Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (87 page)

The returning American hostages stepped off a plane in Wiesbaden, West Germany, into a whirl of unexpected and, for many, unwanted celebrity. Few of them felt heroic—indeed, some wrestled with feelings of shame—but they were heroes to their countrymen whether they liked it or not, complete with fan mail, flashing cameras, unceasing demands for interviews, honors, and even ticker-tape parades. The Miami Beach Convention Bureau donated a free weeklong vacation to all the hostages; Bill Royer was given a yellow Cadillac by wealthy admirers in Houston; Kevin Hermening was awarded a free lifetime pass to Milwaukee Brewers baseball games. Major League Baseball then awarded similar lifetime passes to all the hostages. There was much discussion over whether their treatment had amounted to “torture,” with divisions among the hostages themselves. Asked about it, one marine commander took a gentle swipe at the civilian foreign service. “Torture is a subjective term,” he said. “What some soft-living State Department types might consider torture is just normal living conditions for a marine.” The ever cantankerous and blunt Bob Ode knew that nothing about his experience was heroic, “unless there is a new definition of hero as being in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Nevertheless, President Reagan invited the lot of them to the White House, where he pinned small American flags to their lapels and thanked them for their service. The State Department employees were given the prestigious Medal of Valor; Michael Metrinko got two, one for his time as a hostage and another for his daring rescue of the young Americans who had been jailed in Tabriz months before the embassy takeover. The CIA employees received both the State Department award and the agency’s Exceptional Service Medallion. All of the military hostages were awarded meritorious service medals except Joe Subic, “Brother Subic,” the army sergeant whose self-serving behavior in captivity had earned the undying scorn of most of his fellow hostages, but not all.

“I think Joe has gotten a bum rap,” says Al Golacinski, who now works as a consultant in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. “He was a young man who was just more eager than most to be the center of attention and to please whoever was in charge. He is guilty of poor judgment in a difficult situation, that’s all. Nothing he did really harmed anybody.” Golacinski feels that Subic’s public mistakes were less harmful than some of the capitulations behind the scenes of other high-ranking hostages.

They all had stories about returning to their country’s smothering embrace. My favorite was Metrinko’s, the man in love with distant lands. He was accustomed to deliberately low-key homecomings after his frequent travels. Once, after being away for two years in the Peace Corps, he had come home to Pennsylvania without announcing his arrival, taken a cab from the bus station in Scranton, entered the big old family house in Olyphant quietly through the cellar door, taken a seat in the kitchen, and just said hello to whoever walked in. It was fun watching the startled, delighted reactions. But there would be no understated return this time.

On the then emerging (now prevailing) popular notion that those who have experienced any sort of trauma need professional help to cope, he and the rest of the hostages were subjected to a daunting series of medical and psychological examinations in Wiesbaden. Waiting with noses pressed to the window were American and international reporters. They would impose a different kind of captivity. When Metrinko phoned home for the first time he felt a little sheepish; it was the middle of the night in Olyphant. His parents not only didn’t mind, they had been waiting with a TV crew for his call. His mother explained that they had been deluged by the press.

“This one is particularly nice,” she said. “Would you talk to him?”

In Germany he was given a free satellite phone with an answering service, and once the number got out to family and friends, messages began to pile up. It seemed like everybody in the world was waiting in line to talk to him.

One call was from an Iranian professor in Bonn, a man he had met when he was in Tabriz, who had an unusual invitation. It seemed a daughter of Imam Khomeini was visiting in Germany and wanted to meet with Metrinko and discuss what had happened. He turned her down. He wanted nothing further to do with the Khomeinis and Iran.

Some old friends living in Germany had a more welcome suggestion. They offered to pick him up and take him touring through the country by car, just to get away from everything. His minders in Wiesbaden were appalled. They had a full agenda of activities planned, more tests, meetings, debriefings. They said he couldn’t possibly go.

“Am I a prisoner?” Metrinko asked.

The question brought looks of horror.

So he went touring, eating, drinking, and talking his way down the Rhine.

In the months and years that followed, some of the freed captives became, in effect, professional hostages, writing and lecturing and popping up whenever events called the crisis to mind. Most just got on with their lives. When I interviewed Greg Persinger, who now works in Roanoke, Virginia, for a company that makes electronic devices for the military and law enforcement, he said that few of his friends or coworkers had even been aware that he was once one of the hostages in Iran until the company newsletter ran a small feature story about him several years ago. Some of the hostages have never spoken of their ordeal and refused to do so with me, and when I started working on this book in 2001, ten of the hostages were dead: Malcolm Kalp, Bill Keough, Richard Queen, John Graves, Bob Blucker, Lee Holland, Bert Moore, Jerry Plotkin, Bob Ode, and John McKeel. Ann Swift was killed in a horseback riding accident while I was working on the book.

I heard a story about Kalp from Keith Hall, a fellow CIA operative, who said he spent a long night with the former hostage in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, in 1989, on the tenth anniversary of the embassy takeover. Kalp was drinking and had a tube-shaped grenade launcher in the backseat of his car. He and Hall and another agency man went off in search of the Iranian embassy, into which Kalp announced his intent to mark the occasion by lobbing a grenade. It turned out, fortunately for all concerned, that there was no Iranian embassy in Tegucigalpa.

Metrinko came home and completely renovated his family’s sprawling home in Olyphant along the lines of the meticulous plans he had made in his head during all those months alone. Today he is officially retired from the U.S. State Department, but he is busier than ever putting his language skills and experience in that part of the world to work for the United States. During his long career in foreign service, in addition to his seven years of service in Iran, he spent four years in Turkey, four in Israel, over a year in Yemen (on two separate tours), six months in Syria, seven months in Afghanistan, and years at Department headquarters, where he served as deputy director of Iran and Iraq affairs. He served as consul general in Tel Aviv, and then spent three years as a director in the refuge bureau. His small home in the Virginia suburbs is furnished with mementos of his travels, and he is still frequently gone. During the years I worked on this book, Metrinko was away for months at a time on government contract work in Afghanistan and Iraq. He still has the bowl and spoon he used in captivity and the collection of poetry that he took from the chancery library.

In answer to an e-mailed question in July 2005, he sent me the following:

This response comes to you from my military base at Farah in southwestern Afghanistan, a Beau Geste cement fort that sits in the middle of a vast expanse of sand and rock under what we expect to be 120 degrees of heat by noon time. I share my abode with about 100 guys from East Texas, and I am the Political Officer here. In a very few more days, I will be transferring to the Lithuanian Army base (Think NATO) in Chaghcheran, Ghor Province. Chaghcheran is noted for its inaccessibility for several months a year because of heavy snow and VERY BAD roads through some of the most difficult mountain terrain in Afghanistan. I get to live in a tent there until next spring. Do you remember The Man Who Would Be King? The origin of that story was an adventurer from the USA going to Ghor in the 1830s…and he was from Pennsylvania too. All in all, retirement is a hell of a lot of fun!

John Limbert spent a long and distinguished State Department career in the Middle and Near East, including tours in Algeria, Djibouti, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. He served as U.S. ambassador to Mauritania. He also taught political science at the U.S. Naval Academy and was a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Center for International Affairs. After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, he went to Baghdad with the Organization for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, where he was responsible for trying to restore the looted Iraqi Museum. When I interviewed him he was serving as president of the American Foreign Service Association, a group that represents the interests of career diplomats.

Tom Ahern retired from the CIA in 1989, having spent the bulk of his career in Southeast Asia, and accepted a contract with the agency’s Center for the Study of Intelligence. When I met him he was working on the seventh in a series of classified books on both the operational and the analytical aspects of the CIA’s participation in the Vietnam War. He lives with his wife in a Virginia suburb, where he kindly agreed to discuss with me his experiences in captivity for the first time, and did so with remarkable candor. Bill Daugherty served out his career for the agency and then made real the imaginary classes he had taught in his long months of solitary confinement. He is a professor of political science at Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah, Georgia, and is the author of a book about his hostage experience, In the Shadow of the Ayatollah, and a book of CIA case studies, Executive Secrets, Covert Action and the Presidency.

Dave Roeder retired from the air force in 1989 as a full colonel and, from his home in Alexandria, Virginia, has on occasion served as an informal leader and spokesman for the hostages’ ongoing effort to sue the Iranian government for damages related to their captivity. As lead plaintiff, Roeder won a default verdict in federal court that would award each of the hostages $4.4 million. Iran declined to defend itself, but no payout appears likely. The judgment was vacated, and appeals have been fruitless. Lawyers for the former hostages continue to pursue remedy through legislation. The damages theoretically would be paid out of millions of dollars of Iranian assets still tied up in litigation before an international court. Contesting the awards, as I have said, is the American government.

“It never occurred to me when I was getting the crap beat out of me in a Tehran jail cell that I would have to one day fight the same government that I was defending,” said Roeder. “It’s just so demoralizing. So discouraging.”

Colonel Chuck Scott retired from the army when he returned from Tehran and wrote a book about his experience, entitled Pieces of the Game, which tells both his own story and that of the guard he knew as Akbar Housseini, the most sympathetic of the students who held him and the others captive. He received a letter from Akbar some years ago but has since lost track of him. Scott travels to make motivational speeches and to talk of the Islamist threat.

Joe Subic, the man so many of the former hostages regard as a turn-coat, was back in the army and serving in Iraq where my friend the journalist and author Christina Asquith interviewed him on my behalf in the summer of 2004. Subic said he was a different man today than he was twenty-five years ago, and acknowledged that under duress he occasionally cooperated with his captors, but not to the extent some of his fellow captives have alleged, and no more, he says, than did others. He was in Iraq with a National Guard unit from Florida, where he is the police chief in a small town.

Kathryn Koob, who had a religious awakening in captivity, is now a part-time professor at her old school, Wartburg College, in Waverly, Iowa. Joe Hall, who pined so for his wife, Cheri, through all those months in captivity, split up with her when he returned. They had grown apart during the fourteen months and could never completely reconnect. Hall, who is now a lobbyist in Washington, D.C., cites the breakup of “a good marriage” as one of the lasting consequences of the ordeal.

Among those who wrote books about their experiences was Morehead “Mike” Kennedy, who now makes a living as a writer and lecturer. His book, The Ayatollah in the Cathedral, describes his own religious awakening in captivity. Kathryn Koob wrote Guests of the Revolution about hers. The late Richard Queen, the hostage released early because of multiple sclerosis, wrote a dramatic account of his ordeal called Inside and Out. Barry Rosen, an administrator at Columbia Teachers College in New York, wrote a book with his wife, Barbara, entitled, The Destined Hour, which tells both of their stories during the ordeal; Rocky Sickmann, the ever cheerful marine, married his girlfriend Jill when he got back home to St. Louis. He was allowed to return with his diary, which was published as Hostage, A Personal Diary. Bruce Laingen, the long-suffering chargé locked on the third floor of Iran’s Foreign Ministry, published his diary under the title Yellow Ribbon: The Secret Journal of Bruce Laingen. I have learned much from them all.

Laingen is now retired from a long career in the foreign service. When he returned from Iran he was named vice president of the National Defense University, where he stayed until his retirement in 1987. He was executive director of the National Commission on the Public Service (the Volcker Commission) from 1987 until the commission completed its work in 1990. He became president of the American Academy of Diplomacy in 1991. He still frequently lectures on the hostage crisis. Victor Tomseth, his old roommate, served a variety of posts in the State Department, and was U.S. ambassador to Laos from 1993 to 1996. Mike Howland, who prowled the Iran Foreign Ministry nude, now runs his own security company in Virginia and is married to former hostage Joan Walsh.

Kevin Hermening became a financial adviser and formed his own firm in Wausau, Wisconsin. He’s still enjoying his free seats at Brewers baseball games. His mother, Barbara Timm, lives in Phoenix.