Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (7 page)

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” the woman said dismissively. “We have a relief force of Revolutionary Guards and police on the way over. You have nothing to worry about. In twenty minutes or so they should be there.”

“I’m happy to hear it,” Limbert told her. “I hope what you say is true.”

“All the students want to do is read a declaration that they have, and leave.”

“Fine,” said Limbert. “We have no problem with their reading a declaration. Our concern is that there be no blood shed. We’re glad you have a group on the way. They should get these people off the embassy grounds as soon as possible or something might happen for which we feel your government would be responsible.”

Limbert hung up the phone, and when Swift took a break he got on the phone to Washington and explained to Assistant Secretary of State Harold Saunders what had been promised.

Downstairs, Golacinski was preoccupied with the radio. He knew that the marines he had told to stay at the Bijon Apartments had been captured there, and that those in the small office building off the motor pool, most notably ICA staffers John Graves and Barry Rosen and their staffs, had also been taken. The only hope of restoring order was for the provisional government to act, so his hopes rested with Laingen and Tomseth at the Foreign Ministry. He requested permission from the chargé to send Washington a “flash” message, the highest emergency protocol, and the chargé authorized it.

The wiry young Iranian Golacinski had taken by the arm kept insisting that all he and the others wanted was to stage a sit-in, and that he wanted to speak directly to Laingen. Golacinski relayed this to Howland, but they all agreed that the chargé d’affaires shouldn’t get on the phone with an Iranian protester. Golacinski asked for permission to go outside with the guy and face the crowd himself, acting as a go-between on the radio for Laingen.

“This can’t go on,” he told the young Iranian. “If somebody breaks through these doors we’re going to have to defend ourselves, and people are going to get hurt.”

“We must stop this,” the young man agreed.

“Yes,” said Golacinski.

Laingen told the security chief that he could go out so long as his personal security was assured. There wasn’t much chance of that. Golacinski felt responsible for the embassy staffers who had already fallen into the hands of the demonstrators. He believed somebody had to do something to turn this around, and he wasn’t nicknamed “Bulldog” for nothing. He loped up the staircase to the top floor and told Bert Moore, an administrative consul, about the authorization to send a flash message, and that Laingen had authorized him to go outside. That meant that decisions regarding security inside the embassy, including supervising the marines, were now Moore’s responsibility.

As he went back downstairs, Golacinski got a radio call from Sergeant Lopez at the consulate.

“Sit tight,” he told Lopez. “You have a very secure building. I’m going outside to try and get this thing resolved.”

Upstairs in the chancery’s communications vault monitoring events on the radio, State Department communicator Bill Belk thought Golacinski was nuts. The vault was the embassy’s most sensitive and secure spot, and Belk had been at work since early that morning, downloading messages from the satellite and sorting through them. Being in the vault gave him a sense of distance from the events just downstairs, which were increasingly compelling. He had stepped out to look out a window at the demonstrators, and back in the vault later he heard someone gasp into the radio, “My God, they are in the basement!” Then he heard people shouting, evidently at a marine downstairs, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”; and then “Don’t throw any more tear gas!” It sounded pretty hairy. When he heard that Golacinski was going out he thought, Great, give them a hostage!

Golacinski handed his weapon to Gallegos and removed his flak jacket. He wanted to appear nonthreatening.

“I’ve got to talk to these people,” he said. “I know what’s going on.”

“Al, don’t go out there,” Gallegos said.

“I’ll be all right,” he said.

The security chief had made up his mind. Gallegos followed him and the Iranian back downstairs to the open window. Golacinski sent the Iranian out first and then said to Gallegos, somewhat dramatically, “Cover me,” and climbed out himself.

Hermening, the young marine who was still wearing his blue suit, watched the security chief go out alone with amazement and admiration. He wouldn’t want to go out there for the world. But he had seen Golacinski intervene several times in tense situations and resolve them. That’s what this situation needed.

As soon as he stepped out into the gray drizzle, Golacinski was surrounded. With the wiry Iranian by his side translating, he demanded that everyone leave. Some of the leaders of the crowd quieted the others, which heartened him. They were listening.

His handheld radio crackled with the voice of a State Department communicator upstairs.

“Should we start destroying files?” he asked.

“No, hold off,” Golacinski said. “I think we’re going to get this under control.”

Sergeant Lopez radioed again to say that protesters were now on the consulate roof and were trying to get through windows, so Golacinski began moving in that direction. The crowd tried to stop him.

“Look!” Golacinski complained. “I’ve got to go over there and get that calmed down. You want to help me or not?”

So they all followed him through the rain. He felt like the pied piper, leading a train of placard-wearing demonstrators across the compound, their number swelling as they moved. At the consulate, Golacinski was let inside by Lopez, and they ran upstairs to confer with Morefield.

At the top of the stairs, Lopez moved quickly to deal with a protester who was climbing in through the second-floor bathroom window, having lowered himself from the roof. The marine handed his shotgun to Gary Lee, the senior general services officer.

Lee held it awkwardly. He was not used to guns and couldn’t tell if the safety was on or off.

Lopez popped a tear gas grenade and entered the bathroom with pistol in hand. The intruder saw him approaching and backed out the window, and Lopez flipped the grenade out after him. Then he popped the pin on another grenade, dropped it and closed the bathroom door behind him. He went to work securing the handles to both the men’s and women’s bathrooms from the outside with a length of electrical cord, which he tied to a post between the two doors.

One of the secretaries passed around candy. Invaders were banging hard on the roof, trying to break through, but Lee assured those around him with a smile that the roof was solid concrete. “They’ll never break through,” he said.

Golacinski and Morefield agreed that those trapped in the consulate should choose a moment to head over and take shelter on the second floor of the chancery with everyone else. The security chief then went back outside to lead his growing entourage of Iranians away from the building. His radio crackled to life. Protesters were coming through the chancery basement window again. Golacinski started jogging in that direction with his retinue, which now numbered almost one hundred.

As he approached the motor pool he saw Bill Keough, a giant of a man who stood six-six and weighed almost three hundred pounds, towering in the fine rain over a small mob of chanting protesters. Keough was a school headmaster who had come to Tehran for only a few days to sort out the records from the closed American school. He looked down on his tormentors like a bemused Gulliver.

One of the young men in the crowd around Golacinski was filming him now with a small 8mm camera, and it slowly dawned on the soggy security chief that he was no longer so much leading this crowd as being led by it. He heard Farsi coming from his walkie-talkie; the protesters had evidently grabbed some of the marines’ radios.

His own was then snatched from him. The wiry young man he had seized in the basement had melted off into the crowd. He was now addressed by a bigger man with a gruff voice, who appeared to have taken charge. Golacinski recognized him as one of the Revolutionary Guards who had chased off Mashallah, and was at first relieved. Then the man said, “No more on the radio.”

“Okay, but I told you, I’ve got to get permission for you people to be on the compound here. If not, something bad is going to happen.” His bluff sounded lame.

He was led toward the motor pool office building. Looking over his left shoulder, Golacinski saw that the chancery was now ringed by thousands of protesters, who were holding hands and chanting. It looked like they were performing an exorcism, and it reminded him of the Pentagon demonstration more than a decade ago when flaky antiwar protesters had tried to levitate the building.

“Let me have a cigarette,” he asked one of the Iranians. A young man handed him one and then lit it for him.

At the motor pool garage, he phoned Sergeant Wesley Williams, a marine guard at the chancery’s main post inside the front door.

“Look, things are starting to turn here, Williams,” Golacinski told him. “It’s absolutely essential that you get Laingen on the phone for me.”

From the speaker on his radio in the Iranian’s hand he could hear Williams—the systems were linked—talking to someone at the Foreign Ministry, trying in vain to track down the chargé. The consulate was still holding on. Someone grabbed Golacinski by the arm and steered him in that direction. As he was being pulled out, he caught the gaze of the Iranian police captain, who was sitting with his men, watching. The captain looked at Golacinski apologetically and shrugged his shoulders, as if to say, What can I do?

Inside the consulate, Sergeant Lopez had gotten a similar response from the local police. His contact at headquarters listened politely as the marine described what was going on and responded with a simple, “Thank you.” No help was coming from that front. The battery on his radio was going dead, and he was no longer getting a response from the guard post in the chancery. The bulk of the crowd outside the building had left with Golacinski, but there were still protesters beating on the windows with sticks and some had come in through the open second-floor bathroom window again and were trying to break through the cords he had used to secure them. Morefield ordered the visa plates destroyed. Vice consul Don Cooke and Richard Queen got them out of a safe and began whacking them to bits with a steel bar.

“Well, no matter what happens, we won’t have any work to do now for five or six weeks,” said Morefield. “It will take that long to get new plates, and we can’t issue new visas without them.”

Lopez collected embassy ID cards from the Iranian employees, which they handed over readily—none of them wanted to be caught on the streets and identified as American collaborators. Morefield and Lopez decided they would let the visa applicants go first, and then the American staffers would walk together over to the chancery. The women were told to walk together.

“Be prepared for a mob,” said Lopez. “If anyone grabs for your purse, let them have it. Let them take whatever they want.”

As they prepared to leave they noticed that the demonstrators outside the consulate had suddenly vanished. Lopez heard on the radio that the chancery had been breached again. Apparently all the protesters had rushed off in that direction, so instead of going that way themselves, Morefield decided they would all leave in the opposite direction, out the consulate’s front door and into the side street. From there maybe they could melt into the city.

One of the marines at the chancery radioed, “You’re on your own. Good luck.”

Lopez destroyed his shotgun and pistol. Then he, Morefield, Queen, and the other American staff waited until the east-side alley looked clear before peeking out of the garage door. Traffic barred by the mob on Takht-e-Jamshid Avenue was trying to get around the embassy on their side, so it was jammed with cars. Outside were two pasdoran, but they seemed to have their hands full with the traffic. Morefield let the Iranian visa applicants go first. One embassy worker stood at the door, looking out, and another at the top of the stairs. When the street was clear, the door would open and ten of the Iranians would be let down the stairs and out the door. They did this until all sixty or so of them, including the young American woman, had gotten away. Bob Ode came down the steps holding the arm of a terrified, elderly Iranian man who was nearly blind. “God bless you, my son,” the man kept saying, patting Ode on the wrist. “God bless you, God bless you.” Ode led him out the door into the side street alongside the embassy, which was fairly quiet. A car was waiting there to pick up the old man, and Ode helped him into the car and saw him safely off.

Then the first of the American workers walked out, accompanied by the Iranian staff.

Cora and Mark Lijek, Joe and Kathy Stafford, Bob Anders, and Kim King, a tourist who had stopped by the consulate that morning, walked across the street and proceeded at a brisk pace down a road that paralleled Takht-e-Jamshid. They went straight ahead for four blocks, then turned left toward the British embassy. Mark Lijek felt odd walking in a three-piece suit in the light rain with no coat or umbrella. He was getting soaked. King separated from them and headed for a local police station; he was trying to work out a passport problem prior to his scheduled departure. The Americans offered to bring the Iranian employees with them to the British embassy, still a few blocks away, but all but one of them decided to melt off on their own. So the Lijeks and Staffords proceeded with Anders and the remaining Iranian staffer, who said she would show them the way—they were not used to walking the streets in Tehran.

They came upon a square crowded with demonstrators, so the Iranian woman offered to take them to her house. They thanked her but decided it was a bad idea, that it might place her in a dangerous position. But they agreed that they needed to get off the street. People were beginning to stare at them. Anders suggested they go to his apartment. They turned around and headed back in the direction from which they’d come. They made their way circuitously, searching out streets that were relatively quiet, and crossing them in staggers, two at a time. About an hour after leaving the consulate they arrived safely. Anders cooked chicken curry for a late lunch.