Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (20 page)

They both knew immediately who “they” were.

Koob and Royer set down the phones, walked quickly down a back staircase, and left the building through a door to the parking lot. A secretary was waiting in a car, and she pulled out of the lot and into the busy street in front of the campus. As part of her preparations for this, Koob had phoned the West German Goethe Institute and had been assured of safe haven there by its director. The institute was only three blocks away, and she and Royer were received warmly. They sipped tea and discussed their next move when a secretary from the society called to say that the “students” who had come for her had left. So Koob and Royer went back to their own complex and once again successfully dialed up the connection to Washington.

She kept the line open until the students arrived again late that afternoon. Koob and Royer tried to sneak out the back door again with Lillian Johnson, one of the embassy secretaries who had been stranded at the airport the day before waiting for a flight home, but this time the students had surrounded the building.

Koob and Johnson hid in a basement lavatory, crouched silently in a toilet stall, but were eventually found. As the three were being driven through slow-moving traffic across Tehran toward the embassy, Koob contemplated jumping from the car with her colleagues and making a run for it, but she decided against it. Where would they go? In the present climate, if Iranians on the street saw Americans being pursued they might attack. The students in the front seat were talking softly to each other and she strained to listen. They were speaking in Arabic. They must have known she understood some Farsi.

As they approached the embassy neighborhood, Koob could hear the roar of the demonstrators outside. It was an ugly, hateful sound, “Magbar Cartar! Magbar Ahmrika!” Their car was enveloped by the mob as they approached the gates to the motor pool. Revolutionary Guards pushed the crowds back, but people leaned toward the car waving their fists, their faces twisted with hatred. One of the Iranians in the front seat triumphantly held up Royer’s radio and briefcase to the guards at the gate, as if to say, Look, we caught another American spy red-handed!

They were let out of the car near the motor pool gate and advised to keep their heads down as they ran the short distance into the compound. Once inside they were instructed to sit on a small plot of tall grass behind the chancery. It had been raining the day before but the ground and grass were already dry, even dusty. A short while later they were led to the second of the three staff cottages by a female guard in a chador, the full-length black drape worn over the head. Inside, passing the living room, Koob caught a glimpse of some of the embassy men tied to chairs. Royer found it strange that none of the Americans he saw, all of whom looked him up and down as they entered, uttered a word of greeting. Koob was searched, first hesitantly by a young woman clearly embarrassed to have her hands on her, and then a second time, more aggressively, by the same young woman after she had been instructed to do a more thorough job. This time she told Koob to remove her dress and then carefully patted down the American woman’s ample girth front and back and ran her fingers through Koob’s thin brown hair. Dressed again, she was reunited with Royer.

The guards demanded that they turn over their jewelry. Koob handed over her rings.

“One of our experts will examine these,” a guard told her.

“For what?” she asked and was amused to be informed that they were checking for communications or homing devices. If it hadn’t been so serious, Koob was inclined to laugh.

In another room, Royer was asked to hand over his wallet and watch, which was examined carefully—for what, he wasn’t sure—and handed back to him. His briefcase was opened gingerly, as if it might hold some kind of explosive device. As a veteran ICA officer, Royer was used to people in foreign countries assuming he was a spy—his was only another obscure American foreign operation with its own set of initials, wink, wink—even though his primary responsibility had always been to teach English. Any suspicions these young Iranians had about the initials ICA were overwhelmingly reinforced by the bulky two-way radio he had been carrying. There was nothing he could say that would explain that satisfactorily to this bunch. He could only look on and patiently deny that he was a spy. Inside the case was a set of prized gold Cross pens. The students examined these with care, unscrewing the tops and taking out the ink cartridges, shaking them and holding the parts up to their ears. It was all Royer could do to keep from chuckling. He was told to remove his shoes, and the heels and linings of these were checked. His possessions were then placed in plastic sandwich bags and he was promised he would get them back.

He was put in a bedroom with Koob, who hadn’t slept more than a few hours the night before. She was overcome with fatigue but was too anxious to fall asleep. There was a steady procession of students in and out of their room, male and female. The embassy compound had become an exhibit, with all of these Americans on display. Groups of young Iranians, obviously excited and fascinated, would enter the room and gape at them for a few minutes, then move off to look at the next group of “spies” on display.

Koob finally fell asleep late in the night. Blankets had been hung from the windows to block out glare from the spotlights outside. She wrapped her green wool cape around her and on the other bed Royer slept in his tweed sport coat. She had finally dozed off when she was awakened by a voice.

“Hahnum,” said a male guard, using the polite honorarium for a woman. “You mustn’t do that.”

“Do what?” she asked.

“Signal your partner with your eyes.”

Koob blinked with astonishment and asked him to explain.

“Your eyes,” he said. “You mustn’t use them to signal your partner. That is foolish and dangerous.”

When the guards learned the next morning that Koob and Royer were not husband and wife, they were appalled to have left them together in the same room and immediately separated them.

There were now sixty-six hostages.

Two days after the embassy takeover, General David Jones, chairman of the joint chiefs, and the rest of the Pentagon brass met in the “Tank,” the top-secret briefing room in the massive building’s inner rim, to hear what kind of emergency plan their staff had prepared for rescuing the hostages. A twelve-man team had been working around the clock for two days, sketching out a reckless thrust that, if necessary, could be attempted immediately.

From first word of the hostage taking, President Carter’s fear was that the students would begin executing the captives. What could the United States do? There were plenty of punitive options. Iran’s oil refineries and ports could be leveled, for one thing, and under such circumstances most Americans might applaud. That had been the underlying logic of the nuclear age: our enemies dared not attack because they would be annihilated. But the logic of deterrence seemed not to apply to rogue hostage takers in a country that celebrated martyrdom. If the threat of retaliation wasn’t enough, could the hostages be rescued? It would demand something a lot more difficult than air strikes, naval blockade, or bombardment. What was needed was a fast, pinpoint strike, one that relied on a few well-trained men who could descend on the embassy in a sudden, furious thrust. This, of course, was why Colonel Charlie Beckwith’s new counterterrorism force had been created.

When the Delta Force commander had arrived at Fort Bragg on the first day of the takeover, he had told his men, “This is going to be a hard nut to crack.” He had hoped for something a bit simpler their first time out.

He had immediately sent his operations officer, Major Bucky Burruss, and a legendary special operations veteran, Dick Meadows, who was serving as a civilian adviser for Delta, to join the small planning cell that was setting up shop in the J3 Special Operations Division, behind a door labeled 2C840, which opened to an L-shaped suite of offices that even in the inner rim of the Pentagon was secured with coded locks. Led by Major General James B. Vaught, a lean, flinty-looking man with a deeply lined face who was both a scholar and a decorated battle veteran, the entire operation was going to be run “off line,” which meant it would have no visible budget and would be unknown even at the highest levels of Pentagon bureaucracy. Even the mission’s code name, Rice Bowl, was deceptive; it was meant to suggest an operation in Asia. General Vaught had received his orders in London to report back to Washington “ASAP, on the next direct flight,” which had happened to be an Air France Concorde. It got him to the Pentagon fast, but the general had charged the trip to his personal credit card, and it would be months before the army could be persuaded to reimburse him. To help maintain secrecy, Vaught spent much of his day working his regular job in the Pentagon heading an army counterterrorism command, and would drop down to the planning suite at odd hours of the day and night. Both Burruss and Meadows were decorated combat veterans. Burruss, whose Virginia drawl and fun-loving manner belied a serious and careful mind, had led a “Mike Force” battalion, a daring mobile strike unit made up primarily of Montagnard soldiers that operated in some of the most dangerous fields during the war in Vietnam. The smoother of the two was Meadows, who had fought in the Korean War as the army’s youngest master sergeant and had received a battlefield commission in Vietnam running a special forces unit that captured more North Vietnamese troops than any other. Dark-haired, impeccably groomed, with a quiet, unflappable, and unassuming manner, he seemed more like a business executive than an elite soldier. Both men were prototypes of the soldiers who made up Delta Force, in that their manner and appearance were deceptive. They didn’t look or act like soldiers. In fact, they were two of the best the army had, not just smart but possessed of battle-tested cunning and courage. They were tough, poised, irreverent to the edge of cynical, and impatient with military bureaucracy. They had been told to design a mission that would leave for Tehran directly from American soil without intermediary stops.

The Tank is a small conference room with a table large enough for the four service chiefs and the chairman, and with a few chairs on the side for staff members. Burruss presented what they had. The sandy-haired, ruddy veteran was nervous. There was no higher-ranking audience in the American military.

“Obviously, we don’t want to do this,” he began, and explained that with more time a better plan could be devised. Tehran was remarkably isolated from an American military point of view. The nearest friendly country was Turkey, but given how important it was to surprise the hostage takers, asking for help there posed an impossible security risk. Asking any nation other than a close ally for help invited leaks. Just to position forces in Turkey would arouse suspicion—the Soviets kept a vigilant watch on American troop deployments from satellites and high-flying aircraft, especially in that part of the world. There was already a fleet of warships in the Persian Gulf, five hundred miles away. The United States did not have helicopters that could fly those kind of distances without refueling, and choppers that refueled in air were not yet available. Launching a mission without help in the region seemed impossible, but asking for help would likely betray the mission. Burruss said that Delta Force could assault the compound and free the hostages, but getting there and back was a different order of problem.

What they had come up with in two days was a plan so reckless it was just shy of ludicrous. It proposed parachuting soldiers at low level into an area east of Tehran where there was a road that was usually busy with trucks. They would then hijack the vehicles needed to drive their force into central Tehran, raid the embassy compound, load the hostages on the trucks, and then drive and fight their way to the Turkish border four hundred miles away. One variation of this plan, provided the Turkish government would cooperate, would be to fly helicopters in from that country and pick up the rescue force and freed hostages. Another variation called for driving the hostages out of the city either to an airport seized by a second team of soldiers or to a makeshift airstrip in the desert, where everyone could board planes and be flown out of Iran.

“As I said, we don’t want to do this,” reiterated Burruss, noting his audience’s disbelieving looks. The action would be accompanied by both punitive and diversionary air strikes and raids throughout Iran. One recommended target was the Abadan oil refinery; crippling key components there could effectively disable fuel oil production in Iran for months. Since it was the beginning of winter, there was little doubt such a loss would be felt throughout the country. The cell had already begun to identify and recruit Farsi-speaking soldiers or translators to take part in the action.

Burruss and Meadows explained how their men would choose an hour soon after midnight to storm the compound over or through the back walls, with the aid of a high-flying AC-130 gunship, which could lay down curtains of intense fire with great precision on the streets around the embassy. The raiding parties would be wearing night-vision devices, which would give them a major advantage as they took down the various buildings in the compound and rounded up the hostages. They had only a vague notion of where in the compound the diplomats were being held, most of it gathered from close satellite surveillance and TV reports; the CIA at that point had nothing to offer.

As the joint chiefs questioned and discussed the option, General Robert Barrow, the Marine Corps commandant, said he was uncomfortable with the whole plan, which prompted General E. C. Meyer, the army chief of staff, a hard-bitten character who was sitting with his feet up on the table, to quip: “These are soldiers, not marines.”

Accepting or rejecting this emergency plan was not an issue, it was the only plan, and if American diplomats were being publicly executed in Tehran the United States would have to try something. The principals left this meeting praying that wouldn’t happen. What the crash exercise had done was identify the biggest hurdle to such an operation: getting Delta Force in and getting them and the hostages out.