Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (75 page)

There was no sign of the guards. All four had been riding for so long that they had to urinate urgently, so the two shackled pairs ran off a short distance to do that. When they returned, neither guard nor driver had emerged from the battered front of the van.

Kirtley’s first thought was, Now’s our chance! But they were standing in the middle of nowhere. Nothing but sand stretched off in all directions. They all turned slowly in a complete circle, thinking the same thought. Which way should they go? The van was going nowhere.

They were gaping at it, wondering at their good fortune in having escaped with only minor injury, when the guard they called Big Ali, who had been riding shotgun in front, emerged slowly from the wreckage with his gun. He had apparently just come to. It was the first time Hall had seen Big Ali with a weapon, and the Iranian gruffly ordered them to do what they had already decided.

“Stay here,” he said.

Not long afterward an ambulance arrived; it had been coming along the same road a distance behind them. Big Ali told them to climb in, where they were surprised to find hostage Jerry Miele on a stretcher. They were squeezed in around him, and when Big Ali told them to put their blindfolds back on, which he had retrieved, they all refused. He and the other guards were too shaken and distressed to push the issue—the hostages learned later that the driver of the van had been killed—so the hostages had an opportunity to talk freely for the rest of the drive.

Miele’s head was bandaged. He was particularly surprised to see Kirtley again. They had been together until a few days earlier, when Miele had made a bizarre and futile attempt to kill himself. He was known to be CIA—he was a communicator, a technician—and the guards constantly harassed him about it. They had told him repeatedly since the day of the takeover that, once the trials began, he would be the first to be killed. A short, bald man with a long hooked nose and protruding eyes with deep dark circles under them, Miele looked ill, old, tired, and broken. He was naturally withdrawn, and over months of captivity he had grown increasingly silent and sullen, convinced his life was over. The method most frequently mentioned was electrocution, and on one occasion the guards had rigged a chair with wires to drive home the threat. Occasionally Miele would mutter fearfully, “They were going to plug me in.” Before the rescue attempt, Miele had regressed to an extent that was alarming to his fellow hostages. Sometimes he would just curl up in the corner and shake. Kathryn Koob had been shocked one evening to see Miele, whom she did not know, sitting curled up like a child, asking meekly, “Bathroom? My turn? Bathroom?”

In the dispersal after the failed rescue, he had been placed with Kirtley in Isfahan, where one afternoon, when Big Ali was bringing lunch into the room, he became agitated and started pacing rapidly.

“I hope when this is all over the real truth comes out,” he said, and then ran himself head first, with as much speed as he could muster in such a small space, into the edge of the opened door. The blow knocked him cold and carved a deep eight-inch cut in his scalp. Kirtley ran to him and tried to wake him up. Blood poured out over Miele’s face. The marine put his head to Miele’s chest and heard his heart still beating.

“Call an ambulance, Ali!” he shouted.

Kirtley inspected the wound carefully, looking to make sure that there were no visible pieces of dirt or stone inside, and then folded the loose flap of scalp back over Miele’s slick, bleeding forehead. He took a towel, one that he had washed and hung to dry, and pressed it against the top of his roommate’s head. He leaned on it, applying steady pressure.

Miele awakened. He opened his eyes and looked around the room and said nothing.

“Jerry! Jerry! Wake up! Say something!” urged Kirtley.

Miele didn’t speak. An ambulance came quickly, but then it sat for a long time while the two attendants debated about what to do. Kirtley kept shouting at them to get Miele to a hospital, but they ignored him. Finally they wrapped some gauze around his head. Kirtley retrieved Miele’s Bible and gave it to the ambulance men to take with them. After what seemed like hours, they drove off.

This was the first Kirtley had seen him since then, and Miele seemed better, no worse off than the four of them. Graves was the most severely injured; his back would trouble him for the rest of his life. Hall had noticed blood in his urine and presumed he’d bruised his kidneys. He also had a gash on his right ankle. Persinger and Kirtley had deep cuts. When they arrived at Qom, just a fifteen-minute drive from the site of the accident, Hall washed the cut on Persinger’s back and asked the guards for a disinfectant, but they didn’t have any and refused to find some, so he used toothpaste. Fluoride was supposed to kill germs; at least that’s what all the commercials said. Nobody knew for sure. Persinger said it stung when it was applied, which they figured was a good sign.

Kathryn Koob and Ann Swift were given a remedy for tedium in late June when Akbar, their new guard supervisor, asked them if they knew how to cook. They were brought to the chancery kitchenette, where they proceeded to take charge. They were told to cook for six, which meant somewhere in the cavernous building were four of their male colleagues. There was a working oven, two burners, and a hot plate. They thoroughly scrubbed down the kitchen and threw themselves into making creative dishes out of the ingredients at hand. There was a huge store of frozen vegetables, cheese, and canned food. The students kept them supplied with fresh eggs. The women captives put cans of flour and grains in the freezer and then sifted out the frozen bugs and larvae.

One night they found a tiny message of thanks under a dish on a returned tray, signed “The Boys in the Back Room.” That set them searching for clues to who their mystery diners were. Swift ran into Bob Ode on one trip to the bathroom, and on another they found discarded wrapping in the waste bin from a package addressed to Don Hohman. Eventually they were able to determine that the remaining two diners were Richard Queen and Jerry Miele, who had been returned to the chancery after his suicide attempt.

Koob knew that Hohman was a vegetarian and worked hard to provide him with interesting dishes, including an attempt at huevos rancheros. The empty dishes now routinely carried notes of thanks and requests. Chocolate chip cookies? Peanut butter cookies? Pumpkin pie? Most of the ingredients came from the vast stores in the embassy commissary, but occasionally the students were talked into making shopping trips to local markets. They provided a steady assortment of fresh fruits.

On Independence Day Koob and Swift baked a chocolate cake and decorated it with four fake firecrackers they had fashioned out of cardboard covered with brightly colored paper and topped with a piece of silver tinsel for a fuse. The feast included fried chicken and potato salad. In the bathroom, a few days later, they saw three of the four firecrackers lined up in a row on the floor behind the wastebasket. It was a message. One of their diners was gone.

Queen, Miele, and Ode were placed with Hohman so he could keep an eye on their health. Queen’s mysterious symptoms had worsened, Miele was on suicide watch, and Ode’s condition was worrisome just because he was the eldest and seemed so frail. At first, Queen and Ode had hit it off, but in time their personalities clashed. Ode was bitter and angry about his circumstances, while Queen tended toward irrational optimism, and because he spoke a little Farsi and could eavesdrop on the guards he tended to rush to conclusions about things that were later proved wrong. As Queen’s optimistic predictions failed to pan out again and again, Ode wrote him off as a Pollyanna. In time, the older man couldn’t be around him without arguing with him.

More and more, the lanky, bearded vice consul retreated into himself. The numbness on his left side had spread to his right, which both troubled and confused him. If his problem had been caused by a slight stroke, that explained why the loss of feeling and strength affected only one side of his body, but why was he now experiencing it on the other? He noticed that he was having trouble hearing with his right ear and with keeping his balance. What did that mean? Hohman told him that it was possible he had suffered another slight stroke on the other side of his brain, but the medic said it was unlikely and confessed that he was out of his depth. Queen explained his symptoms to Akbar, who was also baffled. Hohman guessed that the dizziness and hearing loss might indicate an ear infection, so Queen began taking antihistamines to dry out his ear. It had no effect.

The dizziness worsened until it was so bad that Queen couldn’t stand without getting sick. He tried turning off his air conditioner, thinking maybe something he was breathing was making him nauseous, but that made no difference. The vomiting grew worse. Even when he didn’t eat he could not stop retching. By the Fourth of July, as nearly a million Iranians were outside marching in protest against the United States, Queen was literally flat on his back, unable to move without growing dizzy and throwing up.

His roommates were alarmed and angry. His condition was bad enough to intrude even on Ode’s typically self-obsessed diary entry.

I presume our great and glorious President is enjoying himself over the weekend at Camp David as well as all our other hard-working government officials who are certainly not going to let a little matter of 50 hostages spoil their long holiday weekend…. Now that the Fourth of July has come and gone I guess our hopes of ever getting out of here within the foreseeable future are practically nil. I had so hoped that some arrangement could be made to free us by our ‘Freedom Day.’ Just wishful thinking, I guess…. Hopefully, even the Iranians are getting tired of this state of affairs, but again that is probably wishful thinking…. Queen has been very ill for the past several days with some sort of ear trouble that is causing him considerable dizziness and nausea.

Hohman was worried. He believed Queen was dying and complained bitterly to Akbar about the lack of medical care. He told Akbar that he personally was “killing” Queen, and that unless he did something quickly they were going to have a dead hostage on their hands. “How’s that going to play?” Hohman asked. Akbar agreed to send for help, and the next day Queen was visited by both a student doctor and an ear specialist. When the student doctor walked in, Queen turned his head to look at him and that slight movement made him so dizzy he vomited. The ear doctor quickly surmised that the problem was not an ear infection. He promised Queen a visit to the hospital the next day.

Ode noted:

It is about time. In his condition he should have been released immediately and sent home or at least taken to a local hospital months ago. Now, I’m afraid he is going to suffer for the rest of his life because of the neglect during his period of captivity. It is a miracle that others have not taken seriously ill and it is a national scandal and a national disgrace, as far as I’m concerned, that our government hasn’t done something long before this to obtain our release. The medical student took an EKG of me today. Said that everything is normal! Considering my heart condition, I don’t see how that could be!

That night, Ode and Hohman sat up beside Queen until late, talking to him and trying to cheer him up. When it was time to sleep, Ode gave him a broom handle and told him to hit the door if he needed anything. Queen lay awake that whole night. He was afraid to fall asleep for fear he might try to turn over, which would make him vomit again. The retching had bruised his insides and become extremely painful.

The next morning he was half carried to a passenger van. Queen felt he was dying. He lay supine in the vehicle’s backseat, his long, skinny legs bent at a sharp angle. After being locked up for eight months it was his first trip off the compound, and he lacked the strength or will even to lift his head and look out the windows. Inside the hospital he was helped to a bed. His head was swimming and the heat and odors of the place aggravated his nausea. The hospital, renamed Martyr’s Hospital after the revolution, was not up to Western standards. The bathroom in his room was unclean. Cockroaches ran on the walls. There were flowers alongside his bed, and when Queen asked Akbar about them he was told that they had been sent to the Ayatollah Sadeq Khalkali, the revolution’s notorious hanging judge, who had been treated in that same room earlier in the day for injuries from an auto accident. Queen noticed that Akbar had a .45 shoved under his belt, the first time he had seen him armed. He asked what they were worried about, since he couldn’t even sit up. Akbar said they weren’t worried about him trying to escape, they were worried that a rival group might kidnap him.

Queen observed that Akbar and the other guards were despised by the hospital workers, especially the women. When one of Queen’s armed student guards sat in a chair in his room, a nurse tending Queen snapped at the young man angrily, “Can you get rid of that thing,” pointing at his weapon. “This patient is not going anywhere.” The guard took a towel and wrapped it around his weapon. The nurses complained to Akbar about the white head scarves they were now required to wear, arguing that they interfered with their ability to work.

“Why do you torture us with these new requirements?” one nurse asked.

Queen was surprised by their anger and by the fact that they saw Akbar as responsible, which meant they saw him as an important man. The afflicted young American amused himself by softly singing old marching songs he had learned in the military. There was nothing else he could do. The doctors tried several treatments, which just made him feel worse. One set of shots caused violent spasms of the muscles in his head, causing it to turn violently from side to side. He began grinding his teeth uncontrollably.

“Akbar! Look what’s happening!” he cried fearfully. When he put his tongue between his teeth to stop the grinding, he involuntarily bit into it.

Five days of tests and various treatments led finally to the surprising announcement, by Akbar, that Queen was going home. The hostage assumed he meant back to the chancery.

“With all this?” he asked, horrified, nodding at the tubes plugged into his arms.