Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (10 page)

One of the marines who came down the steps asked Golacinski, “What’s going on?”

“Just stay cool,” Golacinski said. “Stay cool.” He said it as much to himself.

As he emerged the crowd chanted joyfully, “Allahuakbar! Allahuakbar!”

After the smoke and tear gas, it was a relief to breathe fresh air. The rain seemed to be coming harder and colder.

Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Dave Roeder was led down the staircase, held gently on both sides by young Iranian men. Immediately outside the door they had placed a partly burned American flag, which he was made to walk over on his way out.

The strip of cloth tied tightly around navy Commander Don Sharer’s eyes burned like hell. It felt like it had been soaked in tear gas.

As Morehead Kennedy, the embassy’s chief economics officer, was being led down the stairs, the Iranian who had hold of his arm kept repeating with each step, “Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam…”

Belk was grabbed and blindfolded. His hands were bound with a nylon rope. When the young man tying the rope used a knife to cut off a strip he had inadvertently jabbed Belk with it in the side.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

The tall State Department technician was led down the stairs and out the front door. He towered over his captors, a middle-aged father of two boys back in South Carolina, with longish hair and sideburns wrapped in a cloth blindfold, wearing an open-collared shirt, hands bound in front, surrounded by triumphant students. His captor kept telling him, “Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid,” but with a multitude screaming for his blood it was hard not to feel like he was being led to his death. “We will teach you,” his captors said. “We will bring to you Khomeini’s thoughts.” He was surprised by how gentle they were. In the din he heard camera shutters clicking. Photographs of Belk emerging from the chancery would be transmitted around the world and would become emblematic. He was urging himself to maintain his dignity. If they are going to kill me, then at least I’ll keep my head up. He squared his shoulders and held high his blindfolded head.

Bruce German was convinced that he was being led to his execution. He had been asked before leaving the building if he would make a statement to cameras outside denouncing President Carter.

“I won’t say anything,” he said.

As marine guard Rocky Sickmann was being led through the fine rain he heard the protesters around him making hissing sounds. Some would come right up to him and hiss loudly in his ear. He didn’t know what it meant. It sounded like they were shushing him, telling him not to say anything. He had nothing to say. The large angry crowd outside the embassy was apparently being held back, and inside the compound there were photographers snapping pictures of him and everyone else. One of the protesters came up to him and held a knife to his temple, which made the others around him laugh. Someone snapped a picture of it.

Joe Hall felt oddly elated. A young army warrant officer from Oklahoma with a broad forehead, dark straight hair, and mustache, he had never liked the idea of being stationed in Tehran and had arrived with great reluctance that summer to work in the defense attaché’s office. He and his wife, Cherlynn, had worked together for four years at the U.S. embassy in Athens, and it had been the best four years of Hall’s life. This assignment meant they would have to live apart for a full year. They had been missing each other terribly. Hall had taken the post only because the army had tied it to the warrant officer promotion he felt he had earned, and he had resented it from the start. He had found Tehran to be dusty, dry, hot, crowded, and hostile. Now, bound and blindfolded, reeling under the waves of hatred from the Iranian mob, he walked with captors holding him on either side, feeling the drizzle on his face, the first rain he remembered since he had arrived, convinced that this meant his stay in Tehran would be over a lot sooner than planned. So his first reaction to being taken hostage was delight. He figured it meant they would all be evacuated as soon as the local authorities got things in hand. This was going to be the shortest assignment of his career. He would be back home with Cheri soon!

John Limbert was delighted to get out of the tear gas and smoke. The rain felt soothing. He felt a sudden enormous rush of relief at having escaped death on the staircase and he was overjoyed just to be alive.

In answer to the chanting crowd he shouted, “Allahuakbar!” in agreement, rejoicing.

They must have thought he was nuts, an American official, a “spy” flushed from the very bowels of America’s espionage machine, blindfolded, shouting earnestly with them in the rain, “Allahuakbar!”

President Jimmy Carter was awakened at Camp David with news of trouble at the embassy in Tehran. It was four-thirty in the morning and the call was from Zbigniew Brzezinski, his crisply efficient national security adviser. Carter then spoke briefly with his secretary of state, Cyrus Vance. The hostage takers were demanding the return of the shah, which was, of course, out of the question. Brzezinski was optimistic. So far none of the hostages had been shot, he said, which was a good sign, because such actions were usually the most violent in the first hours. But before he went back to sleep the president had an awful vision of hostages being executed, one a day, for his refusal to be blackmailed. What would he do then?

As Carter tried to get back to sleep, word flew from phone to phone throughout the highest levels of the American government. White House staffers, generals, and diplomats were awakened before dawn. Word reached out and down to those who would need to know immediately. The train of early morning calls eventually found U.S. Army Colonel Charlie Beckwith in a hotel room in Hinesville, Georgia.

He was awakened by Delta’s CIA liaison, Burr Smith.

“I thought you’d like to know, Boss,” he said. “The American embassy in Iran has gone down. The entire staff is being held hostage.”

Beckwith, who had slept only two or three hours, got dressed, checked out, and pointed his car north on Interstate 95. It was a five-hour drive to Fayetteville, to the Stockade, the unit’s headquarters at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. As he drove through sunrise over the spectacular fall display, the colonel, who had once been a lineman at the University of Georgia, thought, What a great day for football!

Farouz Rajaeefar was elated. An engineering student at Amir Kabir University, she had been among the first wave into the compound. Raised in a secular family, she had spent time in the United States and in fact had been enrolled earlier that year at the University of Texas. But she hadn’t made it back to the States for classes. Swept up by the revolutionary and religious fervor at Amir Kabir, she had joined the embassy invaders as a translator. Her English was fluent.

She was thrilled with their success. The demonstration was similar to ones she had heard about in the United States and in Europe, where young people had seized campus or government buildings in order to publicize their grievances. She marched that morning dressed in a long pullover and blue jeans, with her Khomeini picture pinned to her chest, waving her fist in the air and chanting anti-American slogans. The takeover had gone more smoothly than they had dared to hope. Many of the men felt sure there would be shooting, and that there would be martyrs, but the whole invasion had succeeded without anyone firing a shot, so far as she knew.

On the chancery second floor, in the heart of the evil beast, she and the others stared in amazement at the piles of shredded documents they found on the floor of some offices. What more proof of American plotting and trickery was needed? What were these spies trying so desperately to hide? This would be the students’ next great task, to piece together not just these documents but the whole place, who was who, what work was going on in these offices, what secrets were hidden in these files. They would study this den of espionage and piece it all back together and reveal its evil machinations to Iran and to the world.

But first Rajaeefar had to call home. How should she tell her parents that she had taken part in invading and occupying a foreign embassy, and not just any embassy but a superpower’s?

She picked up one of the embassy phones and dialed home. Her mother answered.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“Listen to the radio,” Rajaeefar said triumphantly, and, with a goodbye, she hung up.

Other excited occupiers were using the phones in the chancery, calling family and friends to boast of their success. One of the young women involved phoned a local radio station, which at first refused to believe her when she said she was calling from “the former American embassy, the present Den of Spies.” She directed them to phone the main number for the U.S. embassy and ask for the extension of the phone she was using.

The students had prepared a communiqué, which was read over the phone to the radio station. It reflected the full idealistic and naive sweep of the students’ intentions, which were nothing less than to ignite a worldwide spiritual uprising of the virtuous oppressed masses.

“In the name of God the Merciful, the Compassionate,” it began, and then quoted from the imam’s recent speech urging students throughout Iran to “forcefully expand their attacks against America and Israel.”

The Islamic Revolution of Iran represents a new achievement in the ongoing struggle between the peoples and the oppressive superpowers. It has kindled hope in the hearts of the enchained nations and has set an example and created a legend of self-reliance and ideological steadfastness for a nation contending with imperialism. This was in reality a conquest over the curse of blindness that the superpowers had imposed so that even the intellectuals of the oppressed world could not conceive of any other freedom than under the benediction of another superpower.Iran’s revolution has undermined the political, economic, and strategic hegemony of America in the region.

It went on to explain that “the world-devouring America,” which for years had been exploiting Iran’s resources, was now engaged in “spiteful attempts” to regain power.

We Muslim students, followers of Imam Khomeini, have occupied the espionage embassy of America in protest against the ploys of the imperialists and the Zionists. We announce our protest to the world; a protest against America for granting asylum and employing the criminal Shah while it has on its hands the blood of tens of thousands of women and men in this country…. And, finally, for its undermining and destructive role in the face of the struggle of the peoples for freedom from the chains of imperialism, wherein thousands of revolutionary and faithful humans have been slaughtered.

It was signed, “Muslim Students Following the Imam’s Line.”

A few miles away from the embassy compound, a furious Bruce Laingen was finally allowed to see the foreign minister Ibrahim Yazdi, a gentle, professorial man with a sparse, graying beard who had been out of sight—conspicuously, Laingen thought—throughout the ongoing siege. Laingen unloaded on the minister, protesting the seizure of his embassy and reminding Yazdi of his obligation and promise to protect it under long-standing rules of international diplomacy.

Yazdi heard this out patiently. He seemed troubled, acknowledged his government’s responsibility to protect the embassy, and apologized for what had happened. He was surprised by how agitated Laingen seemed. After all, this sort of thing had happened before. The foreign minister spoke English fluently; his exile during the shah’s years had been spent primarily in Waco, Texas, where he had worked as a medical researcher and had been Khomeini’s man in America in the years leading up to the revolution.

“Calm down,” he told Laingen, and couldn’t keep from adding, “I told you so.”

Yazdi had warned weeks ago that there would be consequences he might not be able to control if the United States admitted the shah. In a meeting with the State Department’s top Iran hand Henry Precht, the foreign minister had likened welcoming the shah to “opening a Pandora’s box.” Yazdi was in a position that both Laingen and Vic Tomseth, the chargé’s acting deputy, recognized as precarious. Tomseth thought now that he had not fully appreciated how precarious. The foreign minister was one of a group of primarily secular intellectuals who had formed a brain trust around Khomeini when he was in the last months of his exile in Paris. Along with Prime Minister Bazargan, he was part of a practical political faction that wanted to see the new Iran form a Western-style democracy. They wanted to show the world that postrevolutionary Iran was not some renegade nation of religious fanatics but a serious country, one that understood its obligations in the world, and one that was led by sober, practical, well-educated people. But he was increasingly under attack, as was Bazargan, by hard-line clerics who claimed the revolution for Allah alone and who wanted a radical Islamist state. These street demonstrations, and the rampant anti-Americanism, were tools in the mullahs’ arsenal. Any politician who dared step up to defend the need for continued ties with the Great Satan before the pious mob put not only his political goals and career in jeopardy but his freedom and quite possibly his life. Yazdi had warned that admitting the shah would play right into the hands of these powerful forces, who fully embraced the fantasy of devilish American omnipotence. They would tell the people that President Carter was plotting to restore the monarchy, and if that happened Yazdi and his government were in trouble. Yazdi had answered Precht, “The responsibility is yours if you let him in.” It was not a threat. He knew what the mullahs would make of such a gesture, and he suspected his fragile government would not survive the storm that followed.

When it happened, they had considered severing relations with America but had dismissed the idea as impractical. Even Khomeini and the Revolutionary Council had agreed. There were too many outstanding issues—military contracts, the shah’s vast bank accounts in the United States—that needed resolution. It was decidedly not in Iran’s interest, at least in any short-term sense, to completely shun America.

The foreign minister had earned some credibility with his American guests. He had personally defused the February takeover, when as deputy prime minister he had gone to the embassy as the invaders were chased off and the compound restored to the American mission. It had taken courage. But much had changed in nine months. Yazdi’s current position as foreign minister was a less powerful post, and Carter’s decision to admit the shah had badly eroded his authority. Just as he had predicted, the mullahs had been fanning fears of an American countercoup. Yazdi believed this was nonsense, but politics is based not on reality but on perception. Leaked reports of the private meeting with Brzezinski in Algiers days before had worsened matters. It had provoked wild speculation in Tehran. Now he and Bazargan were openly branded as sellouts and traitors. This was intensely serious business. Yazdi had a better appreciation of the dangers than did his American guests, who had not fully grasped the fury of suspicion in Iran.