Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (46 page)

How could they all have been so blind? Just weeks before this had all begun, Limbert had shepherded around Henry Precht, director of Iranian Affairs for the State Department, on his last visit. They had gone to see Ayatollah Montazari, the leader of Friday prayers, and the ayatollah had asked who else they were planning to see. Precht named some of the people on his itinerary, all of them old-line nationalists, and Montazari had suggested that he add to his calendar the weekly prayer meeting at the University of Tehran. Limbert later warned that they would be wading into an unfriendly ocean of Muslims, but Precht liked the idea. So they went, accompanied by a representative of the Foreign Ministry, parking several blocks away from the university and walking in with the crowds. Limbert was content with a spot well outside the large tentlike enclosure where the prayer meeting was held, where they could see and hear at a relatively safe distance, but the Foreign Ministry man insisted they go all the way in. “My job is to get you two into the Friday prayers,” he had said. They had some trouble getting past the armed guards at the front gate but were eventually let in after their minder somehow convinced the young guards that they were distinguished guests from the nation of Senegal! Never mind their white faces. Their escort warned them to avoid speaking English inside. When the meeting got revved up, the crowd began chanting slogans. Someone would step up to the microphone, scream something into it, and then everyone else would repeat it. Limbert and Precht felt compelled to shout along, so they found themselves chanting in Farsi the usual condemnations, including one that went, “Death to the Three Spreaders of Corruption, Sadat, Carter, and Begin!”

“Didn’t that last one say something about Carter?” Precht whispered.

“Henry, just chant and don’t ask questions,” Limbert told him.

Their ministry escort was throwing himself into the work, red-faced with effort, rhetorically raining down the wrath of Allah on America and Israel and all their works, and when they were done he turned to them, the two official representatives of the Great Satan, and asked sweetly, “Would you care to join me for lunch?”

Moments like that had lulled Limbert, had lulled them all, into thinking that the hatred and malevolence was just rhetoric, that polite officialdom was somehow going to continue to control this whirlwind.

When he learned that the provisional government had resigned, Limbert had a better sense of the power shift taking place. Here he was, at the center of an international storm, someone who had trained his whole life to study and report on circumstances like these, arguably one of the Americans best suited for doing so, and he was utterly powerless to do a thing. He could question no one and write no reports. So in an interrogation session like this he at least had a chance to converse and to get some insight into what these captors of his were thinking, and what they were trying to accomplish.

Already he discerned an important shift in emphasis from the first few days of the takeover. At first many of those who took part did so as a kind of lark, a demonstration of youthful idealism, naiveté, and defiance. Their goals had seemed primarily rhetorical, to protest U.S. policies and to demand the return of the shah—a demand no one really expected America to honor. Those orchestrating it were acting out an arrogant youthful fantasy, nothing more. Now, listening to Sheikh-ol-eslam’s detailed questions, he saw something new. The emphasis was now local, not global. They wanted information about Iranian officials that they could use against their political enemies. In the present atmosphere in Tehran, anyone could be smeared with suspicion of treason if it could be shown they had met with American “spies.” Careers could be derailed, enemies brought down. Whoever was running this thing now had a very practical agenda, one that was local and ruthless.

In this context, Limbert also saw the logic in putting him and at least some of the others on trial. If they were going to make the charges against local officials stick, it would help to spell out conclusively the plots emanating from the den of spies. He knew he was not a spy, but he also knew he had to be very careful about what he said. He saw how wording in the documents was being twisted to support all kinds of things. Anything he said could get him shot or hung.

Sheikh-ol-eslam pressed him again to name those he had met with. He was fishing. When Limbert mentioned a name, one of hundreds, Sheikh-ol-eslam quickly asked, “Why did you meet with this person?”

“It was my job,” said Limbert. He explained that his role at the embassy was to seek out Iranians, and listen and learn. “That’s what a diplomat does.”

Sheikh-ol-eslam mentioned that a train had been bombed recently in southern Iran.

“We think that the CIA did that, and you know who the people are who did it.”

“Think what you want.”

From time to time Sheikh-ol-eslam would leave the room and Limbert would sit blindfolded for ten or fifteen minutes. Then he would return with a new question. At the end, Sheikh-ol-eslam simply said, “That’s it.”

Lieutenant Colonel Dave Roeder, a pilot, was questioned—with Ebtekar translating—about the embassy’s C-12. In the embassy files, they had evidently come upon a memo describing the first meeting Roeder had attended in Iran, one with the revolution’s air force officials. During that encounter, Roeder had asked for permission to bring back the embassy’s C-12, a small, two-prop aircraft that was used to ferry embassy officials to meetings around the country. It had been flown to Athens at the time of the shah’s departure, and it had not been allowed back into Iran. Roeder had a personal interest in getting the plane back; it was his best chance of being able to fly regularly.

What he did not know was that there had been an international scandal recently in South Africa when the government there discovered that the U.S. embassy had been using its C-12 to take surveillance photographs around the country. To the Iranian students, Roeder’s efforts to get the plane back proved he was a spy. Ebtekar explained the South African incident triumphantly.

“Did you have that same camera system on the C-12 you were using here?” he was asked.

“I have no idea what you are talking about,” he said. He was lying. In fact, he knew well that C-12s were used for surveillance purposes at U.S. embassies around the world. He had used one himself when he was based in Panama.

“What kind of system is it?” he was asked.

Roeder just stared ahead, silent.

The interrogator stormed from the room and another entered, a small man in a silk jacket. He was well groomed and looked studious. He spoke calmly. He warned Roeder that the first interrogator was a violent man and that he was very angry.

“I’m really worried about what he might do to you,” he said. He told Roeder that they wanted him to sign a statement admitting that the United States had used the C-12 to spy on Iran. Roeder knocked the paper and pen to the floor.

Ski Mask came back and began raging at him. Roeder was taken from the room and led to the building’s cargo elevator shaft. It was freezing. Way up at the top of the shaft they had opened doors to the winter outside and snow gently descended. They chained him to one of the metal bumpers inside the shaft and took away his shoes.

He began to shiver and decided that the only way to stay warm was to move. He had, by now, plenty of practice at exercising in a small space, so he fell easily into his rhythm of jogging in place. Then he would stop and do push-ups against the wall. When his captors tried to prevent him from moving by dragging in a chair and chaining him to it, Roeder picked the chair up and continued jogging with it in his arms. When they found him doing this, his guards brought in a cinder block and chained him to that. Draped in chains, holding the chair in one hand, Roeder defiantly picked up the block and kept moving.

They left him there all night and throughout the next day. Then he was brought back for more questioning. He was taken this time to an embassy living room, placed in a comfortable, stuffed chair, and his blindfold was removed.

Sitting across from him behind a table was another young man with a two-week growth of black beard and Ebtekar, draped in her black robes, smiling politely. On the table was a delicate teapot and glasses, a box of biscuits, and a pack of Marlboro cigarettes.

Okay, here’s the “good guy,” he thought, since the “bad guy” didn’t produce. And, sure enough, Ebtekar asked, “Would you like some tea?”

“No, thank you,” Roeder said.

“How about a cigarette?”

“Yes, I would.”

He lit the cigarette and took a deep drag. He hadn’t had many in the weeks he had been captive.

The young man spoke and Ebtekar translated. “Why are you here?”

“I’m the assistant air force attaché. I’m a lieutenant colonel, my name is David Roeder.”

“We have heard all that,” Ebtekar said translating the questioner’s response, “and we know that’s not what you are.”

Roeder clammed up again. He had told them the truth; if they were going to start playing games he wasn’t going to play.

There was a long period of consultation between Ebtekar and the interrogator in Farsi, and then she said, “You’ve got to answer questions here. We know that you are not an air force lieutenant colonel.”

What Roeder most felt was boredom, and he was genuinely curious about Ebtekar. Here was this young woman whose English was so fluent, and whose accent was so American, that she obviously had lived in the States at some point. She seemed bright and articulate. Why would she want to embrace this fundamentalist crap that denied her gender equal status with men? Why would she want to drape herself in dark robes?

“Why are you doing this?” he asked her.

She looked back at him startled.

“Look at your status as a woman in this society,” Roeder said. “Why would you want this?”

Ebtekar was off like a shot. She launched into her rationale for traditionalism, how it was, in fact, liberating for women. She and her revolutionary sisters were actually much freer than women in the Western world, who remained enslaved by the twin satanic values of commercialism and sexual exploitation. “I believe in the fundamentals of Islam,” she said. “And my faith requires women to do this.”

Roeder argued with her, and she argued back, and the interrogation session came undone. Ebtekar warmed up readily to her standard jeremiad about the evils of America and Western society and the transcendental wisdom of Iranian Islam, Ali Shariati, the imam, the world’s new Third Force. Roeder smoked and listened politely and relished the warmth. He felt sorry for her, and he felt pleased with himself for derailing his interrogation so easily. He thought, What amateurs!

Despite his crusty defiance, interrogators did finally manage to disturb Roeder. He was shown a picture of his wife, son, and daughter. It was a photograph he had kept on his office desk in a frame.

“Is this your wife and children?” he was asked.

“Yes. Where did you get that?”

The interrogator seemed to know a lot about his family. He knew that his son, Jimmy, was disabled. This shook up Roeder, although he tried not to show it. He had never considered that his family in Virginia would be at risk but, of course, there were many Iranians in the United States. His interrogator mentioned the stop where the school bus picked up his son every weekday.

“We know the route that bus takes,” he said.

If he did not start cooperating, they were going to take his son off the bus.

“We will start sending pieces of him to your wife,” he was told.

Roeder still refused to answer questions and was led back down to a cold basement room, but he was distressed. It was the lowest point so far in his captivity. His mind raced over the possibilities. Was his family under surveillance in Virginia? Was the U.S. government aware of this threat? Were they protecting his family? How seriously should he take it?

After more than two months of captivity, the hostages and their guards were getting to know one another well and, in many cases, were getting along badly. One night Gary Lee heard an angry American voice say, “What the fuck makes you right and the whole world wrong?” It summed up perfectly the central complaint. Some of the hostages worked at tormenting their captors.

Marine guards Steve Kirtley and Jimmy Lopez, together in a room at the chancery, kept up a constant torrent of verbal abuse. Early on, Gunnery Sergeant Mike Moeller had begun substituting the word “Khomeini” for every foul word in the English language, and his fellow marines adopted it with relish. When they needed to use the toilet, they would tell the guard, “I need to take a Khomeini.” They tried to remember every Polish joke they had ever heard and substituted for “Polack” the term “raghead,” which they used for the Iranians in the mistaken assumption that they were Arabs. They would make sure to tell each other the jokes whenever a guard who spoke English was within earshot.

“You know how you can tell the shah was a raghead, Steve?”

“No, Jimmy, how?”

“Because he was too stupid to shoot enough of these other ragheads to stay in power.”

When the guards passed around an item from the English-language Tehran Times detailing the abuse of Iranian students in the United States, the two marines made a big show of their delight.

“What’s it about, Jimmy?” Kirtley asked.

“It’s about all the great stuff Americans are doing back home,” Lopez said. “They’re siccing attack dogs on Iranians, running them over in cars, sheriffs in Texas are beating the shit out of them, stuff like that. It’s great!”

When the two marines found a stack of the guards’ plates and eating utensils piled in the bathroom they urinated on them. One night they wrapped a butter knife in a rag and took turns poking it at the exposed wires of their lamp. It shorted out the electricity in the chancery basement. They waited for the guards to replace the fuse and get the lights back on and then did it again. To the marines’ amusement, the guards raced from room to room, convinced they were under attack. Kirtley cultivated a habit of farting loudly whenever he stood close to a guard. It would make them so angry that they would haul him out to another room and shout at him about his bad manners. He would return to his room grinning.