Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (19 page)

“You can’t use that story,” Carter told him.

Valeriani had already alerted his bosses in New York, who were excited to have it first. Valeriani said he didn’t think he could stop them, so the White House intervened with top executives to hold the story.

“We don’t have formal permission yet for them to land in Tehran,” explained Carter. “If you run the story tonight, it will make it look like we are putting pressure on them. It could kill the mission.”

NBC agreed to sit on the story, but not for long.

Monday morning brought sunshine to Tehran. It slanted in through the tall windows of the ambassador’s residence, which was now crowded with Iranian guards and blindfolded Americans tied to chairs or beds or scattered on floors everywhere. In fewer than twenty-four hours the carefully planned demonstration had stirred an international storm. Protests would come from most of the world’s nations, but there was also approval. The embassy seizure had tapped a well of Muslim resentment that stretched well beyond the borders of Iran. In practical terms it was nothing more than a cheap shot—the embassy had been defenseless—but symbolically it was a major blow.

The students who had spent a cramped night with their hostages didn’t understand this yet, but they could feel it. Overnight, with Khomeini’s endorsement, they had become national heroes. It was as if they had captured a dragon. The jubilant throngs ferociously cheered as the embassy’s new occupiers carried out trash in American flags or led an American out a door bound and blindfolded. Their glee rattled the walls and vibrated the floors. The crowd also acted as a human shield, protecting its new young champions from an anticipated American counterattack. The imam’s decision to endorse the takeover had dramatically undercut the provisional government and strengthened the hand of religious radicals.

Inside the residence and at various other places where hostages were being held on the compound, the almost giddy mood of the first night had evaporated. After a traumatic day and night, the new morning brought a sense of heightened risk and darker consequences.

“No speak! No speak!” the guards kept shouting.

They seemed fearful, as though expecting an attack. Some of the hostages’ chairs had been moved directly in front of windows, apparently to inhibit anyone trying to shoot their way in. Nearly all of the students were now armed, many with weapons they recovered from the embassy, and which they were unsure how to use or even hold safely. Some of the young men strutted triumphantly, cocking and recocking their new toys. The military men among the American captives cringed. They figured it was only a matter of time before there was an accident.

Joe Hall noticed that one guard across the dining room was casually cradling a shotgun that was pointed right at him. The guard even had his finger resting on the trigger as he chatted animatedly with one of his comrades. Hall finally got the attention of another guard, closer to him, and asked, “Could you ask that guy to point that thing somewhere else?”

The request was relayed to the guard with the shotgun, who immediately pointed it at the ceiling and gave Hall a sheepish smile.

In a sense, the enthusiastic endorsement of their action had called the students’ bluff. The overwhelming acceptance of their act trapped them in it; rooted them in the spotlight. It was both exciting and frightening. The tension was evident in the way guards were now shouting at the hostages and treating them much more roughly. It alarmed Ibrahim Asgharzadeh, the tall young man with a neatly trimmed beard who had come up with the idea of seizing the embassy. He sensed that control of the event had already slipped out of his and the other students’ hands, that powerful men had moved into position behind them. In their planning sessions, he and the other students had imagined something nonviolent and symbolic; they would treat the American captives gently and with respect while at the same time dramatizing to the whole world the offended sovereignty and dignity of Iran. Instead, some of the captives had been paraded blindfolded before threatening, jeering crowds. Some had been threatened with guns and roughed up. While he and the other original planners remained ostensibly in charge, the others they recruited, men like Mohammad Hashemi and his crew, the men with guns, seemed to be pursuing their own agenda. The demonstration had become something else, but they were not free to leave. History had them in its grip, protesters and hostages alike.

But most of the hostage takers basked in their sudden enormous popularity, at least for the first few days. They held press conferences at the embassy to display the piles of shredded documents, the smashed communications equipment in the vault, and the invisible ink kit they had found in Ahern’s office. They were particularly thrilled with the Bubble. It all seemed to make a compelling case for the students’ claim that the embassy had been engaged not in diplomacy but in espionage. Individual students took turns mounting the walls of the chancery to harangue the adoring multitudes and lead them in prayers. The various student committees scrambled to organize food preparation and living arrangements for the hostages, who it seemed they were going to be watching for longer than expected.

For the hostages, the anger many had felt in the first hours was largely overtaken by fear. They sat bound, blindfolded, and helpless, at the mercy of these young Iranians who seemed ill-organized, arrogant, and capable of anything. If they didn’t turn their captives over to the bloodthirsty mob, they might lead them all out and shoot them—some hostages had been threatened with both possibilities. Then there was the prospect of being killed in the crossfire of an American rescue attempt.

John Limbert was discovering degrees of terror. The political officer with the shaggy hair and dark-rimmed glasses had come down from the intense fear he had felt on the chancery steps the day before, when he had tried vainly to negotiate. The night before, he had relaxed and even felt a certain professorial rapport with some of his captors. But this morning dawned with dark flutters of foreboding. He kept hearing the sound of helicopters overhead. Could they be American? Would President Carter attempt a rescue? The thought at once excited and terrified him, but then he thought, no, it wasn’t possible. It’s the sort of thing that happens only in the movies. Where would American helicopters come from? Tehran was too far from any air base where Americans would be able to launch such an assault.

Every new sound had an ominous implication. Just behind him he heard crumpling paper, and because he knew the custom was to pin a list of the condemned’s crimes to his shirt before execution, he worried that such lists were being prepared.

Playing outside over a loudspeaker were the moody, ominous notes and brooding drums of Henry Purcell’s “Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary,” well known from the haunting electronic version in the movie A Clockwork Orange. The music formed a surreal backdrop to the viciously joyful chanting beyond the walls. The whole scene reminded Limbert of the “two minutes of hate” in George Orwell’s novel 1984, in which everyone stops for a brief period each day to publicly vent hatred for the country’s enemy, the source of all fear and evil. These “two minutes,” however, kept on hour after hour, and Limbert and his colleagues were the enemy.

Limbert tried to reason through his fear. There was nothing he could do. Either he would survive this or not. They would probably all be shot. That was the worst thing that could happen. Everyone dies. Perhaps this was his time. He decided that he had lived a good thirty-six years. He thought of his wife, Parvaneh, who was in Saudi Arabia with his children. They were no doubt worried about him. The prospect of their grief over his death pained him. Combined with the chanting and the soaring funereal music of Purcell, these thoughts were chilling. Then he had a different thought. He still had plane tickets to Saudi Arabia. He was scheduled to fly there on Friday for a visit. This thing would probably be over by then, and what a story he would have to tell! God, I hope I’m out by then. I hope I make that flight. Maybe the crumpling paper sounds he heard were just someone reading a newspaper. If they were going to be shot, that would be better than to be turned over to that crowd. They would surely be lynched or torn limb from limb. Such thoughts made him shake. He tried to stop worrying about it, since there was nothing he could do to influence matters. He worked at accepting whatever came, but as he waited his mind turned these thoughts over and over.

It seemed bitterly ironic that he, John Limbert, of all people, had come to such a spot. He loved Iran, arguably more than any other American. He had first visited in 1962 when his father was working for the U.S. Agency for International Development. A college student, he had felt instantly at home. Everything about the place had fascinated him, its people, its history, its culture, its language. Limbert was a language sponge, and Farsi he found deeply melodic and beautiful. When he graduated from college he joined the Peace Corps and returned. He taught for two years in Kurdistan, where he had met and married Parvaneh. He had come back to the States to get a Ph.D. in history at Harvard, and then the two returned to Shiraz, where Limbert finished his thesis and took a job teaching at the university. He had left that to join the foreign service, and, given his background, he was immediately asked if he would like to be assigned to Tehran. He declined, in part because he wanted to try something new, but also because he disapproved of the relationship between the United States and the shah. He did not want to be party to that policy.

Only after the shah’s flight had he agreed to return, and when he did in August he had found the revolution’s potential to be thrilling. In former years, political discussion in Iran had always been fearful and muted. When people spoke about issues and current events they did so in hushed tones and in language laden with double meanings. Now politics was a loud public obsession. There were at least a hundred different newspapers, each barking a different line, and the TV, radio, and coffeehouses were filled with discussion and argument. The country was remaking itself, riding a burst of emotion and creative power that had been suppressed for a generation. Everything about the country was up for grabs. A new Iran was struggling to take shape, and Limbert was delighted to help design America’s new role in it.

At some point that first morning he was able to get a glimpse in the direction of the paper noise behind him and saw to his relief that one of his captors was reading a newspaper. Then the hostages were untied late in the afternoon, two at a time, and taken to the kitchen, where they were fed.

Limbert thought, They probably wouldn’t be feeding us if they were going to shoot us, and that was a turning point. Gradually, he was able to untie the knot in his stomach. Late on the evening of the second day, a group of his captors approached him with a Super 8 movie camera and a small cassette tape recorder. One by one, they were questioning the men tied to chairs.

“What is your name?” Limbert was asked in English.

He told them.

“What do you do?”

“I am the second secretary.”

That was all he said. The others in the room responded in the same way, offering only their name and job title.

As the night wore on, he and the others nagged at the guards to let them out of the chairs so that they could sleep, and eventually this was allowed. A long rope was used to tie their feet together; Limbert was bound this way to Charlie Jones. They stretched out on their backs on the floor, and for the first time in two days the second secretary dropped off into a heavy sleep.

Through that long second day there were still nine Americans attached to the embassy who were at large in Tehran. Kathryn Koob had waited out the beginning of the hostage crisis across the city at her Iran-America Society campus. After losing touch with the men in the embassy vault, she and her assistant Bill Royer and their staff had stayed on the phone with Washington all day and into the night, relaying whatever information they could find.

Koob was an officer in the International Communications Agency (ICA), a branch of the American foreign service (soon to be called the U.S. Information Agency) that dealt with cultural affairs. She was a big, wide, soft woman of prodigious energy and idealism, who brought a missionary zeal to her work. As she saw it, politics dealt with the things that kept people apart, but culture—theater, painting, literature—dealt with the things that tied all people together. She was an idealist but not a cockeyed one. She knew her effort to forge creative ties with this hate-filled new order would be fraught with difficulty. At her apartment she had a bag packed at all times in case there was an emergency evacuation, and she had sat in on the regular security briefing at the embassy where the practical risks had been evaluated. She and Bill Royer, who had arrived six weeks earlier, had been issued two-way radios to monitor the frequency used by the marine guards. In the event of an emergency they had been instructed not to call the embassy; it would only add to the confusion. So as their colleagues were taken hostage, Koob and Royer had stayed by the phones in Koob’s office.

Close to midnight Mark and Cora Lijek, Bob Anders, and Kathy and Joe Stafford arrived. They had been among those who just walked away from the consulate and, unlike some of their less fortunate colleagues, had made it back to their apartments. They manned the society’s little phone bank through the night while Koob and Royer got some sleep, curling up on couches. In the morning of the second day, the others left to link up with Lee Schatz, the agricultural attaché who had watched the takeover from his office in a high-rise across the street from the embassy and who was now being sheltered at the Swedish mission.

Suspecting that it was only a matter of time before her own complex would be overrun, Koob had some of the society’s most important papers—those defining its status as an Iranian organization—removed to the home of one of her board members, and even arranged to have several rugs she had borrowed from a local merchant returned. She and Royer were both on the phone to Washington when a staff member interrupted at about one-thirty in the afternoon to say, “They’re here.”