Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (62 page)

They stopped before a door. Ebtekar opened it and there was her Kevin, sitting on a couch, tall, thin, mop-haired, and amazed.

He stood and embraced her. She was weeping and still trembling, with happiness now, and the two just held each other for a long time. Kevin started to cry with her. Eventually they noticed that they were not alone. There were several guards in the room with rifles, as well as Ebtekar, standing before big posters of Khomeini and some with anti-American propaganda.

“Be careful,” Hermening whispered to his mother. “There are bugs everywhere.”

They sat on the couch next to each other and sipped tea and talked about their family and about sports. Barbara told her son about his younger brothers and sisters and some of his old high school friends. She said Bud Selig, owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, had said that as soon as he got home he could throw out the first ball for a game. Hermening wanted to know more about what was happening in the States regarding their situation, but every time he approached a banned subject Ebtekar would interject to his mother, “You cannot answer that.” She was not allowed to tell him about her trip or where she had been in Tehran that day. Seeing that his questions were making his mother nervous, Hermening asked if he could tell her who his roommate was. Ebtekar said no.

Timm didn’t let on, but she was shocked at how bad her son looked. He had never suffered acne, or any other skin problem, and now his face had completely erupted in what looked like some kind of rash. He looked pale and sickly.

Hermening was thrilled to see his mother but couldn’t get over a feeling of awkwardness about it. Why him? Why was he getting a chance to visit his mom? Did it have to do with his having read that statement on TV at Christmas? What would the Americans who saw this and read about it think? Would he be seen as collaborating with his captors? What would his fellow hostages think? As they talked—Hermening had to keep looking at his mother and holding her hand to assure himself she was really there—he found himself wishing almost in spite of himself that she had not come. He was worried about her safety, too. What if they didn’t let her go?

“Time is up,” said Ebtekar, and without ceremony Hermening was pulled up off the couch by the arm, blindfolded, and led from the room.

Timm broke down sobbing. Ebtekar sat next to her and tried to put an arm around her and Timm shoved her away, swore at her, and then sat crying for a long time. Her husband was led in then, and they were made to watch a movie about the revolution, full of grotesque images of the dead, wounded, tortured, and executed. It was horrible. It went on and on, well over an hour.

“When the hell does this end?” Timm asked.

“It never will end,” said Ebtekar.

“Oh, Jesus,” said Timm.

“Our revolution has not ended and it won’t end until all the oppressed people of the world are free with us,” said the robed young woman.

Unlike the revolution, the film did eventually end. Afterward they were led to a room where a feast had been prepared for them, steaks, vegetables, potatoes, and salad. Timm said she wasn’t hungry, but Ebtekar and the others insisted that they eat.

She sat and picked at the food while her Iranian hosts stood around and watched.

“Is this not a delicious meal?” they kept asking.

The Timms nodded and ate and tried to appear thankful enough to satisfy them.

“This is a fine meal,” Timm said finally. “Now I’d like to just get back to the United States.”

“You can go back and let your people know that this is what the hostages are eating every day,” said Ebtekar.

Ken Timm called her a liar, which did not seem to startle or bother Ebtekar. It was dark when they were finally led from the compound. They were handed blindfolds and instructed to tie them on, but once in the car the driver told them they didn’t have to do so.

“Just put your heads down in your laps,” he said.

They were driven away hunched over in the backseat. After a few minutes of driving they were told they could sit up again. At their hotel a mob of reporters was waiting with cameras, and they were filmed as they left the car and entered the lobby. Back upstairs, McAfee wanted them to return to the lobby to answer questions, but Timm refused. She had had enough. But McAfee waited until she cooled down and then led her downstairs. She was worried about saying anything that might prevent them from going home, but before the cameras she seemed composed and happy. In answer to one question, she said she would go home and work for a peaceful settlement of the standoff. She said that she had found her son to be “in excellent health and very, very happy to see me. He was surprised and overjoyed that I had traveled across the globe to be with him.”

What was the reunion like?

“We never quit holding hands. There was a lot of hugging, a lot of touching. I kept telling him how strong he was, and he kept telling me how strong I was. He says he has not lost faith. He said, ‘I’ve become a better person and a stronger person.’ I told him I had come to give him strength and faith.”

Timm portrayed the six hours inside the embassy as a happy social occasion. She and the militant students had “talked and talked and talked. I still can’t understand or justify an embassy being taken over. But I had to live with one of two choices, either going on hating these people and having that destroy our family or trying to understand these people.”

The captors showed her and her husband “nothing but the best of hospitality. I found human beings…. The government has said these people are brainwashed. I really don’t know what that means, but I can’t agree. What would be the sign?”

Hermening returned to his chancery room in a daze.

“You’re not going to believe this,” he told Golacinski.

“What?”

“I just saw my mother.”

“What do you mean you saw your mother?”

“I just met with my mother.”

They talked for hours, with Hermening reconstructing the dialogue as best he could. Golacinski kept pressing for more details—“Try to remember,” he said. “Try to remember. What did she say?”—until it dawned on him that his young friend was embarrassed. He realized that Hermening felt bad for him and for Miele.

As she waited the next few days in a Tehran hotel for her flight home on Friday, Barbara Timm prayed that her son would be allowed to join her. She had played along with his captors in every way she could, nodding sympathetically to their stories of the abusive shah and the evil designs her country had on theirs.

Inside the chancery, the guards fed the same hope in Hermening. Several days after the meeting the guards brought him a box of photos and long letters from just about everyone in his family. One of his guards even told him it might happen. Hermening had mixed feelings. There was no question that he would go if he got the chance, but he wondered if it might brand him for life as a “mama’s boy.” He was prepared to live with that.

“If you let me go, I’ll make sure that the American public hears about what the shah did,” he promised.

He closed his eyes Thursday night nursing hope that tomorrow might be the day of his release.

Bruce Laingen composed a secret letter for his colleagues in Washington in mid-April and passed it to the Swiss emissary who visited him on occasion. It expressed his growing sense that the crisis was at a hopeless impasse, and while it was not Laingen’s intent, it was received in the White House as a request from the hostage action:

We welcome steps announced by the president this past week [the expulsion of Iranian diplomats, among other sanctions]. They can only succeed if they in fact hurt and if the prospect for further hurt looks real to those who seek to guide and influence the way the Majlis handles this issue. It is vital that we have the maximum support of our allies and friends…. [Iran] can now only hope to limit the damage that is being done to its own vital interests…that damage will increase each additional day the hostages were held.

The imprisoned chargé had in mind economic and political sanctions, not a military mission, but Carter would see in those words a call to arms.

Howland became convinced that there would be a rescue attempt. He knew that if commandos came in, they would come through either doors or windows, loud and fast. He knew they would shoot anyone who didn’t comply.

“If some guys come bursting through the windows, don’t get up and start yelling,” he told Laingen and Tomseth. “Just do exactly what they tell you. Because they’re going to pick you up and physically carry you out. They will not let you walk. They will physically carry you.”

If the raiders came in downstairs, they would have to fight their way up the stairs, which would give the guards upstairs time to shoot them, so Howland started sleeping in the nude again, figuring the split-second advantage it gave him would help. He found a heavy stick that he put under his mattress. He put it next to the door every night, figuring he could jump the first guard to come through. He knew their pistols could fire only one round, so all he had to do was make a gunman miss that first shot.

The evening of April 24 was clear, and the view out the windows of the Foreign Ministry was quite beautiful. Laingen watched the mountains at sunset, admiring the blush of bright green spring growth in the gardens below. He continued watching until the Iranian sky faded into darkness.

Through that falling darkness a lone plane was moving fast and low toward Iran over the dark waters of the Gulf of Oman. It was a big, four-propeller U.S. Air Force workhorse, a C-130 Hercules, painted in a mottled black and green camouflage that made it all but invisible against the black water and night sky. It flew with no lights. Inside, in the eerie red glow of the plane’s blackout lamps, seventy-four men struggled to get comfortable in a cramped, unaccommodating space. Only the plane’s usual eleven-man crew had assigned seats; the others sprawled on and around a jeep, five motorcycles, and two long sheets of heavy aluminum—which would be placed under the plane’s tires if it became stuck in desert sand—and a bulky portable guidance system that would help the planes and helicopters to home in on Desert One. It had taken all the ingenuity of the plane’s loadmaster to squeeze it all in. As they had been working on it, one of the air force crewmen had wondered aloud, “With all this added weight, I hope we can get off the ground,” which had set off the already edgy Colonel Beckwith like a firecracker. He had to be reassured by the loadmaster that the excess cargo had been carefully weighed and was within the plane’s limits. The Hercules was designed primarily to carry sixty-four paratroopers, with webbing on the sides and fold-out aluminum seats, but even those spare comforts had been stripped to make more room. The men had spread mattresses on the steel floor of the fuselage, which got frigid once airborne. Some were napping on their gear. There was the vaguely sweet smell of fuel and, other than the drone of four big propellers, mostly silence.

Just after dark they moved in over the coast of Iran at two hundred and fifty feet, well below radar, and then began a gradual ascent to five thousand feet. They were still flying dangerously low at that altitude, because the land rose up abruptly in row after row of jagged ridges—the Zagros Mountains, which looked jet black in the gray-green tints of the pilots’ night-vision goggles. The plane’s terrain-hugging radar was so sensitive that, even though they were safely above the peaks, the highest ridges always triggered the loud, disconcerting horn of its warning system. The plane’s copilot kept one finger poised over the override button to silence it.

Since the decision to fly into Iran on fixed-wing transports instead of the helicopters, Beckwith had added still more men to Eagle Claw, as the rescue mission was now code-named, most notably a half dozen soldiers from the First Battalion (Ranger) 75th Infantry out of Fort Benning. They would block off both ends of the dirt road that angled through Desert One and man Red-eye missile launchers to protect the force on the first night in case it was discovered and attacked from the air. The rangers, who would fly out of Iran when all the planes and choppers departed, would be commanded by Wade Ishimoto, a Delta captain who worked the unit’s intelligence division. Then there was the separate thirteen-man army special forces team that would assault the Foreign Ministry to free Bruce Laingen, Victor Tomseth, and Mike Howland. Also on Beckwith’s lead plane was John Carney, the air force major who was making his second secret flight into Iran; he would command a small air force combat control team that would orchestrate the complex maneuvers at the impromptu airfield. Some of these men sat on and around the jeep. One of Delta’s team leaders, the tall Texan Logan Fitch, who had never believed this day would come, stood in the rear with Carney and the plane’s loadmaster, who informed them when they entered Iranian airspace. Fitch told one of his men, “Pass the word. We’re in Iran.” It didn’t get much of a response. If there was one character trait these men shared, it was professional calm. After six months of practice runs this method of deployment had become so routine that it took effort to remember that this time it was for real. Their attitude for the most part was, It’s about goddamn time.

They had taken off at dusk from the tiny island of Masirah, off the coast of Oman at the southeastern tip of the Arabian peninsula. One hour behind them would come five more C-130s, one carrying most of the remainder of Beckwith’s assault force, which now numbered one hundred and thirty-two men, and four “bladder planes,” each equipped with two gigantic rubber balloons filled with fuel, carrying a total of eighteen thousand gallons. One of the four bladder planes was specially outfitted for eavesdropping and communications and was capable of listening in on Iranian telecommunications.

Days earlier the entire force had flown to an abandoned Soviet airstrip in Wadi Kena, Egypt, on big air force transports. His big mission under way, Beckwith was in full-bore command mode; abrupt, decisive, and aggressively irritable.

They spent a few days at the Egyptian airstrip, which had been amply outfitted for their arrival. There were two refrigerators and pallets full of beer and soda. Much beer was consumed, the first time in any of the soldiers’ memories that they had been supplied free drinks by the U.S. Army. When the refrigerators were finally emptied of beer, they were stocked with blood.