Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (25 page)

Those weeks before Khomeini’s return were like living in the calm before a pending eruption. The headless regime’s army and police were still in place, people were still going to work every day, things appeared normal but you could feel the pressure building. When Khomeini’s plane landed all hell had broken loose. Revolutionary forces rose up everywhere to tear down all remnants of the shah’s power. In the days before it happened, Metrinko got a tip from some Iranian friends allied with the revolt that the prison in Tabriz was going to be liberated, so he had visited the young Americans locked up there and advised them to come directly to the consulate when they were freed. He gave them small maps to show them the way and promised not to leave without them. He liked them. They were victims, nice, adventurous kids who had been given two hundred dollars each to drive cars to Tehran during their school break. They had delivered the cars as promised, but had been arrested when they tried to take the train west out of Iran with their money back to Europe. Their passports indicated they had entered the country with cars, and now they were leaving without cars, and without having paid the customs fee. So they went to jail, charged with smuggling. They had been there through Iran’s eruption. Now they were an afterthought, accused of a minor crime by a regime that no longer existed. As predicted, the prison was stormed and all of its inmates freed. The four arrived on foot, elated, still wearing their inmate pajamas and slippers, enormously relieved to be free but now imprisoned with Metrinko in the consulate with the country coming apart all around them. They were joined by four fellow escapees, two Germans, an Austrian, and an Australian.

Tabriz was in chaos. Anger, revenge, religious fervor, and revolutionary zeal combined to unleash a nationwide spasm of bloodletting, a season of murder. Many associated with the former regime were hunted down and killed, policemen, bureaucrats, local and national leaders, civilian and military. In some cities the entire police force was executed. Nobody was even keeping track. The raid on the prison had been followed by an attack on the main military base and a general collapse of authority. The armory had been looted and the streets were full of excited amateur gunmen with a seemingly limitless supply of ammunition. It seemed as if everybody was fighting everybody. Metrinko heard by radio that the American embassy in Tehran was in danger of being overrun. Telephone service was up and down, but mostly down. Much of the fury at large was anti-American, but for a time it seemed to bypass the consulate, which looked empty. His guards and staff had melted away. Metrinko and his eight charges huddled down. It was too dangerous to go outdoors, even inside the compound. Next door, a SAVAK crew was cornered and fighting for its life. Once they counted more than seventy rounds fired in a minute. Metrinko had been able to arrange with the besieged staff in Tehran to have a team of Americans waiting for him and the students across the border in Turkey, but with the violence in the streets there was no safe way to move. They were stuck and for a time, it appeared, forgotten. Metrinko had put his charges to work helping him to destroy every letter, file, memo, note, and report in his office.

On Valentine’s Day, the embassy in Tehran was invaded. In Tabriz, Metrinko was in his office when he saw a group of armed men in Iranian air force uniforms come over the compound’s back wall. They opened fire on the consulate, shooting out the windows. He dropped to the floor behind the desk and made a quick phone call—the phone was working!—to an Iranian friend, Ali, who was part of an activist group allied with the revolution. The man’s mother-in-law picked up the phone. Metrinko told her who he was and what was happening before the armed invaders burst in, grabbed him, and tied his hands.

Metrinko and his charges were marched to one of the kangaroo courts that were in full swing throughout the city. This one was a former government building, the Youth Palace, which had been commandeered. There were several bodies dangling from a tree in the front yard. They were placed in a holding room with others awaiting their turn before the kangaroo court—Metrinko would later see some of those he waited with hanging with the others out front.

They were rescued by his friend Ali, who had gone immediately to the Youth Palace when he got the message from his mother-in-law, but he’d arrived there before Metrinko and the others had. No one at the palace knew what he was talking about. Ali had then set out on a dangerous search, braving heavy gunfire on the streets, going from one place to another until he finally ended up where he had started, and found his friend Metrinko and the eight others. Ali’s revolutionary credentials and bravado, combined with many shouted threats, succeeded in getting Metrinko released, but then the American consul refused to leave without his eight young companions. Finally, the self-appointed enforcers relented, and all nine of them were allowed to go. Ali took them all to his family home for dinner and then delivered them back to the consulate, where he left them under the protection of a group of revolutionary soldiers.

Still the saga continued. No sooner had Ali left than the soldiers guarding them turned on them, ordering the nine to sit on chairs in the living room, pointing guns at them. The guards spoke to each other in Turkish. They had heard Metrinko speaking with his friend in Farsi and never dreamed he was also fluent in Turkish. So the soldiers spoke freely over the course of the day, as higher-level revolutionary figures came and went from the consulate. The men were bored with the detail and began planning among themselves to shoot Metrinko and the students in the yard that night and claim the group had tried to escape. Metrinko didn’t bother to tell the students what he had learned; he figured they were better off not knowing. But when a higher-ranking official stopped by to check in on them that afternoon, Metrinko told him that he had some communications gear in a back bedroom he wanted to show him. When they retreated there, Metrinko hurriedly explained the guards’ plan.

“I can’t do anything about them now,” said the official. “They aren’t my men. Hold on, and I’ll try to get some help.”

Some time later the official returned with a new group of soldiers to replace the guards who had planned to kill them.

Over the next two days, whatever semblance of leadership that existed in Tabriz decided that it would be best to ship Metrinko and the others to Tehran, where, for the time being, a deal had been worked out to protect the U.S. embassy. Metrinko outfitted his charges with his wardrobe; he was five-ten and wide and the students were much taller and thinner. Ill-fitting clothes and all, they had made their comical arrival just as the bulk of the American mission was being evacuated. Buses were taking wives and children and unessential personnel to the airport in convoys. The American students all returned home safely. Metrinko had no intention of going home. Things were getting interesting. That was when he had agreed to stay on in Tehran as a political officer.

He had reason to remember all this in November as he sat listening to the guards laughing and joking freely with one another. But Metrinko’s fly-on-the-wall status was short-lived. A student shouted a question in Farsi at one of the other hostages, and the man, rattled and at a loss, said, “Ask Metrinko, he speaks Farsi.”

So that was that. In the chummy atmosphere that prevailed for the rest of that evening, Metrinko had sat with a young Iranian science student and translated an article from Time magazine for him. He had been a teacher in his years with the Peace Corps, and the role came naturally. Then he was escorted into another room and allowed to watch a TV program. He had tea and chatted amiably with several of the students. He found them quite intelligent and politically astute. They told him that they had cased the embassy by coming in to apply for visas, mapping out where all the buildings and offices were. They were very proud of themselves.

“It had to be done,” one of them told him. “We had to do something to show people that Americans would not be allowed to regain control of Iran.”

Metrinko told them the truth about himself, and they didn’t believe him. They demanded that he open his safe for them and he complied. Inside were a few papers, nothing important. He did not keep many files in his office. The most damaging thing, what he worried about, was his personal directory, full of names, addresses, and phone numbers, which he kept at his apartment. He figured it was only a matter of time before they found that. Any of his many friends listed there could be subjected to the dictates of this inquisition. In this first interrogation session he was relieved right away to see that the papers in his safe contained nothing even remotely compromising.

His questioners were persistent but not abusive. The daily sessions continued over weeks. Eventually they stopped blindfolding him, which he saw as a bad sign; it suggested that they were not afraid of his knowing who they were. Over time, they grew more irritated and hostile. He was not telling them what they wanted to hear. They told him that they knew he was lying and tried to coerce him by keeping him awake all night, but then they would leave him alone for hours during the day. Metrinko had a fortunate facility for dozing. He had always been able to put his head back and nod off. It was a talent that had gotten him in trouble in meetings from time to time, but now it served him well. Whenever he was left alone, even briefly, he would nap. It was enough to foil their amateur efforts at sleep deprivation. Metrinko had not been trained in methods of resisting interrogation, but he found he could manage quite well. The sessions were a welcome break from staring at the walls. He was able to figure some things out from the questions they asked. For instance, he was heartened by the realization that his captors had no access to Laingen or Tomseth, who had left for the Foreign Ministry before the takeover. They were asking him questions that both men could and would have answered readily, but which Metrinko could not. That meant the chargé and his assistant had either gotten away or were being protected by the provisional government (he did not know that it had resigned).

Like Koob, Metrinko went through his entire history in the foreign service with them, from high school in Scranton to Georgetown, to his work in Turkey for the Peace Corps. He talked their ears off. He gladly told them about the two years he had spent teaching English at a literacy training center outside Tehran, how he had joined the foreign service five years earlier, and then had spent two more years in Turkey, as a staff aide, before moving to Damascus. He had been in Tabriz since 1977 and had come to Tehran only after bozos like them had closed the consulate there. Of the things he could be open about he spoke freely. He was especially glad to tell them about the lovely dinners and drinks, cocktails and wine—especially the cocktails and wine—he had shared with the families of prominent religious leaders. Still angry at the Taleghani brothers for what he thought had been a setup, making sure he was at the embassy to be taken along with the others, Metrinko talked freely about the late ayatollah, about how strongly it appeared that he had been set up and murdered by their pious religious bosses. What his captors saw as divinely inspired leadership, Metrinko saw as simply another ugly political faction using treachery and violence to prevail. He tried very hard to avoid mentioning the names of his friends. He would talk only about those he knew had already fled the country. After a session he would sit alone and go back over every question and answer, examining his performance and analyzing the questions they had asked to figure out what was going on. In a sense, he was still doing his job.

In the beginning, Metrinko was kept with a large group of his colleagues on the floor of the consulate waiting room, but in mid-November he was isolated in a chancery basement room. It was a very small, windowless storeroom that was about ten feet long and narrow enough so that when he held his arms outstretched he could touch both walls. When he held his hands over his head they touched the ceiling. The air was stale and there was a fluorescent light overhead that was left on continuously. He was given an air mattress that pretty much covered the floor space.

This is where he would spend the next five months.

Despite their clumsy and sometimes comical methods, the students did make some headway toward sorting out the embassy and learned things that would have dire, even fatal, consequences for some Iranians who had cooperated with the American mission. They suspected from the start that Bill Daugherty, the former marine flier, was a spy, and believed wrongly that he was the station chief. He was the one whose office on the east wing of the chancery’s top floor had the biggest safe, and under duress on the first night he had relented and opened it. They knew from preliminary interviews with several hostages that that part of the chancery was CIA.

Daugherty was treated like any other hostage in the first days, shuffled from room to room in the staff cottages, where a marine showed him how to slip a piece of wire into the lock of his handcuffs and pop them open at will, a great relief. He wore the cuffs whenever the guards were present, but when he could, such as at night with his hands under a blanket, he would slip them off. On the evening of November 22, he was taken from a cottage and placed alone in the office of Tom Ahern, his boss. Everything had been removed from the room but a desk, a chair, and a foam-rubber pallet on the floor. Its windows overlooked the front of the chancery and Takht-e-Jamshid Avenue, which seemed permanently jammed with demonstrators. Their angry din echoed in the empty space beneath the room’s high ceiling, rattling Daugherty, who fantasized about easing down over the city in his old F-4 and painting the crowded avenue with a long string of napalm.

After a few days alone in this space, Daugherty was taken for six interrogations over the next two weeks. He was prepared for them, and had given a lot of thought about how to handle himself. Years earlier he had taken a training program for marine aviators who might find themselves in a North Vietnamese prison camp and had been through exercises designed to help resist hostile interrogation—he had even been locked for several hours in a small metal box. He had already decided that his circumstances in Iran did not require him to adhere to the military code of “name, rank, and serial number.” Since he was in Iran ostensibly as a foreign service officer, not a spy, he was determined to act like a State Department employee, that is, he would talk at length and try to engage his captors in dialogue. He had two personal guidelines. He would do his best not to reveal secrets or to say or do anything that might make life harder for his fellow captives.