Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (85 page)

State Department communicator Rick Kupke felt angry at Metrinko. Here he was thinking that he might live through this after all, and this hard case has to pick a fight! He prayed that his colleague would just shut up.

Hermening had to smile. Metrinko was still giving them shit, but then he worried about him. It was the wrong time to rock the boat. The young marine kept trying to tilt his head and see out the bottom of his blindfold. All of them were hopeful but still a little worried. They wanted to believe that this was it, but wouldn’t do so until they were at least in the air on their way out of Tehran.

Golacinski heard the voice of Ann Swift. Feelings were running high. Golacinski could tell this was it and suggested loudly, “Let’s take off our blindfolds.”

He and a number of the others did. Golacinski looked around and saw a large number of his embassy colleagues for the first time in more than a year, and what a worn-out, hairy, ill-clad group they had become! The sight filled him with joy.

“What are you doing?” asked a guard they called Bozo, who was carrying a pistol in each hand.

“Fuck you,” said Golacinski, feeling brazen. “You’re not going to screw this up. We’re on our way.”

He was dragged off the van by Bozo and several other guards and thrown up against a wall. He stood there for a few minutes and then heard the motors start. All of sudden his brazenness drained away.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” he shouted, pleading. He was placed back aboard.

Limbert’s bus was so crowded that he had to sit in the toilet stall. When it started to move he was surprised that it didn’t stop. In Tehran’s insanely congested traffic, with mobbed traffic circles and jams at every intersection, driving through the city was always stop and go. The smooth movement of this bus suggested that it had some kind of escort, which implied government authority. They were on their way.

Carter had reluctantly abandoned his plan to fly to Wiesbaden before the inauguration in order to greet the returning hostages, but as the final hours of his presidency ticked away he remained determined to bring the crisis to a satisfactory end on his watch, to exit the White House announcing that the hostages were on their way home.

Christopher and Nabavi finally initialed the agreement very early in the morning on Tuesday, the twentieth. Carter and his staff had been up all night in the Oval Office, its walls stripped bare and the outgoing president’s books and papers in boxes that were being removed, waiting for word that it was done. The Federal Reserve Bank was to transfer the first portion of Iran’s frozen assets to an account in London as soon as the banks opened for business there, and then the Bank of England would move that money into an escrow account controlled by the National Bank of Algiers. When the White House received word about the agreement shortly after five o’clock, Carter immediately placed a call to Reagan. The president-elect, he was informed, did not wish to be disturbed.

The president took the news to the American people. He appeared behind the podium in the White House press room—“looking tired,” as the CBS correspondent noted—to make the announcement. The signatures had just put the release process in motion and, given the dramatic reversals of the previous fifteen months, nobody was going to celebrate yet. Until the hostages were actually aboard the Algerian commercial jets waiting for them on the runway of blacked-out Mehrabad Airport in Tehran, winging their way home, there was still a chance it would all fall apart again.

As a sunny, cold inauguration day dawned over the temporary stage set up in the back porch of the Capitol building, the two stories unfolded simultaneously. Carter maintained a vigil at his desk, fretting to his aides that some last-minute glitch might still derail the process and leave the sensitive matter in his successor’s hands. “I can just see the Iranians delaying for another day, Reagan saying something inflammatory, and our deal going down the drain,” he said. Reagan did call after seven to ask for an update and Carter explained exactly what was going on. When he hung up, Hamilton Jordan asked, “What did he say?”

“What hostages?” Carter quipped.

The departing first couple met the Reagans on the front porch of the White House a few hours later. Carter had cleaned up and sat for a haircut. “We think the Reagans will enjoy their new home,” he told the reporters on the front steps. The two couples sat together for the traditional inauguration morning tea, and Carter was surprised that the president-elect didn’t ask him a thing about the tense situation that had kept him up for the past forty-eight hours. It was as though Reagan wanted nothing to do with it, as though the whole mess belonged to Carter and was going to be swept away with the change of administration. As they rode together in a car to the Capitol, Reagan told jokes.

Carter sat wrapped in a tan trench coat through the pomp of the swearing in, as Reagan stepped out on a bright red carpet and looked out over a sea of spectators, to the grand promenade of the East Mall and the Washington Monument.

“No arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women,” Reagan said in his address. “It is a weapon our adversaries in today’s world do not have. It is a weapon that we as Americans do have. Let that be understood by those who practice terrorism and prey upon their neighbors.”

Carter wasn’t listening. He was waiting for news from Tehran.

Mehrabad Airport was blacked out because of the Iraqi air raids, but the tarmac where the buses stopped shone under the glare of television lights. The hostages were led one by one off the buses and through a jeering gauntlet of students who had formed two long parallel lines from the buses to the plane.

“Magbar A’mrika!” they shouted, and then, something new, “Magbar Reagan!”

Sickmann was grabbed from behind by one of the guards and pulled toward the plane. One of his sandals slipped off, and the marine resisted for a moment, stooping to adjust it, then ran toward the plane. He was the first one up the steps. A pretty stewardess greeted him with a smile at the top and he choked up with emotion.

“Yankee go home!” one of the Iranians screamed in English at Hermening. He thought, From your lips to God’s ears.

When they let go of him at the foot of the stairs, Hermening ran up into the plane. It crossed his mind that someone might take a shot at him as he went up, and he practically flew up the stairs.

Bill Royer in his rumpled tweed sport coat felt a sense of pride and satisfaction as he was escorted to the airplane down the jeering corridor. Whatever the arrangements had been, and he didn’t know what they were precisely, he was confident that his captors had not gotten what they’d wanted. They didn’t get the shah back, for one thing, and that had been their primary demand.

Farsi-speaking Vic Tomseth toyed with the idea of shouting out his own slogan as he was led through the gauntlet, something along the lines of “Magbar Khomeini,” but he thought better of it. I get to leave, he thought, these poor suckers have to stay here. So he walked silently and happily through the gauntlet to the plane.

Koob was frightened but made an effort to walk through the gauntlet with her head up. She was led up the stairs of the plane and steered down the aisle, where she saw Laingen and, beside him, her boss John Graves. Before them sat Barry Rosen and her assistant Royer. She slipped into the empty seat between them and they both recoiled with surprise to find her just a slender remnant of her former hefty self.

John Limbert heard the doors of the bus open and he was led out into the night air, where his blindfold was finally removed. The guards took the sack he had packed and searched and removed everything from his pockets.

“Steal, steal, and steal again,” Limbert said, and kept repeating the phrase.

Stripped of even this small horde of possessions, skinny and shaggy, Limbert walked happily across the tarmac toward the plane. The insults shouted at him were more disappointing to him than threatening. They have no sense whatsoever of decency or style. If they had any class at all they would have sent him and the others off with a human gesture, some flowers, a handshake, a “Nothing personal” or “No hard feelings.” Just this ugly, meaningless display, beyond all reason.

Laingen saw Limbert’s face first when he reached the top of the stairs. To him, the political officer looked like he hadn’t changed a bit. They embraced and laughed with joy on seeing each other again.

Joe Hall just ignored the crowd. He kept his eyes fixed on the stairs leading up to the plane, and once he was on board he took a seat and held on for dear life.

Bill Belk raised his middle finger and responded to cries of “Magbar A’mrika!” with “Magbar Khomeini!”

Colonel Chuck Scott made a point of marching through the gauntlet. He had come to Iran as a soldier and he was going to leave it like one. He regretted that Akbar, the guard he had come to admire, had not been able to say good-bye.

Jimmy Lopez looked down at the watch on his wrist. It was the self-winding kind and it had worked perfectly through the entire captivity. He wondered if he might get to make a commercial for Timex watches when he got home.

On the bus, awaiting his turn to leave, Dave Roeder sat wondering what was happening to his friend Metrinko. Had he been taken off the bus? Was he being left behind? He felt helpless and angry, at both the Iranian guards and his friend and roommate. Didn’t the man know when to keep his mouth shut? He admired his friend’s constant pugnacity, but there were times when it crossed over into pure stupidity.

Metrinko had had much the same thought when he heard the bus move off. His heart sank. How stupid can I be? But then an apparently higher-ranking guard approached and angrily demanded of the others, “Why did you take him off the bus?”

It was explained that he had shouted an insult.

“You have to get him to the airport,” the guard said angrily. “He has to get out of here with the others. They all have to go.”

Metrinko had been placed in a car with Lee Holland, a white Mercedes. His blindfold was removed. Evidently they did not want to attract attention on the roads by having a blindfolded man in the backseat. Metrinko watched with fascination as they drove off through the city. It was the first time he had been able to see Tehran in over a year.

At the airport, waiting for his turn, Metrinko watched as his colleagues were led through the gauntlet. To him it all seemed rote, like a summer camp initiation ritual. The guards no longer had their hearts in it. Everybody was exhausted by this game.

Metrinko finally walked through the jeering crowd in a cloud of joy and disbelief. He felt none of the slaps or jabs and heard none of the insults. More than a year of near constant abuse coated him like a shell. As he reached the end he was pleased to see armed, uniformed Algerian guards. He mounted the steps and entered the plane and there, arrayed in seats on either side, were all the embassy workers he had barely known and the few, like Roeder, Regan, and Ward, whom he had come to know well in captivity. Everyone looked skinny, poorly dressed, and shaggy—long hair and long beards. It felt wonderful to see them, all of them. People reached out and touched him as he passed down the aisle. It was like a reunion he had just happened upon, and for the first time in more than a year he felt surrounded by countrymen, by warmth and friendship.

For all the joy of reunion, the plane stayed silent. People sat together not in the groups that might have formed according to the hierarchy or job descriptions at the old embassy, but in the random groupings of their imprisonment. This was partly because the various roommates had grown close during their captivity, but also because they did not yet feel free. So long as they were still in Tehran, they were still hostages.

Only when the plane taxied down the runway and its wheels left the ground did the great weight of fear begin to lift for the fifty-two Americans on the plane. There was still some disbelief. Billy Gallegos thought it entirely possible that the Iranians would let them take off and then hit them with a surface-to-air missile.

Real celebration didn’t begin on the plane until the Algerian pilot announced they were out of Iran. The freed hostages went wild with happiness. Shouting, cheering, crying, clapping, falling into one another’s arms. Hall fell into an embrace with Jerry Plotkin, whom he didn’t know and had never seen before. Champagne corks popped and half full plastic cups were passed around the plane.

There was something more complicated than joy in the hours of celebration that ensued. There was a sense that they had weathered an extraordinary adventure, had all involuntarily participated in an historic ordeal, but they had not done so together. Many of them had not known one another before the takeover, and were strangers still. Yet they would always be tied together now. Those who had been forced to live together in close quarters for months and months had seen each other at their best and at their worst, and they would forget neither. Colonel Scott, who still burned over the time his onetime roommate Bob Blucker had refused to hurry his meal so that they could go outside for a walk, was not the only one who harbored anger toward the prickly economics officer. Dave Roeder hung a sign on the back of Blucker’s seat that read, “I’m an asshole.” Many of the passengers eyed Army Sergeant Joe Subic with scorn and made resolutions to report his behavior when they got back. Nearly all of them had done or said things over the past fifteen months that made them feel proud, or that made them feel ashamed. How would their behavior in captivity be assessed? Few felt heroic. The experience had been in many ways humiliating. Some of them were ashamed of things they had done or said, secrets they had named, weaknesses they had revealed. There was no sense yet of the frenzied national welcome that awaited them at home, the reunions with families and friends, the crush of press, the ticker-tape parades, the speeches, the gifts, the great smothering embrace of American sympathy fully aroused.

Rick Kupke finally had a chance to confront Tom Ahern over something that had been bugging him ever since the day of the takeover, when he had been soundly beaten after being stranded on the roof of the chancery.