Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (5 page)

“Fine,” the captain said.

When Hermening turned to go back, the masses outside the gate seemed to lurch toward him, so he broke into a run, which provoked gleeful cheering. As he bounded up the front steps he saw the big front doors of the chancery closing and heard panic in his voice as he shouted, “I’m coming in! Don’t close the doors yet!”

He took the rest of the steps three at a time and made it back into the building before the doors were closed and locked.

Inured to months of angry public displays, the Tehran embassy staff was slow to recognize that this one was different. It was late morning when Tom Ahern first noticed that there were young Iranians in the compound. The CIA station chief was a tall, slender man with a concave face, deep-set eyes, and straight, thin, brown hair. The Eagle Scout son of a Wisconsin plumbing contractor, Ahern had earned a degree in journalism from the University of Notre Dame before joining the agency. He had a studious, retiring manner and a wry sense of humor and worked in a complex of offices behind an unmarked door on the east end of the chancery’s second floor. He usually started early, reading through the cables collected overnight and chatting with people in the political section. Early that morning he had encountered Laingen on the front steps conferring with a gardener and, pausing to say hello, had quipped, “Sorry to interrupt a meeting of the Fine Arts Committee.”

When he saw protesters inside the walls he called downstairs to alert the marines, but when he looked back out the window a few minutes later the number of invaders had grown. He checked with the political folks across the hall, who seemed unconcerned. They demurred when Ahern suggested they might want to consider destroying sensitive files.

Given his position, it made sense that Ahern would be more sensitive about protecting sources and files than the others. At that moment, all of his office papers fit into a file only three inches thick. This was partly because the spy agency was cautious about keeping written records on site in a precarious post, but it also reflected the paucity of CIA activity in the country. Ahern himself had arrived only four months earlier and the two officers on his staff, Bill Daugherty and Malcolm Kalp, had even less time in the country. Daugherty had arrived fifty-three days earlier and Kalp just a few days ago. They had been focusing their efforts on trying to sort out the political mess and find sympathetic Iranians from the ranks of the more moderate mullahs and nonreligious factions in the emerging power structure. They had plans. They wanted to get back up and running the vital Tacksman sites, telemetry collection centers along the northern Iran border that had been essential for monitoring Soviet missile tests, but which had been shut down by khomitehs earlier that year. If the current unrest and instability continued, they hoped eventually to figure out how to influence events in a more America-friendly way. But they were still a long way from making these things happen.

The difficulty excited Ahern, who at forty-eight was an old agency pro. He had held posts throughout Southeast Asia, including Vietnam, during the long years of conflict there, and he had signed on for Tehran knowing that its future would be tumultuous and uncertain. He didn’t have much to work with, however, only his two officers, neither of whom spoke Farsi, and no real agents to speak of, only a handful of prospects. The language barrier invited misadventure. Once, Ahern had gone to a high-rise apartment house to meet with an informant. The two men stepped into an elevator to go upstairs and their car abruptly halted in mid-ascent. It went completely black inside. Trapped for more than an hour, they held their meeting right there in the dark. Ahern learned only later that he had walked past a large sign in Farsi on the apartment house front door warning of a power shutdown at that hour. In the four months since he’d arrived, he had mostly managed to reestablish links with people who had spied for the agency in the past. His file was thin, but it was important that none of it fall into the wrong hands. The information was ruinous to his own meager efforts, embarrassing to the United States, and potentially catastrophic (even fatal) to the Iranians involved. Ahern walked down the hall to the other end of the building, to the communications vault, and began feeding his files into the disintegrator, a drum-shaped device with a metal feeding chute like a mail slot. It had blades, grinders, and chemicals inside that tore, pulverized, and deconstructed documents and electronic parts, rendering all into a fine, dry, gray-blue ash. The machine made such a terrible racket that users were supposed to wear earplugs to protect their hearing. For now, Ahern began feeding short stacks of paper into it. The machine worked methodically but slowly, and kept jamming, so Ahern started feeding some of his files into a shredder that cut the paper into long, thin, vertical strips.

In his office over by the motor pool, Barry Rosen, the embassy’s press attaché, was closest to the demonstration and among the first to see Iranians coming over the walls. He was working on a ridiculous directive from his superiors in the International Communications Agency (ICA) in Washington, who wanted him to draw up a chart of the current power structure in Iran. Were they kidding? Nobody he knew had a clear idea of what was going on. Rosen had a better fix than most Americans; he spoke Farsi and had worked in Iran as a Peace Corps volunteer a decade ago. He had networks of friends all over the country. He had been in Tehran on this ICA tour for nearly a year, through the fall of the shah, the return of Khomeini, the February siege of the U.S. embassy, when he had briefly been held hostage, to the current provisional government phase and ongoing struggle to form a more permanent state. This year on the ground had made him, like Metrinko and Limbert, one of the old heads at the embassy at age thirty-five. But the little he knew only underscored how much he didn’t. Iran was like the intricate designs on its famous Persian rugs: the closer you looked the harder it was to discern a pattern.

Nevertheless, after attending the morning meeting, he dutifully inserted paper in his typewriter and started banging out a response. When the demonstration outside grew louder he got up from his desk and went into his outer office to stand with his secretary and watch out the window. The demonstrators were all very young, and he noticed many of them had plastic-covered placards around their necks with photos of Khomeini. As he watched, the mob swelled rapidly.

Then a few of the young men began scaling the front gates. Rosen locked the door to his outer office and slid a locking metal bar into place. He told his secretary, Mary, not to open the door for anyone.

Then he ran back to his inner office and began flipping through his files looking for classified documents to destroy. Things were happening fast. He heard some of his colleagues being taken from their offices down the hall. Rosen was not unduly concerned. When it had happened nine months earlier he had been convinced as he was led out into the tear-gas-filled compound that he was going to be shot. When he had not been, along with the enormous sense of relief came a reduced fear of the demonstrators. Their bark was worse than their bite. He assumed this would be another rude interruption; his biggest concern was that it might convince Washington to close the embassy and bring everyone home. He hoped that didn’t happen. He was enjoying the work too much to go home now.

Rosen figured the bar on the outer door would buy him enough time to destroy the most vital papers, so he was surprised when he heard the scrape of metal. His secretary, an Armenian woman apparently frightened by threats from behind the door, was removing the metal bar.

“Don’t!” Rosen shouted.

It was too late. He was at once surrounded by young Iranians, boys and girls, the girls in manteaus and the boys carrying clubs, many of them with kerchiefs wrapped around their faces.

“Get out!” he shouted in Farsi.

“Either you move out of this room or we are going to drag you out,” one of the invaders said.

“This is United States property. Get out of this building immediately.”

Rosen’s defiance was not simply bravado. He found it hard to take this bunch seriously. They were so young, for one thing, shabbily dressed and clearly nervous. He was more angry than frightened.

The growing crowd in his office didn’t budge. Some of them began pulling open drawers to his desk and file cabinets and removing his files. His secretary was curled in the corner, frightened.

“Leave this room immediately or you will be hurt,” one of the demonstrators ordered Rosen. “This is no joke. We’re now in control of this place. You are flouting the will of the Iranian people.”

“You leave immediately,” said Rosen. “You have no right to set foot in here, any of you. You are violating diplomatic immunity. It is totally illegal.”

When a club was waved in his face, Rosen relented. He was led out of his office.

Inside the front door to the chancery, Golacinski felt events slipping out of control. He flipped the switch on his radio and with unmistakable urgency in his voice ordered, “Recall! Recall! All marines to Post One!”

The plan Golacinski and Mike Howland had put together in case of an invasion, which was designed to prevent Americans from being taken hostage, involved locking down part of the workforce and encouraging others to flee. The second floor of the chancery could be closed off behind a steel door, so employees had been instructed to congregate there in an emergency and wait for help from the provisional government. If the door to the second floor were breached, the communication vault on the west end was a final fallback position. It was large enough to accommodate dozens of people and was well stocked with food and water, so theoretically it could protect the chancery staff long enough for help to arrive. Those working in the buildings spread out across the campus would be told to move toward the relatively quiet back gates, where protesters rarely gathered, and slip out toward the British, Canadian, or Swiss embassies. Ordinarily Howland would have helped coordinate this response, but he had gone to the Foreign Ministry with Laingen and Tomseth. By radio, Golacinski told his assistant to stay there and press for an immediate local rescue force.

Several of the young Iranians who had climbed the gate now severed its chains with bolt cutters and swung the doors open wide. Protesters flooded in. On his radio, Golacinski heard reports from the various marine guard posts.

“They’re coming over the walls!” shouted Corporal Rocky Sickmann from another spot on the compound.

This was clearly a coordinated action.

Golacinski’s emergency call had awakened four marines who had worked the night shift and were asleep in the apartment building behind the compound. They quickly dressed but, as they prepared to leave the building, saw protesters and Iranian police massed around their building.

“Stay where you’re at,” said Golacinski.

Usually there would have been only three or four marines in the chancery at that hour, but today there were about a dozen. Some had come in to get paid and others had been attending a language class. Corporals Billy Gallegos and Sickmann had just come running through the front door, having abandoned their guard posts, as instructed. Gunnery Sergeant Mike Moeller, the top-ranking marine at the embassy, gathered his force together and couldn’t contain his enthusiasm.

“All right, guys,” he said with a grin. “Let’s go for it.”

Sickmann noticed that his hands were trembling as he fed rounds into his shotgun and .38 pistol. Outside, the protesters were now ramming a long wooden pole into the large, locked front doors. Inside, every impact shook bits of plaster off the frame. He watched this until the frame was almost completely shattered and then called Sergeant Moeller on his walkie-talkie to tell him that the doors were not going to last much longer.

Outside the door, demonstrators with bullhorns were repeating reassurances in both Farsi and English, “We do not wish to harm you. We only wish to set-in.”

Staffers throughout the building were standing on chairs in their offices, watching the drama unfold. The security barriers on the windows blocked the view on the lower half, so they had to climb to see outside. Joan Walsh, the blond-haired secretary in the political section, was frightened as she watched the now dozens of protesters running around the building. She knew the chancery was virtually a fortress but also that one of the windows on the basement floor was not barred like the others. It had been secured only by a single lock to provide ready egress in case of fire. Seeing some of the protesters with bolt cutters, she assumed it would be only a matter of time before they were in the building.

Gallegos ran to the front door duty station and changed clothes quickly, donning fatigues. He was annoyed because he had polished his combat boots the night before and had left them in his apartment. He had reported to work in the regulation short-sleeve tan shirt, blue pants, and black dress shoes, but the dress shoes looked stupid with the cammies, and it bugged him, but there was nothing to do. He pulled on his emergency gear and ran to his post upstairs, which was in the ambassador’s spacious office. There were floor-to-ceiling windows looking south over the compound. Gallegos saw that the safe doors were still open in Laingen’s office—his secretary, Liz Montagne, had not finished emptying them—and ordered them shut and locked. He stretched himself prone on the floor pointing his weapon out the window. It was a great spot. If he were ordered to shoot, he could pick off targets all day. He kept cocking and aiming his empty rifle at the demonstrators below, pretending to shoot. Corporal Greg Persinger saw this and worried that his buddy, always a little too gung ho, was going to get them all killed.

Golacinski pulled on riot gear and watched images of disorder on an array of closed-circuit TV screens. There were easily thousands of protesters on the grounds now. Four of his marines had surrendered to the mob, and he suspected correctly that Rosen, Graves, and the others in the motor pool office building had also been taken. He had told the marines still in the Bijon Apartments to stay there.