Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (41 page)

Far and away the bulk of the film was of these hostages [Subic, Hermening, Plotkin, and Lauterbach] reading a prepared statement, praising the revolutionary zeal of their captors, reciting the misdeeds of the embassy in supporting the Shah, citing documents discovered in the embassy to suggest “espionage,” and calling on the US government to return the Shah to Iran. All this was done in what appeared to be a rehearsal reading, seriatim, by the hostages of their statement, the desk in front of them displaying “evidence” of one kind or another. Only one (Steve Lauterbach) of the four seemed in any way hesitant in what he was reading. The hostage who seemed to preside, Joe Subic, clearly was, or seemed to be, relishing his role. A young marine, Kevin Hermening, too, seemed relaxed and at ease. The fourth, the businessman Jerry Plotkin, read a separate statement, and he, too, seemed in control of himself.All of this culminated in young Subic displaying a Christmas card from which he read a special greeting to Imam Khomeini on behalf of the hostages. All of this is incredible. I have heard of brainwashing and mind control. I have read of such and recognize that in all hostage situations this is commonplace. But here is an example involving people I know and whom I respect…Eight weeks of confinement and harassment by sound from the crowds in the streets brought the hostages to the point of servitude to their captors’ purposes. And all this in a setting of Christmas with the two priests sitting docilely, watching and listening to the entire charade.

If the students felt such images were going to affect public opinion in the United States, they were right. Americans were horrified. There was an outpouring of sympathy for the hostages. Bishop Gumbleton explained in press conferences at home that the four men had clearly been forced to make the statements. He told reporters that while the men were reading the statements, one of them [Hermening] had whispered to him, “This is just a put-up job. Don’t pay any attention to what you hear.”

Gumbleton said he had asked, “Aren’t you afraid of what might happen if I report that when I return?”

“Just tell the truth, sir,” the hostage told him. “That’s all we care about.”

Laingen didn’t need the bishop of Detroit to tell him that. He knew what kind of stress his colleagues were under and felt guilty that his own circumstances were so much more comfortable. On Christmas Eve they had been delivered a gift basket from the Spanish ambassador, a wicker basket stuffed with various kinds of Iranian candy, and a visit by the British ambassador, who brought sturdier fare, a basket with a variety of meats and snacks and a bottle of “cough syrup,” which contained a lovely red wine—all the more delicious with dinner that evening after such long deprivation. Coffin, Howard, and Gumbleton paid them a visit, and they talked with the clergymen for hours. Tomseth was impressed with Howard and Gumbleton, whom he found to be sincere and there purely for humanitarian reasons. He was suspicious of Coffin, who had the air of a grandstander about him. It seemed to the veteran diplomat that the famous leftist preacher was playing to his home audience. In one glib aside he had remarked, “This situation is much too serious to be left in the hands of professionals!”

The minister seemed not to appreciate that he had just insulted three foreign service professionals.

“You are being absolutely silly,” Laingen told him.

When they left, Laingen hoped that their visitors, whatever their motives, had been appropriately shocked by the zealotry of the students and the new strange political contours of this land. Islamic fundamentalism posed a threat that transcended the traditional liberal-conservative polarity that had defined Western politics for generations. There was a natural tendency of liberals like Coffin, Howard, and Gumbleton to seek dramatic change and to see any revolutionary as ideological kin, but they needed to be careful in this case about who they were cozying up to. The world was a more complicated place than they imagined. A new form of totalitarianism was taking shape, a religious variation on an ugly twentieth-century theme.

In the end, Coffin, Howard, and Gumbleton would fly home with their own sketchy notions of what was going on in Iran, while Laingen and the others were left behind as its captives.

Vice consul Bob Ode stewed over the Christmas party for days afterward. In the brief chance he had to speak to Coffin—the minister knew he was the eldest of the hostages and had sought him out to ask how he was doing—Ode had said, “If you are under the impression that the students are being kind to us, then you are mistaken.”

Ode’s wedding ring had been returned, but he had not been given back a ring that his parents had given him when he’d turned twenty-one and that he had worn his entire adult life. The naked finger reminded him every day of the injustice. Several days after Christmas he asked for paper and a pen and wrote numerous appeals, each in neatly printed capital letters. He wrote to Coffin, politely thanking him for coming, and then spelled out his misgivings about the ceremony and the minister’s apparent misplaced sympathies. He wrote another to the Washington Post, and others to President Carter and several other likely candidates for president in the coming year.

In one of his letters, Ode expressed thanks for the various cards that had been sent to him and others by strangers from around the United States, all of them promising to pray for their release. “I don’t mean to be unappreciative,” he said, “but what we need most is action—not prayers.”

Despite its obvious propaganda value, John Limbert felt that the Christmas event had also been a genuinely kind gesture by at least some of the students. He found that comforting. It seemed unlikely that after such a public display of charity they would be marched out to be shot any time soon. Even more reassuring was the visit several days after the holiday by Ayatollah Montazari, a chubby, often jolly middle-aged cleric who was reputed to be the first in line to eventually succeed Khomeini. The students were very excited and nervous about the visit. Montazari arrived at the Mushroom Inn with a TV crew in tow and addressed all of the hostages in the basement prison in a calm, friendly way. He was known among the hostages as “Screaming Monty,” because of thundering, feverish orations that drove the devout to great exertions of public prayer and denunciation. In person he was a short man with a face full of blackheads and sprouts of hair projecting from both ears. He reiterated the students’ demand for the return of the shah, and spoke to the hostages of his own years of imprisonment under the old regime, assuring them that they, too, would survive and prosper. When America relented, he said, they all would be released.

Colonel Scott, though relieved to hear that they would eventually be released, found the speech depressing. The bottom line, as he saw it, was that the Iranian clergy were holding fast to the students’ original demand that the “criminal shah” be returned for trial, which meant, as far as he was concerned, a very long stay.

When he finished speaking, Montazari walked around the crowded basement room and shook hands with each of the hostages.

When the cleric approached Limbert, the hostage took his hand and reminded him in Farsi, “We have met before.”

“Yes, I remember,” Montazari said, surprised. “You came with Mr. Precht to see me.”

It was an important moment, Limbert thought, because he knew the students were accusing anyone who had met with Americans from the embassy of spying. Those in the ayatollah’s entourage were visibly shocked. The meeting had taken place weeks before the takeover, and Limbert had accompanied Henry Precht as an interpreter. He had liked the cleric, who seemed less rigid than others he had met. He was impressed by the fact that Montazari seemed to harbor no grudge against the shah, this in a country where grudges seemed the guiding spirit of the day.

Montazari stopped into the room where Hall and Queen were being kept. Hall noted with displeasure that the great man’s entourage was wearing muddy boots. The ayatollah spoke to Hall and Queen through a translator.

“How are you?” he asked.

Hall was never sure what to say or how to act in this situation. Should he curse at the cleric or behave politely? He wanted to conduct himself with dignity, as a professional and an adult, but under these circumstances how exactly was that to be done? He saw some of his colleagues take perverse pride in treating their captors with nothing but scorn and bile, while others had become sickeningly meek and submissive. Some, like Subic, were actually trying to be helpful. He saw himself as somewhere in the middle. So how should he respond? Both he and Queen told Montazari that they were fine, but in a way that made it clear that they were anything but.

“Oh well,” said Montazari, “I stayed in one of the shah’s prisons for two years and I came out alive, and so will you.”

It was meant to be encouraging, but all Hall could think about when he left was, two years?

To butter them up for the ayatollah’s visit, most of the hostages were given mail. Limbert got a letter from his sister and her family, but most of the others weren’t so lucky; they were handed mail addressed to them from perfect strangers who had responded to the plight of their countrymen by writing in a show of support. The embassy was inundated with them. “Dear hostage,” these letters typically began. It was a sweet gesture, and the TV networks at home enjoyed airing pictures of schoolchildren all over America leaning over their desks, pencils working away, sending love and good cheer to their captive countrymen. They arrived at the embassy in sacks piled on pallets, another picture the American TV cameras loved. The gesture created such a flood of mail, however, that real letters from the hostages’ loved ones got lost. Golacinski was somewhat luckier; he received a letter from a young woman he had helped in Morocco, thanking him, but it had been written and mailed before the takeover. It was nice, but in the present circumstances, when he longed desperately to hear some news from home, he was crushed.

Michael Metrinko spent the holiday as he had spent all of his days since the first week of the takeover, locked in a windowless basement storage room by himself. He had been invited to the Christmas party but he wanted no part of a propaganda show. His guards brought him a gift from the ceremony, a plate of turkey and stuffing, cookies, and decorated marshmallows. Metrinko was hungry, and the food was tempting, but he was galled by how self-congratulatory his captors seemed, how generous and noble and proudly Islamic. He accepted the plate, and when they left him alone to eat it he sat staring at it for a long moment.

Then he knocked on the door and said he needed to go to the bathroom. When the door opened, holding the gift plate before him, Metrinko marched down the hall and dumped the contents into the toilet. He made sure the guards saw him do it.

They were furious with him. The gesture prompted a fit of screaming. He had insulted their hospitality and kind intentions. He was crazy! When they shoved him back in his room and slammed the door behind him, Metrinko felt a momentary pang about losing the meal. What a glorious pleasure he had denied himself! But the remorse was nothing next to the pleasure he took in delivering the insult. It had hit home and wounded them and that was something he could take pleasure in for far longer than the food.

Metrinko fed off his anger. It kept him going. Ever since he refused a cigarette on the day of the takeover, the pattern of his captivity was set. He would not accept any rationale for the way he and the others were being treated. It was wrong by every measure, by the standards of international diplomacy, by the cultural standards of Iran, and by common decency. Going cold turkey on his two-pack-a-day cigarette addiction helped, in a perverse way. It fed his irritability and rage. He worked up a whole philosophy of anger. His sense of outrage was his last connection to dignity. A man had to hang on to his capacity to protest, to express his anger, to move up a few steps into the faces of his oppressors. It made him feel better about himself. In time, it was the only thing that did.

As Ebtekar, the hostages’ spokesman, would later put it, Metrinko “hated everyone and was hated in return.” And what he got in return was continued isolation. Metrinko spent hour after hour, day after day, month after month, locked in his tiny storage room with the fluorescent light buzzing overhead through day and night, with no fresh air and no companionship. Boredom was no longer an occasional state of mind; it defined him. He often had books, but one could read for only so long. He fought to find something to do to pass the time and frequently lost. He spent hours sitting and staring at the walls, brooding, lost in fantasy.

Now and then, one of his captors would come into his cell just to talk. They were convinced, of course, that Metrinko was evil. He was a foreigner, an infidel, an American, and they were certain he was “See-ah.” So the conversations were one-sided. They avoided listening to him in the way one would avoid listening to the devil himself. They were there to enlighten him about the evils of the United States and the shah, the terrors of SAVAK, and the virtues of their own revolution—to which Metrinko was in sympathy although they would never believe it. Since he had known many of the leaders of the revolution personally, and knew how many had used the tumult simply to enrich themselves and exact revenge on their enemies or rivals, his sympathy for the ideals of the revolution was laced with cynicism.

For a man who lived to collect information, analyze it, and report it to others, solitude was a particular torment. He began doing calisthenics to fill the time and to wear himself out enough to sleep. He lost all sense of day and night. He would sleep for an hour or so, wake up, prop the big air mattress against the wall, and run in place and do sit-ups for an hour or so—he was doing hundreds of sit-ups a day. His time was spent alternately sleeping, running in place, doing push-ups and sit-ups, reading, brooding, going to the toilet, and waiting for food. He seized on any opportunity to break the tedium. Given some colored pencils, he began drawing on the walls. Using his food bowl, a glass, or a dish, he would trace interlocking circles, forming elaborate patterns, and then carefully color them in. He began a mental project. At home in Olyphant, Pennsylvania, his family owned a huge building, a onetime inn, with more than fifty rooms. He loved the place, and decided to completely renovate and decorate it, room by room. He remembered every corner of it vividly from his childhood. He tore wings off the building, stripping it down in his imagination to its original structure, then rebuilt the wings from scratch. He picked out colors for the walls, furniture, and rugs, redesigned the kitchens…