Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (22 page)

Then they were all told to lie prone on the cold concrete floor. Out of the bottom of Morefield’s blindfold he could see a drain on the floor. He heard the guards preparing their weapons.

For him the moment was surreal. Three years earlier, in March 1976, his nineteen-year-old son and namesake had been murdered in a holdup at a Roy Rogers restaurant in Fairfax County, Virginia. It was one of the most sensational and cruel murders in the D.C. area in many years. Young Morefield had been one of four workers who were forced to lay prone on the concrete floor of the restaurant’s walk-in refrigerator. The robbers then methodically shot each three times in the back of the head. It had been an agonizing loss that had left Morefield and his wife and daughter shattered. The pain had created a rift in his marriage, and he had accepted the Iran assignment (after initially turning it down) in part because he felt the need to escape for a while. And here he had managed to place himself in precisely the same predicament as his dead son, facedown on the concrete with a gun over his head. He felt himself entering into his son’s terrified last moments.

The muzzle of the rifle was pressed against the back of his head and he heard the click of the firing mechanism…then nothing. The chamber was empty.

When he was pulled back to his feet he was spent. The shock had been cathartic. He no longer felt as frightened and he knew two things. First, these people meant business and he was unlikely to be freed any time soon; and second, nothing they could do to him from then on could be worse. He was a man acquainted with the random unfairness and cruelty of life and had arrived at a hard-bitten acceptance of it. He calculated his odds of getting out of this alive at about 10 percent, but for him, dead or alive, the worst was over. His fear for himself and his anger at this situation were real, but paled in comparison to the helpless rage he had been carrying around with him for more than three years. If they killed him…well, he had seen his wife and daughter battle through the tragic and senseless loss of his son, so he knew they could cope with his loss if it came to that.

Bob Ode, the eldest of the hostages, seemed to feel the injustice of captivity more deeply than his colleagues. He had signed on for just a short tour in the Tehran consulate, and as the days dragged on, without a rescue or sign of release, his outrage grew. He had struggled briefly with the guards on the first day when they’d confiscated his jewelry, concerned particularly about losing his precious rings, one given to him by his parents on his long-ago twenty-first birthday and his wedding ring—he had met and married his wife, Rita, a fellow foreign service officer, twenty-two years earlier. He clenched his hands into fists and resisted as the guards tried to pry his fingers open.

“Leave him alone,” protested marine guard Rocky Sickmann. “He’s just an old guy.”

At sixty-four, Ode still bristled when he was called “old,” but he was grateful for the marine’s sentiment.

“You’re a bunch of goddamn thieves,” he told the guards, who eventually got his hands open and removed the rings, assuring him that he would get them back.

“Look,” said one, holding up a big yellow envelope with “Odie” written on it.

“You don’t even have my name spelled correctly. How in the hell are you ever going to get these things back to me?”

They took the rings.

“Goddamn thieves,” said Ode.

Ode was tall and thin, with a face that looked like it belonged in a Norman Rockwell painting, long and narrow with a high forehead and a chin that got lost somewhere between his lower lip and his collarbone. He wore big glasses that accentuated the narrowness of his face and magnified his eyes, which gave him, with his big nose, the slightly comical appearance of someone peering into a fish-eye lens. Four years earlier he had been forced out of the State Department because of its mandatory retirement age of sixty. The postwork lifestyle hadn’t suited him, or his family budget. He had gotten himself a real estate license and was making a decent living at that, but he had always been a world traveler, a kind of professional tourist, and selling homes in the Virginia suburbs didn’t excite him. So when the department began offering retirees a chance to take temporary postings around the world, filling in for full-time officers who needed a break, Ode had embarked on a series of foreign adventures. He had gone to Guyana to help out after the messianic preacher Jim Jones and his followers committed mass suicide, and had taken a three-month posting to Jamaica. In Tehran he was filling in for a consular officer who was taking a three-month medical leave. Ode had not even agreed to the full three months. He had stipulated that he would take the job only if he could be home in time for Christmas, so the department had enlisted him for only forty-five days, thirty of which were gone. He had spent his free time in Tehran taking long walks around the city and snapping pictures.

He lost his defiant, seen-it-all attitude only once in the first weeks, when his captors demanded that he tell them where he had been living. He had been using the apartment of the vice consul on leave, and he realized he didn’t know the address. He knew how to walk to the apartment, however, so he drew them a map.

A navy veteran of World War Two, he was so certain in the beginning that President Carter would attempt a rescue that he refused to remove his shoes. They were new ones, Hush Puppy loafers, and were still a little stiff and hard to pull on without a shoehorn. He had taken them off the first night, and it had been such a struggle to get them back on that he kept them on, for fear of being shoeless when the time came to run. He could see how disorganized and amateurish his captors were and figured they would be a pushover for any military unit with the smallest level of discipline and training. Surely somewhere in the multibillion-dollar American military arsenal was a commando unit similar to the Israelis who had made the rescue at Entebbe. He tried to picture in his mind how the attack would happen, how the American force would enter the building, how they would take them out. He was good to go.

He had no patience whatsoever for the idealism or rhetoric of his tormentors, and more than most of the hostages, perhaps with the license of old age, Ode flaunted his contempt. On the night of the second day the students had brought a camera crew through the residence and had awakened him with its bright lights. He rolled over and elevated a long, bony middle finger.

“This is for television!” one of the crew gasped.

Said Ode, lifting the finger still higher, “Yes, and this is for you.”

In the first week of his confinement, Limbert was roughly awakened.

“Come on,” the guard said. “Get up.”

His first thought was they were being released. A blanket was thrown over his head and he was led downstairs and placed in the back of an open truck with several other hostages. As they drove off, he reluctantly concluded that they were not bound for freedom. They stopped just a short distance away, still inside the compound, and were led into a large waiting room at the consulate. It was the room where visa applicants were lined up as they waited to submit their applications, windowless, with parallel rows of railings to control the flow of the lines, brightly lit by fluorescent ceiling strips. Limbert and the others were assigned blankets that were spread out on the hard floor. He counted nineteen other hostages, about one-third of the staff. Two armed guards roamed among them rapping long sticks against the railings, enforcing the rules against speaking or standing, and a third guard with a machine gun stood at one end of the room. They would spend the next two weeks there.

They communicated with gestures and facial expressions. Limbert was pleased to see that no one seemed unduly intimidated or upset. There were occasional chances to whisper to the person on the next blanket over, and a rumor made its way around the room that they were to be visited by some international figure, which made sense, because they continued to count the passing days with disbelief. Surely there would be a resolution soon. Occasionally the students would pass around copies of a document they had found in the seized files that they considered particularly damning. The only time Limbert got to stir from his blanket was when he had to use the toilet. He would stand, wait to be blindfolded, and then was led to the bathroom. The students distributed some magazines and books—Limbert got a copy of Apartment Life, which dealt with home decoration—and brought in fast food, mostly hamburgers, but once from the local Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet, which, despite the Iranians’ loathing for all things American, apparently was still thriving.

The first group of students who had taken them hostage was largely replaced. The new guards were about the same age as the first crowd but seemed all business. They rarely spoke to Limbert; he could see that any of them who began to converse with him was glared at by the others, so clearly they were under instructions not to interact with the American devils.

Limbert found a small way to break through that reserve at mealtime. He exploited ta’arof, the elaborate ritual protocol of Iran. When he was served food he would offer some to the student who delivered it.

“Please, before I take a bite, go ahead and have some of my food.”

“No, thank you,” the server would respond.

“But you must,” Limbert would insist.

“No, please, excuse me, but I wouldn’t dream of it,” the server would say, following the standard rules of this game.

The guards were disarmed by his fluency with their language and customs. As Limbert saw it, such moments forced them to set aside their stern demeanor and act more human.

Some of the military officers were annoyed by this behavior, which they interpreted as inappropriate cozying up to the enemy. It particularly bothered Colonel Leland Holland, an assistant defense attaché. When he overheard one of the young naval officers addressing a guard with what he regarded as excessive politeness, he took advantage of the first opportunity to whisper to his colleague, “Tell these motherfuckers to shove it. Don’t be so goddamn nice to them.”

After a few days on the hard consulate floor, the hostages were given mattresses, which were a terrific comfort, and which had the effect of more clearly defining each man’s space, which some found vaguely reassuring. The fear of execution was still strong. Richard Queen requested a pencil and piece of paper and wrote out a will to his parents, telling them, “I don’t expect to ever be seeing you again,…I love you more than I can say. Thank you for being my parents.”

Occasionally the higher-ranking students would come through trying to confirm the name and job of each captive. Limbert noticed that his colleagues were being taken off one by one, and would return hours, or sometimes days, later. He assumed they were being interrogated.

Bruce Laingen, the embassy’s indignant but ever hopeful chargé d’affaires, along with Tomseth and the embassy’s second-ranking security officer, Mike Howland, were undergoing captivity of a different sort. Still stranded at the Foreign Ministry, they were in the curious position of being both inside and outside the ordeal.

They had watched the provisional government collapse, which reduced them to being vagabond emissaries to a government that did not exist. In the first days they had been treated like diplomats, important men. They had received visitors from other embassies during the day in the ministry’s diplomatic reception room—struggling to keep themselves presentable in clothing they had worn day and night—and talked to Washington regularly by phone. Tomseth spoke fluent Farsi, so he translated the reports on television, radio, and in Tehran’s newspapers. They followed with hope and then disappointment the aborted mission of Clark and Miller. An effort at mediation by the Palestine Liberation Organization was reportedly under way, but, so far, had yielded no results.

They were not officially hostages. They had not been directly forbidden to leave for a friendly embassy, but even if they were not stopped on their way out, the practical problems were considerable. Any embassy that accepted them would itself become a target for these fanatics. How could they impose on their friends like that? And how could they just walk out on their colleagues? Staying on had its own logic. Laingen not only believed but expected that the outrage would be set right. After the failure of the Clark/Miller mission, there seemed to be no way for Washington to establish a dialogue with Iran. The crisis then worsened with a round of spiteful gestures. Carter froze six billion dollars of Iranian assets and suspended oil imports from Iran, and the imam responded by banning exports to America, which said, in effect, You can’t refuse to buy our oil because we refuse to sell it to you. The crisis was at a complete impasse. But so long as he stayed under the foreign minister’s feet, a constant reminder of the ongoing insult to his country and to their shared profession of diplomacy, Laingen felt there was always a chance that such a dialogue might begin with him.

They slept on sofas in the ministry’s long and narrow formal dining room and spent most of their time during the day in the reception area’s central salon, a larger room forty feet wide and seventy feet long. The wood floors were creaky, the ceilings high and hung with beautiful crystal chandeliers. It was a sunny, airy space. Large windows faced north toward the snowcapped mountains, but most days the city’s heavy smog completely cloaked the view. The ornate rugs were thin and faded with age and traffic. Unlike their colleagues, they were not bound, blindfolded, harangued, and interrogated, and they had access to the local news. Laingen, an avid tennis player, was used to being outdoors and exercising, and as the ordeal crept along through the first week, and then into another, he could not recall a time when he had been so long indoors. A kindly official in the protocol section had brought them clean socks and underwear, so they could alternate, washing the dirty underclothes in the morning and hanging them on the legs of the table leaves that were set upside down on the dining table. They could still communicate with Washington via telex, but because it was an open line they could not have candid exchanges.