Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (79 page)

Not long after the attacks, Michael Metrinko was taken away from Dave Roeder and again placed in solitary in a basement cell at Qasr prison. The combative embassy political officer was always picking fights with his captors. Every time things started to feel a little bit too chummy, Metrinko would lash out. One night, after several had lingered in his cell for a long time lamenting how badly the war with Iraq was going, Metrinko suddenly announced: “You know, the imam is not a man.”

The words immediately stilled the conversation. After a stunned moment, one of the guards asked, “What?”

“The Ayatollah Khomeini, he is not a man,” said Metrinko.

“He is a man,” said one of the guards.

“He is not a man,” said Metrinko. “He does not have a wife.”

“He does have a wife.”

“No, he doesn’t,” Metrinko said. “The Ayatollah Khomeini does not have a wife.”

“He does have a wife,” one of the guards insisted. “There are pictures.”

“The only pictures I have ever seen of the ayatollah with anyone else are always pictures of him with a small boy beside him,” said Metrinko.

The guards caught his drift; he was suggesting that their imam was a pederast. Metrinko was grabbed by the hair—it had grown quite long—and dragged from the room. The angry guards took turns kicking and punching him. He was thrown into a cell at the end of the hall where a blanket was draped over him and he was beaten some more. Then they locked the door and left him there and refused to bring him food for three days. Then he was driven to Qasr, where he was placed alone in a “punishment” cell. They took away his watch and his glasses and left him. The room was dark and cold. At first he upbraided himself for provoking the guards, but he also felt good about standing up to them. He would pay a heavy price.

When they saw how much time Metrinko spent reading, they took away his books for days at a time. For two weeks he was left alone in the cell, freezing. They fed him bread and water. He spent his days and nights shivering in his blanket, pacing or jogging in place to keep warm, and brooding. After some time, he was visited by several of the student leaders.

“You have insulted the guards, who have complained that they can no longer bring you food or take you to the toilet,” the head of the group explained.

Metrinko was eventually taken back to Evin and placed again in a cell by himself. Now and then he was let out into a small courtyard to exercise. He walked in circles in the yard, just like prisoners in old Hollywood movies. Sometimes there were others walking in circles with him. That was how he discovered which hostages were being kept in that part of the prison, a discovery he found disconcerting. They were all embassy workers with the most sensitive jobs. There was Swift, the second-ranking political officer; Thomas Ahern, the CIA station chief; CIA officer Bill Daugherty; Lee Holland, an assistant defense attaché, and his boss, Tom Schaefer, the military attaché; and others. If the students were planning to put any of the hostages on trial, this would be the group.

He still lived with the guards’ special enmity. One day one of them entered his cell with a stack of letters.

“These are from your family,” he said. Metrinko had received mail from his family only a handful of times since the day of the takeover. Sometimes the letters he received seemed to have been chosen at random. One had appeared out of the blue from an old girlfriend whom he had not seen for eight years. He had devoured the letter, and was glad to get it, but had no way to respond. He wrote letters to his mother and father frequently but suspected they were not being sent (he was correct). So the sight of a pile of letters from his family was a thrill.

Then the guard tore the letters in half and walked back out of the cell with them.

Akbar was the only guard who took pity on him. When he took over at Evin, the mood of the place lifted. Even Metrinko grew to like him; he found him well educated and kindhearted. Akbar spoke some English and was fluent in Turkish and Farsi. He was not an innocent. He had taken part in the assassination of a government official ten years earlier, and at one point had been arrested by SAVAK and thrown in jail. He and Metrinko often conversed in Turkish, which few of the other guards understood. Metrinko found him to be a true believer in the revolution but not a fanatic. He would actually listen in conversation and carefully weigh what was said.

Akbar told Metrinko that he, too, had been trapped by the embassy takeover, caught up in events that he could no longer control and which he no longer agreed with. He shared some of the prisoner’s contempt for his jailers; they, after all, were warm and comfortable and still basking in praise from the great mass of Iranians. For many of them this would be the most important accomplishment of their lives, and they delighted in remaining at the center of such worldwide attention. But what kind of attention? It pained Akbar to know that because of what they had done they were considered thugs all over the world, and he admitted to Metrinko that even in Iran there was now a growing criticism of the ongoing standoff. He and many others now believed the effects of taking and holding diplomats hostage were bad for his country and were going to get worse. He stayed, he said, because he felt partly responsible for putting the Americans in this position and felt obliged to do what he could to ease their captivity. When Metrinko told him he had not been able to communicate with his family, Akbar brought him a letter from his parents and offered to hand-carry his own letter out of the prison and mail it for him. Metrinko sat down right then, filled with skepticism about Akbar’s promise, and wrote a typically uncompromising one-page letter in a tight but clear script.

Dear mom and dad—this is another futile attempt at a letter—futile because the Iranians won’t send this one just as they have never sent any of the others I’ve written. Their so-called spokesmen lie about it, of course, just as they lie about everything else. But what else can one expect? If nothing else I can now fully understand what the old regime jails were like, since I am presently incarcerated in my third different one…the type of jailer hasn’t seemed to have changed much either…only the name of the regime. Certainly standards of conduct remain barbaric, but there’s no reason for me to belabor the point. Anyone who has had any contact with the “new government” knows exactly what I mean. It’s just that now crimes are committed under a different imprimatur. There are exceptions to this generalization, even among the guards, but even the exceptional few refuse to accept any personal responsibility for the poor (very) conditions—“Orders are orders.” One wonders if all this present and past idiocy and ill treatment of the hostages/prisoners stems from Persian paranoia, xenophobia, simple malice or just typical and all-pervasive incompetence…but then trying to figure it out is hardly worth the effort. Enough. Rather obviously I am not in a good mood. Chalk it up to my eight months of solitary confinement (not even SAVAK did that to prisoners), my lack of news of what’s happening and my general weariness of all the local lies and ranting and raving. It’s safe to say that I have spent the last 13 months being angry and “pissed off,” and my own emotions have tired me out. Your last 2 letters were dated 10 July and 1 October. So much for the freedom of receiving mail. Yesterday I got birthday cards from Debbie and Aunt Mitzi—Please give them my best. Since most of my mail is destroyed I have no idea how many other cards I would have gotten. The birthday itself was uneventful. I did my usual three hours of calisthenics (mostly jogging in place) as well as 2 hours of pacing the 4-pace length of my cell. Enough already. You can see what kind of mood I am in. Someday all of this will be funny…God knows it’s already ridiculous. Take care of yourselves, and I hope you have a pleasant Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc. All my love, and regards to everyone—Michael.

Akbar kept his word. The letter arrived a week later in Olyphant, Pennsylvania, the first his family had heard from him in more than a year. His parents read the letter out loud over the phone to an official at the State Department, and it further confirmed their fears that at least some of the hostages were not being treated well.

One day, without explanation, Metrinko was handed several new paperback science-fiction books. He was a big fan of science fiction and the books were like manna. Then, in the TV room, he discovered a box with dozens of similar volumes, all of them new, published in 1980. Adding to the mystery, as he poked through the box, he discovered one of his own books, which had evidently been removed from the shelf of his apartment—the first proof that his apartment had been invaded and looted. Looking with even more interest now, Metrinko found that one of the new paperbacks was inscribed, “Hope you enjoy the books, Michael,” and that they had been sent from Cooperfield’s Bookstore in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He had no idea how the box had found its way to Evin prison. He never asked, and no one explained, but Metrinko felt an enormous debt of gratitude toward the bookshop. He plunged into the books.

Reading was only a partial cure for the boredom, however. At times, Metrinko’s spirits sank. The worst prior moments for him had been the two weeks in the chancery basement, handcuffed day and night, and then, more recently, the two weeks of cold, dark, and loneliness in the punishment cell. In those circumstances Metrinko’s despair was salvaged by the pride he took in defying his captors. But time and tedium eroded even the defiance that sustained him.

One fall night, alone in his cell at Evin, the moist walls peeling paint, Metrinko listened to the muffled booms of bombs exploding in the distance. Then the walls and floor of his cell began to shake. It had announced itself first as a great rumbling sound that grew louder and louder as it approached. It was an earthquake. The shaking lasted only a few seconds, and after that he could hear sirens and horns outside. It made him feel small, hopelessly alone, stranded, vulnerable, and insignificant. Part of him wanted to laugh out loud. It was such a travesty of disasters. Here he was a pawn in a great struggle between nations over matters that neither Iran nor the United States fully understood, trapped on a battlefield between two nations fighting over something else, and in an instant all of it could be rendered irrelevant by some blind, unthinkably powerful tectonic shrug. The futility of his predicament mirrored the absurdity of life itself. He was going to sit in this miserable cell until the day he died and it didn’t matter to a soul, his life was forgotten and meaningless, all his dreams were illusions, and when he was dead and gone the great idiot pageant would keep on rolling right along, heedless, pointless, and cruel.

Iraq’s invasion of Iran was a direct consequence of Khomeini’s revolution and of the embassy seizure, and it would take a horrendous toll on both nations over the next eight years.

It was hard to disguise the tone of satisfaction in American TV reports on the outbreak of the war, just as the hostages had cheered the pounding of Tehran. But Saddam’s aggression had derailed, at least temporarily, an agreement for their release.

Two weeks before the bombs started falling Sadegh Tabatabai, a mid-level official in the collapsed Bazargan provisional government and the brother-in-law of the imam’s son Ahmad, had initiated secret talks with the United States to resolve the crisis. A chain-smoking dandy who wore expensive suits with colorful matching silk ties and pocket handkerchiefs, who combed his brown wavy hair into a pompadour and had more than one hundred varieties of tulips in his personal gardens, Tabatabai was a highly unlikely figure to be a member of Khomeini’s inner circle. He had run unsuccessfully for president in the last election. For almost two decades before the revolution he had lived in Germany—indeed, documents seized at the embassy suggested that the CIA regarded him as a German spy—and he had the appearance and manner of a sixties-era Western playboy. But his marital connection and kinship with Ahmad Khomeini gave him a unique opportunity to speak unpopular truths.

There had been a number of worldly, well-educated, well-placed Iranians who considered the hostage taking to have been a mistake from the beginning. Tabatabai was a veteran diplomat and knew well that the documents seized at the U.S. embassy revealed nothing more than the routine, prudent espionage conducted at diplomatic missions everywhere. Now, as the one-year anniversary of the embassy takeover approached, as Soviet troops built up in Afghanistan, as world opinion continued to condemn Iran, as economic sanctions, although hardly crippling, began to have a noticeable effect, and as Saddam Hussein’s military might massed on the nation’s western border and increasingly menaced Iranian forces inside their own country—a helicopter carrying President Bani-Sadr would nearly be shot down by Iraqi fighters in mid-September—it was all too clear that Iran would only become further isolated and vulnerable if the hostage standoff continued. While popular opinion still responded enthusiastically to anti-Americanism and calls for trying the hostages as spies, more practical elements in the country’s leadership, including some in the clergy, realized they could no longer afford to indulge in this warm bath of popular anger. Unlike the most devout of the mullahs consolidating power, these men were not entirely willing to leave their future in the hands of Allah. Iran had, for instance, started buying those desperately needed parts for their American-made jets from Islam’s presumed archenemy Israel.

Speaking with his brother-in-law Ahmad Khomeini one evening early that fall, Tabatabai again expressed his impatience with the hostage crisis. He admitted storming the embassy had had its purposes, but that “it has become a quagmire. I would like to try and end it,” he said.

“What is your idea?” Ahmad asked.

“If you endorse me, if you support me, I can find a way.”

Tabatabai said that he was friends with Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the West German foreign minister, and that through him he could arrange for private talks at the highest level of the American government. It was critical that the talks remain secret, because any public move toward an agreement with the Great Satan would trigger the wrath of Iran’s religious conservatives and could bring down catastrophic reprisals. Only someone with connections like Tabatabai’s would dare to initiate such discussions. Even he was frightened.