Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (71 page)

Limbert was not the only one whose code scheme failed. In dozens of letters to his wife, Navy Commander Don Sharer spelled out secret messages, choosing the first letter of each paragraph so that when put together they would read, “TORTURE,” or “STARVING,” which wasn’t exactly true but which conveyed the message that things weren’t all hunky-dory. Years earlier he had told his wife about that code, which had been employed by some prisoners in Vietnam, and was sure she would be looking for it. Once, just to throw his captors off, he reversed the pattern, spelling out the hidden message backward. This, as it happens, was the only letter his wife received from him. She looked for the code, but because it was backward, she didn’t find it.

Eventually Limbert discovered that Malcolm Kalp, one of the embassy’s three CIA officers and the one he knew least, was in a room separated from his by a shared bathroom. Limbert tore the top off a paper box of raisins one day, wrote the word “hide” on it, and left it in a conspicuous spot on the toilet. He figured that if one of the guards found it they wouldn’t know what to make of it and if the person on the other side of the bathroom found it he could know what it meant. Kalp found it and understood immediately. He wrote, “Inside the Ajax container” on it and left it where he had found it. There was a box of powdered soap in the bathroom. Kalp figured that an American who left the note would know what “Ajax” was but that an Iranian would not. Sure enough, when he used the bathroom next there was a note from Limbert in the soap box. Later they found that there was a space between the washbasin and its pedestal that would serve even better. They passed messages four times a day. Limbert informed Kalp of the failed rescue mission, and it was Kalp who told him that Bill Belk, Kevin Hermening, and Joe Subic were also in the villa. In one of his notes Kalp wrote that he had not been mistreated but that he had been kept alone for a long time.

Summer turned suffocating in the windowless room in Qom where Michael Metrinko, Dave Roeder, and Regis Regan were imprisoned. They spent hours each day exercising, three pale, shaggy, bearded men in ill-fitting clothes bouncing up and down, running in place for hours at a time, then dropping down to do push-ups. The downside was that they would sweat heavily and, because they could shower only occasionally, their room reeked like a dirty gym locker. Regan was withdrawn, but Metrinko and Roeder hit it off. Metrinko admired Roeder’s sly military sense of humor, and Roeder admired the political officer’s intelligence and unyielding toughness. Metrinko taught Roeder how to swear in Farsi, more particularly, how to grievously and obscenely insult the guards. He still missed no opportunity to aggravate his captors.

One day they were visited by Ahmad Khomeini, the imam’s son, who greeted the three as “guests.” The false hospitality disgusted Metrinko, who had bottomless contempt for all of Iran’s new “spiritual” rulers; to him Ahmad just seemed a fat, greasy young man in robes and a black turban. The guards, however, were awestruck. Clearly anxious about hosting such an august figure, they had urged their three captives to say nice things about them.

“What can I do for you?” the cleric asked beneficently. “We want to make you more comfortable.”

Metrinko told him that they wished to be released. They were being treated worse than animals, he said, and their captivity was an insult to Islamic values and Iranian traditions.

“I haven’t been outside for several months,” Metrinko told him. “I want to see the sun. We need air. We would also like to have some meat with our food.”

Khomeini seemed shocked and the guards were chagrined.

“They haven’t been outside?” he said, turning to the guards, who looked panic-stricken. “They must go out every day!” he said.

“Oh, yes, your Excellency,” the nearest guard said. “Yes, sir, we will arrange it immediately.”

After that, Metrinko was taken to a courtyard, a standard feature of an Iranian house, and for the first time he had a better sense of where he was imprisoned. It was a fairly large building that had once been some kind of art school. The walls were covered with propaganda, mostly drawings of Khomeini and others in the new pantheon of Islamist leadership. Metrinko had no knowledge yet of the attempted rescue mission, but it was apparent that his guards had been spooked by something. After months of growing more and more lackadaisical, suddenly they were vigilant out of all proportion. They had been holding him now for six months and he had not made the slightest move to escape, yet in the small courtyard where he was permitted to stroll he was surrounded by more than a dozen armed guards who eyed him so warily it was comical. He ignored them and gave himself over to the rare pleasure of being outside. He basked in the sunshine, smells, and sounds. Metrinko had never considered himself a great lover of the outdoors, but in his captivity he discovered in himself a deep need for it. He had begun to fantasize about taking long walks in the woods, watching sunsets, drinking great gulps of glorious fresh air. In the little courtyard he walked back and forth aimlessly inside the circle of armed guards. It occurred to him that if he made a sudden move in any direction and they opened fire, they would probably all inadvertently shoot each other. It might be worth getting shot himself just to see it happen. His outdoor stroll lasted ten minutes. Despite the admonition of the imam’s son, he and the others got to go outside once more in the next two months.

It was sometime in July when the three were taken back to Tehran and placed in a cell at Qasr Prison, another of the shah’s notorious lockups. It was modeled after 19th century “panoptican” prisons, a central hub with arms that projected outward. They were placed in a large cell, the first genuine prison cell they had inhabited. It was concrete and clean, with a thin carpet stretched over the floor from wall to wall. It had one barred window, too high on the wall for them to look out. The door was made of solid iron and had a transom with a barred window that they could reach by gripping the top of the door and pulling themselves up. It afforded nothing more than a view of the empty hallway. Given a mattress and a pillow, they chose their spots and unpacked their few belongings.

It was summer but the concrete walls and floor were cool. The guards allowed them to listen to music. Every few days they would bring in a portable tape player with cassettes of classical music and they were permitted to listen for an hour. On occasion they were led down the hall to a room with a television, where they watched videotapes. One of the tapes was of a press conference in the United States by Darrell Rupiper, the radical oblate missionary who had visited Iran in the spring and come away favorably impressed by the revolution and the embassy takeover. Metrinko and the others were appalled. The hostages, Rupiper said, were being treated well by their captors, whom he believed were justified in their action. America, he said, owed Iran a big apology.

At home during the late spring and summer of 1980 the hostage drama went flat. Jonathan Schell, writing in The New Yorker, wrote of “a numbness, an emotional fatigue” that seemed to settle over the nation in the weeks after the failed rescue mission. Throughout the previous winter and spring there had been dramatic developments to keep the story moving, the takeover itself, the threats, the secret negotiations that, in the words of ABC’s Ted Koppel, would come “so tantalizingly close” again and again, only to repeatedly collapse. In the weeks before the rescue mission there had been a mounting expectation of war; the crisis was like a festering boil, and the prospect of ending it violently engendered not so much dread as relief. The spectacular failure at Desert One had lanced the boil. It had a peculiar and unanticipated effect: the fever seemed to lift. For a few days afterward the hostages’ families, the Carter administration, and the rest of the country waited anxiously to see if the Iranians would make good on their threat to retaliate by killing hostages, which would have provoked a furious American military response, and when they did not it was as though Iran had earned, for a time, a respite. Both sides backed away from the precipice. The angry rhetoric from Washington cooled. Word got back that the hostages were being scattered around Iran, which killed any prospect of a second rescue effort. Congress settled in to investigate Beckwith’s disaster and to assign blame for it, but the hostages themselves receded from television and the front pages. The story had exhausted itself. It seemed there was simply nothing to be done about it or, perhaps, that too much had been made of it.

Commenting in the June 2 issue of The New Yorker, Schell speculated that the abrupt change had more to do with the news media itself than world events. “In an instant, the frantic urgency about [the hostages’] release dissipated, and they seemed to disappear from the face of the earth,” he wrote. “Gone were the interviews with their friends and relatives, gone the impromptu delegations of clerical would-be peacemakers, and gone the sideshow of freelance meddlers…. Gone, too, were reports of the ‘rising impatience’ of the American people which was thought to have so much to do with the decision to launch the rescue mission.” Schell noted the tendency of television news to leap from one short-lived obsession to the next, in “obedience to a rhythm…which seems to have more to do with the world of entertainment than the world of international affairs,” and concluded, “In part, however, the news media may have abandoned the hostage issue because of a well-founded if largely unarticulated suspicion that their own disproportionate coverage of it, together with the presidential campaign, had generated a terrifying vortex of political pressure that brought on the tragic rescue mission and came near to dragging the nation into a catastrophe.”

Some of the hostage families had reached similar conclusions, which helped explain why they suddenly vanished from television. All had grown savvy about news coverage, particularly about cameras, and so became more wary. Barbara Rosen was annoyed with herself for not having caught on sooner. Like most of the other spouses, parents, and siblings, she had assumed that the more attention given the plight of their loved ones the better, but her conversation with Helmut Schmidt in Bonn had stayed with her. “Get the story off the front pages!” he had said. She now saw the wisdom in that advice. The great swirl of media attention in the months after the takeover had fed the crisis. She had fed the crisis. She regretted having allowed TV cameras into her home over the Christmas holidays the year before, and winced at the memory of her children telling America how much they missed their daddy. Those snippets of family life had tugged at the heartstrings of her fellow countrymen and people of goodwill everywhere, which, she now realized, was precisely what her husband’s kidnappers wanted. Now she refused to go on TV. When reporters showed up she would sometimes agree to talk, but declined to do so on camera. When a New York studio lured her with an offer to see the latest film released from Tehran, she went to the studio but refused to allow them to film her watching it. When a producer insisted, Rosen picked up her bag and started out of the building. The producer chased her down and let her watch the film in private.

In light of the obvious heroism of the men who attempted the rescue, it was predictable that efforts were made to hang the mission’s failure on the White House. Some reports suggested that Delta Force had been pressured to launch against its will by an overeager president, or that it had been prevented from going all out by presidential timidity. Colonel Beckwith stepped forward to bluntly deny both claims. He said that he and his men had been eager to launch and still believed they might have succeeded. He dismissed speculation that the raid had been undermined by micromanagement from the White House, that Carter had aborted it in an excess of caution over the objections of the men in the desert. Beckwith said he had aborted the mission himself and would do so again, and called reports that said otherwise “pure bullshit.”

“I’m not about to be party to a half-assed loading of a bunch of aircraft and going up and murdering a bunch of fine soldiers,” he said, indignant, his eyes blazing under his dark eyebrows. “I’m not that kind of man.”

Carter himself pushed the hostages out of the news by abandoning his strategy of camping in the White House and looking presidential. He declared world events more “manageable” and hit the campaign trail, failing even to mention Iran in two major speeches.

Americans took grim satisfaction in May when Iran’s own embassy in London was seized by six Iraqi-trained Khuzestan separatists, who took hostage two dozen Iranian diplomats and staffers. The situation, according to Iranian president Bani-Sadr, was “in no way comparable” to the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. This was “an unjust hostage taking,” he said, because Iranian diplomats, unlike American, “had no other duties but to represent their country.” They had been kidnapped by “a group of hired and deceived terrorists,” as opposed to the patriotic heroes who had kidnapped American diplomats in Tehran. But the parallel was obvious and there for all the world to see. The British government demonstrated how responsible nations protect foreign missions on their soil by storming the embassy and rescuing fourteen of the sixteen hostages—two Iranian diplomats were killed by their captors, and five of the six terrorists were killed by the British SAS forces, several of them apparently executed on the spot. Without a trace of irony, Bani-Sadr praised the British government for upholding its obligations as a host government under international law.

It did nothing to alter the standoff in Tehran. A “Crimes of America” conference kicked off there in June, attended by representatives of many small nations and by a ten-person delegation of Americans led by Ramsey Clark, who had failed to win permission to enter Iran as a special emissary of the president the previous November, and who now attended in defiance of President Carter’s ban on American travel to Iran. The TV networks showed the tall, lean former U.S. attorney general listening and lecturing at the conference, faulting both sides of the dispute. He admitted the imperiousness of America’s foreign policy—“The United States still clings to the idea that it can control the government and destinies of other people,” he said—and he denounced the embassy takeover and the holding of hostages. Clark’s public criticism of the hostage takers in Tehran was courageous, but his presence there conferred a trace of legitimacy to an event designed for only one purpose, to embarrass and insult his own country. When Khomeini addressed the conference, he suggested that Carter’s travel ban showed how much he feared what Americans might learn. He urged those attending to return to their homes in the West and tell the truth, because the mainstream press portrayed Iran “as a jungle filled with crazy people.”