Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (4 page)

To Iranians, Aban the thirteenth had an additional significance that went unnoted by the American staff. It was the fifteenth anniversary of the day the shah had exiled the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Laingen concluded the meeting by announcing that he had an appointment at the Foreign Ministry that morning, so he and Tomseth would be away for a few hours. Golacinski advised his assistant, Howland, who would accompany Laingen to the Ministry, to avoid streets around the University of Tehran on their way.

As he walked back down the corridor to his office, Limbert decided against visiting the barber. It would keep him from his office for several hours and he didn’t feel right getting a haircut on government time. Instead, he would start writing up his report of the trip.

Michael Metrinko was just arriving for work. He ignored the larger-than-usual crowd outside the east-side entrance. The protests were often worse later in the morning. Metrinko was a night owl and was customarily one of the last to show up. He did his real work after hours, meeting with Iranians, eating, drinking, smoking, and talking, trying to figure things out. As he saw it, that’s what his job was about. And what a fascinating job it was.

For a student of politics, being in Tehran just then was like being a geologist camped on the rim of an active volcano. Iran had gone temporarily insane. Revolution gives ordinary people the false belief that they can remake not just themselves, their country, and the whole wide world but human nature itself. That such grand designs always fail, that human nature is immutable, that everyone’s idea of perfection is different—these truths are all for a time forgotten. Those in the grip of righteousness saw the opportunity—no, the need—to weed the impure from their new and glorious garden. It started as always with the officials of the overthrown regime, authors of the criminal past, who were given show trials and marched out in the streets or to rooftops to be shot or hanged. With the taste of blood, the executioners then turned on those who had merely collaborated with the old order or its foreign sponsors or allies. Next, as former revolutionary brothers vied for permanent power, the killing turned inward.

This was where things had arrived after nine months. Various political and religious streams had joined in the exciting years before, Islamist fanatics, nationalist democrats, European socialists, Soviet-sponsored communists…they had all allied to bring down the shah. Now they were eyeing one another dangerously. The competition was not academic; it was a matter of life and death. The losers were being imprisoned, assassinated, or marched to the rooftop shooting galleries, outmaneuvered and denounced as traitors and spies. Tehran was a cauldron of intrigue, mysterious factions, uprisings, plots, clandestine maneuvers. Clerics considered too liberal were being gunned down in the streets by their more radical brothers, and some considered too conservative were being killed by violent leftists; Khomeini was cracking down on women who ignored the new mandates for hijab, traditional Islamic dress; the Kurds were rebelling in the northwest. This was the big leagues, people playing politics for keeps, reinventing themselves and their country, borrowing from Marx, from Jefferson, from Muhammad. And Metrinko wasn’t on the sidelines, either, he was right in the middle of things. While others studied the dynamics of political upheaval in libraries, he was present for one, and this revolution was particularly intriguing and original. He would describe it to his friends at home as “Delightful chaos with lots of blood!”

At thirty-three he was still a young man in the State Department, that ponderous, mysterious, plodding bureaucracy that could be, depending on the time and place, brilliant or utterly blind. It was an organization that respected age and tradition to a fault, and while it cultivated worldly expertise, grooming young officers like Metrinko to become expert in their region of the world, it was famous for ignoring or distrusting them. It had a mission to explore and understand foreign politics and cultures, but the farther afield its officers wandered the more suspect they became, as though distance from Foggy Bottom meant distance from the truth. The more one’s reports deviated from the venerated status quo and challenged established policy, the more readily they were dismissed. There was an institutional fear of going native.

Metrinko was aware of this but undaunted. He was working Iran. He was ambitious, but not for promotion or pay. His ambitions were intellectual and personal. He was from a small town in Pennsylvania, from a family of eccentrics. The Metrinkos owned a huge, rambling apartment and tavern complex of more than fifty rooms in Olyphant, a coal-mining town about an hour and a half north of Philadelphia. Growing up surrounded by the immigrants and travelers who wandered through the family home had broadened his horizons, and he had grown to be a man more at home abroad than anywhere else. He had wide-set blue eyes and a broad forehead, with the thickening features of his Pennsylvania Slav ancestry. A mustache partly framed his full lips. His wide wire-rimmed glasses were stylish, but he kept his brown hair well trimmed in a way that was out of step with the shaggier fashion of the day. Metrinko did things his own way. He was stout but solid; he studied judo with an Iranian policeman, but efforts at fitness were no match for his nightly bull sessions with food, wine, and tobacco. He held forth in such sessions with a peculiarly proud, precise way of speaking, building long complex sentences that came out fully sanded and polished, like he had written them down beforehand and memorized them. They sounded like comments delivered between long thoughtful puffs on a pipe, except Metrinko’s vice was cigarettes, which he smoked habitually. He sometimes found it hard to mask his impatience with others, which could make him seem high-toned and superior. He dealt with Iranians daily who knew their own history and language less well than he did, and with Americans, in both Tehran and distant Washington, most of them his bosses, who lacked his language skills, his experience in the country, and his complete absorption in the work. He was used to knowing more than anyone around him about the subject matter at hand.

The way he had it figured, Iran was about the size of a big state back home. It held about thirty-eight million people, the vast majority of whom would never play even a slight role in deciding the country’s fate. Decisions were made, as they were in any state back home or in any small country, by a tiny fraction of the educated and well connected. In a country the size of Iran, he figured, it was theoretically possible to know most of those people. He had collected hundreds of names and profiles, a vast network of acquaintanceship. He preferred not to meet with people in their offices but in restaurants, or in their homes, where they relaxed and said what they really felt. And nothing bad ever came of unburdening oneself to Michael Metrinko, because his reports were never published inside or outside Iran. He was a sponge and a valuable contact. He offered people a perfectly neutral, sympathetic sounding board. He listened well, asked questions, empathized, and almost never argued, unless it was to better flesh out his subject’s feelings and ideas. A person like that is rare anywhere, but in a society as notoriously closed and fearful as Iran’s—and things had gotten worse even in that respect since the overthrow of the shah—Metrinko was addictive. People sought him out, trying to glean intelligence as they positioned themselves on ever shifting grounds. He reaped fascinating insights nightly and wrote incisive, well-grounded, and reasoned reports for the department, reports that would be thrown into the mix with all the others that guided American policy. Metrinko had no illusions that the brilliance of his fieldwork and insights would outshine those of the CIA, military, press, and various other foreign service departments at work in the field. He was content to play his part. His reports floated off into the mists of Foggy Bottom. He loved the work for its own sake, for giving him a chance to live well overseas. If he could serve the United States at the same time, all the better. In the deepest sense, though, Metrinko was working for himself.

Most American staffers overseas lived in carefully constructed American cocoons, safe inside the walls of the embassy grounds or at home in apartment clusters with their coworkers. They shopped for the usual American foods at the well-stocked embassy commissary, watched American TV, and hung out with other staffers after hours. Not Metrinko. He was the opposite of that kind of foreign service officer, a man fully and warmly immersed in the local culture. He was thoroughly familiar with Iran, having worked in the country off and on for three years in the Peace Corps before joining the State Department. He took pride in his ability to blend. It was his special talent. To the other Americans at the embassy he was considered a loner, an oddball, and even something of an elitist. Joan Walsh, a secretary in his section, thought he was strange, a man whose idea of a good time was sitting up all night smoking scented tobacco with a bunch of mullahs. More than any of the other places he had worked—Syria and Israel—Metrinko had fallen in love with the place, with its language, its bazaars, its quaint, courtly customs, its food, its art, and its spirit. His nightly dinner outings were a chance to show off this passion, especially rare for an American, and they usually lasted until the wee hours.

This morning he was the last in, but he was much earlier than usual. He had set his alarm for eight. Two sons of the Ayatollah Mahmoud Taleghani, the city’s onetime Friday prayer leader who had died under fishy circumstances weeks earlier, had urged Metrinko to meet with them early that Sunday. The sons were convinced that their father, a revered figure in Iran (the street in front of the embassy would eventually be renamed for him), had been murdered by clerics loyal to Khomeini, but there was no proof. Nobody really knew what was going on in Tehran, but it was assumed that around Khomeini was a circle of men—sometimes called “the Bureau”—that was pulling strings behind the scenes. In Tehran there was the provisional government, headed by Bazargan, which was managing things until a constitution was written. Writing the new constitution was the Assembly of Experts, made up of select members of the Revolutionary Command Council, but beyond all this there were further layers of power and connection, shadowy factions, plots, and maneuvers that no one could fully fathom. Taleghani was the most recent prominent victim of these treacherous, shifting waters. He had advocated keeping mosque and state separate, a concept now opposed by the imam. Because he was widely revered, his opinion was dangerous. His family insisted his murder had been arranged by the clergy, but nothing was certain. They were now reaching out to him. One of the sons, Mehdi, had said he was about to leave the country for a meeting with Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) leader. Metrinko was both surprised and a little pleased that Mehdi and his brother wanted to confer with him beforehand. A PLO connection would make an intriguing addition to his next report.

So Metrinko paid little heed to the crowd he passed that morning. It was just the usual rabble, young men with beards, women in loose black manteaus, white-bearded old men with stained teeth, most of them carrying signs, chanting slogans both triumphant and hateful, shaking their fists in the air, burning American flags and giant dolls of President Carter and other Western leaders—the standard background noise. Metrinko didn’t underestimate what these mobs could do; he had been in Tabriz during the riots that followed the shah’s exit and he had seen the bodies dangling from trees. He had come close to a similar fate. But what he felt for the rabble was more contempt than fear. The way he saw it, they were nothing more than the tools of more powerful men.

Entering the relatively calm green enclosure, he was met with the familiar scent of pine. He walked up the chancery’s rear steps and mounted the stairs to his office on the second floor, where he poured himself a cup of coffee, lit another cigarette, and waited for the call from the guards to tell him the Taleghani brothers had arrived. He had a full schedule that day. After meeting with the brothers, a University of Tehran official was coming by to pick up a passport. Metrinko then planned to lunch with friends from Tabriz, including the former mayor of that city. An old roommate from the Peace Corps was in town and they planned to meet for dinner. As he looked through the milky plastic over the sandbags in his window, he was startled to see some people scaling the walls out front, forty or so feet away.

Picturing the job faced by the embassy guards, he watched amused as the protesters darted across the front yard.

Kevin Hermening, who at nineteen was the youngest of the marines assigned to the embassy, woke up in the seven-story apartment building across Bijan Alley from the back wall of the embassy, where he lived with the other marines. Hermening had worked from afternoon to eleven o’clock the night before, so he was not assigned guard duty that morning. He got up at eight, late for him, and did his laundry in the apartment building basement. Then he decided to tackle some paperwork. One of his jobs was to account for the copious amounts of food and drink he and the other marines consumed, documenting the money collected for meals, and planning menus for the coming week. So instead of putting on one of his uniforms, he donned his “office clothes,” a powder blue suit with a vest, and strode across the empty alley, entered the compound, and walked toward the chancery.

He was stopped at the front door by his boss, Al Golacinski, who had been trying in vain to raise on his walkie-talkie the Iranian police captain who was stationed at the motor pool just inside the front gate. Golacinski asked the marine to find him. When Hermening stepped back outside he was surprised to hear the volume of crowd noise jump. The mob was reacting to him, which was unnerving. He noticed for the first time that some of the protesters had gotten inside the walls. Instead of walking, he trotted in the direction of the motor pool, where he found the Iranian captain.

“Al wants you to call him,” Hermening said.