Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (84 page)

Before Laingen and his roommates were removed from the Foreign Ministry, where they could listen to news broadcasts and receive visitors, he had learned enough to be convinced that the impasse had been broken. He had heard with pleasure the refreshingly blunt statements of the president-elect, whose use of words like “criminals,” “kidnappers,” and “barbarians” stood in marked contrast to Carter’s measured public comments. Reagan’s tough talk set off a scornful crescendo of renewed anti-American rhetoric from the pulpits of Tehran and alarmed Tomseth and Howland, who felt it didn’t help with the delicate negotiations they all knew to be under way, but Laingen felt it was a dose of exactly what was needed. Carter and Reagan, perhaps intentionally, were working a classic good cop/bad cop routine. Reagan’s words would make the powers in Iran think hard about blowing the remaining weeks they had to make a deal with the very reasonable Jimmy Carter.

This was more of the chargé’s constitutional optimism, to which he clung even now when he had lost all sense of what was going on. For the first time since the day of the takeover he was cut off from all sources of outside information and from any sense of why things were happening, but his instincts were solid.

If the students believed the televised Christmas greetings they had allowed many of the hostages to make would earn them goodwill in the United States, they had miscalculated. The images of scrawny, unkempt American diplomats, held prisoner for more than a year, once again inflamed American anger and put the hostages back on the front pages. The Christmas tree at the White House remained unlit for the second year, although Carter allowed it to be illuminated briefly for a ceremony that remembered the hostages. There was renewed pressure on Washington to do something, and speculation flared over what military steps Reagan might take when he assumed office in less than a month. There was blood on the horizon. More than 60 percent of Americans polled at the end of the year said they expected Reagan to attack Iran in some way. When all the lights were turned off in Times Square for a full minute on New Year’s Eve in honor of the hostages, the darkness and quiet seemed ominous.

At first, Radio Tehran seemed to welcome the coming clash. In a broadcast on the first of the year, it reported that Iran would be rid of the hostages soon. Either the United States would accept the country’s demands for their return or they would be tried as spies and executed. Carter took the threat seriously. He instructed his staff to prepare a declaration of war if trials began. Iran’s assets would be permanently frozen and some form of military action would proceed.

Despite the gathering clouds, or perhaps because of them, the bazaar-style haggling had resumed behind the scenes. Although he’d tendered a “final” offer weeks before, toward the end of December Carter dispatched a new initiative. In a Camp David meeting the week after Christmas with the Algerians, the president made another counterproposal that still fell way short of paying up the $24 billion Iran had demanded but that offered something new: “All claims by American institutions and companies against Iran in U.S. courts will be cancelled and nullified.” The immediate effect of that provision, which Carter once again labeled a “final offer,” would be to free Iran of the almost $3 billion in claims by Sedco, Du Pont, Xerox, and other corporations. The proposal also contained a new wrinkle, which proved to be key in surmounting opposition from Iranian hard-liners: Any agreement ending the crisis would be made with the country of Algeria, and not directly between Iran and the United States. After a weeks-long silence, Tehran responded favorably, and by January 6 the talks in Algiers had resumed.

Now, as the countdown to Reagan’s January 20 inauguration proceeded in the United States, television reports about the change of power competed with news about a hostage agreement. Reagan announced that he was setting up a special team to take over the talks, but that he might decide to keep Warren Christopher and several other members of Carter’s team in Algiers for a time to ensure continuity.

Iran countered with some modifications to Carter’s “final” offer, but Christopher and the head of the Majlis’s special negotiating committee, Bezhad Nabavi, were ironing out the details of an agreement that still essentially followed the outline achieved by Sadegh Tabatabai and the American emissary months ago in Germany. The United States would promise not to interfere with Iran; it would return $9.5 billion in Iranian assets frozen after the embassy takeover; it would freeze the shah’s assets in the United States to enable Iran to mount a legal effort to reclaim them; and it would nullify all lawsuits presently filed against Iran (referring the large corporate claims to binding arbitration before an international tribunal) and bar any such actions in the future.

With neither side trusting the other, a complex scheme of money transfers was worked out to trigger the hostages’ release. The United States would wire money to a bank in England, and only after it was safely deposited would the Iranians release the hostages. The British bank would not release the funds to Algeria until the hostages had departed Iran. The deal was all but done.

“Iran is not getting one dime of U.S. money,” said State Department spokesman James Trattner, explaining the deal to reporters. “The basic exchange is we’re getting back what they took from us and giving back to them what we took from them.”

In the final hours of his presidency, Carter had become obsessed with finishing the matter before stepping down. He believed he had lost his office because of his determination to preserve the hostages from harm, so securing their release and safe return before leaving office was on some level a satisfactory bargain. He feared that the negotiations under way in Algiers might not survive the transition, and what Reagan would do was anybody’s guess. It might be many months before the hostages came home, if they ever did. To lose the presidency only to see all his efforts on their behalf unravel was a disappointment he dreaded.

The Iranians were deliberately stalling. They had agreed to accept the deal and to send the hostages home, but they had also decided to deny Carter the satisfaction of seeing it happen on his watch. Such pettiness didn’t enter the president’s thoughts. He pushed Christopher to finish the deal and made plans to fly to Germany to greet the hostages on their return as the final act of his presidency. Then he would fly back to Washington and take his place on the inaugural stand behind Reagan with a sense of completion and accomplishment.

Two days before the inauguration, there was a knock on Bill Daugherty’s door in the Tehran guesthouse basement. He was startled. He couldn’t remember the last time that had happened—his guards always just burst in. Even his friend Mehdi, when he came by with food or to chat, just walked right in. When Daugherty overcame his surprise and opened the door, he found himself face-to-face with a young man wearing a white jacket and carrying a tray. Had a waiter come to take his order for dinner? The tray held a hypodermic needle, and Daugherty submitted to having blood drawn from his arm. He took this as proof that he and the others were actually going to be released, and, indeed, just after midnight he was blindfolded and taken to a large room for a medical exam. Two of his embassy colleagues were already on tables, men he had not seen in more than a year. They did nothing more than exchange silent hellos and hopeful smiles. An Algerian doctor gave him a quick once-over and pronounced him fit.

It was only the first in a cascade of signs that they were at last going home.

Back in his room, Daugherty was visited by the black-bearded, gap-toothed Hussein Sheikh-ol-eslam, who said he had come to say goodbye. The tall, slender young Iranian slipped to the floor and leaned against the wall. He was wearing his usual sweater and dirty blue jeans, his feet thrust into a pair of unlaced athletic shoes that he wore like sandals, with the back ends crushed under his heels. To Daugherty he seemed weary but pleased with himself. Iran, he told the CIA officer, would at last be free of outside interference and Iranians would build the country based on their own culture and values. Daugherty told him that he foresaw more trouble for Iran, years of oppression and isolation. For any country to thrive, he argued, it had to give its citizens room to breathe. Any government that did not was ultimately doomed. Sheikh-ol-eslam said that an Islamic government had great respect for the rights of its citizens, provided they obeyed the rules. For instance, he said, a newspaper would be free to publish whatever it wished so long as it didn’t say anything “prohibited.” Daugherty was amazed at how this intelligent, sincere young man could so blithely embrace such a striking contradiction.

If Sheikh-ol-eslam had hoped for an amicable parting, he wasn’t going to get it. He wished Daugherty well, then hesitated before leaving, waiting for a response. Daugherty just shrugged and his former interrogator departed.

Sheikh-ol-eslam also had one more session with Tom Ahern. The CIA station chief was led into a room where his old interrogator was seated alone behind a desk. Stretched across the desk was a long piece of cord.

Sheikh-ol-eslam lectured Ahern about how well he and the other hostages had been treated, and explained why it had been necessary to shame the United States and to reveal the insidious plotting that had been going on. Ahern listened silently. He had heard it all before. He was eyeing the rope. The best he could figure, Sheikh-ol-eslam was going to use it on him again. Instead, Sheikh-ol-eslam started explaining that the beatings Ahern had received were really not indicative of his own values or those of Islam.

“As a token of my sincerity in this, I invite you to use this rope to do to me what I did to you.”

Ahern looked at the rope and then at Sheikh-ol-eslam.

“We don’t do stuff like that,” he said.

John Limbert fought a losing battle against his rising hopes. He had heard snatches of a report on TV when he had been taken for his physical, and the announcer had been talking about an agreement, about money and conditions, so he knew that something important was afoot. But he also knew that any number of things could happen at the last minute to abort all this. Months earlier there had been talk of turning all the hostages over to the government, and that had come close and then fallen apart. Limbert was aware of the time difference between Tehran and Washington and knew that it was drawing close to Reagan’s inauguration.

The guards told everyone to expect to leave on the nineteenth, and throughout the guesthouse the anxious hostages waited through the entire day and night. Nothing happened. Limbert and his roommates then sat expectantly through another long day on the twentieth, and again nothing happened. At dusk, he decided that the deal must have fallen apart. It was already approaching noon in Washington, which meant Carter’s term, and his power to make the deal, would soon expire. If it fell through, it seemed fairly likely to Limbert that they would never go home.

Then, just as the sound of evening prayers began to crackle through loudspeakers in the neighborhood, came the roar of big guns. It wasn’t the usual sound of antiaircraft fire, which the hostages had grown accustomed to hearing. It sounded more like heavy artillery, and it was going off at regular intervals, like a salute. Holland said that it sounded like they were celebrating some great victory.

Only then did a guard appear.

“Pack up,” he said. “We’re going. One sack.”

Koob and Swift were instructed shortly before six to “Get ready. We are going.”

“Going where?” asked Swift.

“To the United States. Get your things ready.”

Neither woman assumed it was true. They pulled on several layers of clothing, because they had learned that the things they packed were often lost in transit. They packed their possessions in bags and waited. When the guards came they were led blindfolded down a hall and some stairs and then outdoors.

“Be careful,” said Koob’s guard. “There is ice underfoot.”

They were ushered into a van with rows of seats and sensed immediately that it was full of people. Koob slid over next to a man.

“How are you?” the man asked quietly.

“Fine. Who is it?”

“Kalp.”

“It’s Koob.”

For the first time since the morning of the takeover, Al Golacinski heard the voice of his assistant, Mike Howland. Golacinski was shocked. He had assumed long ago that Howland, Bruce Laingen, and Vic Tomseth, whom he knew had been at the Foreign Ministry on the day of the takeover, had gotten out. On that day a year ago, Howland had accompanied Laingen instead of Golacinski. The embassy security chief had no idea where his assistant had been for the previous year, but he assumed it had not been spent in prison.

“Mike, that’s the last time you and I are going to have a shift change,” he said.

Kevin Hermening was sitting on the bus when the guards pushed Bob Ode down to the floor. The youngest hostage stood and gave the eldest his seat.

Laingen argued with the guards who tried to take away his small blue bag.

“Don’t you trust us?” one of the guards asked.

Laingen laughed scornfully, but sensing that now was not the time to mount a struggle over insignificant possessions he handed it over.

Marine guard Rocky Sickmann was squeezed into a small place that turned out to be some kind of radiator. He had a hole in the seat of his pants—he had spent most of the past year sitting on a mattress—and suddenly felt a sharp pain in his rump. There was no place for him to move. So he fidgeted on the hot plate. If the bus was taking him home, he could cope.

Michael Metrinko heard people behind him whispering.

“Shut up!” shouted Akmed in English, and then cursed all of them in Farsi.

Metrinko responded in Farsi, “You shut up, you son of a Persian whore.”

The bus ground to a halt. Metrinko was grabbed by the arm and felt himself being pulled from the bus.

He shouted in English, “This is Metrinko and they are taking me off the bus!” Outside he kept bellowing loudly as he was beaten. Metrinko wanted everyone on the bus to know what was happening. The blows didn’t hurt much. The past fifiteen months had toughened him up.