working the phones, including a special red one, which was a direct line to Khomeini’s offices in Qom.

After some time at this, Yazdi said confidently, “We will solve this tonight. I have just had some good news.”

He explained that high-level discussions were under way between the provisional government, the Revolutionary Council, and the imam himself. None of the Americans had been harmed, he said. The embassy had not been seriously damaged and tomorrow, at the latest, Laingen’s staff would be released and the embassy returned.

Inside the chancery vault, Rick Kupke continued to feed documents into the clamorous disintegrator. The other communicators set about destroying their communications equipment. This was not as simple as banging things with a hammer. They had a list instructing them step by step. First they had downloaded a program called “Terminal Equipment Replacement,” which would enable them to get most of their electronics back up and running quickly in case the invaders were chased off and the crisis suddenly ended. Then they began taking apart the machines in a selective, nondestructive way, but one that would make it exceedingly difficult for anyone unused to them to restart them. A telex machine in pieces that could not be readily reassembled by anyone but an expert was preferable to a broken telex machine. So it was very deliberate work, and because some of the machines, like the teletype, had been in use all day, they were hot. Barnes would read off the serial number of the selected piece and Regan would write it down. The list was prioritized, so that the last items to go were the secure teletypes that kept them connected to Washington. When it was decided to begin destroying them, selected parts were culled from the various bits and either smashed with a hammer or cut in half with a saw. Miele held the computer list and would cross off items one by one as they were destroyed. Some of the people in the vault didn’t work there and were unfamiliar with the equipment, but everyone pitched in. Those who knew what they were doing gave instructions to those who didn’t. The center of all this activity was the over-stressed disintegrator, which kept churning and banging away.

Tear gas came through the air-conditioning vent, so Phil Ward put on a gas mask. He wore it for only a few minutes and then took it off.

“I can’t breathe in this,” he said. Cort Barnes inspected the mask and saw that Ward, like the Iranian woman earlier, had not removed the tape at the bottom that covered the airholes. They got a laugh out of that. Barnes tried the gas mask for a few minutes but he had to remove his glasses to wear it and he couldn’t see well enough to do his work. So he also discarded it and just fought through the discomfort. They had earlier donned blue and yellow flak jackets, but took those off, too. Barnes thought the colors looked silly.

About two hours after Kupke closed the vault door they were finished. They performed a complete check of the master list, and then took a careful look around, pulling open drawers and safes, making sure that nothing had been accidentally left behind. They left open only the one or two phone lines to Washington. The vault was a mess; strewn across the floor were papers and broken equipment. When they were done they broke open some of the stock of C rations and snacked on peanut butter and chocolate.

Kupke then noticed the weapons. He had been stepping over them for hours but hadn’t looked down. Kevin Hermening had brought them into the vault and dumped them on the floor. There were long rifles, Uzis, handguns, and shotguns and boxes of ammo.

Tom Ahern was talking on the phone with Mike Howland, the assistant security chief, who was at the Foreign Ministry with Laingen and Tomseth. Howland was concerned about the weapons falling into the hands of the Iranians, which had happened during the February crisis.

“Get rid of them,” he advised.

Ahern passed along this instruction to Hermening. More than turning over the weapons, the CIA station chief was worried about how it might look for this mob of fired-up protesters to find them holed up in a vault armed to the teeth.

They set to work breaking the weapons down and stashing the parts in the now empty safes. They had planned to leave the safes open to show that there was nothing inside, but now they decided to lock away the remains of the guns. They tossed in the handguns and Uzis. Most of the guns fit into the safe’s drawers. The ammo was placed in the main chamber. The shotguns were too long to fit, so Kupke looked around for another way of getting rid of them. The vault consisted of two small rooms, divided by a wall of electronic equipment, power panels, wires, and transmitters. One of the chambers had a steep, narrow spiral metal ladder that led up to the roof.

“I’m going to take some of these guns and stick them up there,” he said.

At the top of the ladder was a flat steel door about a quarter of an inch thick on rollers. With an armful of shotguns under one arm, Kupke used the other to slide the door open. He swung the weapons out to the roof and then climbed up after them. Toward the center of the building was a wooden shed, which he crawled to on his belly, being careful to keep his body below the eighteen-inch lip of wall around the roof. Kupke wasn’t worried about being seen from below—the roof was about fifty feet up—but he was concerned about being seen from the window of one of the multistory buildings that ringed the compound. He was wearing a yellow shirt, so he would have been easy to spot. With the shotguns, he feared that if he was seen someone might start shooting at him. He stayed close to the wall.

As Kupke was disposing of the guns, Ahern wanted a better idea of what was happening outside so he and Hermening climbed up to the attic that ran the length of the building and, using a flashlight, eased out along the ceiling studs. They walked stooped in the darkness, stepping over crossbeams. At one point they had to balance their way along a beam for about fifteen feet—falling would most likely have meant crashing through the ceiling and into the middle of the occupied hallway underneath. At each end of the building were triangular windows that had big fans in them. They were both badly startled by a loud bang from overhead—Kupke was dropping weapons up there but they didn’t know that. They assumed that somehow the invading Iranians had made their way to the roof. They eased out to the window, shut off the fan, and Ahern had a good look around the compound. There were Iranians everywhere.

Above them, Kupke peeked over the rim and saw the same scene. Some of his colleagues were blindfolded and being led across the compound toward the ambassador’s residence at the south end. There were still mobs of excited Iranians running in all directions; outside the walls was a growing mass of cheering people, urged on by protesters with mega-phones. He placed the shotguns on a short pile of wooden planks beside the shed, crawled back to the sliding door, and backed down the ladder. He got on the phone with the State Department.

“I was just on the roof,” he said. “There are hundreds of demonstrators on the grounds.”

“Did you see any Americans?” asked the man on the other end.

“I saw some Americans blindfolded.”

When he returned to the disintegrator, he found Barnes smoking a cigarette and looking worried. Barnes’s hands were shaking. He had been evacuated from the roof of the American embassy in Saigon only four years earlier. Now that the documents had all been destroyed, they were feeding circuit boards from the computers and encryption devices into the disintegrator, which was hot and roaring. Both Kupke and Barnes were sweating profusely.

The State Department communicator screamed to his CIA friend over the noise, “Cort, when you were flown off that embassy, were you more scared then, or are you more scared now?”

“Now,” he said.

“I didn’t want to hear that,” Kupke said.

Barnes fed a thick piece of circuit board into the machine and, abruptly, it came to a halt. The blades stopped and wouldn’t move. Kupke picked up a two-by-four and prepared to give the blades a whack.

“Don’t do that!” Barnes protested.

Kupke slammed the two-by-four into the blades and they started to turn so quickly that the machine bit the end of his two-by-four right off, then sputtered to a stop again. Kupke next found a four-by-four, whacked at the blades with that, and the machine once more began churning.

There were still shotguns on the floor; some time later Kupke took a break and carried more of them up to the roof.

The phone lines started to go inside the vault. The Iranian invaders had control of the main switchboard. Soon, the only ones functioning were local lines: one to the Foreign Ministry, where Howland had stayed on the line, and another across town to the Iran-America Society offices, where the director, Kathryn Koob, and her assistant Bill Royer were acting as go-betweens for Washington. Royer stayed on the line to the vault and Koob would relay questions or instructions from Washington to him, then he would pass them to Jones.

“I think it’s just a sit-in that got out of hand,” said Jones. “They said they were just going to sit-in, but it sounds as if they’ve gone wild.”

At the Foreign Ministry, Laingen remained optimistic.

“Help is coming,” Howland told Ahern.

The station chief still had a direct teletype link to his supervisors at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. There wasn’t anything headquarters could do, of course, except to wish him well and ask for frequent updates. So the agency’s station chief decided there was no point holding out further. Files and sensitive material had all been destroyed or shredded and the weapons had been broken down and removed. The Iranians outside were working on the vault door with a sledgehammer and would eventually break through. Refusing to open it would only further antagonize them, and any attempt they made to blow open the door would probably injure those inside.

At the Foreign Ministry, Howland was urging Ahern to hang on.

“Tom, we think you’re more valuable not surrendering,” he said.

Then, outside the vault, the Iranian invaders produced Howland’s boss, Golacinski.

The security chief had been marched through the rain with the others to the ambassador’s residence, where he had briefly been tied to a chair in the dining room with a large number of other captives. The residence was a mansion, with huge rooms designed for entertaining on a grand scale. The dining room was furnished like an old French palace. The Iranian invaders had removed cushions from the chairs and placed them on the floor, where they lounged with their weapons. The hostages all sat on the hard, straight-backed chairs, which in time grew quite uncomfortable. Still, the mood had been surprisingly light. Everyone was talking and joking. The protesters were a little giddy with success. Both they and their captives assumed that government forces would arrive shortly to restore order. But then Golacinski had been taken from his chair and led back out across to the chancery and upstairs to the vault door at the west end of the second floor, the final holdout. He figured that the men inside were still destroying documents and resolved to buy them as much more time as he could.

His captors took off his blindfold and one who spoke English told him to talk his colleagues inside into opening the door.

“There’s nobody in there,” he said, but then they distinctly heard someone shouting on the other side of the door.

“Look, it’s a very thick door,” Golacinski said. “They’ll never hear me.”

He suggested that instead of him shouting through the door that they use a phone.

“No,” said his lead captor.

“Then I can’t talk to them.”

They relented and took him into an office a few steps down the hall. Golacinski said he didn’t remember the phone number, so they searched for an in-house phone book. The guards opened drawers and poked through bookshelves. They could not find anything. Finally, disgusted, they led Golacinski back out to the vault door. They banged on the door and Golacinski shouted in.

He heard Hermening’s voice inside saying, “It’s Mr. Golacinski out there!”

“Al, are you okay?” Hermening asked through the door.

“I’m okay. Everybody is over at the ambassador’s house. These people want you to come out, and they say they won’t hurt you.”

“Do we have some time, Al?” he heard Tom Ahern shout.

“I don’t know,” Golacinski said.

At the Foreign Ministry, where Howland had been talking to Ahern on a phone in a small office downstairs, Howland set the phone down on the desk in order to keep the line open and ran upstairs to Yazdi’s office to confer with Laingen.

He explained that Ahern was ready to open the door and the reasons why he thought it should not be done.

“No, I agree,” said Laingen. “Tell them to hold on.”

Howland ran back downstairs, but when he got there he found the phone on the cradle. Someone had seen it off the hook and hung it up. Howland dialed the number for the vault but he didn’t get through. It was about four o’clock.

He hung up the phone, and seconds later it rang. Howland picked it up and heard an American voice. It was a sergeant calling from Germany who had somehow, in all this confusion, tracked him down to this office inside the Iranian Foreign Ministry.

“How did you—” he started to ask, but the sergeant cut him off. “Hold on for just a minute, sir.”

Then a four-star general was on the phone, asking for a full situation report. Howland was shocked and impressed. He began explaining things to the general.

On his end, when the line went dead, Ahern decided to wait another five minutes and then instructed everyone to make one last check of all the drawers, files, and equipment. Hermening went to work helping Jones and the others destroy heavy “core boards” from the computers. They were as thick as books and had to be cut into pieces with a knife before being fed into the disintegrator, which would loudly break them down further.