Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (42 page)

Books were the only consistent diversion from his own thoughts, and he devoured them. He read Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War, a massive nine-hundred-page volume, in two days, then opened the first page and began again. He read the Bible and reread the New Testament several times. He pored over the Psalms, committing certain favorites to memory. Poetry was a source of great pleasure, because he could read and reread it with increased enjoyment. In a pile of books he was shown, he found The Book of Living Verse and A Little Treasure of American Poetry and never returned them. He practically wore them out. He read Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and found its myriad accounts of men coping with captivity very useful in dealing with his own. He was pleased to read, for instance, that in captivity Solzhenitsyn thought mostly about his stomach. A myth about imprisonment is that isolation and deprivation incline men to great spiritual and philosophical insights, that in solitude the mind settles into great thoughts. Metrinko obsessed about food. He would think about lunch for three hours before it came: What will they bring for lunch? How long until they do? Will it be hot or cold? Then he would savor the memory of the meal for two hours after it was eaten, at which point it was time to start thinking about dinner. He felt guilty about the smallness of his thoughts and was relieved to read that he was not alone. The food was not bad, lots of rice and bread, occasionally a stew, but Metrinko’s weight plummeted. He dropped thirty pounds in the first month of captivity. His jeans drooped badly and his captors had taken away his belt. He bunched up the waist in front and fastened it with a paper clip.

He welcomed the interrogation sessions and drew them out for as long as he could. Anything was a welcome break from his solitude and boredom. Even the prospect of being put on trial and executed didn’t disturb him. He found himself perversely looking forward to it. The trial would at least be interesting. Months of sitting alone had made him desperate for any kind of stimulation, even death.

When he lashed out at his interrogators or guards, he would be punished. Sometimes he was dragged out into the basement hall and beaten. Once, after a particularly vicious outburst in which he had insulted the Ayatollah Khomeini and refused to wear a blindfold, he was handcuffed for two weeks. It was misery. His wrists were clamped in metal at his front, and after a day or so they rubbed his skin raw. Any movement that disturbed the cuffs became painful. He couldn’t sleep comfortably. There was no place to put his hands that felt natural, and when he changed position he was shocked awake by the pain. When he moved his bowels he could not wipe himself clean, so he developed a painful rash. It was hard to eat. His food would come in a bowl, and he had a spoon, but it was difficult to put the spoon to his mouth without spilling it back into the bowl.

He endured this for two weeks.

Charlie Beckwith decided to give his men a break for Christmas. Delta had been preparing for the rescue mission nonstop for more than a month, and the basic plan was in place, despite lingering problems with fuel delivery and hiding choppers and men outside Tehran on the second day of the mission. The Delta major from Texas, Logan Fitch, and his men had been completely out of touch with their families since they had been summoned home from their “training” on the ski slopes in Colorado.

Fitch’s wife, Sandi, was nine months pregnant. She knew that the nature of her husband’s work meant he would simply drop off the face of the earth from time to time, and accepted it, but under the circumstances he was enormously relieved to have permission to return to Fort Bragg. None of the men was allowed to discuss where they had been or what they were doing, but nearly everyone around them understood.

Two other things happened on Christmas Day that would have important consequences for the hostage crisis, one of them shockingly public and the other a well-kept secret.

The public event was the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan, the nation that shared Iran’s eastern border and that, with Iran, lived in the Russian shadow. Concerned about a growing Islamist fundamentalist movement in that country, about four thousand Russian troops had seized government buildings in Kabul and installed a new, Soviet-approved leadership. It was news enough to chase Iran off American front pages and posed an entirely new, threatening, and unexpected twist to the confusion in that part of the world. There had been fears of Iran’s clerics cozying up to the Soviets in the previous weeks, but they would certainly respond with alarm to this assault on Islam and the implied threat of an expanded Russian presence along their border. With ethnic unrest in provinces along the Soviet border to its north, and with mounting military probes by the Soviet-backed regime of Saddam Hussein to their west, Iran’s world of trouble had just grown darker.

As had America’s. The Soviet invasion altered the strategic map. Iran and the United States were no longer officially on speaking terms, but where the Soviet Union was concerned they had shared interests. Resistance to the Soviet putsch would come from the region’s Islamic fundamentalists, which meant that there was not only less danger of Iran falling into the Soviet sphere, but incentive to form a tactical alliance with the West. The stakes were high. Brzezinski had long feared that Moscow would take advantage of Iran’s confusion and lack of American backing to make a move on the Middle East, and Afghanistan looked as if it could be just a first step. In the White House, they war-gamed what the United States would do if the Soviet army pushed into Iran, bearing down on the valuable oil fields to the west. If it came to that, Iran’s relationship with the United States would be irrelevant. The Soviets would have to be stopped. There was even discussion of employing tactical nuclear weapons to close potential gaps in the Zagros Mountains and bottle up a Soviet thrust.

The other significant event was the arrival of two men, Hector Villalon, a wealthy Argentinian expatriate and Cuban cigar distributor living in France, and Christian Bourget, a French lawyer and human rights activist, at the international airport in Panama City. They had flown there to deliver a formal request from Iran to Omar Torrijos, asking his government to extradite the shah and send him back to Tehran to face revolutionary justice. It was at best a perfunctory gesture. Torrijos was not about to send the shah back to Tehran, but that was the visitors’ only announced purpose. What they told Marcel Saliman, a Torrijos assistant, was something else. They said they knew that there was no chance Panama would return the ailing shah, but the formalities might serve as a pretext to cover secret negotiations to free the American hostages. Iran was ready to talk.

Both men were friendly with Foreign Minister Ghotbzadeh, who, they explained, was officially hamstrung by the radicals who had seized the embassy. He and other moderates were being driven out of power by these young militants, who with their weekly press conference and “disclosures” were plucking them off one by one, exposing them as “traitors” and spies because they had met at one time or another with an American official. Ghotbzadeh wanted the sideshow to end. Sending the hostages home would disband the students and effectively end their reign of political terror.

Villalon and Bourget wanted to know if Torrijos could arrange a secret meeting with Hamilton Jordan. Why Jordan? They said that Ghotbzadeh did not trust the U.S. State Department, which he believed was controlled by Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller, and knew that through Jordan they would have the president’s ear.

In the second week of January, Hamilton Jordan, the president’s chief of staff, was contacted by an old friend in Panama, who urged him to meet privately and soon with an aide to Panama’s dictator Torrijos. He wouldn’t say what it was about, but Jordan was intrigued enough to fly down to Homestead Air Force Base, twenty-five miles south of Miami, on a mystery mission. Negotiations to hand over control of the Panama Canal in 1977 had built close ties between the Torrijos regime and the Carter administration, and the dictator had recently done the administration a favor by agreeing to accept the shah.

In a nondescript brick office building Jordan was introduced to Marcel Saliman and to Villalon and Bourget. Since his initial meeting with the men, Saliman had flown to Tehran and seen Ghotbzadeh, confirming for himself that the link promised by the two French-speaking visitors was real. Despite all the public rhetoric to the contrary, Saliman now told Jordan, Iran was eager to begin quiet talks about the hostages. What the two unofficial emissaries from Paris had suggested was that Iran be permitted to file legal papers in Panama seeking the extradition of the shah. The request would go nowhere, Saliman promised, but the process would provide cover for the secret negotiations.

It was a slender thread, but the Carter administration had few other prospects. The new year had begun with bewilderment and disappointment. The president had turned his efforts in December to the United Nations, where the administration had mounted a full-court diplomatic press on Iran. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim had agreed to personally intervene, and with the prospect of draconian economic sanctions in the balance it was hoped that Iran would bow to the weight of world opinion. Hopes were also high because the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan seemed to powerfully illustrate the threat posed by the great bear to the north, and now east. Soviet forces could easily push into Iran and grab the rich oil fields of the Persian Gulf; that had always been a big part of the logic in making the shah’s army and air force effectively a regional branch of the U.S. military. Now, without American help, Iran’s only ally was Allah.

These threats amounted to nothing in the febrile atmosphere of Tehran, however, where the alliance with Allah was considered very real and entirely sufficient. Instead of a breakthrough, the dignified Austrian diplomat, despite being wreathed in the prestige of the world body, had encountered nothing but suspicion and hostility. One Iranian observed the gaunt secretary-general “trembling like a leaf in the autumn wind” on an enforced tour of a graveyard to view the plots of those martyred in the revolution. He was escorted around Iran as a prop in the ongoing propaganda war. One morning on TV he was shown meeting “victims of SAVAK torture sessions,” a room filled with the disabled and deformed, many of them victims not of the secret police but of accidents and birth defects. Death threats, angry denunciations, and riots chased Waldheim from Iran a day before his mission was supposed to conclude. He had met with the Revolutionary Council, but Khomeini refused to see him. Waldheim returned to New York shaken and empty-handed—“I’m glad to be back,” he said, “especially alive”—even though from the White House’s perspective he had all but groveled before the mullahs. That impression would be reinforced weeks later when administration officials received a tape recording of Waldheim’s session with the council; in a memo to Carter, Hamilton Jordan would describe the secretary-general’s presentation as “apologetic, defensive, and at points obsequious.” The students, holding forth from their conference room at the so-called den of spies, called the secretary-general’s visit “a vague and suspicious trip,” and denounced him as “an American pawn.”

“We are not afraid of economic sanctions,” a student spokesman said. “They are not important for us or our people. We can stand it.” His comments apparently reflected the public mood accurately. On January 5, an estimated one million Iranians marched in Tehran to demonstrate steadfast support for the students. The hostages would go nowhere until the United States handed over the shah.

It was a sentiment shared by at least some Americans. A group of ministers from the United States had visited Iran seeking a “spiritual resolution” of the crisis and returned home in January with words of encouragement for the captors. The Reverend John Walsh of Princeton, New Jersey, called for the shah to be returned to Iran immediately for a show trial and what would be certain execution.

“Let justice roll,” he said.

Having thumbed their nose at the prospect of punitive sanctions, Iranian revolutionaries then had the pleasure of watching international willpower swoon. Waldheim himself argued to Carter that sanctions would only strengthen Iranian resolve. When Khomeini threatened to cut off oil exports to any nation that voted for sanctions, oil-dependent Japan quaked. The Soviet Union then twice vetoed the measure at the UN Security Council. Thus did the world organization dedicated to diplomacy acquiesce in the kidnapping of diplomats. When Carter proposed an economic boycott outside the auspices of the toothless UN, this, too, met with a cool reception. European nations found one reason after another to back away from holding Iran accountable. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, the captive American foreign mission was expendable.

The only bright spot came at mid-month, when Iran’s Revolutionary Council decided to expel all American reporters from the country, accusing them of “biased reporting.” As far as the White House was concerned, any easing of the media’s fixation on the story was a relief.

So Jordan was more than ready to grasp at this straw from Panama. A burly Georgia lawyer with a round baby face and a youthful crop of dark hair, he had signed on years earlier as a driver in Carter’s first, failed campaign for governor of Georgia. With a combination of native shrewdness and mutual loyalty, his role had risen with the candidate’s political fortunes, becoming Carter’s chief political strategist and managing his successful campaign for the White House. Unpretentious, informal, and blunt, his impatience for the niceties of wielding power in a tripartite government had made him few friends in the capital, where he was regarded by some as an arrogant amateur. But Jordan was a skillful behind-the-scenes horse trader, a man willing, despite his relatively provincial background, to throw himself into the most complicated matters, always with the complete trust of his boss.

Jordan told Saliman that even beginning an extradition process might spook the shah.

“If he gets scared and asks to come back to the States, we’d have to accept him,” he complained. Jordan had worked hard to ease the ailing former monarch across the border.