Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (57 page)

Because he had some difficulty at first orienting himself, the work took fifty minutes, ten more than he had estimated. Twice while he worked vehicles came roaring past. The landscape was so flat that he could see the headlights coming from a long way off, and Carney just lay flat, pressing himself to the ground. They passed so close by that Carney watched the truck driver casually light a cigarette as he passed. One of the pilots, Bud McBroom, had come out to help Carney align the runway lights, and as they lay flat he told a long joke about Roy Rogers, concluding with a silly punch line he sang to the tune of “The Chattanooga Choo-Choo.” “Pardon me, Roy, is that the cat that chewed your new shoes?” It made Carney laugh.

Both men and the other pilot were armed, but the last thing they wanted was a confrontation in the middle of the desert. It could scotch the whole mission. Apparently neither passing vehicle had spotted them or the plane. When, exhausted and relieved, they returned to the plane with the soil samples, tools, and motorcycle, they found the other pilot, Jim Rhyne, standing at the nose of the plane with his M-16.

On the long flight out of Iran, the pilots noted an electronic indication that the plane had been picked up by radar. They were near the southern coastline, just minutes from the Persian Gulf, and fearing that one of the country’s defense radar stations might have spotted them, the pilot changed his course and the indicator went off. Later analysis showed that the radar had come from a commercial vessel in the gulf, not from Iranian defenses. When they landed back in Oman, Carney immediately boarded another plane for London, where he was met at Gatwick Airport by two CIA agents who escorted him to the Concorde lounge. Feeling out of place in his dirty jeans and sweater, still ripe from his days of travel and night of work in the Iranian desert, with traces of camouflage paint still on his face and hands, he passed on the complimentary champagne and asked for a beer. Later that same day he was in the office of General James B. Vaught, the mission commander. His soil samples, analyzed at nearby Fort Belvoir, showed that the “Desert One” location was suitable. There was some concern over the trucks that had rolled past; it indicated a much busier road than surveillance had led mission planners to believe, but that was dismissed as an anomaly.

Carney’s bold scout mission did more than test the soil and lay out a runway. It confirmed that it was possible to slip into and out of Iran without detection. Satellites watched Desert One carefully for several more days until wind had erased all traces of the marks left by the Twin Otter and Carney’s dirt bike.

Over the same days, Beckwith’s operatives had slipped separately into Tehran. Led by Major Dick Meadows, they were the Iranian-born U.S. airman and several special forces soldiers who spoke fluent German, posing as German businessmen. Meadows went under an Irish passport and had apparently summoned enough of a brogue to satisfy the customs officer at Mehrabad Airport.

Over the next few days, Meadows and the rest of the team double-checked all the arrangements put in place by “Bob,” the CIA agent Beckwith didn’t completely trust. They checked the hide sites and spent time observing the embassy from outside, noting the number of guards and the kinds of weapons they carried and also their habits. Nights were still cold in Tehran at the end of March, and the guards could be seen leaving their posts to duck periodically into shelter.

The German-speaking team managed to pay a visit to the Foreign Ministry building where Laingen, Tomseth, and Howland were being held. Their assessment of the security precautions there prompted mission planners to increase the size of the separate force planning to rescue the diplomats from their gilded cage on the third floor.

Confidence in the mission was now high. The planes and choppers and Delta had conducted their sixth full-dress rehearsal at Twenty-nine Palms, the Marine Corps base in California, in the last week of March, and it had gone well. Delta’s operators knew their moves so well they could practically do them in their sleep. Yet Beckwith still fretted over the unforeseen. There were so many things that could go wrong that, if you let yourself think about it for too long, it induced paralysis. His men were trained to quickly scan hands when they entered a room, and to direct their fire at those with weapons. What if, in the confusion, some of the hostages jumped guards and seized their rifles? He worried about what would happen if, after his men had taken down the embassy and herded the hostages into Amajadieh soccer stadium across the street, the Iranian police or army counterattacked with armor. Delta was strictly light infantry. They could not hold out long against tanks or any kind of armored assault vehicles. The answer to those worries were the AC-130 gunships that would be flying that night over the city. They would destroy any Iranian armor that moved toward the rescue operation as well as any Iranian fighters on the runway at Mehrabad Airport.

By the beginning of April the colonel was convinced Delta Force was as ready as it was going to be. His men had been sequestered for months, training endlessly. Major Pete Schoomaker, one of the squadron leaders, had simply vanished from his fiancée’s life. He had not been allowed to tell her or anyone else what he was doing, where he was going, or when he might be back. She canceled their wedding several months after he left, having heard nothing from him. At night the men would watch Ted Koppel’s new program on TV, Nightline, America Held Hostage, which every night would list the number of days since the embassy takeover. Somebody hung up a sign in their barracks that read “Delta Force Held Hostage” and every day upped the number of days. As spring approached in Iran the nights grew shorter, robbing the mission of precious minutes of darkness.

General David Jones, chairman of the joint chiefs, visited Fort Bragg not long after these secret surveillance trips were completed. He and Beckwith pulled off on a muddy trail near one of Delta’s practice sites and had a long conversation in the car. Beckwith looked Jones in the eye and told him his men were ready.

“We’ve got to do it,” he said.

The colonel explained how many times his men had practiced, and how often they had been told to get ready to go only to be stood down.

“Sir, I can’t get these troops up one more time,” Beckwith said. “If we’re going to go, this has got to be it.”

“I would agree with you,” said Jones. “I think we’re ready.”

Colonel Charlie Beckwith, founder and commander of Delta Force, training for the rescue mission in Arizona in December 1978. (Courtesy: Lewis Burruss)

Members of Delta Force prepare for the rescue mission in Wadi Kena, Egpyt. From left to right: Dick Potter, Lt. Col. Lewis “Bucky” Burruss, Fred Lewis. Background, left to right: Phil Hanson, Jimmy Knotts (with beard), Norm Crawford, Steve Wright, Moe Elmore (wearing camouflage hat), Mike Vining. The man in the foreground is Lawrence N. “Larry” Freedman, the first American killed in Somalia in 1992. (Courtesy: Lewis Burruss)

Forcing grown men to live together in a small space day and night, month after month, is a form of slow torture.

The way one man chews his food, sniffles, coughs, farts, snores, or clears his throat becomes a torment. Bob Ode’s garrulousness drove his roommates crazy. He was guilty of a failing that afflicts many men as they age, the tendency to tell the same stories over and over again. ICA chief John Graves’s patrician disdain for meticulous personal hygiene—he stank—had his roommates contemplating roommate-icide. Economics officer Bob Blucker’s hatred of tobacco smoke finally drove him to isolation; he would stuff toilet-paper wads under the crack of his door to keep smoke out of his space. Opinions become deadly, and anything can provoke argument—the rules of a card game, the coming American elections, the likelihood of snow in Tehran in February, the advantages of French cooking…anything. Rocky Sickmann and Jerry Plotkin grew intensely envious of their roommate Billy Gallegos because for some reason—reasons were hard to come by—he had been given back his shoes after the visit from Norm Forer’s crowd, and his roommates had not. It engendered weeks of ill will.

The three primary beats of each day were meals. Immediately after breakfast, speculation would begin about what would come for lunch and, after lunch, what would be served for dinner. It was pathetic. Many of the hostages coped with boredom by sleeping half the day. Some of the hostages took up arts and crafts. Al Golacinski received a paint-by-number set in the mail from someone and spent hours patiently coloring in the intricate patterns, producing paintings that the guards vied to take home. At the Foreign Ministry, Bruce Laingen took up watercolors, painting scenes outside the tall windows on the third floor. Michael Metrinko drew complex geometric designs on the walls of his cell, using his food bowl and the top of his drinking cup, and then colored them in.

The main pastime was making life difficult for the guards, who obliged, many of them, by being exquisitely sensitive to slight.

Hamid the Liar stepped into Sickmann’s room one night and complained about the marine’s use of the word “guard” in reference to him. The term, he said, was “too cruel.”

“We don’t want you to feel that you are in a prison,” he said. “We want you to feel that you are our guests.”

Sickmann and his roommates were visited one day by an Iranian professor who encouraged them not to despair so much about going home.

“It is good to take four months off work and have a rest,” he said.

Then he went home.

America’s long lack of a military response to Iran’s provocation prompted a popular joke; in which President Carter was visited by the ghost of Theodore Roosevelt, who wondered what was going on in the world.

“The Soviets have invaded Afghanistan,” Carter says.

“Are you retaliating with conventional forces or with nuclear weapons?” Roosevelt asks.

“Uh, neither one,” says Carter. “We’re boycotting the Olympics in Moscow.”

“What else is going on?” the former Rough Rider asks.

“Iranians have taken over an embassy in Tehran and they’re holding fifty-three of our diplomats hostage.”

“How many bombers have you sent over?” Roosevelt asks. “How many divisions have you committed?”

“None,” says Carter. “We’re using diplomatic restraint.”

Roosevelt looks stunned, and then bursts into laughter.

“I get it,” he says, “you’re joking! Next you’re gonna tell me you gave away the Panama Canal!”

Jimmy Carter’s patience was not just principled forbearance, nor was his determination to end the crisis peacefully fed by wishful thinking. It was based on the belief that nations were guided ultimately by self-interest. Even in the swirling currents of Iran, he was convinced that cooler heads would eventually prevail. By any realistic calculation, sustaining the standoff hurt Iran far more than it did America. Khomeini’s new Islamist state was struggling to define itself while battling ethnic separatists and Soviet-backed leftists inside its borders and fending off increasingly bold incursions by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Russian armies had occupied its neighbor Afghanistan. The country was imperiled by both civil war and invasion. Even as it disdained Western allies, Iran needed trading partners and military suppliers. So why jeopardize these things for the sake of holding a few score Americans captive? The move made sense only in the imaginary world of the student hostage takers and their hard-core clerical supporters, who were motivated more by symbols than by reality. In their eyes, the embassy occupation had become the revolution’s defining moment, a dramatic uprooting of all American interests and values and a hopeful beacon to all the world’s oppressed. The various downsides to drawing it out were dismissed by the faithful with a wave of the hand; Allah would defend and provide.

Less well understood by Carter and even the foreign service professionals who advised him were the practical political benefits to religious hardliners inside Iran of sustaining this crisis. Stories of American subterfuge undercut the efforts of popular rivals such as Bani-Sadr and Ghotbzadeh to create a more democratic, secular state. The embattled president and foreign minister made one last effort to wrest control of the hostages from the students in April. With support from the Revolutionary Council, Bani-Sadr once again demanded that the hostages be delivered to the Foreign Ministry, where Laingen, Tomseth, and Howland oversaw new preparations to receive them. For once, the students appeared to have been outmaneuvered. Instead of repeating their defiance, a spokesman for the hostage takers declined public comment, fueling hopes in Washington that at last they were prepared to submit. Carter was so encouraged that he took the unusual step of inviting reporters into the Oval Office on the morning of April 1 to share the good news. It appeared at last that this long, embarrassing, confusing ordeal was at an end.

“This morning the president of Iran has announced that the hostages’ control will be transferred to the government of Iran, which we consider to be a positive step,” the president told the journalists. The shift came at a propitious moment for Carter, who was facing off against Senator Kennedy that day in two primaries, in Wisconsin and Kansas.

Carter was not just preening. He had prearranged with Ghotbzadeh to make such public remarks. Bani-Sadr was to announce that the Revolutionary Council had approved the transfer, and the White House would respond by welcoming the move and promising not to impose additional sanctions. Carter made a point of repeating the promise three times to reporters. He had met the afternoon before with Ben Bradlee, editor of the Washington Post, and several powerful national reporters and columnists to brief them, off the record, about the deal, hoping to forestall a critical response that might undermine the overture.

By the end of the day the president had carried both election primaries, but his hopes for a resolution of the hostage standoff were once again dashed. For reasons the White House did not understand, Bani-Sadr had abruptly announced that the United States had failed to fully live up to its part of the bargain. The accusation was bewildering. “We’re not sure what he’s talking about,” said Jody Powell, the president’s press secretary, when reporters asked what Bani-Sadr meant.