Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (39 page)

Immediately he was struck by two things he hadn’t considered. It was bitterly cold and the compound was brightly illuminated by spotlights from front to back. It wasn’t usually like that at night, but for some reason, on this night, every damn light was ablaze. He could see armed Iranians walking all over the compound. His heart sank and he considered crawling back inside. He sat there, on the roof over the crowded kitchen, watching his breath trail off in gusts of steam, pulling his sweater tighter around him, expecting alarms to sound and people to shoot at him, but nothing happened. None of the Iranians looked up. So far so good. He decided to push his luck. He scouted around the edge of the roof and found a place where he could lower himself into the back patio by stepping down on an air-conditioning unit that protruded from a window. There were some large gas bottles on the ground beneath that fed the kitchen stoves and he dropped among them and squatted out of sight. The bottles were warm, so it was comfortable. He stayed there for about an hour.

The patio was enclosed by high walls. If he tried to climb over he would immediately be spotted. The gate was padlocked and the only other one had a guard posted alongside. He figured that gate was his only way out. He waited until a group of about six students emerged from the kitchen and proceeded through the gate, laughing and talking, absorbed in their conversation, and with his heart pounding Belk stood up and fell in behind them, drawing his sweater up over his head like he was pulling it on and adjusting it as he passed the guard. He stepped out of the gate and turned immediately to his right and kept walking.

He followed a fence that ran from the back of the ambassador’s house over toward the warehouse. There was a break in the fence ahead that opened into the spacious pine woods in front of the residence, and he was making for them when he heard over his shoulder, “East!,” which meant, “Stop!”

It was a female voice, one of the guards. He turned and saw her standing right over him on a small platform, pointing a rifle. She repeated excitedly, “East! East!”

He grabbed her and her weapon, twisting the barrel up and reaching for the switch that released its ammo magazine. The guard got off one shot into the sky before Belk managed to eject it. He knew she still had one more round in the chamber. She fired that one into the air, too, and Belk ran.

He headed back toward the residence, then heard another shot. Someone else was now shooting! He sprinted across the compound toward the tennis courts and a point on the back wall where there were steps leading up, a place where he could climb up and look over the top. He heard another shot snap, the round passing close as he bounded up the steps. He planned to pull himself up and over the wall, but when he peered over it he saw two policemen in the alley who had obviously been alerted by the shots inside. He stopped himself so abruptly that he lost his balance and fell off the stairs and twisted his right knee when he hit the hard ground. When he stood the knee buckled. He couldn’t run. Right beside the stairs was a metal container, about the size of a big ice cooler. It didn’t look large enough for a man to hide inside but Belk had no choice. He raised the lid and wiggled his six-foot frame inside.

It was filled with ice-cold water. The lid to the container didn’t close tightly, so he could see out across the compound, where guards were now running toward him from all directions. When they got close, they split up and fanned out to search back across the compound without bothering to look inside the cooler. Belk sat there in the freezing water trying not to breathe. He tried to raise himself to climb out once the guards had left that spot, but now his knee hurt even worse and he was also frightened. He thought if he raised the lid and tried to climb out he would be shot. So he stayed.

Soon a group of twelve guards reconvened at the stairs carrying flashlights and began conferring in rapid-fire Farsi. Belk could have reached out and touched them, they were that close. If they would just move again, Belk thought, maybe he could summon the strength to climb out and over the wall. The icy water had numbed him so he no longer felt any pain in his knee. He would head for Bert Moore’s house at the end of the alley immediately outside the compound. Maybe he could hide there through the day, and then hijack a car and drive toward Turkey. Or maybe he would try for the British or Canadian embassies. He stayed still for several long minutes until one of the guards looked down and noticed something.

“Oh!” he said, and jumped backward. Immediately all the guards pointed their weapons at the cooler. Belk slowly opened the lid and tried to stand. He was grabbed under both arms and hauled out. One of the guards slapped him and then pulled the wet sweater up over his head, pinning his arms. Then he clapped his arm around Belk’s head in a wrestling hold. The others slapped and kicked at the captive and hit him with their guns. He couldn’t stand because of the knee, so he was dragged to a car, thrown in the backseat, and driven to the chancery, where he was hauled into a first-floor room, what had been Bert Moore’s office. They threw blankets over him, handcuffed him, and began to berate him and to question him.

“There is no escape!” one of them told him. “Allah is against you!”

“You are CIA and you were taking a message for Malcolm Kalp,” his questioner said. “Who were you going to see?”

“No way,” said Belk. “I was just going home for Christmas.”

“What is your code name?”

His questioner reached down and tightened his handcuffs and then leaned on them, digging the steel into his wrists.

“It hurts!” Belk protested.

“It doesn’t matter,” the interrogator said.

Belk was left alone for the remainder of that evening. The cuffs were so tight his hands swelled and ached. In the room next door he heard Joe Subic and Kevin Hermening talking. It sounded like they were planning some sort of Christmas party and talking about getting out their Christmas cards! One of them was working a typewriter. It seemed weirdly incongruous to Belk, who was wet, cold, frightened, and in pain.

The next day six students came in and questioned him again, asking him about Kalp and where he had planned to go. When Belk told them the truth, that he had left by himself and didn’t know where he was going to go, they kicked his injured leg and hit him several times over the head.

“People that try to escape get shot,” one of them said.

One put a .45 caliber pistol to his head and pulled the trigger. Belk heard the hammer snap and at that point didn’t care. He begged them to remove the handcuffs. His hands had turned a faint blue and the pain was intense.

Finally, one of them loosed the cuffs. He was taken to another room in the basement and tied with nylon ropes hand and foot to a straight-backed wooden chair. He was untied only to eat and use the toilet. This is how he spent the Christmas holidays.

The approach of Christmas was a very emotional time for Kathryn Koob, who felt both joyful and sad. Like the rest of her colleagues, she stood accused of being a spy and had been told to expect a trial and what seemed like a strong chance of execution. Since she had been moved from the ambassador’s residence in early December to a small room on the top floor of the chancery, what had been the political section’s library, she was much closer to the chanting multitudes outside the compound’s front walls, and because she understood at least some Farsi it meant living with calls for American blood—her blood!—ringing in her ears day and night. In the crowd she could also hear vendors circulating drinks and snacks. It was bizarre, an ongoing festival of death and revenge. Her greatest fear, even greater than trial and the hanging judge, was that her captors would give her to this mob.

Ever since Ann Swift had disappeared after Thanksgiving, Koob had been held alone. She spent her days sitting in an armchair reading novels under the watchful eye of the punctilious female guard she had dubbed Queenie. Koob ate sparingly and savored what she was given at mealtimes, and she could feel the excess pounds she had accumulated over years falling off rapidly. She was still wearing the green wool dress she had on the day of her capture, although she also had a pair of slacks and a pullover shirt that the guards had brought from the embassy co-op. After weeks of such rigid confinement, she decided that she needed some sort of exercise regimen to supplement the ten minutes a day she was allowed to stand and do calisthenics. She worked out isometric routines she could do in the chair, stretching, lifting herself by pressing down with her hands, pushing her hands together, alternately flexing and relaxing sets of muscles. As she grew thinner she also grew stronger and despite the restrictions felt herself becoming more flexible. On the wall opposite her chair one of the students had spray-painted the words, “Down With the Carter,” and some weeks later another had brought in an idealized portrait of Khomeini and tacked it over part of the slogan, so she now faced the imam’s portrait under the words “Down With.” Since none of her guards spoke English very well, nobody noticed the ironic juxtaposition, and she was silently amused by it. It symbolized for her the intellectual clumsiness of this whole terrifying exercise.

She, too, contemplated escape. There was a good chance that an Iranian family she knew who lived only a few blocks from the embassy would hide her if she could get there. A woman in Iran had a better chance of staying hidden than a man, because she could drape herself from head to toe in a chador and move around with relative freedom. Her Farsi was limited but serviceable. She tried to remember exactly how far it was from the ambassador’s house to the wall. There were trees along the inside of it. With her newfound agility, she might be able to pull herself up to a low branch, which would give her the step up she would need to get over. All she had to do was wait for her guard to fall asleep, which happened often enough.

But she had never tried it. Partly because the attempt would have been risky and bold, Koob always found a reason, or was given one, to delay. Then one day a young woman named Sheroor, who was the kindest of her guards, allowed her to spend a few minutes on the front porch of the residence. It was the only time she had been allowed outside since the day of the takeover. Standing in the clean winter air, savoring blue skies and the sweet odor of the pine grove that filled that side of the compound, admiring the glimmer of moisture on the grass from a recent shower, Koob also scouted for an escape avenue. She was dismayed to see that the wall was much higher and farther from the house than she had remembered. None of the trees had branches low enough for her to reach, and the inside perimeter was busy with armed guards. There was no chance she could escape in the way she had imagined.

When the interrogation sessions ended after the first days, Koob concluded that the documents in her office at the Iran-America Society had confirmed her stories and quashed any remaining suspicions of her work in Tehran. But then she noticed Queenie surreptitiously taking notes after they spoke. Her chief guard would seize upon some comment or phrase and twist its meaning into something sinister. Chatting one day about the Iran-America Society, her efforts to revive the Cultural Center in Tehran, Koob mentioned that she had been interviewed from time to time by reporters about the organization’s events or plans. Queenie seemed particularly interested in this.

“How did you relate to them?” she asked. As Koob described how she had tried to be helpful with the reporters, how she had welcomed the publicity and tried to encourage their interest and coverage, she noticed that her chief guard was scribbling furiously behind a stack of books. It dawned on her that Queenie had a completely different take on what she was talking about.

So she asked, “Hahnum, when you were just talking about reporters, you were talking about Iranian reporters who came to me to find out about American things, right?”

“No,” said Queenie, and she explained that she had been talking about American reporters. Koob suddenly understood. Queenie had the idea that the “reporters” were actually spies, who reported the information they had gathered about Iran to her. Koob explained that this was not at all what was going on and Queenie dropped the subject. It consistently surprised Koob to glimpse such deep-rooted, unshakable suspicion.

She coped with her isolation and boredom by imagining her confinement as a religious retreat. The comforting miracle of her sister’s presence that she believed she had experienced on her first night in captivity fired her religious convictions. She had often wondered about and admired Catholic women who entered convents or contemplative communities to live in self-imposed isolation, silence, and prayer. She began to emulate what she knew of such lives, creating for herself prayer schedules and disciplines. Her captivity was a chance to direct the ambition and energy she had poured into her career into spiritual pursuit. It was hard work. She found it difficult to sustain prayer; anything more than a simple request for strength or deliverance or blessings on her family and friends challenged her patience and creativity. So she created categories, morning, afternoon, and evening devotions, and assigned different objectives for each. In her morning devotions, she set aside Mondays to pray for church institutions, Tuesdays for human crises around the world, Wednesdays for her family, and so on. To sustain prayer for her family she sought divine favors for each member individually, one by one, beginning with her parents in Iowa and then moving around the United States to each of her siblings and kin. She designed a worship ceremony for herself and began to see her religion not just as a backdrop to her life but as a practice, something that demanded mindfulness and effort at every moment. When she was allowed to keep an armed forces hymnal she’d found on a shelf in the residence library, she memorized the songs and sang them to herself. Later she was given a Bible.

In the weeks before Christmas, Koob had felt all of these currents coming together, her fear, her sadness, and her joy in the new religious life she had built for herself. Surrounded by hatred, she was determined to turn herself into a beacon of Christian love. She talked to her guards about the way her family celebrated Christmas at home, the cookies, candies, the oyster stew they always ate early before setting out for evening services. Given a branch from an artificial tree, she placed it upright in a flag holder and turned it into a Christmas tree. She tore pink routing slips she’d found in a desk drawer into strips and fastened them together with tape to create a chain she wrapped around it. She folded sheets of white and brown paper into snowflake designs, and shaped one sheet into a small cross and placed it on top. Then she got more ambitious, creating a whole manger scene complete with Mary, Joseph, and the Christ child and even an angel to hover over the scene. Her guards were so intrigued by her labors that they began imitating her, fashioning their own paper ornaments and hanging them on her “tree.”