Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (74 page)

The next problem was the dog, but he had an answer for that. He convinced the guards that he had a nervous condition that required regular treatment with Librium and Valium, and then hoarded the pills. He was not allowed to eat meat—a punishment from some earlier transgression—but Belk and Subic were, so Kalp got a hot dog from them. His plan was to stuff the hot dog with his pills and then throw it to the dog about half an hour before going out the window. With any luck, the animal would be unconscious, or at least mellow.

Still exchanging notes in the pink bathroom, Kalp and Subic decided at last that all was ready and set the time for their break at three o’clock the following morning. Kalp would tie the sheets from his bed into a rope, lower himself to the ground, check around to see if the coast was clear, and then, using a red lens he had scrounged, signal Subic to climb down. Kalp opened his own window a crack early that evening to check out the yard, and for the first time he saw a guard walking underneath. He quickly shut the window, asked the guard in the hallway to take him to the bathroom, and left a note for Subic that said, “Cancel.”

Another week of discussion ensued. By now it was late June, and the news—mostly what Kalp had learned from Limbert at the other house—was that the Majlis planned to vote on the hostage question in July. Subic wanted to wait for the vote but Kalp was through with waiting.

“To hell with it,” he wrote. “The 27th of June I’m going.”

Subic reluctantly agreed to go along. Kalp would throw the spiked hot dog out, then wait for the dog to eat it and fall asleep. Then he would drop to the ground, signal Subic, wait for him to climb down, and the two of them would cross the yard, scale the wall, and drop down into the neighborhood outside. They would hide nearby until morning and wait for someone to start the motor on his car—neither knew how to hot-wire a vehicle. They would jump the driver, hit him over the head with a brick or stone, and drive the car in the direction of the Persian Gulf, hundreds of miles away, where they would steal a boat and row or motor themselves out to where American warships patrolled. Kalp figured he had about a fifty-fifty chance of getting over the wall and about a five percent chance of making it to the gulf. After eight months, it was chance enough.

At the last moment he decided not to use the rope he had painstakingly made. He could tie it down inside his room and it would serve nicely for descending, but he couldn’t figure out a way to then pull it down behind him. If it were left hanging, a guard might spot it and alert the others before he and Subic had a chance to scale the wall and find a good hiding place outside. Their best chance was to slip out without anyone noticing until the guards came for breakfast. That would give them a good four hours of darkness to flee the house and hide. Instead of climbing down, Kalp decided he would simply hang from the window, which was about eighteen feet from the ground, and drop. He figured he was five-ten, and his arms extended fully gave him another two feet, which meant about a ten-foot drop, which wasn’t too bad. He saved himself some of the pills just in case he hurt his ankle or legs in the jump.

On the night of June 26, he threw the stuffed hot dog down to the dog, but it landed in a place where the tethered animal couldn’t reach. Again he wrote “cancel.” He asked for another hot dog and left the note in the bathroom for Subic.

On the following night, he asked the guard to shut his door. Usually they left it open but the guard obliged. Kalp threw out the new spiked hot dog, and this time the dog gobbled it up and appeared to fall immediately asleep. Kalp stuffed all the things he wanted to take with him into his pillowcase—his pills, a bottle of water, some food he had scrounged, a change of clothes, and some letters from his family. He was doing this when a guard abruptly reopened the door to his room. Kalp was crouched in a far corner of the room with his bag, the mattress on the floor stripped and empty, but the guard just took a quick look, shut the door, and did nothing! Kalp couldn’t believe it. The best he could figure is that the guard was so bored with making bed checks he no longer actually looked.

At the last moment he decided not to carry the stuffed pillowcase. He worried it might throw off his balance, so using a long piece of string—Kalp collected things all the time in hopes they would come in handy—he gently lowered it out the window. When it touched ground he hesitated for a moment. Once he let go of the string and the bag was outside, he had to go. He knew his chances were slim, but he had been a soldier and CIA officer for a long time without ever having taken any truly big risks. You’ve been training for this for twenty-odd years, you gonna do it or not? He let go of the string. Then he opened the window fully and eased himself out. Hanging from the window ledge the eighteen-foot drop looked a lot more daunting than he had convinced himself it would be. He saw a ventilation ledge about two feet below him to one side and he managed to swing himself over there and lower himself farther. Still, it was quite a fall.

It was at this point that the dog suddenly sprang fully to life, lunging up at him from its chain, barking furiously. Kalp let go and landed hard on the balls of his feet. He rolled quickly away from the dog, badly scraping his elbows and knees. Bleeding now, with the dog raising holy hell, Kalp got to his feet. He had been lucky. His decision to move over the two feet to the ventilation ledge meant he had landed just out of the dog’s reach.

With the animal still making a racket, he sprinted down to peer around the corner of the building, where he saw no one, and then ran back the other way, beneath Belk’s and Subic’s window. Subic wasn’t there. The army sergeant had been waiting by the window, fully dressed, but when he heard the dog start to bark he had run back across the room, peeled off his shirt, and crawled back under the covers.

“I told you. I told you,” said Belk bitterly. “Now you’re going to get us both in trouble.”

Kalp was beneath their window, reaching in his pocket for the red lens, when a guard appeared, leveling a gun at him and shouting angrily in Farsi. Kalp jerked his hands up, but noticed that his pants were falling down. He instinctively reached to hike them up, then realized that a move like that could get him shot. He jerked his hands back into the air. The guard with the gun was screaming, the dog was raising a racket, his pants were falling down, and he was soon surrounded by irate Iranians.

He smiled sheepishly. “Good morning,” he said. “Good morning.”

Bound and blindfolded, he was led first up a long winding staircase, and then the guards changed their minds and brought him back down to the first floor and placed him in a bathroom. They stripped him, screamed at him, and then two began beating and kicking him.

When Kalp pleaded and protested the guards told him to shut up and kept up the beating. Subic and Belk could hear his cries and figured they were next, but the guards never came for them. Their room was checked, but no one took notice that Subic was fully dressed and that he had several full water bottles in a bag by his mattress. They also didn’t notice that the window was unlocked.

When they had finished beating Kalp, he was led back upstairs and placed in a chair with his hands cuffed behind its back. Then they tied his elbows together and bound his feet. Two strips of cloth were tied over his eyes and pulled so tight that a corner of the lower one dug painfully into his left eye. Kalp spent a day and a half like this with no food or water. Guards led him to the toilet at long intervals. They finally removed the outer blindfold, which eased the painful pressure on his eye. Sometime later they untied him, cuffed his hands in front, and took him to the basement. He felt that the worst was over. They probably wouldn’t shoot him. How mad could they be at him? He hadn’t hurt anyone and even the Geneva Convention, he thought, recognized that prisoners of war were entitled to try to escape.

In the basement he was questioned about the note-passing system, which he denied. Then he was beaten again. His head was smacked against the concrete wall and he was kicked in the groin. They showed him a note he had left for Subic and Belk. He denied that he had written it, even though it was clearly his handwriting and on paper he had brought with him from the embassy in Tehran. Next he was asked about his escape plan.

“I was going to go into Isfahan and find a Westerner,” he told them.

“Why did you think there would be Westerners there?” he was asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t been out of here. I don’t know who is in Isfahan.”

They brought him back upstairs and kept him tied to a chair for a few more days, and then they threw him into a car and returned him to the villa where he had been staying before the move. They took away his knife and fork.

Kalp went quietly to work with the spoon, scraping away the mortar between the bricks.

Both Belk and Subic were punished for Kalp’s attempted escape. When the guards found braided sheets in their room they were separated.

Belk responded by refusing to eat. When they brought him tea on the first day there was no sugar. He asked for some and was told no. So he refused the tea and everything else. He took only water for nine days, and then decided to stop even that. He soon discovered that it is a lot harder to stop drinking than to stop eating. Inside of one day his mouth was like cotton. He gave up and started eating his meals again.

All John Limbert knew was that one day Kalp had disappeared, and then, about a week later, he was back, with a note describing his adventure. Kalp had hidden a ballpoint pen in his room months ago and was delighted to find it still there when he returned. His escape had ended as Limbert thought it would, but he admired Kalp for trying.

Limbert said he had wondered what happened to him, whether he had been moved to a different place or just to another part of the villa, and Kalp promised that in the future he would make a small soap mark on the mirror whenever he used the bathroom. If the mark was gone, he was gone. In the next few days they exchanged notes about the possibility of another rescue attempt. Kalp knew more about the military’s capabilities than Limbert and corrected him when the diplomat speculated that the United States could not reach far into Iran on helicopters. Kalp explained that there were many different ways to refuel en route.

Clearly, another American raid was on the minds of their guards. Limbert overheard a number of them discussing the possibility one night. He heard one say, “Well, if something happens, make sure the explosives are placed right.”

He had seen no explosives at the villa and figured if they were around, he would have noticed them. He suspected the conversation had been staged for his benefit, although for what reason exactly he could not fathom. Apparently the guards still feared their captives were secretly communicating with Washington.

For three days after his return Kalp was kept handcuffed in his room and was denied reading material. He easily picked the lock on the cuffs, refastening them quickly when a guard approached. To pass the time, he began trying to count to a billion. He had read somewhere that if a person tried counting to a billion, his whole life would pass before he finished. He was up somewhere around 20,000 when, on the night of the third of July, a guard gave him a tranquilizer to swallow, removed his glasses, and then took him, blindfolded and cuffed, to a van, where five or six other Iranians and a group of hostages were already waiting. He was handcuffed to Belk—he heard the wheeze. They had agreed that the next time they were together on a move, they would jump the guards and try to escape, and on the long drive he felt Belk trying to pick the lock on the cuffs, though by this time Kalp knew they didn’t have a prayer. They were outnumbered, the guards probably had weapons, he was woozy from the tranquilizer, and without his glasses he couldn’t even see. He patted Belk’s hand gently and whispered, “No, no, no.”

The drive took ten hours. The guards played loudly a tape of their revolutionary songs, which to Kalp felt like torture.

The logistics of moving the captives around the country strained the resources of their student captors, who had to arrange guard shifts, food delivery, and other services wherever their charges were housed. In the month after the rescue attempt they shuffled hostages from place to place, trying to get the makeshift new system to work, but by midsummer they had begun driving them all back to Tehran, to several of the city’s old prisons, which were designed to hold captives and could be heavily fortified against assault. The students took pains to disguise these shifts, mindful of how vulnerable they had been in April when the rescue mission was attempted. When marine Jimmy Lopez was taken from a country house, where he had been kept all summer, the guards kept his guitar, and every evening at the same time Lopez normally practiced one of them stayed behind to pluck at the strings so that anyone listening from outside would think the hostages were still there.

Among the first to be moved were Joe Hall, John Graves, and the marines Greg Persinger and Steve Kirtley. On June 18, they were being driven from Isfahan when their transport van had a severe accident.

The four were blindfolded and handcuffed in the back—Hall to Persinger and Graves to Kirtley—and had ridden for hours through the night when they were awakened by violent bumping, and then were suddenly thrown wildly into the walls of the van as it left the road at high speed and rolled several times before coming to a stop. They were tumbled inside like markers in a Bingo hopper. Hall blacked out. He came to with his blindfold off, lying in thick dust at the bottom of the van, staring at Persinger. Both had bloody faces and were twisted in awkward positions. They untangled themselves slowly, checking for cuts and broken bones, and then crawled outside. Surveying the battered remains of the vehicle, Hall noticed a leg that looked bent in a peculiar position, and his first thought was, Somebody has lost a leg! Then the leg moved and was followed by the intact body of Kirtley, who pulled himself from the van and dragged Graves out behind him. Graves had hurt his back and the marine’s shoulder ached.