Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (56 page)

Hall was also hesitant about any visible display of religious interest because his captors were so obnoxious about their own faith. The guards would routinely call him and the others infidels, and note that America was doomed to fail in the long run because Americans did not pray to Allah and live according to the dictates of the Koran. Most of them liked to have an audience for their prayers. Hall didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of seeing him undergo a foxhole conversion.

Hall ended his effort at finding God with one last prayer: “God, if you exist I will make a deal with you. You take care of my wife and family, and I will take care of myself, and won’t ask anything for me. You take care of them because they are true believers.”

He knew his wife would be praying for him. It seemed to him a better avenue of approach.

John Limbert was moved in Iran’s New Year, March 21, to a room on the top floor of the chancery. The move came after Hohman and Belk had slipped a note into Limbert’s room when he was taking a shower. Not realizing a guard had stayed in his room, they knocked on the wall to get his attention and the guard had found the note, which asked for news about Waldheim’s visit. If the guards were surprised at how much they seemed to know about what was going on they never said a word. They simply moved Limbert. Again the embassy’s political officer experienced the trauma of being torn from the relative security of his routines and colleagues and forced to face a new and uncertain situation. They would not let him take his pillow with him and so he lost his radio. He tried hard to keep it.

“Can’t I take my mattress and pillow?” Limbert pleaded. “I’ve gotten used to them.”

The new room had a window that had been bricked up, and the walls were thick and solid. This time he really was alone.

He fell back on his routines, eating, exercising, reading, sleeping, talking to the guards. He sorely missed the radio. He stretched out his meals as long as he could, reading old magazines, trying to savor each mouthful slowly enough to make the food last through an entire magazine. At one point he managed to accumulate a stack of old Fortune magazines and read one with each meal.

He made himself a deck of cards, and when he was playing solitaire with it one day the guard took pity on him and brought him a real deck. Over the next ten months he wore out six or seven packs. He used pistachio shells to re-create football and soccer plays, and then acted out whole games, and he worked on translating some of the works of Shariati into English. The guards were pleased enough about this to bring him a typewriter. When he was finished with one set of essays he gave it to the guard.

“If anybody is interested, they can have them printed,” he said. “If they make any money, just give it to charity.”

He translated some of C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters into Persian.

One Monday afternoon, a TV crew swept unannounced into his room with Red Cross representatives and Ali Khamenei, the powerful cleric who had been named chief of Friday prayers in Tehran, a very prestigious position. With the cameras rolling, Limbert talked briefly to Khamenei, telling him that his own living conditions were passable and complaining jokingly that Persian hospitality was so aggressive that “they refuse to let the guests go.”

When Khamenei spoke of the shah’s criminality, Limbert acknowledged it dismissively, as a thing that no one disputed.

The interrogations of Michael Metrinko had ended early in the new year. The authorities had not given up their theory that he was a master spy, but they had gotten nothing out of him. Metrinko knew that any association with him, no matter how innocent, might mean a jail sentence or even execution for an Iranian. So he was alarmed in early spring when he was led from his basement cell to be questioned again and found himself in the presence of Mousavi Khoeniha, the nearsighted, portly mid-level cleric and architect of the takeover. He was wearing a turban and clerical robes. Standing beside Khoeniha was Ali Sharshar, an acquaintance of Metrinko’s from better days. Metrinko had taken judo lessons arranged by Ali’s brother Behrouz, a former police colonel and a well-known martial arts teacher.

Earlier in the year, the embassy political officer had helped arrange for Ali and his wife to travel to the United States with their daughter, who needed open-heart surgery. When the family had returned home afterward, Ali had brought a gift to the embassy to thank Metrinko for his help, a tie and a bottle of cologne. It was awkward for Metrinko. He was not allowed to accept gifts, so he had called his friend Behrouz and asked him to return the gift to Ali and explain that he meant no offense by refusing it. Behrouz had invited Metrinko to dinner with his brother.

The Sharshar family was a distinguished one, and both Behrouz and his younger brother, a helicopter pilot, had served the shah. They were a well-educated, Westernized family—Behrouz and Ali’s sister, Fereshte, had married an American journalist and was living in Philadelphia—and they had nothing but contempt for the so-called religious leaders who had seized power. They were Muslims but they were appalled by the hypocrisy of many mullahs, who they saw as more interested in worldly wealth and power than in religion. They had been living in fear of the revolutionary government ever since the shah’s departure. Behrouz had been fired from his police job. At the dinner with Metrinko, Ali had made some harshly critical comments about Khomeini and his circle. Metrinko, as he always did, had written up a report of the dinner and had included an account of the conversation. Evidently this report had fallen into the hands of the hostage takers. Metrinko’s heart sank when he saw Ali in the room with Khoeniha.

The previous weeks had been a nightmare for the Sharshars. Ali had been denounced by the students at a routine press conference in the embassy, and Metrinko’s “spy document” had been produced as proof. Much had been made of it in the press. Ali had been thrown in jail for nineteen days until his father, a former governor of Qom, successfully pleaded for his release. But after his release some of the mullahs complained that Ali was being let off too easily. Behrouz and Ali had been summoned before a meeting with a high-ranking ayatollah, a friend of their father’s, who explained that not everyone was convinced of their innocence. Hotheaded Ali had defiantly told the cleric, “All mullahs are filth.” Behrouz felt like slapping his brother and did his best to smooth over the insult, but the upshot of the meeting was that they were ordered to an interrogation session at the “den of spies,” where Ali, in particular, would have to explain his comments and his relationship to Metrinko.

It was a delicate matter. The Sharshar brothers had friends and family connections that still mattered in the new Iran, but Ali’s effrontery and his documented connection to one of the embassy’s most notorious “spies” demanded some kind of response. On the appointed morning they were driven to the embassy in a windowless van with several of the students, along with Khoeniha.

Behrouz felt confident. He knew he had said nothing compromising, and he trusted that his clever American friend would say nothing to make matters worse. He was kept waiting in the hallway of the chancery when his brother was led inside for questioning. It was sad; the once airy and stately halls of the building were littered with trash and its walls covered with graffiti and slogans. While he waited, he saw Metrinko being led down the hallway and into the room. He could hardly believe his eyes. At first he wasn’t sure the ragged, spectral figure he saw was his American friend, but then he recognized him in the gaunt, bearded face. Metrinko was wearing a green nylon shirt and oversized pants that were gathered and bunched together into a ball at the waist and clamped together with a paper clip. His flip-flop sandals smacked against the hard floor with each step. Behrouz thought Metrinko saw him but his friend made no sign of it. As soon as Metrinko was led into the room where they had taken Ali, Behrouz heard Metrinko start shouting.

“Why have you brought this guy here?” he demanded.

Khoeniha ignored the question. He glowered behind his desk, oddly digging a fork into the palm of his hand, as though working to control his anger.

“What was your relationship with this man?” Khoeniha asked. “How did you know him?”

“His brother is a judo master,” Metrinko said. “His brother-in-law is from Philadelphia. I know him. And he works for a newspaper.”

Khoeniha raised an eyebrow. They were getting somewhere. He asked about this brother-in-law.

“I’m not going to answer questions from anyone wearing a dress,” Metrinko said, contemptuously.

“Shut up, you motherfucker,” one of the students barked at him.

Metrinko exploded. “You are the motherfuckers! The real motherfucker is Khomeini. Fuck him and fuck you all!”

The guards beat him. Behrouz was appalled. He wanted to help his friend but knew he could not. He loathed the scruffy, bearded “students,” and he felt ashamed for his country. So he sat, fighting the urge to run from the building, for as long as the kicks and blows continued and until Metrinko was dragged back down the hall, his head down, still muttering defiance.

One of the students, still clearly angry, brought Ali out of the room and then he and Behrouz and the others left. The students were concerned about what the brothers had seen. They had made a big public show of how gently and respectfully they were treating their “guests” at the embassy.

“If you talk one bit about what you have heard,” one of them told Behrouz, “we’ll stand you up before a firing squad.”

In the coming days, both Sharshar brothers fled Iran. Both ended up in the United States. Behrouz visited Metrinko’s parents in Olyphant. Of all the hostages, Metrinko was the only one the State Department had heard nothing about. There had been no pictures of him at any of the staged events, and none of the hostages who had been released knew what had happened to him. There had been no letters from him, and there was serious concern that he had been killed. Metrinko’s mother sobbed when Behrouz told her that he had seen him alive. He described how he looked but didn’t mention the beating.

Back in his basement cell, bruised and scraped, Metrinko worried about his Iranian friends and was pleased to have escaped from the session without further compromising them. He was confident that they would find their way to safety. And insulting Khoeniha to his face? That was simply delicious. He replayed the moment in his mind with increasing satisfaction. It was well worth the beating they’d given him. He found that as he grew leaner he was also growing tougher; the blows didn’t bother him as much as they had in the past. He knew he must have presented a frightening picture to his old friends, a ragged, dirty, pale, hairy ghost of his former self, captive and pathetically vulnerable. But inwardly he glowed. All in all, it had been the most interesting thing to happen to him in months.

As the month of dashed hopes came to an end, a small CIA plane took off from a desert airstrip in Oman and, with the eyes of America’s most sophisticated tracking system watching carefully, threaded its way through Iran’s radar defense systems, flew across half the country in darkness, and set down on the spot being considered as a staging area for Delta Force’s rescue mission. The president had given authorization for this reconnaissance flight only days before, along with permission for Colonel Charlie Beckwith to slip two of his men into Tehran. To the men who had been planning and practicing a hostage rescue for months, it was a sign that the White House was getting serious about sending them in.

Aboard the CIA plane, a Twin Otter, was Major John Carney, an air force combat controller known as “Coach,” because he had once coached football at the Air Force Academy. He was a big, rangy man dressed completely in black—jeans, sweater, and knit cap—carrying a 9mm automatic pistol with a silencer, more to make himself feel better than out of any realistic hope it would save him if he were discovered. The pistol would do about as much good as his lame cover story, that he and the pilots were geologists. To make that work he’d have to quickly ditch the gun. Carney was stretched out in the back of the plane on a metal fuel tank that provided extra gas for the long flight—four hours in and four hours out—and between that and his Kawasaki dirt bike there was barely room for him to sit up. Beckwith had never even asked Carney about undertaking this mission; he had just volunteered him. The veteran air force man would not have turned it down, but he was surprised not to have been consulted about it. That was Beckwith’s way. Carney saw it in football terms. The colonel was the kind of man who figured if you showed up with a helmet, you’d damn well be ready to play.

They landed in an empty quadrant of the vast emptiness of the Dasht-e Kavir salt desert. The nearest town, Yazd, was more than ninety miles away. There was a “road,” more like a well-worn path, used very occasionally by trucks and buses traveling north from Qom to Meshad, a town on the northeastern border of Iran and Afghanistan. Ninety days of satellite surveillance had observed only two vehicles. It was here that six C-130 transports carrying fuel blivits and Beckwith’s men—now nearly a hundred—would land on the first night of the two-day mission. The eight Sea Stallion helicopters from the aircraft carrier Nimitz would meet them here, refuel, load the Delta operators, and then fly off to their prearranged hiding places outside Tehran. But before this complex rendezvous could be attempted, the mission planners needed to know whether the soil was firm enough to enable large fixed-wing aircraft to land and take off without getting stuck in the sand.

Carney nervously disembarked into darkness suffused with moonlight, unloaded his dirt bike, and went to work. The ground seemed plenty firm enough; it was hard-packed sand as smooth and solid as a pool table. He drilled several soil samples that he would carry back to Washington for more detailed analysis. Then Carney measured out a runway and painstakingly dug holes with his K-bar knife to chip away at the soil and bury small infrared beacons at intervals to define it from the air. He set up four lights to outline the box into which the plane would land, and then planted another about three thousand feet farther on to mark the end of the runway. The beacons were virtually invisible to the naked eye but showed up brightly through night-vision goggles. He connected the lights to batteries, and attached them to a trigger he had removed from a garage-door opener he had picked up at Sears. With the garage-door remote, one of the pilots would be able to turn on the runway lights on his approach on the night of the mission. He also paced off the ground inside the lights to make sure there was no debris, stumps, dips, or bumps big enough to damage a wing or harm the plane’s landing gear.