Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (6 page)

Laingen phoned.

“I’m coming back,” he told Golacinski.

“No, you won’t be able to get near the embassy,” Golacinski said. He could picture the chargé d’affaires’ limo engulfed in a sea of hostile Iranians. Laingen, Howland, and Tomseth might be torn limb from limb. He advised them to turn right around and go back into the Foreign Ministry building and stay there.

Laingen said that under no circumstances were the guards to open fire on the demonstrators. Golacinski asked if, as a last resort, they could use tear gas.

“Only as a last resort,” Laingen said.

In earlier discussions, when they had expected trouble immediately after the shah had been allowed to enter the United States, they agreed that tear gas was not to be used anywhere on the embassy grounds, only inside the buildings. Tehran’s protesters were accustomed to tear gas and had learned how to cope with it during the months of their uprising—that explained the kerchiefs many of them wore wrapped across their faces. Using it would only further incite them. Given that the grounds were completely overrun, the buildings were now the line of defense. Most areas of the second floor were off-limits to those without the highest levels of security clearance, so Golacinski ordered all the local employees to the basement and all Americans to the top floor. Howland came up on the radio seeking an update.

“Look, I can’t talk to you right now,” Golacinski told him. “I’m trying to get this under control.”

At the Foreign Ministry, an impressive collection of large ornate buildings several miles east, Laingen and Tomseth implored Deputy Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi to send help to their besieged embassy. Only a short while earlier they had concluded a polite lower-level meeting over sugary tea, in which Laingen had officially thanked the provisional government for its help in controlling the large demonstrations outside the embassy the week before. They had discussed obtaining diplomatic immunity—a touchy subject in Iran—for the embassy’s new military liaison group, commanded by Army Colonel Chuck Scott. After leaving that meeting, Laingen had gone out to the courtyard to his car, where Howland told him what was going on. They had driven only about two blocks from the ministry when Golacinski advised them to turn back. The chargé and his deputy had raced back into the ministry building, where they first confronted the chief of protocol. He was a gentle, nervous man, who immediately began wringing his hands with anxiety. He was sympathetic but powerless. He had led them back in to Kharrazi.

Ibrahim Yazdi, the foreign minister, and Mehdi Bazargan, the prime minister, had been away for a few days to attend the conference in Algiers, where the informal meeting with President Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski had set off alarms in Tehran. Yazdi was due back that day but had not returned to his office.

So Laingen and Tomseth listened impatiently as Kharrazi phoned various police and security officials trying to get some force over to the embassy to restore order. It was clear from the tenor of his conversations that no one was eager to intervene. The police had their hands full dealing with the mass demonstrations at Tehran University. Help would come eventually, Kharrazi said, but it would take more time.

Inside the consulate, on the east side of the compound, there were a small number of staff and about sixty Iranians who had made appointments that day to discuss their visa applications. Consul general Richard Morefield had closed the building to the normal flood of applicants while the graffiti painted on the new walls was removed, but scheduled appointments were being honored and most of the staff was at work. Among them was Bob Ode, a retired foreign service officer who had taken a temporary assignment to help out in Tehran. He had a backlog of about three hundred visas to review and hoped that a quiet morning would allow him to put a dent in it. Another was Richard Queen, a lanky, shy, bookish vice consul with big glasses, who was working with three other consulate officers typing data into AVLOS, the building’s new computer system. Assisted by four of his colleagues, he was pulling from the files of rejected visa applicants those who had been convicted of crimes or who had been turned down within the past year and entering that information into the computer, which was linked to American consulates around the world. That way, if the same applicant popped up at an office in a different country, there would be a record of what the Tehran office had discovered. It was boring work, and Queen was looking forward to finishing early and spending some time exploring Tehran.

Ode was helping a pretty young American woman, married to an Iranian, who wanted to check on her mother-in-law’s passport. He got up from his desk with the passport number and was flipping through his files when outside his office he heard Morefield urgently announce, “All right, everybody upstairs! Everybody upstairs!”

“What’s the matter?” the young woman asked.

“I don’t know,” said Ode.

“Does this sort of thing happen often?” she asked.

“I have no idea,” said Ode. “It’s never happened before since I’ve been here, but I’ve only been here a short time.”

Ode cleared the paperwork off his desk and locked it in a small safe, which contained his personal things, passport, travel orders, American money, and some letters and other items that he thought were more secure in the office safe than at the apartment where he had been staying. Then he accompanied the young woman upstairs.

“Stay away from the windows,” Morefield said as people filed past him. Queen saw clumps of young Iranians milling around in the compound below, and noted the curious laminated photos of Khomeini that hung from their necks. They didn’t look too menacing, but some had makeshift weapons. One carried nunchucks, another had what looked like a croquet mallet, and another held a length of broken board.

Downstairs, demonstrators were breaking windows and reaching in through the bars trying to grab anything inside they could reach. Marine Sergeant Jimmy Lopez moved from window to window, whacking arms and hands with his nightstick, then herding everyone up to the second floor. If they turned off the lights on the first floor and everyone stayed upstairs, it was hoped the protesters outside would assume the building was empty. The Iranians were asked to sit on the floor of the visa processing room and stay low.

Lopez and Morefield were discussing what to do next when the power went out. Then they heard footsteps on the roof.

In his second-floor chancery office, Michael Metrinko’s amusement at the activity outside quickly soured. As the numbers of intruders grew, he realized that the demonstration was now severe enough to disrupt the busy day he had planned. When the embassy had been overrun in February—he was in Tabriz—he heard it had screwed things up for days. He wondered how much this fracas would set them back.

Staff members from the lower floors were massed in the hallway outside his door. When word came that the basement had been breached, Metrinko phoned his friend Mehdi Taleghani.

A security guard answered and there was a delay before he came back on the line.

“Michael, he won’t talk to you,” the guard said.

“Do you know what is happening here at the embassy?” Metrinko asked.

“Yes, we know,” the guard said, and then, “Michael, I’m really sorry.”

He hung up.

Metrinko thought, So much for Persian friendship. He felt set up.

Golacinski was losing his TV cameras. One by one the monitors in the chancery front guard post went blank. The invading protesters were either destroying the cameras or tilting them up to the ceiling. There were four marines lined up behind the front door, each down on one knee with his weapon up. The door shook more with each impact from the wooden ram. Then, abruptly, it stopped. Sickmann looked through one of the thick Plexiglas windows and saw that the group on the porch had dropped its battering ram and gone off.

Then Gallegos radioed the news that protesters had broken through a basement window. The front side of the building had a sunken concrete porch that ran its full length, letting sunlight in the basement windows. It looked like an empty moat. The protesters had found the one window that had not been completely secured. It had a steel mesh over it and a lock but it was clearly a weak point. Golacinski wondered if they had known about it in advance.

Downstairs, Gallegos confronted the intruders at the foot of the basement stairs. He cocked his shotgun when he saw the first three enter the hallway and they all retreated. Behind Gallegos crouched Persinger, who was handed a tear gas grenade by army Sergeant Joe Subic, a pudgy young man with dirty-blond hair and glasses who worked as a clerk in the defense attaché’s office and whom the marines regarded as a wannabe. Persinger had no use for the grenade, which he did not yet have permission to use. So he set it down on the step next to him and then heard a tink! When he looked down he noticed the grenade’s pin was missing and that the safety lever had popped open. Before handing it over, Subic must have pulled the pin! It went off as he bent to pick it up, blasting a scalding stream of gas into his lower leg. He screamed in pain and the tear gas sprayed off into the basement.

Upstairs, Golacinski smelled the gas. He shooed the remainder of the staff up the stairs. Persinger arrived on a run from downstairs and pulled off his tear-gas-covered pants, uncovering a nasty burn on the outside of his calf. He stripped down to a T-shirt, pulled on cammie pants and boots, then ran upstairs with everyone else. At the bottom of the steps, Gallegos had been joined by Sickmann. Before the two marines was a growing crowd of Iranians, crying and choking from the gas, all with the Khomeini placards, some hand-lettered in English, “Don’t be afraid. We just want to set-in.” Those in the back were pushing and those in front were shouting, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” and inching forward.

Sickmann and Gallegos had donned gas masks. The blood was pounding in their ears and they heard only the whoosh of their own breathing inside the masks, misting up the glass visors. The marines would pump their shotguns and the crowd would jump back. That was the scene Golacinski encountered as he descended the stairs with his Browning 9mm pistol drawn. He joined the protesters in shouting at the marines, “Don’t shoot!”

“No, no, no,” coaxed a woman in the crowd. “We don’t mean any harm.”

More armed marines appeared behind Golacinski on the steps.

One of the young men seemed to be the leader, so Golacinski grabbed him by the arm and asked if he spoke English. When he nodded, Golacinski told him that they all had to get out.

“We are not going to stand for this,” he said, angrily. “Maybe you didn’t realize it but we are prepared to defend this place.”

“Yes, yes,” the young man said. “We don’t want problems. We just want a peaceful demonstration. That’s all we want.”

“You can’t do a peaceful demonstration in the embassy,” Golacinski said. “Now you all are going to have to get out of here.”

The young man nodded. He told the others in Farsi to go back out the window, and the crowd complied. Golacinski directed Gallegos and the other marines to head upstairs.

Golacinski watched until all of the trespassers except the ringleader were out the window. He then took the young Iranian up the stairs, leading him by the arm. Perhaps he could be useful.

On the radio, Howland reported that Laingen and Tomseth had obtained assurances from officials in the Foreign Ministry that help was on the way.

“Just hold out as long as you can,” Howland said. “We are trying to contact the chief of police.”

“That’s fine,” Golacinski said, “but we have a force of police over by the motor pool and they’re not doing anything!”

Upstairs, the hallway was crowded now with American and Iranian staffers. Marines were handing out gas masks and the mood was still calm, although some of the Iranian workers were crying. They knew how ugly these revolutionary confrontations could get. The sting of tear gas was in the air. Joan Walsh walked up and down the hall with a wooden box offering to take any valuables the staffers wanted to secure—during the February takeover, people had been robbed. Up and down the hall staffers dropped jewelry, watches, and wallets into the box, which Walsh then locked in her safe.

Limbert found his boss Ann Swift in the anteroom outside Laingen’s empty office standing before a bank of phones. She was supposed to have gone with Laingen that morning to the Foreign Ministry, but she had been out late the night before and been delayed getting in that morning, so she had asked Tomseth to take her place. Now, with the two ranking diplomats across town, she was in charge. She seemed calm and decisive.

She asked Limbert to call Washington and talk to the State Department watch officer—it was about three o’clock in the morning there. He waited as a secretary placed the call, and when it got through he learned that the department had already received word of what was happening. He handed the phone to Swift and listened to one end of a conversation about what the marines should do, how far they should go in trying to fend off the protesters. In the February episode there had been a lot of shooting before the provisional government provided a local thug, Mashallah Khashani, to drive out the invaders. Khashani had then camped with his gang at the embassy for months, collecting protection fees and running it like his own private concession. That was what they wanted to avoid. Limbert started phoning local Iranian authorities to plead for official assistance.

Both he and Metrinko had done a lot of favors for officials in the provisional government, mostly helping them to obtain visas. It was pay-back time. Limbert tried to reach a friend at the prime minister’s office. He got a secretary on the phone, introduced himself hurriedly, and began to explain to her what was going on.

“Oh, Mr. Metrinko!” the woman said, mistaking him for his colleague. “It’s so nice to hear from you! Tell me, are those visas we sent over ready?”

Limbert explained that he was not Mr. Metrinko, and that if she didn’t find him some help soon she could kiss her visa applications good-bye. He explained what was going on at the embassy.