Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (77 page)

There was a center courtyard and outside the cell door was a long hallway. He could hear other American voices talking in cells up and down. The bathroom was at the end of the hall, and other prisoners were frequently escorted down it past his door. One of them was obviously a marine, because he invariably whistled “The Halls of Montezuma.” At all hours of day and night Limbert could hear from somewhere else in the prison the voice of an Iranian woman singing patriotic songs and talking loudly to herself. He imagined it was some poor prisoner who had lost her mind.

Despite the gloominess of the new place, Limbert was happy. He was surrounded again by his colleagues, which was reassuring, and there were two mattresses! He had a roommate, Lee Holland, the embassy’s army attaché. Holland was a small fireplug of a man who was nicknamed “Jumper” because he had enrolled and passed jump school at Fort Bragg relatively late in his career. He was more than a decade older than Limbert, with thinning straight hair that now hung limply around his broad forehead. He had grown a gray beard. Holland had also spent some time in Tehran before the revolution, so both he and Limbert remembered the country in what they considered better days. They dubbed their new home the “Hitler Hilton.”

After seven months of being alone, Limbert was thrilled to have company, and he found Holland to be especially pleasant. The first few days they were thrown together they sat up until the wee hours every morning conversing—so much that a guard came in and complained, “Don’t you people ever sleep?” They talked about their lives, their families, their children, and what they knew about their situation. Holland had not heard about the rescue mission and had not learned of the shah’s death. Holland told Limbert about his experiences since the day of the takeover, and about his past, about his service in Vietnam and in Germany. They played cards. Holland taught Limbert to play euchre, and Limbert taught him to play casino. Limbert was impressed by Holland’s imperturbability. He was a gruff, steady man, not easily impressed or frightened, who treated his captors with steadfast contempt without deliberately courting trouble. A little of Holland’s defiance rubbed off on the pliant political officer.

Limbert recognized that small acts of defiance preserved the prisoner’s sense of self-worth and remembered how good it had felt when he had been listening at night to his stolen radio, putting one over on the guards.

He began practicing this new, measured belligerence on their guard, a young man named Gholam Reza, who was so perpetually glum that he had been nicknamed “Smiley.” He was one of the true believers, someone who in Limbert’s eyes embodied Iran’s “New Man,” appalling ignorance combined with absolute conviction. He found Reza too high-strung and impassioned to argue with directly, so he began leaving him mocking messages on the walls. In one, he wrote in Farsi:

I am foaming at the mouthWith violence and curses.I’m a rabid dogAnd I desire a bad nameAnd a bone.I am tired of the voices of human beingsAll I want now is the braying of donkeys.I have disregarded the lawOf God and manI desire the jungleAnd the characteristics of the wild animal.

Limbert made posters and drew cartoons. In one, he contrasted in Farsi the perfect Muslim state described in the Koran with the kind of system created by the radical students, comparing the generous historical acts of Muhammad with the students’ authoritarian methods. Muhammad, for instance, had freed all of the prisoners after one battle, had not bothered the people of Mecca after his conquest, and treated foreigners in his country as honored guests. The students, on the other hand, had attacked defenseless people, harmed those in their protection, and had stolen from them. Reza began writing responses on the wall when Limbert went to the toilet. It got so that every time Limbert left for the bathroom he would return to find something new Reza had added to his wall drawings. The guard never spoke to him about it. For instance, in response to Limbert’s point about visitors being treated as honored guests, the guard wrote, “Islam protects diplomats, not spies.” Limbert then wrote, “For example, a businessman and a nurse are spies, like those you have taken hostage.” This went on until his posters were so defaced that Limbert put them in a corner, hung clean paper in another part of the room, and labeled it “Free Speech Area.” Reza continued the dialogue there. They never spoke to each other but carried on this written exchange for weeks.

In the hallway, the guards often played revolutionary songs. Limbert was a lover of old Persian folk music and regarded the new songs as dreadful. The words to one tune just repeated the familiar “Magbar A’mrika” (Death to America).

He teased Reza by replacing the lyrics with a loud singsong, “Hee-haw! Hee-haw! Hee-haw!”

Summer is long in Tehran. It was still sunning weather in early October when Mike Howland, stretched out on the balcony over the ministry garden one afternoon, was approached by a new guard named Isfahani, who asked the embassy security officer if he would show him how to field-strip his Spanish pistol. Howland had done so for some of the others. The big embassy security chief liked Isfahani. He was a slender reed, a slight, inoffensive man whose commitment to the pieties of Islam was suspect—he had asked Howland once if he could get him special American sunglasses that would enable him to see through women’s robes.

They sat together on the third-floor balcony, just under the eave of the roof, and Howland broke down the weapon, explaining as he went. The hardest part about putting the .45 back together was holding down the recoil spring cap as you locked it back beneath the gun barrel. More than one trainee had injured himself by letting the spring cap slip and having it fly up into his eye or forehead. Howland demonstrated the tricky maneuver with his thick thumb pressed hard on the spring cap. Then he handed the pistol to the guard to try it himself.

“Isfahani, you’ve got to be careful or that thing will fly off and hit you,” Howland warned him.

“Bali, bali, bali,” the guard said (“Yes, yes, yes!”).

Isfahani’s thumb slipped. The cap missed him, flying high into the air and landing on the upper roof, where it rolled down and came to rest in the gutter high overhead. The young guard went white with panic. How was he going to explain breaking his own gun or letting his hostage take his weapon apart? He was so beside himself that Howland took pity on him.

“Okay, Isfahani,” he said. “Come with me.”

The other guards were sleeping. Howland led the panic-stricken Iranian quietly into the kitchen and, much to the guard’s amazement, slipped open the key box and removed the key to the attic.

“Shhh,” Howland told him, a finger to his lips.

There was a dormer near the point on the roof where the spring cap had landed, and Howland led the amazed guard up the stairs and into the attic. He took him to the window and pointed down to the place in the gutter where he would find the cap.

The guard said he was too afraid of heights to climb out on the roof. Howland looked down. There were guards in the garden below.

“Bullshit, Isfahani, I’m not going out there,” he said. “Those guards down there see me, they’re liable to start shooting. You’re going to have to go out there.”

He showed him how he could hang on to the dormer on his way down and use it to help pull himself back up when he had retrieved the spring cap. Howland promised to stand in the window the whole time and direct him.

He was standing in the window, encouraging the trembling guard as he eased his way down toward the gutter, when suddenly they both heard explosions in the distance. Howland was shocked. He knew the sound; he remembered it from Vietnam. It sounded like an air strike, coming from the direction of Mehrabad Airport. Off to the west he saw rising columns of smoke. Isfahani looked back up at Howland, stricken and confused.

Just then a MiG-23 fighter bomber flew right past the window. Howland was at eye level with the pilot. The jet turned, hit its afterburners, and shot away from them. Howland braced himself for a bomb to hit but nothing happened. The startled guards below, looking up, saw Isfahani on the roof.

“Isfahani, get the goddamn cap and get back in here!” Howland shouted. Suddenly spry, the guard eased himself down to the gutter, scooped out the cap, and made it back to the window. He was so happy that he hugged and kissed Howland when he got back inside. Then the American helped him put the pistol back together. Isfahani had a perfect excuse for being on the roof. He told his comrades that he had reacted quickly when he heard the jets and had climbed out to shoot at it. His fellows were tremendously impressed with his alert and fearless response.

Laingen saw two jets. While Howland was watching Isfahani out on the attic dormer, the chargé had been sitting at an open third-floor window below, painting. The explosions to the west turned his head and at once he saw two low-flying MiG-23s with Iraqi insignia move directly over the ministry. They were less than a thousand feet from his window, and the angle of their approach made them seem to be moving slowly. One was trailing a drag chute, presumably deployed in error. They seemed bigger than Laingen imagined they would be and, in their apparent leisure, appeared to be flaunting their presence in enemy skies. “As they crossed over us, they swung to the west slightly and then gunned their speed as we watched their afterburners,” he wrote later in his diary.

Holland and Limbert were together at Komiteh prison when they heard the roar of jet engines pass low overhead, a powerful swoosh!, which Holland recognized as the sound of two fighters on a shooting run, and then the burp of their electric cannons. In the distance a bomb exploded, followed by a second much larger boom that vibrated the floors and walls. The guards were shouting angrily outside.

“Goddamn, John! They’re playing our song!” Holland said gleefully.

“What is it?” Limbert asked.

Holland explained that Tehran had just been attacked from the air. A siren began to scream just outside their window.

In a nearby cell, Chuck Scott and Don Sharer went right to work on the sounds. The jet engines sounded like something Sharer had heard once at an air base in Nevada.

“Chuck, I think those were air-dropped bombs, and that jet was a MiG,” he said, referring to the Soviet-built fighter.

Five minutes later two more jets passed over.

“What were they?” asked Scott.

“J-79 engines, must be F-4 Phantoms,” said Sharer. The Iranian air force’s F-4s were one of the models he had come to Iran to discuss with the new government. “Somebody has attacked somebody.”

Then all the lights went out. Antiaircraft guns opened up loudly nearby.

“That was a hundred-twenty millimeter,” said Scott.

Sharer beat on the door, shouting, “I have to go to the head!”

“Can’t go, can’t go,” the guard answered through the door.

“I have diarrhea!” Sharer lied.

The door was opened and he was taken to the bathroom, where he could stand on the toilet and look out a window. It confirmed Scott’s assessment. He could see tracers arcing skyward from nearby rooftops.

They deduced that the likely culprit was Iraq, because other than the Soviet Union it was the only country close enough with MiGs. If the Soviets were attacking it wouldn’t be just two fighters streaking over Tehran. It had to be Saddam Hussein.

In his cell, Daugherty arrived at the same point by a different route. The distant explosions and jets made him believe for a moment that President Carter had launched an attack…then he thought better of it. He sat on the floor of his darkened cell watching the flashes of what he assumed were antiaircraft guns in the small window overhead, trying to figure out what was going on. If Carter were going to attack Iran, it would have happened months ago. The Russians would have no reason to bomb Tehran. The most logical conclusion was Iraq. Saddam Hussein had always been at odds with Iran, even under the shah. Maybe now he sensed weakness and realized he could get some support—under these circumstances, even the United States might be helping him.

Daugherty felt good about it. He wasn’t frightened. He reckoned that if he was going to sit through an aerial assault, few places were better than a prison. Its walls were many times thicker than a normal building. It was probably the safest spot in all of Tehran. At one point the guards opened the door and poked their heads in his room. They looked terrified. Daugherty figured they were checking to make sure he wasn’t secretly communicating with the planes. They were watching when the large whump! of an explosion sounded in the distance. Daugherty smiled at them and clapped.

In a nearby cell, Metrinko and Roeder heard bombs falling close enough to rattle the walls.

“That’s incoming,” said Roeder.

Metrinko asked what was exploding.

“I can’t tell,” Roeder told him.

“You must know,” said Metrinko. “You were in Vietnam all those years.”

“Yeah, but all I ever heard was the sound from the top going down, not on the ground listening to them coming in. I’ve never been on the receiving end.”

Roeder knew his jets, and listening intently to the sounds overhead he told Metrinko that they were MiG-23s, Soviet-built fighters. It took him just a few seconds to figure Saddam was behind the assault.

A panicked guard burst into their cell and asked if they were “weapons trained.” Both men said they could handle a weapon.

“You might be issued weapons to help defend the prison,” the guard told them.

Metrinko was shocked at the suggestion that he and Roeder might be asked to help their guards defend the prison.

“Please give me a gun,” Metrinko said. “I’ll use it all right.”

Blaring loudspeakers spelled out the story for Limbert, who translated for his roommate Holland. Iraq had invaded Iran. Thirty-five people had been killed at the Iran National Works, where the bombs had exploded. The broadcasts urged citizens to postpone going to hospitals except for emergencies.

Suddenly, Iran was at war. At the various prisons guards began enforcing strict blackout rules and distributed candles. On the first night of the blackout, looking out the large windows that had framed his world for so long, Laingen had never seen such blackness since the moonless nights of his boyhood in rural Minnesota. There seemed to be universal compliance with the new blackout regulations. The city was not just black but silent, dead. Nothing was moving. The events of the day shook the chargé d’affaires out of hostage mode and back into gear as a foreign service officer. He recorded his analysis of the situation in his journal.