Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (38 page)

Queen experienced wide mood swings in captivity. He understood some Farsi, and he spent a lot of time eavesdropping on the guards, but he understood only about half of what was spoken and in his anxiety he tended to draw dramatic conclusions, good and bad. Once he thought he had heard two guards discussing plans to shoot all the hostages. He didn’t share the information with Hall, sparing his roommate the fright, but the prospect tormented him night and day. When the guards took away their shoes and replaced them with Iranian-made plastic sandals—with images of elephants embossed on the soles—Queen threw a fit. Hall didn’t understand why his roommate was so upset, but Queen had this image of being lined up in front of a firing squad wearing goofy plastic slippers. The day he had feared passed without incident.

When he thought he’d heard good news, Queen did share it. One day he was convinced that the guards had been discussing the purchase of plane tickets to fly the hostages home. He was sure he’d heard the airlines Alitalia and Lufthansa mentioned. He told Hall and their excitement grew.

As the day approached, Queen was counting down the hours. He woke up on the appointed morning filled with joy. As he returned from his morning wash, he whispered happily to a hostage passing him in the hall, “We’re going home!”

When he got back to the room he asked a guard, “When are they going to take us out?”

“Take you out?” said the guard. “What do you mean?”

“When are we going to be released?”

“You aren’t,” the guard said.

Queen was crushed. He spent the better part of that day motionless on his mattress, his face turned to the wall. He cursed himself for letting his hopes get so high and concluded that the guards were doing it to him on purpose. They knew he spoke some Farsi, but not a lot, and was convinced they were toying with him.

While some of the guards were petty and even cruel, others were kind, in particular a tall, slender guard with a long hook nose, mustache, and sideburns named Akbar. He dropped by and asked Queen and Hall if they would like anything from their apartments. They both made lists. Queen wrote down blue jeans, changes of underwear, his beloved, well-traveled “War Between the States” board game, a Lord of the Rings game, pipes, and tobacco. Hall made up his own list. Weeks later Akbar brought Queen two pairs of jeans, two shirts, a blue sweater, and much-appreciated clean well-fitting underpants—the long-suffering vice consul had been wearing the undersized drawers for weeks. There was nothing for Hall. As he had surmised weeks before, his apartment had been ransacked and all his possessions had vanished. Queen sorted his bounty and shrugged apologetically at his roommate.

The young vice consul wrote a letter to his parents and his brother Alex: “This past week I was hoping, praying, pleading to God so hard that I would be able to return home to you in time for Christmas, but I guess to no avail.”

Queen didn’t mention something troubling that had occurred shortly before Christmas. In the shower one day he noticed that his left arm and hand felt numb, a peculiar sensation he had never felt before. He thought it was probably because he had slept on that side and had curled his arm under his body in an awkward way. When it didn’t go away he mentioned it to Hall.

“You ever have numbness in your hand?” he asked.

“You mean like pins and needles? Like when your circulation is cut off?” said Hall.

“No, more like what you’d feel if you plunged your hand in snow and kept it there for a very long time.”

Hall thought he should ask to have it checked out.

Queen decided to wait. Maybe it would go away. He didn’t connect it with his occasional bouts of wooziness and took neither symptom very seriously. He had no reason to suspect his body would betray him in an important way. He didn’t look it, but Queen was an exceptional athlete. In high school his tall, lean frame had breezed through subminute quarter miles like clockwork. Ailments and injuries had always gone away quickly. But this felt truly odd, unlike anything he had experienced, and over time it didn’t diminish; it worsened. Finally he told a guard about it and they sent a young pharmacy student to look at him. The druggist-in-training diagnosed the numbness as a reaction to a draft coming from a vent over Queen’s space. He arranged to have his mattress moved to a warmer spot and for him to be left unbound—the guards were still using torn bedsheets to tie his hands day and night. When none of the changes helped, Queen was visited by a middle-aged Iranian doctor who claimed to have been trained in the United States. Queen found him unimpressive.

“It’s nothing, it’s nothing,” the doctor said after a cursory examination. He diagnosed a “twisted spine” and predicted that the symptoms would soon vanish. On his way out he asked Hall how he was doing.

“I’m sick, too,” Hall said. “Homesick. The cure is an airline ticket out of here.”

The Mushroom Inn had settled into a dull routine broken only by changes of guard shifts and trips to the bathroom. The shelves that divided each hostage’s cubicle were remnants of the library at the old Iranian-American high school, where in happier days the offspring of embassy workers attended classes, and the books to that library, hundreds of them, were also stored in the basement in boxes. When Queen asked, he was given permission to unpack them and operate a lending library. He brought to the task his delight for careful detail, sorting the hundreds of books by subject matter. There was even a catchall stack of books Queen believed no one would find interesting. Within each subject category he broke them down further into fiction and nonfiction. The fiction was sorted by author, the history chronologically. He arranged the books in vertical piles of fifteen on the floor, with a sign atop each indicating what subject it was.

Overseeing this effort was Hamid, a slight man in a green army jacket with a fair, angular face, reddish brown hair, and a sparse beard, who because of his propensity to cheerfully mislead his captives was dubbed “Hamid the Liar.” His hair and skin color were untypical for an Iranian, which he seemed to compensate for with an overabundance of zeal. Intensely suspicious, he had been the one on the second night of the takeover to warn Kathryn Koob against sending messages with her eyes. He was both ignorant and arrogant, traits which for the hostages seemed to sum up the revolution. When Hamid the Liar played checkers, he jumped over his own pieces on the board as if they weren’t there, a clear violation of universal rules, and when his opponent complained he would cheerfully explain, “In Iran we always play this way. These are my men and if I choose to jump over them it is up to me!”

Hamid had earned his nickname by routinely lying about the mail, telling the hostages that none came when everyone knew (from the other guards) that mail from the United States arrived daily in sacks. When he did hand out letters, he played favorites, rewarding some hostages and punishing others. He was, of course, ready to believe any theory of American malevolence, no matter how wild. When one letter arrived making the case that World War Two had resulted because Adolf Hitler was determined to prevent America from seizing the oil supplies of Peru, Hamid was so impressed that he photocopied it and passed it around. In his role as library supervisor, Hamid permitted books to be borrowed only after he had checked personally to make sure they weren’t “CIA”—even though his English was rudimentary at best. Returned books had to be given first to him, so he could check to make sure no secret messages had been written or inserted in them. In his fractured English, he wrote out rules:

ATTENTION: LIBRARY PROCEDURES

You may never to take more than 20-twenty-20 of books from the month.You may never to write in the twenty books your messages.To stack you found them return your books—20.A student good in English will check for messages you should not write, if he finds this library will be destroyed.

Given the borrowing limit, fat books were especially prized. Don Sharer read War and Peace and Moby-Dick. Barry Rosen began a steady diet of prison literature, beginning with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, MacKinlay Kantor’s Andersonville, Billy Hayes’s Midnight Express, the autobiography of French prison-escape artist Henri Charrière, Papillon, and James Clavell’s King Rat. He took comfort in the knowledge that he was not the first innocent man imprisoned, and that he and the other Americans were comparatively well treated. Marine Greg Persinger tackled one of the volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica, working his way through alphabetically.

Many of the bored, confined Americans began improvising exercise routines in their cramped spaces, though some had not worked out in years. Bill Royer, the assistant director of the now defunct Iran-America Society, was attempting a yoga move, lying flat on his back, raising his feet and reaching up to touch his toes, when he felt a sudden stab of pain in his chest. He thought he was having a heart attack at first, but the pain was in the wrong place, and very localized. After complaining to the guards a medical student gave him a cursory exam and reassured him that his heart was normal. It took weeks for the sharp pain to subside. He learned much later that he had broken his rib.

Enforced silence was defeated by a tap code, a system where letters of the alphabet were arrayed on a grid and words were spelled out painstakingly by tapping out numbers indicating each letter’s horizontal and vertical position. A diagram of the tap code was drawn on the inside of a chewing gum wrapper, which was balled up and then tossed from space to space. Sadly, there wasn’t much news to share. A hostage got one that, after much decoding effort, asked, “When do you think we’ll get out of here?”

Some of the hostages just ignored the petty procedures. When big Bill Keough needed to use the toilet, he would stand up, announce “Toilet,” and start in that direction. The guards would scurry behind him, more like his entourage than his captors. Traffic to the bathroom was constant, given that it was the only time the captives got to stand, walk, and leave their space. The guards must have been impressed by American dental hygiene; everyone brushed at least three times a day.

They were beginning to look ragged. Clean State Department and military faces sprouted stubble and then full beards; well-trimmed hair grew shaggy and then long. Beneath the oppressive boredom was constant tension, which sometimes boiled up. Colonel Chuck Scott, who had endured a difficult interrogation before his captors decided he was not the supposed CIA agent George Lambrakis, blew up after being served a supper of what had been billed as “chicken soup.” It consisted of a cup of lukewarm water with a partly dissolved bouillon cube floating in it. He threw his cup across the room and loudly complained and was immediately surrounded by guards with automatic weapons. Scott began venting a stream of angry Farsi—“You people treat us worse than dogs!”—when Golacinski looked across at the recently returned Dave Roeder and, without a word, they stepped between the angry colonel and the guards. Golacinski tried to calm Scott down. When guards demanded that Roeder and Golacinski go back to their places, they refused.

“As long as you’re pointing that weapon at me, I’m not going to move,” said Roeder. “I’m not going anywhere. Point your gun down and I’ll go, but I’m not moving until you do.”

The guards backed down. They lowered their weapons and Roeder and Golacinski returned to their cubicles. By that time Scott had calmed down, but he continued berating the guards.

One of them said, “Many people in Iran are eating less than you. This is not a hotel. You cannot order anything you want. You are a hostage, you have no rights. If you do not shut up and stop complaining, you will be in much trouble.”

The guard then vented his own anger at the Americans, claiming that all they did was eat, sleep, and make love. The standoff ended with Scott and the guard glaring at each other silently from across the room.

Bill Belk had been moved away from the medic Don Hohman only after the guards were convinced he wasn’t going to stop breathing again. He was shuffled around from week to week and wound up in a small upstairs room in the ambassador’s house with Malcolm Kalp, the CIA officer. So far the highlight of Belk’s captivity, apart from nearly dying of an allergic reaction to an insect bite, was the day he had inadvertently received two cans of beer with his lunch. The guards always put two cans of soda on the table in his cubicle in the Mushroom Inn, where he had stayed for several weeks. Apparently they didn’t realize the difference in the cans of soda and beer. He said not a word and calmly savored his first alcoholic beverages since the takeover.

Mostly Belk felt bored, and stiff. Some days the only time he stood up was to go to the bathroom or to go eat. For the first month, every time he heard a helicopter his heart leapt. Is this it? Are they coming for us? By mid-December he was convinced no one was coming.

He and Kalp had mattresses on opposite sides of the room and were not allowed to speak. A guard sat outside the door. Passing notes back and forth, they began to plan an escape. Kalp said he wanted to go, but he didn’t want to hurt anybody doing it. Belk argued with him in the notes.

“That’s no way to feel!” he wrote.

Belk said that if they tried to go, it would have to be all-out, “us or them.” If he had to hurt or even kill somebody, he was ready to do it. The more he thought about it, the more determined he became. He was going to try and, if necessary, he told Kalp, he was going to go alone. If Kalp was going to shrink at jumping a guard, he didn’t want to have him along.

One of the guards always fell asleep soon after his shift started. Two days before Christmas, Belk waited until he nodded off, bundled his blanket on the mattress to make it look somewhat like he was wrapped in it, and walked out the door. He tiptoed down a back stairway toward the kitchen but he heard voices, and peering through the crack of the door he saw that it was full of Iranians. So he walked back up the stairs. From a window in the hallway he could look out over the back of the residence. The first-floor roof extended from the wall out toward a patio and swimming pool. Weeks earlier he had pried off a small blade from a Gillette shaver and hidden it in his shoe. Now he took off the shoe and retrieved it, using it to cut a neat hole in the window screen. He crawled out onto the first-floor roof.