Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (51 page)

Queen clenched his teeth and said the Lord’s Prayer.

Scott felt dizzy and ill and began to pray.

Jimmy Lopez wondered what it was going to feel like. He had heard about Iranian executions where they machine-gunned the victim starting with his lower legs and working their way up the body, to prolong the pain. How long would it last? Would it hurt or would it happen too fast to feel anything? He hoped that when they shot they hit his head right away.

Bill Keough stood with his hands held high, filled with disbelief. Like many of the others, his mind raced involuntarily to find some last reason to hope. For one thing, the wall they were up against was made of thin plasterboard. There were plenty of places nearby where there were concrete or brick walls. If they are going to shoot us, wouldn’t they put us in front of one of those? Some foreign ambassadors had just come through, checking to make sure everyone was well. Why would they do that and then perform a mass execution? It didn’t make sense. Still, it was a perilous moment. If one of my colleagues panics and goes after one of them, they might start shooting and that would be the end.

Don Cooke was as frightened as he had ever been. In the first days, when he had been taken out to a residence in north Tehran for a few weeks, he was convinced on that drive that he was being taken away to be shot, and for some reason he had been perfectly calm. Now, he was shaking so badly that he could barely keep himself upright.

“Oh my God!” he shouted. “No! No! No!”

Golacinski told Cooke to shut up. The embassy security chief didn’t want these assholes to see any American buckle in his final moments. He felt curiously calm, as though he were watching himself from the outside, thinking, So this is it. It was not the first time he had felt this way since all this started. And he felt relieved. At last this is over. Shoot straight.

Greg Persinger smelled fear. He had always heard that expression and never believed it, but suddenly he detected an odor coming from himself and knew immediately what it was.

A long moment passed. Then another.

Hall relaxed a little…maybe not? Had they gotten past the moment? Maybe they really weren’t going to shoot.

Jimmy Lopez turned around and sat down.

“I’m tired of this shit,” he said. “If you’re going to shoot me, just shoot me.”

Roeder’s fingers got tired, so he leaned his forearms on the wall, resting on his elbows. A guard smacked him sharply in the ribs and he pushed back out to his fingertips. He, too, looked for reasons not to believe that he was about to be shot. Beyond a certain point, he couldn’t take these guards seriously. They were stupid, but not stupid enough to shoot all of them. He was convinced America would turn Iran into a parking lot if that happened. The guards were acting angry and threatening, but when they cocked their weapons, readying them to fire, one of them let his slip from his hands. It clattered to the floor.

The suspense was broken not by an explosion but by the ringing of metal on the concrete floor. They had ejected the rounds.

“Pull up your pants!” one of the guards shouted at Rosen, who stooped to the task with trembling hands.

When it was over, the shaken hostages were led back to their cubicles and rooms, which had been ransacked.

“Goddamned sons of bitches!” shouted Lopez as they left him and Kirtley back in their chancery room. “Fuck you all!”

Limbert found his room in disarray. They had obviously gone through his extra pants and shirt. They had taken a heavy water pitcher that he had scrounged, and a fork, but they hadn’t taken his paper, nor had they found his hidden pencils and the radio! Kupke’s hidden stash of sugar cubes was gone—he had been hoarding them, stealing one or two extra every day at teatime. The guards had also found and taken a small piece of glass he had saved and hidden, and a stub of a pencil. Their belts were confiscated. In the Mushroom Inn, Roeder’s mattress was upended and a few of the little items he’d hoarded were gone. There were rumors that someone had attempted suicide, which would explain removing the belts.

In the room shared by Bob Ode, Barry Rosen, and Bob Blucker, everything had been upended and some things removed but there seemed to be no logic to it. Ode’s liniment for his sore back was gone but all of his mail was left behind. Rosen’s prized picture of his children was gone. Ode was given back his belt, which he had been forced to remove during the strip-search, but Rosen was not given back his.

Some of Bill Royer’s clothing was missing, a second pair of pants, a shirt, and his tweed jacket! He complained enough over the next few days that they brought back the sport coat.

When it was over, Kupke felt exhilarated. He and Kennedy and Graves were in terrifically high spirits, laughing and joking with one another. They were thrilled to still be alive.

In his room, Ode lay down on his mattress and suddenly felt his heart pounding heavily in his chest. He had a heart murmur and was now certain that he was suffering a heart attack. He believed he was dying. He lay perfectly still, in a cold sweat, terrified, but believing there was nothing that could be done. Gradually, his heartbeat slowed until it felt normal again. He felt the need to urinate, and as the guard led him back from the toilet he said in broken English, “These men not ours. They are very angry.”

The next morning, Hall asked Hamid the Liar.

“What was that shit about last night?”

“Oh, that was just a joke,” he said.

“Some goddamn joke. Why would you do that?”

Hamid said that it wasn’t him or his group, that it was a unit of exterior guards. It was just something they had wanted to do.

The mock execution marked the end of one stage of captivity and the beginning of another. It was the last time Rick Kupke felt threatened by the guards. As February wore on, the weather turned brutally cold and there was still boredom, confinement, hunger, and inactivity to cope with, but for a time things settled into a relatively comfortable routine. He, John Graves, and Mike Kennedy were moved to a room on the top floor of the chancery and were given a heater. Kupke was allowed to make a brief phone call home to his mother. The guards now let them speak. For months, “No speak!” had been the most common expression they and the others had heard from the guards, and though Kupke and his roommates had been talking for months, it had always been in whispers, and always in fear that they would be punished. Now they could talk and laugh freely.

Kennedy asked the guards for a can of coffee grounds from the commissary and proceeded to make what he called “cowboy coffee.” He poured some grounds into the bottom of a pot, added water, and brought it to a boil on the heater. They scooped the coffee from the top of the pot.

Colonel Scott sensed that the mock execution had acted as a purgative, and afterward many of the guards felt guilty about it. At night, he and the others in the Mushroom Inn were allowed to resume playing checkers, something they had not been allowed to do since leaving the house in north Tehran before Christmas. The guards set up a folding table in the hallway outside the large room where the hostages could take turns playing. Scott kept telling the guards he wanted to play with Colonel Schaefer, who had been taken away weeks ago and had not returned. By asking for him, Scott was trying to learn something about what had happened to him.

“It is not possible to play with Colonel Schaefer,” said a guard they called Little Ali because he was the smaller of two guards with that name—neither was very big.

“Why not?” demanded Scott. “We were allowed to play together before.”

The colonel let loose a string of oaths and threats, which caused him to be carried off to a cold room and threatened with a beating. Little Ali waved a length of hard rubber hose and promised that if Scott did not behave he would use it. Left alone, he found evidence that Schaefer had been in the room. It was lined with steel lockers, and in one he found a slip of paper and a short pencil. On the paper in handwriting he recognized as Schaefer’s—they had been passing notes for months—was a list of songs. Scott guessed that his air force colleague had been trying to memorize them. On another slip of paper was a rudimentary calendar, again in Schaefer’s handwriting. One of the lessons they had been taught in survival school was to try to keep track of time. From the scraps, Scott determined that Schaefer had been held in this freezing room for thirteen days, and that he had been moved three days earlier.

He shook with cold. Little Ali had locked him up wearing just a T-shirt and slacks. He realized how pathetic he had become. The guards had refused them razors for fear of a suicide attempt, so his dark beard was long and unkempt and he found there was no way to keep soup drippings and chunks of food from falling into it. Without a comb or scissors he could not trim it or keep it clean. He had lost more than a dozen pounds—his clothes hung on him—and he hadn’t seen sunlight for anything more than a few fleeting minutes in months. He was pale, scruffy, dirty, and his teeth were chattering with the cold.

After a few hours, Little Ali returned, standing a safe distance away from Scott in the doorway, and suggested that the colonel apologize. If he did, he would be allowed to return to his warm cubicle—Scott insisted on calling it a “cell.”

The colonel refused. Whatever he had said or done was a lot less than what had been done to him in the previous months. Little Ali closed the door and left. Later that day, he was visited by Akbar, the kindly guard with whom Scott had established some rapport. The slender, mustachioed Iranian told Scott that Bani-Sadr had been elected president of Iran. Scott told him that he had no respect for a government that treated him and his fellow Americans as they had been treated, and complained to Akbar about the mock execution.

Akbar apologized for it and seemed genuinely chagrined. It had been “un-Islamic,” he said. He then led Scott out of the cold room and back to his cubicle.

“Be good,” he implored.

It was the first time Scott realized that Akbar outranked the other guards.

After the mock execution, mail was delivered more frequently. Most was from strangers, which remained a disappointment. Sometimes it seemed as if all of America had adopted the hostages as pen pals. Many of the letters continued to be from schoolchildren who had written as part of a classroom assignment.

“Dear Mr. Hall. Hi, my name is Jimmy. I am eight years old and I am writing this letter because my teacher says that I have to. What do you eat?” One of the letters was similarly chatty and upbeat and ended with, “I sure hope they don’t shoot you.” Hall received several from a man in Houston who had apparently chosen him as his hostage pen pal. These were cleverer than most and Hall actually enjoyed them. The writer always incorporated short parables that were ostensibly preachy little stories, the kind of thing his Iranian captors liked but which could be relatively easily deciphered to reveal important news developments. For instance, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Hall’s correspondent wrote a story about a large man, whom he likened to a bear, attacking his neighbor and insisting that the neighbor wear a bright red collar with a star on it.

The guards withheld mail to punish prisoners they didn’t like. Colonel Scott rarely received anything, and when he did it was usually from a stranger. Once, Hamid the Liar surprised him by offering to escort him to the mail table.

Behind the table, stacked high with letters, was a guard named Ahmad, a squat, thick, balding, cheerfully abusive man who was at least ten years older than the other guards. He made a pretense of shuffling through the stacks.

“I don’t see anything for you, Mr. Scott,” he said. “Are you sure your wife has not found another man?”

A guard alongside Ahmad handed him several letters, and the colonel found a spot on the floor to sit and read them. The first two were from strangers; one was addressed to “Lieutenant Colonel” Scott, which was annoying to a man very proud of his rank. One was a letter from his sister, and another from his wife, Betty, postmarked October 26, more than a week before he was taken hostage. It was terribly disappointing. Like most of the hostages, Scott worried a great deal about his wife and children and wondered how they were coping with this ordeal. The encouraging letter from his sister also revealed nothing about his family. The last letter was from a precocious grade-school girl in Nebraska, writing as part of a class assignment, who addressed him as “Lieutenant Scott” and confided that she thought it would have been smarter for President Carter to send the shah back to Iran instead of letting him go to Panama—it was the first he had heard that the shah was no longer in the United States. The little girl concluded by noting that Scott was forty-eight and that he was a “lieutenant.” She asked, “At your age, shouldn’t you be higher than that?”

Multiple copies of the comics and sports pages of the Boston Globe were being mailed to the hostages daily by someone from that city, and though the students saw no harm in passing them along, the cartoons and stories often disclosed useful information. Garry Trudeau, the cartoonist, was spoofing the Iranian students in his popular strip Doonesbury, which gave a heartening indication of how intense public interest remained in their plight after six months. When a letter from Bill Keough published in the United States thanked the anonymous sender, the Boston benefactor surfaced. He was a taxi driver who was thrilled to learn that his long-shot effort to help his kidnapped countrymen in Tehran had scored. He sent a card to Keough saying that he regarded the success of his gesture as the only “great thing” he had ever accomplished in his life. He promised to keep mailing the sections, and did.

On the same day as the mock execution, forty-nine members of a group calling itself the Committee for American-Iranian Crisis Resolution left New York for Tehran. It had been formed by a professor of industrial relations at the University of Kansas, Norm Forer, who had been active years earlier in efforts to publicize the shah’s human rights abuses and hoped that a dialogue between American citizens critical of their government and the hostage takers might help break the deadlock. He proposed that his group travel to Iran not to initiate a dialogue but simply to listen, to give the hostage takers an opportunity to vent before a group of sympathetic Americans. Many prominent leftist activists sought to be included but Forer, perhaps mindful that his own name would be eclipsed, wanted unknowns, what he called “grassroots.” He polled antiwar organizations for names and selected a cross section of people who shared his political outlook. The student hostage takers, who still felt their message to Americans was being distorted by government-controlled media, smelled enough opportunity for propaganda points to put up the money for the trip. Among those in the private mission were Hershel Jaffe, a rabbi from Newburgh, New York, and the Reverend Darrell Rupiper, an activist Catholic priest from Omaha, Nebraska.