Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (9 page)

There was no answer. Golacinski bellowed up that he needed a phone number there. The ones who had taken him were demanding that he get the chargé d’affaires on the phone.

“Look, this is just like February fourteenth!” Golacinski shouted up, referring to the brief invasion of the grounds nine months earlier. He wanted to reassure those inside that this was going to be over shortly, that they should sit tight. He was then led to the front of the building, where one of the protesters demanded that he tell the others to open up and come out.

“They can’t hear me inside,” Golacinski said.

Someone held a bullhorn up to his face.

“Tell them to come out,” he was told. “If not, you are going to see what we are going to do.”

Golacinski’s amplified voice echoed off the orange brick of the front wall. “These people say if you come out they won’t hurt you. This is just like February fourteenth,” he said.

The militant with the gun was growing irate. He spoke in Farsi to two of the others, who ran off toward the motor pool just east of the chancery.

“They are going to get the rope!” explained a young man in a rugby shirt who spoke fluent English.

Golacinski gathered from this that they intended to string him up, a fear quickened by the jeering multitude behind him, both inside and outside the embassy walls, which had been roaring thunderously ever since he had been led around to the front of the building, thrilled to see a hated American captured. He felt a sudden quiver in his knees and bowels.

One of the other protesters pounded on the door and shouted in English, “Open these doors! You will see what we do to your brother!”

Nothing happened. The doors stayed shut and the gunman returned without a rope. Golacinski was relieved, and also struck by the apparent confusion among these protesters. There seemed to be violent ones, like the one with the gun, more moderate ones, like the one in the rugby shirt, and others who just seemed to be going with the flow. No one appeared to be in charge.

One of the Iranians tied a cloth strip over his eyes.

“Okay,” the gunman said. “We are going to go in there. You are going to go in first. If anything happens, you die.”

They walked him down to the concrete moat and, with the gunman holding the pistol to the back of his head, he was directed to climb back down the same opened window he had climbed up and out of an hour earlier. Held by both arms and blindfolded, Golacinski eased himself down awkwardly, feeling his way. They had rigged a chair on top of a table that he had to negotiate blind. The air inside was choked with tear gas and smoke. Right behind him was the gunman, and Golacinski knew it didn’t take much pressure on the trigger. A sudden slip by either of them might end his life. When he got both feet on the floor he was grateful. The Iranians who followed then pushed him through the basement hallway, advancing warily past the office doors on either side.

“Tell them, no shoot!” the gunman said.

Golacinski knew that by now everyone was upstairs, but nevertheless he shouted, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” as they made their way up the steps to the first floor and then up the steps to the second-floor landing. The door had a cipher lock by the handle. Tear gas had pooled in the stairwell, which was now crowded with invaders.

The blindfolded captive’s nerves were about shot, and when one of his captors rolled up a magazine and lit it and he felt the flame near his face, he panicked.

“Don’t burn me!” he screamed. “Shoot me, don’t burn me!”

“No, no, no,” one of the Iranians told him. “For the gas. For the gas.”

Another demanded, “Open the door.”

“Open the door or you will see what we will do!” shouted several of the men around him.

“They have eight of us!” yelled Golacinski, referring to the others he knew were being held by the protesters outside.

Behind the door he heard one of his colleagues shouting, “They’re trying to burn it down!”

After seeing Golacinski outside with a gun to his head, it was clear that this demonstration had aims beyond simply the reading of a “declaration,” which is what the aide in the prime minister’s office had assured Limbert would happen.

He phoned the provisional government once more and this time spoke with an assistant in the office of Mahdi Chamran, a deputy minister. Limbert explained the situation with more vehemence, and once again was told not to worry.

“Everything is under control,” the assistant said.

Limbert said that things didn’t look under control from his vantage point. There was no sign of the force that had been promised earlier.

“What is being done?” Limbert asked. “What are you going to do?”

“What we are going to do is have a meeting this afternoon to decide what to do about this problem,” the assistant said peevishly.

Limbert understood that they were on their own. The government was neither inclined to nor capable of coming to their rescue, so delay wasn’t going to solve anything. The goal now was to protect the embassy personnel and employees, which could probably best be accomplished by surrender. His greatest fear was that one of the marines would shoot a protester. He could imagine the frenzy a martyr’s blood would ignite. They would all surely be killed.

He spoke to the demonstrators on the radio. They had taken walkie-talkies from the marines and from the security chief, and Limbert could hear them talking back and forth, trying to figure out how the equipment worked.

The smell of smoke sent a ripple of alarm through the crowd of Americans and embassy workers in the corridor upstairs. The downside of being locked on the top floor was that there was no way out. Now smoke began to curl up from underneath the furniture piled against the door. Limbert tried to get someone on the other side to talk to him. He spoke briefly to Golacinski, who told him that there was a gun to his head and that if the door wasn’t opened they would shoot him. Limbert told them all to stand back.

“We’re going to open the door and I’m going to come out to talk,” he said.

It was a decision Limbert made on the spot. Once he learned that help was not coming, it was clear that someone who spoke Farsi would have to try talking to the protesters. If he could find what they wanted, perhaps they could work out an arrangement where nobody would get hurt. Two of the marines pulled back the barricade and one of them opened the door enough for Limbert to slip out to the landing. The door slammed shut behind him.

Crowded on the staircase before him leading down to the first floor were fifty or more very excited young Iranian men, unshaven, wet, and wearing rumpled, worn clothing. Limbert knew immediately that he was going to get nowhere with this bunch. As the door closed behind him he thought, Of all the stupid things you have ever done, this is the topper.

Golacinski was four or five steps down. Limbert rubbed his tearing eyes and felt his nose begin to run from the pungent stab of gas and smoke. He tried to speak calmly. He introduced himself and adopted a scolding professorial tone—he had taught students exactly like these years before at Shiraz University.

“You really need to get out of here before someone gets hurt,” he told them in Farsi. “We have been in contact with the authorities. They are sending police to clear the compound. You have no business here. If someone is hurt it’s going to be your responsibility. You are going to be responsible for the bloodshed.”

His words stunned the crowd momentarily. The last thing they had expected from the top floor of the American embassy was a stern lecture from someone in fluent, unaccented Farsi.

“You’re not an American,” one of the students protested. “You’re a Persian speaker.”

“Yes, but I am an American,” Limbert said. He pushed ahead, asking questions: “Who are you?” and “What do you want?”

“Are you armed in there?” one of the militants asked.

“That’s no business of yours,” said Limbert. “What do you care?”

“We want to get in.”

“Is there somebody here from the government?” he asked.

“We don’t care about the government,” came the answer.

“What about the Revolutionary Council?” Limbert asked.

“We don’t care about the Revolutionary Council,” one of the young men said.

The Iranians were now arguing among themselves. They kept referring to their own “five-man council” that made decisions, but apparently no one from that controlling group was here on the steps. So they quarreled.

“Let’s go in now!” said one.

“No, we’ve got to discuss this.”

“Let’s just knock the door down!” shouted another.

“We do what the council says!” another answered.

As Limbert saw it, to the extent that the crowd on the steps had a leader, it was a young man with a thick Isfahani accent. He was bouncing with excitement and anxiety, capable of anything.

“Tell them if they don’t come out we’re going to kill everybody,” he said.

From inside the door Metrinko bellowed in Farsi, “We just heard on the radio that Khomeini has ordered the Revolutionary Guards to clear the embassy!”

The mob on the stairs wasn’t buying it. Limbert was grabbed and blindfolded. One of the Iranians shouted at the door, “Look, if you don’t come out in fifteen minutes, we are going to shoot both of these people!”

Now Limbert was even more frightened. He judged that this crowd would carry out the threat. He wondered if his colleagues would open the door; he wondered if they should open it. He had volunteered to come out and he had to accept the consequences. He expected this to end badly, for him and for everyone else.

On the other side of the heavy door, Ann Swift was on the line to Washington, while Colonel Chuck Scott, the military liaison officer, and Colonel Tom Schaefer, the defense attaché, were talking to Laingen at the Foreign Ministry, giving him running reports on the situation.

The whole point of holding out on the second floor was to protect personnel and documents until local authorities arrived and restored order. Clearly that wasn’t going to happen. With so many Americans already in the hands of the protesters, and with the threats to kill Golacinski and Limbert, a consensus was emerging that holding out further was pointless. That’s what Laingen told Scott, and when the colonel handed the phone to Swift the chargé said, “Ann, let them in.”

They prepared to open the door. The stash of weapons was carried down to the coms vault, where Bert Moore stepped in and announced, “We’re going to surrender.”

“Mr. Moore, I’ve got more documents to destroy,” Kupke said. “We’ll surrender when we can.”

He had no intention of giving up, although he didn’t say that.

“I’m going to close the door,” Kupke shouted. “Anybody who wants to surrender, leave now.”

All of the embassy staffers and Iranian employees filed out, and as Kupke swung the heavy door shut he saw that his tall friend Bill Belk was among those in the hallway. He thought about holding the door and trying to get his attention, but the marines had begun pulling apart the barricade down the hall. He closed the vault door and locked it.

One of the marines shouted through the main stairwell door, “Do not shoot! We are not armed. We are letting you in.”

Then the door swung open.

Belk felt more disgusted than angry or frightened. He had gone to retrieve more files for the disintegrator, and when he saw that the vault door was shut he knew he was stuck. Why were they surrendering? They had water and some food. Belk figured they could easily have held out for a few days or more, long enough for these yahoos to give up and go away.

But it was too late for that. Protesters swarmed into the corridor, men and women, all young, draped with their Khomeini placards, wet and excited. Some of them were armed. They began to charge off down the hallway but stopped abruptly when one of their leaders raised his hands over his head and bellowed, “We are going to do this in a well-organized way! You will come out one at a time.”

The invaders resumed moving down the hallway, more methodically now, ignoring those seated against the walls and moving instead from room to room. Swift was still on the phone giving Washington a blow-by-blow when an Iranian grabbed it from her hand.

Scott was talking to Mike Howland, who was with Laingen at the Foreign Ministry.

“Surrender with your head held high,” Howland said.

Scott didn’t get to respond. An angry young Iranian grabbed the phone out of his hand.

“Who were you talking to?” he demanded.

“Ayatollah Khomeini,” said Scott. “He told me to tell you all to leave here and let us go.”

The Iranian hit Scott across the face with the back of his hand.

Everyone was herded into the halls. They were ordered to line up single file and their captors started binding their hands and blindfolding them with the prepared strips of white cloth.

Behind the closed door of the vault, standing before the still loudly grinding disintegrator, Kupke watched the surrender on the black-and-white closed-circuit monitor. He saw Iranians running from office to office, carrying out drawers and files. His colleagues, including poor Belk, were being herded out the door. Kupke watched until an Iranian, young and bearded like the rest, peered up curiously at the camera that was mounted outside the vault in the hallway and then removed his jacket and tossed it upward. The screen went blank.

There were eleven others with Kupke in the vault: CIA chief Tom Ahern and his agency communicators Phil Ward, Jerry Miele, and Cort Barnes, Army Sergeant Regan, foreign service officer Steve Lauterbach, two marines, Hermening and Persinger, Air Force Captain Paul Needham, Navy Commander Bob Englemann, and another State Department communicator, Charles Jones. So far, the Iranians didn’t know they were there.

Golacinski was hustled down the stairs and captives were led out the chancery door one by one. Word of the successful storming of the embassy spread throughout the city and soon enraged masses roared outside its walls like some mindless, insatiable, million-throated monster, screaming for American blood. It was as though an impregnable fort had been breached and taken. It was a great victory, a cleansing, an exorcism. A deafening cheer rose as each blindfolded, bound American emerged.