Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (40 page)

On Christmas morning, marine Kevin Hermening was given a clean turtleneck sweater and he, Joe Subic, embassy administration officer Steve Lauterbach, and Jerry Plotkin were taken to an office at the motor pool where TV cameras were waiting.

Their captors wanted them to make a statement on camera as part of the Christmas party they would hold later that day. Over in the Mushroom Inn, unbeknownst to Hermening, his fellow marines had refused. He had been separated from the others several days earlier after threatening a guard and tearing the startled Iranian’s schoolbook in half. Locked in a basement room for nine hours, blindfolded, cuffed, and tied to a chair, the nineteen-year-old marine, the youngest of the hostages, had broke down and sobbed until he fell asleep.

He had been awakened by a voice speaking to him in perfect English.

“So, Mr. Hermening, I understand you’re giving the guards a little bit of trouble?”

“No, sir,” he said. The situation felt like being chewed out in boot camp, only he was more frightened this time.

“Well, do you think you want to talk about it a little bit?” his questioner asked.

“I sure would.”

His blindfold was removed and before him, to his great surprise, had been Subic, the army sergeant, just a few years his senior. He didn’t recognize him at first, because Subic had grown his hair long and had a full beard. He was wearing a winter coat and had sweaters on underneath.

“Joe, what are you doing?” Hermening asked.

Subic explained that the students had come to him complaining that Hermening had been causing trouble and asked him to help.

“I told them I would talk to you and try to resolve things,” Subic said. He added that he might be able to help Hermening understand what was going on.

The young marine was shocked, not only by Subic’s approaching him on behalf of their tormentors but because he was so bundled up. Warm clothing was scarce. Most hostages were wearing the same now ratty clothes they had been wearing on the day of the takeover, with a single change of underwear or socks if they were lucky.

Subic and the guards walked Hermening across the compound—it was the first time the marine had seen an American walking outside without being bound and blindfolded—to the first floor of the chancery. In this room Subic had snack foods, Fritos, peanut butter, peanuts, ketchup, salt and pepper, potato chips! He told Hermening that he had raided the commissary and gone on a spree, without explaining why he had been allowed to do such a thing. Then he said he was planning an escape, which would probably take place early in the new year if they were still captive—they were all waiting to see if they would be sent home over the Christmas holidays. In the meantime, Subic said that he was putting together, at the guards’ behest, a Christmas party. He was their “consultant” for the party, he said, and had helped them decorate for it. Subic’s room also had a desk and a telephone that he said he had used on occasion to call out to other embassies in Tehran. All of this apparently with the guards’ permission!

Hermening helped with some of the Christmas decorations and wrote Christmas cards to his mother and other family members, coached by his student guards.

“Since we have been hostages, we have been shown many documents, pictures, and other information which has convinced us that the ex-shah did indeed commit many crimes in Tehran,” Hermening wrote. “We believe that the students’ demand for the ex-shah’s extradition is justified and we urge all Americans to write to their senators and congressmen and ask them to do all they can to bring about the return of the ex-shah to Iran and obtain our release. The Iranian students are positive that the ex-shah will be returned to Iran and are willing to wait as long as it takes to accomplish this. They have only one demand with no negotiation possible…They will never back down or give in.”

This letter was mailed to twenty American newspapers. When he was asked to make a statement on Christmas morning before the cameras with the others, Hermening said he would say something, but he didn’t want to have to do anything “controversial.”

He was excited about being on TV. Maybe his family would see him. This ordeal was making him famous, he was sure, and with that fame would come opportunity. At the motor pool he met Ebtekar and fell into easy conversation with her. Hermening told her that he was surprised a woman held a position of such importance. He said if she were so successful already, maybe someday she would be a big leader in Iran.

“If I ever get back to the United States, and get into politics, maybe I’ll become a leader there,” he said. He joked that the two of them, years from now, would be shaping world events. Ebtekar laughed gaily at the idea.

The four captives performed precisely as their captors wished. Each read a statement critical of the United States. Both Hermening and Lauterbach read the statements in a flat monotone; Lauterbach had not seen the statement beforehand. The foreign service officer, his hair long and his beard untrimmed, seemed particularly pained to be participating. Plotkin seemed more comfortable but Subic, who sat at the center and held the microphone, appeared to be relaxed and speaking in full earnest.

Some of the statements Hermening read had been prepared for him, and some of it was what he had written, about getting letters from home and receiving medical care when it was needed. The students had added lines about how the American government had sold fertilizer to Iran that killed all its crops. Hermening read on. The statement went on to summarize the American-led coup that unseated Mohammed Mossadeq in 1953, before he was born, and how the United States had placed the shah on the throne and that he and the other hostages were suffering because America refused to own up to its crimes and return the shah.

“It hurts us to have to say that, but that is what we believe to be the situation,” he said. “We will always be Americans and still pray that they make the right decision as soon as possible.”

Clean shaven and neatly groomed, his hair trimmed and parted down the middle, Hermening looked hale and fit, towering over the guards in the room, and despite his wooden performance he did not seem like a man being forced to do something against his will. Although he felt awkward about reading the statement even as the words came out, he figured, Who is going to believe this? Clearly it was being made under duress. So he didn’t worry about it. Maybe his family would see him on TV!

Plotkin read with apparent feeling: “Why is the ex-shah given protection and sanctuary in the United States of America? He is an accused criminal and admitted his abuses of power on Iranian TV before he was dethroned. Why isn’t he extradited like any other alleged criminal would be? The Imam Khomeini and their new government have promised a fair and open international trial with all nations and churches invited to see that justice is done.”

Only glancing at the prepared statement, Subic offered the most dramatic personal testimony. He said that in his short time of traveling in Iran with Lauterbach before the embassy was taken, he had begun to see the evils of the American-supported shah. “We started to see more and more poor people, people without homes, food, education. I asked myself what had the shah done? My thinking started to turn around. My eyes and mind were starting to awake to the truth.”

Subic then stepped around to the front of the table, holding the microphone in one hand and in the other displaying a “special” Christmas card that “the hostages” had made for Khomeini. Smiling, he read from the card: “A Christmas wish especially for you, Imam Khomeini. Merry Christmas. May Christmas bring you lasting joy and lovely memories. Merry Christmas, the American Hostages, 25 December 1979. Tehran, Iran.” If he was aware of how he would appear to his fellow Americans, seething at this prolonged international extortion, Subic showed no sign of it. He seemed proud of himself, cheerful, sincere, and entirely at ease.

In what the students regarded as a “major concession,” they allowed three American clergymen to visit and celebrate Christmas with the captives. All three were chosen, according to a spokesman for Iran’s Revolutionary Council, because of “their militant history against imperialism.” Most famous was the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, the celebrated senior minister of New York City’s Riverside Church. Coffin was a large man with sloped shoulders and long curly dark hair that was retreating fast toward the crown of his head but which still fell thickly over his ears. He did not seem ministerial, with his up-from-the-streets New York accent, earthy humor, and background as an officer in the army and then the CIA, but he had seen the light, left the agency, and entered the ministry, achieving prominence as the chaplain of Yale University and for his civil rights work long before he became nationally known for his often eloquent opposition to the Vietnam War. Accompanying Coffin were the Reverend William Howard, a tall, urbane, dignified African-American minister who headed the National Council of Churches and was a noted civil rights and anti-apartheid activist, and Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, an activist Catholic leader from Detroit famous for his advocacy of liberal issues inside and outside the church. Coffin had defended the hostage takers in public statements in the United States, saying, “We scream about the hostages, but few Americans heard the screams of tortured Iranians.”

Together with the Catholic cardinal of Algiers, they presided over a series of holiday services for hostages who were brought to them in small groups throughout Christmas Day. In session after session, wearing flowing maroon-colored robes, Coffin warned against the vice of “self-pity,” and encouraged the captive Americans to sing along with him as he played the piano and led them in carols. The ceremonies were held in a back room of the warehouse, which Subic had helped decorate, along with the usual wall decorations of anti-American, prorevolutionary slogans. Cameras and lights recorded the event for Iranian TV as armed guards lined the walls looking on happily, convinced they were making the saintliest of gestures, allowing these infidels a Christian celebration. Khomeini, in response to President Carter’s call for Americans to ring church bells in remembrance of the hostages, called for his countrymen to “ring the bells in support of God.”

Many of the hostages were appalled by the event, at being made part of what they saw as a propaganda stunt, but Rick Kupke set aside his resentment when he spotted the treats laid out on the table—brownies, nuts, apples, and oranges. There was even a roasted turkey on a plate! Marine Paul Lewis was impressed enough with the goodies to go through the motions during his ceremony, but ignored Coffin’s exhortation to hold hands with his fellow hostages and sing. Many of the marines refused to sing, and a good number of the hostages showed little emotion or enthusiasm. Coffin hugged each one at the end of the ceremonies, and when he came to Lewis the young marine whispered to him, “It’s all bullshit.” In a brief conversation with Bill Keough, Coffin remarked, jokingly, that he had often longed for an extended period of quiet where he could read and think and contemplate. Keough smiled grimly. It was the remark of a man who had never been taken hostage in a foreign country and threatened daily with trial and execution. At the ceremony he attended, Golacinski leaned over to Reverend Howard and whispered, “Don’t believe what you are seeing. We’re being treated like animals.”

“So I gathered,” said Howard.

The Baptist pastor managed to convey to each group that all of America was intensely concerned with their fate, not just their own families and friends. At each of the sessions, hostages were allowed to write a brief note on a card to their families, which for many would be the first communications since the takeover.

Forbidden to talk about politics or their own situation, Colonel Scott asked Howard, “What’s the price of gasoline in America today?” Scott had thought long and hard about what question to ask if he got the chance, and decided that the current price of oil would help him gauge how events in Iran were playing around the world. Howard looked at the gallery of armed guards and asked them, “I don’t suppose I should answer that question, do you?” Scott was annoyed. Why couldn’t he just have blurted out an answer? Why was he bending over so hard to be helpful to these bastards?

Seeing Scott’s anger, Howard tried to lighten the mood. He said he noticed in looking over the lists of hostages that Scott was from Georgia and began a story about the difficulties he had faced as a young African-American traveling in that state. This further angered Scott, who felt as though the preacher was blaming him for the racism he had encountered.

For some of the hostages, however, the ceremonies were rich with feeling. The songs, no matter how off-key, and the decorations, no matter how impoverished, brought back memories of family and of past Christmases and gave them a fleeting sense of connection with home.

Kathryn Koob fought to hold back tears during her ceremony. She was profoundly sad to be cut off from her world, and yet somehow as a prisoner, isolated from her family and any community of Christians, from familiar Christmas music, the swirl of shopping, cards, parties, and gift giving, the holiday if anything became more meaningful to her, so that as she stood, reunited for the first time in a month with Ann Swift before Bishop Gumbleton, she felt herself trembling so violently that it took all her strength not to break down before the cameras. She balled her hands into fists so tight that her nails cut into her skin.

Several days after the Christmas celebrations, a nearly hourlong film was released and portions played on the big three American TV networks and in Iran. The film had been offered the week before, but the networks balked at paying $21,250 and promising to air the film in full. After a few days, the students dropped the demands and handed over the film. Their propaganda show was meaningless if no one saw it.

On the third floor of the Foreign Ministry, where the three trapped Americans Laingen, Tomseth, and Howland were allowed to watch television, the chargé was shocked. He wrote angrily in his diary that evening, “I think tonight I have learned to hate.”