Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (60 page)

The idea of seizing hostages was quickly dropped, but Carter was inclined to go ahead even without answers for every conceivable contingency. Diplomacy had proved useless, and he felt he was wrong to have pursued it for so long. He was responsible for State Department employees and military staffers in Tehran in a more direct way than for reporters who had traveled there on their own.

Colonel Beckwith was summoned to the White House, and the two Georgia natives swapped stories about their neighboring home counties. The tough, gray-haired colonel gave a brisk, detailed account of the plan, and Carter was impressed. Beckwith had spent a career selling the idea of his elite unit, and now that he had created it he was eager to show what miracles it could perform. Despite his initial misgivings about being assigned such a hard task the first time out, the colonel was more convinced than ever that it could work. He was eager. Briefing the Pentagon brass the day before, he had concluded with an enthusiastic, “Hey, we gotta do this thing!” His enthusiasm was infectious. He and his men were going to make history, not just sever this particular Gordian knot but write their names in the annals of military glory. In a sense, Beckwith’s career-long crusade to create Delta had been a rebellion against the mechanization and bureaucratization of modern warfare. He held to an older, more visceral conviction: War was the business of brave men. He loved soldiers and soldiering, and his vision was of a company of men like himself, impatient with rank, rules, and politics, focused entirely on the mission. Now he had created such a force, choosing the best of the best and training them to perfection. They were not just good, they were magnificent. In his eyes they were beautiful. And now he would lead them into battle. They were going to prove themselves on the most difficult, improbable mission in American history, moving straight into the enemy’s heart, a small force of brave men hopelessly outnumbered, shouldering impossible odds. The fact that it seemed so far-fetched made it all the more appealing. It was perfect. He sold it well, projecting his own brand of brute certainty.

“On behalf of my men, sir, I hope you will let us go,” Beckwith told Carter.

Eight choppers were waiting beneath the decks of the Nimitz. Staging areas in Wadi Kena, the abandoned Soviet airstrip in Egypt, and Masirah, an island off the coast of Oman, were being readied to receive his men and planes. Dick Meadows was packing his bags for a return trip to Tehran. It would take about two weeks to move everything into position.

Technically, Carter had not yet given the go-ahead, but when he left the White House Beckwith was certain the mission was on. He flew to Delta’s stockade at Fort Bragg and immediately assembled his top men. He was elated.

“You can’t tell the people, you can’t tell anybody,” the colonel said. “Don’t talk about this to anyone, but the president has approved the mission and we’re going to go on April 24.”

One morning, for no reason he could discern, Michael Metrinko was allowed to go outside. He was taken from the basement of the chancery to a walled garden outside the ambassador’s residence. It was a sunny morning, and the first time Metrinko had been outdoors since mid-November. The odors, the color, the feel of sunshine on his skin, the slight breeze…it was all intoxicating. It was as though he had been blind and his sight was suddenly restored. He was allowed to walk around the garden slowly, drinking it in.

He noticed that someone was using one of the embassy’s sterling silver candleholders to prop open a window apparently ignorant of how valuable it was. It crossed his mind to take it, but what would he do with it? Metrinko had always been acquisitive. He loved beautiful things, and in his years of travel he had accumulated a small treasure of valuable objects, which had decorated his apartment in Tehran. The candlestick reminded him of such luxuries, which now, walking in his silly plastic flip-flops and oversized pants bunched at the waist with a paper clip, seemed to him frivolous. His instinct to grab the candlestick made him laugh.

Archbishop Hilarion Capucci was sent by the Vatican to visit with the hostages near Easter, and the occasion prompted the guards to bring Metrinko upstairs. He had met the archbishop before when he had stayed at the Greek Catholic patriarchate in Jerusalem for a week in 1969, on his first visit to Israel. They remembered each other right away. He told Capucci that he was being kept in solitary confinement and was badly treated, and the archbishop just nodded and smiled and said he would pray for him. He urged Metrinko to be patient. The hostage wondered what his other options were.

The guards were careful about what he got to read. One of the publications they judged innocuous was the Sporting News, and though Metrinko was not a sports fan he was so desperate for any diversion he began reading about games and athletes and teams that held no interest for him. In one of the stories about a baseball game—the season was just beginning at home—he was stunned to read that the host stadium had welcomed the six former hostages who had escaped Iran with the Canadian ambassador! His heart leapt with the news. The story didn’t name the escapees, but he assumed that among them were Bruce Laingen, Victor Tomseth, and Mike Howland, who had gone to the Foreign Ministry on the morning of the takeover and never returned. His pleasure in the news that his colleagues had escaped was heightened by the way he discovered it. The English-speaking students who censored his reading wouldn’t have had the patience to wade through all these stories about batting averages and sore pitching arms. Any small victory over them was enough to lift his spirits for days.

The punishment Kevin Hermening expected after the guards discovered his note to Rupiper never came. Instead, in the days after Easter the guards became suspiciously friendly toward him. Those who spoke English stopped to chat and, for some reason, asked a lot of questions about his family. They wanted to know what his father did for a living, and his mother, where he lived, about his brothers and sisters. He was happy to tell them, and although both he and Golacinski suspected that something odd was afoot, they couldn’t figure out what it was. In their most optimistic moments they toyed with the idea that perhaps Hermening, the youngest of the hostages, was going to be released.

On the morning of April 21, two guards came to the room with Hermening’s shoes and a clean shirt.

“You better get cleaned up,” one said.

Excited, and afraid even to think that this might mean the end of this ordeal for him, he dressed. The guards returned and led him down the hall to the Ping-Pong room, where they told him that his mother had come to visit him. Hermening was flabbergasted.

His mom?

In an epic gesture of maternal devotion, Barbara Timm had traveled from the suburbs of Milwaukee to Tehran to see her captive son. Not even the fiercest revolutionary zealot could resist the story’s appeal. A few months earlier, Timm could not even have found Tehran on a map. She had her hands full raising five children and working as a telephone operator. Kevin was her son from her first marriage, which had ended in divorce. She had felt no particular fears about his posting. A tall, slender woman with big eyes whose short-cropped hair gave her a boyish look, she didn’t know enough about Iran to feel anything, except that it was far away and had not been her son’s first choice. She was a little disappointed for him, but figured the country’s embassy there was as good as any other. When she had started getting letters from him they were all upbeat and filled with assurances that he was happy and okay, so she hadn’t worried about him at all. Her own mother was the worrier. From the first day that Kevin left, his grandmother had phoned every few days with an alarming story about something bad that had happened in Iran.

When her mother had called again on Sunday morning, November 4, and told one of Hermening’s stepbrothers that the U.S. embassy in Tehran had been overrun by crazed Islamic radicals, Timm’s first reaction was annoyance. Why wouldn’t her mother just leave it alone? She figured it was something minor that would blow over. She hadn’t even bothered to turn on the radio. Then there was a news break during the Packers game, an autumn Sunday ritual in the Timm household, saying that the embassy had been seized but still, she refused to worry about her son. She wasn’t even sure if the embassy was the same one where he had been sent. She went bowling that night, as she usually did.

Then the media storm descended with the fury of a Wisconsin blizzard. It started the minute she walked in the door after bowling, with a phone call from a local newscaster, and her life had not been the same since. A representative from the marines called the following morning with official word that her son was among those who had been taken captive, which by then was old news. From that day forward the fate of her eldest son played out in public. Over the next three months, Timm got to know the various local TV producers and reporters and print journalists all too well, and she had agreed to be interviewed periodically. It was a curious new position to be in; suddenly the whole world seemed fascinated by every comment or insight from this working Milwaukee mom. In short order she regretted saying yes to that first interview, because it undermined her future ability to say no. Whenever a local news outlet would get a picture or an audio or videotape from the embassy they would use it to blackmail her. Would you like to come in and see it? Of course she would. We just want to film you as you watch (or listen) to it. Even during slow news periods she got four or five media requests a day. She drew the line at talking to the persistent national news figures who stalked her for interviews and appearances. The local storm was bad enough.

As much as she hated being pursued by newsmen, though, she was addicted to their reports. The TV was on every minute in her house and her ears arched at any word from Iran. The sight of those marching, chanting, fist-and placard-waving crowds outside the embassy convinced her that the country was populated by maniacs. She feared she would never see her son again.

Timm had attended the regional and national briefings held by the State Department, even though the transportation costs were steep. Because the government would pay expenses only for Hermening’s mother and father, and Timm did not want to travel without her husband, Ken, she had had to foot his bill for two trips to Washington. At the first Washington session she met President Carter, who initially she blamed for the whole mess. She had disliked him before meeting him but left with her feelings somewhat mollified. She and the others had been assured that the administration was doing all it could to bring the hostages home, and that they would almost certainly be back before the end of the year. Carter had seemed genuinely concerned. But by the second Washington trip, in mid-February, Timm was completely fed up. She believed she’d been misled and manipulated.

She was not the only one. Barbara Rosen, whose husband, Barry, the embassy’s press attaché, had been singled out by the students and publicly denounced as a top spy, felt that the State Department was treating her and the other families like children. They had been genuinely moved by the long standing ovation they were given when, as a group, they entered the auditorium at department headquarters for the February meeting, but in the question and answer sessions later, she and others complained about what little information they were being given. As a group, the hostages’ families felt they were being deliberately kept in the dark.

There was good reason for it. Rosen had seen other family members handing over recordings of the “private” sessions to reporters. Clearly, some of the families were enjoying their long moment in the spotlight. The department had grown increasingly circumspect as a result, which aggravated suspicion.

Timm was appalled by many of the families. She regarded the second family session, when they had all been extravagantly wined and dined, as nothing more than an effort to pacify them. She watched with disgust as these supposedly suffering fathers, mothers, spouses, and siblings milked the open bar at receptions and mobbed the buffet tables at mealtime. They seemed more interested in sampling the goodies than in finding out what was really going on. As the weeks progressed and her bitterness grew, Timm found herself losing interest completely in what happened to the other fifty-two hostages. Her one concern was Kevin. She wanted to see him.

So when State Department officials urged her to have nothing to do with Carl McAfee, a Virginia attorney who wanted to fly her and her husband to Tehran, she ignored their advice. McAfee was one of a breed of attention-seeking Washington attorneys who look for ways to inject themselves into the ongoing drama of national and world affairs. He had made a name for himself almost twenty years earlier negotiating a trade for Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot who served nearly two years in a Soviet prison after his spy plane was shot down. McAfee had attended the second hostage family briefing, introduced himself around, and said that he was interested in arranging personal visits to Tehran. After that session, twenty-four of the families signed up to make the trip. Timm’s husband and her ex-husband, Kevin’s father, were among them. Timm and the other mothers and wives were advised that because women were second-class citizens in Iran, the men would have a better chance of success. Those planning to make the trip were waiting in Washington for visas from the Iranian embassy when the six Americans who had been sheltered by the Canadian embassy escaped. That had killed the plan.

Then Timm got a call from a woman in Canada who had received one of the Christmas cards Hermening had mailed months earlier. The ones he sent to his family had not arrived, but for some reason this letter had gotten through. In the note he had mentioned his plan to escape (the attempt had ended badly months earlier). He had also noted that he expected to be dead by the time the card reached its recipient, if ever, and asked that the recipient contact his mother. So the Canadian woman had called.

Timm was alarmed. She knew right away that the card was authentic. It sounded like her son, and she knew he would be trying to get word to her in particular. She determined then and there that even if no one else was going to Tehran, she was. She had contacted McAfee and joined up with twelve other families who had enlisted for the lawyer’s second attempt at a trip. The government was reportedly cool to the idea, but the Timms had never heard anything from the State Department directly and didn’t ask permission. The marines were completely supportive but warned against letting the Iranians use Timm for propaganda purposes. For weeks McAfee kept setting dates and canceling them.