Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (14 page)

“Who are they?” he asked. “Why have they done this?”

Yazdi explained that the hostage takers appeared to be university students, and that they were demanding the immediate return of the shah and his assets.

“Go and kick them out,” Khomeini said.

Yazdi did nothing with those instructions at first. There didn’t seem to be any reason for haste. The takeover was accomplished. With the imam’s permission it would be a simple matter to clear out the students and give the compound back to the American mission, and it might be best to let things cool off for a few hours before starting. He briefed Khomeini on the now controversial meeting he and Bazargan had held with Brzezinski in the prime minister’s hotel room in Algiers. Then he got back in a car for the drive to Tehran and figured he would relay the imam’s instructions about the embassy to Bazargan when he returned.

So the weary foreign minister was startled that evening in Tehran, after he had been driven back from Qom, when he heard on the radio the imam’s first public statement endorsing the takeover and the goals of the students. It wasn’t halfhearted either. In a complete reversal of the sentiments he had expressed earlier, Khomeini warmly supported the move and praised the students. Yazdi was not surprised. He had come to know Khomeini, and despite the ayatollah’s fierce visage, he was a maddeningly vacillating man. In political matters, he tended to side with whomever last had his ear, and because he often regarded the affairs of state as trivial compared to his spiritual concerns, he was usually reluctant to make unpopular decisions. The jubilant scene outside the embassy was being shown on television throughout the country. Yazdi was impressed by the way this stunt had been orchestrated. Whoever was responsible, he thought, had wisely avoided informing the imam in advance, knowing that Khomeini would be less likely to oppose a popular fait accompli than a half-baked idea. The planners had done a great job of getting out the crowd, too. Yazdi had reports of food being served, street performances, and people being delivered by the busload from all over the region. Some of it might have been spontaneous, and the celebratory mood was definitely real, but some serious planning had gone into it.

In between the imam’s meeting with Yazdi and the radio broadcast, several things had happened in Qom. Ahmad Khomeini, the imam’s son, had received a phone call from his friend the popular young Tehran cleric Mohammad Asqar Mousavi Khoeniha, the students’ “spiritual leader.” He had assured the younger Khomeini that the geroghan-girha, the hostage takers, were devout Muslims, not the leftist hooligans who had seized the embassy in February. They had acted, Khoeniha said, in response to the imam’s call for students to “attack” America. Ahmad Khomeini agreed to fly by helicopter to the U.S. embassy and see for himself what was going on.

Arriving on the scene, the younger Khomeini had literally been carried away by the rapture of the mob dancing in the streets. He was lifted bodily over the embassy walls, his presence alone interpreted as the imam’s imprimatur. The young cleric briefly lost his black turban and a slipper in the excitement. After touring the embassy and viewing the captive Americans he had returned to Qom with a glowing report on the students and the suspicious American spy documents and equipment they had seized. When it was clear that what had happened was enormously popular, and that the action had the support of influential clerics like Khoeniha, the imam understood that what to Yazdi was a nuisance was in fact an opportunity.

As he prepared finally for bed, Yazdi knew there was now nothing he or the provisional government could do. The matter was out of their hands.

Before he was blindfolded again, John Limbert watched from a chair at the residence as the twilight faded, sitting alongside the Filipino cashier, whom the students had not yet decided whether to consider an American spy or an oppressed Third World national. Limbert had given his name and job title when asked and had refused a cigarette. He had learned that these protesters called themselves “Muslim Students Following the Imam’s Line,” and understood that they were religious and more aligned with the mullahs than the leftists, who predominated on the college campuses. Most of those he had talked to so far were more curious than hostile. Some were from rural areas, small towns, and they reminded him of the students he had taught in Shiraz. He saw that they were in over their heads but didn’t know it yet. They had been brought up with a very narrow idea of the world. Most of them probably had no idea where America was on a map, much less any understanding of U.S.–Iran relations. For most, this was probably their first encounter with Americans and, given the ridiculous propaganda in the previous year, they were no doubt surprised to find that the embassy personnel didn’t have horns. Limbert couldn’t help himself; he liked them.

As soon as he figured out who they were the events of the day came into better focus. It wasn’t clear if they were acting with the approval of the imam, as their name implied. Limbert suspected not. The atmosphere in the crowded residence was strange. Some of the initial tension evaporated for the Americans when it was evident that they were not going to be harmed, at least not immediately. Captors and prisoners were talking freely to each other, and at one point a student brought a radio into the room, and everyone sat together listening eagerly to hear how the day’s event was reported. They listened to Radio Tehran and the BBC international report, and he could see that the students seemed a little disappointed when the embassy takeover was treated in the London report as a relatively minor story. The students considered their “victory” nothing short of miraculous. They had stormed the American fortress and overrun it without a casualty! In one sense it was too good to be true, and in another…what were they supposed to do now?

He heard the guards whispering excitedly among themselves about the visit of Ahmad Khomeini, and then, passing the word from guard to guard, they removed the blindfolds from Limbert and the other hostages in the room. They apparently did not want the imam’s son to see that they had blindfolded the hostages. When Limbert’s came off he saw that seated alongside him was Charles Jones, who kept trying to tell his captors that he had high blood pressure and needed his medicine. Jones asked Limbert to explain in Farsi. The two of them started nagging the guards, in English and in Farsi, pleading for the medication, which worked, although it took a few tries. The guards kept coming back with the wrong medicine, and each time Limbert complained to them about the seriousness of Jones’s condition. Were they trying to kill him?

Limbert sat up late in a downstairs bedroom talking earnestly with his young captors. They said they were staging the demonstration in order to force the United States to return the shah in order to stand trial for his crimes.

“I don’t think you have much of a chance,” said Limbert.

They tried to engage him further in a political discussion but Limbert avoided it. The little training he had been given about being taken captive warned against getting drawn into political discussions. So he kept changing the subject, asking questions. They were shocked at how well he spoke Farsi, and how much he knew about their country, its history and literature—more than they themselves did.

Throughout the residence, Americans were bound to chairs. Joe Hall, the warrant officer who was convinced his capture meant he would be sent home early, was in the basement TV room, which had a door to a storage area stocked with sodas, canned goods, and candy. He watched as a procession of the young Iranians raided the stash. One came out grinning, and with hands that seemed grubby to Hall he popped a piece of candy into the captive American’s mouth.

The same young Iranian who had earlier posed with a knife pressed against the side of marine guard Rocky Sickmann’s head now offered him candy.

“No, I don’t want your fucking candy,” said Sickmann.

“I’ll take it,” said vice consul Richard Queen. “I’m hungry.”

“The shah didn’t feed prisoners,” said one of the Iranians, who nevertheless placed a date in Queen’s mouth and then held up a small plastic bowl for him to spit out the pit.

As the hours dragged on, Hall’s hands, which were tied behind his back, began to hurt, and he asked if the cloth could be loosened.

“They’re cutting off my circulation,” he said.

A young Iranian bent over and removed them, and for a while Hall sat with his hands in his lap. Then an older student saw him untied and angrily instructed the others to retie him. This time his hands were bound in front, which was a little more comfortable.

In the room with him was an angry little guard with a big nose whom Hall dubbed “Rat Face.”

“You are See-ah [CIA],” he sneered at the bound American.

“I am not CIA.”

“Yes, you are all spies here.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” said Hall facetiously. “I’m See-ah.”

Rat Face brightened at this, accepting it as an admission.

“What was your job?” he asked.

Hall thought for a moment, and then said, again facetiously, “I was in charge of wheat mold.”

“What is wheat mold?”

“You know the wheat that grows and that you use to make bread?” Hall explained, warming to the joke. “Well, mold is something that happens to the wheat that makes it no good. I did all that. I was the CIA agent in charge of wheat mold.”

The young Iranian absorbed this intently—indeed, the CIA plot to destroy Iranian crops would become part of the list of “revelations” later claimed by the hostage takers.

“How long is this stuff going to go on anyway?” Hall asked. “You guys aren’t going to be able to carry this off very long.”

“Maybe one year,” said Rat Face.

He then bent over and removed one of Hall’s shoes. He pulled the TV cord from the wall, doubled it over, and, grabbing Hall’s foot by the toes and pulling it up, slapped the cord across the bottom of his foot.

“This is the way the shah’s army tortured innocent Iranians,” he said, and he slapped the cord across Hall’s foot again.

He didn’t hit Hall hard enough for it to hurt. When he dropped his foot, Hall slid it back into his shoe.

Later, he was taken upstairs, to one of the residence’s larger rooms, where the Iranians were intrigued by decorations left over from a Halloween party that had been organized the week before by Hall’s subordinate, Joe Subic. One of them fingered a hanging cartoon skeleton and asked, “What’s this?”

“It’s part of a holiday celebration, a holiday for children,” Hall said.

“You do this sort of stuff for children?” the Iranian asked, surveying the images of witches, goblins, and spooky pumpkin heads.

“It’s an old custom,” Hall started to explain but then realized how peculiar the holiday actually was. “We give candy to children.”

Hall saw Subic in that upstairs room, and true to form the eager young sergeant was volunteering to be helpful. He had a yellow legal pad and was pointing out all the captives and giving their names, job titles, and descriptions. He seemed to be enjoying himself. They would stop at a blindfolded prisoner, and Subic would say, “This is Greg Persinger. He’s a marine sergeant,” and then they would move on to the next person. Before Sharer, he said, “This is Commander Don Sharer, he’s an F-14 expert, he works for the United States Navy, and he was in Vietnam.” Sharer had earlier given his name as “Mickey Mouse.” Many of the top embassy officials had been trying to keep their status and responsibilities obscure. “It would probably be best to just drop ‘sir’ from your vocabulary for the time being,” consular officer Don Cooke had advised the marines bound to chairs near him. Whatever Subic’s instincts were, they didn’t run along these lines. Before Colonel Scott, Subic said, “This is Colonel Chuck Scott, the military liaison officer. He’s been in Iran many times before. He was an attaché here in the sixties and he speaks fluent Farsi.” Scott would like to have punched the young sergeant in the face, both for being so helpful to their captors and for calling him “Chuck,” a level of familiarity that ignored their difference in rank and actual relationship. Some of those identified asked Subic, “Why are you doing this?” or told him angrily, “Keep your mouth shut,” or “Leave it alone, Joe.” It didn’t seem to bother or deter him at all. Hall had found Subic a difficult employee ever since he had arrived in Tehran. The chubby soldier with glasses and dirty-blond hair was so eager to take on responsibility and to get involved with work others were doing in the embassy that he tended to neglect his own duties. Subic was a well-meaning busybody, who seemed compelled to be at the center of attention, and now he was doing it here, with all of his colleagues tied to chairs.

“Joe, sit down and mind your own business,” Hall told him.

“Shut up!” one of the guards shouted at him. “No speak!” The way the guards pronounced “speak” added a vowel to the front end, so it came out as “Eh-speak,” a phrase the hostages would hear again and again in the coming months.

Subic kept talking. Hall overheard the sergeant say, “Well, I can take you and show you.”

Marines Sickmann and Persinger were bound next to each other. They were approached by an English-speaking Iranian who had a cameraman with him. He asked them their names and what their jobs were.

“We’re pizza runners,” said Sickmann.

“We work for the laundry department,” said Persinger. “We clean laundry, and this guy”—nodding toward Sickmann—“he gets pizzas for all the marines. In fact, I’d like a pizza right now.”

They speculated on how long they would be held. Some felt it might be until Christmas. Sickmann, who had heard that his captors were students, assumed that like American college students they would all be finishing their school year next May, so he predicted it might last until then.

Dinner was served in shifts in the residence kitchen. Young women in jilbabs threw frozen steaks into frying pans, cooked them until the outsides were brown, and served them—inside, the meat was still frozen. Richard Queen was not allowed to use a knife, so he picked up the slab of meat and tried to gnaw off a corner.