Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (83 page)

“I’m still out here, honey, and I can hold on if you can, kid.”

Greg Persinger told the camera, “Mom, Dad, I just want to say Merry Christmas and I send you my love…. Take care. I hope I see you soon.”

When his turn came before the camera Bob Ode said, “I would like to send a message to my wife, Rita Ode, who is living in Sun City West, Arizona. I want to tell her how much I miss her, especially now at Christmas, and I love her very much.” He also sent greetings to his brothers and sister.

Barry Rosen sent his love to his wife and children and parents, and added, “I’d like to thank all the people in the United States who have written to us and sent books and other materials. I’m sure I speak for the other hostages when I say that the support and concern shown toward us by our fellow Americans has been of immeasurable value to all of us…God bless all of you and God bless America.”

They were given gifts. Hall got some clean underwear and a green sweatshirt, which he felt went nicely with his lime green pants, the ones he had worn every day now for nearly fourteen months, and packages from both his wife and his sister filled with goodies. Hall particularly prized a pair of new insulated slippers.

Michael Metrinko decided to attend this year’s Christmas party, if only to make trouble. The night before, he had been brought to the guesthouse and had been placed again with Dave Roeder, this time in a large room with real furniture, even real beds. There was wall-to-wall carpeting, a beautiful chest of drawers with ornate inlaid woodwork, a crystal chandelier, damask wall coverings and drapes, and—luxury of luxuries!—their own bathroom. Metrinko stood for a long time beneath the flow of hot water, basking in it. It was heaven. They were given new clothes, blankets, and even the food was tolerable. The guards were acting strangely. They had become warm and friendly, joking with the hostages as if this whole ordeal had just been a great adventure they had shared. They complained about how much time they had to spend caring for them, and talked about how much they would love to someday visit the United States. Something clearly was up.

The next day they were taken to the party. One of the guards showed up at the door wearing a fancy cowboy shirt with pearl buttons and intricate stitching.

“Where did you steal that?” Roeder asked him.

The guard protested that the shirt had not been stolen.

“It is a Christmas present gift from my sister who lives in Texas,” he said.

Roeder didn’t know which was stranger to believe, that the man had stolen it from the belongings of a fellow hostage or whether this devoutly Islamic young Iranian who had helped hold him and the others prisoner for more than a year to protest the Great Satan United States had a sister who chose to live in America and send her hostage-taking brother a cowboy shirt for Christmas, a holiday that wasn’t on the Islamic calendar.

At the ceremony, Metrinko confronted in Farsi the Iranian clergyman who was there to conduct the service.

“It’s disgusting that you would collaborate with these people,” he told him. “How could you do it?”

The clergyman was insulted.

“I don’t have to be here,” he said. “I could be at home celebrating the holidays with my wife. I had to go through a lot of trouble to arrange this for you…”

Metrinko was openly ungrateful. He found the man obnoxious, a fraud who was there in order to be photographed being a “good Christian.” After a round of dispirited carols—the camera caught the Americans singing “O Come All Ye Faithful”—Metrinko, Roeder, and the others were instructed to pour all the candy and goodies they had scooped up on their plates back into the big bowl. They were, however, given gifts that they were allowed to keep. Some of the other embassies had sent over presents. Metrinko got an exercise warm-up suit. There was also mail from home. Metrinko received a small package sent by a woman in North Carolina with vitamins, candy, and some books. Roeder was given a Christmas package from his wife. It had been opened and rifled. Some of the contents had been removed, including clean underwear, which he very much would have liked to have had. There was candy in the box, a toothbrush, and eight dinner mints, a private Christmas joke from his wife—a little tradition they honored. There were new socks, a Christmas ornament that his daughter had made at school, and a picture of his daughter with her arm in a cast. There was no explanation of how his daughter had broken her arm.

When Metrinko and Roeder were back in their room, two Algerian diplomats were shown in, the ambassador and an aide. They explained that an agreement for their release was very near, and the two hostages began to entertain a flicker of hope.

Kathryn Koob and Ann Swift forbade their guards to speak of their imminent release. They had heard such stories so often that they no longer dared to get their hopes up. One morning in mid-January a guard entered their room and announced, very pleased, that they were to have a “special visitor.”

Into the room walked the familiar, short, round, draped figure of Nilufar Ebtekar. Koob wondered how the guards had ever gotten the idea that they would be happy to see her again. They regarded her as a liar and something of a dupe, and disdained the way she and the other educated Iranian women showed such reverent deference to the men. When they coolly exchanged the standard greetings in Farsi, the two hostages invited Ebtekar to sit down.

Ebtekar had no sympathy for the rumpled, frail-looking women before her. She still suspected Swift of being a spy, and even though she knew Koob was not, in her mind the American cultural emissary shared the collective guilt of all Americans for her country’s sins against Iran and for that reason alone was a suitable candidate for revolutionary justice. Ebtekar was not an empathetic woman. She saw the whole episode through the lens of her own difficulties; even though it had turned her into a national hero of sorts and a notorious international figure, to her it had meant hardship, even though she had met during the previous year the man she would marry, one of the leaders of this action, Mohammad Hashemi. She thought that the women especially had been treated with heroic restraint in captivity, with genuine Islamic kindness. She and the other student captors had worked long and hard to ensure their safety and relative comfort. The business of housing, guarding, and feeding them had been a huge undertaking, all the more difficult for having been unforeseen. Even during the hardship of war, the students had held faithfully to their assigned mission. If she expected anything from the hostages, particularly these two relatively coddled women, who had been treated throughout with all the appropriate Islamic concern for modesty and respect, it was gratitude, especially for the news she was bringing.

“We are not one hundred percent certain that you will be released, but let me tell you that it has never been so close and so real,” she said. “Negotiations are under way, and the possibility exists that you will be released.”

Koob and Swift listened in polite silence and thanked Ebtekar for the information as she left. Later that same morning they were led out of their suite, waited in the same chilly room where they had sat out most of the Christmas celebrations, and then were brought back to the suite, which had been rearranged and equipped with a camera and microphone. Two chairs behind a small table with one of their small Christmas trees at the center had been moved in front of the camera, and Ebtekar sat with her back to the camera facing the table. The two women sat in the chairs.

“We’d like to talk to you about your treatment while you were here,” said Ebtekar. “We want you to tell us about the food, about the care you received, and how you were treated, what your feelings were like.”

Ever since the giggly Easter interview, which both Koob and Swift immediately regretted, they had prepared themselves for another propaganda session like this. They were determined to be truthful, but to project nothing but the grim reality of their predicament and to utter nothing that would give Ebtekar and the other students satisfaction.

“Physically we have been treated quite well,” said Swift. “We have had plenty of food to eat, we are warm. But we have been afraid the entire time we’ve been here. We have not always had the mail from our families that you told us we would have. Sometimes months have gone by without letters from our parents.”

Both women complained of their constant confinement, the weeks of not seeing sunlight, the inability to regularly exercise, the poor access to bathrooms and infrequent opportunities to bathe, and the isolation from their colleagues.

“You are being very negative,” Ebtekar scolded them as a new tape was put in the camera. “You might talk about some of the positive things that happened.”

“Can you tell me one positive thing about being locked up?” asked Koob.

Ebtekar shrugged. This was a thing that could not be helped.

“But what about the treats?” she asked. “What about the nuts? What about the goodies?”

The interview went on for forty-five minutes. Both women felt confident they had given Ebtekar nothing she could use to make the case that they had been happy “guests” of the ayatollah.

One by one, the hostages were led in to be questioned by Ebtekar before the camera. Informed that their release might depend on their answers, most of the hostages tried to play along amiably without giving Ebtekar the satisfaction of praising their captors. Ahern just glared at her contemptuously. Regis Regan waited until the camera was turned on and then lewdly insulted her. He was hauled out and beaten. Metrinko glared at her and refused to speak. Ebtekar asked Dave Roeder, “Weren’t you fed amply? We know this was a bad situation, but didn’t everyone try to work together to make the best of it?”

“Turn off your camera,” Roeder told her. “I’m not going to say anything like that.”

The camera was turned off. Ebtekar suggested to Roeder that they do it again.

“If you do not cooperate, you will not be released with the rest of your colleagues,” she said.

Roeder refused.

Dick Morefield, the embassy consul whose wife Dorothea had become such a public figure at home, enjoyed the chance to talk politics with Ebtekar.

“We have made a decision that we are going to release some of you,” she said. “Wouldn’t you like to be released?”

“I understand that I will be released no sooner or later than when you come to the conclusion that it’s to your advantage. There isn’t much I can do that will either speed it up or delay it.”

“Have you been mistreated?” she asked.

“Do you mean, have I been tortured?” he asked. “No. I’ve been held in very close confinement under very difficult stressful conditions for a very long period of time. I have been through mock executions. But have I been beaten or tortured? No.”

She asked him what he had learned from the experience, and with the camera rolling he lectured her.

“One of the things that I didn’t learn was what you were trying to accomplish,” he said. “You were the first social revolution in history that didn’t have to compromise from the very first moment for lack of money. When you took over, you had all the money you needed to make Iran back into part of the fertile crescent. If you wanted to do reforestation, if you wanted to reinstitute the underground irrigation systems you once had…anything at all. Anything was possible because you had the money, and you threw that away.”

Ebtekar argued that all revolutions required a period of cleansing, of wiping away corrupt influences, such as Iran’s ties to the United States.

“All I’ve got to say is that nothing we could have done to you in our wildest dreams is half as bad as what you’ve done to yourselves,” Morefield said. “Your children and your grandchildren are going to curse your name.”

Bruce Laingen recorded his session in his diary.

I am shown to a chair behind a low table, on which is a microphone and a small plastic Christmas tree. My “interviewer” is none other than the celebrated “Mary,” the woman militant who is so often on Iranian TV interviewing my colleagues. She is in her usual Iranian dress, heavy scarves over her head, and with a trace of a smile. She tells me that she will ask me questions about my treatment and asks if I am prepared to respond. I answer that I assume I am. Sitting and standing around the room are perhaps 20 to 25 young Iranians, men and women; their purpose is not clear, but all of them seem by their manner to feel that they have a right to be present. I assume they are the veterans of the embassy seizure and are present tonight because they, too, sense that the climax of their operation is about to be reached, whether they like it or not.Their manner is not hostile or friendly. We—I—seem to be regarded, as we always have been, as mere pawns in their larger purposes. Some look quizzically at me; most seem to ignore me. I make a determined effort to ignore them, and I am determined not to smile. I am angry, reflecting my frustration and anger over all these long months—now to see these “students” assembled for this final act in the drama arouses all my irritation from that long stretch of time. One wonders what is in their minds, how they really feel now, and how they regard the settlement that is probably near.Mary begins her questioning, the exercise lasting only five minutes at most. The questions are about our treatment in the foreign ministry; my answers are as factual as I can make them, as terse as I can be without being rude. I am determined to keep my dignity and to make sure they understand that I haven’t lost it and don’t intend to do so now. The gist of my answers is that my treatment at the ministry had been reasonably fair, but that, like all my colleagues, I had suffered from the deprivation of my most fundamental human right, freedom. Answering questions about my experience in prison, I note that life there had been Spartan at best and cold. But I add that I had been glad in a sense to be taken there, since it gave me a chance to see what my colleagues had suffered.Mary does not persist with her questions. There is no attempt to sermonize or to try to get me to acknowledge any Iranian grievances. She seems to conclude that I am not very interesting or useful, and so she coldly thanks me and terminates the conversation.