Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (49 page)

Our future is very uncertain, and I am not overdramatizing when I say that our very lives hang in the balance. Needless to say, we have become rather bitter, disillusioned, and frustrated, because we are the victims of poor judgment and lack of foresight on the part of the U.S. The Shah is still in the U.S…. something which totally defies logic. [He did not know that the shah had flown to Panama.] We certainly do not agree with the methods used, such as disregarding diplomatic immunity, but we do sympathize and understand the motives of the Moslem Students. They firmly believe that the Shah was a tyrant, and guilty of despicable crimes against the human rights of his former subjects; and some of us have seen overwhelming evidence to support those charges. The majority of the hostages know that the Shah should never have been allowed to enter the U.S., regardless of the reasons given. Certain people, political-interest groups and lobbyists, would have people believe that the U.S. owed the Shah the right to American medical care. Unfortunately, months prior to our capture, it was speculated in Washington that if the Shah entered the U.S. for any purpose, this embassy might have serious difficulties, and possibly be overrun. We wonder, therefore, why we were not forewarned, and later, adequately protected, once the decision was made.

Lending credence to the student captors’ allegations of secret American plots, German, who would not have been privy to any classified American operations, suggested that the Carter administration was reluctant to return the shah “because of certain things he might reveal, things which could prove to be very embarrassing, to say the least.”

Bill Belk’s combative roommate, the army medic Donald Hohman, undertook a long hunger strike early in the year and, after several weeks, had grown so frail he lay on his mattress all day. He ignored the rule against speaking, talking loud and long to Belk. They were too worried about him to leave him alone; they couldn’t withhold his food and he was too frail to beat. He’d challenge them, “What are you going to do to me? Go ahead and do it right now.”

He had started the hunger strike to get away from Joe Subic, whom he regarded as a traitor and collaborator, but even after he was moved he continued to refuse food. He liked the way it worried his captors. Hohman was a mystery to the Iranian students. Like most everyone else he was considered CIA, and in his case it was a belief heightened by the fact that he had been issued two passports. Yet he was admired for his medical skill. After his dramatic treatment of Belk’s allergic attack in the first days, many assumed he was a doctor. He had been mistakenly identified as such on one of the papers in his personnel file.

Hohman knew the medical conditions of most of the Americans who had been seized, and he would brief the medical students among the guards about what medications and precautions his various patients needed. Charles Jones had hypertension, so he needed his pills. Lee Holland had gout and Hohman taught them how to treat it, and what medications to deliver—“He knows the dosage,” he said. His professional standing, even if he was not an M.D., accorded him a measure of status the others captives did not enjoy. He abused it freely, and because he was admired, his insults stung. When Sheikh-ol-eslam and Ebtekar tried to interrogate him he cut them short.

“I don’t know anything about the CIA. I’m down here TDY [temporary duty],” he told them. “I’m medical. Period.” Ebtekar was so insulted by his demeanor that she slapped his face.

Hohman’s hunger strike flummoxed his guards. At first they were angry, and the medic gave the anger right back, screaming and cursing at them. In time, they were afraid to enter his room. He had hoped others would join him, that it would spread and that all the hostages would stop eating, but none of the others had his willpower. Yet Hohman persisted. He was not suicidal; he saw the hunger strike as a way of fighting back. In a letter to his father in Sacramento, Hohman wrote:

“I’ll come through this no matter what they do to me or how long they keep me. Also, the longer I am held, the more I’ve come to despise my captors and what harm they’ve done myself and all my family by taking my freedom without me ever having done an Iranian any harm. What they forget is that the game can be played both ways. Mentally they can’t get to me because I can go into my mind and lock them out, but physically, with my weight loss and poor diet, they could hurt me. They also, if they push hard enough, could bring on my death. But I don’t think they’ll do that.”

Hohman was taken to see Ebtekar again; she was the resident expert on these peculiar Americans. She had spread out some fresh pistachios and small white candies.

“Try some of that,” she said.

“No, I’m not going to.”

“What do you want?” she asked.

“I want to go home,” Hohman said.

“Well, we can’t do that until the shah is returned,” she said and then launched into the usual litany, starting with the sins of the shah’s father and then enumerating the decades of American-sponsored crimes against simple, honest Iranians. “Don’t you feel sorry for those people?” she asked.

“No,” Hohman said. “You’re keeping me here against my will for something I know nothing about.” He was convinced that this whole ordeal had more to do with the political struggle in Iran than with the “crimes” of the United States.

She resumed lecturing. How were oppressed Iranians to gain the attention of the world when “the whole world system was subjugated to American imperatives?” Their action had forced the world’s media to broadcast their grievances and demands and to realize the suffering the Iranian people had endured. “The decisions of the powerful have never benefited the oppressed,” she said. “If the downtrodden want their case to be considered and their sufferings made known, they must find a new strategy, one capable of paralyzing the existing institutions and mechanisms of domination.” Holding him and the others hostage was designed to do just that. She believed that many of the Americans they held were spies, and that even those who weren’t—and she wasn’t ready to believe that Hohman was not—shared responsibility for the acts of their government. While she admitted that holding otherwise innocent people prisoner apparently was not in accord with “human values,” it was justified in this case by the larger issues involved. He needed to eat not just because his life was still terribly important to his family back home, she said, but because his life was important to Iran—“as a symbol of a country’s legitimate demands!”

She went on and on, repeating the same material in various versions, trying to find the right way of putting it so that it would work its way into Hohman’s hard skull. He listened with both boredom and wonder. She had talent, he concluded. If anyone had to listen to her long enough, he thought, they probably could be convinced of anything. While Ebtekar reasoned on, his eyes wandered to a group of young women across the room who were painstakingly piecing together shredded embassy documents.

“Do you really think there’s anything important in that?” he asked, interrupting, gesturing toward the mound of shredded paper.

Ebtekar left the session convinced she had talked Hohman into ending his hunger strike, but it continued. It lasted twenty-one days. He subsisted on vitamins and drank plenty of water. His clothes hung on him, his skin was pallid and his cheeks sunken. He spent his days sleeping; it seemed to Belk that his roommate had simply turned himself off. He was slowly fading away to nothing. It was difficult for Belk, who after nearly two months of enforced silence and then a month alone chained to a chair had enjoyed having someone to talk to. A companion made captivity more bearable, and besides, Belk admired and liked Hohman. The medic had started him on an exercise regimen when they were first put together, and even though Hohman didn’t smoke he never complained about the clouds that Belk’s habit threw into the room.

One night the medic stood up from his mattress and walked over to pour a glass of water from the pitcher they kept by the window. There was a hole in the window from the break-in, and they had stuffed a rag into it, but enough cold air still flowed through to keep the pitcher chilled. On his way to the window Hohman blacked out.

“You’ve got to eat,” Belk said, helping him back to his mattress and pleading with him. “You’re scaring the hell out of me. You’re going to die here and I’m going to be here by myself.”

Hohman took his next meal.

Next door, Limbert had discovered a small opening where the thin partition wall imperfectly joined the more permanent basement wall. It allowed him to see enough so that he could tell when Belk and Hohman were alone. They didn’t dare speak—the guard outside would have heard them—but Limbert tore blank pages from the front and back of his books and they began passing written messages back and forth, carrying on a running conversation. Limbert told them what news he had and they shared what they knew. He learned of Belk’s attempted escape, and that Hohman had at last started eating. Because they had a window, Hohman and Belk told Limbert what kind of day it was outside.

One day, Limbert received the following message:

“We have a small radio. I guess you can understand Persian. Will this be useful to you?”

Limbert wrote back, “Is the pope Catholic?”

Belk had stolen the radio from one of the guards when he’d dozed off. He slid it deep in the back of a drawer at the guard’s desk—that way, if it was missed and they searched rooms for it, he wouldn’t be caught with it. Apparently the guard hadn’t had the thing long enough to miss it, either that or he assumed another guard had taken it, because the radio’s disappearance seemed to go unnoticed. After a few days, Belk retrieved it from the desk drawer and hid it someplace else. Then he offered it to Limbert.

They arranged for a drop in the bathroom. Late at night Limbert would wait until Belk had gone to the bathroom, and then immediately ask to go himself. That way he was ushered in right behind the tall State Department communicator, who had left the radio tucked behind a radiator on the floor. Limbert returned with it bundled under the waist of his pants. He unzipped the sofa cushion he used as a pillow and hollowed out a small place in the foam. With the radio nestled there, he could lay with his ear close to the speaker and play it quietly enough so that the guards couldn’t hear. To preserve the batteries, he would switch it on for news reports only when he napped at two in the afternoon, at eight in the evening, and then again at midnight.

He wrote Belk a note, complimenting him on his “marvelous coup!”

With a secret process in place to secure the hostages’ release, the Carter White House subtly changed its tone. There was no more talk of sanctions, blockades, and punitive strikes, and instead came reminders of shared interests, particularly of the danger posed by the Soviet armies just over the border. The threat of a Russian move toward Persian Gulf oil fields was of course a tremendous anxiety, not just in Iran but throughout the Western world. To reporters who knew nothing of the secret talks, the new strategy was, in the words of one pundit, “Talk softly and remind Iran of the Red Menace next door.”

Privately, the pieces seemed to be falling into place. Bani-Sadr was sworn in as president in late January by Khomeini and then named head of the Revolutionary Council. The odd-looking little Iranian with the pompadour, clipped mustache, and black glasses was now, at least on paper, the most powerful figure in the country next to Khomeini. In an early speech he referred to the hostage crisis as a “minor affair,” and suggested that a solution was within reach if the United States would only agree to cease meddling in Iranian affairs.

Patience was the message to the American people, who were still watching the days of captivity enumerated nightly on TV. For the time being, doing nothing was the best strategy, argued Carter’s press spokesman Jody Powell.

“Iran is on the verge of disintegration,” he said in a TV interview. “Nothing is the same from one day to the next. They are paying a terrible price for their fascination, their preoccupation with the hostages. The question arises of who in fact is determining the fate of Iran: Is it the Ayatollah Khomeini? Is it the Revolutionary Council? Is it this small group of terrorists who are holding the hostages? Meanwhile, the economy is in shambles. The military is in many ways nonexistent, and disorder and chaos increase every day.”

In his State of the Union address, President Carter emphasized that the United States was ready to be friends with Iran again, to form “a new and mutually beneficial relationship.”

“We have no basic quarrel with the nation, the revolution, or the people of Iran,” he said. “The threat to them comes not from American policy but from Soviet actions in that region.” Carter suggested that retribution was unlikely if the hostages were returned unharmed, but warned that “our patience is not unlimited.”

Although it now seemed happily less necessary, preparations for a rescue mission progressed. “Bob,” the CIA operative who had flown into Mehrabad Airport and breezed through customs a month earlier, had been in and out of the country several times in the previous month, shuttling from Tehran to Athens and Rome. Working with a wealthy Iranian exile who had volunteered to help, he had rented a warehouse and bought five Ford trucks and two Mazda vans to drive the assault force to the embassy from their hiding place south of the city on the second night of the mission. He had purchased material to form a wall of fake cargo at the back end of the truck in order to hide the force in case the vehicles were stopped and inspected at a checkpoint.

To solve the helicopter-refueling problem, Air Force Colonel James H. Kyle had arranged for three-thousand-gallon fuel blivits to be placed inside C-130s, instead of being dropped from them. This meant that six of the four-propeller workhorses would have to land in the desert on the first night of the mission, refuel the eight helicopters, and then fly back out of Iran. Since the plan now called for the planes to go in ahead of the helicopters, Delta Force could ride into Iran on the C-130s, camped out on top of the fuel bladders, an especially welcome development because Charlie Beckwith’s assault teams had swollen from the original forty-five men to ninety-five, the new counterterrorism unit’s full complement. Those numbers would have badly strained the eight RH-53D Sea Stallion helicopters that were now waiting beneath the deck of the aircraft carrier Nimitz, which had replaced the Kitty Hawk in the Indian Ocean.