Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (70 page)

The New York Daily News complained that the mission “entailed risks out of all proportion to the likelihood of success.” In Chicago, the Sun-Times editorialized, “In his aborted effort…President Carter shockingly overcame the charge that he is super-cautious. He is exposed instead as a crap-shooter, willing to gamble away the lives of Americans and the security of the country and its allies to reassert U.S. power against long odds. Before the failure, the U.S.—in the eyes of our friends as well as our enemies—was merely frustrated…. Now it has been demonstrated to be impotent.”

The Chicago Tribune was one of the only newspapers to offer unqualified words of support: “We believe, and the nation must believe, that President Carter made the right decision in sending the rescue team to Iran. It is wrong to criticize him now for making the decision. It is wrong to criticize him for failing to consult in advance with Congress or with the allies…. There are but three proper emotions for Americans in the tragic aftermath of the mission’s failure: gratitude to the brave volunteers who undertook it; grief for the eight who died in it; and intense disappointment over the bad luck that aborted it.”

There was a mixed response from the families of the hostages. Those who had become outspoken critics of the administration, like Timm and Bonnie Graves, were publicly appalled. “Eight deaths for what?” said Bonnie Graves. “I hope to God the Iranians are capable of restraint.”

“It’s a bumbling error by the president,” said Zane Hall, the father of Joe Hall. “We didn’t approve of it. We don’t know what this could lead to.”

Richard Hermening, Timm’s former husband and Kevin’s father, who just weeks earlier had lamented Carter’s slowness to act and lack of follow-through, now criticized the president’s “timing.”

However, most of the families, who had a ready and waiting press audience for their every utterance, were sympathetic to the president and respectful of the courage and sacrifice of those who had made the effort.

“I understand why he [Carter] had to go to this point in time,” said John W. Limbert, the hostage’s father. “He had to take action.”

A grieving but proud George N. Holmes, father of the Pine Bluff, Arkansas, marine crewman who had perished at Desert One, told reporters, “I think it was fine. It was a risk worth taking. That’s what I thought beforehand. I don’t change it now.”

It was a dejected group of Delta soldiers who reassembled at Wadi Kena after the mission, and none was more depressed than Beckwith, who treated his pain with booze. The colonel realized that the chance of his lifetime had been blown, badly, and he was liberal and unsparing in apportioning blame. He let it be known that he never again wanted to work with the mission’s commanding general, James Vaught, and in one tirade he placed the primary responsibility for the mission’s failure on the marine pilots, whom he called “cowards.” He was particularly scornful of Colonel Chuck Pittman, the ranking officer on board the relatively undamaged chopper that had given up in the second haboob and returned to the Nimitz. For some reason—it was not immediately clear why—Beckwith also regarded the Iranian-American drivers and translators as “cowards.”

Dick Meadows, the courageous Delta point man in Tehran, weighed his options the day after the mission failed. He could try to drive across the Turkish border, or drive down to Abadan on the Persian Gulf coast and use his satellite radio to request pickup by helicopter. He chose a third, less dramatic course. He simply drove to Tehran’s international airport on Sunday, the same day as the Timms’ departure, and while the country was still in an uproar over the American “invasion,” he presented his Irish credentials, fully expecting at any moment to be stopped. He was allowed to board a commercial flight to Ankara. The false passports of the other agents also held up; they were able to fly out of the country in the days after the disaster—one, the young Iranian-American airman code-named “Fred,” slipped out weeks later.

Given the uproar in the media at home, it was decided to fly the rest of Delta Force from Egypt to the Farm in Virginia, keep them sequestered there for a few days, and then allow them to fly home to Fayetteville and enjoy a vacation. Alert reporters spotted some of the men arriving at the airport in North Carolina days later, but the only public comment they got was one from an unnamed arriving passenger, probably not a member of the rescue force, who grumbled about not being allowed to “finish the job.”

The men who had taken part knew that “finishing the job” had not been an option. Their humiliation had already felt complete when, before they departed Egypt, Beckwith gathered both squadrons in a hangar. Apparently drunk, at first it seemed he had just wanted to console them and buck up their spirits. He began by telling them how proud of them he was, and how professionally they had prepared for the mission, and how in his mind no part of the blame was theirs for the debacle.

As he spoke he grew more and more worked up and emotional, and his remarks began to wander, until he was telling the men that he was disappointed in them for only one thing, for having left their weapons behind when they scrambled out of the burning C-130. Technically, of course, he was correct. A soldier is taught from day one that his weapon is his life, that to lose it or misplace it or leave it behind is a cardinal sin in soldiering. Most of the men had left their weapons and their gear, including the thousands of dollars in American and Iranian cash they had been issued in case they had to find their own ways out of Iran. But given the circumstances—some of the men had been asleep when the accident happened, and had only seconds to evacuate in an inferno—it was certainly understandable.

“You guys, as you came off, should have reached up and grabbed something,” Beckwith said angrily. “Goddamn, a lot of money burned up in there.”

The men took it badly. They were just getting used to this disappointment, one that they knew well they’d wear for the rest of their lives, which many had escaped with only narrowly. They had felt the flames and had seen men on fire. Many were injured. They were in no mood to be chastised by someone who had watched the inferno from a safe distance. A sergeant major interrupted Beckwith.

“Sir, we were lucky to get off with our asses,” he said.

“Well, some of you picked up your weapons. Why in the hell didn’t all of you?” Beckwith asked.

The sergeant major began, “Sir—,” but the colonel lost it. “Shut up!” he shouted. “You’re all just a bunch of goddamn cowards.”

“That’s not true, sir,” Fitch said sharply, grabbing the colonel by the arm and hustling him out of the hangar before things got uglier.

Beckwith would later regret this outburst and asked Fitch to convey an apology to the men, but he never softened his assessment of the other service branches involved in the fiasco.

The mood had been glum on the long flight home. When Fitch’s squadron landed at an airport outside Washington, they transferred to a C-130 for a short flight to Virginia. Welcoming them into the plane was a veteran air force sergeant who, having no idea who this motley assortment of hairy apparent civilians were, assumed that they were unfamiliar with the C-130 and so, upon takeoff, launched into an especially spirited performance of the standard safety briefing for passengers—something ordinarily abbreviated or forgone entirely for military passengers. The plane was virtually identical to the one the mission members had flown into Iran just days before. They sat obediently through the meticulous and thorough safety presentation, then stood up (against instructions) and gave the bewildered sergeant a spirited ovation.

After the rescue attempt, Bruce Laingen noticed a change in his keepers on the third floor of the Foreign Ministry building. Gone was the easy banter that had characterized his relationship with most of them, and some of the guards had become outright hostile. There were accusations that the chargé and his roommates, Mike Howland and Vic Tomseth, had known in advance about the mission, given their occasional phone calls and telex contacts with Washington and visits from foreign ministers. In the garden below their balcony, the army unit assigned to the ministry still spent every spare moment playing pickup games of soccer, but they no longer waved and joked with the Americans looking down from the high windows. Some glared up at them with what was clearly hatred.

Unlike the other hostages, the three in the Foreign Ministry learned of the rescue mission in breathless local press reports as soon as the rest of Iran did. Laingen wrote in his diary on the evening of April 27:

Our minds and hearts are filled with thoughts and emotions that leave us confused and perplexed. Had there been no mechanical failure, where would we be now? On board an aircraft carrier, stranded in the desert, still here in the ministry, injured, or even dead? Who can say? And who can say now what might have happened to our colleagues, to their captors, and to personnel guarding us in this ministry? In a sense, we are, in the aftermath, less fortunate than our 50 colleagues, since they will not know, presumably, what happened, while we do and must now live with the emotions and frustrations that are the consequence…. So we are filled with an enormous sense of sadness. Grief for those eight courageous men who volunteered and were ready to give their lives for their country and for the principle we represent here—the nation should be forever grateful to them. A sense of compassion for a president who made this difficult and lonely decision and who now suffers this bitter disappointment and must bear the full responsibility of failure. Concern for the hostage families whose worries are now deepened. Regret for our country that it should suffer this blow to its self-esteem and pride. Sorrow for the Iranian people whose future is so jeopardized by the continuation of this whole tragic affair. Anger at those who perpetrate this crisis here, when the simple act of decency of releasing the hostages would turn this whole thing around…and finally, pride in our country for this demonstration of resolve in our efforts to get the hostages released.

It was galling for the three to watch the gleeful press coverage in Tehran, where the failure of the rescue mission was seen as nothing less than divine intervention and a heavenly blessing on the gerogan-girha, the hostage takers. Allah had dealt the Great World Devouring Satan a terrible blow. At night, to celebrate the “victory,” thousands of Iranians had again taken to their rooftops to shout over and over, “Allahuakbar!”

Laingen spent long portions of his days now watching the pigeons that roosted in small gaps in the brickwork of the ministry garden walls. They lived on the ledges of the windows outside the third floor and roof, periodically swooping down to the large fountain in the middle of the courtyard and then back. He also watched the swallows, which appeared at dusk to flit crazily around the sky catching bugs. They reminded him of the barn swallows he had watched as a boy on the family farm in Minnesota. He worried about becoming lazy, after so many months of idleness. Laingen was an energetic and ambitious man, and having little to do besides eat, sleep, read, and work crossword puzzles ate away at his sense of himself. He worried that he would find it hard to resume the pace of work and family and wondered admiringly at the industry of his wife Penne, who had for so long now managed everything at home by herself and yet had emerged as a leading activist and voice of the hostage families.

At long last the Majlis convened at the end of May, fanning faint hopes that the hostage issue would be resolved. Laingen noted in the local press that his old friend Ibrahim Yazdi, the foreign minister on the day of the takeover who had resigned with the rest of the provisional government when it was clear their authority had been usurped by a gang of students, was now a member of the legislature calling for public trial of the hostages as a way of taking the United States to task for its “interference” in Iranian affairs. Laingen wondered if his friend ever thought of him locked away where he had left him six months before.

John Limbert enjoyed his garden view for only three days before being taken to a villa more in the center of Isfahan, near a river that he knew to be the Zayandeh. His new room had no view nor any good light, but he could overhear bits of radio reports that drifted in from somewhere outside, and it was here that he first caught snippets of a broadcast about a rescue attempt. The sound faded in and out, and he heard only bits, but that’s what it had sounded like. A mission, unsuccessful, and American casualties. This was confirmed when, on a visit to the bathroom, he found a week-old newspaper that one of the guards had used to line the top of a shelf. It carried a wire service story about the mission, so Limbert became the first of the hostages other than the three at the foreign ministry to learn that his government had tried a daring rescue and had failed. He wasn’t sure how to feel about it. On the one hand, it showed that he and the others had not been forgotten by President Carter and their countrymen, which lifted his spirits and filled him with hope and pride. On the other hand, it had failed, which meant that the prospects of being saved by military action, always remote, were now nil. He also felt a pang of sorrow and gratitude for his countrymen who had tried, especially those who had died in the effort.

As the long summer dragged on, Limbert was beset with boredom, loneliness, and despair. Occasional letters from his wife and two children helped sustain him. The children mailed their school report cards, and the fact that they were doing well heartened him enormously. He received, months late, a Valentine the children had made at school. Just to know that they were safe and thriving eliminated one of his biggest worries. He had been concerned early on that his wife Parvaneh might try to come to Iran to lobby for his freedom, which, given the present atmosphere in her home country, might well have landed her in jail. He worried whether his daughter and son would recognize him when they saw him next, whether they would remember him and whether he would be the same person he was when he had left. In his own letters (most of them never made it home) he left coded messages in the text. Counting on the students’ generally poor English, he constructed sentences with strings of words that barely made sense, but which, if you took the first letter of each, spelled out his message. For instance, he wrote, “Shervin [his son] every new defenseman needs energy with savvy.” The first letters of each word spelled out “s-e-n-d-n-e-w-s.” When Parveneh received the letters she knew that there was a code embedded but could not figure it out. She turned it over to the State Department and the CIA and neither of these agencies figured it out either.