Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (8 page)

After helping the old man, Ode had not followed the Lijek group but had gone back to the remaining staffers. He was carrying a briefcase that Mark Lijek had handed him for some reason, no doubt expecting him to come with them. As he made his way back toward the door, one of the armed pasdoran grabbed at the briefcase. Ode didn’t know what was in it but he wasn’t going to give it up that easily, and even though the Iranian was armed Ode shoved him backward and pulled the briefcase out of his grasp.

“Keep your hands off me!” Ode said. The startled gunman backed off.

Ode was joined then by Morefield, Lopez, Queen, and several other staffers. The marine pulled the door shut behind them, inserted keys in the locks, and broke them off. He had taken off his uniform shirt, torn the red stripes from his blue uniform trousers, and replaced his Marine Corps belt with its shiny buckle with Queen’s plain black one. He was wearing an old army fatigue jacket and still carrying his two-way radio. Queen grabbed his pipe, tobacco, lighter, briefcase, and a flashlight. They chose a direction at random and started walking fast. They could not have been more conspicuous. Morefield looked like an American businessman, a short, wide, balding pale man in a business suit who had turned fifty the month before. Lopez had the standard high-and-tight marine haircut, and the others were wearing ties and suits or sport jackets and carrying briefcases. The streets were crowded with excited demonstrators. Someone shot at them. Lopez heard the snap of a round close by, and then the loud report of the gun. They encountered some local police, who eyed them dubiously, and one demanded the radio. Lopez smashed it hard against the side of a building and then handed it over, broken. The police scowled at them and walked off.

Morefield proposed they go to his house, which was nearby. Others wanted to try the Swiss embassy, only a few blocks away. There was some question about whether the Swiss mission was open on Sunday. Lopez wished they’d stop arguing and make a decision.

“I’ve got a radio at my house,” said Morefield.

So the six of them started toward there, spreading out so that they would be less of a target. They made it a few blocks without being noticed, but then one young man began running alongside, shouting, “See-ah! See-ah! [CIA! CIA!]” His alarm summoned others, and soon a crowd had formed around them. Some were shouting in English, “Go back! Go back!” The Americans ignored the mob and tried to push on through, but then they heard another shot and suddenly Morefield was surrounded by armed men carrying pipes, clubs, pistols, and automatic rifles.

“Look, the embassy is yours, do what you want with it,” the consul said. “No, you are a hostage!” one of the armed men answered.

“What do you mean, hostage? Hostage to whom? For what?” Morefield asked.

All six of the Americans were roughly steered back to the embassy, and then were marched through the misty rain across the compound through mobs of jeering protesters. At first they were told to put their hands over their heads. Ode held up his, including the briefcase, and hung on to it even when one of his captors tried to pull it away. They walked for a while this way, then were ordered to put their hands down.

“Make up your minds,” complained Ode. He didn’t get far before the briefcase was finally wrested from him. It was opened on the spot, and Ode leaned in for a look, as curious about it as his captors. All that it held were some in-house newsletters and press releases. Why on earth had Lijek wanted me to carry that?

A cameraman filmed them as they made their way toward the ambassador’s residence.

On the top floor of the chancery, inside the thick metal walls of the communications vault, Rick Kupke had only a vague notion of what was happening outside. He was a State Department communicator and was busily feeding papers into the raucous disintegrator. The vault had a heavy steel door like the ones on bank safes. It had been open all morning and news of the excitement outside had been drifting in, reaching him secondhand. He knew they wouldn’t be destroying everything unless the circumstances were dire. This was confirmed when Bert Moore stepped in and told him to send Foggy Bottom a flash message.

“Tell them the demonstrators have entered the compound and the embassy,” he said.

Kupke didn’t usually write messages himself, he just copied them.

“Do you want me to write it?” he asked.

Moore nodded, hurrying away, so Kupke sat down before the teletype and composed his own short message. He began with five Zs, which would cause alarm bells to ring in the relay centers.

Kupke typed: “Demonstrators have entered embassy compound and have entered the building.”

Then he went back to destroying the piles of cables and messages that had been accumulating for months. Helping him were Bill Belk and Charles Jones, the other State Department communicators, Army Sergeant Regis Regan, and CIA communicators Phil Ward, Cort Barnes, and Jerry Miele. Air Force Captain Paul Needham had joined them.

All along Kupke had figured it was just a matter of time. A few weeks ago he had watched on a monitor at the guard station downstairs as one or two intrepid locals had scaled the front gate, and he and the guards had placed bets then on whether the whole mob was going to come over. Kupke was from rural Indiana and spoke with a slow country drawl. He was on temporary duty in Tehran, in part because he was ambitious and had made a point of accepting difficult assignments, and in part because of an act of kindness. His primary posting was to an isolated outpost in the Sinai Desert, where staffers were rotated out periodically on temporary jobs to give them a break. The temporary duty was usually in Athens or Rome, and when one of his married colleagues drew Tehran instead, a hardship post where he could not be reunited with his wife and children, Kupke offered to take it instead. He was single and, besides, he knew that hardship posts were a short path to promotion in the department. He had arrived two months ago and by now was accustomed to the low cloud of anxiety that hung over the embassy, the fear of being taken hostage or of being torn apart by one of the bombs that were occasionally lobbed over the walls. When he and his buddies played poker in one of the small cottages near the east wall, and gunfire outside grew close, they would just duck their heads under the table and keep playing. Kupke originally had been scheduled to leave in October but had extended his stay after discovering that, hidden beneath their dark robes, Iranian girls had the same charms as girls at home. He was particularly interested in a spirited young woman he had met at a party thrown by the marines a few weeks earlier. Once inside the door she had lifted off her black manteau to reveal an amazing skin-tight silver dress. Some of the girls at the marine parties were as wild as any girls they had ever met back home. Kupke had been scheduled to leave tomorrow, November fifth, and even had seven crisp hundred-dollars bills in his pocket for that travel, but he wasn’t eager to return to the desert and had asked to be extended a second time. He fully expected that his request would be approved, as it wasn’t easy at that point to find Americans who wanted to work in Tehran.

When he heard on the radio that protesters were in the building, Kupke put down his papers for a moment and stepped out in the hall for a look. People were sitting on the floor on both sides of the hallway, and some of the female Iranian staffers were wailing. Walking down the corridor, tear gas stinging his eyes and nose, he stepped into Laingen’s office to listen as Swift, Limbert, and the others worked the phones. He quickly gathered that help was not on the way. Phone lines were being kept open to a number of places, and at one point Kupke was handed a phone with an open line to the crisis operations center at the State Department. He was holding it to his ear when a voice came on and asked, “Have you started destroying files?”

“We are now,” Kupke told him.

“Have you destroyed the back channel?” This was the highest-level State Department information kept at the embassy, kept in a separate safe.

“No,” said Kupke.

“Can you confirm to me that you’ve destroyed it and get right back to me?” the crisis center man asked.

Kupke put down the phone and ran to the safe that contained those files. He scooped them up, mostly papers concerning the shah’s travel to the United States, and carried them back to the disintegrator. Kupke hurriedly fed this stack in, bunching the papers more thickly than before. The blades of the machine began loudly tearing at the pile. Then he ran back down the corridor and picked up the phone.

“Yeah, all the back channel stuff on the shah is gone,” he said.

Seeing Kupke arrive with that pile of documents sent Belk down the crowded corridor to ask the chargé’s secretary, Liz Montagne, if there were any more classified documents in Laingen’s office that had to go. She said she had already handed over everything, but the chargé’s personal safe was locked—Gallegos had earlier demanded that it be closed—and she didn’t know the combination.

Trying to escape the gas thickening in the hall, some of the staff began crowding into the vault. Kupke began handing out gas masks and bottled water. One woman gave Kupke her diamond ring and a wad of cash, saying, “Here, hold this for me, Rick.” When others who had not given their valuables to Walsh saw this they began pulling off their rings and producing more wads of money. Soon Kupke’s right front pocket bulged with money and jingled with jewelry. One Iranian woman became hysterical and began to hyperventilate inside the gas mask; Kupke noticed that she had not taken a tape off the air filter at the bottom and so was suffocating herself; he gently removed the mask and tried to calm her. An American woman, one of the secretaries, was sobbing. Kupke put his arm around her and assured her that it would be okay.

“We’re diplomats, they don’t just murder diplomats,” he said. He hoped it was true.

Not all the women were distraught. Terri Tedford, who worked on the clerical staff, was very poised.

“You’re not worried, are you?” Belk asked her.

“Oh, no,” she said. “I’m fine.” She was working to encourage the others to stay calm.

For some reason the tear gas didn’t bother Belk that much; it only made his eyes water a little, so he didn’t bother putting on a mask. He brought a small fan out to the hallway and started it in order to blow the gas away from the vault, but it quickly shorted out.

Until that point, the communicators had been picking out for destruction only the classified material from the piles, but now Kupke sensed that time was running out. He had seen how easily the machine had handled the stack of back channel files, and noticing that Barnes and Miele had finished feeding their CIA documents into the device he suggested, “Let’s just start destroying everything.” He felt odd giving directions, but nobody else was.

At the foot of the basement stairs, Corporal Gallegos heard a crash, and when he went to investigate he saw Iranians climbing back in through the broken window. He pulled the pin on another tear gas grenade, threw it, and backed up toward the stairs, calling for help on his handheld radio.

“If we can get somebody down there, we will,” said Sergeant Moeller.

Then Gallegos heard the order, “Everybody upstairs.” He opened the weapons cabinets at the foot of the stairs, wrapped both arms around shotguns and rifles, and started up the stairs. He got to the small landing on the second floor and the big door was already closed. It had a wood veneer but was steel inside, and it hurt his foot when he kicked it. He was wishing all the more he had his boots on. “It’s me! It’s me!” he shouted. “Open up!”

“Go downstairs,” someone shouted through the door. “Get the guns in the cabinets.”

Gallegos already had as many as he could carry, but he knew there were more radios and weapons in the lockers at the guard post. So he set down the weapons he had and ran back down to the first floor. Hermening was struggling with the combination locks. Gallegos knew the combination, but in his excitement he couldn’t make it work. So he found a pair of bolt cutters and severed the locks. He and Hermening pulled radios and weapons from the lockers.

The odor of tear gas was now mingled with smoke. The protesters downstairs were burning paper to ward off the sting of the gas. They would be coming up the steps any minute. The two marines broke the closed-circuit TV monitors, grabbed all the weapons they could carry, and ran up the stairs to the second floor. The door was opened for them and then slammed shut and locked. A barricade was pulled back into place against it, a table with a refrigerator on top and a couch wedged behind both.

Gallegos was surprised to find all the marines on the top floor unarmed.

“What the hell is going on?” he asked Moeller.

“Put your weapons up,” the sergeant said.

“You’re crazy!” said Gallegos. “I’m not giving up my weapon.”

Moeller yelled at him to obey orders, and then Ann Swift stepped out into the hallway, angry, harried, and not in the mood for discussion.

She pointed to all the weapons Gallegos and Hermening had hauled upstairs and said, “Put them away!”

Looking down from an upstairs chancery window through a determined gray drizzle, Hermening saw his boss, Al Golacinski, being led across the compound by a small mob of young Iranians. The security chief looked soaked and defeated. One of the protesters had a pistol pointed at his head.

Someone from another window shouted down, “Al, are you okay?”

“Yes, I’m okay!” he shouted back.

It was midafternoon, almost two hours since the protesters had come over the walls. Hermening leveled his weapon nervously and surveyed the chaos below. The spacious compound was now swarming with protesters, thousands of young bearded men, most of them in blue jeans and many wearing green khaki army jackets, and young women draped in long tunics and wearing head scarves like the nuns he had known as a boy back in Wisconsin. Golacinski’s decision to go out and reason with them now appeared to have been a mistake.

A muscular man with a thick mop of dark hair that now clung wetly to his head, Golacinski’s vision was blurry and his eyes stung from tear gas. He yelled up at the windows, “Have you gotten hold of Laingen?”