Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (68 page)

He told them that they were leaving some snipers behind, and that if anyone tried to leave the scene before morning they would be shot.

“So make sure you stay on the bus until daylight,” Burruss said.

As he left and headed back to the plane, he took one last look at the flaming ruins of the plane and chopper and felt a stab of remorse over leaving behind the dead. But there was nothing to be done about it.

John Carney was the last man to leave Desert One. He climbed into Uttaro’s tanker and said, “Everybody is out of the desert now.”

There were so many men inside the last plane that they had to throw some of their rucksacks, mattresses, and equipment out to make room. The injured pilots and air force crewmen were being attended to by the Delta medics, who administered morphine and dressed their burns. As the plane accelerated across the desert floor it hit the lip of the road at full speed and with a frightening jolt was airborne. Inside it felt like Iran had delivered one last kick to the rear as they reached the sky, but then the plane hit the ground again hard. It didn’t have enough speed to stay airborne. Fitch managed to stay on his feet as the plane kept surging forward and then slowly urged itself off the ground. One of the propellers had clipped the rise by the road and had been bent, so the overloaded C-130 flew off toward Masirah with just three engines. Behind them on the desert floor was a giant flaming wreck surrounded by four intact helicopters, an amazed bus full of Iranian pilgrims, and the still-burning ruins of the fuel truck. It was hard to imagine that such a spectacular series of calamities had not caught the attention of any Iranian authorities, but there was no indication that the intrusion had been noticed.

As they got in the air, Fitch told Boykin. “We need to get some fighters over.” He was assuming that with all the commotion at Desert One the Iranian air force would be on them soon. They would not be out of Iranian airspace by daylight, and the overburdened, wounded, and unarmed C-130 would be a fat and easy target for a jet fighter.

“It’s already done,” said Boykin.

No fighters were necessary. All four C-130s limped out of Iran without being challenged by Iran’s air defenses—fighters on the Nimitz were ready to intervene if necessary. The planes flew back the same way they had flown in, unescorted and unseen by Iran’s air defenses. It was the one part of the mission that had gone right.

America’s elite rescue force had lost eight men, seven helicopters, and a C-130 and had not even made contact with the enemy. It was a debacle. It defined the word “debacle.” Meadows and his crew would be stranded in a very tight spot in Tehran as the country woke up to this ham-handed invasion. Still, the men in the departing planes clung to the hope that the disaster scene in the desert would remain a mystery long enough for them to try again.

What they didn’t yet know was that there would be one more disaster to add to the mortifying list. In their haste to clear out immediately after the collision, the marine crews and pilots had left behind in their Sea Stallions classified documents describing their failed mission in detail. It would all be there for the Iranian authorities to inspect, a veritable play by play. Kyle called for an air strike to destroy the choppers and the papers in them, but concern for the bus passengers, who had been so sternly instructed to stay put, ruled out that option. There would be no mystery, and there would be no second chance.

Word reached the White House at about that time, just before the force left the ground. Still in his study, surrounded by his advisers, absorbing the shock of the abort decision, Carter received a call from General Jones.

“Yes, Dave.”

Jordan watched the president close his eyes, and then Carter’s jaw fell and his face went pale.

“Are there any dead?” Carter asked.

The room was silent. Finally, the president said softly, “I understand,” and hung up the phone.

He calmly explained to the others what had happened. The men took in the awful news quietly. Then Secretary of State Vance, who had submitted his resignation earlier that day because he objected to the mission, said, “Mr. President, I’m very, very sorry.”

Jordan ducked into the president’s bathroom and vomited.

Iran found out about the failed rescue attempt the same way the rest of the world did; the White House issued a statement at one o’clock in the morning (nine-thirty in the morning in Tehran). It began, “The president has ordered the cancellation of an operation in Iran which was under way to prepare for a rescue of our hostages. The mission was terminated because of equipment failure.”

It went on to briefly explain without details that there had been “a collision between our aircraft on the ground at a remote desert location in Iran.”

This mission was not motivated by hostility toward Iran or the Iranian people, and there were no Iranian casualties…Preparations for this rescue mission were ordered for humanitarian reasons, to protect the national interests of this country and to alleviate international tensions. The president accepts full responsibility for the decision to attempt the rescue. The nation is deeply grateful to the brave men who were preparing to rescue the hostages.

Released hostages arrive at Rhein-Main Air Base in West Germany. Top to bottom: Michael Metrinko, David Roeder, and Tom Schaefer. (Courtesy: AP)

President Reagan listens to Bruce Laingen at the official welcome ceremony at the White House, Tuesday, January 27, 1981. (Courtesy: AP)

On the day after the failed rescue mission most of the hostages were moved from the embassy and scattered around Iran. Stunned by the audacity of the American rescue effort, and alarmed by how vulnerable they had been, the student hostage takers quickly corrected the major mistake of keeping all of the hostages in the same place.

Without knowing why, the Americans were hustled out of Tehran in cars and vans, bound and blindfolded, sometimes taken for drives that went on straight through the night. Bill Keough, Bill Royer, Cort Barnes, and Charles Jones were driven to an airport and flown to a southern city on a commercial airliner. The hostages, who had grown accustomed to being shuffled around for no apparent reason, sensed that something important had happened. The guards were all wearing gas masks and seemed especially skittish. They carried more weapons than usual and seemed unwilling to look the hostages in the eye. Kevin Hermening guessed that his chances of going home with his mother were dashed. His roommate, embassy security chief Al Golacinski, wondered if there had been an attempted coup d’état.

After a long drive through the night, CIA station chief Tom Ahern was deposited in an empty room in what appeared to have once been a large private residence or a small school. There was a giant bush outside filled with birds, hundreds of them. At first the chirping of this mob entertained him, but gradually it became annoying. He still had his music sheets and one or two books and resumed his solitary routines. He would be there for more than a month.

Speeding along in the back of a different van, John Limbert could tell that the landscape was flat, which indicated he and the others with him were being driven south, since to the north were mountains. He knew that part of Iran well from many drives he had taken back and forth between Tehran and Shiraz during his years as a teacher, so he could picture the small towns and open spaces even though he couldn’t see. They drove for seven to eight hours. He was glad he had eaten and gone to the toilet not long before they’d left. When he could see the light of dawn glowing at the edges of his blindfold, they came to a stop in what he figured was Isfahan.

Limbert was left in a room by himself again, which he did not like, but there was a bay window in which he could sit and look out into a large garden. He was doing that on his first evening when he saw Colonel Lee Holland standing in a window across the way. Holland didn’t see him and Limbert didn’t dare call out. But it was the first American he had seen since February.

Michael Metrinko bounced blindfolded in the back of a van for two hours, and was then led up some stairs and left in a prison cell with, to his delight, two other Americans, CIA technician Phil Ward and army Master Sergeant Regis Regan. It was the first time the embassy political officer had been out of isolation since the previous November. Metrinko recognized Regan, although he didn’t know him well. They had been together once escorting a group of visitors on official embassy business. He had no memory of Ward and thought he might be a plant. But Regan vouched for him, and soon the pleasure of having company overcame any sense of caution. The three men sat up all night talking. It was the first time Metrinko had spoken more than a few words of English in almost six months and it felt wonderful. The cell was very hot and had iron cots with thin, soiled mattresses on them. They knew they weren’t in the mountains because it was too warm, and they concluded that they had been driven south. The taste of the water was extremely sour, which was peculiar to just a few places, and they heard the whistle of a train. They finally concluded with certainty that they had been driven to the holy city of Qom, the Ayatollah Khomeini’s home base.

When one of the guards asked if they knew where they were, Metrinko told him, “Of course.”

“Where are you?” the guard asked.

“I will tell you if you will go out and get us some sohan [an oily and brittle yellow candy peculiar to Qom].”

The guard laughed and confirmed the deduction.

Ward was taken away without explanation soon after they arrived. Metrinko and Regan were moved to better quarters, an old art school. They were given a bigger room that had mattresses on the floor and a new roommate, Dave Roeder.

CIA officer Bill Daugherty was one of the last to be moved after the rescue attempt. Late in the afternoon that day he noticed a peculiar quiet had fallen over the embassy. Usually things picked up before dusk, when the day-shift guards were replaced by the night shift. When he pounded on his door to be taken to the toilet no one came. In the hall outside he could hear only what sounded like a news broadcast on the radio. He sensed that something had happened, or was about to happen, and in his experience such changes were almost always for the worse. Instead of his usual well-rounded dinner he was brought just a thin bowl of chili. In the middle of the night, guards entered his room, cuffed his hands, and slipped a canvas bag over his head. He was led to the back of a van, where he joined several other American captives similarly bound and hooded, and taken on a silent drive that lasted only a half hour. Daugherty was escorted into a building—he had the sense that he was passing through a huge room—up several flights of metal stairs, and into a room, where he was told to remove his hood.

It was a prison cell, an oddly shaped room about six by eight feet, with a stainless steel toilet in a corner. The entrance to the room was a steel door with a slot at the bottom big enough for a food tray and a small window at eye level that was closed by a sliding panel on the outside. Some light filtered in from a small window high above, but otherwise the cell was lit by a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, fifteen feet up. Daugherty was furious. One of his persistent fears was of being hauled off for trial and execution, and being placed in a prison cell seemed a big step closer to that fate. No one responded when he banged on the door, so he began pacing back and forth—three steps forward, turn, three steps back. About the only reassurance he had was that he had arrived with other captives, and he had heard other doors slamming nearby, so at least he wasn’t here alone.

One of the student leaders paid him a visit the next morning. He seemed calm and he assured Daugherty that he and the others had been moved “for their own safety.” He told Daugherty that he was not in a prison but “a prison-like place.” He would learn later that he was, in fact, in Evin Prison, the most notorious of the jails in Tehran. Set in the foothills of the snowcapped peaks north of the city, Evin was an ugly, self-contained city of incarceration, a sprawling complex of older, dungeon-like buildings and more modern administrative ones surrounded by high stone walls that climbed and dipped with the steep contours of the landscape. The color and construction of the walls varied from brown to brick, reflecting the patchwork nature of the place, which had been expanded, renovated, and rebuilt over its seventy-five-year history.

On his second day there, for the first time since being taken hostage, Daugherty got a cellmate. Bruce German, the embassy’s budget officer, introduced himself. The two men had seen each other in the embassy but had never been acquainted. German had spent much of the previous night sobbing and weeping in a cell in another part of the same building, which may be why the guards decided to put him in with someone else. The two men compared notes about where they had been and who they had been with. Daugherty had precious little to contribute to the conversation. He had been held alone for nearly the entire time and had not been able to communicate with any of his former colleagues, much less anyone at home. German shared some of his experiences, but not all. He had been allowed to send letters home and had received mail and had even been allowed to speak on the phone with his family in the Maryland suburbs of Washington. He didn’t mention this to Daugherty, and even after the CIA officer said, “I heard somebody talking on the phone with their wife,” German didn’t mention that it might have been him.

Daugherty noticed that German still had his watch, which surprised him. All of his own possessions except the clothes he wore had been taken on the first night, along with those of everybody else as they sat around the big table in the ambassador’s residence. The two men were together very briefly. German was taken away after only four hours, and Daugherty did not see him there again. He had felt uneasy about German—he wondered if he was helping their captors—and the episode reinforced his preference for solitude.

It was early spring, but the mountain altitude was chilly. Several times Daugherty was taken out to a tiny enclosed space for “exercise.” It was no bigger than a large dining room table, surrounded on four sides by brick walls reaching up nearly twenty feet. He was allowed to stand in this space for about a half hour. He was so cold that he followed a small patch of sunlight around the space.