Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (24 page)

Those interrogated were struck by how determined their captors were to believe any scrap of information that buttressed their theory, and by how dismissive they were of anything that contradicted it. Joe Hall, the army warrant officer, found himself being questioned about the “wheat mold” plot he himself had made up as a joke on the night of the takeover.

Many of these sessions were conducted by Hussein Sheikh-ol-eslam, the gap-toothed former Berkeley student. In the second interrogation of Golacinski, Sheikh-ol-eslam presented the embassy security officer with evidence of his “secret counterrevolutionary activity.” In a search of his office and home they had found grenades and other weapons and a number of other suspicious items, including counterfeit twenty-dollar bills. They had also learned some things about him from Joe Subic, the unusually cooperative army sergeant whom the hostage takers had dubbed “Brother Subic.” The helpful sergeant had told them about a project Golacinski had undertaken with the U.S. Secret Service. He didn’t know much about it, just that Golacinski had been working on the project, and that it involved fake twenty-dollar bills. In fact, it was an investigation into an Iranian counterfeiting ring. Golacinski had a big file on the case that contained a stack of counterfeit notes; he had been excited by the opportunity to work on the case. His interrogators, however, surmised from the suspicious title “Secret Service” and the counterfeit bills a vague plot to somehow undermine the Iranian economy by flooding the country with fake American currency. It wasn’t clear exactly how this was supposed to have worked, which is one of the things Sheikh-ol-eslam wanted Golacinski to explain. The files revealed that Golacinski had helped question some of the suspected Iranians, so to the other allegations against him was added the label “torturer.”

“Where are the rest of your weapons?” Sheikh-ol-eslam asked him.

“I don’t have any more weapons.”

“Why were you torturing Iranians?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I have never tortured anyone.”

He told Sheikh-ol-eslam about guard shifts and talks with the local police about problems at the gates, and whenever he got the chance he asked a question. Sheikh-ol-eslam, in particular, could not resist the chance to hold forth on his theories. He explained to the security chief how in the United States oppressed minorities and politically enlightened Americans were rallying behind Khomeini and assured him that the revolution in Iran was just the beginning. Eventually the whole world would embrace the perfection of Islamic heaven on earth. “The American people will revolute!” he said.

Golacinski listened happily. So long as Gaptooth was holding forth, he didn’t have to say anything, which suited him fine.

Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Dave Roeder was privy to national secrets in his defense attaché job; he held one of the most important and sensitive positions at the embassy so as he awaited his interrogation, he plotted an opening gambit.

Seated on a chair in a room he thought was the chancery basement, blindfolded, he heard male voices speaking in Farsi and was then addressed by a woman who spoke flawless, American-accented English.

“Who are you?” was the question. The voice belonged to Nilufar Ebtekar.

She was a round-faced young woman with doe eyes and a pretty smile who was among several fluent English-speakers recruited by the students after the takeover. She had spent part of her childhood in Philadelphia while her father had worked on his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, and she had fully absorbed the language. In fact, when she had returned to Iran as a young girl, her English had been better than her Farsi. At Amir Kabir University, she was formally a second-year chemical engineering student, but she had long since grown more interested in the turbulent postrevolutionary politics playing out on campus. She had been raised in a Western-style home but had embraced the distinctively political Islam taught by Ali Shariati and others, who subscribed to the traditional leftist belief that capitalism was, at its core, the systematic exploitation of the weak. In the years prior to the revolution, she had come to see the popularity of American culture and consumerism among her peers as evidence of a Western plot to undermine Iranian culture and traditional morality and to further the imperialist designs of the United States. She had embraced hijab as symbols of her liberation from this plot and wore a black chador that covered everything except her face. Ebtekar was one of many smart young Iranian women swept off their feet by the revolution, who despite their education and ambition voluntarily adopted the submissive role accorded women by the Koran. She regarded submission as liberation. It offered freedom from capitalism’s soulless marketing of female sexuality. Unlike the women of an earlier generation, who covered themselves out of modesty, Ebtekar covered herself out of pride. Her black robes and veils announced her Islamist beliefs. She had actually met Shariati once, in 1977, before he had fled Iran for London, where he had died weeks later. Along with many students who for years had circulated his banned writings and lectures hand to hand on Iran’s campuses, Ebtekar was inspired by his vision of Islam as a divine third force, a deeply rooted traditional alternative to the demons of capitalism and communism that were at that time vying to control the world.

She knew Mohammad Hashemi and several of the other leaders of the protest, and three days after the takeover she was approached on campus and asked to help out with interpretation and “public relations.”

The next morning Ebtekar had presented herself at the front gate and was immediately introduced to the “Central Committee.” Despite some hostility from male students who disliked the idea of a female spokesman, she would soon become the public face of the hostage takers. She was thrilled in every way by the action, which she saw as a great victory of righteousness over evil, an historic and world-altering event that she was privileged to join. Thrust before the cameras to answer questions from the press, local and international, she became famous overnight in Iran and infamous in the United States. The day after she started, she was visited at the front gate by a starstruck delegation from a shoe factory where she had taught for several months as a volunteer in a literacy program. Her former students were delighted that their teacher had become one of the “conquerors of the embassy.” They carried a banner that read, “All Our Sufferings Are from America.” Ebtekar was moved; the encounter convinced her that she and the other students were the true representatives of the people.

Inside the compound she worked as an interpreter.

“I am Lieutenant Colonel Dave Roeder,” was the answer to the question she had posed to the former fighter pilot. “I’m the assistant air force attaché of the United States.”

“No, you’re not,” she said.

The interrogator spoke in Farsi again, and Ebtekar said, “We have found evidence in your embassy here that you are a member of the CIA.”

Roeder said nothing.

In fact, they said they had found a copy of a recent memo from CIA station chief Ahern to Laingen asking what classified operations Roeder had been briefed about prior to his arrival. This they said, confirmed that he was secretly “See-ah.” Roeder ignored them. It was the approach he had decided on. In the first session he would tell them his name and rank…period. They could do whatever they wanted with him, it was all he was going to say. So he sat silently, which he found easier to do blindfolded. He was asked a few more questions but he continued to pretend he hadn’t heard. Years before, in his survival school training class, Roeder had gotten the instructors angry using this tactic. They told him that the only reason he had the nerve to pull the silent act was because he knew he was taking part in a training exercise, but in a true war experience, where the fear was real and the threat of punishment, torture, and execution was real, nobody had the guts to play that game for long. By holding his tongue, Roeder had decided to prove an old point to himself.

He heard chairs move and then people leaving the room. He sat alone for about ten minutes but sensed the whole time that someone was standing right behind him. Then his questioners returned and his blindfold was removed. His questioner was a young man with a beard, and beside him sat Ebtekar.

She translated a series of questions and Roeder pretended he didn’t hear her. He found her manner particularly grating. Because her English sounded like the girl next door in America, there was something that seemed traitorous about her, even though Ebtekar was Iranian through and through. She had the smug self-righteousness of her cause; that was what truly burned Roeder and would so annoy the other Americans who dealt with her in the coming months. Her familiarity with America added profound emphasis to her rejection of it.

Ebtekar translated a few more questions and Roeder continued to stare off into space. They left him again, tying the blindfold back on. He sat alone for a long time, until he could see under his blindfold what looked to be the first glimmer of morning light from a basement window. When his questioners returned, the interrogator was angry.

“You had better start talking to him,” advised Ebtekar, “because I can’t protect you anymore.”

Roeder was amused by the idea of this woman “protecting” him. He said nothing. Then Ebtekar said something to the man in Farsi and he heard her get up and leave the room.

The air force officer tensed for whatever was going to happen next. He was hit in the head from behind by something that felt like wet cardboard. It didn’t hurt, but it surprised him and dazed him a little. Once again he heard Ebtekar enter the room and speak to the man in Farsi, and then leave.

This time he heard or sensed something coming, because he ducked and the blow missed him. His chair was violently upended, leaving him on his back, still tied to it, his feet sticking up in the air. He was being kicked, but the arms of the chair prevented his attacker from landing a solid blow. Then it stopped. He lay there a long time on his back, blindfolded, until about an hour later someone came in, untied him, and led him back upstairs.

If they had a hard time believing in the innocent intentions of Queen, Koob, Golacinski, and others, there was no way the students were ready to accept that Michael Metrinko was just a diplomat. Multilingual, well connected, widely traveled and hyperkinetic, he was made to order for spying.

He possessed a stubborn streak that at times made him oblivious to danger. He had spent the first few days of the takeover tied to a chair, irate about missing his dinner engagement and standing up his friends. He didn’t have time for this nonsense. What did they think they were going to accomplish by this stunt? One of the students offered him a cigarette and Metrinko had reflexively said no. He was dying for a smoke…but, no. It was a standard politeness; if you were going to light a cigarette, first you offered one to anyone else in the room. But under these circumstances the gesture was jarring. Accepting anything from these bastards, no matter how small, was acquiescence; it would imply that there was something normal or acceptable about the situation, which there was not. Metrinko resolved right then that, no matter how long this took, he would take nothing from them. He would deny them even the smallest satisfaction.

“This is ridiculous,” Metrinko told one of the students who spoke English. “The American government has accepted your revolution. We were trying to come to terms with it. We’re trying to find mutual interests, something to build on. What you’ve done is counterproductive.”

The Iranian shrugged off Metrinko’s argument. He made it clear that he didn’t believe a word of it, that he regarded everything this American spy said as a lie.

Metrinko didn’t speak to him in Farsi because he felt he would lose an important advantage if they knew he was fluent in the language. They were all conversing around him freely in their own language, assuming that he couldn’t understand. Having that secret had saved his life and that of eight other Westerners ten months earlier in Tabriz.

He had been there in the weeks after the shah fled, camped out at the empty American consulate. Iran was in its ecstasy of fulfillment and expectation. The executions had not yet begun. Metrinko was the only American in any official capacity to stay on in the northwestern city. When the facility was evacuated, he had offered to remain in part to keep watch on things, and in part because he felt responsible for four young Americans who had been locked up in a car-smuggling operation several months earlier. The consulate was a fifteen-acre walled estate with beautiful gardens, tennis courts, and a swimming pool. He had opened up the grounds to local Iranians the previous summer. Now whatever goodwill that gesture earned was forgotten in a tidal wave of anti-Americanism. Demonstrators gathered to stone and jeer the compound and to taunt its Iranian guards, who like most of the police and army (as opposed to the air force) had stayed loyal to the shah. They felt angry and betrayed by his departure. There had been a few testy moments at the gates. Once, when his army guards had responded to taunting demonstrators by leveling their guns, Metrinko had stepped between them and talked the guards into backing down. He felt relieved and even vindicated in those days, being the one American in Tabriz who had judged the situation safe enough to stay. At that point, no matter what was happening outside his walls, the maid and the cook were still showing up for work, the guards were still keeping watch, and he was enjoying himself, watching TV at night, drinking, smoking cigarettes, and playing cards. He was excited to be there, by the buzz of possibility in the air.

He was also glad that the shah was gone. The whole story of American involvement in Iran twenty-five years earlier was a disgrace. As a freedom-loving American, he was embarrassed by his country’s abandonment of its basic principles and by its support of the shah’s often heavy-handed regime. Back when he was a Peace Corps volunteer, he had seen some of his students hauled off to jail by the police just for speaking critically of government policy. He was in Tabriz because of his enthusiasm and fascination with the unfolding changes. He was looking forward to rebuilding relations between America and Iran on sounder footing. Metrinko wished the revolution well. He understood what most Iranians wanted from it. On the first of February he had watched on TV as Khomeini returned to Tehran, a day of intense national celebration. He and the guards heard the cheers and blasts and blaring car horns outside their walls. It wasn’t a bad thing, he thought. Public enthusiasm had elevated Khomeini to the status of a king, or a god, which made him dangerous, but most indications were that he would retire to Qom and continue leading a nice, quiet, religious life. The more secular revolutionaries who had surrounded him in Paris, men like Bazargan, Yazdi, and Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, had advocated free elections and an Islamic-flavored but essentially democratic state. There was reason to hope for a return to stability and a whole new and better Iran. America would have a lot of repair work to do, but there were deep connections between the two countries—financial, military, and geopolitical—that would be foolish to discard.