Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (50 page)

Delta had been through several more full-dress rehearsals for the raid in the Utah, Nevada, and Arizona deserts. They were a mob of crusty, sunburned mountain men in blue jeans and T-shirts cadging supplies without explanation from every military unit in the region. All of the men assigned to the mission were given top priority but were not allowed to reveal what they were doing, which created confusing and sometimes very satisfying clashes with the regular military command. Major Jim Schaefer, one of the marine helicopter pilots, was told to report immediately with his crew to the Nimitz to inspect the helicopters. He hopped a military plane to Hawaii and then the Philippines and was preparing to board another flight at Clark Air Force Base to Guam when a naval officer somewhat dismissively told him that he would have to wait for the next plane.

“I have to get the university baseball team on this airplane,” the officer said.

“No, I don’t think you’re going to do that,” said Schaefer.

“Sir, you don’t understand,” the navy man said firmly. “I am the navy liaison officer, and I’m in charge of this, and I have to bounce you off. We’ll get you on the next available flight.”

“You don’t understand,” Schaefer said.

“Sir, the flight is closed. I’m going to have to do this.”

“This flight is not leaving without me,” said Schaefer.

On the airport wall was a poster with the photograph of the base’s commanding general. The poster welcomed all comers to Clark Air Force Base and invited anyone with a problem to call the commanding general directly. Schaefer called.

After a series of conversations, during which certain orders and their priority were clarified, Schaefer was connected to the general at home at three o’clock in the morning.

“This is Major Jim Schaefer,” he said. “I’ve got a little problem down here at the terminal and I saw your sign offering to help. General, would you help?”

The general drove directly to the terminal. He was wearing a flowery tropical shirt, shorts, and flip-flops. He looked, Schaefer thought, exactly as the commanding general of a Philippines air force base should look.

“Who’s Major Schaefer?” the general asked.

“I am, sir.”

Schaefer showed him the letter giving him his orders. The general, suddenly wide awake, told the naval liaison officer, “Lieutenant, release that airplane, now.”

Training sessions in the western American deserts created their own local stir. The region was sparsely populated, and the rescue force did its best to stay out of sight during the day, but there were bound to be run-ins with the locals. Just before the holiday break, one of the helicopters on a night training run had unknowingly tried to snatch a Christmas tree from some local’s roof. The pilots oriented their choppers at night with flashing infrared markers on the ground, and when the training exercise was over they were required to retrieve them. They had a pincer attached to a rope and would hover over the flashing light, grab it, and haul it back aboard without landing. One night, when a pilot searching for his last marker found a blinking light, he hovered and lowered the aircraft over it and, before he could drop the rope, the light moved.

Confused, he decided to set the chopper down for a closer look, and suddenly the landing area was flooded with light. He was about to land on a house. The light had been blinking on a rooftop Christmas tree decoration. The downdraft from the choppers created winds in the 150 miles per hour range, considerably more than any visit by Santa’s nimble-footed reindeer, and the decoration had taken flight and landed somewhere out on the highway. The shocked home owner, no doubt alarmed by the sudden violent storm, had turned on the lights to investigate. The chopper pulled up and flew away. The unit sent someone out to the house the next day with a hundred bucks and an apology.

The Delta “operators,” as they called themselves, were hardly timid souls, but they were terrified by the helicopter rides in darkness. All of them complained about the marine pilots’ skills. The fliers were being asked to do things they had never tried. They were working hard to learn and adapt. When the ever changing plan called for them to land in a soccer stadium in Tehran, they began practicing blacked-out landings at a football stadium at Twenty-nine Palms, the marine base in California. The newfangled night-vision goggles, which enabled them to fly without any lights, were so heavy that after an hour or two it became difficult to hold their heads upright. Everyone in the unit had a stiff neck. Then one of the pilots hit upon the idea of fastening a garter belt to the roof of the cockpit just over his head and latching the goggles to it so that the belt took some of the weight. The garter’s flexibility allowed him to turn and bend his head. It worked so well that the pilots cleaned out the PX at the nearest military base. To practice night flying over a city without land lights, they got permission to practice low-level flights over San Diego.

Beckwith remained skeptical about the CIA’s “Bob” and was unwilling despite CIA assurances to trust his elite, handpicked force to this swarthy, slippery-seeming foreigner. He began making plans to get one of his own men into the city in advance of the mission.

The way things were shaping up, however, it appeared less likely than ever that a rescue mission would be attempted. Iran’s newly elected president had turned up the heat on the students and appeared headed for a showdown with them over the hostages. Bani-Sadr publicly called them “children” who behave “like a government within a government.” When they responded by condemning one of Bani-Sadr’s cabinet as an American spy and had him arrested, the president intervened to have the man released and condemned the students as “lawless dictators.”

The students were feeling the pressure. Near the end of January three of their star hostages were caught trying to escape. Joe Subic had cooked up a half-baked plan to make ropes and climb out of a second-floor window of the ambassador’s house the next time he and his roommates, Kevin Hermening and Steve Lauterbach, were taken for showers. He had a vague notion about stealing a car and driving to Turkey. Hermening was excited about it and helped make the ropes, and Lauterbach, while filled with reservation, went along with the plan. They didn’t get anywhere. On the day of their attempt, all three were caught with their ropes and marched off to stretches of solitary confinement.

Lauterbach was locked in a basement room of the chancery with his hands tightly cuffed. Sitting alone in the darkness for days, his hands aching badly, he grew increasingly despondent. His guards had given him a water glass embossed with the embassy’s emblem, and it began beckoning him. In the deeper sense, he was not suicidal. He loved life and wanted to keep on living it, but not here, not in pain, alone, with no idea of when or if his circumstances would ease. He was angry. Hurting himself was the only way he had with which to lash out at his captors. On the fourth day he stopped arguing with himself, broke the glass, and slashed his wrists.

He didn’t make a sound. When a guard entered his room some time later he found Lauterbach woozy and bloody. He was rushed to a hospital, startled at how alarmed and angry his captors were. There was plenty of blood but the wounds were not deep enough to have severed his arteries. A doctor patched him up, and after that Lauterbach’s treatment dramatically improved. His captors were apparently afraid that word of his suicide attempt would put the lie to their claims of treating the hostages as “guests.” He was given a room of his own on the upper floor of the chancery, one with a couch made up as a bed. His guards became solicitous, even kind.

Inside Iran, the students remained extraordinarily popular. Some were offered positions in the government, others received offers of marriage in the mail. But at least some of the group’s leaders wanted out. Ibrahim Asgharzadeh, the author of the takeover, felt trapped. He believed they had backed themselves into a corner by demanding the shah’s return, a condition they had never seriously expected would be met. Now even if they had wanted to back down they could not, because their continued occupation of the U.S. embassy gave leverage to hard-line clerical elements opposed to the government—no mullahs had been allowed to run for office. With their hostages, the students had become pawns in the battle over the future of Iran.

Their frustration boiled over on the night of February 5, in what would be the most terrifying night yet for the fifty-three American hostages.

John Limbert and the others in the chancery basement were awakened by a sudden clamor. Guards in black ski masks moved through the rooms with weapons, shouting in English, “SAVAK! SAVAK! Everybody up and out! Up and out now! Everybody! Move! Hurry! Now! Now!”

Limbert was awake anyway. He was reading War and Peace after listening to the news on the small radio tucked inside his pillow. He was accosted by two guards in masks.

“Okay!” one of them demanded. “Come on, get out! Get up!”

He stood and was blindfolded and then led down the corridor with the rest.

The scene in the Mushroom Inn across the compound was the same. A masked guard entered the room shared by Joe Hall and the ailing Richard Queen. “Get your hands up!” he shouted, waking them. “Do not speak! Stand up!” Out in the larger room, many of the captives, similarly roused from sleep and used to the rituals of their imprisonment, obligingly tied on their own blindfolds.

Chuck Scott asked for his hands to be unbound so that he could pull on a sweatshirt. “It’s cold,” he said.

“You will not need a shirt or sweater again ever!” one of the masked men said, pushing him out of his room.

Hall walked with his hands up as a guard propelled him along, shouting. One of them kicked him in the buttocks and pushed at his back with a gun.

Those in the Mushroom Inn were led to a cold, empty part of the warehouse basement and ordered to strip to their underwear. Because the numbness in his hand had worsened, Queen had to be helped with the buttons of his pants. It was very cold.

Bruce German felt betrayed. The embassy’s budget officer had sought assurances that Tehran would be safe before he had accepted the assignment just five weeks before the takeover, and he felt bitter about those who had encouraged him to come. Now he could hardly move he was so frightened. His legs were shaking.

In the chancery basement, the hostages stood as instructed, leaning forward with their hands extended over their heads, holding themselves off the wall by their fingertips. One by one, the guards moved down the line, forcing them to drop their pants to be searched. Bob Ode’s legs weren’t wide enough apart and one of the guards roughly rattled the butt of his weapon between the old man’s knees. They pulled on the waist of each captive’s underpants front and back to make sure they weren’t hiding anything. Kupke’s legs were shaking from the cold and from fright. Barry Rosen, whose nerves were shattered anyway, felt his heart pounding heavily. He assumed immediately that he and the others were going to be shot. Everyone was confused. Why were they suddenly doing this? It occurred to Roeder, one of the cooler heads, that the gunmen might be clearing everyone out so they could search the area for contraband.

Rosen heard one of the guards growl to another, “Don’t speak Farsi here,” warning him that the hostages spoke their language. This seemed to confirm Rosen’s worst suspicions. He was shaking so badly he was having a hard time keeping his arms raised against the wall, and when he stooped to pull his pants back up he couldn’t. He was both terrified and ashamed of his terror, of how he looked to the others. He put his arms back up against the wall and when one slipped down again the guard screamed at him.

Limbert thought it was unlikely they would be shot in the chancery basement. He assumed that if they were going to do it, they would take them out to the countryside somewhere, out of the city. The executions he had seen on TV in Iran had always taken place outdoors. He considered these young Iranians’ flair for the dramatic and decided this simply wasn’t for real. But the fear was there anyway; he couldn’t reason it away.

Kupke prayed. He thought about turning around to fight, not being led like a sheep to the slaughter, but saw the futility of it. He prayed that the bullets would kill him quickly, and that he not be left alive, wounded, and maybe paralyzed. Belk just felt numb, as though he was in shock. He did what he was told. Part of him refused to believe it was true, that they might shoot him, that this was it. Hohman didn’t stand close enough to the wall so one of the gunmen pushed his head hard into it. Belk was surprised that his roommate didn’t raise hell. Once he had seen Hohman take off after five guards, kicking and swinging. If Hohman was afraid, then this was for real.

In the warehouse basement, German also prayed. He hadn’t been particularly religious since his childhood but it seemed the only thing to do. He prayed for himself and for his wife and family. He imagined what a shock his execution would be to them.

When he and the others were told to face the wall, Navy Commander Sharer refused.

“If you are going to shoot me, you’re not going to shoot me in the back,” he said.

And, amazingly, the would-be executioners obliged him.

To the rest, one of the guards screamed, “Arms against the walls! Spread your legs! Don’t drop your arms! Do not lower them a centimeter or you will die right now!”

Bob Englemann thought, “Negotiations must have broken down.” Apparently they were going to finish this.

Because of his illness, Queen could not keep his left hand up, and one of the guards kept hitting him with his weapon.

“He can’t get his hand up!” Hall protested.

“Shut up! No speak!” one of the gunmen screamed at him.

Scott’s hands were bound so he could not spread his arms as far apart as demanded. A guard pushed his hands higher up the wall and kicked his legs wider apart. He heard the guards behind him clear their weapons for firing.

Hall was more frightened than he had ever been. Jesus, this is it! They’re going to kill us! He asked God to take care of his wife, Cheri. He felt terrible about leaving her and then thought, I hope I get hit in the back of the head and that it will be over quickly. “God, take care of Cheri. God, take care of Cheri,” Hall kept repeating quietly to himself, shaking. His knees were banging together and suddenly they stopped. His whole body stiffened, as if clenching to receive a final blow.