52 WHO BECAME A NATIONAL SYMBOL
The Hostages and The Casualties

Sixty-six Americans were taken captive when Iranian militants seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran on Nov. 4, 1979, including three who were at the Iranian Foreign Ministry. Six more Americans escaped. Of the 66 who were taken hostage, 13 were released on Nov. 19 and 20, 1979; one was released on July 11, 1980, and the remaining 52 were released on Jan. 20, 1981. Ages in this list are at the time of release.

The 52:
Thomas L. Ahern, Jr., 48, McLean, VA. Narcotics control officer.
Clair Cortland Barnes, 35, Falls Church, VA. Communications specialist.
William E. Belk, 44, West Columbia, SC. Communications and records officer.
Robert O. Blucker, 54, North Little Rock, AR. Economics officer specializing in oil.
Donald J. Cooke, 26, Memphis, TN. Vice consul.
William J. Daugherty, 33, Tulsa, OK. Third secretary of U.S. mission.
Lt. Cmdr. Robert Englemann, 34, Hurst, TX. Naval attaché.
Sgt. William Gallegos, 22, Pueblo, CO. Marine guard.
Bruce W. German, 44, Rockville, MD. Budget officer.
Duane L. Gillette, 24, Columbia, PA. Navy communications and intelligence specialist.
Alan B. Golancinksi, 30, Silver Spring, MD. Security officer.
John E. Graves, 53, Reston, VA. Public affairs officer.
Joseph M. Hall, 32, Elyria, OH. Military attaché with warrant officer rank.
Sgt. Kevin J. Hermening, 21, Oak Creek, WI. Marine guard.
Sgt. 1st Class Donald R. Hohman, 38, Frankfurt, West Germany. Army medic.
Col. Leland J. Holland, 53, Laurel, MD. Military attaché.
Michael Howland, 34, Alexandria, VA. Security aide, one of three held in Iranian Foreign Ministry.
Charles A. Jones, Jr., 40, Communications specialist and teletype operator. Only African-American hostage not released in
November 1979.
Malcolm Kalp, 42, Fairfax, VA. Position unknown.
Moorhead C. Kennedy Jr., 50, Washington, DC. Economic and commercial officer.
William F. Keough, Jr., 50, Brookline, MA. Superintendent of American School in Islamabad, Pakistan, visiting Tehran at time of embassy
seizure.
Cpl. Steven W. Kirtley, 22, Little Rock, AR. Marine guard.
Kathryn L. Koob, 42, Fairfax, VA. Embassy cultural officer; one of two women hostages.
Frederick Lee Kupke, 34, Francesville, IN. Communications officer and electronics specialist.
L. Bruce Laingen, 58, Bethesda, MD. Chargé d’affaires. One of three held in Iranian Foreign Ministry.
Steven Lauterbach, 29, North Dayton, OH. Administrative officer.
Gary E. Lee, 37, Falls Church, VA. Administrative officer.
Sgt. Paul Edward Lewis, 23, Homer, IL. Marine guard.
John W. Limbert, Jr., 37, Washington, DC. Political officer.
Sgt. James M. Lopez, 22, Globe, AZ. Marine guard.
Sgt. John D. McKeel, Jr., 27, Balch Springs, TX. Marine guard.
Michael J. Metrinko, 34, Olyphant, PA. Political officer.
Jerry J. Miele, 42, Mt. Pleasant, PA. Communications officer.
Staff Sgt. Michael E. Moeller, 31, Quantico, VA. Head of Marine guard unit.
Bert C. Moore, 45, Mount Vernon, OH. Counselor for administration.
Richard H. Morefield, 51, San Diego, CA. U.S. Consul General in Tehran.
Capt. Paul M. Needham, Jr., 30, Bellevue, NE. Air Force logistics staff officer.
Robert C. Ode, 65, Sun City, AZ. Retired Foreign Service officer on temporary duty in Tehran.
Sgt. Gregory A. Persinger, 23, Seaford, DE. Marine guard.
Jerry Plotkin, 45, Sherman Oaks, CA. Private businessman visiting Tehran.
MSgt. Regis Ragan, 38, Johnstown, PA. Army noncom, assigned to defense attaché’s officer.
Lt. Col. David M. Roeder, 41, Alexandria, VA. Deputy Air Force attaché.
Barry M. Rosen, 36, Brooklyn, NY. Press attaché.
William B. Royer, Jr., 49, Houston, TX. Assistant director of Iran-American Society.
Col. Thomas E. Schaefer, 50, Tacoma, WA. Air Force attaché.
Col. Charles W. Scott, 48, Stone Mountain, GA. Army officer, military attaché.
Cmdr. Donald A. Sharer, 40, Chesapeake, VA. Naval air attaché.
Sgt. Rodney V. (Rocky) Sickmann, 22, Krakow, MO. Marine Guard.
Staff Sgt. Joseph Subic, Jr., 23, Redford Township, MI. Military policeman (Army) on defense attaché’s staff.
Elizabeth Ann Swift, 40, Washington, DC. Chief of embassy’s political section; one of two women hostages.
Victor L. Tomseth, 39, Springfield, OR. Senior political officer; one of three held in Iranian Foreign Ministry.
Phillip R. Ward, 40, Culpeper, VA. Administrative officer.

 

One hostage was freed July 11, 1980, because of an illness later diagnosed as multiple sclerosis:

Richard I. Queen, 28, New York, NY. Vice consul.

 

Six American diplomats avoided capture when the embassy was seized. For three months they were sheltered at the Canadian and Swedish embassies in Tehran. On Jan. 28, 1980, they fled Iran using Canadian passports:

Robert Anders, 34, Port Charlotte, FL. Consular officer.
Mark J. Lijek, 29, Falls Church, VA. Consular officer.
Cora A. Lijek, 25, Falls Church, VA. Consular assistant.
Henry L. Schatz, 31, Coeur d’Alene, ID. Agriculture attaché.
Joseph D. Stafford, 29, Crossville, TN. Consular officer.
Kathleen F. Stafford, 28, Crossville, TN. Consular assistant.

 

Thirteen women and African-Americans among the Americans who were seized at the embassy were released on Nov. 19 and 20, 1979:

Kathy Gross, 22, Cambridge Springs, PA. Secretary.
Sgt. James Hughes, 30, Langley Air Force Base, VA. Air Force administrative manager.
Lillian Johnson, 32, Elmont, NY. Secretary.
Sgt. Ladell Maples, 23, Earle, AR. Marine guard.
Elizabeth Montagne, 42, Calumet City, IL. Secretary.
Sgt. William Quarles, 23, Washington, DC. Marine guard.
Lloyd Rollins, 40, Alexandria, VA. Administrative officer.
Capt. Neal (Terry) Robinson, 30, Houston, TX. Administrative officer.
Terri Tedford, 24, South San Francisco, CA. Secretary.
Sgt. Joseph Vincent, 42, New Orleans, LA. Air Force administrative manager.
Sgt. David Walker, 25, Hampton, TX. Marine guard.
Joan Walsh, 33, Ogden, UT. Secretary.
Cpl. Wesley Williams, 24, Albany, NY. Marine guard.

Eight U.S. servicemen from the all-volunteer Joint Special Operations Group were killed in the Great Salt Desert near Tabas, Iran, on April 25, 1980, in the aborted attempt to rescue the American hostages:

Capt. Richard L. Bakke, 34, Long Beach, CA. Air Force.
Sgt. John D. Harvey, 21, Roanoke, VA. Marine Corps.
Cpl. George N. Holmes, Jr., 22, Pine Bluff, AR. Marine Corps.
Staff Sgt. Dewey L. Johnson, 32, Jacksonville, NC. Marine Corps.
Capt. Harold L. Lewis, 35, Mansfield, CT. Air Force.
Tech. Sgt. Joel C. Mayo, 34, Bonifay, FL. Air Force.
Capt. Lynn D. McIntosh, 33, Valdosta, GA. Air Force.
Capt. Charles T. McMillan II, 28, Corrytown, TN. Air Force.

This list was adapted from information in Free At Last by Doyle McManus.

The Hostages Finally Arrive Home in the United States!

The following is an excerpt from the Tuscon Weekly

“Hostages Reveal Iran Torture.

“The emancipated hostages told of beatings and other atrocities at the hands of the Iranian captors today as they telephoned their loved ones back home.

“One said … he was told by Iranian interrogators … that his mother had died. He didn’t learn that she was still alive until the freed captives reached Germany this morning.

“As they began a stay of several days at a U.S. military hospital in Wiesbaden, Germany, most of the 52 hostages talked with their families for the first time in 445 days. …

“Col. Leland Holland, 53, security chief of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran … ‘spent a month in what he called the
“dungeon” and said his captors were S.O.B.s,’ said the colonel’s mother. ‘He said his house was ransacked and
everything taken, including his watch and rings. They took all the furniture and clothes.’

“A spokesman for the family (of Duane ‘Sam’ Gillette) said: ‘His treatment was at times disgusting. I think President
Reagan was polite when he termed the Iranians barbarians. We know that his letters were covering up what the real
situation was. There was no physical torture, but there was psychological pressure. The food wasn’t good and the
conditions were very poor.’

“And the family of Malcolm Kalp said … ‘He told us he was beaten by them and placed in solitary confinement because of his escape attempts.’ He served from 150 to 170 days in solitary. …

“Returnee David Roeder, 40, of Washington, D.C., said, ‘I’ve never been so proud to be an American in all my life.’ …
“Outside the hospital … the crowd … broke into a chant of ‘U.S.A., U.S.A.’ Only 12 hours and nine minutes earlier, the two women and 50 men hostages flew out of Iran on an Algerian jet to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards’ jeers of ‘Down with America’ and ‘Down with Reagan.’ … “

 

Click here to go to the original web site of this next article

http://www.gazetteonline.com/news/9903/mar076.htm

Iowan drew on faith during hostage ordeal

Posted March 13, 1999

By James Q. Lynch

Gazette Northeast Iowa Bureau

WAVERLY — The 444 days she spent as a hostage in Iran may define Kathryn Koob in the eyes of others, but she doesn’t think of the ordeal often.

“I think about it when I’m asked,” she said at a press conference Friday at Wartburg College. “It’s a part of my life.”

She has been able to move on from the hostage experience that began almost 20 years ago because her faith allowed her to cope with the situation at the time, Koob said. Isolated from the 50 other hostages, she drew on the faith she learned growing up in an “orthodox Lutheran” household in Eastern Iowa.

“Without that faith, I don’t know what I would have done,” Koob said. “It never occurred to me not to use that faith, the strength that I had been told would be there when I needed it.”

She accepted her captivity as a challenge, “something I could not change, but had to learn to live with.”

“I didn’t like it, but told myself that with the help of God I’ll get past it,” she said.

As a result, Koob said, she was able to leave her anger behind in Iran along with her ice skates and some of her favorite recordings.

In spite of her experience there, Koob is encouraged by diplomatic efforts to re-establish links between Iran and the West.

Apart from a visit to the United Nations last year, Iranian President Mohammad Khatami’s visit to Italy this week was the first an Iranian leader has made to a Western nation since the 1979 Islamic revolution installed the rule of the clergy in the country.

Student leaders of that revolution took control of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in November 1979 and held Koob and her colleagues hostage.

“I had hoped we could recognize our differences even sooner,” she said about the diplomatic efforts. “But perhaps slower is better.

“However angry we might be about the hostage crisis, Iran is a country full of wonderful people, intellect and culture, and should be a part of the world community,” Koob added.

Terrorists still take hostages, but Koob came to Wartburg in Waverly, where she now lives, to talk about other forms of terrorism. She spoke at her alma mater on “Terrorism: Antecedents and Present Action.”

“What we’re looking at now is narco-terrorism, bio-terrorism, cyber-terrorism and nuclear terrorism,” she said. “In these cases, the threat is the terror.

“There is much more reason to be worried about bio-terrorism than even a small group of terrorists with a bomb,” she said. “The threat is much, much larger.”

She called on federal, state and local governments to prepare responses to these new forms of terrorism. The same resources and effort applied to studying nuclear war scenarios must be applied to preparing to respond to the new threats of terrorism, she said.

 

http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/Content/1999/10/18/news/zandy.html

The Daily Princetonian

Monday, October 18, 1999

Founded 1879 – Online since 1997 Kennedy ’52 relates details of months as hostage in Iran

By KATY ZANDY

Imagine spending 444 days wondering every waking moment whether or not you would live another hour. For Moorhead Kennedy ’52, this nightmarish scenario became a reality in 1979.

Kennedy spoke last night about his experience as a U.S. embassy employee during the Iran hostage crisis as a part of the ’02-’52 lecture series.

In the speech, he described the final days before a group of young Iranians stormed the embassy compound in Tehran, his days of captivity and a few of his thoughts in hindsight.

Kennedy was introduced to an audience of about 90 in the Rockefeller College common room by his classmate, Hal Saunders ’52, who was assistant secretary of state at the time of the crisis. Kennedy’s wife, Louisa Kennedy, also added her perspective on the experience.

Cut off Saunders described hearing the final words in Washington from embassy officials before contact was cut off – “we’re going down now” – and defended the decision to not pull personnel out of Iran before the crisis.

Following him, Kennedy said, “The decisions that Hal and his superiors made were not all perfect, but they worked, and the proof is that you now have a speaker.”

Kennedy related the apprehension that he felt in the days before the crisis, as the embassy began to realize that a serious conflict was almost upon them.

In particular, Kennedy recalled the prediction he heard just before the crisis from a Marine guard at the embassy. “Man, we’re going to have an Alamo,” the soldier said.

Kennedy went on to describe the denial that he experienced during the early stages of being a hostage. He slept in one bed with two other men, wearing his suit jacket and tie because he believed that he would be released any minute.

His wife echoed his initial feeling of denial. “In any crisis, you’re going to find a moment where you accept it. If you’re wise, you find ways to normalize it. This took time for the families to get used to,” she said.

In reaction to the crisis, she volunteered for the State Department and formed the Family Liaison Action Group, which raised money for medical and psychiatric help for the families of the hostages.

After Kennedy spoke about her experience during the crisis, her husband finished the story of his captivity – replete with its moments of terror.

“When you are overcome with fear, your legs begin to twitch,” he said. “You live on every thread of evidence, often wrong, and often reaching the worst conclusion.”

At the beginning of his captivity, Kennedy said he was held in the American embassy in Tehran. However, after President Jimmy Carter ordered a helicopter rescue that ended in failure, the hostages were spread out over the country.

There was a long period of waiting after the rescue attempt where he was moved frequently, but saw little progress toward a resolution. Finally, a guard walked into Kennedy’s room and said, “OK, let’s go.”

“Our hearts stopped,” Kennedy recalled. “We said, ‘Go where?’ And he said, ‘Home.’ “

 

This is a photo of what the Iranians did to the dead Americans who took part in the rescue attempt. This is a shot of an Iranian man taking his knife to one of the bodies. He eventually took off the head of the dead American. This is a barbaric act, but it is not as crude as the next photo, taken of someone who is supposed to represent the religion of Islam.

This is a photo of someone who was supposed to be a holy man in Islam. His name is Ayatollah Kalkali. He literally spit on the bodies of our Marines and Airmen that died in Desert One in the attempt. I consider him a criminal, too.

Click on the link to proceed to the original web site for the next article

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/1998/dom/980803/world.can_iran_be_forgiv10.html

 

 

 

CAN IRAN BE FORGIVEN?

A dramatic meeting between a former American hostage and one of his captors could be a powerful symbol of reconciliation

By SCOTT MACLEOD

It has been almost 19 years, but the images from Tehran are forever burned into the American psyche. The sudden assault on the U.S. embassy by Iranian students. The angry street mobs shouting “Death to America!” The parades of helpless, blindfolded hostages. Back home, outraged Americans could only imagine the horrors that the 52 prisoners faced during their 444 days of captivity. Barry Rosen did not have to imagine. He was there. As the embassy’s press officer in 1979, he was not only taken hostage at gunpoint but also accused of leading a spy ring and subjected to a mock trial. His punishment included months in a barren prison cell, where an always burning light bulb and constant stress made it almost impossible for him to sleep.

The American government has never forgiven Iran for what happened, so why should the hostages? But rather than carry resentment around for the rest of his life, Rosen has decided to make a remarkable gesture of reconciliation. This Friday at a conference in a U.N. building in Paris, he will come face to face with Abbas Abdi, one of the dozen student leaders who planned and directed the hostage taking. As the dramatic meeting unfolds, the former hostage and his former captor will give talks on U.S.-Iranian relations, sit down for meals together and probably even shake hands. That powerful image of healing is sure to be criticized by hard-liners in Iran and by many Americans, perhaps including other ex-hostages. Both men are attending as private citizens and do not represent their governments or any groups.

In interviews conducted by TIME with Rosen in New York City and Abdi in Tehran, they said they were encouraged to meet after Iranian President Mohammed Khatami’s call last January–quickly taken up by President Clinton–for cultural exchanges aimed at bringing down the “wall of mistrust” between their two nations. The idea for the meeting originated with Iranian moderates who were friends of Abdi’s. They approached a Cyprus-based human-rights group called the Center for World Dialogue, which organized the conference and invited Rosen. Although the two men are still poles apart in their thinking, they welcomed the chance to put the past behind them and help their countries build fresh ties. “I am not naive about Iran, but I think it is important to understand one another’s feelings,” says Rosen, 54, director of public affairs for Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York City. “I don’t have to forgive and forget. But we are trying to restart this relationship, and this is an important beginning.” Agrees Abdi, 42, a columnist for Salam, a Tehran newspaper: “The aim is to contribute to a better understanding and promote a normalization of relations.” That is easier said than done.
Plans for a London meeting were aborted when British authorities refused Abdi a visa. He has had to make his preparations in utmost secrecy lest Iran’s still powerful hard-liners detain him before his departure for France. Once a fervent supporter of Iran’s clerical regime, Abdi was arrested in 1993 and spent nearly a year in prison for criticizing the mullahs’ aversion to democracy. Rosen has had to overcome his own concerns. Will a public reconciliation with Abdi create a backlash in Iran against the rapprochement that Rosen deeply hopes for? Or will Abdi somehow publicly embarrass him? While Abdi is ready to shake hands, Rosen is reluctant to commit himself until the moment comes. He hopes, though, that his meeting with Abdi will help “close the circle, close that 444 days.” That would bring Rosen closer to a country he loved–and still loves, despite his hostage ordeal.

He first went to Iran as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1967 before taking up graduate studies in Iranian culture at Columbia University three years later. He became U.S. embassy press attache in Tehran in 1978, at the height of the revolution that overthrew the Shah. And he was in the embassy on Nov. 4, 1979, when bearded militants poured over the compound’s walls and began the 15-month hostage crisis.
Among those militants was Abdi. In an interview at his spare Tehran office a few blocks from the old U.S. embassy–now a school for the Revolutionary Guards–the Iranian provided rare insight into the takeover and his role in it. The students’ aim was to force the U.S. government to extradite the deposed Shah. They genuinely feared, Abdi insists, that the Shah’s arrival in New York City in 1979 for medical treatment was part of a U.S. plot to restore him to power, as was done by a CIA-engineered coup d’etat in 1953. Abdi denies that Ayatullah Khomeini ordered the embassy seizure or knew about it beforehand. “The way we saw it, the Imam would either approve of the action afterward or disapprove of it, in which case we would have left the embassy,” says Abdi. At 7 a.m. on takeover day, Abdi held a secret meeting with 130 students he had summoned to a hall at Tehran Polytechnic University, where he was leader of the Organization of Islamic Students. He described the takeover plans, gave out assignments and ID badges and told the students to head, one by one, to the embassy, where they would meet up with recruits from other universities. As hundreds thronged into the compound, Abdi’s task was to seize the embassy’s visa offices while others handled the main building and the ambassador’s residence. According to Abdi, the restraint shown by U.S. Marine guards may have averted a bloodbath. Had they shot and killed any of the students, he says, he and other leaders planned to depart and leave the compound to be engulfed by the mob.

Abdi says he never guarded the hostages and has no recollection of meeting Rosen personally. The Iranian still justifies taking the prisoners as a defense against a potential U.S.-backed coup d’etat, holds American support for a despotic ruler partly responsible for provoking the students and tends to downplay the ill treatment of the hostages. However, Abdi echoes the conciliatory words spoken by President Khatami. “No one likes hurting others,” Abdi says. “The Iranians regret what the hostages and their relatives endured.” He adds that he can understand why Americans felt that hostage taking was wrong.

Rosen flatly rejects the notion that the students’ ends justified the means: “It is very dangerous when you cross that moral line.” But he sympathizes with Iranian complaints about U.S. support of the Shah’s repressive regime. “There is a moral and ethical question that Americans have to face up to,” Rosen says. “The Shah served the purpose of stability in the region. But we should have been much more aware of and sensitive to what was going on inside Iran, whether it was human-rights violations or lack of political growth.” If that sort of exchange is heard this week in Paris, conference director Eric Rouleau will judge the gathering a success. “We thought this meeting could contribute to a better understanding,” says Rouleau, who witnessed the hostage crisis firsthand as a correspondent for the French daily Le Monde. “There are people in both countries who would like to turn a page of history, a page that was very painful.” Rosen and Abdi may already have begun writing the next chapter.

–With reporting
by Henry Schuster/CNN web site address :
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/1998/dom/980803/world.can_iran_be_forgiv10.htm l

 

 

Click on the link to the original web site for the next article.

http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/europe/9807/31/france.hostage/index.html

Former U.S. hostage meets his Iranian captor

Men shake hands, look to future

July 31, 1998
Web posted at: 11:56 p.m. EDT (2356 GMT)

In this story:

No apologies
Protesters disrupt meeting
Related stories and sites

PARIS (CNN) — Almost 20 years after an Islamic revolution overthrew the U.S.-backed government in Iran, a former U.S. Embassy hostage met face-to-face with one of his Iranian captors.

From 1979 to 1981, Barry Rosen and 51 other U.S. citizens were held captive for 444 days by Iranian militant students upset over the U.S. decision to allow deposed Iranian leader Shah Mohamed Reza Pahlavi, who had cancer and other ailments, to enter the United States for medical treatment.

Other embassy occupants captured when the students stormed the building were released not long after the takeover.

On Friday, Rosen shook hands with Abbas Abdi, who helped organize the embassy seizure. Their meeting was organized by the Cyprus-based Center for World Dialogue as part of a three-hour meeting on U.S.-Iranian relations. Rosen, 54, said the decision to meet with his former captor was one of the toughest he ever made.

“But this platform is not for remembering only my pain or blows to American honor,” he said. “Iranians also suffered deeply.”

No apologies

Abdi said the students thought the takeover on November 4, 1979, would last no more than a week. The hostages were freed on January 21, 1981. He called the occupation “the most nonviolent possible measure taken … in response to what the United States had done.”

Abdi, 42, now a senior editor at the previously hard-line newspaper Salaam, acknowledged that he was among those who planned the event.

“I could be taken hostage for 444 days,” Abdi said. “This I could overlook. “But taking a nation hostage for 25 years,” he said, “needs more apologies.”

The hostage crisis was but “a row of bricks in this tall wall (of mistrust),” Abdi said. He said the wall’s foundation was laid in 1953, with the U.S.-backed coup that toppled President Mohamed Mossaddegh and returned the shah to the Peacock Throne. Rosen disagreed.

“No matter how they rationalize, however, they must face up to the wrong and admit, if only to themselves, that it was unjustified,” he said.

In the end, no apologies were given, but the men shook hands and agreed to look toward the future.

“I’m here with Mr. Abdi, because I want to see Americans and Iranians turn that difficult corner away from mutual demonizing,” Rosen said.

“The past cannot be altered,” said Abdi. “Instead, we must focus on the years ahead and endeavor to build a better future,” he said.

Protesters disrupt meeting

The hostage crisis remains a sensitive issue, even among Iranians. The start of the session was interrupted by two Iranian exiles who denounced Abdi as a “mass murderer” and a “terrorist.” Both men were forcibly removed from the hall.

Official Iranian attitudes toward the United States have softened somewhat since the election last year of Iranian President Mohammad Khatami.

Despite opposition from hard-liners in Tehran, Khatami has called for a “crack in the wall of mistrust” between both countries.

There was no immediate official response from Iran about Friday’s meeting. However, the U.S. State Department called the encounter “a positive development in the people-to- people dialogue that both nations support.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

  ————————————————————————————————————————-

October 26, 2004
Q&A: Kevin Hermening on the Iran Hostage Crisis
Nov. 4 will mark the 25th anniversary of the start of the Iran Hostage Crisis – a day when Iranian extremists and militants seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and captured several dozen U.S. diplomats, servicemen and civilians and began a 444-day siege that captivated Americans and the world.

During that 444 days, Walter Cronkite closed each of his broadcasts by counting the number of days the Iranians – led by extremist religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini – held U.S. citizens in violation of international law. Ted Koppel also began a nightly broadcast, then called “America Held Hostage,” which later transformed into “Nightline.” Eight U.S. servicemen died in an aborted rescue attempt, Operation Eagle Claw, that ended unsuccessfully in a fiery crash in the Iranian desert.

The crisis, many believe, paralyzed the administration of President Jimmy Carter and led to his defeat at the hands of Ronald Reagan in 1980. The hostages were finally released on the day Reagan was inaugurated.

Command Post contributor Ed Moltzen interviewed the youngest of the 52 hostages who had been held for that period, Kevin Hermening, who at the time was a 20-year old Marine assigned to guard the Tehran embassy. Since 1981, Hermening has become active civically in Wisconsin, becoming a school board and twice running unsuccessfully for U.S. Congress as a Republican.

CP: Does it seem like 25 years ago?

Hermening: From my perspective, there is so much that has occurred in my life since then. It rarely is given a second thought by me. It doesn’t mean that it’s ignored – especially in the context of current events. Obviously there are a lot of current events that have affected the way that our country has – and in many aspects hasn’t – dealt with the threat of state-sponsored terrorism.

CP: What are your most vivid memories of your time being held against your will by the Iranian students?

Hermening: Probably the uncertainty of knowing how it would all end, or if it would come to an end. There was so much emotion and drama and trauma during that time. Of course, the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan, the Iraq-Iran war began. There was the failed attempt to rescue us, resulting in the deaths of eight men who perished in the Iranian desert.

CP: Being a marine, did it make it more difficult for you?

Hermening: There were many aspects of it – including being young – that were involved. There was an element of adventure and excitement surrounding it. It doesn’t mean we were any less fearful. But when you’re 20 years old and you’ve been through military training you kind of feel invincible. How quickly that false image is shattered. Bravado is important, but only if it doesn’t result in your getting yourself foolishly killed. I tried to escape once – I never really had an opportunity later – that resulted in 43 days in solitary confinement.

CP: Hostage and then-CIA agent William Daugherty wrote a book

two years ago in which he describes 444 days of mostly solitary confinement, and suggested he and the other military personnel taken hostage had it worse out of any Americans. Were you mistreated?

Hermening: After the failed escape attempt by a few of us, about a week later they had a mock execution that occurred in which they stormed into our rooms in the middle of the night, strip searched us and had us standing out in the hallway. Some of the most radical elements ran up and down in the hallway – we were spread eagle – and they were shouting out execution commands at the top of their lungs.

Meanwhile, others were in our rooms searching out for anything we may have had, including weapons. Although we know now anything can be a weapon.

CP: How did you plan the escape?

Hermening: Joe Subic, Steven Lauterbach and I – in my case, I never made it out of the room. They had taken us to a different building for showers. They put me into the only room in the ambassador’s residence that was a safe-room….I never made it out of the room. They immediately handcuffed me and put me into another room, in which I was put into solitary. Five feet by ten feet.*

CP: Were you able to form a bond, or friendships, with any of the other U.S. diplomats and civilians that lasts today?

Hermening: Alan Golancinksi was one. Don Cooke and I, we kind of became friends for the short time we were together. I was roommates with Alan right after I got out of solitary. That was a real relief to me to get out of solitary confinement. Some of the other guys in Vietnam who were in POW camps for seven years – my experience pales in comparison. It doesn’t mean it was easy, but I would never try to suggest our (situations) were similar.

CP: You’ve spoken of your admiration for Ronald Reagan and your opportunities to meet him. But some hostages, in returning from Iran, have said they were measurably cooler toward President Carter – whom you also met after you were freed. What’s your assessment of Carter?

Hermening: I would describe it that way, too. But for me, it was in my pre-political days…I would describe it – there was a cool reception given to him. For me, I would describe it as being honored to meet a president. I do think that President Carter is one of our best ex-presidents, though I would describe his presidency as a failed presidency. I fail, personally, to see the merits of putting the interests of 52 individuals ahead of the nation’s national security. I really do believe our situation was one of the first terrorist acts in a series that have victimized Americans worldwide. I would further say that when President Carter agreed to return $9 billion of frozen Iranian assets to the terrorist government under the Ayatollah Khomeini, as Charles Scott said, Iran walked away with no cost in blood or treasure. In essence, the terrorist organizations, those who put a face on terrorism – al Qaeda, Hamas and others – they get their support from governments. By not extracting a penalty, or anything punitive, I think it simply encouraged more acts against Americans.

CP: Looking at Iran today, some of the students who took over the U.S. embassy are now in positions of power, including Tehran Mary – who is an Iranian vice president – and one of the leaders who the New York Times has even described as a reformer…

Hermening: I just read recently that some are in the government, some are in the opposition – today – and some are in prison. That’s, in my opinion, what you get when you look at a group of anarchists which is really what terrorism is. Anarchy.

CP: Many of the same people who took you hostage are now seeking to expand a nuclear program for Iran. Is this something that angers you? What are your thoughts?

Hermening: That should scare the heck out of every American and anybody in the West and, I would submit, their Muslim neighbors. The other thing lost in the broader context is, that Iranians are not Arabs. Except or Israel and Iran, every other country over there is Arab or Arabic. Iranians are Aryans. Despite their common interest in a religious background, Islam, they do not share a cultural connection. Hence the acrimonious relationship between Iraq and Iran and some of their neighbors to the east. I was one of the few people I know, I think, who understood why (Gen. Norman) Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell decided not to take out Saddam in 1991. We weren’t prepared to deal with, as a country, militarily or diplomatically, creating a vacuum in Iraq where Syria and Iran could consumer that country. And with all the difficulty this President Bush has had in winning the peace, at least he is willing to fortify the forces. There are 16,000 forces whose job is to protect the oil fields from sabotage. I personally don’t see that as a bad thing.

CP: Do you believe there are enough pragmatists in Iran to ever see a successful reform movement?

Hermening: I think there are some forces over there that are interested in breaking the stronghold the mullahs have on their country. I don’t know. They’ve had, I believe, about two dozen government buildings burned by government protesters in the last two months.

CP: Anyone under the age of 25 – including what could be millions of voters – weren’t even born yet when you were held captive. If you could have them understand one thing about that time, what would it be?

Hermening: I think it would have to include what I consider to be a reality: that there are individuals and entire governments who are so opposed to Western values and freedom that they are willing to use every means possible to bring about our destruction. Even to the point they are willing to support financially those who are willing to come into our own country to make us fearful and uncomfortable without our own borders.

CP: Do people still stop you, and ask questions about your experience?

Hermening: It’s become less and less, just by virtue of the fact that I am more active in other things. I’ve done a lot of public speaking. I speak on Veterans Days and Memorial Days in schools. I make civic appearances. The sad irony is that people care more about what we had to eat (while being held hostage) and whether I’ve had any nightmares since I got back – which I haven’t – than they do wondering how did this happen to begin with, and how can we protect Americans here and abroad in light of what they’re trying to do today?

CP: Yet at the same time, the same holds true in Iran: Anyone under the age of 25 doesn’t remember what happened back then – they weren’t yet born. How does this work in our favor?

Hermening: I think that there is some hope, because young people do not have a historical attachment to the Ayatollah Khomeini…

Once you open up the Freedom Genie, the Technology Genie – whether it’s satellite dishes, or the Internet, I think it’s next to impossible to put it back. And that’s why I personally hold out a great hope for many of these Middle Eastern nations to become more democratic. Even for China to try to contain what is likely to spread like wildefire – and that’s economic development and recognition of personal liberties and civil liberties – I don’t think you can permanently keep that down.

In Iran, it was a very strong sense that the United States was meddling in the internal affairs of their country. The mullahs were very fortunate. They almost had the perfect storm: the Shah was getting ill, President Carter being a particularly weak president not standing by our ally, and we left (the Shah) and all of his supporters out to dry. This is the big concern that somebody like myself would have in a change of the administration in Washington right now. – would be people like the president of Pakistan, who has really gone out on a limb at the risk of his own political survival (although he has the iron hand of military power), Musharraf is using (the military) to support the war on terror. If we have a total reversal of policy, what’s it going to mean for the folks who have gone out on a limb? Personally, I think it’s going to mean an even more unstable world over time.

I hate to sound like a partisan – even though I am – but I think in the big scheme of thigns I think it is more in our nation’s advantage to stand for something principled in a part of the world that only understands force and, I should say, respects strength.

CP: Is there any one solution for the U.S. to have a normal relationship with Iran?

Hermening: The problem is we are not in the cold war nay more. Countries such as France and Germany, and some of the more longstanding alliances, play less of an important role to our national security, and our way of life for that matter, than they once did. After all, 25 years ago and prior to that, most of our international trade and international exchange students came from largely western countries. Our economic interaction occurred mostly with Western nations. That’s because that’s where most of the wealth of the world was located…

Egypt and Pakistan play much more of a role to us today. They are the new France and Germany as an example – economically, politically, culturally perhaps not yet. I don’t think it’s a bad thing for us to have as an objective to spread freedom around the world.

Posted By Late Final at October 26, 2004 09:28 PM | TrackBack
http://www.command-post.org/oped/2_archives/016250.html
Ex-Hostages See Terror Roots in 1979 Iran

https://web.archive.org/web/20041104015212/http://www.command-post.org/oped/2_archives/016250.html

---

How One Marine Made it Through the Iran Hostage Crisis

June 4, 2024 DAV (Disabled American Veterans)

https://greatergood.com/blogs/news/marine-iran-hostage-crisis

The following story was submitted by DAV, an organization that aims to empower veterans by fighting for their interests on Capitol Hill, educating the public about the sacrifices and needs of veterans as they transition back to civilian life, and ensuring that they can access all benefits available to them. You can read more about them here.

Kevin Hermening was on his way to evening chow in 1978 when a giant banner inviting him to learn about the Marine Security Guard program caught his eye. The life-size cutouts of Marines in dress blue uniforms standing in front of the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal and on the Great Wall of China were enough to sell the young Marine on the special duty.

“One thing that the military does a great job of is recruiting,” he said. “It’s about the image, it’s about patriotism, and it’s about all the things that resonate with those of us who raise our right hand.”

 KEVIN HERMENING. PHOTO COURTESY OF DAV

But the Wisconsin native got more than he bargained for when the U.S. Embassy he was assigned to was overrun in 1979.

“That was the biggest group of people I had ever seen in my life descending toward me,” recalled Hermening, a member of DAV Chapter 64 in Wittenberg, Wisconsin. “And I made a beeline for the front door of the main embassy building.”

That was November 4, 1979, when 66 Americans were initially taken hostage. Hermening and 51 others would spend 444 days as prisoners during the Iran hostage crisis, a major international calamity that shattered U.S.-Iran relations and forever changed Hermening’s life.

 IRANIAN STUDENTS COME UP TO U.S. EMBASSY IN TEHRAN. PHOTO COURTESY OF DAV

The seizing of the embassy in Tehran sent shock waves down the spines of Americans everywhere.

Hermening was selected for Marine Security Guard training in mid-1979 and, initially, was assigned to West Germany. However, his dreams of skiing the Alps and driving at lightning-fast speeds on the Autobahn were trounced as the Marine command switched his assignment to Iran.

For the first few months, Hermening loved it there. He dedicated time to studying Farsi, the official language of Iran, and took opportunities to visit the shopping district in the city. Two weeks later, however, the embassy was overrun.

---

SEND FOOD AND COMFORT TO UNHOUSED VETERANS

---

The attack occurred on a cool, drizzly Sunday morning. Hermening was in the main embassy planning a ball for the Marine Corps birthday, just six days away. That’s when he caught wind of a demonstration at the front gate.

“Looking out onto the front grounds, I saw hundreds of Iranians already gathering and thousands more smashing through and eventually opening the front gate,” he said.

The Americans used tear gas to delay the entry for as long as possible.

For over a year, Hermening was at the mercy of his captors. They would wake Americans in the middle of the night, place an unloaded gun to their heads and pull the trigger in a mock execution. Army Col. Charles Scott, chief of the Defense Liaison Office at the embassy, was beaten severely during an interrogation, and three of his teeth were broken off at the gum line — injuries that went untreated until after they were released.

 RETURN OF THE HOSTAGES. PHOTO COURTESY OF DAV

Bill Keough’s health visibly declined while in captivity. The then-superintendent of the American International School in Islamabad, Pakistan, was visiting Tehran to obtain student records when the embassy was seized. A hulking man at 6 feet 9 inches tall, Keough lost 80 pounds before being released. He died in 1985 from Lou Gehrig’s disease.

“We begged the guards all the time as we saw Bill’s health starting to deteriorate,” recalled Hermening. “‘Please bring him to a doctor, bring a doctor in to see him, anything.’ And they never did.”

“I’m not saying he would’ve survived [after being released], but frankly, he never had a chance,” he added.

With the crisis stretching into its sixth month, a military attempt to rescue the hostages ended in tragedy. On April 24, 1980, the ill-fated special operations mission saw three of the eight helicopters fail, prompting President Jimmy Carter to cancel the mission. That’s when an American helicopter collided with a C-130, killing eight service members and injuring five. The next day, Carter took full responsibility.

“Our rescue team knew, and I knew, that the operation was certain to be difficult and it was certain to be dangerous,” Carter said in an address to the nation. “We were all convinced that if and when the rescue operation had been commenced that it had an excellent chance of success.”

“They were the real heroes in the hostage crisis,” said Hermening. “The rest of us were just survivors. We were the ones who got to come home.”

 HERMENING WITH PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER AND WALTER MONDALE. PHOTO COURTESY OF DAV

All of the hostages were released the day President Ronald Reagan was inaugurated. At the same time, the U.S. unfroze $8 billion in Iranian assets. After 444 arduous days, Hermening and the others were finally freed.

Ironically, Hermening was initially awarded the Defense Meritorious Service Medal, the nation’s highest peacetime military decoration. However, in 2001, he received the Prisoner of War Medal.

“Our nation must ensure we properly recognize and honor the service and sacrifice of veterans like Kevin,” said DAV National Commander Nancy Espinosa. “Although his time in captivity is considered peacetime, the experience he and others went through is anything but. We at DAV are proud to have Kevin within our ranks.”

More than four decades later, Hermening reflects on his catharsis when speaking about his experience.

“I managed to get all the bad stuff out of my system,” he said. “And so that’s a big part of the reason why I adjusted fairly well.”

This story was shared by DAV, an organization working to empower veterans and ensure they lead a high-quality life with respect and dignity. Read more about them here!

Send food and comfort to unhoused veterans!

As Veterans Day approaches, nearly 40,000 veterans experiencing homelessness – and their pets – lack the essentials, including supplies needed to keep warm.

Homeless shelters often don’t allow pets, so veterans with a dog or cat may have to choose between them and a roof over their heads.

We’re distributing kits to bring comfort and the necessities to these veterans, and their pets.

Click to help an unhoused veteran!

Help HereDAV (Disabled American Veterans)

DAV empowers veterans to lead high-quality lives with respect and dignity. It is dedicated to a single purpose: keeping our promise to America’s veterans. DAV does this by ensuring that veterans and their families can access the full range of benefits available to them, fighting for the interests of America’s injured heroes on Capitol Hill, providing employment resources to veterans and their families, and educating the public about the great sacrifices and needs of veterans transitioning back to civilian life. DAV, a nonprofit organization with more than 1 million members, was founded in 1920 and chartered by the U.S. Congress in 1932. Learn more at DAV.org.

 Read more articles by DAV (Disabled American Veterans).

---

A Quarter-Century Later, U.S. Hostages See Beginnings of Modern Terrorism in 1979 Iran

Iranians burn a U.S. flag outside of the former U.S. Embassy in a gathering marking the 25th anniversary of the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, on Wednesday, Nov. 3, 2004.Thousands of Iranian students gathered outside the former American embassy in Tehran on Wednesday to mark the 25th anniversary of the 1979 storming which led to the year-long “hostage crisis” between Iran and the United States.(AP Photo/Hasan Sarbakhshian)

McLEAN, Va. Nov 3, 2004 — In the minds of many, terrorists struck their first blow against the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. But others look back exactly a quarter-century ago, on Nov. 4, 1979, when 66 Americans were taken hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Iran.
Most remained in captivity for 444 days. Today, reflecting on their experiences through the prism of 9-11, the war in Iraq and two decades of tumultuous relations with the Middle East, many say the United States was too late to recognize that a new era had begun.

“The day they took us is the day they should have started the war on terrorism,” said Rodney “Rocky” Sickmann, 47, of St. Louis County, Mo., an embassy security guard.

Many agree that terrorists were emboldened by their success in the Iran hostage crisis none of the hostages were killed, but the U.S. government agreed to release $8 billion in frozen Iranian assets and see the kidnappings and beheadings in Iraq as a consequence.

“Given the terrorist modus operandi nowadays, we probably wouldn’t come out alive. They weren’t as bold then. They had a latent fear of the United States,” said Chuck Scott, 72, of Jonesboro, Ga., a former Green Beret in Vietnam who was an Army colonel when he was taken hostage.

Steven Kirtley, 47, of McLean, who was a Marine security guard at the embassy, said that while he’s grateful everybody survived, he’s also angry about what he sees as America’s largely ineffectual response to the hostage-takers. He called the episode “a stepping stone to get that terrorist movement going. It was such a terrible loss of face … such a show of weakness that I still don’t think we’ve recovered.”

Fifty-two of the hostages were held for the entire 444 days. Of those, 11 have since died.

Among the rest, memories of that time have resurfaced with the kidnappings and beheadings of Americans in Iraq.

“When I saw them there blindfolded with the guys with the ski masks on I had gone through those things in Iran,” said Rick Kupke, 57, of Rensselaer, Ind. “I can tell exactly what they felt and the fear that’s going through them.”

William Blackburn Royer Jr., 73, of Katy, Texas, remembers being jolted awake by the screams of his captors, “herded like cattle” into another room, stripped naked and forced up against a wall in front of a firing squad.

“The whole thing was a shock to the system my legs were shaking from the insecurity of the situation,” he said. “It was intended as a good psychological upheaval.”

Still, he was not sure if he would be killed.

“I knew this was a political thing,” he said. “Ultimately, I think I thought that we were too valuable to be disposed of completely. So I kept the faith in that respect. (But) I had my doubts at a couple points.”

Paul Needham said he remembers reciting the 23rd Psalm as he was lined up for a firing squad. He said he reflects on his captivity every day.

“It definitely changed me,” said Needham, 53, of Oakton, Va., a professor at the National Defense University. “I took a look at getting my priorities in life in order God and family and country, rather than work, work and work.”

While nearly all the hostages said they feared for their lives at some point, many said their memories center on the tedium. Most hostages were largely isolated, and many said they were allowed outside for exercise less than once a month.

During a six-week stint in solitary confinement, Gary Earl Lee said he “made friends” with ants and a salamander that inhabited his room. He would tease the ants with a pistachio nut, letting them almost reach it before nudging it farther away.

“At least they were something better than the guards,” said Lee, a retiree living in south Texas.

L. Bruce Laingen, of Bethesda, the embassy’s charge d’affaires, was the highest ranking American taken hostage. He said it doesn’t make sense that 25 years later the United States has little dialogue with Iran, considering the large American stake in the Middle East.

He mainly faulted Iranian leaders for pursuing hostile policies such as developing nuclear technology and continuing to threaten Israel. He has lingering bitterness for the men and women who took him hostage.

But he doesn’t blame the Iranian people, who he said were welcoming.

“We need to understand Iran, and Iran needs to seek to understand us,” he said.

Scott said he’s still frustrated that the U.S. government has never held Iran accountable for taking the hostages.

“I agree with the war on terrorism, but the war on terror by the current administration has been a very selective war. So far we’ve gone after the really easy targets,” said Scott, who opposed going into Iraq but says America must now remain committed to finishing the job there.

Kirtley, on the other hand, believes America is on the right track with the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“It’s the right approach,” he said. “That culture responds more to strength than to a negotiated response.”

As for the anniversary, many said they prefer to remember another day.

“We celebrate Jan. 20, the anniversary of our release,” Laingen said. “That’s a good day. Nov. 4 is the day the roof fell in.”
Associated Press writers Kristen Gelineau in Richmond, Va.; Steve Manning in College Park, Md.; Russ Bynum in Savannah, Ga.; Carol Druga in Indianapolis and Betsy Taylor in St. Louis contributed to this report.

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=223814&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312

https://web.archive.org/web/20041210060459/http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=223814&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312

---

Former Iranian hostage meets with area students

Discusses experiences and repercussuions
Karima Tawfik, Managing Health Editor
11/8/2004

Area high-school students met with Bruce Laingen, former U.S. ambassador to
Iran and hostage during the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979.

(photos from event unavailable)

Laingen, currently President of the American Academy of Diplomacy, talked with a
dozen students, three of them Blazers, at the Dirksen Senate office building on
Thursday, November 4, the 25th anniversary of the crisis. He discussed his
experiences as a hostage and the current U.S. relations with Iran.

In response to interview questions, Laingen stated that the act of taking political prisons is “abominable.” “Hostage taking is a fundamental violation of human rights,” he said. “The government endorsed the action of Iranian students who had taken us hostage to use us as pawns for their political gains.” Despite the actions of the Iranian government, Laingen said that the U.S. should be communicating with Iran. “For 25 years we have not talked officially with that consequential region,” he said.

Laingen was serving as chargé d’affaires of the American Embassay in Iran when
he became one of 53 Americans captured and held in solitary confinement between November 1979 and January 1981.

He describes his experience as a “debilitating experience.” “You can do nothing
but look at a bulb hanging from your ceiling,” he said. Laingen and his colleagues were blindfolded when outside of their cells and were threatened by “mock executions,” where Iranian militants pressed guns to their heads.

The U.S. embassy was seized by Iranian students during the overthrow of the
American-backed shah regime that had been installed in Iran in the 1950s.
Laingen said Iran’s anger toward American support for the shah prompted the
hostage crisis.

While Laingen said that Iranian actions against him and his colleagues were
horrific, he criticized the Bush administration’s rhetoric to describe countries such as Iran and Iraq. “There’s no real axis of evil,” he said. After the overthrow, Ayatollah Khomeini gained power forming a theocratic government.

Laigen stressed the rich history and culture of the people of Iran, stating that the Khomeini regime was “an aberration” of Iran’s own national and Muslim traditions. He spoke about U.S. misunderstandings of Iranian culture. “The American public broadly doesn’t understand the role that the Islamic religion plays in the world out there,” he said.

http://silverchips.mbhs.edu/inside.php?sid=4238

---

The Iran Hostage Crisis — Part I

The Iran Hostage Crisis — Part I

A Moment in U.S. Diplomatic HistoryHostageMiddle EastTerrorism2

November 4, 1979 – Radical Iranian students take over the U.S. embassy in Tehran and hold 52 Americans hostage. The embassy had been seized in February of that year, shortly after the Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile in Paris, but that was resolved quickly; few suspected that this diplomatic crisis would end up lasting 444 days and cost the lives of eight soldiers who died during the ill-fated Operation Eagle Claw rescue attempt on April 24, 1980.

Bruce Laingen was Charge d’affaires of the embassy and was one of three people who spent most of that time held hostage at the Foreign Ministry. In this interview, conducted by Charles Stuart Kennedy starting in January 1993, he discusses the run-up to the takeover, his stay at the Ministry, the “Canadian caper,” which became the inspiration for the movie Argo, and the negotiations which led to their eventual release.

His wife Penne’s experiences from Washington can be read here.  To see Part II, go here. To see a video interview, go to our sister site, usdiplomacy.org.  Read also John Limbert’s experience as a hostage in the U.S. embassy and Kathleen Stafford’s account as a “house guest” of the Canadians, the inspiration for the movie Argo.

Prelude to the Takeover

LAINGEN:  Our big concern was a very large demonstration planned for support of the revolution on November 1, three days before the embassy was overrun. That demonstration was originally scheduled to take place around the walls of the embassy and in the immediate environs of where we were.

At the last minute, indeed the night before on October 31, the word was sent around that the Ayatollah had directed that the revolutionary demonstration take place in another area further from the embassy. The next morning, the bulk of the demonstrators did go to that other destination, but somewhere between one and two thousand demonstrators nonetheless came to the embassy compound that morning and spent the day marching back and forth around the walls. We anticipated some of that, to the point where we had added security and the Marines were in sort of battle formation that morning.

I recall, myself, going out to the gates of the embassy to look around that morning and at one point having the chief of police come rushing up in his jeep to take a look at the situation and assure me through the gates that things were under control, that I need not be concerned about any particular danger.

They were noisy during the day. A lot of graffiti was put on the walls, on the outside. There were some tense moments late in the day, when some of the more determined demonstrations were determined to keep it up and put some banners on the outside of our main gates, denouncing us and putting up pictures of the Ayatollah. It caused us a rather difficult stretch late that evening, requiring our security officers, particularly Alan Golacinski, to spend some very tense moments out there. We were finally able to resolve it.

Q: What type of thing are you talking about?

LAINGEN: More than I knew at the time. We were demanding that the posters be taken down, that the Ayatollah’s picture be taken off the gates, and that sort of thing. At one point, apparently one of the security officers or one of the Marines may have ripped one of the posters down from the inside and taken it. That caused some of the demonstrators to demand that it be returned undamaged. Eventually we did turn it back, but not before there had been a good deal of very close physical exchanges between those on the outside and those on the inside of the gate.

This was on the night of November 1, culminating a rather difficult day, during which we had advised the bulk of the Americans who lived on the compound and those who lived in apartment houses immediately to the back of the compound behind the rear gates to spend the day up in the British compound in the hills of Tehran. And they did, so we were a skeleton presence that day, except for the beefed up Marine Security Guard patrol on actual duty. But we weathered the day and the next day was, as I recall, a relatively quiet day in the city….

The night before the embassy was taken over was the third of November. Periodically I would have welcoming parties for new arrivals and we had scheduled one that evening in the residence, where we also showed films in the large salon for the American community.

At the last minute, I was unable to host that affair because I got word from the Foreign Office that there was a command performance for the entire diplomatic corps to go to the Foreign Ministry club compound where a new documentary film on the revolution was going to be shown. So I asked my secretary, Liz Fontaigne, to substitute for me, as hostess, at least until I came back from that command performance.

I went to that command performance and saw the film, which was an interesting documentary on the revolution, not least because some importance footage of the film was filmed immediately outside the embassy compound back in February, showing tanks on the streets and the embassy under a state of siege at that time as well. It was rather ironic that the night before the embassy was to be overrun the second time I was at that command performance watching a film showing how we were affected by the revolution eight months before….

I recall that we agreed to keep the Marines on a state of alert but that business would go on as usual in the embassy. I would keep a long scheduled appointment that morning at the Foreign Ministry at 10:30, or whatever, I have forgotten precisely, to carry on discussions I was having with the Foreign Ministry about arranging for the future diplomatic immunity status of my reduced military liaison office — reduced and changed….

I was scheduled also to be accompanied by the senior political officer in the political section, who was Ann Swift. A more senior officer, the head of the section, was Victor Tomseth, but he was also designated as acting DCM. Ann Swift was to accompany me. As it turned out she had been out of the city or at a distant place in the suburbs, and I don’t recall exactly where, and wasn’t able to get back to the embassy in time to join us, although we saw her come walking into the compound as our limousine drove off.  So it was I, Victor Tomseth, and Mike Howland in our group that morning that went to the Foreign Ministry.

We passed on the streets several groups of demonstrators, all of which — as we understood before and was apparent to us — were heading for the university compound where there were to be large demonstrations commemorating an assault on the university by the Shah’s regime at an earlier time. We did not sense that they were heading towards our compound and so proceeded as planned to the Foreign Ministry.

We had a good conversation over traditional cups of tea with Iranian professional diplomats, none of whom that morning raised the issue of the Shah. Our conversation was entirely limited to the question of diplomatic immunity for the military liaison office. At the end we departed without resolving the issues, but we had not expected to.

It was a reasonably productive conversation. We went down to the parking lot in the Foreign Ministry compound and there we found Mike Howland in active conversation with his counterpart in the embassy. Mike informed me that a dustup was taking place over at the compound, that there were demonstrators trying to come through the gates.

We got in the limousine and started off, followed by another Iranian security-laden car and got only a block or two when we heard the situation was getting worse at the compound and given advice by Alan Golacinski that it would be best if we not try to come there, and we agreed that we would return to the Foreign Ministry to seek what was then needed, help from the provisional government.

We turned around and got back to the Foreign Ministry and raced up the stairs. I say raced because I recall running up those stairs, the sense of urgency was that great by that time to see the acting foreign minister because the foreign minister, Mr. Yazdi, had not yet returned that morning from Algiers, where he had been with the prime minister as part of the Iranian delegation to celebrations attending the 15th or 20th anniversary of the Algerian revolution….

Brzezinski was heading the American delegation and it was during these ceremonies in Algiers on November 1 that Brzezinski and Bazargan had had a conversation, the highest level conversation that had taken place yet at that time between a leader of the revolution and an American policy maker.

So we saw Mr. Kharrazi, the acting foreign minister, who incidentally today is the sitting Iranian Perm rep in New York at the UN. We pleaded with him, demanded of him, that he take steps immediately and provide assistance. He clearly wanted to do that, to protect the compound. He was pretty ill-informed as to what was going on. He knew less than we did at that point when we began the conversation.

There ensued a number of conversations by telephone between him and elements of the government. I was getting on the telephone as well, accompanied now, however, by Mike Howland and his radio connection. So we had a continuing report of what was going on in the compound to the extent that our beleaguered colleagues over there could report on it, could see it all. All of them at that time were holed up in the chancery itself.

The U.S. demands that Iran remove demonstrators from the Embassy

An hour or so went by, I think, before Yazdi, the foreign minister, turned up. He had come directly from the airport to the Foreign Ministry and the conversations then continued in his office. Meanwhile the chief of protocol, who was clearly a friend and had done his best to facilitate improved security at the compound over the preceding months and had been a very good interlocutor, moved about wringing his hands, as concerned as we were. His secretary and other secretaries were milling about. Everybody was in a state of uncertainty, to some extent bewilderment, as to just what was happening because it wasn’t visual to us. It was all by telephone and radio.

Eventually, Vic Tomseth and I ended up in the foreign minister’s office where I repeated my demands for some action to be taken to protect the embassy and to evict those who by now were coming over the walls in large numbers. I, having by that time established a telephone connection with Washington, with the cooperation of the foreign ministry, was sitting for much of the remainder of the day at the side of the foreign minister’s desk, determined not to give up that telephone connection.

It went on that way for several hours — he trying to carry on to some degree normal business, while I was in conversation with a number of people in Washington from [Under Secretary for Political Affairs] David Newsom on down.

It became painfully clear in the course of the day that things weren’t happening the way we had hoped they would happen. The foreign minister, Mr. Yazdi, was the man who had been the person, as the revolution had occurred in February when the Embassy was overrun then, who had acted physically on the spot to restore the embassy to our control then. Now he was the Foreign Minister who should have been able to act to repeat what he had done then. And I think he meant to do it, wanted to do it, actually tried to do it in the course of that day. But it became increasingly apparent as we sat there that he was no longer the locus of the kind of power that he had had then.

Meanwhile, of course, the embassy had been overrun. In conversation with the Embassy, both with Ann Swift and Alan Golacinski by telephone and by radio, because we also had a telephone connection with them in addition to the telephone connection with Washington, I had given what instructions and what orders I could from that vantage point. Unfortunately, it evolved into a rather mixed up command and control situation.

I was in the Foreign Ministry, available only by telephone and to some extent by radio. The acting DCM was with me, there was no chief, if you will, apparent in the embassy. The chain of command involved the next senior political officer, who was Ann Swift, the incoming head of the military liaison office, Col. Scott, USA, and the senior defense attaché, Col. Shaefer, USAF. So I was in conversation with several of them at several points that day over those hours, and I confess the locus of authority there was never clear to me.

Security Issues and Too Much Classified Material

A key issue as things developed was destruction of documents and equipment…. We had earlier been under instructions to reduce our classified material. We had supposedly responded to that instruction. I say supposedly because it is clear in retrospect that not enough destruction had taken place, not enough return of documents had taken place to Washington.

Indeed, there is some evidence that some documents had been returned from some offices in Washington to the embassy in Tehran. We clearly had much more classified paper than we should have had and I knew we had. We also had generally inadequate destruction equipment, older varieties. Not enough of the total mashing version, or whatever the terms are. More often it was stripping equipment.

We also that morning began the destruction too late. It did not seem, in the conversations that I was having, that it was that threatening. The first impression that all of us got, both on the compound and certainly with us in the foreign ministry, was a kind of repeat of the February intrusion and that the intention of the students coming into the embassy was this time to again hold it for a while as a kind of demonstration of their contempt for the United States, and more importantly their concern about the direction in which the provisional government had been taking the revolution and their hope that they could destabilize the provisional government under Bazargan.

This was in any event their real intent. Their real intent was not to get the Shah back, despite the slogans that were so useful to them in that sense to get passions in the streets aroused. Their intent was to use that device to destabilize and undermine the provisional government of the revolution and to facilitate a greater role for the more radical elements.

At any rate, it did not seem that the situation was all that bad at the outset. In retrospect we should have begun destruction earlier. I, obviously as chief of mission, had that responsibility and today bear that responsibility for the way in which not enough of our classified documentation was destroyed. We had too much, we started too late, and we had equipment that was not the best….

Of course, a lot of the paper that did not seem to have that urgency of destruction, including unclassified biographical material, would also in time prove to be a very damaging element of the situation, because lots of that stuff has Central Intelligence Agency logo stamped on it even if it is unclassified. That was enough to fire the fury of the more radical elements of the revolution, even though it was material of an unclassified, descriptive nature. That was sufficient to cause a great deal of pain and hurt to a lot of Iranians.

And that is the real pain that I have felt since. Not that our security was threatened, our strategic interests, or political interests in Iran and the region. They were not seriously affected by what was leaked. It was clear in any event at that point that our relationship with the Iranians was not going to be reestablished very soon. But the human hurt for a lot of people in Iran because of the way we were not able to destroy incriminating documentation, that is the legacy that hurts me very much today.

As we have all learned since, if you are going to be overrun by a revolutionary group at an embassy, make sure you are overrun by groups a little less passionate in their zeal and determination than those in Tehran, because their passion, their determination, their zeal as revolutionaries was apparent in many ways in the months that followed, and not least in the way they laboriously over hours and hours, days and days, and still today probably, pieced back together a lot of the damaging paper, strip by strip.

Q: These papers were cut in very thin strips, the idea being it is easier to burn.

LAINGEN: On the other hand, most of us would assume that even if we were unable to destroy it further, no one would ever piece that together. But they did. Today, I don’t know what the count is, more than 50 sets of such documentation is available in books that are on sale in book stores in Tehran. It was a bad day in many ways, but there were many lessons learned from that day and what occurred before and since.

But one certainly was that cliché: “Think lean as an embassy, as a mission.” In a computer age one would assume that one could. On the other hand, I think all of us today concede that computers and Xeroxes make it possible to have even more paper….

The first assault on the embassy in February, in the middle of the revolution, had been a very dangerous state of affairs, where the Marines at that point were stationed in several places on the far perimeters of the compound, in effect defending a 27-acre compound with a Marine Security Detachment at that time, I suppose, of 15 or 20. I wasn’t there, so I can’t say precisely how many were there, but it never got over that number that I know of and wasn’t over that number when we got overrun in November. At that time I think we had 16, several of whom were out of the country on leave.

But in February the Marines had engaged in some rather difficult one-on-one situations. The standing instructions for Marine Security Guards in all embassies is that they do not fire on their own initiative unless or until they are in danger of immediate bodily risk themselves; otherwise they fire only on instructions of the senior officer present, who normally would be the ambassador or chargé.

That was the situation in Tehran and that was the situation in February when the embassy was first overrun, but because some of the Marines were at distant points around the compound, that need to make a decision on their own fell on them. Some of them had to face some very difficult situations.

There is today still some uncertainty as to the number of Iranians that were killed in that incident that day, but one or two we know were killed. At least one, I believe, as a consequence of Marine firing. One Marine was held by those revolutionaries in February and taken off somewhere for a time. His escapades have been written up publicly. I wasn’t there, but it was a very dicey situation for about 24 hours before we got him back.

All of that is background for the situation which I faced when I came up against that problem on November 4, 1979.

At no time did I order the Marines to fire. At no time did they fire. I did instruct them to use tear gas as needed, fairly early on, although I think we probably should have used it even earlier. But we didn’t use it when the actual intrusion into the compound began. At that time their battle stations were all within the chancery, itself. One problem, by the way, that morning was that some of the Marines were in the Marine House immediately behind the embassy compound, across the street from the outer walls.

They had to get back into the compound when the alarm bells began to ring. One or two of them were captured in the Marine House, itself, complicating the situation when the decision was made as to whether we should surrender. We did eventually use tear gas — again I am speaking from my vantage point in the Foreign Ministry on the other side of town. I wasn’t there, so the specifics of how things went from minute to minute, from hour to hour, have to be provided by someone else. But my understanding is, based on telephone and radio conversations, that one or two of the Marines actually did not make it back into the chancery and into that kind of protection.

In any event, the chancery was eventually surrounded by hundreds of these demonstrators, armed with a variety of things — some with banners, some with protest slogans, some with actual guns, some with equipment to pry open a rear window of the basement slightly below ground floor of the chancery. That is where they forced entry into the building and as they came in were deterred to some degree by tear gas, but not sufficient to stop them. The Marines retreated back up to the first floor and eventually up to the second floor behind the steel door there.

As time went on, the question developed as to what we should do, having been forced into that kind of fortress on the second floor of the chancery. Eventually at one point, Alan Golacinski went out into the compound, down the stairs, to attempt to negotiate with those who were leading the demonstrations. He was captured and held himself. I was informed of that. I don’t recall that I was aware of another thing that developed at that time, although I am aware of it now directly from John Limbert, one of the political officers in the embassy, the most fluent Farsi speaker we had and who at one point made the decision to open that second floor door.  [To read John Limbert’s account of the crisis, go here.]

To what degree the decision to do so was coordinated among those of my staff in charge or who had taken charge in the hallway, is not entirely clear to me. In any event, he went out as well, and was captured. I was informed at one point that smoke was coming through under the second floor door suggesting that they were trying to burn the place down even though it was a metal door.

That and other reports from the embassy indicated that there was no possible way to defend the chancery, that we had made sufficient progress in destroying what I understood to be the bulk of the classified gear, and I ordered them to surrender when they thought they had no alternative to doing so. And they eventually did. The rest of the story is better told by those who were there on the second floor.

The demonstrators then stormed through the open door, bound all the staff loosely, hands in particular, and blindfolded them, forcing them to sit down on the floor. At the outset the classified code room was held a little bit longer, but eventually that too was surrendered, when they had completed the destruction of the equipment there. After I had given the order to surrender and the second floor was occupied, obviously my contact ended. Radio and telephone links were cut off.

The three of us, Victor Tomseth, Mike Howland, and I were left to ourselves and the horrible sense that something, not totally unexpected, but a serious event had transpired. I say not totally unexpected because we still had the feeling that this was probably going to be something like what happened in February.

Q: This is the way things are done. We have had problems before and they all worked out within a day or two.

LAINGEN: Well, they did then, but they didn’t this time. I continued into the evening, until late that evening, approaching midnight eventually, sitting at the desk of the foreign minister, still in telephone conversation with Washington, he in telephone conversation with a number of people around the city. He at one point said to me, as he told me that he had to go off to a cabinet meeting, “What are you going to do?” I said to him, “You tell me what I am going to do, because you have the responsibility to provide me security and my colleagues security. I can’t go out on the streets. I am not going to go back to the compound now and be taken.”

There was some discussion earlier on whether it would be a good idea for me to try to return. That idea was rejected rather quickly because of the way things were developing. It was better that I and my two colleagues stay where we were to see if we couldn’t work things out from the government end. I told him that it was his responsibility to tell me what I should do. I said that I could not go out and try to make some other embassy in town responsible for me and my colleagues. And there was some risk of my being picked up in any event.

Establishing an “Embassy in Exile” at the Iranian Foreign Ministry

So he said, “Well, look, you better stay here. We will work this out by morning.” He took me down personally to one of the diplomatic reception rooms, I and my two colleagues at that point having not eaten anything to speak of during the day, except for tea and some cookies and some Algerian dates that Yazdi had brought back as a gift from the Independence Day celebrations there.

He arranged for us to get something to eat from the kitchen of the Foreign Ministry. This was roughly just before midnight — he going off to a cabinet meeting.

So we made ourselves as comfortable as we could in this rather splendid room, full of pseudo-French furniture. We took turns trying to sleep during the night on those uncomfortable sofas. It was a very painful time. And yet, a time when we were still determined to convince ourselves that we would work this out. We really believed it — or told ourselves we believed it.

The next morning came around. We had been on the phone all night with Washington. We were on the phone also with elements of the Foreign Ministry that were friendly with us. We had telephone contacts occasionally with Kate Koob, who along with Bill Royer, were still two not taken hostages. They were running the American Cultural Center in another part of town and were not to be taken hostages until later, the second day.

We had visits from the Chief of Protocol; friendly kitchen force people; we were on phones to other ambassadors in the city, all of which was being facilitated by the Foreign Minister’s office. The Foreign Minister, himself, came down to see us once on the second day. We talked to the Deputy Foreign Minister once or twice.

As all of this was happening, Washington, with whom we were in contact, were constantly asking us for our opinion of how things stood and our own judgment of the scene and giving us their own judgment of the scene from back there. President Carter eventually weighed into action, himself, in deciding to send several messages to Khomeini.

He decided to send Ramsey Clark, the former Attorney General, and William Miller, a retired Foreign Service officer who had served in Iran earlier and who had a lot of contacts, particularly with the nationalist secular elements of the revolutionary leadership. The idea was to send them to Tehran for conversations directly with the Ayatollah to work the thing out.

Then we got involved as a kind of sitting foreign embassy within the Foreign Ministry in trying to work out the landing rights for the aircraft to come in. We were facilitated in this fashion by the Foreign Ministry to continue to operate “normally” as Chargé with my deputy and security officer. Incidentally we also had in the same room with us the driver of my car, an Armenian-Iranian employee of the Embassy who had been driving for American ambassadors in Tehran for years and years. He was held hostage, too, if you will, for the first week or so, when he eventually was allowed to slip out of the Foreign Ministry.

The Clark-Miller mission, of course, never arrived, despite full cooperation of the Foreign Ministry, carefully laid out landing arrangements, etc., because eventually the Ayatollah said no. And if the Ayatollah said no to something, that was the end of it. He was determined not to have any conversation with the Carter regime. So the Clark-Miller mission got as far as Ankara or Istanbul.…

Meanwhile, the three of us in the Foreign Ministry maintained contact around the clock with Washington for two or three days. Eventually that ended, although for some time thereafter we had daily contact, and for several months thereafter until February, we had use of the telex facilities of the Foreign Ministry to communicate with Washington.

This was done obviously in carefully guarded correspondence which wasn’t very sensitive, because it was sent by means of Iranian facilities. But it gave us a way of talking to Washington. It gave the three of us a sense of participation. It was great for our morale. We could answer questions and get it on the record with the cooperation of the Foreign Ministry about our judgment of the mood in Tehran, the scene in Tehran.

At the outset we were a kind of Embassy in exile, in isolation in the Foreign Ministry in the diplomatic reception room. We were able to get information of a relatively limited nature. We couldn’t go out into the streets and get a Gallup poll of the mood on the street. But we could watch from the windows at what the sentiment was like out there.

The Chief of Protocol came to see us, almost daily at the outset. I had long conversations with him, which on his part were obviously guarded. He was clearly sympathetic. He was old school Persian — a typical chief of protocol who wanted to cooperate in every way in a protocol sense, and I have no doubt he, being a professional diplomat himself, was deeply troubled by what had happened. But what he had to say had to be carefully guarded. But we could read through lines in conversations with him.

We talked to the kitchen force, who also were friendly. Shortly after we were taken, Army guards began to appear who would remain our guards throughout the process until we were taken off to prison, late in the affair. We could converse with them. But, most importantly, we had visits from foreign ambassadors once in a while. A few were allowed in to see us. The British came in to see us once or twice. We could talk on the phone with them the first few days. The Canadian ambassador got in to see us. The German, the Turkish.

And we had access to radio and to Iranian TV. Victor Tomseth speaks fluent enough Persian so that he could watch television and inform me. I didn’t know Persian that well. From all of those hearing points we could say something to Washington as to what the situation was like; what we judged the mood to be; ideas that we might have for media coverage, public relations handling. We couldn’t get into sensitive material except to the point we could communicate sensitive views and suggestions to these visiting ambassadors who would then leave and themselves report back to Washington.

A lot of that went on and it developed over the months into a rather sustained channel, although not always regular. The Swiss ambassador came in to see us periodically and, when we broke relations with Iran in April of that year, his embassy became our protecting power in Tehran. He got in to see us sometimes weekly, not always that often, but reasonably often so that we could send messages through him that we wrote out ourselves, and passed to him reasonably surreptitiously, although we were not watched that closely when we were talking to him.

We would pass him a piece of paper and he would put it on his wires. So there is a file of classified cables from Laingen in the archives of the Department. Scores of them and some quite sensitive. Some, I would like to believe, reasonably helpful to Washington as that crisis wore on over the next 444 days.

Freezing Iran’s Assets but Keeping Diplomatic Channels Open

Q: Did the action on the part of the United States to freeze assets have any effect?

LAINGEN: I regarded Carter’s action in freezing those assets as the smartest thing he ever did in this crisis. As it turned out, it became a powerful tool in our hands, as freezing of assets can be in certain situations….

We saw it as the right thing to do. I don’t recall sensing at that time that it was going to be as consequential as it was. In terms of PR, yes it was also a useful thing that made it clear to the Iranians that Jimmy Carter could be tough, at least in that area, and that was something that I thought was a good thing to do.

I am often asked whether I disagree with policies that Jimmy Carter followed in the hostage situation in Tehran and my stock answer, usually over-simplified admittedly, is that I don’t think he had many other options than those he chose, including the seizing of the assets, which any president would have done.

He, however, put reliance not on the use of force but on a sustained process of applying pressure through diplomacy, eventually through economic sanctions, through diplomatic isolation, and using and probing for channels of communication in every way he conceivably could. He did, in fact, warn, in classified communications with Tehran, and we became aware of that, that if the hostages were put on trial then no holds were barred. That he was prepared to use force if necessary…if any kind of physical action was taken against us.

Q: That was a constant threat, was it?

LAINGEN: It was implied, and also expressed on several occasions in a classified, secret sense. It wasn’t blatantly touted from Washington every morning. One can make a good case today that had Jimmy Carter resorted to actual force from day one, regarded what had happened in Tehran as an act of war, as Ronald Reagan described it, the situation might have developed differently, probably would have developed differently, if he had used force.

I did not, sitting there, think the use of force was a good idea. I got swept up, if you will, in the sense that we can work this out over time through negotiations and discussions and diplomacy and pressure, diplomatic and economic pressure. I really believed that that was the preferred course of action. In part because I thought the use of force, the threat, say, we are going to bomb Kharg island everyday if you don’t release the hostages immediately, was a slippery slope that would have been very difficult to handle, because I thought the passion in Tehran at the time was such that they would respond with force equally against the hostages.

If you do that we will kill three hostages tomorrow. We will put them on trial and condemn them as spies next week. Maybe those threats would have been proven false, I don’t know. We can’t replay it. At the time I believed that the passion was such that Khomeini’s vindictiveness, determination and rigidity was such as to make it impossible to see him back down.…

Ronald Reagan, when he was confronted with the first such crisis in his presidency, the TWA hijacking in Beirut, didn’t use force. A number of Americans were held hostages for a time. He ended up negotiating, or at least trying to work it out without the application of force. The only two times that force has really been effective in dealing with terrorism in my view is the bombing of Tripoli by Reagan, and you can argue how effective that was. It seemed to have some effect on Qadhafi.

The other singularly successful one, where everything was in place and worked right, was the Achille Lauro cruise ship incident, where we were able to use force to pick up the terrorists involved.

But normally things aren’t neatly in place, things don’t work right, and there is inevitably all manner of risks, and God knows we certainly came to appreciate that in a subsequent hostage crisis that went on for years and that was Beirut. We never ever felt we could wade into Beirut with military force and get at those bastards. I use that word advisedly. They were assuredly bastards and needed to be clobbered. But we couldn’t find a way to do it. We couldn’t be assured of where they were and, of course, we could not be assured at all about what would happen to the hostages if we tried it.

Moments in U.S. Diplomatic History

The Iran Hostage Crisis– Part II

Share on facebookShare on twitterShare on emailShare on printMore Sharing Services

In these excerpts, Bruce Laingen, then Charge d’Affaires of U.S. Embassy Tehran and one of the “super Satans” kept hostage at the Iranian Foreign Ministry, discusses his concerns about a possible “apology” by the U.S. government to the regime, the confusion engendered by changes in the Iranian government, the Argo episode (and how the Ministry knew of their whereabouts but never told anyone), the failure of the rescue mission, his imprisonment, negotiations for their release, and their eventual flight to freedom.  To read Part I of his interview, go here.  

The 44 days became 444 days

Q: What were you getting from the people you talked to in Washington? I suppose it was the desk and David Newsom and others. Was it sort of “Keep your chin up, we are doing everything we can?”

LAINGEN: Oh, yeah. They did everything they could from Washington for all of us. They kept assuring the three of us they were doing everything they could. As I suggested, we were kept informed, reasonably, obviously not totally. We didn’t know everything. We knew a lot about what Washington was trying to do. We knew about the efforts through the UN with the Secretary General to get a UN panel of inquiry in there. That was front page news here and a front page element of American policy for the months of late December and January and into February. We knew enough about that to be concerned about it.

The three of us were deeply concerned that we seemed to be prepared to make some kind of deal with the Iranian regime in terms of that panel of inquiry and in the process extend a kind of “apology” to the Iranians. We thought this would be counterproductive to our interests in the long run and we thought it would subvert the commitment the three of us and our colleagues over in the compound had made to the very principle of diplomatic immunity. To depart from that in any way we thought would be wrong. We believed that to the point of being prepared, I think I can say again with conviction, for some risk. We thought it better to take some risk than concede that point to the Iranians. We were very nervous about that UN business….

I should add that as all of this was going on there were changes in the role of the Foreign Minister. Mr. Yazdi, of course, lost office, as did Prime Minister Bazargan when his provisional government resigned within 36 hours after the seizure of the Embassy, and that saw accomplished one of the central purposes on the part of the more radical elements of the revolutionary regime. That was to oust that government that appeared to them to be prepared to let the revolution drift back into a relationship with the United States. They wanted to stop that. They were able to stop that with the seizure of the Embassy. So Yazdi and Bazargan and their government fell within 36 hours, and power then centered in the Revolutionary Council that had been functioning before but from behind the scenes. Now power was centered in that Revolutionary Council and, of course, centered ultimately in the hands of the Ayatollah….

Mr. Ghotbzadeh took his place in early December. One of his first public statements was to the effect that Laingen and the other two hostages in the Foreign Ministry were free to leave. That got on the wires very quickly, particularly back in Washington. Within hours we were given instructions that got to us through some source to be indeed ready to leave. Ghotbzadeh, however, had made it clear that we were free only to leave the Ministry. He could not guarantee our security after we left the building. So his assurance of our being free to leave proved hollow from the beginning.

There is a myth around that I refused to leave at that point because I didn’t want to leave before my staff in the Embassy were permitted to leave. That is myth. That is not fact. I didn’t leave because I couldn’t be assured that I would be free to leave. If I had been free to leave in the total sense, to leave the country, I guess I would have left, particularly since Washington expected me to leave. I can assure you that I would not have been happy to leave, because I thought still at that point, and this is only a month after we had been taken hostage, that we could work it out and I didn’t want to leave my colleagues in the lurch.

In any event, I didn’t leave. I could not leave. Meanwhile the students, over in the compound, on occasion would clamor periodically with the Ayatollah and with others for our heads. They wanted the “super Satans” as we were called, the three of us. That happened three, four, five times in the course of the next several months. Sometimes the demand got louder than other times. At one point early on, the first few days of the seizure, they were reported at the doors of the Foreign Ministry, physically ready to take us. In each case, when the decision was eventually his, the Ayatollah decided not to let them get at us. Just why, I will never know. I guess I have to conclude that it was one gesture symbolic to some degree, however slight, of their respect for diplomatic status and immunity and something they could point to for world public opinion as demonstrating their “respect” for diplomatic immunity.

Q: Did you have any contact with Ghotbzadeh at all?

LAINGEN: I had contact with Ghotbzadeh twice. Once was when he summoned me to his office in February in the height of the process involving the UN panel of inquiry and the expectation then that part of that process would see the hostages in the compound turned over physically to the control of the government, not the students. The idea was that they would be moved physically from the compound to the Foreign Ministry and into the same diplomatic reception rooms where we were. There were three very large rooms there. They were to be moved there and held in one room. Indeed, they moved 50 cots in there and 50 small steel wall cabinets for hostages to keep their clothes.

He called me to his office, on the same floor where I was held, to tell us this and to ask for my cooperation in insuring that there would be no attempt to escape from there at that point. The theory was that eventually the government would have enough control that they would be able to release the hostages themselves. It didn’t happen.

Then I saw him one other time when he came down into that room and talked to us seeking cooperation from Victor Tomseth in some kind of testimony for a trial that they were envisaging of a counterrevolutionary that they had captured. I had strong distaste for Ghotbzadeh at the beginning because of the way in which he maligned the United States image and purposes in Iran when he was head of what was called the “Voice and Vision of Iran.” That was the propaganda office. He had that office during the months when I was Chargé in a free Embassy. He had not been very helpful. So I didn’t like the guy.

I didn’t like him at the outset for the role he played as Foreign Minister, but I sensed as time went on over those months, that he came to the conclusion, himself, fairly early, that this hostage business was counterproductive to the revolution and that it needed to be ended. I think he genuinely wanted to end it and was prepared to make some concessions to do that. And he stuck his neck out to do that. He showed some guts. I regret the fact that eventually he was executed. I thought he was one of those Iranians in the revolutionary arena that could, over time, have put a more rational and more moderate direction to that revolution. But he took too many risks with the more radical elements to the point where he eventually was accused, rightly or wrongly, who can say, of conspiring to kill the Ayatollah himself. So were the charges. The Ayatollah eventually allowed him to be executed even though Ghotbzadeh supposedly had one of the closest relationships of anyone in the revolutionary regime with the Ayatollah.

Q: I take it that the Ayatollah was looming over everything all the time.

LAINGEN: Of course, it was the Ayatollah’s revolution. It was his revolution to lose. We had no doubt of that. During the time the provisional government was functioning and we were dealing with it, we knew. And Bazargan, the Provisional Prime Minister, knew better than anyone else that the decision making power was not his on fundamental issues, but was the Ayatollah’s. He used the expression in a celebrated public interview once that he was like a knife without a blade. He didn’t have real power. The Ayatollah was a looming presence. We watched him a lot on television, particularly when we were hostages. We could watch television, usually, in the guards’ room next to our room. The army guards would allow us to do that. Endless, almost daily, lectures, homilies, sermons, preachments by the Ayatollah to the faithful. We got sick and tired of it, but I can assure you we never lost our “respect” for his capacity to control that place by the power of his words, the power of his ideas, his physical presence and his pivotal role, of course, of bringing on the revolution.

The 44 days became 444 days. I think my comments earlier suggest that I and my two colleagues, and I suspect most of my staff over in the compound, believed that it would work out. That this would be another one of these things that we had gone through in February. Maybe in a day or two we could work this thing out. When 14 of our colleagues were released, the blacks and women, except for two women and one black, that was further indication to us that maybe the pressure of international opinion was beginning to work and the Ayatollah would bring this thing to a head and conclude it. In other words, we lived on hope, grasping at straws and signals. As it turned out we gave much too much credence to every one of them.

In a situation like that you live on hope. That is as much as you’ve got. So you tell yourself, “Hey, by Thanksgiving, they will let us go.” “Christmas? They wouldn’t hold 53 Americans hostages through Christmas and thus demonstrate to world opinion how heartless a regime this is.” Well, Thanksgiving and Christmas came, New Year’s came, St. Patrick’s came, birthdays came. Second Thanksgiving, second Christmas even. We lived on hope and I am sure my colleagues in far worse straits than I was over in that compound lived on that same kind of hope.

The Six Americans with the Canadians (i.e., The Argo Episode)

Q: Were you aware of the Americans who were with the Canadians?

LAINGEN: We were very aware of those six Americans who were around town and hadn’t been caught, because we were in telephone conversation with them. We got into contact with them. We were able to find them with help particularly from Kate Koob and Bill Royer who weren’t taken hostage for the first 24 hours. Victor Tomseth was the one who handled that most. He was on the telephone with the six several times, giving them advice to where they should go as they moved around town from one spot to another, including a time in Tomseth’s own apartment, where his Thai cook still lived and for a time became quite celebrated for harboring those six. After being in the British compound for a while, they got in touch with the Canadians. The first conversation was with the Canadian Minister, the number two, Mr. Sheardon, who said in those celebrated words, “My God, where have you been? Why didn’t you call us before?” I get emotional on the subject because of what the Canadians did. For the next three months, roughly, those six lived in the homes of those two Canadians, the Minister and the Ambassador. Except for one, the Agricultural Attaché, who spent several weeks in the Swedish Embassy in hiding.

Yes, we were aware of them. Indeed, we told the Desk Officer of the Foreign Ministry who handled American affairs on the second day that those six were still around and we needed the Ministry’s help in getting them out of the country. They responded by saying, “Look, we have enough trouble with you all, coping with the ones we’ve got. Let’s worry about these six later.” They never divulged the fact that they were there. They knew it, but kept it secret and I give them credit for that.

The Canadian Ambassador got in to see us and eventually he told us that they were with him. It was he who told us that. They weren’t in telephone contact with us then. Over those three months, the Canadian Ambassador got in several times. He kept us informed to a degree about what was being done to get them out. We would pace up and down the central floor of that diplomatic reception room, he and I, making sure we were out of earshot of anybody while he briefed me about what they were doing in terms of fraudulent passports, etc.

Suddenly, one day we learned that not only had the six left, but the Canadian Ambassador himself had left and closed his Embassy and taken his entire staff with him. That was a very good day, because it gave us such enormous satisfaction that here at least was one success. We had fooled them. We had played a marvelous game with them and gotten them out. And, of course, it was a success back here, the way in which the image of Canada became for a time so splendid among the American public.

The next morning, I learned about this later, a member of the American press corps in Tehran, who hadn’t been kicked out yet, went to the gates of the Embassy and told the student who was on guard on the other side of the gate what had happened; i.e. that six Americans had been spirited out of the country with the help of the Canadian Embassy. And he responded, according to this story, “But that is illegal.” We thought that was one of the funniest expressions we had heard the whole time. That he could say that standing there, having stolen an entire embassy….

It often would boggle our mind thinking about it, that the three of us were sitting in the Ministry and our Iranian counterparts in Washington were allowed to function freely until early April 1980. The fact that the Embassy in Washington was allowed to remain open was a product, of course, of Carter policy, broadly defined. That is, to keep every option open, to keep probing, to leave every avenue possible available so that if some contacts that hadn’t been considered, could be, and I guess Carter just felt that the Iranian Embassy in Washington was a possible liaison to something with somebody.

It bothered me and I can assure you it bothered our families, not least my wife. I may have mentioned earlier that there developed a tradition of prayer vigils across the street from that Embassy, begun by members of my parish in Washington, All Saints Church. These people eventually recruited a fairly large number of regulars who always appeared on Sunday night for a prayer vigil and sing-along across the street from that Embassy. The “Battle Hymn of the Republic” became the theme song of that group and was sung every Sunday night, hopefully, my wife would say, within the hearing of those who occupied that chancery. On at least one occasion they knocked on its door, went in and presented a petition. But the fact of that Embassy remaining open while we were kept hostage was troublesome. It was a curious aspect of that whole affair.

The Failure of Diplomacy and the Rescue Mission

Q: What were other developments? You had heard that the Canadians had gotten six Americans out.

LAINGEN: From the time of the visit of the Secretary General of the United Nations, Mr. Waldheim, in January, until the break of relations finally on April 6, 1980, was a time of rather high maneuver and activity on the part of the Carter administration using the United Nations. Using that avenue as a possible means of developing contacts and encouraging some degree of response from the regime in Tehran.

The Secretary General’s visit to Tehran was a bit of a disaster, because he got not only inhibited, but I think frightened physically, by the way in which carefully constructed demonstrations were mounted against him in his sight and in his presence, hostile to the United Nations and to him personally. But his visit and his departure in January did not end the effort through the United Nations, because then there began a long process that extended a couple of months to try to develop some kind of a panel of inquiry under the Secretary General’s auspices. In its final evolution it was to be a panel that would come to Tehran — and a panel eventually did — and listen to the grievances of the Iranians, hear what the USG had to say and, ideally, would also sit down and hear from the hostages themselves about how they felt about the situation. The three of us sitting in a corner — it was destined to failure from the beginning, because Ayatollah Khomeini announced actually on the day that the panel was en route to Tehran that the hostage issue would be resolved by the majlis, the parliament….

Q: Did anyone talk to you from the panel?

LAINGEN: No, they never got in to see us, even though that was the plan. We did see the Secretary General of the United Nations back in January and some of his colleagues who came in with him. The collapse of that United Nations effort essentially ended the diplomatic phase that Carter had pursued so actively in the first six months roughly. There were continuing efforts through the French and Argentine lawyer types and others who would pop up occasionally. And there was an exchange of letters that became very celebrated, involving one to Khomeini from Carter. Its authenticity was never fully determined, at least not by us, but eventually Jimmy Carter in Washington realized that the diplomatic process had been played out, and on April 6 he broke relations, and the Chargé in Washington and his remaining staff, which was very small at that time, were ordered to leave within 72 hours….

That was the end of that process. The next big event was the failed rescue mission at the end of April, April 25 by our counting, April 26 back here. That day — for all the hostages, I think, surely it was for me — remains of the most poignant memories of that entire crisis. Not so much that the rescue mission failed, but that eight men died in its failure. The three of us in the Foreign Ministry knew nothing about the planning. We all assumed that planning of that kind was going on back in Washington and had been going on since day one of the hostage crisis. We had been encouraged, admonished, by Mike Howland, the security officer, to always have at our cot sides in that room where we were held a few essentials in a small plastic bag, so that if a rescue mission were to take place and the rescuers should suddenly bolt into our room, we would have that ready to go with us. We learned of the rescue mission almost immediately because at that point we had access to a shortwave radio. So we knew about it, I think, before the guards who were watching us in the room adjacent to us were aware of it. It was a very dark day, one that grew worse as we learned from a later broadcast that eight men had died.

The result in Tehran, among other things, was that all of the hostages to my knowledge in the compound, all 50 of them, were moved physically. Some simply around the city, some in the compound, but most of them to other cities in the country. Moved blindfolded, bound in the back of vans at great risk, with injuries to some of them because of a traffic accident. The whole process was designed to insure that Washington would never try another rescue mission because of the difficulty of trying to find all of the hostages in that many places around the country.

They remained scattered around the country for much of the remaining time, although all of them were back in Tehran by, I would say, November of that year. We expected to be moved as well, the three of us in the Foreign Ministry. But while security was greatly tightened in the room in which we were held, and some of our “perks” were taken away, otherwise we were not affected.

I have the highest respect for those who went on that rescue mission. For that matter, I have an enormous respect for those who planned it, however much today with benefit of hindsight it is obvious that there were many mistakes in the process of that planning. And, of course, I have undying regard and respect for the eight men, and in particular, for their families, who died in that process. We have tried to express that on the anniversary, April 26, here in Washington when there is annually a ceremony at Arlington Cemetery at the monument for all of them — and a grave site for three of them — to remember what they had sacrificed. The ceremony is put on by an organization called, “No Greater Love,” which is a private non-profit group here in Washington that has been active since the Vietnam War in reaching out to families and children of people held in such circumstances.

After the failure of the rescue mission in late April, the whole process, as far as we were concerned, and I think as far as Washington was concerned, went into pretty much a stalemate for the next five months, roughly, when it was clear that there was no further hope, or likely progress, in the diplomatic process of probing for openings that the Carter administration had been following up to that time. It was essentially a time of watching the new majlis in Tehran come into being so that they could be responsive to the Ayatollah’s directive that the hostage issue would be resolved by that body. All of that we took with a grain of salt. We knew full well that the majlis would not agree on anything that the Ayatollah himself didn’t approve of, or for that matter that the students, the terrorists, didn’t approve of, their voice being that consequential in any action in respect to the hostages.

The Iran-Iraq War and Strengthening the Radicals’ Hold on Power

…

It was a long hot summer for us sitting in the Ministry, and I am sure much worse for my colleagues over in the compound. It does get hot in Tehran in the summer. Nothing really of consequence happened until late September of that year, when the Iran-Iraq war began with Iraq’s obvious, clear-cut act of aggression across Iranian borders in the south, particularly around Khorramshahr. Clearly an act of aggression, however much the two sides, including Iran, had been engaged for over a month or more before that in a lot of border skirmishing, reflecting the problems between the two countries at that time. But this was a massive offensive across borders designed by Saddam Hussein in Baghdad to take and hold areas of the south of Iran, oil producing areas, and, of course, in the process strengthen Baghdad’s access to the Gulf, which in normal times is only a very narrow strip of land. A larger purpose, as well, in launching that war in Saddam’s mind, was to take advantage of what he sensed was Iran’s discombobulation and isolation on the international scene as a consequence of the hostage crisis, to try to topple the regime in Tehran, to undermine the Ayatollah, believing as well that he would have support from the Arab minority in the south of Iran.

That didn’t work out, of course, and as we all know the result was an eight-year war of enormous consequence and loss to both countries, neither of which to this day, 1993, has fully recovered. Indeed, there remain today tens of thousands, to my knowledge, of POWs held by both countries now for many years. And it still is in a state of cease fire. The war has not been resolved beyond a cease fire engineered by the United Nations in 1988. The result of that aggression was not discombobulation of the Tehran regime, not to topple that regime, but in the immediate sense to strengthen that regime. It doesn’t take much to get Iranians exercised about the wrongs of Arabs, particularly Iraqi Arabs, and this was a clear wrong as they saw it. As a consequence there was a great surge of nationalist fervor in Tehran in particular….There wasn’t much damage done to Tehran at that time; it was mostly psychological in terms of what the Iraqis were able to do in flying without much challenge over the city….

The outbreak of that war worried us and I am sure it worried Washington. This was not only a worry because of the tragedy, the futility and dangers of that war in a larger sense, but also because of the way in which our immediate response and concern was that there would be a further and very considerable delay in getting at the hostage issue….

By late September and early October, the Iranians were beginning to appreciate — not least because of the Iraqi aggression — that they needed to get on with this hostage situation and get it resolved. Iran was hurting by that time rather considerably from the economic sanctions, however incomplete they were. And hurting in the way the Iraqi aggression, clear as it was, produced almost no sympathetic response from the rest of the world in support of Tehran, realizing clearly more than they had realized before at any time in that crisis how isolated Iran was in international public opinion because of this crisis. And of course, by this time, September, October, the Iranians had done with us. They had finished the use of us in the sense that a major purpose in the beginning in taking the hostages was not simply to undermine the provisional government of the revolution, get rid of Bazargan, to get a more radical government in place, but also to get a majlis and a constitution in place, a referendum completed, and all of the process of legitimizing a more radical government by using the hostages as pawns in that political process to fire up the passion of the masses. By September much of this had been accomplished. Virtually all of it had been accomplished. A majlis was in place, dominated by radical elements, dominated by clerics. They didn’t need us anymore. It was possible to begin thinking, from their point of view, of ending the crisis, getting rid of the hostages. We were becoming a kind of burden.

A Break in the Ice – Negotiations Toward a Deal

I don’t have the dates immediately in mind. I wasn’t aware of its happening, of course, but one of the Deputy Prime Ministers of the regime, Mr. Tabatabai was sent to Bonn to convey to the Germans and through the Germans to us in Washington the conditions, the requirements, that the Iranians were demanding that had to be accomplished to end the crisis. And that had been preceded by a celebrated speech by the Ayatollah in September in which he spelled out four specific conditions. The three of us in the Foreign Ministry hearing that speech and reading it didn’t sense as we should have, I think, that these four conditions were as important as they were. To us in large part they sounded like more of the same. But there was enough difference in them, there were enough things left out of previous demands, to make Washington appreciate better than we did that these conditions were newly phrased and more negotiable. And the fact that Tabatabai went to Bonn to convey these conditions in that fashion was even more important. It was that trip by Tabatabai to Bonn with those conditions, obviously blessed by Khomeini, that set in motion the process that eventually saw the crisis end. That was in September-October. It didn’t end until January 20. It took that long.

It also required at one point rather early in this process that the Iranians needed a different interlocutor, hence the Algerians. They concluded the Algerians would be a better vehicle at that time. The Algerians were highly regarded because they had accomplished a revolution and overcome their problems of colonial status with France. They were seen as a revolutionary regime. So the Iranians turned to the Algerians, and as far as Washington was concerned Algeria met some essential requirements as well. It was non-aligned and we had reasonable relations with Algeria. Thus began the process of getting agreement — the money hassle began — involving endless time, energy, thought, and intelligence to determine how the issue of the frozen assets was to be dealt with.

Eventually they were dealt with, in a remarkable process of diplomacy. There were many ups and downs. Some of them so far down that we worried, and I know Washington worried, that the issue simply could not be resolved, because of its complexity and because of Iran’s demands, before the end of the Carter administration. Of course it did go down to the wire to the last minute, almost to the last second, before it could be done.

It was done, thanks to a remarkable group of Americans. Thanks to the skill of the Algerians as well. We came to know, we, that is our government, how useful a non-aligned country could be for us at that time, particularly one with the professional diplomatic skill, highly French oriented, that the Algerians could bring to bear. The Algiers Accord — eventually worked out in the waning minutes of the Carter administration — saw us released. Part of that Accord is the Hague Tribunal, today sitting 14 years later in the Hague still resolving economic, commercial, governmental claims against Iran and Iran against us. The Accord and Tribunal have been a boon to lawyers and will be for years. But the Algiers Accord and particularly the Hague Tribunal represent in many ways a remarkable, as Christopher himself said, who was the prime player in that process, “a classic example of diplomacy.” That is what it was, with a lot of skill and innovative approaches applied to a settlement affecting something like $12 billion in frozen assets, which Mr. Carter had wisely, early on, frozen.

Q: Apparently that was quite a shock to the Iranians. It hadn’t really occurred to them that someone might do that.

LAINGEN: Well, it was a shock in the sense that we acted early enough to prevent them from realizing it was a possibility.

The assets did not, of course, all go back to Tehran. Indeed, after American banks had been provided for in terms of interest claims they had in loans outstanding and given particularly the way a good bulk of it was reserved for an account in The Hague to make possible this process of resolving economic and commercial claims, only a small part of the assets actually went back to Tehran.

Blindfolded and Imprisoned

As I said before all hostages were back in Tehran by December and we were still sitting in the Ministry. All along the three of us had far more knowledge, of course, than the others did. Never total knowledge, never complete awareness of the facts, but very considerable. By late December all of us were pretty well informed including the 49 other hostages, Richard Queen having departed in mid-summer, were aware of what the Algerians were up to, that they were the interlocutors, that they were the middlemen. And at Christmas time in 1980, the Algerians in Tehran were able to come in and meet all of the hostages, to my knowledge, and tell them essentially where things stood. The three of us in the Foreign Ministry, suddenly on December 23, were given notice that we were to be taken from the Foreign Ministry that night. The notice came to us around 7:00 that evening. We were told that we would be taken to join our colleagues.

I think that was the intention that evening of those who eventually did take us. But that evening the process failed and we were not moved. I protested. I said, “Why are we being moved now?” I protested to the Chief of Protocol and tried to get word to the Swiss Ambassador, who had been our benefactor on so many occasions. I was unable to get through to him. Approaching midnight that night on December 23 the room was entered by a large group of people, including clearly members of the student terrorist group over in the compound, but also members of the Foreign Ministry and a couple of representatives of the Prime Minister’s Office. After a good deal of discussion took place — we demanded to know why we were being moved and demanded that we have access to the Swiss Ambassador — the three of us were taken down into the courtyard of the Foreign Ministry. There we were ordered to get into a van.

At that point, sensing that we were also to be blindfolded and bound, restrictions that we had been assured were not going to be imposed on us when we were talking up on the third floor, we got into a bit of a contest, triggered by Mike Howland’s having been pushed into the van and reacting by saying, “You can’t push me” and fighting back giving a well placed kick at the student terrorist who was trying to push him into the van.

That saw us almost at sword’s point and eventually my two colleagues were ordered up into the room above and I as well, but I had lingered a while to protest and I was then ordered by gun point at my head to leave and tell my colleagues that if they tried anything like this again there would be real trouble.

That incident in the presence of members of the government, the Foreign Ministry staff and the Prime Minister’s Office, obviously embarrassed everybody concerned, including the student terrorists who were frustrated in their efforts. We spent the rest of that night wondering what the hell was going to happen to us the next day or later that same night. Nothing did happen and we were able to spend Christmas in that room.

One of the Algerians came in to see us. The Papal Nuncio came in to see us. We had a ceremony. We had in effect a kind of party. We began to think that we were secure in the position we had before, but in fact we were eventually moved on January 3, I think it was, when a group of terrorist students returned and this time were clearly determined to get us. We were ordered into vans with the clear cooperation of the Foreign Ministry and taken that night not to join our colleagues but to solitary confinement in some prison somewhere in Tehran. This was contrary to the assurances given us again that we would in fact be taken to join our colleagues.

We were put into prison, I think, clearly as an act of retribution for the dust-up we had gotten into during the first attempt to move us. So we spent the next several weeks in solitary confinement until a few nights before we were released on January 20. On the night of January 19 we were suddenly ordered to go to another room in the building where everybody else at that point was being held for physical examinations. It turned out that the doctors examining us were Algerians and it was pretty clear to us then that something conclusive was about to happen.

We had our physical examinations and that night we were also invited to make a statement on Iranian television. Some of us did, some of us did not. They were clearly hoping by the nature of their questions that we would say things that were useful to them to confirm their continuing allegations and insistence that we had been treated in a humanitarian fashion. None of us cooperated in that fashion to my knowledge. I did not. I don’t think any of that was used very effectively on television.

Flight to Freedom

The next day nothing happened until late in the afternoon. Then we were given copies of Tehran’s English language newspaper, the Tehran Times, replete with headlines that the crisis was over, that an agreement had been worked out, and that the U.S. had supposedly conceded on every condition posed by Iran– which of course we would later learn was far from the truth. About 5:00 in the afternoon we were told that we would be leaving for the airport in twenty minutes and that we could each take a small tote bag of whatever personal possessions we had. Those twenty minutes became several hours, but late in the evening we were ordered to put on blindfolds and led down into a cold courtyard where we could hear buses lined up and ready to go. On the way down the stairs we were told we could not, despite the earlier statement, carry our tote bags, but that they would be on the plane when we got there. I resisted, saying a promise was a promise, and that I didn’t think they would be true to their word. This went on for several minutes, with my guard finally saying as he pulled the bag away, “Don’t you trust us?” To that I could only laugh.

On the buses we were ordered to sit without talking, keeping our blindfolds on. I followed orders, as did my colleagues. It was a very tense time, and I remembered what Mike Howland had often said, and that was that the trip to the airport, if and when it came, could well be the most dangerous time of all, since there could well be elements determined to frustrate any agreement. At the airport, and by now it must have been close to midnight, we were pushed off the buses, the blindfolds ripped off, and forced to walk and run a gauntlet of shouting and pushing militants, determined to have their last word of abuse of the hostages. But there was the ramp, leading up to a plane, one of two Algerian aircraft, and there in that plane assembled 52 wildly happy Americans, embracing each other, moving up and down the aisle, talking, laughing, shouting, unable to sit more than a few moments, a scene almost incredible, except that it was real, very real.

As we entered the cabin, however, the first person to greet us was the Swiss Ambassador, Erik Lang, who with one of his staff was meticulously recording the name of each and every one of us as we appeared, the Swiss determined not to leave the plane until they were absolutely sure we were all accounted for. On board too was the Algerian Ambassador to Washington, the Governor of the Algerian Central Bank, and of course a full staff of air attendants and the pilots, all of whom were equally excited and determined to reach out to us in every way they conceivably could. It was bedlam and it was noisy and yet there was a perceptible uncertainty still in the air, the plane sitting there for some time before we were finally told, ordered might be a better word, since we were up and down all over the place, to sit and calm down so that the plane could be airborne.

Well, to describe it all would take a book, or perhaps a movie. There were uproarious cheers as we cleared the runway, more when champagne was broken out when we crossed the Turkish border, and then the beginning of a flight to freedom we can never forget, nor can we forget the constant hospitality of that Algerian aircraft’s crew. What beautiful people they were….

Some Parting Thoughts on Those Involved

Let me make some comments about those who guarded us in the Ministry. They were army men, not the student militants; the latter got their hands on us only for the last several weeks. Some of the soldiers were zealous revolutionary types, but most were pretty bored with the whole thing. Some were anxious to practice their English and talked at every opportunity they had. Some we liked very much. We were cared for in terms of food and toilet access by the regulars in the Ministry kitchen on that floor, and these were older Iranians, long on duty in the building, and most were fed up with the revolution. They became our friends, and I look back on some of them with real affection.

I remember too the other chiefs of mission in Tehran who got in to see us occasionally, especially the Papal Nuncio, the Vatican’s ambassador in the city. He was allowed in to see us on both Christmases and on Easter. He was the embodiment of the best in Christian virtue and humility and comradeship and, not least, faith — faith in our future, faith in prayer, and hope and optimism. He was magnificent. We felt his love and faith more than that from anyone else on the outside. I will always remember him with affection. Unfortunately he died after we came home and before any of us could convey to him personally how grateful we all were.

And of course there were my two cellmates, Victor Tomseth and Michael Howland. My respect for them is deep indeed. I could not have been kept in such close quarters with better companions. Mike, always reminding me and Vic of the importance of keeping physically fit and always alert to any opportunity to escape, however hopeless it seemed. And Vic, who had been my deputy in the embassy and knew Iran better than any of us…. I should note also the two women hostages, Ann Swift and Kate Koob, who clearly handled themselves with distinction and courage. Indeed all of my colleagues, in my view, endured that crisis with distinction and stood tall, with only one or two occasional exceptions.…

Given the kind of treatment they suffered with, the way they survived and coped with that atmosphere, with the isolation, with the way they were bound and particularly at the beginning the way they were denied the right to talk to each other, didn’t have enough food most of the time, their performance was remarkable. They fully deserved and earned the award for valor that each of them received.

https://web.archive.org/web/20121120102930/http://adst.org/2012/11/the-iran-hostage-crisis-part-ii/

---

Moments in U.S. Diplomatic History

Tie a Yellow Ribbon — The Iran Hostage Crisis as Seen from the Home Front

https://web.archive.org/web/20140213022722/http://adst.org/2012/10/tie-a-yellow-ribbon-the-iran-hostage-crisis-as-seen-from-the-home-front/

More Moments in U.S. Diplomatic History

Share on facebookShare on twitterShare on emailShare on pinterest_shareMore Sharing Services? Penelope (Penne) Laingen is the wife of Bruce Laingen, who had served in Germany, Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan before being named ambassador to Malta in 1977.  He was sent back to Iran to serve as Charge d’Affaires, and had been there for only a few months when the U.S. Embassy was overrun by student protesters.  In this interview, Penne Laingen describes the agony of the hostage crisis from the spouse’s perspective, the now ubiquitous yellow ribbon campaign she started, and the chronic frustration of dealing with the U.S. government. She was interviewed by Jewell Fenzi starting in March 1986. Read Bruce Laingen’s account here. “I got no support from the Department” Q: Can I ask you how you lived those 444 days? LAINGEN: I was just thinking yesterday about that time in Pakistan that I told you about — the tremendous stress and the coming close to a nervous breakdown in Pakistan — almost made those 444 days a piece of cake. Frankly, no it wasn’t, but how did I spend it? Well, I mainly spent it — you couldn’t think about anything else. Let’s face it. In my whole history of being connected to the Foreign Service, whenever I’d started a project – [it would frequently be interrupted].  For instance, I am a writer and I had three chapters written in a novel and my teacher said, “You have a real winner here and should get an agent now.”   Then Bruce was taken hostage, so I put that away and I’ve not gotten back to it. I will someday, I hope. I had also upholstered a chair and I had everything but the back done when we went toMalta, so I had to put that away, too. I mean, it’s just been a history of deferring or putting aside something. So when he was taken hostage, I just had to put everything else out of my mind and concentrate on that. I also called all my training in the Foreign Service to bear, even though I felt I had been “dismissed” by the Foreign Service…. Q: Cast adrift. LAINGEN: Cast adrift. This is another thing I don’t think my husband understands to this day. “But, honey, haven’t you enjoyed the Foreign Service?” Well, yes, there are high points, but I think it was the total identity that I had been led to believe I was a part of — and a vital part of it — and it gnawed on me all through Malta. I did it [carried out the role], but it still gnawed, terribly — the lack of recognition that I was out there doing a job for the U.S.government. That’s the way I really felt about it.So, here we come to the hostage crisis, a terribly public, international crisis, where you are on television. I think most people recognize and say, okay, this is the wife of the chief of mission and how she behaves reflects not only on her husband but perhaps on the whole Foreign Service or on Americans on the world scene. If I had gone on television and cried nightly, if I’d flown off to Iran and called the President stupid or the Government’s policy stupid, I think I would have heard in two minutes just how private a person I was! I would have been reprimanded by the very Department of State which had proclaimed me to be a private person with no responsibility to my husband’s career. I mean, I’m being sarcastic and I realized I wasn’t a private person. You can’t be a private person. You are a part of the Foreign Service and particularly when you are on the public stage like that. It’s a public life. How can you be a private person in a public life? See, this is what Sandra Gottlieb found out. You cannot be a private person in a public arena. There’s no way. So, the hypocrisy of this official policy has just gnawed no end at me. And I got no support from the Department in that role. I got sort of superficial support. Well, not even that, not even that. “Just tell them to tie a yellow ribbon around the old oak tree.” Q: Did you call weekly, daily, hourly to find out ?LAINGEN: No, no. Q: Did you wait for them? LAINGEN: Well, I started — I went down to the Department, I will say that. They opened up this task force center and you could go up there. But after a while, you felt in the way. They were not giving you any jobs to do.But along about March of 1980, five months after the takeover, I went to lunch over at Annapolis with some former POWs’ wives and they had been very supportive. One of them was Alice Stratton, and she is now head of the Navy Family Office or whatever. She said you need to get organized — the families need to get organized. I said, yes, I really feel that’s something that I have been feeling. I’m not getting any support from the Department, but the families have all these questions — legal, financial, repatriational, (medical, administrative), whatever — they aren’t getting the answers. The one thing that was coming up was, “Should we pay our income taxes?” We just weren’t getting the answers. Anyway, I called the families together in March of 1980 and we founded FLAG right then and there, formed the family group, the Family Liaison Action Group. In the meantime, I had been working on the yellow ribbon campaign. That started because a Washington Post lady [Barbara Parker] called me and said, “You seem so calm.” And she said we noticed that the psychiatrists are saying that their mental patients are so angry at Iran that they’ve coined this phrase “Irage” that they’re seeing it in their patients. And she said they are wondering how you manage….At that time there were some college students throwing dog food at Iranian demonstrators in our streets. They were showing signs of this Irage. I said that just wouldn’t help our situation. “Tell them to do something constructive, because we need a great deal of patience. Just tell them to tie a yellow ribbon around the old oak tree.” I don’t know why it came to me, except that I had put a yellow ribbon up myself on a large oak in my yard. And she said, “Have you done this?” And I said, “Yes.” She lived in Reston,Virginia, and she said “I think it’s a wonderful thing,” so she started hanging ribbons in Reston .One night, it was snowing and my doorbell rang. I went to the door and there was a woman there, who turned out to be an AID wife. And there was her station wagon with the children and the dog hanging out of it, and she said, “I have just come to tell you that I have appointed myself Chairman of the Yellow Ribbon Committee — my sister and I.” [It was Gail Carlson and Karen Helfert.] And so, those two started hanging ribbons all over Washington, DC, up Massachusetts Avenue and around the White House. Then eventually I was asked to the White House to hang a yellow ribbon on a Georgia Maple, so I went with Mrs. Carter and did that. Then, I was asked up to Capitol Hill to put a yellow ribbon around the Sam Rayburn Oak tree [the night of the State of the Union Address]. And then, I went to Wye Oak,Maryland, where the largest oak tree in the United States is located, with Governor Harry Hughes. It was so large that instead of a ribbon, we had a bolt of yellow and he went around one side of the tree and I went around the other (laughs), and we swathed this giant tree with yellow.Well, it did just snowball. And then, No Greater Love [a humanitarian organization under the direction of Carmela La Spada] went to the unions and they produced this pin. We began giving those out all over the United States. Then we worked with Girl Scouts [and Boy Scouts], veterans, and various Junior Chambers of Commerce, and it became a national [symbol]. I think Dotty Morefield was putting up billboards in California. (laughs) And bumper stickers. And it just spread. There was one thing that interested me about the American people. They do love their gimmicks, and we had to be very careful of those people who began exploiting our situation to make money off of our trauma. There was one woman I remember particularly in North Carolina, I think, who began putting out bulletins to people and selling them or selling bumper stickers and T-shirts and things like that, but I think I have always been amazed at the way that the hostage situation took hold of the American people’s imagination. I just think the time was ripe after Vietnam and Watergate. We were feeling very down about ourselves. If you recall, Jimmy Carter was going up to Camp David into the mountains, calling all these people in and saying, “What’s the matter with the United States?” At the time the takeover took place, he was in fact at Camp David doing that very thing. There was a tremendous amount of being down about ourselves as Americans. I think with the Iran crisis, people began to say, “No more, this is it.” Q: We bottomed out with the Iran crisis. LAINGEN: Who are they to treat us this way? We were over there to try to establish a new relationship with the revolutionary government ofIran. In fact, I have a letter from my husband to that effect. But it was too late. Our relationship with the Shah was so deep. After all, thirty years of supporting him and they [the mullahs] weren’t trusting of us at all. And when we did bring the Shah into this country, they thought we were going to get him well and send him back. So we could understand that.At any rate, I think that’s one reason why the yellow ribbon really took off, because people were feeling the need to be united about something at last and feel good about themselves. We were really a good people and we didn’t mean bad by the Iranians. And it was such a ludicrous situation, holding diplomats hostage like that, even though there had been a precedent in 1949 in Mukden, China. [To read more about the Mukden  incident, see “A Hostage in Communist China.”] Q: I didn’t know that… LAINGEN: There were Americans held for thirteen months. I’ve met one of the women, Mary Hubbard, a Foreign Service officer actually, and she later married one of the fellows that she was held captive with. And you never heard of that situation. That’s why I feel the Iran thing just happened at a time of history when we were ripe for that. At any rate, the yellow ribbon. And then I felt through my experience as an ambassador’s wife and then having served under ambassadors’ wives who took their jobs, in quotes, seriously, that my training meant that I had a certain responsibility for the families of the hostages, just as Bruce was feeling for his colleagues in Iran. I felt a responsibility there. I had not necessarily one to the U.S. Government with its official policy of not caring what I did, but probably… A rescue mission was aborted and eight commandos have been killed Q: In human terms… LAINGEN: Yes, but mostly to my husband, that I had to behave. But also, I just felt a responsibility and that’s why this family organization came about. I felt it just had to be done. We had to have input into decisions that were being made, for us and for the hostages. It wasn’t that we were going against the government, and the military services were very concerned about that when we organized FLAG, but we had to have that option if we wanted to….[Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, the third-ranking position in the Department] David Newsom said, “Nothing is going to happen, nothing is going to happen, I assure you. We are keeping the hostages first in our minds and we will do nothing to endanger their lives.” So everyone left the meeting feeling very good and calm. At one or two o’clock in the morning, the phone rang and it was Henry Precht. He said, “First of all, Bruce is all right, I’ll tell you that. Secondly, there was a rescue mission and it was aborted and eight commandos have been killed.” The interesting thing is, because I had had some background of this [concerning a possible raid] from this other person, I wasn’t shocked. I wasn’t surprised. I was really feeling, well, my goodness, what to think about David Newsom? Either he didn’t know about the raid or it was the biggest ruse anyone had ever pulled on the families. So, I fell right back to sleep after I hung up.The next thing I knew it was about five o’clock in the morning and the media people were banging on the door, just banging on the door, and it woke me up with a start — and my son. But we hid out and didn’t turn on any lights and waited until they had left. About 7:30, I went to church, because I was feeling not only sad about the eight that had been killed, but I felt sorry for Jimmy Carter. I thought what a terrible decision he had had to make, that he was that desperate and then it failed….Anyway, I came home [from church] and I felt at peace, because Bruce was all right. I called the White House — I had a contact there — and I said, “I just want President Carter to know how badly I feel for him, that I support him, and it’s a shame it failed, but if you can possibly hit ‘em again, hit ‘em harder,” that sort of thing. At any rate, the next day, which was Sunday or Monday, I believe, I had friends come down from New York. They said, “Oh, we saw your telegram in the New York Times, the telegram you sent to the president.” And I said: “The what?” “Yes,” they said, “It said that you supported the rescue mission, hit ‘em again, don’t despair.” That was the time when I was really angry with President Carter, because I had wanted just a private message to him, that I knew how badly he must feel. I had prayed over it, and then he — needing desperately some support for it, let my message go to the New York Times without asking me at all. This put me in a difficult position with the other hostage families. It wasn’t that I went against President Carter, but I just really wasn’t as happy with him after that. And then… Q: Do you think it was his decision or somebody else’s? LAINGEN: It could have been somebody else’s. Q: But still, he let it go through. He was a man who paid attention to detail. He knew that it was going through. LAINGEN: Yes, right. And then, [columnist] Mary McGrory called me. At that time, they were saying that the rescue mission was a political maneuver. Did I think that Carter had done it in order to win the election? He was beginning to campaign and beginning to see that his Rose Garden policy of staying close to the White House and doing nothing but hostages was hurting him. I said I refused to make any comments that way. The only thing I will say is that, anybody who turns this tremendous American surge of patriotism or whatever it is we are feeling into a political gimmick, makes a big mistake, I think. I don’t see how anybody could win an election if he does that. They’ve got to stay above politics where this Iran thing is concerned. Anyway, it’s sad, because it did turn out to be his undoing. Most people, as they pointed out today with Reagan in Grenada and Reagan in Libya, that the American people do support their presidents in quick little wars, but they certainly didn’t with Carter in Iran. It turned against him very much. It killed him. At any rate, the more I thought about the rescue mission, too, I realized — after it failed — that America was not as capable as I thought we were. A raid into that populous area was impossible and, no doubt, many would have been killed, even some of the hostages. When Secretary Vance resigned in protest, I became very skeptical about the raid. I mean, what in the world were these helicopters failing for in the desert? And I felt particularly bad, because, as I say, I had one son at the Naval Academy and another one at the University of Minnesota in NROTC and a third one coming along who is now at Annapolis, all of them wanting to fly. Our middle son now is a helicopter pilot, and…he recently took off from an aircraft carrier and the plane burst into flames and he had to quickly get back on the aircraft carrier. He almost dunked in the ocean! There’s so much talk about missiles, spending money on missile weapons, when the things we really need in warfare are falling apart. These helicopters are so old that it was very disillusioning to me. The more I thought about it, too, I thought how are they going to rescue my husband at the Foreign Ministry? The more I thought about the rescue mission, I thanked the good Lord that it really didn’t succeed. Publicly, even when Bruce got home, we never said anything against it, because we marveled at the fact there were other Americans willing to put their lives on the line to save their fellow Americans. So that has always been something we don’t want to shatter, that those men went on a mission that was stupid. We certainly didn’t want to say that to their families. But I do look back on it and think it was an act of desperation. We had been through everything we possibly could and then, in April, this mission failed. After that, the whole summer through 1980, there was nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing going on. “They held a gun to Bruce’s head and then put him in solitary” Q: No initiations…negotiations? LAINGEN: Nothing, they had turned over every stone possible, and also the families were beginning to feel that perhaps we ought to be quiet and just wait until the Iranians saw that nothing was happening and they’d get tired of it, tired of all the publicity. Perhaps too much publicity had lengthened the hostage crisis. So then, we tried to calm everybody down, and that didn’t work. By then, the American people had really been stirred up too much. (laughs) That summer, too, Richard Queen returned because he had developed multiple sclerosis. The family members took that to mean that their loved ones were probably in pretty good health. Also, that the Iranians had no intention of killing any of them. It then became a matter of waiting for the Iranians to figure out a way to release the hostages without losing face. They had made their points about their grievances. The Shah died that July, so they knew he wouldn’t return. And they’d just about squeezed every value out of the hostage issue to unite their people behind the new revolutionary government.I think what really completed the hostage crisis was the Iran-Iraq War, where Iran had used the hostages to put their government together with the mullahs, the clerics. So then, they had served that purpose and now they were distracted by the war. Also, I remember that the Iranian banker, Nobari, who was in Paris, finally saw that the freezing of the assets was killing Iran and he went to tell Ghotbzadeh and some of them — and Bani Sadr, who knew economics — that the hostage crisis was now beginning to turn against them. One of them came to the United Nations and saw how isolated Iran had become on the world scene when they received no support concerning the invasion of the Iraqis. And then, I think the prospect of Ronald Reagan coming in also had something to do with ending it .Q: It seemed to me it gave them an opportunity. With Carter out and Reagan coming in, it was an opportunity that they seized. Now, whether we planted the thought with them or someone there thought it up themselves… LAINGEN: Well, I do think that’s true, but I also think that they panicked, because the last few days before the inauguration, when all the business with the Algerians was going on and with Warren Christopher flying back and forth, the feeling was that the day of the inauguration was the deadline, and if they didn’t come through and agree on it and they didn’t get what they wanted from the Americans, who knows what Reagan would do, bomb Kharg Island or something?  That was his reputation then. So that was definitely the deadline for them. They had to get that done.But it’s interesting that weeks before that they did come and get Bruce and the others out of the Foreign Ministry, held a gun to their heads — a lot of people don’t know this —  and those three were in solitary confinement in prison for three weeks. And no beds there. They slept on cement floors, their teeth chattering. It was just awful. I was informed that Bruce had gone from the Foreign Ministry. They didn’t know where. And I remember Sheldon Krys saying he hoped that I would not worry too much. I said, “No, as a matter of fact, I felt it was the beginning of the end. Bruce might be in prison and it might be awful, but there was something moving. It’s movement, and I think it’s a step out.” And that’s exactly what happened .“We put up a dart board of Khomeini and threw darts at it” Q: Was Sheldon Krys in on those negotiations? LAINGEN: Oh, yes, I’m sure he was. Perhaps not the monetary negotiations, but certainly involved with the hostages’ release. Q: He came as Ambassador to Trinidad just as we were leaving. I had one afternoon briefing session with him and saw him a few times afterwards. Very competent. LAINGEN: Very competent. One thing that made it difficult was the lack of esprit de corps among the families. I mean, we had never served together, so that was one of the drawbacks. And there were all different services involved. There’s a study done of fourteen hostage wives. Those of us who had served the longest in the Foreign Service expected the most, yet felt we had received the least support. Those foreign-born spouses in the group expected nothing and were deeply grateful for whatever they received in the way of support. They had no great expectations of the Department, which was perhaps a cultural difference. And the military wives felt they received the greatest support, which they did, and in return kept their allegiance to those services intact.I believe Sheldon Krys and other Department managers did the best they could under the circumstances, but they had much to learn from the Iran crisis in the management of families during a crisis. It was always a source of great disappointment to me, for instance, that not once during the crisis did any of my husband’s colleagues offer to take our youngest son to a basketball game or call to inquire about the house or other personal matters. It was up to us to unite ourselves and support one another in that personal way.I suppose at posts overseas, when crisis strikes, Foreign Service personnel exhibit more esprit de corps and community cohesion than was evident to us here in Washington. Several of us wrote a report for the State Department with suggestions on methods of handling families in crisis, and I am happy to say that crisis managers are beginning to include family members in the terrorism equation. At least now they are seen as “indirect victims” and that their reactions are not mental problems but human reactions to stress.You knew you were angry, but there wasn’t much you could do. You tried to focus your anger. Many of them [the families] focused it on the State Department. That was another thing I told them [the crisis managers] : “You mustn’t take it personally, because anger is very natural. They’re going to have to find someplace to put their anger and it probably will be focused on you.”But what we did, in our family, was put up a dart board of Khomeini and threw darts at it in our house. That kind of thing helped get it out. I saw in my diary, looking back in it, you could see the anger. We didn’t call them Shiites, for instance. (laughs).I had become much more independent and mentally retired from the Foreign Service. A long separation like that usually means that nothing will ever be the same again, and it takes a great deal of commitment to the marriage and love on the part of everyone in the family to adjust. I had never liked Iran, as I told you, and I’m afraid that the hostage crisis did nothing to better my estimation of the country. Bruce has been much more forgiving than I. The thing that surprised me most was how the anger remained for such a long time afterward. I thought it would disappear once the hostages were home. I finally came to the conclusion that the anger stemmed from the whole upsetting trauma in our lives, not from anyone or anything specifically. What they did in Iran was wrong, and there’s no two ways about it, and if they haven’t learned that lesson, it’s too bad for all of us.

---

Iran Hostage Crisis: Revisiting 1979

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,263990,00.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20070418072629/http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,263990,00.html

Friday , April 06, 2007

By Catherine Herridge

FF
Friday, April 6, 2:33 p.m.

As I write, the British hostage crisis is resolved, but their situation has sparked new questions about the Iranian president and his possible role in the 1979 takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran.

Earlier this week, I told you about Kathryn Koob (rhymes with robe), one of two women held for 444 days in ‘79. This week, I met up with her in Minneapolis, where she told me an extraordinary story about one of her captors at the embassy … a captor she believes to be Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Kathryn’s story is remarkable. She says her faith got her through the terrible days when she was isolated and alone. She had no idea they had released all of the women at the compound, except two, because she rarely saw anyone else. Like the British, they were segregated and held in isolation.

“We were tied in chairs, faced the wall, told not to speak to each other and we weren’t able to communicate, except maybe if you walked past someone and pressed their shoulder or something like that,” Koob told me.

Over the next year and a half, the students kept with their new radical beliefs and separated the female hostages from the rest. Koob was often held in a small 8 x 12 foot room. Some of the female guards were strident and unpredictable.

“My fear was that one of them would do something really foolish and strike out, or that the strain would get too much for one of my colleagues,” she said.

When Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected in 2005, about a half dozen former U.S. hostages, like Koob, claimed he was one of the students.

Koob claims her brush with Ahmadinejad came in the embassy courtyard. It was one of the few times she was allowed to go outside by her captors — so Koob and the other female hostage pulled up their shirt sleeves to get some sun.

“All of a sudden, this whirlwind of a man came into the courtyard, sort of yelling at us, you know, ‘How dare you do this, how dare you insult the principals of Islam and show your forearms and your legs, you know you’re not supposed to do that,'” Koob said.

Koob’s view is shared by a former CIA officer William Daugherty, who was among the 66 Americans taken in ‘79. He was first interviewed just after Ahmadinejad’s election, where he told FOX, “I think that’s what impressed me more than anything else, was his looks at us, as though, you know, we really weren’t worthy to live. Just, just a deep, intense personal hatred on his part. And that sort of thing really doesn’t leave you.”

While Koob’s claims, as well as others, are not shared by all of the former hostages, FOX News has learned that state department officials began quietly investigating their stories.

State Spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters this week that “there was an effort by the U.S. government to get in contact with former hostages to determine whether or not President Ahmadinejad was, in fact, one of the hostage-takers, or one of the people that was involved in questioning them or in any way involved with that whole incident.”

U.S. officials tell FOX the questions surrounding the Iranian president have never been resolved, but they do believe he was part of the student movement. What’s new and important here is that this episode seems to upping the ante. One official told me that there is, “Strong interest in any information about Ahmadinejad and his background — especially that 1979 time frame.”

Wednesday, April 4, 3:33 p.m.

In this week’s intelligence briefing: Iran, the bomb and the British hostages.

On the surface, there doesn’t seem to be a connection between the three — but in the Middle East, from my experience, nothing happens in a vacuum. A new report this week suggests that Iran may be only two years away from the bomb. Senior U.S. officials are disputing the report, telling FOX that they don’t believe Iran will have the ability to build and deliver a bomb before 2015.

Frankly, 2015 is not very far away either, but in order to cross that threshold, Iran will have to accomplish several things.

U.S. officials confirm that Iran is making a big push to put more centrifuges into its plant at Natanz. Officially, the Iranians say it’s for power, but no one in the U.S. intelligence community really believes that. As one U.S. official told me, it takes more than just hardware to get the bomb: “The Iranians must show that they can operate, run the centrifuges in sync, and run them efficiently [in order to enrich uranium.]”

Even if they can accomplish that, Iran must work on good detonators and also a means of delivery. This is just a fancy way of saying that they need the raw materials and the know-how to get the bomb. And that could still take years.

What’s the connection to the hostages? On Weekend Live Saturday, we interviewed Kathryn Koob. During the 1979 hostage crisis, she was one of only two American women held for the full 444 days in Tehran. Her theory is that the Iranian regime wants to take the focus off their nuclear program. It’s almost like that old saying, “There is no such thing as bad publicity.”

As far as Iran is concerned, the world media, the British and the European union are breathing down their neck about the hostages. It may be a welcome change from constant scrutiny about their nuclear ambitions.

Koob is now one in a long line of former U.S. hostages who believe with absolute certainty that the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was one of the students who held them in ‘79 and ‘80. The official line from the intelligence community is that they know Ahmedinejad was part of the student movement in Iran, but they don’t know what his exact role was. A guard? One of the hostage-takers? None of these are officially being ruled out.

And, Koob says the seizure of the British sailors has Ahmadinejad’s fingerprints all over it.

Catherine Herridge is the Homeland Defense Correspondent for FOX News and hosts FOX News Live Saturday 12-2 p.m. ET. Since coming to FOX in 1996 as a London-based correspondent, she has since reported on the 2004 presidential elections, Operation Iraqi Freedom, Medicare fraud, prescription drug abuse and child prostitution. You can read the rest of her bio here.

 ——————————————————————————————————————————————————

A First Tour Like No Other

Held Hostage in Iran
William J. Daugherty
COPYRIGHT 1996 by William J. Daugherty

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/docs/v41i5a01p.htm

https://web.archive.org/web/20070613074602/https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/docs/v41i5a01p.htm
——————————————————————————–
I do not recall now the exact circumstances in which I was finally and firmly offered Tehran for a first tour, nor even who made the offer. I do know, though, that I did not hesitate a second to say yes. For the most part, I have not regretted that decision, but at times it is only with a prodigious dose of hindsight that I have been able to keep it in perspective. After all, it is not often that a newly minted case officer in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations (DO) spends his first tour in jail.
I was recruited into the Agency in 1978, during my last year of graduate school, and I entered on duty the next January. In my recruitment interviews, I was told about a special program managed by the DO’s Career Management Staff that was designed to place a few selected first-tour officers overseas in a minimal period of time, without lengthy exposure to the Washington fishbowl or reliance on light cover. The program sounded fine to me, and so I joined the Agency and was rushed through the Career Training (DO) spends his first tour in jail.

Something else that presented a problem initially–but later came to be a blessing in disguise–was that I enjoyed an astonishingly small amount of knowledge of the DO and how it did its business. Despite that innocent state, I managed to do well in training. I was particularly captivated by the stories told by the instructors from the DO’s Near East (NE) Division, and by the challenging situations found in the Middle East; midway through the training course, I had decided I wanted to go to NE Division. At that point, during a Saturday visit to Headquarters, the deputy chief of NE Division (DC/NE), knowing of my participation in the special program, raised the possibility of my being assigned to Tehran–even though I possessed absolutely no academic knowledge of, nor any practical experience whatsoever with, anything Iranian.

By the time of this conversation in spring 1979, Tehran station was in the midst of coping with postrevolutionary Iran. The Shah (ruling monarch) of Iran had fled the country on 16 January, and soon thereafter–on 2 February–Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile in France to oversee a government founded on his perception of an Islamic state. Also of importance to later events, US Embassy and station personnel had already been taken hostage for several hours, on 14 February 1979, in what came to be called the St. Valentine’s Day Open House.

This last event triggered an almost total drawdown of Embassy and station personnel, along with a reduction of active-duty American military forces in Iran from about 10,000 to a dozen or so, divided between the Defense Attaché’s Office (DAO) and the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG). It did not, however, generate much (if any) sentiment at the highest levels of the United States Government for disrupting or breaking diplomatic relations with Iran. In fact, it served mainly to strengthen American determination to reconcile with Iran’s Provisional Revolutionary Government.

By March, Tehran station consisted of several case officers and communicators rotating in and out of Iran on a “temporary duty” basis. But NE Division was already looking ahead to the time when the station could again be staffed with permanently assigned personnel and functioning as a station should–recruiting agents and collecting intelligence. And that was the state of affairs when I met DC/NE in Langley on that spring day.

The Right Background
The deputy chief had fair reason to consider placing me in Tehran station. First, my special program had kept my cover clean: I had no visible affiliation with the US Government, much less with the Agency or any of its usual cover providers. I did have military service–eight years of active duty with the US Marine Corps. But between those years and my entry on duty with the Agency I had spent 5 1/2 years as a university student.

The nature of my military experience and education probably also helped prompt DC/NE to look at me for assignment to Tehran. During my eight years of Marine Corps service, I had first been an air traffic controller and, for more than half my service time, a designated Naval Flight Officer flying as a weapons system officer in high-performance jets. When my time for a tour in Vietnam rolled around, I was assigned to a fighter/attack squadron deployed aboard an aircraft carrier. I flew 76 missions over North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and Laos in the venerable F-4 Phantom. While no hero (indeed, I was the most junior and least experienced aviator in the squadron), I nonetheless had been subjected to the pressures of potential life-and-death situations and to high standards of performance. On returning to school, I earned a Ph.D. in Government, specializing in Executive-Congressional relations and Constitutional law associated with American foreign policy. This background seemed to nudge DC/NE toward selecting me for Tehran, and later it also was to serve me well in critical ways, in circumstances the nature of which I could have scarcely conceived.

Soon after my conversation with the DC/NE, however, I was told that the Tehran assignment was being withdrawn. When the acting chief of station (COS) was offered an inexperienced first-tour officer, he not unwisely rejected me. His position, which is difficult to rebut, was that Tehran was a hostile environment in which contacts and agents were placing their lives at risk by meeting in discreet circumstances with American Embassy officers (all of whom, of course, were considered by many Iranians to be CIA). Therefore, our Iranian assets deserved to be handled by experienced officers who knew what to do and how to do it. Further, any compromise whatsoever, for any reason, would unquestionably have severe repercussions for US-Iranian relations, which the Carter administration was trying to resurrect. Hence I was offered another station as an alternative.

It was sometime in late June or early July, while I was on the other country desk, that I was again offered Tehran. A permanent COS had finally arrived in Tehran and, when my candidacy was raised with him, he did not hesitate to say yes. Later, he told me that given a choice between a well-trained, aggressive, and smart first-tour officer or a more experienced but reluctantly assigned officer who would rather have been somewhere else, he would take the first-tour officer. I thought then, and have thought ever since, that the COS made a courageous decision–one that, had I been in his place, I might have decided differently. He earned my respect right then and there, and it has never waned.

I accepted quickly. Shortly afterward, elated at the thought of going to a very-high-visibility post of great significance to policymakers, I was on the desk reading in. When the day came to depart for Tehran, I called on DC/NE. He ushered me into his office, chatted a minute or two about my itinerary, wished me well, and, shaking my hand, looked at me and said, “Don’t [expletive] up.” I wish he had been able to convey that message to a few other government officials downtown.

Historical Perspective
Iran (then known as Persia) at the turn of the century was a barren country barely existing as a grouping of tribal fiefdoms, more or less caught in the rivalry between Russia and Britain. The discovery of oil in Persia in 1908 changed things considerably for the Persian people and the two competing empires, particularly the British, but had little initial impact on US interests. With the events in revolutionary Russia in 1916 and 1917, that nation’s ability to exercise power and influence in Persia diminished, and Persia quickly became fully incorporated into Britain’s sphere of influence. Succeeding US presidents avoided any official contact or involvement, preferring instead to sidestep Persian entreaties and to recognize that the country was now within the British sphere.

In 1925 a Persian Army officer, Reza Pahlavi, became something of a national hero by halting a Communist-sponsored revolt in northern Persia. He parlayed that success into being elected Shah by the civilian Parliament, and then turned that semidemocratic position into a highly autocratic dictatorship. In short, he became just the latest in a centuries-long line of Persian masters who ruled by fiat and fear.

Officially calling his country Iran, Reza Shah began a reign that left him popular with virtually no one. Before World War II, he engaged in modernization of his country, although not necessarily for benevolent or public-spirited motives (one of many reasons he was detested by his subjects). During his reign, Iranian-US relations continued at a low ebb, with neither country understanding the other’s culture and with much distrust existing on both sides.

It took World War II to create the Iranian-US ties that were eventually to become so seemingly invincible and permanent. The Soviet Union had been invaded by the Nazis in June 1941 with three field armies, one of which headed for the Transcaucasus region in southwestern Russia. With vital lines of transport and communication severed, there remained only two avenues of supply by which needed US lend-lease and other materials could reach the Soviets: the always dangerous Murmansk Run for ship convoys, and the Trans-Iranian Railroad reaching from the warm-water ports of the Persian Gulf to the Soviet borders in northwestern Iran. The Transcaucasus thrust also threatened Iranian oil fields, for which Germany’s need was desperate.

The outcome was the occupation of Iran in the north by Soviet troops and in the south by predominantly British forces. Reza Shah (whose army was completely undistinguished in its efforts to deter the arrival of foreign troops) was forced into exile on the island of Mauritius, and his teenage son, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, was placed on the throne in a figurehead status. During this period, both Soviet and British troops earned Iranian antipathy as occupiers who were, in the eyes of most Iranians, looting their country while fighting a war in which Iran had no stake. (This enmity was not without some justification, although the British were never given the credit they deserved for significant and measurable assistance to the Iranian people throughout this period.) All of this, of course, deepened Iranian suspicions of foreigners and hostility toward outsiders who tried to or, in this instance, actually did control the country. The US Government’s stake in Iran, as well as its diplomatic and military presence, concomitantly increased as a consequence of America’s unyielding support to its wartime allies, Britain and the Soviet Union.

With the war over in 1945, the Soviets refused to leave Iran, as previously agreed to under a 1943 treaty. Instead, relying on sympathizers in the local populace they had worked to cultivate during the war, the Soviets commenced a blatant attempt to annex the northern regions of Iran, coveting both the oil and access to a warm-water port. By the time American and British troops had departed from Iran in spring 1946, the Soviets were firmly ensconced in the province of Azerbaijan and were moving into Iran’s Kurdish region.

Although George Kennan was still a year away from enshrining the geopolitical strategy of containment in his celebrated “Mr. X” article, the highest officials in the US Government had already recognized the true nature of Stalin’s Soviet Union and the need to prevent, where possible and practical, the USSR’s expansion beyond its own borders. Exerting strong diplomatic efforts, including mobilization of the nascent UN General Assembly, the US Government finally succeeded in getting the Soviets out of Iran and in having their puppet governments in Azerbaijan and Kurdistan disbanded.

Now, with Soviet and British influence over Iran greatly diminished, US-Iranian relations on all fronts gradually expanded, with the first arms sale by the United States to the Iranian military coming in June 1947. From then on, oil and “strategic imperatives” cemented and drove this unnatural relationship, despite continuing and increasing distrust and antipathy toward each other over the next decades.

CIA involvement in the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq in 1953 loomed extraordinarily large in the minds of Iranians. In April 1951 the then-popular but eccentric Mossadeq, a wealthy career civil servant and uncompromising nationalist, had been appointed by the Shah as prime minister to replace his assassinated predecessor. Shortly thereafter, the Shah, under pressure from Iran’s political center and left, signed an order nationalizing the British-dominated, putatively “jointly owned” Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC); Mossadeq had earlier submitted, and the Majlis (parliament) had approved, legislation mandating AIOC’s nationalization. The ultranationalist Mossadeq, who had advocated remaining aloof from both the Soviets and the Americans (rather than continuing the usual strategy of embracing both in order to play one off against the other), soon came to be seen by many in the West, including Washington, as de facto pro-Soviet.

The nationalization of AIOC touched off two years of political turmoil, during which Mossadeq’s popular support eroded. This period culminated in August 1953 with the Shah’s flight into a brief exile, CIA’s stage-management (under explicit Presidential directive) of the coup against the Prime Minister, and the Shah’s return (with US Government assistance) and consolidation of his power. Subsequently the United States, driven by the inexorable forces of the Cold War, increasingly assumed the role of chief protector for Iran and the Shah, leaving many Iranians more convinced than ever that the Shah and their country were simply a dominion of the United States, administered by or through the CIA. The seeds of the Iranian revolution of 1978-79 were being sown.

Fifty-Three Days
I arrived in Tehran on 12 September 1979 and began the first of what turned out to be only 53 days of actual operational work. If I knew little about Iran, I knew even less about Iranians. My entire exposure to Iran, beyond the evening television news and a three-week area studies course at the State Department, consisted of what I had picked up during five weeks on the desk reading operational files.
Virtually all my insights into Persian minds and personalities came from a lengthy memo written by the recently reassigned political counselor, which described in detail (the accuracy of which I would have ample time to confirm) how Iranians viewed the world, and why and how they thought and believed as they did. It did not take much to see that even friendly and pro-Western Iranians could be difficult to deal or reason with, or to otherwise comprehend. The ability displayed by many Iranians to simultaneously avow antithetical beliefs or positions was just one of their quainter character traits.

One memorable introduction to all this was my first encounter with the Iranian elite several weeks after my arrival. In this instance, I met with an upper-class Iranian woman who was partnered with her husband in a successful construction company. This couple was wealthy and held degrees from European and American universities. They were well traveled. But, her exposure to the West and level of education notwithstanding, this woman insisted that the Iranian Government was directly controlled by the CIA. She said that the chief of the Iranian desk at CIA Headquarters talked every day to the Shah by telephone to give the monarch his instructions for that particular day, and that the US Government had made a deliberate decision to rid Iran of the Shah. Since the US Government did not, in her scenario, have any idea whom it wanted to replace the Shah as ruler, it had decided to install Khomeini as the temporary puppet until the CIA selected a new Shah. I was both fascinated and stupefied by this explanation of the Shah’s downfall.

The woman’s unshakable theory did not encompass an explanation of why the United States would have permitted the bloody street riots in 1977 and 1978. Nor did it explain why, if the US Government (or the CIA) wanted the Shah to leave, he was not just ordered to go, thereby avoiding the enormous problems of revolutionary Iran.

My initial weeks in Tehran passed quickly. The Chargé, L. Bruce Laingen, was more than helpful, as was Maj. Gen. Phillip Gast, US Air Force, head of the MAAG, with both of them generously taking care to include me as a participant in substantive meetings at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) and Iranian General Staff Headquarters. I worked essentially full-time during the day on cover duties, which I found much more interesting than onerous, dealing with issues of genuine import; in the evenings, I reverted to my true persona as a CIA case officer. I was 32 years old, at the top of my form both physically and mentally. Captivity was to change all that, and I have never since regained that same degree of mental acuity and agility. But during those 53 days on the streets of Tehran, I reveled in it all.

On 21 October, however, I came to realize that my euphoria would probably be short-lived. On that date, the other station case officer (as acting COS) shared a cable with me in which CIA Headquarters advised that the President had decided that day to admit the Shah, by then fatally ill with cancer, into the United States for medical treatment. I could not believe what I was reading. The Shah had left Iran in mid-January 1979 and had since led a peripatetic life; indeed, he had even rejected an offer of comfortable exile in America (to the relief of many US Government officials). Now, with US-Iranian relations still unstable and with an intense distrust of the United States permeating the new Iranian “revolutionary” government, the Shah and his doctors had decided the United States was the only place where he could find the medical care he needed.

The Shah Comes to America
Since February 1979, strong pressure on President Carter for the Shah to be admitted to the United States had been openly and unrelentingly applied by powerful people inside and outside the US Government, particularly by National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and banking magnate David Rockefeller, with added support from former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Had the Shah come directly to the United States when he left Iran in January 1979, there probably would have been little or no problem–the Iranians themselves expected this to happen and were surprised when it did not. But, as the ousted monarch continued to roam the world, the US Government was also working to build a productive relationship with the new revolutionary regime. Thus, as a practical working plan, the greater the American distance from the Shah, the better for the new relationship–and vice versa. The Shah’s entry into the United States 10 months later, however, quickly unraveled all that had been achieved and rendered impossible all that might have been accomplished in the future.

When the Shah’s doctors contacted the US Government on 20 October 1979 and requested that he be admitted immediately into the United States for emergency medical treatment, the President quickly convened a gathering of the National Security Council principals to decide the issue. Only Secretary of State Vance opposed the request; the others either strongly supported it or acquiesced. The CIA was represented by DDCI Frank Carlucci in the absence of DCI Stansfield Turner; it is instructive to note that Carlucci was not asked for CIA’s assessment of the situation. The meeting concluded with President Carter, while harboring significant misgivings about letting the Shah in, nonetheless acceding to the majority vote and granting permission for the Shah to enter the United States for “humanitarian” reasons. The President, familiar with warnings from Bruce Laingen about the danger to the Embassy if the Shah were to be admitted to the United States, asked what the advisers would recommend when the revolutionaries took the Embassy staff hostage. No one responded.

Hundreds of thousands of Iranians were enraged by the decision to admit the Shah, seeing in him a despot who was anything but an adherent to humanitarian principles. They also felt, not for the first time, a strong sense of betrayal by the US President.

Disillusionment
In 1976, Jimmy Carter had campaigned for the presidency on a platform that included a strongly stated position advocating human rights around the world. Friendly or allied nations exhibiting poor adherence to those criteria were not to be excluded from sanctions, one of which was the withholding of US military/security support and related assistance. Many Iranians heard this and took heart, believing that President Carter would cease US support to the Shah’s government while also easing, or stopping completely, the abuses taking place in their country.

On 31 December 1977, while the President was making a state visit to Iran, he openly referred to the country as an “island of stability in a sea of turmoil,” lauding the Shah for a commitment to democracy. All Iranians were keenly aware of the rioting that had broken out in their cities during the past year. Such disturbances were occurring ever more frequently, accompanied by a mounting death toll at the hands of the Army and the internal security forces.

To many Iranians, this seeming unwillingness of President Carter to accept reality was a bitter sign that he had been dishonest and deceptive in his often-stated desire to promote human rights. Those few spoken words by the President generated an intense disillusionment within the Iranian populace–about which my militant captors frequently talked during the hundreds of hours of harangues, discussions, and debates I was to have with them.

Now the same President who had spoken fervently in support of human rights was letting the Shah into the United States for putatively humanitarian reasons. Again, a sense of betrayal flooded the Iranian people.

There was one notable irony in the decision to bring the Shah into the United States. After the Embassy was seized, President Carter publicly proclaimed that the lives and safety of the Embassy hostages were his first consideration. It was unfortunate that we did not occupy the same position in his hierarchy of priorities on 20 October; instead, the lives and safety of 66 Americans were secondary to the life of a man who was already dying. I have never understood that logic.
It is not accurate to say that the policies of and actions by President Carter and his advisers created the Iranian crisis; they in fact inherited and continued policies put in place by their predecessors. What is clear is that President Carter was not well served by several of his advisers in their unwillingness to face the possibility that the Shah’s regime might not last the decade, much less to the end of the century.

That said, I doubt that the United States would have been able to rejuvenate its relations with Iran even if the Shah had been denied admission to enter the United States. With hindsight, it is easily arguable that, if the militants had not used US admission of the Shah as a pretext to take the Embassy and break relations, some other unacceptable act would have occurred to sever the relationship. The Iranian revolutionary regime continued to engage in state-supported terrorism, murders of exiled dissidents, and attempts to acquire nuclear weapons. The country’s new rulers also made an enormous (and at least partially successful) effort to export the revolution to other nations. The United States would not have been able to do business with such a hostile and outlaw government. Refusing the Shah would simply have prolonged what, in retrospect, was inevitable.

Feeding Xenophobia
To the ever-suspicious Iranian radicals, the admission of the Shah for medical treatment was a sham designed to hide a conspiracy aimed at overthrowing their revolutionary government. To add more fuel to the fire, Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan and Foreign Minister Ibrahim Yazdi (a graduate of a US medical school who had practiced his profession in the United States, and who held a Permanent Resident Alien green card) met briefly with National Security Adviser Brzezinski in Algiers on 1 November 1979, during the celebration of Algeria’s independence day. In this meeting, which was not publicized in Algiers, the Shah and the future of US-Iranian relations were discussed. When the radicals in Tehran learned of these talks, they used Radio Tehran to claim that nefarious motives lay behind the meeting.

In the eyes of the radicals, the prime minister and the foreign minister were meeting “secretly” and conspiring with a representative of the US President. The inevitable conclusion was that the United States was again planning to return the Shah to power in Iran. At a protest march in Tehran attended by anywhere from 1 million to 3 million demonstrators, the stage was set for actions against the American Embassy in Tehran and the actors were placed into motion.

Shaky Security
We all knew the Embassy was vulnerable, despite additional physical security measures taken to protect the chancery following the St. Valentine’s Day Open House. But the building had not been rendered impervious to assault; rather, the structure had merely been “hardened” to provide protection from gunfire, increase the difficulty of forced entry, and establish an area of (relative) safety where the Embassy staff could hold out until help arrived. With news of the Shah’s admittance into the United States, there came a certain realization that it would now be just a matter of days before the Iranians reacted. The only question we had was whether they would repeat the 14 February takeover, with more serious consequences, or renew the terrorist attacks against US officials that had occurred early in the decade. But no new changes were made in the Embassy’s security posture.

From all outward appearances, life seemed normal. The Embassy staff was being told that it was safe in Tehran, and employees were being encouraged to bring over their families, including preschool-age children; on the day of the takeover there were several dependent families of Embassy staff at the Frankfurt airport waiting to fly to Tehran.
The chief purveyor of this position
was the State Department’s office director for Iran, who was visiting the Embassy when the news of the Shah’s admittance into the United States was announced to the staff. Bruce Laingen asked the office director to join him on the trip to the MFA to inform the Iranians and to ask for protection for the Embassy, which Foreign Minister Yazdi personally promised.

Unbeknownst to us, however, the same office director had, while in Washington before his trip, written a series of memos discussing in detail the lack of adequate security at the Embassy and the dangers the staff faced if the Shah came into the United States. He said nothing of this to the Embassy staff during his visit, preferring instead to repeat that it was now “perfectly safe” for us to be in Iran. (In a chance encounter with this officer following my return to the United States, I raised the issue. Somewhat disingenuously, he replied only that he did not think it proper for “those of us in Washington to be second-guessing the assessments of those who are actually on the ground.” I let the matter drop.)

One other sign that the State and Defense Departments were buying into the “perfectly safe” assessment was the presence of literally thousands of classified documents in the Embassy. Following the 14 February takeover, many Embassy safes and files had been flown to storage in Frankfurt, including over 30 safe drawers of materials from the Defense Attaché Office. By mid-July, however, those files were back in Tehran, in anticipation of better relations with the new government and improved security measures at the Embassy. In addition to the DAO files, the political section had more than 24 safe drawers full of files, and the economic section had roughly the same number. Also on hand were all the personnel files for the Embassy staff of about 70. (The Iranian militants eventually published the documents taken from Embassy safes, along with translations into Farsi. As of around 1990, the Iranians had published more than 65 volumes of these documents.)

The political and economic section files included documents going back to the mid-1950s, useful only in a historical context, if that. These files provided the means to compile a list of all Iranians who had visited the Embassy officially during the past 25 years. As it turned out, “someone” did make a list, creating serious problems for hundreds of Iranians who found themselves accused of espionage and interrogated by militants demanding to know why they had visited the “spy den” two decades previously. When visiting the DAO or the political offices, I had often seen safes with multiple drawers open. I had been dismayed by the amount of paper remaining in a building so vulnerable to another takeover.
Twice in the summer of 1979, Chargé Laingen had been queried by State as to when and whether the Shah should or could be admitted to the United States. Each time, he replied that this would eventually be feasible, but not before the US Government had fully signaled acceptance of the revolution and not before the Provisional Revolutionary Government had been replaced by a more stable and permanent government. To do otherwise, he warned, would place the Embassy and its staff in serious jeopardy. Neither criteria had been met before the Shah arrived in New York, nor was there any sign that officials in Washington were giving much thought or credence to Laingen’s position.
Iranian militants invade US Embassy, November 1979.

Dubious Policies and Practices
It was only after our release in January 1981 that I came to understand fully why security precautions were ignored and our concerns unheeded. As background, it is useful to remember that the Carter administration, particularly in the person of Dr. Brzezinski, strongly desired to maintain friendly relations and a close military relationship with Iran. For Brzezinski, Iran was the cornerstone of his plan to thwart Soviet expansion in the region; it was also a key nation on which the United States would rely to maintain regional stability. To assist in making this strategic vision a reality, the Carter administration continued the program begun in the Nixon years to expand Iranian military capabilities substantially.

Beginning in the early 1970s with the sale of 72 advanced F-14 Tomcat fighter-interceptor aircraft to the Iranian Air Force, the United States steadily built up the Iranian military. Iran was the only country in the world to which the United States had sold the F-14. In the pipeline by 1979 was about $6 billion worth of military materials, including four technologically advanced Spruance-class destroyers. A side benefit of this largess was Iranian permission for the United States to establish and maintain two sensitive signals intelligence collection sites in the northern part of the country to intercept data link communications of Soviet missile tests.

But hundreds of thousands of Iranians who did not benefit from this official American aid or understand the reasons behind it viewed all this as a greedy, “imperialistic” America working with a greedy, corrupt Iranian Government to steal oil revenues from the Iranian people to whom the monies truly belonged.
The Shah was the key to Dr. Brzezinski’s strategic vision. The monarch had pushed the Iranians into the 20th century, modernizing the country as rapidly as he could spend the money necessary to do so–but not always wisely or productively. He especially kept pressing the United States to provide him with military equipment far too technical and complicated for his own military forces to maintain or use, as well as sufficient quantities of military supplies for him to maintain a standing force much larger than many American officials believed necessary. The Nixon administration acceded to the Shah’s demands. In modernizing and enlarging his military, however, the Iranian monarch created a hollow force supplied with the latest in technological equipment but lacking in effective command leadership. He also came to depend heavily on SAVAK, the internal security organization, to maintain his oppressive regime.

To ensure that the Shah remained in power, the US Government was required to turn essentially a blind eye to the harsh measures he employed to silence his critics. In an ill-considered policy early in the life of SAVAK, this force had been turned loose against opponents of the regime and against the general populace, even for minor civil infractions. Thus, large segments of the population came to suffer cruelly and often unjustly at SAVAK’s hands.

Dr. Brzezinski, moreover, seemed to become unwilling to accept any possibility that the Shah’s regime might be at risk from internal pressures that could lead to his overthrow. For Brzezinski’s strategy to be successfully implemented, the Shah had to remain in power at least until the 1990s. Finally, in its efforts to please the Shah, the US Government for a number of years had relied on information he provided on the stability of the country and the threat to his regime, eschewing any intelligence collection efforts against internal Iranian political targets.

As the populace became increasingly unhappy with the regime’s oppressiveness and corruption and with the deterioration of the economy, resistance to secular authority by Iranian Islamic fundamentalists intensified and open displays of dissidence became more frequent. By 1977, street demonstrations were turning into open rioting, with a growing loss of life.

When the Embassy began reporting these events and citing growing indications that perhaps the Shah’s grip was slipping, Dr. Brzezinski, and, by extension the President, became critical of the Embassy’s reporting. The incumbent ambassador was replaced with William Sullivan, an experienced Foreign Service Officer (FSO) who had a reputation for dealing effectively with difficult situations. Sullivan’s marching orders were to go to Tehran, put a lid on the unwelcome reporting, and get things back on track. But it soon became clear to him that Iran was in serious trouble, and with it the Shah’s future. Dr. Brzezinski, meanwhile, seemed to be increasingly disregarding the information coming out of the Embassy because it did not conform to his strategic plans for Iran and the regional role the country was to play. During the summer of 1979, Brzezinski’s and State’s basic reactions were to listen to Bazargan and to ignore the radicals, even though Laingen–while noting that the situation was becoming calmer–continued to warn of dangers to US personnel.

The Ordeal Begins
Sunday 4 November 1979 was the first day of the normal workweek for the Embassy (in Muslim countries, the weekend consists of Friday–the holy day–and Saturday), and I was in the office by 0730. At about 0845, I heard the first stirrings of a crowd gathering in front of the Embassy for one of the frequent demonstrations we were subjected to, but it was nothing out of the ordinary. I paid it little heed. Absorbed in work, I was unaware of the time when the crowd noise became louder and closer, but it had to have been about 0930. I knew it was a different situation when I heard someone in the center hall call out that “they” were over the fence and into the compound. I looked out the window and saw young-looking Iranians swarming about the grounds surrounding the chancery.
The Embassy sat on a 27-acre compound surrounded by a high brick wall. The predominant structure was the chancery, a long, slender rectangular building with a basement, ground floor, and top floor. On each floor, a central hallway ran the length of the building, with offices opening on each side of the hall (hence, all the offices were directly entered from the hall and overlooked either the front lawn or rear parking lot and athletic field.) The ambassadorial suite was in the center of the top floor on the back side, opposite the grand staircase rising up from the entrance. It consisted of the outer office occupied by the secretaries and the offices of the (non-existent) ambassador and deputy chief of mission. Chargé Laingen was using the ambassadorial office.

The security drill required that all American and local employees in the chancery were to move up to the building’s second floor. There, we were to be protected by a heavy-gauge steel door at the top of the winding staircase ascending from the main entrance, located in the middle-front of the building. The door was touted to be virtually impossible to breach. Thus protected, we were to sit tight and await the arrival of the Iranian police or military–the protection Foreign Minister Yazdi had promised to Laingen and the office director from Washington.

With the hallway full of local employees, most of us Americans stayed in or near our offices, looking out the windows to see what was transpiring. From the political counselor’s office at the back of the chancery, we could see Embassy staffers who worked in the other buildings on the compound–administrative offices, a warehouse, and four bungalows used by TDY visitors–being marched across the compound toward the ambassador’s residence, hands tied behind their backs and blindfolded. At about 1030, the Iranians broke into the chancery.
The intruders got in through windows in the basement and moved to the first floor. The personnel section offices were in the basement, and the DAO and economic section offices were on the first floor. In moving to the sanctuary of the top floor, the Embassy staff had to abandon the sensitive files in the DAO and economic sections, and to give up the personnel files showing who was assigned to the Embassy, what our jobs were, and where we lived. All of this occurred without any resistance. At this point, a tear gas canister was accidentally set off in the central hallway upstairs, lending to the confusion and clamor.

When the Iranians first entered the compound, the station chief initiated destruction of the station’s files, particularly the highly compartmented materials in the communications vault. After the Iranians came into the chancery itself, I returned to the vault in my office, where an operations support assistant (OSA) was rapidly removing files from our four safes.

Since early summer, when things began returning to normal, the station had been on a “three-month retain” basis. This meant that most cable traffic was destroyed after being read, but basic information necessary for doing our jobs could be retained in skeleton files for three months. An additional proviso was that the materials we did retain were not to exceed what could be destroyed in 30 minutes. The entrance to the station vault, a room about 12 feet by 12 feet with a most impressive-looking bank vault-type door, was in the office I was using temporarily–which created some problems for me later. In the vault was a device, shaped like an oversized barrel, for use in destroying classified material by shredding and then incinerating it. It was slow to work and temperamental in nature, subject to jamming at the least provocation. I went into the vault and began to feed documents into this “disintegrator.”

Shutting out the wails of the Embassy locals in the hallway as well as the yells and shouts of the mob outside the door, I continued to feed the disintegrator, assisted by a member of the DAO contingent. Within a few minutes, the device went “ka-chonk” and shut down. Using a small commercial paper shredder, we continued to destroy what we could. As we made progress in our destruction, I noticed the growing pile of shreddings accumulating on the floor–rather than completely destroying each document, the machine cut the papers into strips. Around noon, just as the last of the papers were going through the shredder, someone appeared at the vault and exclaimed that we had to get out.

As I closed the vault door, I was struck by the sight of the large pile of shredded paper on the floor in the center of the vault and by a sign stating that the vault was secure against forced intrusion for 30 minutes. I thought about burning the shreddings, but reasoned–too optimistically–that the door would hold until authorities arrived and dispersed the mob in the next few hours.

Surrender
I left the office and made my way to the outer office of the Chargé’s suite. There was a lingering, acrid mix of tear gas and burning wood–the Iranians had tried to set the steel door afire, not realizing the wood was only a veneer. In the Chargé’s outer office, a senior political officer was on one phone to State’s Operations Center while Chuck Scott, an Army colonel who had replaced General Gast as head of the MAAG, was talking by phone to Chargé Laingen. The Charge had gone to the MFA that morning with one of our two security officers and the political counselor. From what I could gather of the latter conversation, the Chargé was still telling us that we should hang on and that Yazdi was trying to make good on his earlier promises of protection.

This went on for another 15 minutes or so while the Iranians outside the main door by the stairwell were yelling to us and to each other, and trying to force the door. And then one loud American voice was heard over the din: “Open this door right now!” Someone standing close to me yelled back that the Chargé was on the phone and that our instructions were to hold our ground. To which the voice on the other side of the door screamed back in panic, “You tell Laingen I said to open the goddamn door NOW!” I looked at Chuck Scott, telephone in his hand, and wondered if the pained look on his face was a reflection of the one on my own.
Earlier that morning, after the Embassy compound had been overrun, but before the Iranians had gained entry into the chancery itself, the second of our security officers announced that he was going to go out and “reason” with the mob. Having by then seen a number of our colleagues in the outer buildings marched away bound and blindfolded, none of us were surprised when, a few minutes later, we saw him, hands tied behind his back, being escorted to the Embassy’s front entrance by several Iranians. It was that same security officer to whom the voice on the other side of the door belonged, now claiming that the Iranians would shoot him if the door was not opened immediately. (In response, one of his colleagues muttered, “Let ’em shoot, but keep the damn door closed.”)

Chuck Scott relayed this information over the phone to the Chargé, listened a moment, and then informed us that we were to surrender. The door that would supposedly protect us for days was to be opened after only three hours. The classified material in the political section and MAAG safes on the top floor, the destruction of which the security officer could have been overseeing had he not walked out to certain capture, remained intact for the Iranians to recover. Just before the door opened and the Iranians began swarming about us, Bert Moore, the Administrative Counselor, looked at his watch and remarked, “Let the record show that the Embassy surrendered at 1220.”

We were blindfolded and bound and escorted to the Ambassador’s residence, where we were freed of the blindfolds only and placed in chairs and on sofas located anywhere on the first floor. We remained that way for the first night, but the next morning we were tied to our chairs and again blindfolded. The earlier arrivals had been taken to the living room and salon, where the chairs and sofas were oversized and plush. The last of us to surrender ended up in the dining room, seated around a long table on uncushioned, straight-backed and armless chairs matching the table. We had to endure what were surely the hardest seats in the Eastern Hemisphere, and we sat there for two days and nights.

Our bewilderment as to why we remained captives was worse than the physical discomfort. Once, in the middle of the second day, a helicopter landed and took off from the open area between the residence and the warehouse. Our hope was that some outside mediator had arrived and that our release was imminent. It was inconceivable to us that we could be held prisoner for as long as we had already been by nothing more than a gang of youths.

I overheard my colleagues several times asking the Iranians when we were going to be freed. “When you give back Shah,” was the reply, in their fractured English, “when American people force ‘the Carter’ to give back Shah, then you go home. But not before.” I knew that such an act by the US Government was unthinkable, and I began to wonder if the irresistible force had just met an immovable object.

“You Are Wanted In Your Office”
Shortly after dinner during the first night of captivity, a young Iranian carrying a .38 came into the room calling my name, using pretty good pronunciation. The thought did not occur to me until much later–and was subsequently confirmed–that he had had some prior help from someone who did know the correct pronunciation. “You are wanted in your office,” I was informed. I was again bound, blindfolded, and then assisted out of the residence. Considering my true professional affiliation, being singled out by name and separated from the others did not strike me as a positive development. It was a frightening walk through a dark night.

I was walked to the chancery and led into my office with its impressive-looking vault. Still bound and blindfolded, I was placed not ungently against the wall. I heard the escort leave, but, in the silence, I sensed another presence. I reminded myself that it was imperative to act like a genuine State Department Foreign Service Officer would act, and to say those things that a real FSO would say. During the past few hours, and in expectation of such a turn of events, I had given this subject some reflection. I had decided that, if I was interrogated, my actions and words would be guided by two principles. First, I would try to protect classified information; as part of this, I would talk about anything in order to appear as though I had nothing to hide. Second, I would do or say nothing that would or could bring harm to any of my colleagues. The exception to this second “rule” was that I would take advantage of any opportunity to escape, even though it might lead to retaliatory measures against the others.

I had already decided that refusing to talk at all to any interrogators would be about the dumbest thing I could do. First, I did not think bona fide diplomats would clam up in this kind of situation. Silence would not only give off a signal that the interrogatee had been up to something nefarious; it also would run contrary to the personality of most legitimate diplomats, whose business it is to talk to people, to negotiate, and to reason.

The second problem with the “John Wayne I’ll-never-say-anything-to-you-bastards” school of interrogation resistance is that it presents a challenge to the interrogators that most likely will not be ignored. While considering whether or to what degree to resist in such a baldly confrontational manner, it is not a bad idea for the prisoner to recognize that his captors hold absolute control over his health and welfare. That does not mean that he should not try to resist, only that there will almost certainly be consequences from doing so. When the prisoner refuses to say anything, acquiring information becomes a secondary objective for the bad guys. Their overriding objective will now be to break the prisoner; they cannot permit his obstinacy to threaten their control.

As was learned from the experiences of the American aviators who were POWs in the Vietnam war, additional problems accrue when a prisoner is finally broken. First, he no longer has the ability to withhold sensitive and secret information. Second, the “breaking” is likely to be both a physical and a mental process, thus rendering it harder for the prisoner to resist in general and harder to escape should the opportunity present itself–and probably doing permanent damage to his health.

The broken prisoner also will be likely to carry permanent psychological scars, feeling that he is a coward or that he let down his country or comrades, even though he may have suffered terribly and endured the truly unendurable longer than anyone would have reasonably expected. The point is worth a moment’s reflection: secrets and lives must be protected, and I believe one is duty-bound to resist his captors. Each has to decide, alone, how and to what extent to resist. In my mind, trying to tough out an interrogation by refusing to talk was not a good idea.

Interrogation
Following a brief silence, probably intended to intimidate me, an unseen interrogator began to speak. I remained standing against the wall for what I believe was several hours while this first interrogation ran on and on. My questioner spoke good English in a deep but surprisingly soft voice that he never raised, despite his growing frustration with me.

I was confused at first by the direction of the questioning, but it soon became clear that because of my large office, executive-style furniture, and especially the vault, the Iranians had assumed that I was a senior official, someone who really mattered. They even went so far as to postulate that I was the “real” chief of the Embassy while the Chargé was merely a figurehead. As a GS-11 who was so new to the Agency that I would still get lost in the Headquarters building, this construct left me speechless for a moment.

As “proof” of Iranian conclusions about the scope of my work, the interrogator noted that the Chargé had only a small, two-drawer safe in his office while I had an entire vault. This suspicion was fed by the Iranians’ penchant for conspiracy and their pervasive belief that the CIA controls the State Department (if not the whole US Government). Regardless of how ludicrous the Iranian accusation was, I still had to deal with it.

To the Iranians, it made perfect sense to have the CIA secretly running the Embassy in what they would consider the most important country in the Eastern Hemisphere. How, the interrogator continued, could I be only a junior officer when no other junior officer had such large office or a “personal vault”? Moreover, the real junior officers were all in their early- to mid-twenties, while I was clearly much older. So, he asked, why was I trying to deny the obvious? Why didn’t I just tell them about all the spy operations I was running in their country? And would I mind opening the vault, too?

From my side, the discussion centered around explaining why I really was just a junior officer; why I had worked for the State Department for only three months; how I had completed graduate studies in January 1979 and then worked for a civilian “company” before joining State; and why I was only temporarily in that particular office. I tried to explain why I could not possibly have the combination to the vault and why I was not sure who did. My interrogator kept pushing on this subject, and I finally said that there was one guy who would come in and open the vault, but I maintained that I did not know him and that he was in the United States on R&R. I told the interrogator that, having recently arrived in Iran, I did not know many people at the Embassy.

I stayed with this story, which was not hard to do because much of it was true. But the interrogator returned repeatedly to the vault. It was evident that the vault would continue to be a problem until we were released or the Iranians opened it by force. During this interrogation session, I was directly threatened only a few times. More often, it was a subtle sort of warning, such as reminders of firing squads and SAVAK torture rooms. Also, the interrogator occasionally would work the action of an automatic pistol and pull the trigger, but I always could hear him playing with the weapon, so its sounds never came so suddenly as to make me flinch.

I concentrated on staying outwardly calm, answering his questions in as normal a tone of voice as I could muster. I emphasized that this was a breach of diplomatic practice, that I should immediately be returned to my colleagues, and that we should all be released forthwith. Every time he raised the idea that I was the true head of the Embassy, I would laugh and remark what a preposterous idea that was. Interestingly, the interrogator never became angry in return; he would just repeat his “evidence” and continue. While I really did have trouble at that moment comprehending that the Iranians would actually believe something so farfetched, it did not take long before I learned enough about our captors’ perspective to realize that they genuinely believed things that were much more absurd. This realization began to sink in later, when they started accusing me of being the head of all CIA operations in the Middle East.

In more than 100 hours of hostile interrogation, this particular man was the only interrogator I never saw. I also believe that he may have been someone who was accustomed to, possibly trained in, interrogation techniques. He certainly exercised abundant self-control and seemed at ease in this environment. That he was not harsher may have been due to the Iranians themselves thinking that the situation would be over soon, and thus they did not need to press hard for answers. Later, it would come out that the Iranians took the Embassy initially intending to hold us captive only for as long as it took the US Government to break diplomatic relations. The ultimate length of the hostage crisis surprised virtually all the participants, Iranian and American alike. Having unlimited opportunity to conduct interrogations of Embassy personnel was probably not an element they considered in their initial planning. This bears some explaining.
In February 1979, to the chagrin of many Iranians, the Carter administration had elected to continue with a business-as-usual attitude following the St. Valentine’s Day Open House rather than breaking diplomatic relations. Thus, in summer 1979, seeing the US Embassy staff grow steadily in size and the secular-oriented government of Prime Minister Bazargan move toward normalization of relations, militant Iranians had begun envisioning another takeover of the Embassy. This time, the militants would hold the Embassy staff captive for as long as it took for the United States to break relations. This was the only action, they believed, that could foreclose any opportunity for future US interference in their revolution. Always suspicious of US motives and sincerity, Iranians during this period were constantly looking for signs of US intentions to repeat the coup of 1953. These signs appeared with the admittance of the Shah to the United States and with the meeting in Algiers between Brzezinski and Bazargan.

The Vault
After what seemed like all night but probably was only a few hours, the interrogator left. I was moved by the student guards into the OSA’s office, and my blindfold was removed. I found myself surrounded by a group of about a dozen Iranians, the oldest of whom could not have been more than 20. I was not pleased to see several youths who looked to be 15 or 16 waving Uzi assault weapons. The oldest looking, who was armed with a .38, which I suspected had not too many hours before been part of the Marine Security Guard weaponry, was also the leader. In good English and making a sweeping gesture about the room, he ordered me to open the vault. I replied that I could not.

We went back and forth on this for some time, with the atmosphere becoming increasingly hostile. The Iranian finally said, “All right, so you can’t do it. Now tell me who used this office.” I replied that it was just a secretary, to minimize her importance to the Iranians, and said that I had never seen her go near the vault, much less open it–as I had earlier told the interrogator numerous times. But this young Iranian looked right in my eyes and ordered the two youths standing beside him to “find the girl and bring her here.” I had been afraid this might happen.
A number of things ran through my mind at that point. One determinant for me, in those days before “political correctness,” was my belief that I was paid to take responsibility and risks but that secretaries and OSAs were not. I had no idea of the methods they might use with the OSA to get her to open the vault, nor did I know what would happen to her afterward if she did open it. I was aware that prospects for my immediate future would not be particularly brilliant if I now opened the vault after insisting vigorously for some hours that I could not.
One probability was that the Iranians would be much less inclined to believe anything I said in future interrogations, thus making it harder to protect that which had to be protected. But that also assumed the Iranians were in fact believing what I had been telling them up to that point. If not, then I was already in deep trouble. At the time I had no way of judging how effective my dissembling had been. Months later, however, I discovered that the Iranians had learned, with some assistance, that I was CIA within a few hours of surrender; in the end, it did not really matter what I had told them earlier. When they asked for the OSA’s name, I told them to leave the woman alone, that she could not open the vault. I then said that because the guy who worked in the vault had left me the combination in case of emergency, I really could open it. And I did.

As the door opened I could not keep from laughing at the Iranians’ reactions to what they saw inside. Or, rather, what they did not see. From the surrender to that moment, they had believed there were one or more persons actually inside the vault. This notion was based on two factors. First, the staff members in the communications vault at the other end of the hallway were among the last to surrender, if not the last. So it was not necessarily illogical for the Iranians to assume there were people inside this vault as well. Second, and supporting the first factor, was a steady, clearly audible clicking noise coming from inside the vault, a sound like that of a typewriter. I had told the interrogator earlier that the sound was the alarm, which had not been set properly–which was exactly the case. But, given the earlier discovery of Embassy staff in the communications vault, there was no way this Iranian was going to believe that the vault was empty.
When the door swung open to reveal the worthless disintegrator, four empty safes, and a pile of shredded paper, but no humans, the Iranians who had crowded around the door did classic movie-quality doubletakes, looking back and forth at each other, at me, and at the emptiness of the vault, as though they had just witnessed Houdini pull off the greatest escape trick of his life. I laughed aloud. All the while, the alarm box inside the vault was still emitting its typewriter sounds. And then the Iranians got angry.

I was barraged with shouted questions: who had been in the vault, what had happened to them, who had shredded the paper, and where was the stuff from the safes? I just shrugged. I was led to the chair behind the OSA’s desk and, to my great surprise, left to sit unbound and with no blindfold.

I was then witness to a steady stream of Iranians who came to gaze into the vault and then leave. When this parade finally waned, and with no more “adults” around to supervise, the dozen young Iranians who had watched the opening of the vault and then vanished–reappeared. They seemed to take up where they had earlier left off, yelling and waving Uzis, pistols, and one USMC-issue riot gun. I was propelled out of the chair and shoved up against the wall by the door opening to the center corridor, next to a four-drawer safe. The Iranians now insisted that I open this safe, too.

But I did not know the combination, nor did anyone else in the station. When I had first arrived, I asked the OSA about the safe, and she told me that it was thought to be empty, but no one really knew because the combination had been lost. So it just stood in her office, serving as a stand for a house plant.
The more I denied knowing the combination, the angrier the Iranians became, until I found myself looking down at the muzzle of an Uzi about two inches away from my navel. It was being held by a kid who had probably never before held such a weapon. It became even scarier when I noticed that the weapon’s safety was off. With all the jostling and shoving, I thought there was a good chance I could end up, perhaps unintentionally, with some extra navels about nine millimeters in diameter. Suddenly, the commotion stopped, and I found myself out of energy, patience, and adrenaline, and I became very tired.

When I was told that, if I did not give them the combination, I would be shot at once, I told them to go ahead because there was no way I could open the safe. By then, I was so exhausted that I did not care. The Iranians appeared nonplussed, and the apparent leader said that they were going to have to ask the secretary to open the safe. Then I was led back to the ambassador’s residence and the hard chair.

During the next two months, the Iranians forcibly opened all locked safes, and this safe was one of the last. Yet, that first night, they appeared to be so anxious to get into it that some of them were willing to kill me. Why this safe seemingly lost its priority status is beyond me. When it was finally forced open, it was indeed empty.

Iranian demonstrators burn American Flag on wall of US Embassy shortly after takeover by militants in November 1979.

Solitary
During the third day, most of us were moved to the basement of the Embassy warehouse (quickly dubbed the Mushroom Inn by its inhabitants, for its lack of windows), and some were moved out of the Embassy compound altogether. I spent two more days as a guest in the Inn, with about 40 of the Embassy staff, and then I was moved into one of the four TDY (temporary-duty visitors’) bungalows with eight others, mostly members of the Marine Security Guard. We were no longer blindfolded, but our hands were continually bound, usually by strips of cloth. On occasion, and just for the hell of it, the Iranians would come in with handcuffs and take delight in using them. There was no reason for this, but it did underscore that we were essentially defenseless.

I stayed in the bungalow for eight days and nights. During that time I was taken back up to my office for one additional interrogation, which was similar to that of the first night. I was placed against a wall, blindfolded, and questioned by the same interrogator. I maintained my cover story, and this man, to my surprise, never pressed. I was politely threatened with summary execution a couple of times, but I did not take it seriously because the interrogator made it sound pro forma.

What was threatening were the huge crowds that gathered almost nightly outside the Embassy compound walls, frequently being driven to near-hysteria by the speakers. I think we were all afraid that the mobs, whipped into a frenzy, would break into the compound and slaughter the lot of us.

On the night of 22 November, I was taken back into the chancery and placed in the COS’s former office, which was now vacant save for a desk, a chair, and a foam-rubber pallet on the floor. The room, at the front of the chancery and overlooking the wide boulevard in front of the Embassy, was sufficiently close to the street to make the collective roar of several hundred thousand demonstrators a frightening experience for the first several nights it happened, and unsettling thereafter.

I was to be held alone in the chancery until the night of 24 April 1980, when we were moved out in the aftermath of the tragic events of Desert One–the attempt by US military forces to rescue us. In the meantime, I was moved to five other rooms in the chancery at varying intervals. The worst times were the six interrogation sessions I endured from 29 November to 13-14 December 1979. These sessions each began sometime after dinner and continued through the night until daybreak. My principal interrogator was Hossein Sheik-ol-eslam, a mid-thirties “student” who had previously studied at the University of California-Berkeley. (In the years since, Hossein has served as a deputy foreign minister and has played a major role in Iranian-sponsored terrorism.)

The first two of these interrogation sessions, and most of the third, were long recitations of my cover story and denials of any activity beyond normal diplomatic work. While frustrating and not a little frightening, these particular sessions did give me a chance to learn more about the students and why they took the Embassy, as well as to gauge the expertise of Hossein and two other Iranians as interrogators. On one level, the sessions were total-immersion lessons in the workings of the “Iranian mind” and the Iranian brand of revolutionary theory; in a detached, academic sense, I was highly intrigued and curious. I chafed over the confinement, even while (for the first three months or so) being held in thrall of my own psychological denial that such a thing was happening. But when I could mentally take myself out of the immediate circumstances, I often found the hours and hours of nonhostile discussions and conversations with the Iranians (interrogators and guards alike) to be interesting, occasionally useful, and not infrequently a source of true amazement. And it killed time.

In gauging the abilities of Hossein and friends as interrogators, I quickly came to realize that they had no training or experience as such, nor did they comprehend any of the underlying psychological factors used by professional interrogators. While these students all claimed to have been arrested and interrogated by SAVAK at one time or another, being victims of interrogation did not mean that they learned how to interrogate. What they did, at least in my case, was only an emulation of the surroundings and trappings of their interrogations by SAVAK (that is, times of day/night, room lighting, the good cop-bad cop routine, and so forth). But having an idea of what to do while not understanding the psychology of why it is done served to make them ineffectual questioners. As such, they often undermined their own progress and left me openings in which I could damage or deter their efforts.

This ineptitude enabled me to withhold successfully large amounts of classified information. It also allowed me to have the upper hand on occasion, when I was able temporarily to manipulate or disrupt the proceedings. Instances such as these, while seemingly of little import, provided me with tremendous psychological victories when I most needed them. What the Iranians did not know was that, thanks to my years in the US Marine Corps, I knew much more about interrogation than they did. And that was the key to withstanding their efforts.

One Lucky Guy
Actually, it was military service combined with an excellent graduate education that enabled me to get through intensive interrogation sessions and to survive captivity in general and return to the United States in better psychological condition than many of my colleagues (despite having arguably been treated worse than anyone else, except the COS). There were several elements at play. First, as a Marine aviator in the early 1970s, my fighter/attack squadron had been deployed to Vietnam with a Navy carrier air wing. Before that deployment, in the process of earning my wings and then going through fleet training in the F-4, I had had two courses on survival in captivity, one ending with a stay in a mock POW camp. In these courses, we learned the theory of interrogation and ways to resist interrogation techniques. While on the carrier in transit from Norfolk to Vietnam, we had another several days of survival in captivity, taught by a former POW from the Korean war and by Doug Hegdahl, a former Navy enlisted man who had been held in the “Hanoi Hilton.” I never forgot these instructors, and seven years later I could recall their lectures, especially Hegdahl’s, word for word with almost crystalline clarity.

The second element was that I was used to living routinely with a level of activity that most people would agree constitutes stress. I attended military school for high school; went through Marine Corps boot camp; trained and served as an air traffic controller; attended Officer Candidate School and took flight training; and subsequently flew F-4 combat missions over North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and Laos. After leaving the service, I earned a B.A. in two years and a Ph.D. in three-and-a-half years, and then entered the Agency’s Career Training program. To me, life was fun, challenging, interesting, and occasionally exciting–but I never thought of it as stressful.

At the time of my captivity, I had already been shot at and had come close to death or serious injury several times. I was often as scared as anyone else in the Embassy, but the one important difference was that I had had experiences in dealing with fear created by different kinds of dangers and pressures, while almost all of my nonmilitary colleagues had not. Among the military officers captured in the Embassy were a number who had seen service in Vietnam, some as aviators. They had backgrounds similar to mine, and they too survived the experience in much better form than those without military experience.

Third, I had recently finished my graduate degree, and my mind was sharper than it ever had been before captivity (or since, for that matter). I had limitless mental nooks and crannies into which I could retreat to find stimulation, entertainment, comfort, and distance. Thus, mentally surviving solitary was in some ways not as difficult as it could have been.

Because of these life experiences, I could not have been better prepared to deal with the rigors, fears, and uncertainties of captivity. It was nothing that I deliberately planned for or trained to accomplish. Rather, it was only by great good luck that I had a background which allowed me to survive mentally and physically.

Uncovered
Toward the end of an interrogation during the night of 5-6 December, my cover went up in smoke. As with the session the night before, I adhered to my cover story while seizing or creating opportunities to digress into areas that had nothing to do with my real assignment in Tehran. My working theory–which was the opposite of the “name, rank, and serial number only” dicta of military service–was that the more time we spent talking about neutral or irrelevant subjects, the less time they had to talk about things which I hoped to avoid. I had discovered earlier that asking questions about the Shia brand of Islam, the Koran, the Iranian revolution, and why they continued holding us would often generate long discussions with Hossein and his two cohorts, as well as occasional tidbits of news of outside events. So, I took every occasion to delve into these areas.
I also learned that both of the assistant interrogators had emotional buttons which, when pushed, would quickly turn a structured interrogation into a shambles of shouting and insults. For example, one assistant was a man, probably in his late twenties, who liked to brag about having spent a couple of years in Florida as a student. He also was highly sensitive about being viewed as a devout Muslim. I found that looking in his direction and asking if he had enjoyed doing unnatural acts with young girls on Florida beaches, or if he enjoyed drinking and gambling in beach-front bars, would make him go almost blind with instantaneous rage. By the time Hossein could get him calmed down and the interrogation back on track, at least 15 minutes or more would have passed and the subject being pursued just before the outburst would have been forgotten.
This tactic also undermined any progress the interrogators had made toward establishing a psychological mood that they could ultimately exploit. I could not use this technique too frequently, but it generally worked exceedingly well. Usually, there was a physical price to pay for this because it often entailed insulting one of the interrogators. The penalty was never unbearable, however, and the ensuing disruption was always worth it.

I had also learned that I could ask for tea or fruit juice and that the Iranians would actually stop, bring in the refreshments, and for 15 minutes or so, we would sit around and chat like next-door neighbors. When the cups were empty, Hossein would say, “OK, back to work,” and the questioning would resume. The level of intensity that had developed during the interrogations before the break was destroyed, leaving the interrogators to begin anew in their efforts to create a psychologically productive mood. These little time-outs were among a number of episodes that always seemed surrealistic. I never did understand why Hossein permitted me to control the sessions to such a degree; he obviously did not comprehend the effects of the interruptions.

On the night of 1-2 December 1979, we had gone on at length and, sometime well after midnight, I was becoming complacent and tired. I had successfully, it seemed, kept to my cover story while instigating or capitalizing on a half-dozen or so digressions of some length. To my mind, I was outwitting the interrogators, and I was smugly satisfied. Returning to the subject of my general duties (yet again!) after an interlude for tea, Hossein asked if I still denied I was CIA. When I responded yes, Hossein handed me a sheet of paper, and my heart seemed to stop dead in midbeat. In that moment, I thought my life was over.

The sheet of paper was a cable sent through special diplomatic channels that are used for certain sensitive matters. And the subject of this message was me! I could not believe what I was reading. The cable gave my true name and stated clearly that I was to be assigned to the station in Tehran. It also mentioned the special program under which I had come into the Agency 10 months previously. When I looked up at Hossein and his stooges, they were grinning like a trio of Cheshire cats. My astonishment quickly gave way to fright and despair.
I should note here that copies of the cable hit the world press corps on the morning of 2 December 1979, a few hours after the 1-2 December interrogation session ended. Hossein and a female student, dubbed “Tehran Mary” on American television, held a press conference in the Iranian capital attended by several hundred media people, and passed out copies of the cable to all present. The cable was subsequently reprinted in newspapers the world over. To my dismay, many American newspapers reprinted the cable again on 21 January 1981, immediately after our release.

It somehow got though to my addled mind that I had two options: try the “this is a fake document” accusation, or anything else. It was not clear to me at that precise moment what the “anything else” could be. I knew that the document was real and, more to the point, that it looked identical to other State Department traffic in terms of format, routing lists, appended comments, and so forth. Denying its provenance, which the Iranians were probably expecting, did not seem realistic. With my stunned brain generating no other brilliant ideas, I looked up at the gloating Iranians and said, “OK, so what?” To my surprise, the three interrogators stopped laughing and, for a moment, they looked back and forth at each other, seemingly bemused. It dawned on me that they were not expecting this sort of reaction, and they did not know what to do. But that little respite lasted only a few seconds.

For the next few hours, the Iranians tried to confirm that their suspicions of my activities were correct. They said that I could have been a CIA officer disguised as a Marine for years and that my education was just for cover. They said they knew that I was the head of the CIA’s entire Middle East spy network, that I had been planning Khomeini’s assassination, and that I had been stirring up the Kurds to revolt against the Tehran government. They accused me of trying to destroy their country. Most of all, my interlocutors told me they did not believe anything I said. The Iranians ranted and screamed at times; I raged and yelled back.

We then engaged in mutual accusations of lying, which let to a semicoherent digression about whether Iranians were bad Muslims, what the Koran said, and so forth. Because I had never read the Koran and knew next to nothing about Islam, I wondered later how idiotic I would have sounded to a Muslim in a different situation. By the time the topic shifted from my being an evil person to their being good (or bad) Muslims, we all eventually ran out of steam.

We spent more time than I could fathom on why it was that I did not speak Farsi and was not an Iranian specialist. These Iranians found it inconceivable that the CIA would ever send to such a critical place as Iran someone who was so ignorant of the local culture and language. It was so inconceivable to them that weeks later, when they at last came to realize the truth, they were personally offended. It had been difficult enough for them to accept that the CIA would post an inexperienced officer in their country. But it was beyond insult for that officer not to speak the language or know the customs, culture, and history of their country.

I tried to string out this train of conversation as long as I could. Finally, seeking one more psychological victory, I said that there were many Iran specialists in my government who could come here, but none of them would, so I came instead. This deliberate insult took them aback. The younger Iranian, the one who was so easy to set off, asked why US Government officials who specialized in Iran would be so reluctant to come? Because they are afraid, I responded. Perplexed, he said, “What could they be afraid of?” I held up my bound wrists. “They are afraid of this,” I said.

We spent the rest of the night in a calmer atmosphere, with the Iranians making some outlandish accusations, while I tried to refute some of the more reasonable charges with a mixture of the truth, when appropriate, and logic. The bizarre things I could only snort at or otherwise ridicule. Many of their charges were tossed on the table only once or twice, and it soon became possible to discern the ones about which they were really serious.

But there was one point that night that Hossein did make chillingly clear. “This is our country,” he declared, looking into my eyes, “and we intend to find all the spies and foreign agents who have been disloyal and who are trying to stop the revolution.” Hossein then went a step further without, I believe, realizing what he was saying. He stated emphatically that he did not care about anything I or the CIA had done outside of Iran, while re-emphasizing that he intended to find the spies inside his country.

I mention this because it occasioned some surprise in later interrogations. In three subsequent all-night grillings, Hossein would begin asking questions about my training and the identities of CIA officers elsewhere in the world. Each time he did this, I quickly reminded him of his statement about being interested only in events in Iran. And each time I was flabbergasted when he recalled his words and backed off. By then, I had learned that our captors were so completely untrustworthy, regardless of the issue, that I never expected Hossein to abide by his own words. But he did, much to my great relief. And I confess that I am still astonished by this today.

Protecting Secrets
There were three more all-night sessions in which Hossein and his comrades pressed hard to learn who I had been in contact with and what these Iranians had told me. In actuality, I had had only one agent who was providing sensitive material, but to the Iranian revolutionary mind simply meeting privately with an American Embassy official, much less a CIA officer, was grounds for severe punishment, including death. There were now a dozen or so Iranians in jeopardy merely because they had a dinner with me or had invited me into their homes. During these interrogations, I continued to play the “new guy” card as often and as forcefully as I could, providing logical-sounding (to me) explanations as to why I could not have known or done whatever it was they were asking me about.
I maintained that it had taken me several weeks after arrival to learn my way around just a part of the city and that, as a new, inexperienced officer, I was an unknown quantity to the station chief in terms of capabilities, competence, and judgment. Given the serious security situation in Tehran, I told Hossein, this left the chief reluctant to give me any significant responsibilities so soon after arriving. Hence, I had been spending time familiarizing myself with the city and doing only some elementary work at finding possible meeting sites and so forth. I did not vary from this simple story, hoping that it sounded plausible, and that in its consistency it would also be convincing.

Unfortunately, the shredded documents that I had so casually left in the vault returned to make an even bigger liar out of me. The Iranian students had industriously set about reconstructing the shreddings; by early December, they had made sufficient progress to be able to read portions of most of the papers. They would eventually manage to piece back together virtually all of what we had tried to destroy. When Hossein and his pals began to ask me about specific nights or people, I knew with certainty they were no longer fishing for information and, whatever the source(s), were focusing on exact events, the answers to which they already had. When Hossein showed me one of my own cables–strips of paper carefully taped together–about a meeting I had had with a contact, everything became clear.

For the rest of that interrogation and the next two sessions, my goals were to limit the damage and to determine how much other information they had. I refused consistently to give accurate answers to any questions until, in a fit of pique, they would haul out a reconstructed document and show me they knew I was dissembling, and then we would go off again. While in the midst of intense questioning about one Iranian I had met more than a few times, it became evident that this person had been arrested and interrogated, because Hossein gave out information which only that person could have known. (When I confronted Hossein with this, he did not hesitate to tell me that my surmise was correct; two months later, he told me that this unfortunate person had been executed.) Once I was proven again to be a liar, they would bring up another person or event, and we would go through the whole rigamarole again. And on and on we went, until they got tired of it and began to use physical means of persuasion, as much out of frustration as anything.

The final all-night interrogation, circa 13-14 December, was also the hardest. When I was returned to my room that morning, sore and tired, I was as despondent as I would ever be. The last two interrogations were, I believe, potentially the most dangerous period for me in terms of deliberate physical harm: the Iranians definitely knew I had been trying to recruit and run spies in their country, but they did not know how effective or successful that effort was. At that juncture, they had no reason to believe anything but the worst about my activities. Ironically, it was (I am convinced) the reconstructed documents, the shreddings I had neglected to destroy, that made further interrogation of me a waste of their time.

By mid-December, enough of these shredded cables and documents had been reconstructed to show that I had not done nearly as much as they had suspected. But I had done enough to justify being kept in solitary confinement throughout–as was the station chief. The third case officer, who had arrived in Iran a few days before the takeover, apparently had not angered the Iranians to any great extent, at least in terms of being a “spy” in their country. He did provoke them frequently by trying to escape, assaulting the guards, and in general causing the Iranians more trouble than they liked. His reward was about 360 days or so in solitary, parceled out during the 15 months of the hostage crisis and based on his deportment. If resistance can be at least partially defined as making it difficult or unpleasant for your captors to hold you against your will, this officer was succeeding admirably. With the reconstruction of the station files, the Iranians had a fairly clear picture of my limited operational activities. After this point, they mostly left me alone and concentrated on the chief, who had no easy out.

The Daily Routine
My routine was to wake sometime after daylight, and then await the usual breakfast of Iranian bread or Afghan barbari bread with butter and jam or feta cheese, and tea. I would then prop my pallet against the wall and take my morning walk, beginning at one corner of the room and striding the eight to 10 paces to the opposite corner, then turning around and heading back. This would continue until I became tired or my feet grew sore. I would then read until lunch, after which I would repeat the morning agenda until dinner. After dinner, I would again walk and read until I was sufficiently tired to sleep.

During the initial months when we were kept in the Embassy compound, and then later, when we were reunited in the summer of 1980 following our dispersal in the wake of the Desert One rescue attempt, our lunches and dinners consisted of American-style food prepared by Iranian students who were trained by the Chargé’s cook. Most meals were adequately nourishing and palatable, with the food coming mainly from local US military commissary stocks seized by militants during the withdrawal of the 10,000 military personnel who had been in Iran as part of the MAAG. Toward the fall of 1980, however, some of the foodstuffs clearly were suffering from old age. Chicken, for example, began to show up in a marginally edible state, and eventually I had to abandon the powdered milk I occasionally received when it reached the point where there were too many worms to pick out.

It required some months before I was able to accept psychologically what was happening to us. It was a classic state of denial. I would go to bed each night thinking that it would all be over the next morning, and, when it did not end, I would have to deal with anger and disappointment until it was evening and I again convinced myself that the following day would bring release. It was months before I was able to accept that the next day would be another day of captivity.
During the first few months, I could not believe this was happening to me. I also could not believe that the American Government was unable to gain the freedom of an entire Embassy staff held in contravention of international law by a motley band of revolutionary youths. And I could not believe that the President had made the decision he did concerning the Shah, when the potential damage to America’s national security and the threats to our safety were manifest. The unanswered humiliation to the dignity and prestige of the United States was more intensely frustrating to me than any other aspect of captivity. I recalled an incident in Nicaragua in 1854, when a US diplomat received a small cut on his nose from a piece of glass thrown at him during a minor incident. In response, and to uphold the honor of the United States, a US Navy vessel shelled the small coastal town in which the incident occurred, completely destroying it. Now, nearly three-score US diplomats were being held by students and nothing seemed able to end the situation, much less restore the lost dignity.

What probably kept many of us from going nuts was a serendipitous supply of excellent books. Just before the Embassy takeover, the entire library of the Tehran-American School had been delivered to the Embassy warehouse for safekeeping. There was a large selection of novels, notably English mysteries, and thousands of nonfiction volumes. From the first days in the Mushroom Inn, the Iranians were good about keeping us supplied with books, although I suspect it had more to do with keeping us occupied (and, hence, less likely to cause trouble) than it was a matter of human kindness.

While in captivity, I read more than 500 books covering a wide range of subjects. I plowed through dozens of books I enjoyed and learned from, many of which I would have never otherwise had the opportunity to read. I read most of Dickens’s works, and lots of Agatha Christie and Ruth Rendell. I delighted in the adventures of Bertie Wooster and Jeeves. I devoured histories of Russia, Britain, World War I, early 20th-century America, and all of Barbara Tuchman’s works up to that time. Some of the most enjoyable books I stumbled across were ones that I would never have even looked at in a normal life.

The Iranians with whom I had contact fit into two categories: the younger men, barely into their twenties (if that), who performed guard work; and the older men, in their thirties, who seemed to call the shots and did the interrogations. It was the younger Iranians who constituted my company for nearly 15 months. Unlike the older Iranians, who had no illusions about why they engineered the taking of the Embassy, the younger ones seemed to believe fervently that the only purpose of the takeover was to coerce the United States into returning the Shah. I never heard any of the young Iranians speak of ending the Iranian-US relationship, as did Hossein and his cohorts, nor frankly did the younger ones seem to want much of anything the older ones did. Virtually none of these youths, who were in fact real students at various universities, had ever traveled outside Iran. For many, the trip to Tehran to attend school was the first time they had ever left their villages. Their knowledge level seemed to be generally the equivalent of the average American ninth grader. But they were as fanatically devoted to Khomeini as were their older leaders.

Over the months, we all came to know a number of the guards fairly well. Some were with us from Day One to Day 444. Others whom we saw frequently during the early days faded away after the first three or four months. Initially, the Guards were apprehensive of all of us, the first Americans many had ever met, and uncertain what to think because their elders, including the clergy, had clearly painted all of us as evil incarnate. As their contact with us increased, especially after we had been separated into smaller groups, they began to reevaluate their ideas of who and what Americans are. My Embassy colleagues, possessing the same American national characteristics which led many Japanese and Germans to like and respect Americans after World War II, soon were establishing friendly relationships with these young guards.

Marching a prisoner around the occupied US Embassy in Tehran.

The Guards
After I was moved into solitary, there were guards in my room(s) 24 hours a day. I never discovered why or for what particular reason, if any, and at first I ignored them. I was angry over being held, angry at being in solitary, angry and frustrated at seeing them turn an American Embassy into graffiti-laden prison. I resented like hell having them in the same room with me, whether they spoke to me or not. I felt no impetus to make conversation, and did not. The Iranians were quiet at first, too. For almost their whole lives they had been told of how the CIA was responsible for many (or even all) of the world’s problems, and especially the problems in Iran. And their perspective of the Shah’s reign and their knowledge of the CIA-engineered coup in 1953 were certainly less than objective and by no means fully informed. Understandably, they approached me with some wariness, very much unsure about whether I was a real human being or the monstrous bogeyman of their imaginations.

For the first several days I was in solitary, some young Iranian would be sitting at a small desk just inside my door while I walked, read, slept, or ate, completely ignoring my existence, except when I needed to use the bathroom. The guard would then blindfold me, escort me down the hall and back, and resume his post. They would change at approximately two-hour intervals, and I neither bade them good-bye nor welcomed the next shift.

But human nature has its way, and slowly and tentatively the young Iranians began to talk to me, as much out of curiosity as a desire to make me understand the evil of my ways. Inevitably, their first words spoken to me condemned various offenses, real or imagined, and were laced with quotations from the Koran and Khomeini’s sermons. I would grunt back a word or two and go on with whatever I was doing. Soon, however, the guards became more talkative, asking more questions and making fewer accusations, impelled by a desire to convince me that the country I served and the government I worked for were corrupt and evil. I would toss out a contradictory comment and then, in Socratic fashion, ask them a question intended to get them to justify or expand on their comments or ideas.
It was not long until all but two of my 10 or so guards had become fairly garrulous. From then on, until I no longer had them in the room with me, almost every time the guard changed, the new watcher would come in ready to talk. And so we began to have conversations that ranged from amusing to amazing to surrealistic.
There were a number of common denominators among these young men. First and foremost, they were fanatically religious and totally obedient to the wishes (or what they perceived as the wishes) of the clergy, as personified in Khomeini. Literally hundreds of hours of talks with these kids distilled down to one basic tenet: Khomeini was infallible because he was the Imam, and he was the Imam because he was infallible. It was not necessary for any of them to really know firsthand anything about anything, or to be independently convinced of the correctness of any position or action. If Khomeini said it was so, or if he ordered it done, then that was all they needed to know. Not once did I ever hear one discuss anything, whether the subject was religion, human rights, politics, or social responsibilities, in which he felt obliged or even willing to question Khomeini’s judgments or to decide facts, opinions, and actions for himself.
My Iranian captors contended that America was responsible for all the evils and wrongs in the world. One of them declared to me that Iran had been America’s main enemy for over 400 years! Even after I mentioned that America had actually been a nation for only 203 years and had been populated only by Native Americans less than 300 years before that, I could not sway him.

I learned from these Iranians that America had created plagues and national disasters in its efforts to control the world (“hegemony” was a favorite criticism); that all the West European countries and NATO as an organization were controlled by the United States; that we had decided–apparently just for the hell of it–to beat up on the peace-loving Vietnamese people, creating and then maliciously prolonging our war in Southeast Asia; and that in general America had never done anything positive or good for the world. When I pointed out a few of the innumerable “nonpolitical” things Americans had done which benefited the world (the Salk polio vaccine and other medical discoveries), the Iranians would find ulterior motives underlying each accomplishment; world control was one of the all-time favorites, as were greed and profit. Or they would deny that the achievement was useful, or say they had not heard of it, in which case it could not be really important or true. I asked one pre-med student to compare the number of American Nobel prize winners to the number of Iranian Nobelists, and the student replied that America always fixed the voting so that no Iranian could win; it was just part of our war against Iran.

Most of my captors stubbornly asserted that they were always right and that everyone else was always wrong. If they broke any law, it was because they had a justification for doing so. One student related the story of how he had been in a car accident because, at 0200, he had run a red light, and another car, which had the green, hit him broadside. Perfectly seriously, he said that the little traffic at that hour made it OK for him to ignore traffic signals (no point in waiting at a red light when no one is coming from the other side) and that it was the other driver who was at fault because he should have known someone might be running red lights and therefore should have been driving slowly while looking out for other drivers like him.

The corollary to never being wrong was that nothing was ever their fault. In the midst of our captivity, more than one of the guards complained to me that holding us hostage was ruining their lives: they could not go to school, they were not spending time with their families, they were not able to go home to their villages. In short, it was their lives which were on hold. And it was all our fault because we were there. The obvious solution of putting us on a plane and sending us home made no impression.

These same Iranians who shouted “death to America,” who condemned everything American as evil or decadent, and who would have killed us had it been ordered, would nonetheless ask my colleagues for help in obtaining visas to the United States, and then could not understand why they were laughed at. If the reader by now suspects, too, that these Iranians, at least, seemed to have difficulty with the concept of cause and effect, he or she would be dead on.

The Education of Tehran Mary
In my discussions and debates with my Iranian captors, I was frequently numbed by their lack of knowledge about the world and about critical events which, they claimed, “proved” how right they were. I have never forgotten a conversation I overheard between Tehran Mary and Air Force Col. Tom Schaefer, the Embassy’s Defense Attaché. For much of February and into March of 1980, Tom and I were kept in small adjoining rooms in the basement of the Embassy, for which there was a common air vent. By remaining still, I could often hear what was being said in Tom’s little corner of paradise.

One day an unknown (to me) female voice–I had no idea who Tehran Mary was, until I came home–started berating Tom for the US decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, calling it barbaric, inhumane, and racist. Tom replied, “The Japanese started the war, and we ended it.” That was obviously news to Mary, who asked in disbelief, “What do you mean, the Japanese started the war?” And Tom replied, “The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and so we bombed Hiroshima.” “Pearl Harbor? Where’s Pearl Harbor?” asked Mary. “Hawaii,” said Tom. A long pause occurred, and then, in a small voice pregnant with incredulity, Mary said, “The Japanese bombed Hawaii?” “Yep,” stated Tom, “they started it, and we ended it.” Mary’s sense of astonishment was easily discernible, even through the wall. After another long pause, I heard her rush out of Tom’s room. (“Mary” is now one of several vice-presidents in the government of President Mohammad Khatami.)

Small Victories
Even though conversations with the guards began to fill some of the solitary hours, I was still not happy with them being in the room at all hours. And so I undertook a covert action campaign to get them out. One lesson I remembered from Doug Hegdahl’s talks on survival in captivity was that it is vitally important to resist your captors in whatever way you can; to make it difficult or uncomfortable for them to hold you; and to make them pay some sort of price, however small, for denying you your freedom.

One small way I tried to make it harder on selected Iranian guards was to make their time in my room as unpleasant as I could. Doing things like breaking wind as I walked by their desk, belching after meals, and wearing only skivvies (that “public” state of undress being offensive to the Muslim religion) were steps toward this end. When I had a cold, I made sure to breathe hard in their direction as I passed by the desk. And, when I heard a few days later a guard complaining that he was having to do double duty because a couple of his colleagues, who had previously stood watch in my room, had been taken ill with bad colds, I felt one of those psychological boosts that comes from those little victories that keep you going. Soon afterward, around New Year’s Day of 1980, I was moved to a room on the ground floor in the back of the chancery, and from then on I lived without guards inside the room. It was a truly solitary existence, although the guards would still drop in for conversations from time to time.

One threat Hossein would occasionally toss out was that of placing me on trial as a spy. It struck me that this was no idle threat. The Iranians were obviously feeling a need to convince the rest of the world that they were justified in holding American diplomatic personnel captive and in demanding redress from the United States. I figured that the COS, myself, and any of the five or six military officers were prime candidates for the defendants’ dock, inasmuch as we were the ones being singled out for harsher treatment. I had memories of the Life magazine photos of Francis Gary Powers’ show trial in Moscow, and it was not something I wanted to experience firsthand. Moreover, as time went by and I learned more about the Iranians, their revolution, and their goals, I came to understand that, should they actually put us on trial, they would probably execute several of us and give the others long prison sentences.

There was also much talk of adding “war crimes” to the indictments for those of us who had fought in Vietnam. To bring this home, the Iranians taped to my wall a propaganda poster showing several American soldiers grinning and holding the severed heads of two Vietnamese. I used the poster as part of my own propaganda war: when new guards came into my room I would walk to the poster, put my finger on one of the severed heads, and point out that when Americans went to war, they were serious about their business–and one casus belli might be something like the capture and incarceration of American diplomats. The poster was soon removed.

The exceptionally supportive mood of many if not most Iranians toward the Embassy takeover, together with the zealots’ desire to tighten their grip on the reins of government, elevated the possibility of trial (and execution). One discomfiting experience in having a room in the front of the Embassy was that I could hear clearly the din of the huge crowds that would gather in front of the compound on Fridays. I learned later that some of these gatherings had more than 500,000 Iranians in attendance, and I was always worried that some speaker would whip the crowd into a frenzy, culminating in a storming of the Embassy by a mob bent on lynching the vile Americans. Hence, were we to be put on trial, the revolutionary government probably would feel compelled to execute at least a couple of us, if for no other reason than internal credibility. That prospect concentrated the mind exquisitely.

But after the first of the year in 1980, talk of a trial receded. The last time I heard it mentioned was on George Washington’s birthday (I kept a homemade calendar in the back of a book I managed to retain for almost the entire time). Hossein had come to my room for one of his increasingly infrequent visits and, in the midst of our chat, tossed out the threat of a trial. By that time, even he seemed to find it difficult to take seriously. The Iranian Government, however, continued to threaten in the world media to convoke public “spy” trials through the fall of 1980, apparently as part of its propaganda war.

Life Improves
Roughly coincident with the apparent end of the threats to put us on trial was a welcome, albeit limited, improvement in our treatment. For me, this included a shower every week or 10 days instead of the usual two weeks; several short periods actually outdoors just to enjoy the sun; and visitations to the library–the economic counselor’s former office that now housed the books from the Tehran American School. I was given pen and paper for the first time, and I began to draw whenever I did not feel like reading.

I was also told I could write home, and from then on I wrote three letters a week to my mother. Midway through our captivity, however, I learned that the Iranians had never mailed any of my letters. In fact, I later learned that I had not been heard of, or from, since Christmas 1979, when I was allowed to send a couple of cards in mid-December. When the press irresponsibly reported that some hostages had been able to spirit out “secret messages” in those cards, the Iranians assumed I was one of the culprits and my mail privileges were ended. I believe in freedom of the press, but this was one occasion in which it would have been helpful if the press had acted with some self-imposed restraint.

Nor was I ever filmed with visiting clergy like the others were, so my well-being and even my continued existence remained a mystery to my family, friends, and colleagues from December 1979 until the Algerian Ambassador paid me a visit the night of 23 December 1980. In the end, keeping me in solitary and putting my family through the agony of not knowing was nothing more than an attempt by the Iranians to punish the CIA, as an organization, for all the “bad” things that had happened to and in Iran since the 1953 coup. Because these students could not get their hands on any of the CIA personnel who had served there earlier to punish them, my COS and I served as their surrogates. It was that simple.

There were, I believe, several factors that combined to ameliorate our conditions, none of which I knew about until after we were released, plus one element that I learned of only in 1985. These factors were basically the Iranians’ realization that it was the American people, as much as it was the White House, who posed a serious threat to them; a back-channel message from President Carter to the Iranians warning of dire consequences should we be put on trial; and the increasing and unwitting involvement of the 52 of us in Iranian domestic politics.
First, regarding the fear the Iranians came to have of the American people, it will be surprising to many in the US that our captors fervently believed all Americans would support their seizure of the Embassy. Many of the younger and more naive students believed the American people might even begin a revolution in the United States. The older ones merely expected that the support of the American populace would become strong and influential enough to induce the Carter administration to give in to Iranian demands, which in reality had little or nothing to do with the return of the Shah.

The reason for this belief was simple: most Iranians had no concept of a “people’s government” in the sense of the populace having any influence over or participation in their governance. To a majority of them, there was an unbridgeable chasm between government and the people. One common characteristic among many Iranians is ethnocentricity, a belief that every other society in the world mirrors theirs– a state of mind that was amplified by our captors’ lack of life experiences and limited education; nor were they encouraged by their religion to look beyond their own ken. In this instance, the Iranians seemed to me truly to believe that the American people were as alienated from the US Government as the Iranian people had been from their government.

Thus our captors were at first perplexed and then greatly disappointed when the American public condemned their taking of the Embassy. And this held true even for Hossein and his peers, who were older and better educated and had lived or traveled in the United States for some period of time. The Iranians did not understand why there was so much antagonism and hatred shown by the American people over our captivity and why Americans were rallying behind President Carter. One night in early December 1979, Hossein admitted to me that the reaction of the American on the street was the opposite of what the militants had fully expected, and he added that obviously the United States Government, through the exercise of an enormous (and improbably successful) censorship program, had prevented the “truth” from reaching the American populace. The solution to that problem was a public relations campaign by the militants.
After I returned home and was able to read press accounts of our captivity, it became clear that the Iranians had indeed tried such a campaign. The starting point was probably the distribution to the world press of the special-channel message in early December 1979 (see section above entitled “Uncovered”), followed by a number of appearances by Tehran Mary in the media throughout that period. The culmination of this effort was the “Crimes of America” conference held in Tehran in June 1980. The Iranians induced several US citizens, notably former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, to come to Tehran and criticize American policies.

By January or early February 1980, it seemed to have finally sunk into the minds of our captors that nothing they could say to or produce for the media was going to generate any surge of sympathy (much less support) in the United States for the militants’ actions. And with it came a realization that they had much more to fear from the American public than they did from the White House. They had assumed from the beginning that it was the American people’s affection for Iranians and support for the takeover that kept the White House from responding militarily. It was truly a shock to their collective ego finally to accept that the depth and intensity of dislike with which most Americans viewed Iran was genuine. They came to realize that the one thing that would almost certainly compel the White House to abandon its self-imposed restraint would be if any of us were harmed, for any reason. And this realization at least partially translated into better treatment for us and, probably to a lesser degree, the end to threats of a trial.

The second development that benefited us was a back-channel message from President Carter to the Iranian leadership, via the good offices of the Swiss Government (representing US interests in Tehran), which warned the Iranians of exceptionally serious consequences if any of us were placed on trial for any reason. To this day, I do not know the contents of that message, but it had to have been very credible and truly frightening. The Iranians had, from the beginning, been openly scornful and contemptuous of the Carter administration–feelings that were formed beginning with the New Year’s Eve toast to the Shah in 1977. When no US military action was taken against Iran in the aftermath of the earlier Embassy takeover in February 1979, Iranians began to view the administration as weak and cowardly– beliefs that only deepened and hardened after we were captured. They had no fear whatsoever of US military action. That evidently changed, though, with the receipt of the President’s back-channel message. While the Iranians might have talked openly about trials for propaganda purposes, by mid-February 1980 this no longer appeared to be a viable threat.

The third element that affected the conditions (and duration) of our captivity was our increasing utility to each side in the Iranian domestic political struggle between the “moderates” under Iranian President Abdulhassan Bani-Sadr (elected with Khomeini’s approval in February 1980) and the hardcore “radical” Islamic fundamentalists. In essence, whoever controlled the hostages controlled the Iranian Government. By spring 1980, the only Iranians who were talking about returning the Shah were the young guards, who kept hoping; the older Iranians, such as Hossein, now a rare visitor, quit discussing why we continued to be held. One point all the Iranians repeatedly made was that they were going to make sure President Carter was not re-elected, as “punishment” for his “crimes.”

Departing the Embassy
From February to almost the end of April 1980, life was the same, day in and day out. There were no more interrogations, no more guards in my room, and few “drop-in” visits by Hossein or any of the older students. The monotony was broken only by an occasional trip to a shower in some other building and, on a good day, maybe 10 minutes outside in the sun. I was moved to five different rooms in the chancery during this period, never being told either that a move was coming or the reason why.

Easter Sunday passed quietly, but long after midnight that night I was awakened and taken upstairs to meet Archbishop Hilarion Capucci, the former Archbishop of Jerusalem, who had once been imprisoned by the Israelis for gunrunning. This occurred in the ambassadorial office, which was crammed full with our captors, some of whom I had not seen in months. It was a non-event for me, however, and to this day I do not understand the purpose. My picture was not taken, and I was not given anything. The Archbishop, the first non-Iranian I had seen in months, said nothing memorable. After a few minutes, I was taken back to my room, befuddled as to why my sleep had been interrupted for something that was apparently meaningless.

One evening in late April 1980, the routine went awry, and it was quickly noticed. In late afternoon, there usually would be an increase in the sounds of life in the hall as the guards changed, as food carts were wheeled up and down the corridor, and as my colleagues were taken to and from the restroom. There were also numerous ambient noises; I was once again in a room in the chancery facing the street, and noises reached me from the street as well as from the compound just beyond my window, where some outside guard would work the action of whatever type of firearm he was carrying. And there was also an occasional gunshot, which would carry with it the sounds of running feet down the hallway as the Iranians rushed outside, only to find a shaken guard who had accidentally discharged his weapon while playing with it–a wonderful source of amusement for us captives.

But in the afternoon of 24 April 1980, none of the usual noises were heard. In fact, as dinnertime approached, the chancery grew eerily quiet. I pounded on the door for a restroom call, but no guard appeared. Listening closely, I could hear a radio down the hall emitting what sounded like some sort of a newsbroadcast, judging from the intonations of the speaker. Continuing to bang on the door, I finally got a guard to come escort me down the hall to the bathroom; when I was finished, the Iranian, grim-faced, hurried me back to my room. I could by now easily hear the radio, just the voice, and nothing else. It was also quiet outside.

I realized that something major was happening. Long ago, I had learned that any unexpected shift in the routine was not because of our imminent release, but was probably because things were going to get worse. Dinner came late, and I was starving; in lieu of our usual weeknight fare of meat, vegetables, and bread, I was brought one bowl of a thin, chili-like soup. Much later, in the middle of the night, a heavy canvas hood was placed over my head and, in deathly quiet, I was taken from the chancery, seated in a van with perhaps five or six of my colleagues, and driven away.

Evin Prison
The ride lasted 30 minutes or so, with most of it uphill. The van stopped, and I was escorted through a large, possibly gymnasium-sized room, up several flights of metal stairs, and down a narrow corridor. Finally I was pushed into someplace small and told to remove my hood. When I saw my new quarters, I became instantly enraged, my emotions intensified by the adrenaline that had been flooding my body. My “room” was a prison cell, about six feet long on one side and about eight feet across the back. The opposite-side wall ran only four feet before angling in for another three feet (against which a stainless steel toilet was situated) and then angling back before joining the front “wall.” This front wall was less than three feet in length and consisted almost entirely of a floor-to-ceiling steel door with a slot near the bottom for a food tray and a small closed window at face height. The ceiling was perhaps 15 feet above the floor, and one small transom-type window joined with a dim bulb to provide the only light. It was a scene out of Hollywood’s worst B-grade movies. And I was furious.

I pounded on the door until my hands began to swell, but no one came. I paced angrily back and forth in the small area (three steps, turn; three steps, turn; three steps…) for what seemed like hours. Once, when the judas window opened and a strange face peered in, I rushed toward the door, whereupon the window was slammed shut. I let loose with a string of the foulest obscenities I could think of, insulting the unknown peeper, our captors, Khomeini, and Iranians in general. No reaction, no response. I had heard other doors slam down the cellblock, and at least I had the small reassurance that I was not alone. After enough time had passed for the adrenaline to begin wearing off and I had calmed down slightly, I had two thoughts: first, whatever had been on the newsbroadcast probably had also caused our relocation; second, this never happened to James Bond.

As dawn approached and I was running out of steam, one of the our student “guard supervisors” came to see me. While he would not tell me what was going on, he was at ease and friendly. I told him that putting us in prison was not a good move for him and his colleagues, and noted that it would no doubt create more antipathy toward him, his fellow students, and Iran. For once, the student made no attempt to justify the Embassy takeover or to condemn either the Shah or President Carter. He replied that the move was carried out only for our own safety and that we really were not in prison, we were only in a “prison-like place.” I gaped at him and waved my arm to encompass the medieval-like surroundings. He smiled and left.

We were there 10 days. I left the cell three times for showers, followed by short stints in a 12-foot by 12-foot exercise pen with 15-foot brick walls and open only to the sky. For the rest of the time, it was pace, sleep, and try to read by the light of the bulb, which burned 24 hours a day. The food ranged from bad to abominable, and the only part of it I ever recognized was the rice. At least, I hoped it was rice. The only exception to this routine occurred the morning of the second day, when a fellow hostage was put in my cell. While glad to see someone besides an Iranian, I was hoping the two of us were not going to have to live for an unknown period of time in the matchbox-sized cell.

After an awkward greeting (for I had not known him well), this non-CIA “colleague” asked me what I knew of the recent events, whether I had been able to communicate with anyone, and if I had any thoughts or ideas on what might be happening. We talked awhile, but I knew little to tell him, having been in solitary for so long and not having talked with any Iranian in weeks who could or would tell me anything. He also professed to know little. I thought it a bit strange that, after a short while, this individual wanted to quit talking and play cards. I also noticed that he had been able to keep his watch, which was odd; I and everyone with me in the dining room that first night had our watches and rings taken, never to be seen again. Nor did any of those who were with me in the Mushroom Inn or in the TDY bungalow before I was moved into solitary have their jewelry.

After we were all reunited at the Air Force Hospital in Wiesbaden, Germany, I learned than this individual was one of several who had collaborated with the Iranians. He had been able to receive uncensored letters from home and had even been allowed to talk to his family on the telephone, so he knew much that he did not share with me during our few hours together. Nor, as it turned out, did he share any information with his cellmates during all that time. I then understood why he had been put in my cell that day in Evin Prison.

I passed our 180th day in captivity (and my 161st day in solitary) in Evin. Then, in the middle of the 10th night, I was again subjected to the canvas hood and driven for several hours, along with a couple of others, to a new place. This time, it was an ostentatious villa that must have belonged to a wealthy person. After crossing an elaborate marbled grand foyer (although still hooded, I could see out of the bottom just enough to get a good sense of the surroundings) and ascending a wide and curving staircase carpeted with the deepest pile I have ever trod on, I ended up in a room about 10 feet by 12 feet, which had obviously been the bedroom of a small girl. The bedspread, sheets, and wallpaper had green and pink cartoon-type dinosaurs and other creatures, the windows were framed with lacy curtains, and there were Nancy Drew books in the bookcases. The bed was about two feet shorter than my 6-foot, 3-inch height. Although there was a bathroom adjoining it, I was never permitted to use it; instead, I was blindfolded and walked down a corridor to an incredibly sumptuous black-marbled bath with bright brass fixtures. Despite the luxury, I was still a prisoner, and there was always an armed guard outside my door. I was struck then, and remain so today, by the highly surrealistic sensation these circumstances evoked.

If It’s Tuesday, It Must Be…?
Along with several colleagues who constituted our little tour group, I was moved four more times in a short period. The villa was home for only five days, followed by about nine days in a ratty, filthy, rundown third-floor apartment in an urban area. Then I was moved to a ratty, filthy, rundown ground-floor room in the same building for another eight days or so. By this time, I had become so inured to moving that it no longer angered me to be awakened in midsleep and told to get ready to move out. Not that there was much to move out in the first place; my belongings consisted of a plastic shopping bag holding a change of clothes, a few toiletries, a towel, pencil and paper, and a couple of books.

My next move, with US Air Force Capt. Paul Needham and Marine Gunnery Sgt. Don Moeller, was to a fairly modern Holiday Inn-type hotel, situated several hours away. I was on about the fourth floor, in a room with two double beds, a bathroom, and a balcony fortified with steel plates about three inches thick and a foot wide. The plates were welded together to form a nearly solid wall from the floor to the ceiling of the balcony, making it impossible to see out.

We spent six weeks there. They were not particularly bad weeks, except for our meals, which were so unpalatable even our Iranian guards had trouble choking them down. Most of the time I had no idea what it was we were being served, but I do know that there was no meat. Beans I could distinguish, and rice was a no-brainer, but much too frequently neither taste nor appearance lent any clues to the origin or nature of the glop before us. Of the two dishes I could handle, one was marginally satisfactory, and in the other I just dug out the beans and left the rest.

I lost quite a bit of weight. When we arrived in Wiesbaden I tipped the scales at 133 pounds; I had weighed about 180 on 4 November 1979. If it were not for the pistachio nuts and dates that appeared fairly frequently during our stay at the hotel, plus the barbari bread at breakfast, I would have lost even more weight.
On the positive side, the weather was superb, with cool evenings and warm days. I could sit out in fresh air, even if I could not be in the sun. I had unlimited access to a real bathroom with a Western-type toilet, rather than the usual porcelain holes in the floor–which I had quickly dubbed “Khomeini Holes.” I was kept supplied with books, and I had a real bed with sheets I knew were clean because I washed them myself in the shower. In terms of captivity, it did not get much better than this. If it were not for the cuisine, this stay might even have been almost bearable.

Komiteh Prison
It did not last, of course. On the night of 22-23 June 1980 we were moved to Komiteh Prison in Tehran, where I would reside for the next 15 weeks. While my cell was bigger than the one in Evin, perhaps eight feet by ten feet, there was no toilet. I was back to sleeping on a foam pallet on the floor and had only a small desk, chair, and lamp for furniture, plus one small window high up on the back (outside) wall that let in partial light during the day. It soon was the middle of summer, and to handle the heat I began sleeping during the day and staying up all night. There was an open ventilation grill over the solid steel door; by standing on my chair, I could look out into the cell block.

Within a few days, I discovered that my cell was at one end of the block and that there were five colleagues, including Tom Schaefer, in the cell across from me and three of the Marine security guards next door. I soon deduced from a number of clues in the toilet room and shower room (located at the opposite end of the cellblock) that there were about 20 to 22 of us in the cellblock, split among five or six cells. As usual, I was the only one in solitary.

Late in August and again in September, two memorable events occurred. On one night around mid-August, at perhaps about 0200 hours, I was reading when I heard someone down the cellblock knock on the steel door, the usual sign that someone needed to visit the toilet. But I then heard no sound of the door opening. A minute or two later the knocking came again, only louder. Again no response, and again a louder knock, followed by the crashing sound of a fist really hammering the door. An amazed voice said, “Christ, he’s sound asleep out there!” I pulled the chair up and looked out the ventilation grill (which someone else had also obviously done) and saw our guard, possibly the youngest–and smallest–of all the Iranians I had seen during the entire hostage crisis, head down on his table and dead to the world only a few feet from the door that had received all the pounding.

With that, colleagues starting whispering back and forth across the cellblock. When I chipped in, there was a startled hush at first, caused, I learned, by the fact that some of those present thought I had already been executed. Once over this news, the others remained quiet while Tom Schaefer brought me up to date on such things as the Desert One rescue attempt that prompted our forced exodus from the Embassy in April; the release of Rich Queen, who was sent home in July with multiple sclerosis; and other information on who was where and what others had heard, seen, or suffered. (Originally, 66 Embassy staff were captured on 4 November 1979. Two weeks later, most of the minorities and women were released, bringing our number down to 53. With the release of Rich, the rest of us would remain until the end.) This little over-the-garden-fence chat with Tom was wondrously rejuvenating.

The other momentous evening was on 23 September, when all the lights suddenly went out, not just in my cell but also on the cellblock and around the prison. This was followed a few minutes later by a warning siren going off outside my cell. On the heels of the siren came the somewhat distant but unmistakable whump, whump of exploding ordnance–my first clues that all the ruckus was an air raid. It took a minute for my bemusement to evaporate and then my spirits soared, thinking that President Carter had finally unleashed US military might against the Iranians in another rescue attempt. But common sense and reasoning quickly returned, and I realized that this scenario was very problematical.

It was too dark to read, so I sat on the floor watching the flashing light of shell bursts somewhere outside my little window and tried to figure out who the perpetrators might be. The only conclusion I could draw was that it was the Iraqis. I could not imagine why Iraq might be bombing Iran, but I did recall that the two countries had not always been the best of neighbors; nor did I doubt that it was in the Iraqis’ character to attack Iran on any pretext if they perceived the Iranians to be in a weakened position.

I was not at all unhappy to see someone, anyone, dropping bombs on Iran. I felt reasonably sure a prison would not be a prime target. While a stray round could always drop in, I was feeling safe sitting in a room with three-foot-thick reinforced walls. So bomb away, I mentally told whoever it was, and damn good luck to you. The muzzle blasts of several antiaircraft guns in close proximity to the prison kept the noise level high, but it was not greatly disconcerting. I was also intrigued, having flown dozens of missions in Vietnam–the primary purpose of which was to drop bombs on people–by the unique sensation of being on the receiving end of an air assault.

Meanwhile, my Iranian guards kept popping in every five minutes, most of them gripped in something akin to an acute state of goggle-eyed panic, apparently to see if I were sharing the same fear–or perhaps to see if I was using some secret gizmo to guide the bombers; anything was possible to these kids, whose knowledge of the espionage business came from movie characters. One reason I had not been permitted to keep a watch was that at least some of the Iranians believed I might be able to use it to “talk to Washington.” On the plane out of Tehran following our release, one colleague told the story of visiting the toilet room in Komiteh Prison, which was monitored by a video camera. While standing by the window, he continually looked back and forth between the sky and his watch, which he had been able to talk the Iranians into returning to him, mimicking someone checking the expected time of arrival of something, say a particular satellite. A minute or two later, he gave a nod of satisfaction and began alternately talking to his watch and then holding the watch up to his ear. After a minute of that, the guards burst into the room. That was the end of that watch. Now, with bombs going off in the vicinity of the prison, the guards did not know what to think when they found me sitting serenely on the floor cheering each explosion.

Evin Redux
We were in Komiteh only two more weeks before being moved back to Evin Prison, this time into a bungalow-sized house on the prison grounds that had been turned into a makeshift jail. From its hillside perch, I could continue to sneak peeks through a less than perfectly blacked-out window at the night air raids on Tehran. The room was only about four feet wide but possibly 15 feet long; it was actually half of a larger room, partitioned by a wall constructed of acoustic tile nailed to a framework of 2x4s.

This divide was not too substantial, and soon I was having short, whispered conversations with the adjoining occupant. Dave Roeder was an Air Force lieutenant colonel who had arrived in Tehran just days before the takeover to serve as the Air Attaché. I had talked with him briefly before we were captured, but now we began a short-distance relationship that became a strong friendship. The dividing wall ended at the rear of the room against a window, leaving about a 1/4-inch gap between the wall and the windowpane. Dave and I soon began sliding notes back and forth between our respective cells; we communicated about many things, especially our prospects for release.

Dave had flown two tours in Vietnam, the first in B-52s and later in F-105 fighter-attack aircraft. Thanks, no doubt, to those experiences plus nearly a year in captivity, he had become thin, gray-haired, rather haggard-looking, and possessed of a scraggly beard. He looked like something between a kindly grandfather and a homeless person. We were again seeing a number of our old guards whom we had not seen since “the old days” back in the Embassy, and some were actually happy to see us. There were also some new students who did not seem to have the initial dread of us our guards had exhibited right after the takeover. Most of the guards soon came to consider Dave a pleasantly benign person, possibly something of a substitute father-figure, and they would often stop to chat with him. Dave passed along to me whatever he was told, and I reciprocated, although the students were not nearly as forthcoming with me.
I would think about whatever news Dave would obtain from the guards and reach some general conclusions, which generated more questions in my mind. I would send a note back to him giving my thoughts and a list of questions, answers to which he should try to elicit from the students. The next time he was visited by these guards, he would work the questions into the conversation and, when alone, would send the answers back to me. Thus, the classic intelligence cycle: a recognized need for particular information was followed by tasking to a collector, who acquired information from sources and then reported it back to the requirements originator, where it was collated, analyzed, and disseminated, along with new requirements. By the time we were split up in late December, Dave and I had an efficient intelligence cycle working for us!

Other sources of “intelligence” were Time, Newsweek, and Der Spiegel magazines, which the Iranians began giving to us, albeit with information about our own situation carefully excised. Keenly interested in the coming US elections because one of the goals of our captors was the unseating of President Carter, the Iranians took great glee in showing us stories of the political campaign and nominating conventions that indicated former Governor Reagan held a significant lead over the President in the polls.

Fortunately, the Iranians did not always catch things they did not want us to see in these periodicals. In an issue of Der Spiegel, for example, our captors completely missed a story about the Desert One rescue attempt, complete with maps and diagrams of the mission plan, as well as the photos of the burned wreckage of the C-130 in the desert. Although I did not read or speak German, the photos provided a clear picture of what the mission was to have been and, to a somewhat lesser degree, what had gone wrong. All this “open-source” information was factored into my disseminated “intelligence” to Dave Roeder.
Many conclusions Dave and I reached as a result of this collection program were right on the mark or nearly so. For example, from student comments about the elections and their much more cheerful attitudes, we hypothesized that those of us who were going to be returned to America would probably be released no later than the presidential inauguration on 20 January 1981; those who were not released by then (and we counted ourselves, plus Tom Schaefer, the COS, and one or two other military officers as potential members of this select group) would probably be kept in Iranian jails for at least several more years. Other possible, but not likely, release dates were soon after–but not before–the 4 November 1980 presidential election, and Christmas. We also concluded that the Algerians’ offer to serve in an intermediary role was a positive step. Finally, from observing the changing attitudes of the students who guarded us, we decided that the shooting war with Iraq was now probably much more of a pressing problem to Iran than its diplomatic war with the United States.

Standing Tall
Our Iranian captors’ hatred of President Carter was so deep and strong that they never focused on what his defeat might mean to Iran and to our situation. They believed Mr. Reagan would be their friend, someone who understood all the injustices America had perpetrated on their innocent country for so many years. Our captors were certain Reagan would understand their point of view and why they came to the Embassy that November day. Dave and I told them differently, but our words did not resonate. Imagine, then, the Iranians’ utter befuddlement when, several days after the election, President-elect Reagan called the Iranians “barbarians” and noted that he did not bargain with such people.

Being labeled as barbarians was highly offensive to many Iranians, who believed their country and culture to be sophisticated and refined. Several students came to talk to Dave Roeder about this, and Dave would ask, in effect, “What did you expect? You capture the American Embassy, hold American citizens prisoner for over a year, claim that America is your number-one enemy, claim that you hate Americans, desecrate the American flag by burning it and hauling garbage in it before the world press, and maintain that you are at war with America. And now you think that Ronald Reagan is going to be your friend? He will not be your friend. You have brought this on yourselves, and that is the way the world works.” The overnight change in the Iranians’ attitude was palpable. Their delight in a Carter defeat was replaced by a growing fear of the new administration.

The students knew that serious negotiations between the United States and Iran were finally in progress, spurred by two crucial facts: dealing with Iraqi aggression was almost a life-and-death matter for their country, from which the Iranian Government needed no superfluous distractions (such as the care and feeding of 52 prisoners of the state), and the hardcore Islamic fundamentalists had finally seized control of the government from the Bani-Sadr “moderates.” In the midst of this, Khomeini, when asked what to do next with the hostages, is reported to have replied, “We have squeezed them like lemons, and they are no longer of any use to us. Send them back.”

There was one additional element that had some bearing on our ultimate release. In October 1980, the new Iranian prime minister came to the UN in New York to seek support for his country in the war with Iraq and condemnation of Iraq as an aggressor. What he found was that no one wanted to talk to him about Iraq. Everywhere he turned, he was confronted with demands to release the American diplomats, with Iran–and not Iraq–the object of general condemnation. In a private conversation with the wife of one of our colleagues who was an effective leader in the family support organization, the prime minister offered the immediate release of her husband, only to be told in blunt terms that her husband was not to be released unless and until all hostages were released. The all-or-nothing policy had been voiced by the State Department and the White House from the beginning, but the prime minister was surprised to learn that the families felt the same way.
So it was that the Iranian Government finally began negotiating seriously with the American Government, with the help of the Algerians. The task was not an easy one for the US negotiating team, headed by then Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher. To the Iranians, negotiating “seriously” did not necessarily mean negotiating in good faith; they looked at the beginning of talks as the opening of the bazaar.

The Iranians wanted a number of issues settled in their favor–particularly the freeing of several billion US dollars that had been frozen in their European and American bank accounts; the delivery of US military equipment on order, and, in some instances, paid for under the Shah’s regime; and apologies for “previous wrongs” done to Iran by the United States. In bazaar-market fashion, the Iranians bargained for everything, soon frustrating not only the Americans but also the Algerians by apparently agreeing on certain points or amounts, only to renege several days later.

We could tell by the Iranians’ attitudes and moods that things on the diplomatic front were, at last, moving along. Our move back to Evin was, at least in my mind, more than routine. In Komiteh, we were all together, in circumstances which made it easy for the Iranians to take care of us; and we were as safe from external dangers as we could probably ever be. For the Iranians to go to the trouble of moving us again to new quarters, which only increased their workload, seemed a positive development. The guards became more open and willing to talk (especially, and thankfully, to Dave Roeder). They began to talk more about us “going home,” and there was an upswing in their collective mood, despite their disappointment with President-elect Reagan. And our quality of life marginally improved: I was able to shower more frequently (although there was no hot water, the shower room unheated, the window permanently cracked open–and it was getting damn cold in the mountains where Evin is situated). We continued to receive American-style food, and we were regularly given newsmagazines, minus stories about us and the negotiations.

As November 1980 moved into December, there was anticipation that Christmas would bring good news, perhaps even freedom. Dave hoped for a Christmas release. I too thought that was possible, considering that President Carter had been unseated and that Iraq was now Iran’s biggest problem. To my mind there did not appear to be any substantive reason for holding us longer, although that did not rule out keeping us for spite or for leverage in trying to obtain more in the negotiations. I grew cautiously optimistic.

The Final Weeks
My positive attitude was dashed and replaced by an angry outburst on 23 December, when we were moved again. After a short ride from Evin, I was led into a building and down several flights of stairs. Just before entering my new quarters, we walked across the marble floor of what seemed to be a large, unfurnished room. When I heard one of the guards plink at a piano somewhere in the room, the first impression was that of a ballroom or other similarly large area.

When the blindfold was removed, I looked around. I thought that I had been magically transported to one of the men’s restrooms at the Kennedy Center. I was standing in a room that resembled a small parlor; it was nicely carpeted and wallpapered, and furnished with an easy chair, a table, lamp, and the ubiquitous foam sleeping pad on the floor. Additional light was provided by sconces. On one side was a short hallway leading (I soon learned) to the toilet area. There was just one window in the “parlor,” near the high ceiling on the wall opposite the double-entry door. (After release, I learned that we were being held at the Foreign Ministry’s guesthouse. The source of this information was a colleague who had been living in one of the luxurious guest rooms upstairs, while I languished in what was a basement bathroom).

While I had a better living area than I had had in most of my previous abodes, I was still furious at being there, to the point of lashing out verbally at the guards, even trying to pick a fight with them. In earlier days, an episode like this would have resulted in some form of punishment, probably either shackling or loss of book privileges. Now the guards just shrugged, told me not to turn on the light, and left.

As I stewed in the dark (and in the cold, there being no heat coming from the radiator), a flak cannon opened up just outside the room’s only window, and I could again hear the whump, whump of ordnance exploding in the distance. From the light from the muzzle flashes, I confirmed that I was in a basement (looking up and out the window, I could see that I was at least eight feet below ground level). I set about pacing across the room, full of anger and adrenaline, the way lighted by the flashes and a modest amount of ambient light. Finally, the gun silent, I walked until fatigued and called it a day.

Still in a funk the next morning, I ignored the guards when they brought me breakfast and again when they returned to fix the heat and jerryrig a shower in the toilet area. By day’s end, after having taken long, hot showers following each of my two exercise periods, I was in a much better frame of mind. But I continued to ignore the guards, just to be perverse and to remind them of my intense dislike of being treated like a commodity. I had again been made aware of the utter lack of control I had over my life. That never failed to anger and frustrate me, not only while in captivity but also for years afterward.

Several hours after dinner on this Christmas Eve, the door opened and in walked three Arab men in suits and ties, accompanied by a contingent of our guards. I was then introduced to the Algerian Ambassador to Iran. He asked how I was faring and told me that if I wanted to write a letter home, he would personally carry it to United States Government officials. I quickly accepted the offer and then, speaking softly but quickly, outlined to the diplomat in terribly fractured French my previous treatment, including the 400-plus days in solitary. When the guards started to react to this discussion, which they could not follow, I switched back to English and thanked the Ambassador for his time.

I was in much better spirits following the visit, but was still surprised when someone collected the just-written letters. And I was even more surprised when I learned on release that the letter had made it to my mother (the Iranians had by then long destroyed any trust I placed in their word). When the Algerian Ambassador was able to report to US officials that he had personally seen and talked with me, that was the first news in a year that I was still alive; but it was good to have the letter as confirmation. The letter was hand-delivered to my mother by an Agency officer, who then sat with her and went over the letter, asking her to confirm that it was my handwriting and that it reflected my personality. With that, my name was apparently checked off on the “still with us” list.

Along with Christmas breakfast, I received a real present from home (the only package from home the Iranians let me have, out of many sent to me): a shoebox stuffed with goodies, including a crossword puzzle book, a deck of cards, and real Kleenex. It struck me then that release was probably close, if not in the next day or two, then around 20 January (the symbolism of a release on inauguration day was not lost on me).

I tried not to be too optimistic by reminding myself that it was possible I would not be freed then or anytime soon. If nothing happened during the week of the 20th, then I should accept that I was in for a long term of incarceration and be grateful that things were not worse. (To put our situation in perspective, it is a fair comparison to say that our treatment was worse than that received by American aviators at the hands of the Germans in the World War II stalags, but unquestionably much better than the treatment Japan gave to its POWs during that same conflict or that meted out by the North Vietnamese to the POWs in the Hanoi Hilton.)

During this time, there reappeared one of the first guards I had had in the Embassy during the eternity before our dispersal around the country. Mehdi was perhaps 20 or 21, and he had consistently been kind to me while I was in his charge. We had spent hours talking on many topics, often with each trying to educate or explain things to the other. I was pleased to see him again, and he confessed to being pleased as well. It was interesting to note a change or two in him, particularly an improvement in his English, an ancillary benefit many of our guards obtained as their months with us passed. None of Mehdi’s previous occasional dourness was in evidence and, although not giving away any secrets, he spoke more openly and frankly.

Mehdi’s optimistic attitude and those tidbits he did let drop (or I elicited) in our chats served as additional indexes of possibly imminent release. Unlike any of the other guards with whom I spoke during those last few months, he had begun to engage in some objective reflection of what it was that he and his cohorts had done and what their actions might have meant in terms of his country’s long-term stability. For example, although most of our captors seemed to have trouble grasping “cause and effect” relationships, Mehdi had independently concluded that Iran’s loss of US friendship and protection had helped allow the Soviets to invade Afghanistan and later encouraged the Iraqis to initiate the recently begun hostilities with Iran. No other Iranian I talked with ever gave any sign of understanding this.

The End in Sight
With something positive finally in the offing, the days seemed to pass more slowly as we went from December 1980 into January 1981, with the only noticeable change being less contact with the guards. By early January, the only Iranians who came to my room, other than Mehdi, who still dropped by occasionally, were those who brought my meals. I did not mind this reduction in contact and was thus irritated when, several hours after dinner on 18 January, there was a knock on my door. I was startled by this unusual act of courtesy, and it did not occur to me to reply. The door opened, and a guard ushered in a young male dressed in a white jacket and carrying some sort of tray, only to find me standing perplexed in the middle of the room. Viewing the white jacket, I assumed that the guard had brought the cook down for a culinary review of that night’s dinner. Then I took a good look at the tray and saw that it was a medic’s blood kit. With sleeve rolled up and fist clenched, I watched with no small amount of trepidation as this youth approached my arm with a huge hypodermic syringe, fully intent on draining a few gallons of blood.

My fears notwithstanding, the experience left me unharmed and for the first time almost free of pessimism: I had been seen by the Algerian Ambassador, permitted to write a letter home which enjoyed some real prospect of being delivered, and had blood taken, almost certainly as part of a medical examination. Looking at this evidence, I could not talk myself out of believing that the end was really coming.

Nineteen January lasted forever. I could not sleep, read, or close my mind. I spent most of that day pacing the room and waiting for another knock. Dinner came and went, while time dragged on and I grew more and more despondent. I had miscalculated, I thought; if I was not released now, then it would probably be a long time before I enjoyed any kind of freedom again.

But it did happen. Well after midnight, I was blindfolded and walked outside to another building. When I could see again, I was in a large institutional-type kitchen, and in the room beyond I could see some of my colleagues. I was taken to a smaller room, where there were three medical examining tables set up, two occupied by colleagues I had not seen in over a year. A smiling Algerian doctor gave me a rudimentary physical exam and finished by telling me I was fine. While pleased to hear that, what was really exciting to me was the thought that the Iranians, now having had outsiders verify that I was alive and in acceptable health, could not very well claim I had been shot trying to escape or had died in captivity. Moreover, knowing that the Algerians had played a significant role in the negotiations between Iran and the United States, I thought it highly unlikely that they would certify we were alive and healthy, and then walk away and leave us. I knew then for sure that we were going home.

There were two other interesting events that night. First, I had to appear before Tehran Mary and a film crew. Mary and her friends were smiling and acting as though this was the social event of the season. In front of the camera, I was asked how I was doing, and I replied, “Fine.” She then asked if I had been treated well while I had been a guest of Iran. I burst out laughing, and replied that I had been held against my will in solitary for more than a year, had not been able to tell my family that I was even alive, had been interrogated, was physically abused more than once, and had been threatened with trial and execution. And now I was being asked if I had been treated well. So the answer was, “No!” There were no follow-up questions.

As for the second event, I had not been back in my basement bathroom long when, near daybreak, Hossein came to say good-by. He sat on the floor against the side wall, looking tired and more than a bit haggard, but happy. Almost gloating, in fact. He began by telling me that it was all over, that we were all going home, and that Iran was finally going to be free from outside interference so Iranians could have the kind of country they wanted. I responded that it sounded good, but that I was sure it was not going to happen because, in my view, Iranians lacked the necessary self-discipline to keep the past from repeating itself.

Hossein said he did not understand. I noted that governing a nation and permitting at least some degree of freedom (which Hossein and his cohorts always maintained would be the case in Iran) required great tolerance on the part of the authorities. I said that the government of such a country could not lock someone away or execute them just because someone with the power to do so did not like something the person said or did. I told him that rules and laws had to be applied to all citizens equally and that it took governmental and personal self-discipline to make this work. Looking him directly in the eyes, I told him that nothing I had seen, heard, or experienced in my time in Iran gave me any indication he and his fellow Iranians had any understanding of this. The revolutionary government was unwilling to grant its citizens any measurable degree of true freedom, and there was not, in my opinion, a snowball’s chance in hell that it would.

Hossein rebutted my comments, using the same idealistic revolutionary rhetoric that I had heard so many times, from so many Iranians. He ended by repeating that all Iran’s problems had been caused by outsiders, most notably by America, and that now everything was going to be good in Iran. I did not carry the debate further. He tried to chitchat for a few minutes, but, when he realized that I had no interest in a congenial farewell, he said he had many things to do. He then stood and wished me good luck. I shrugged, and he left.

After sundown on 20 January, I was blindfolded for the last time and walked out of the building, minus the little bundle of possessions that I had managed to retain over the months. The Iranians had taken everything we had and sent us out of the country with only the clothes on our backs. I was helped onto a bus and pushed toward the back, able to see from underneath my blindfold that all the seats were filled with Americans. I was the last one on. Standing at the rear, I glimpsed my COS sitting in the seat in front of me. This was the first time I had seen him in nearly 15 months.

As we slowed on the airport apron, we could hear a crowd yelling; the sounds were almost deafening as the bus stopped and the door opened. Each of us was walked to the door of the bus, where the blindfold was removed. We were then more or less pushed off and propelled through a gauntlet of screaming Iranians toward the rear stairs of a Boeing 727. As I was moved along to the airplane, I recognized some of our former guards. The last sounds I heard before tearing loose from the crowd at the bottom of the stairs and sprinting into the cabin were, “Hey, wait! Can you help get me a visa to America?”

Epilogue
I want to record here some vignettes that did not make the evening news and were not of any great import to what happened to the 52 of us as a group. But these brief moments almost without exception hold indescribable meaning to me. Not coincidentally, whenever I have been privileged to speak to various audiences, these were also the stories that seemed to touch the individual listeners the most. Yet these stories, which put a human face on those events, are the least likely material to survive over time. And I do not want that to happen. Too many Americans gave too much of themselves during that time to allow these memories to fade.

It may seem odd that the 14-plus months I spent as a captive of the Iranians have endowed my life with memories actually worth safeguarding. Even some events that were not and are not things I like to dwell on had their uplifting and sometimes humorous aspects. My fondest memories are those of our return to freedom; one colleague likened it to being “bathed in love,” which says it all. I should also add that this was all a tremendous surprise to me, and it was some time before I came to accept psychologically the great good fortune that befell us.
Confined in a solitary state for all but the first 19 days of our captivity and generally deprived of news from the outside, I had no idea of what awaited us when the time came for our return. Some of my colleagues who received changes of roommates more frequently than I received chances to shower had, through various sources, been able to glean some general idea of the public reception in the offing. I was clueless.

The above notwithstanding, I did have infrequent glimmers of the extent to which the American public supported us because the Iranians would, on rare occasion, give me one or two of the thousands of cards and letters sent to us by caring Americans throughout our captivity. These short missives would without fail inform us that we were in their prayers, urge us to be strong, and end with a hope for a speedy conclusion to our ordeal. Many thanked us for our sacrifice and for bringing the country together, even at such a cost to us and to our government.
The Iranians had waged a psychological war against all of us, its intensity varying only with the degree to which each of us was viewed by them as an “enemy of the revolution.” A measurable element in that war was the unrelenting effort to convince us that we had been abandoned by the American people, that Americans everywhere wanted to see us “justly” held in prison for “crimes” against the Iranian nation and people, and that on return to the United States we would face only shame and humiliation. Permitting us to read those wonderful cards, which spoke just the opposite to our hearts, undermined their efforts to reduce our will to resist. These letters meant so much to all of us, and I am still amazed that the Iranians ever gave any of them to us. Nonetheless, even with the joy and strength those cards brought me, I never envisioned anything like what awaited us in Germany and back home.

It was only by happenstance that I even knew we would be heading to Germany. Tom Schaefer had shared this tidbit with me through an air vent one February day, when we were next door to each other in makeshift cells in the chancery basement. Beyond that one specific piece of intelligence, I was left with my imagination when it came to dreaming about and planning for my return home. And I will humbly note right now that for every single image, idea, or dream I had about our return, I was dead wrong on each of them.

The Captain
We left Tehran on an Air Algerie 727, and it all seemed surrealistic. It still does. But it was the best plane ride I have ever had. In celebration, we hoisted small glasses of champagne when we left Iranian airspace and, when dinner was served, bottles of Algerian wine surfaced, though not many; when they were emptied, no more appeared. (Some years later, I remarked that I thought the wine was excellent, only to have a skeptical friend point out that my taste buds at that particular moment might not have been in top working order.) Moreover, the feast of delicacies, which I had assured myself would certainly be ours, did not appear either. Our first meal in freedom was hard rolls and butter. Four or five of us were thus milling around in the aisle, somewhat perplexed at what was passing for our “welcome to freedom” dinner, when the plane’s captain stopped by.

A remarkable man, the Algerian captain had a marvelous sense of humor and loads of charisma. The looks of disappointment, which must have filled our faces as we contemplated the rolls and butter, drew his concern. He inquired if everything was OK, and one of us managed to stammer out with some embarrassment that, while we did not mean to appear ungrateful, we had been looking forward to a meal that was a bit more substantial. The captain made a small joke, but then turned serious and apologized for the meager fare.
The reason, he explained, is that the plane had left for Tehran several days ago, unsure of exactly when, or even whether, our release would take place. He described landing in Ankara to top off the fuel tanks and to stock the larder, noting that the only food that would keep on the plane more than a day or so without spoiling were the rolls and butter. “So you see,” he said softly, “we did not know how long we would be in Tehran, and we would not allow the Iranians to cater your food.”

The Air Algerie 727 was configured in three sections, with first-class seating at the front and two economy seating areas behind. The VIPs on board were up front, and my colleagues and I were in the middle section. At Mehrabad Airport, we boarded in such a rush that I hardly noticed the occupants in the rear of the plane. Later, heading back to the restroom, I did notice a number of large, tough-looking chaps sitting in seats that were too small for their bulk. Later, I learned that they were Algerian commandos. On landing in Tehran, the commandos had set up a protective perimeter around the plane so that no could get within several hundred feet of the aircraft.

Actually, there were two Air Algerie aircraft that came for us. Identical 727s were used, not only to carry everyone connected with our release (negotiators, the Algerian doctors who examined us, Red Cross personnel, commandos, and so forth), but also for an added layer of protection. At departure time, the two planes taxied away from the lighted apron together and, by the time they had reached the runway, no one watching could be certain which plane held the former hostages. The two planes took off within a minute of each other and, once airborne, changed position a time or two. If the Iranians were of a mind to attempt a downing our aircraft, they would have been confused as to which plane was ours.

We have many reasons to be eternally grateful to the Algerians. They truly cared.

Warm Welcome
After we landed in Algiers for the formal turnover from Algerian custody to the US Government (as negotiated by the Algerians with the Iranians and our government), we were ushered into the VIP suite at the terminal. Some months later, I was watching a video of TV coverage of the event and, when the 727 came to a stop, I eagerly awaited my appearance. The opportunity to see myself on worldwide TV was more than just a novelty. So, I waited. And waited. A half-hour passed before the aircraft’s door opened, and then more time elapsed before Bruce Laingen walked down the stairs toward the terminal. Watching the video, I was astonished at the time lapse. I still am. To this day, I have no idea where the time went or what we did in the plane while we were waiting.

The walk to the terminal served as a modest introduction to the welcomes we were to experience in the days and weeks to come. The first thing I noticed was a VIP version of the Boeing 707 from the US Air Force Special Missions unit at Andrews Air Force Base parked about 50 yards away from our 727. There was a crew member hanging about halfway out the co-pilot’s window, his face one huge grin, wildly waving a small but very visible American flag. We were as happy to see him as he was to see us. The first of what could be called our “cheering crowds,” several hundred happy and smiling members of the American business community and Embassy in Algiers, were ecstatically waving more American flags.

The scene inside the VIP lounge could have been easily mistaken for a routine diplomatic cocktail party. We strolled in, accepted a small tumbler of tea or fruit juice, and then stood around making polite conversation with people we had never seen before and, at least in my case, have not seen since. It was clear, though, that these strangers were delighted to see us.

I do remember Algerian Foreign Minister Benyahia officially transferring custody of us to the State Department representatives. Other than shaking his hand before we left, we had no chance to meet him or talk with him; still, I know we were all saddened when he died in a plane crash in 1982. He was a man who had devoted the better part of a year’s energy and patience to gaining our freedom.

By 0300, we were aboard two US Air Force C-9 Nightingale medevac aircraft heading for Rhein-Main Airbase at Frankfurt, Germany. I was sitting in the jump seat on the flight deck, between the pilots, having something of a normal conversation in abnormal circumstances. The two pilots seemed as pleased to have been chosen to fly us as we were pleased to be in their charge–almost. In the midst of this conversation, the Italian air traffic control service handed off our flight to French controllers as we entered France’s airspace.

After the check-in calls, the French controller departed from established radio procedure in his signoff message to the pilot. “I am sure all of your special passengers must be asleep in the back,” (which was decidedly not true: all the interior lights were on, and my colleagues were all bustling about and acting as though it was an airborne New Year’s Eve bash), “but when they awake before landing, please tell them that all France is happy their ordeal has ended and that French citizens everywhere wish them the best as they return to freedom.” The pilot rogered his thanks and we flew on. Only much later did I realize I should have asked the pilot for the microphone to thank the controller personally for his wishes. I have always regretted not thinking faster.

On arrival in Frankfurt, it seemed as though most of the American population of Europe watched us leave the aircraft, walk across the ramp, and disappear into blue Air Force buses for the short trip over to the USAF hospital at Wiesbaden. A good number of my colleagues had the presence of mind to wave to the crowd that met us; I did not. I felt indescribably awkward and out of place. Later, I realized I was experiencing a species of culture shock; I did not know what to do or what was expected of me. I was self-conscious, did not know what was happening, and was overwhelmed.

I soon learned that these wonderful Americans were from the Rhein-Main Airbase and surrounding area, and that they had been waiting for hours during the coldest part of that January night to welcome us. They had a huge American flag hanging from the control tower, and almost everyone present was also waving small American flags while cheering without restraint. It was the warmest welcome anyone could ever dream of receiving.

There was also a sea of yellow ribbons, bows, and garlands fluttering around. No other colors, just yellow. There was even a huge yellow bow tied around the control tower. I mentally chalked up these displays of yellow to some quaint local German custom, and headed for the bus.

The short walk from the buses up the hospital’s main entrance was through a corridor full of beaming faces and more flags and yellow ribbons. As I went to my room, it was impossible not to notice the wall decorations. Lots of art work by youngsters in grammar and middle schools led me to conclude that the Air Force had cleared out a pediatrics ward for us. And we were afloat on a sea of yellow ribbons. Later, when I had the time to look at each one, I saw that the drawings were letters of welcome from children of American military personnel. At the time, however, the only sensation was that of being nearly overwhelmed by color and smiling faces.

I was looking forward to the medical exam, certain I had come through captivity in fine shape, save for the loss of a couple of pounds and a slight decrease in cardiovascular endurance. The examination went well; the doctor was wonderful, as was everyone connected with the hospital. But when I learned the outcome, I thought at first I had gotten someone else’s results. I was flabbergasted to discover I had lost 47 pounds. My surprise was even greater when I saw my physical state described as “general wastage,” because I certainly did not feel that way. Fortunately, “wasted” was a temporary condition remedied by a lot of eating.

When we arrived back home, many people–family, friends, neighbors, any groups we spoke to, as well as the folks who stopped us on the subway, in airports, and at the neighborhood tavern–were naturally highly curious about our first days in freedom, especially at Wiesbaden and, later, West Point. That was because the State Department took great care to isolate us and our immediate families, and news organizations were not allowed near us. I will try to satisfy some of that curiosity.

I confess that I cannot remember what my first real meal was after we were released. What I was especially looking forward to was pizza and Heineken beer, and, as a good Oklahoma boy, a thick T-bone. But the first meals in Wiesbaden were not memorable. The doctors were doing a seemingly endless series of laboratory tests, requiring donations of about half the blood supply in our bodies; for accurate test results, our diets had to be restricted. Thus, we came to realize belatedly why we had only one cup each of Algerian champagne and wine on the flight to Algiers, and why we were kept on limited diets during our first days at the hospital. On our last night in Wiesbaden, however, we enjoyed Maine lobsters sent to us by a generous (and imaginative) American. What certainly had to be the best cooks in the Air Force prepared the lobsters and served them with an incredible array of side dishes. This delicious meal was truly a feast and a most memorable event.

It is impossible for any of us to express our gratitude adequately to the staff of the Wiesbaden Air Force Hospital. The people working at the hospital, including US military personnel and American and German civilians, were as happy to have us there as we were to be there. I cannot begin to describe the genuine kindness and expert care we received from these folks.
In the middle of the second day, Tom Schaefer a
nd I were talking with the ward’s head nurse, Maj. Toni Carner. We were trying to tell her how much we appreciated everything her staff was doing for us and how grateful we were to be in their care. Recognizing what we were trying to say, Maj. Carner stopped us by taking our hands, looked up at us, and softly said, “We’ve been waiting for you for 444 days.”

After the lobster feast, we were invited to a party in the enlisted barracks. A bar had been set up and music was playing, and many of the medics we had seen during our three days were there in casual clothes. I think about nine of the Tehran bunch showed up, to be welcomed with a large traditional German stein and beverages of our choice. With no dietary restrictions now, we could enjoy the world’s greatest beer. I took special care to make sure the stein made it back home with me, and it now sits in my home office where I see it everyday.
We were given a lot of things while we were in Germany, including collector-type plates from several German cities depicting a local landmark, usually a cathedral or the city hall. We were given coffee-table books for these cities, a yearbook of the Wiesbaden Air Force Hospital, a crystal Christmas tree ornament, and a porcelain bell compliments of German Chancellor Schmidt. We received flowers by the truckload. On the day of our departure, about eight of us loaded up shopping carts and rolled through the hospital wards giving the still-beautiful flowers to real patients. But when it comes to gifts, what I remember most of all is the “klepto table.”

Our ward was L-shaped, with the long side running along the center front of the hospital and the shorter side heading off to who knew where. (Well, I knew where, actually, and so did several of the others–it led to a small men’s restroom room and lounge in which several of us shared some contraband beers on our second day, smuggled in by a kind soul who shall remain nameless but who earned our eternal gratitude.) At the angle of the L was a large open area where a long, wide table had been set up before our arrival. And on that table were stacked many of the gifts, along with the myriad floral arrangements, that had been sent to us from people all over the world.

Two items on the table stood out: an amazing number of T-shirts (once back home, it was years before I had to buy another one) with mostly patriotic designs, and an enormous Hershey’s chocolate bar. This slab of chocolate was probably close to four feet in length and an inch or two thick. Someone had tossed a wicked-looking knife on the table next to it so that we could hack off whatever amount we wanted. We ate so much chocolate that it is a wonder we did not all get off the plane at Newburgh resembling a bunch of ambulatory pimples.
It soon became second nature, whenever passing the gift table, to look it over for the latest arrivals, take one each of whatever there was, and then hew off a chunk of chocolate before heading off. It amuses me now to recall how quickly we got used to the table and how accustomed we became to getting unsolicited gifts. (Several months after we returned, seven of us were guests of Radio City Music Hall in New York City at opening night of a special production with a patriotic theme. We were staying in the exclusive Towers section of the Sheraton, and I had already entered an elevator when, just as the doors started to close, one of my Tehran colleagues jumped in. As we began the ride up, he looked at me and said, “Nice tie. Did you have to pay for it?”) By the time we left Wiesbaden, I felt like a latent kleptomaniac and fervently hoped this instinct would not manifest itself the next time I was in Sears.

A German orderly at the hospital was assigned to us, and he was always there whenever we needed anything. Herr Gottfried Pfeiffer had been at the hospital since at least World War II days, when the hospital served the German Army, and we all became indebted to him for his many kindnesses. Herr Pfeiffer even serenaded us on his accordion at the lobster feast, beaming with pride as he played.

Two years later, almost to the day, I was in Wiesbaden as a tourist. I made it a point to go to the hospital to look up old friends. Many of those who had waited for 444 days to care for us were gone; I saw no one I recognized as I walked up the main staircase. There were no yellow ribbons on the walls and no crayon drawings by school children. I walked past the room Don Cook and I had shared and into the central part of the ward. There was no klepto table, no wall of flowers. And then Herr Pfeiffer came around the corner. He recognized me immediately, and we greeted each other with joy. He then took my arm and led me to a wood plaque on the wall. This lovely tribute informed all readers that they were standing in “Freedom Hall” and encased a group photo of the 52 of us, taken minutes before we left the hospital for Rhein Main Air Base and the flight home. If there had been a “before” photo to go with the “after” photo, the viewer would have no trouble in noticing the difference. And much of that difference was due to the wonderful people at the hospital who cared so much for and about us.

VIP Visitors
We had two special visitors at the hospital–former President Carter and former Secretary of State Vance. Their receptions could not have been more different. We all gathered in our ward’s lounge area to meet Mr. Carter, who arrived with former Vice-President Mondale, Secretaries Edmund Muskie of State and G. William Miller of Treasury, and several key members of the White House staff. None of my colleagues with whom I talked beforehand had much interest, if any, in seeing Mr. Carter. In fact, the atmosphere in the room as we were waiting for him to arrive was so chilly that Tom Schaefer felt obliged to remind everyone that Mr. Carter had been our President and Commander in Chief, and, as such, was due respect, regardless of our personal feelings. When he entered, the former President appeared to me to be ill at ease, uncertain of his reception.

Mr. Carter was introduced to us one by one, giving us each a hug. Few embraces were returned with any enthusiasm. He spoke to us for about 10 minutes, relating some background on why he had made the decision to admit the Shah and what had been done since to obtain our release. He then asked if there were any questions.

There were several soft questions posed out of politeness, and then a colleague stepped forward. He stated that he did not have a question but wanted to remind the former President that the Embassy had provided plenty of advance warning of what would happen if the Shah were admitted to the United States. Mr. Carter looked down at the floor for a moment, then raised his head, smiled, and said he wanted his picture taken with each of us. End of meeting. (I still have the photo stashed away somewhere; the former President looks awkward, and I look like an unsmiling cadaver.)

I do not deny that President Carter’s handling of the crisis after the Iranians took over the Embassy was the primary reason we all returned alive and together from Iran. Although hindsight shows that some mistakes were made, Mr. Carter’s efforts were ultimately successful. But I believe he has to bear the responsibility for creating the circumstances that brought about the crisis in the first place. The Embassy, in my view, probably would have been left alone had the Shah gone directly to the United States from Tehran in January 1979; it had been a mistake to allow him into the United States after he had roamed the world for 10 months.
Our session with Mr. Vance was the opposite. He had opposed the rescue attempt and had resigned his office in protest, but only after the attempt had taken place, so as not to jeopardize the security of the operation or undermine the President’s authority as Commander in Chief to conduct it. We received him with admiration and respect. He related honestly and forthrightly how and why various decisions were made, and what was done after the Embassy was taken.
Among the 52 of us, opinions were definitely mixed as to whether it had been wise to try a military rescue operation, but that diversity did not lessen the esteem we felt for Mr. Vance. He answered a great many questions with frankness. When he had finished, we gave him a standing ovation. I doubt that any of us left his presence without feeling that we had been well served by an American of great dignity and honor.

The Prime Minister’s Mug
On the flight home, we stopped to refuel in Shannon, Ireland, and were turned loose in the terminal for about an hour. Having an Irish name, I was selected, along with one other, to receive on behalf of the group a gift of one bottle of Irish Mist from the company that makes it. There was a nice little ceremony, after which I ended up talking to one of the company managers. We were soon joined by a friendly guy, who, when I mentioned in passing that I occasionally enjoyed a Guinness stout, suggested we repair to the bar for a glass or two.
The Irish Mist representative, this other chap, and I spent 30 minutes or so at the bar, where we each had several glasses of Guinness. Midway through a glass, this nice man asked to see the Waterford crystal Christmas bell, which had also been given to us at Shannon. While he was appreciating it, I mentioned to him that I had been given a Waterford beer mug as a gift before I had left Washington a lifetime ago, and I lamented its loss to the Iranians. A minute later, when the Irish Mist representative was talking, I almost did not notice when the other gent turned to a couple of big fellows who seemed to be just hanging around in background and whispered something.

A few minutes later, the hangers-on returned and handed him a box. He in turn handed it to me–it held a lovely Galway crystal beer mug. It is not Waterford, the man stated, but he hoped that I would enjoy it and think of Shannon and true Irish hospitality whenever I drank from it. And I do. Because that is how Irish Prime Minister Charles Haughey came to present me with a Galway beer mug over a few glasses of Guinness stout at the Shannon Airport bar.

West Point
The reception in America is still difficult for me to describe. It could not have been any warmer or more memorable. I was–and remain so today–immensely grateful for the homecoming our fellow Americans showered on us. We landed at Stewart Airport near Newburgh, New York, and, after having cheerful and tearful reunions with our families, we boarded buses for the ride to West Point, where we were to have a sheltered two days with our families before going to Washington for our official welcome home. It took more than two hours to cover the 18 miles from the airport to West Point; the way was lined with well-wishers who carried all types of signs expressing their happiness to see us back and their feelings toward the Iranians who had held us captive.

One of the more common signs we saw used different cartoon characters or caricatures of famous people, all of whom were depicted condemning Iranians in general or Khomeini in particular. One frequent expression of disapproval was the blatant presentation of a hand with the middle digit extended, in the universal symbol which decidedly does not convey a “We’re number one” meaning. We loved each and every one of those posters.

Around every turn, there were still more people waiting, with more signs and posters. There were masses of American flags and yellow ribbons everywhere. From the buses, we all waved until our arms grew tired, and then we waved some more. All of us were deeply touched by this parade.

The US Army and the entire staff at West Point were as caring, giving, and gracious as the Air Force personnel had been at the hospital in Wiesbaden. I was always amazed at the number of people in both institutions who would thank us for coming to be with them. But we were the ones who were really grateful, and we were extremely proud to have met all those who were involved in some way with our care.

About an hour before dinner that first night at West Point’s historic Thayer Hotel, I was making the rounds of the hotel lobby and meeting room, looking at more pictures and letters sent by area grade-school children, surrounded as always by yards of yellow ribbon. Like those in the hospital at Wiesbaden, these missives all expressed happiness at our return. I wish I had had the foresight to have collected these on our departure and ensured that they ended up somewhere where the public could see them. To me, these works of hundreds of young Americans were priceless.

If the West Point faculty and staff were wonderful to us, they almost paled in comparison to the welcome we received from the Corps of Cadets. During the second day, we and our families were invited by the Corps to dinner that night in the cadet dining hall. Although I found out later that many cadets expected a low turnout (anticipating that we would want to spend time alone with the families), almost all of us did accept. And of all the heartwarming and exciting events we experienced, this dinner with the Corps ranks at the top. As our buses neared the front of the dining hall we could a distant roar, almost like thunder, intruding into the quiet of the evening. The closer we got, the louder the roar. By the time we stepped out of the buses, it had become deafening.

The din, coming from inside the dining hall, was our greeting from the Corps. Walking into the building we witnessed the most extraordinary spectacle, as cadets of all ranks and classes were cheering and yelling at the top of their lungs, many standing on their chairs while creating this mind-numbing noise. This welcome home was the most touching of all to me, and it was all I could do to hold back the tears. I do remember being seated at a large table with perhaps 10 cadets, including several of the first women to enter the Academy, and being so pleased to be with these young Americans and future leaders. I do not think I have ever met a more impressive, motivated, and intelligent group of people. Today, I cannot adequately relate the pride I felt in being an American while in the company of these outstanding men and women.

The White House
On the morning of our third day, we retraced our route back to Stewart and boarded planes for the flight to Andrews Air Force Base, where we were greeted by more family and by close friends and colleagues. We were then driven in another bus caravan past thousands of people through the Maryland suburbs and the streets of Washington, DC, to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. We were separated from our families and escorted to the Blue Room, where we were introduced to President and Mrs. Reagan and to Vice-President Bush. President Reagan welcomed us home in a short speech and gave each of us a silk American flag in a personalized rosewood presentation box.

I embarrassed myself somewhat in this simple ceremony. A presidential aide would call a name, and that person would walk up to the President and Mrs. Reagan, shake hands, and receive his flag. I was busy chatting with two colleagues as the others were called, however, so I did not quite follow everything. When my name was called I went up to the President, shook his hand, shook Vice-President Bush’s hand, and walked directly back to where I had been standing. Only then did I notice that I was receiving a strange look from Mrs. Reagan, as well as a few pointed comments from my friends.

What I had not noticed before was that each person, after shaking hands with the men, had received a kiss and a hug from Mrs. Reagan. I was chagrined when I realized I had walked right by the First Lady. So, after the last name was called, I went quickly up to her and, apologizing profusely, asked if it was too late for me to get a kiss. The First Lady laughed and gave me a warm hug and a kiss on the cheek. Holding my hands in hers, she smiled and welcomed me home. We then followed the President out through the diplomatic reception entrance onto the south lawn.

Keeping Promises
As we sat in an unseasonably warm January sun, I tried to assimilate mentally all that had happened to us in this short period of time. It was almost incomprehensible. We were all heartened and cheered, though, by President Reagan’s words, especially when he promised “swift retribution” against terrorists who might try to repeat such acts against Americans. When I heard these words, my mind flashed back to Evin Prison and the change in our captors’ attitudes after the President-elect referred to them as barbarians, and the fear these Iranians had come to have of the Reagan administration. Good, I thought. What Mr. Reagan could only imply as President-elect, he could now state openly and authoritatively as administration policy.

But if I had to finger one single disappointment from that time, it is that President Reagan did not live up to his own words. The next horrific terrorist act against the United States came in April 1983, when 63 people, 17 of them American citizens, lost their lives in a car bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut. The US Government soon learned who perpetrated the act and where their headquarters was situated in Lebanon’s Ba’aka Valley. But, because of Defense Secretary Weinberger’s concern for possible civilian casualties, there was no US retaliation, no swift retribution. Escaping without penalty for its awful deed, the same faction would, in October of the same year, kill nearly 250 US Marines in Lebanon with another car bomb. The next spring they would again bomb the US Embassy annex in East Beirut, with the loss of more lives.

When there was still no retaliation, the terrorists began attacks on Americans in Beirut, killing several and kidnapping others, including Bill Buckley, a man I respected greatly. The kidnapped victims were held in horrid conditions for as long as five years before their ordeals finally ended. Whenever I recall President Reagan’s speech on that beautiful afternoon, I wonder whether there would have been any further attacks against Americans in Lebanon had we indeed meted out swift retribution for the first bombing of our Beirut Embassy. The failure to do so, in my view, only served to prompt more attacks and more loss of American life–and to institutionalize hostage-taking for the better part of a decade.

But all this was in the future on that wonderful January day. After the ceremony, we went back inside for a reception and reunion in the East Room, where the atmosphere was like New Year’s Day and the Fourth of July rolled into one. In the midst of this, Anita Schaefer, Tom’s wife, pulled me aside and said there were some special people she wanted me to meet. As we walked down the wide corridor leading from the East Room into the mansion, Anita told me that she was going to introduce me to the families of the eight servicemen killed during Desert One. I almost stopped dead in my tracks, overtaken by a complete evaporation of coherent thought. What, I asked myself, do you say–what can you say–to total strangers whose husbands and fathers died trying to save your life and return you to freedom? How can you tell them you understand and share their sorrow? How can you tell them you are more grateful that you could ever possibly express? And how can you ever thank them enough for what their men tried to do for you?
While all this was running through my mind, Anita had been moving us down the hall and into another room, and suddenly I was in the middle of this group. It was the most moving and emotional experience of my life. The wives and children of these heroic men were elated with our release and so very happy that we were all safely reunited with our families. Their smiles were as big as those worn by our own family members, if not more so. If they had any regret or sorrow, there was absolutely no sign of it. They missed their men, I am sure, but on that day they were proud that their husbands and fathers had participated in such a noble cause, even though at terrible cost. I was immensely thankful to Anita for making it possible for me to have spent this brief time with those magnificent women and children.

The day of celebration ended, and we soon went our separate ways, back to our careers and families and to a normal life. We went from being “hostages” to “former hostages,” until, with the passage of years, we were not even that. That much has changed over the years is clear to me through at least one marker. For many years, when I spoke to groups about my experience, I was often speaking to people who were teenagers or young adults during the time of the hostage crisis. They had a clear memory of the events and had, in many instances, participated in letter-writing campaigns or in school projects, or simply followed national and international affairs, often for the first time.

As an audience, these folks were greatly interested in all aspects of the event. They were seeking to learn and understand more about something that had perhaps influenced their lives. But by the 1990s, there were few people in the audiences who were much over five or six years old when Iran and the United States were involved in this struggle of national wills. Now, when I speak to them of the Iranian crisis, they look at it as a historical, academic event remote from, or even unrelated to, their own lives.

And, interestingly enough, so do I.

All opinions expressed in this article are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the CIA or any other US Government entity.

William J. Daugherty, Ph.D., served in the Directorate of Operations. He is now a faculty member at a university in the southern United States. In 1997 the Editorial Board of Studies in Intelligence chose him to receive the annual Sherman Kent Award for the most significant contribution to the literature of intelligence submitted for publication in Studies.

---

 

 The 1979 Hostage Crisis: Down and Out in Tehran

Foreign Service Political Officer Michael Metrinko spent most of his 14 months as a hostage in solitary confinement. Here is his story.

BY MICHAEL METRINKO

What happened on November 4, 1979?

I generally got into the embassy late because I would go out every night. I would not get home until midnight or 1 a.m. I was one of the few people who was going out, but I was also seeing a whole wide range of people who were useful to the embassy, for reporting and to get things done.

On Nov. 3, I had been contacted by two of Ayatollah Taleghani’s sons, saying they wanted to meet me the next morning at the embassy. I told them that I wouldn’t be able to get there until around 11 a.m. or so. They were insistent it had to be earlier, because they were leaving to see Yasser Arafat and they wanted to talk to me before they went. This was logical, knowing these two people, so I agreed to be there early.

I was in my office waiting for my friends to call. I noticed that there was a tremendous amount of activity around the embassy. The noise level had just picked up considerably, and when we looked out we could see lots of heads. Suddenly the heads were coming over the walls. And that was that. When I got to the main floor, people were at the doors. Then it was a matter of battening down the hatches.

I was part of the group in the ambassador’s office—a large group with some discipline, not a tremendous amount. The chargé, his deputy and the regional security officer were gone, so there was some confusion over who was in charge. There was more noise outside. The phone lines were still working. We were on the phone with Chargé Bruce Laingen, who was trying to give orders from the Foreign Minister’s office, saying Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had ordered that the protest be broken up immediately and that there were people on the way to help us, just to hang tight.

I dialed the number of my revolutionary friend who had asked me to be at the meeting, and got his security guard, whom I also knew quite well. I told him I just wanted to speak to Mehdi; he was silent for a moment, and then said, “Michael, Mehdi won’t come to the telephone.”

“You know what’s happening here at the embassy, where I’ve been waiting for Mehdi to come?” I asked.

“Yes, we know,” he said. I realized then that they had set me up.

So I just said, “Okay, I guess this is goodbye.” And he said, “Michael, I’m really sorry.” And that was that.

And That Was That

Michael Metrinko, a Peace Corps Volunteer, at the door to his house in Songhor in 1971.

Then one of our regional security officers went outside, despite recommendations that he not do so—and shortly thereafter wanted us to open the doors and let them in because they said they were going to kill him if we didn’t. He had gone out thinking he could talk to the mob, using mid-American English and with no sense at all of Iran, Iranians or anything that was happening. He was going to go out there and say, “I am the American diplomat. You are breaking the Geneva Convention…”

“Oh, shit!” was our group’s collective reaction.

Still, the general feeling was that we’d be taken, but that the situation would be managed because the government was going to come back in and break this up. And in fact, the captors, the “students” that had arranged all this, also believed it was going to be a one-day event. They told us that at the time, some of the more pleasant ones. “Don’t worry,” they said. “You’ll be in your own home by midnight tonight.”

Even in later years, as they talked about it, giving interviews about it, they still said they had planned that this was going to be a quickie, just to show the world that they could do it. Instead, so much solidarity cropped up for them—and Ayatollah Rouholla Khomeini suddenly supported them—that they stayed, and that was that.

We were taken to the ambassador’s residence first, held for a while there, kept tied up. Well, I got singled out fairly quickly. I did not tell anyone in the group, and they had no reason to know, at least initially, that I could speak Persian. I had learned my lesson in Tabriz. You do not tell captors your entire life story and what languages you speak as soon as you meet them. In fact, you hope you never have to tell them.

The author in Kurdish costume, visiting Kurdish friends in Mahabad in 1972.

By the second day, I was taken over to the cafeteria area, where they had mattresses spread out on the floor. We were placed on the mattresses, which we were sort of forced to sit and sleep on. At one point a new group walked in, went up to somebody and started speaking to him in Persian.

They were going from bed to bed. One of my embassy colleagues blurted out, “I don’t speak Farsi. Ask Metrinko. He speaks Farsi really well.” And they came over and hauled me away, and I never saw an American again for many months. The fact that you’re a Foreign Service officer doesn’t stop you from being an idiot, necessarily. They purposely tried to separate the ones who spoke Persian and also the ones who were the heads of offices in the embassy. I went to solitary on Nov. 6 and came out sometime in May 1980 for the first time, briefly.

A Lot of Interrogation

For the first month or two there was a lot of interrogation. Who do you know? What did you do? Who did you talk to? I had to give them information about figures who were public revolutionary figures. They went on repeating and repeating and repeating the same questions. They weren’t very professional.

First, they ordered me to open up the safe in my office, and I did that. If someone’s pointing a gun at you and telling you to open up an office safe, it encourages you. Besides, the break-in time for one of these safes is approximately three minutes anyway, so I just saved them the trouble. By chance I had very little in my safe. They had my list of phone numbers from the office; but, luckily, the ones in the office were standard professional contacts. And the ones in the house they had not gotten.

(I found out much later that a friend of mine, hearing over the radio the news about what was happening at the embassy, had immediately rushed to my house, gone inside and removed every piece of paper to be found in my apartment. All the paper that was in the house, including telephone numbers of friends, things like that, was removed from my house and destroyed. And that probably saved a number of people’s lives. It certainly saved them a fair amount of discomfort.)

You do not tell captors your entire life story and what languages you speak as soon as you meet them.

My impression of my interrogators was that they were very idealistic, and not too bright in the sense of having had practical experience—just sort of know-it-all students, people who were sure that their point of view was the only point of view in the world, and that everything you may have done was wrong. But by this point I was used to that attitude. I had already gone through a year and a half of listening to similar people.

They were not trying to indoctrinate me. They knew I was a lost cause. They were trying to extract information, especially about revolutionary officials who they thought might have been collaborating with us in the embassy. So I think I must have mentioned the name of every revolutionary official I could think of. “Oh, yes, he was educated in the United States. Ha, ha.” I was throwing them as many bones from their own ranks as I possibly could.

Metrinko’s return to his hometown, Olyphant, Pa., in January 1981 received national TV coverage.

Survival Techniques

I ended up spending quite a bit of time in a small, semi-closet area in the basement of the embassy. I got by by doing a tremendous amount of physical exercise. When I say that, I mean a really tremendous amount of physical exercise. I was doing many hundreds of situps a day. I’d run in place for two or three hours. And I would do this all day long every day because I had to get tired enough to fall asleep. Otherwise you don’t sleep.

Food was no problem. They always fed us, even when it was only bread and tea. I never saw anybody else all that time. I would read, exercise, read for an hour, stand up, run in place for an hour.

I never blamed the U.S. government. The U.S. government was us. I could blame myself for lack of prescience. But, you know, a revolution is an act of nature. In fact, it would be the “perfect storm.” A revolution is natural; it occurs in politics—not all the time, but as a cataclysmic event which, when you’re involved in it, you cannot deflect. You can lay back and enjoy it; you can go with it, hope to survive it; but you can’t stop it, and you can’t sit back and say, “Gee, if only I had done this” or “Why doesn’t my government do that?”

I knew my government. And I also knew all the various conflicting trends of thought in Washington about how to deal with the revolution that we were going through. I remembered very, very clearly from junior officer training, we had been told that if we were taken hostage, the government would not deal with hostage takers. I was in that situation. I did not expect the government to do anything.

May 1980 was when the incident in Tabas occurred, when Americans were killed trying to rescue us in one of the most stupidly planned, botched-up military-political escapades of the season—it was unworkable, unwinnable and if they had succeeded, we would have been dead. It could not have gotten us out. Guards came into my cell one day and said, “Pack your things, you’re being moved.” I packed my things into a tiny bag. I think I had an extra shirt, an extra pair of underpants.

They came back to my room a while later, blindfolded me, put these heavy plastic restraints on my hands, led me out and put me in the back of a van, lying on the floor. There were other people lying there next to me. We were not allowed to talk. And we started to move. I was on the floor of the van, bouncing around for a couple of hours.

We got to a different place, and they led me out, blindfolded, from the van and into a building. Various doors slammed and shut and opened and closed. You’d hear voices. Eventually, they sat me down, took off my blindfold, took off my restraints. I looked around, and I was with two other people (Americans) in the room.

We were, as it turned out, in a former SAVAK (Iranian secret police) prison in the city of Qom. I had no idea who the others were at first, and it was the first time I had talked to an American since November. So it took a while to start speaking English, which I hadn’t spoken since November. We lived together for the next month or two.

Flags set up as a memorial to the Iran hostages in Hermitage, Pa. The photo was taken after the hostages returned.

A Real Prison

I’m not sure how long I stayed in Qom. I knew it was Qom. They didn’t want to tell us where we were, but I figured it out because I could hear a train in the distance the first evening, and I knew that Qom was on a railroad track. And when I tasted the water, I knew that we weren’t in Tehran any more. Water in Iran has very distinct tastes depending on the city you’re in. The water of Qom is infamous because it tastes like salt water. It’s very brackish. Tea and coffee made there are almost undrinkable. When I had some water, I knew immediately that we had to be in Qom or somewhere near there.

We were then taken away from Qom—this was the time the hostages were spread out all across the country—and brought back to Tehran to what was called the Ghasr Prison, also known as Komiteh Prison, that had been built by Germans in the reign of Shah Reza.

It was the first time I was in a real prison, with cells and little apertures and no windows. You could hear screaming and things like that at night where people were being tortured, because there were lots of Iranians in prison with us at the same time. I had a cellmate there.

Then I was taken to Evin Prison, and went back into solitary. It was winter. Evin is in the northern part of the city of Tehran. My cell was excruciatingly cold. It was below freezing, especially at night. We had no heat. This was already after the Iran-Iraq War had started. But one day I was really, really cold. I had been told that the guards also had no heat, that they didn’t have any way to stay warm either, and there was nothing that anybody could do about this. Conditions were harsh all over the country.

Fine, I could accept that, except one day when I was going out to the bathroom—they were leading me out blindfolded—I brushed up against a stove that was on, a heater. I immediately knew it was a heater, and I just started to go on and on about what bastards they were.

They threw me back in my cell, and a little while later a of the leaders of the group came in—they were called in from the outside—and they said the guards were refusing to deal with me anymore because of my attitude, and they took me back down to Komiteh Prison at night in a car, blindfolded, and put me in a cell, just on a concrete floor with nothing else, for about two weeks. I was on bread and water for about two weeks. It was quite interesting. I may have been the first prisoner evicted from Evin because of bad behavior! Then they brought me back later to Evin.

Large crowds lined the streets to honor the former hostages as they made their way to the White House in January 1981.

Beginning of the End

It ended when the United States, I guess, finally got its act together. We had an election in the United States, which allowed the Iranians an out. Do I believe that our release was delayed on purpose, so that the election would take place? Yes, I do. Do I also believe that some Americans conspired in this? Yes, I do.

I was removed from Evin, taken to a building that (I found out later) was the former guest house of the prime minister. I was there with Dave Roeder, the Air Force attaché who had been my cellmate off and on. Dave’s a good guy. We started getting visits—Algerian diplomats, for example, and others. They weren’t supposed to talk to us very much, other than to inquire about our health. The guards were becoming “friendlier,” as in, “Gee, hasn’t this been swell?” and “You’ll be going home very shortly.”

One of the guards even gave me a copy of Time magazine, and that’s when I discovered that Ronald Reagan had been elected president. I immediately assumed it was Soviet disinformation; I did not believe it.

And then it was almost over. When we were being put on the bus, I was led back to my seat (blindfolded), and I was trying very hard to be correct because it was an important time. The bus was filling up. Two of the Americans behind me started to whisper to each other.

One of them said, “Where do you think they’re taking us? Are we really going?” Something like that.

When the other started to reply, one of the guards yelled out, “American, shut up!” Then, in Persian, he made an insulting reference to Americans.

So, in Persian, I simply replied in a loud voice, “Shut up yourself, you son of a Persian prostitute!”

They pulled me off the bus, and the bus left. They beat me up a little bit, and that was fine, except then they realized that they still had me, and I realized the bus had gone, too.

It had been stupid of me. I had just been pushed. I reacted.

Eventually they sent me out to the airport in a Mercedes-Benz, which is actually the only way to leave Iran.

Michael Metrinko was a Foreign Service political officer in Iran when the U.S. embassy was overrun on Nov. 4, 1979, by some 3,000 radical Iranian students. Before joining the Foreign Service in 1974, he had been a Peace Corps Volunteer for five years, two in Turkey and three in Iran. His first State Department assignment was back to Turkey, followed by six months on temporary duty. After only a few months in the Tehran visa unit, he was assigned as principal officer to Tabriz, where his Turkish and Persian fluency, and the large network of friends from his Peace Corps days, gave him access to a wide spectrum of Iranian society. He served in Tabriz as the revolution began to build up, returning to Tehran in February 1979, after his consulate in Tabriz had been overrun by revolutionary militia and he had been briefly jailed. In 1981 he received two Medals of Valor for his time in Iran, the first for saving American lives in Tabriz and the second for his 14 months in captivity.

Embassy Tehran had been taken over earlier in 1979, but the problem was resolved quickly and most believed Nov. 4, 1979, would be similar. Iranians were angry over President Jimmy Carter’s decision to allow the shah of Iran, who had been forced out of the country earlier amidst widespread discontent over his reign, into the United States for medical treatment. What was expected to be a short demonstration turned into a 444-day hostage crisis.

Now retired, Michael Metrinko’s lifelong interest in the Islamic world led to post-9/11 assignments in Yemen, Iraq and more than five years in Afghanistan, places he continues to follow from his home in central Pennsylvania. He remains in touch with a number of old and new Iranian friends. As the third generation of his family to live in Iran, he hopes that someone from his younger generation of relatives will also have that opportunity someday.

Metrinko’s account of his experience has been adapted from the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training’s “Moments in U.S. Diplomatic History,” excerpted from Metrinko’s oral history with permission from ADST and Michael Metrinko. The oral history was recorded in interviews with Charles Stuart Kennedy beginning in August 1999.

All photos are courtesy of Michael Metrinko.

This article originally located at:
https://afsa.org/1979-hostage-crisis-down-and-out-tehran

---

Moments in U.S. Diplomatic History

444 Days: Memoirs of an Iranian Hostage

More Moments in U.S. Diplomatic History

Share on facebookShare on twitterShare on emailShare on pinterest_shareMore Sharing Services?More than thirty years later, the Iranian Hostage crisis still ranks as one of the most traumatic diplomatic events in U.S. history. Dissatisfied with the corrupt and ineffective regime of Reza Shah Pahlavi, many Iranian citizens began protesting the Iranian government in 1977. In 1979 after nearly two years of protests and strikes, the Shah was exiled from Iran and was succeeded by the radical Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as Supreme Leader of the newly established Islamic republic. The Shah sought asylum and medical care from his erstwhile allies, particularly the United States, which agreed to help. Enraged members of the Iranian Revolution insisted on his return so that they could prosecute and punish him for his actions. The 444-day-long crisis began on November 4th when some 3,000 militant Iranian students stormed the United States embassy in Tehran, taking nearly sixty diplomats hostage. Revolutionaries demanded that the U.S. return the Shah to Iran. After much internal debate, President Jimmy Carter decided not to do so, given the Shah’s medical condition and his many years as a stalwart American ally. Shows such as ABC’s “Nightline” with Ted Koppel had daily updates on the crisis and counted the days of “America Held Hostage.” Ultimately, the long grind of negotiations and bad publicity took its toll on the American psyche and the Carter presidency; he lost to Ronald Reagan and his campaign for “Morning in America” in the 1980 elections.In these excerpts from his oral history, John Limbert describes how the mob of Iranian Revolutionaries attacked the embassy, his “stupid” attempt to calm the crowd, his initial days of captivity, and a mock execution.  Part II on the End Game can be found here. You can also read the account by Chargé d’affaires Bruce Laingen, who had a much different experience as a captive at the Foreign Ministry.“All these people want to do is read a statement and leave ”LIMBERT: I had been, for about the week before, traveling outside of Tehran, so I wasn’t completely up to date on what was going on in the capital, but Sunday morning as I say was the beginning of our work week. [Chargé d’affaires] Bruce Laingen and Victor Tomseth, head of political section and number two, plus one of our security officers, went to the Foreign Ministry on an appointment that they had been seeking for a week before that, so it wasn’t specifically related to embassy security. In the morning, groups had been marching by the embassy, going to a demonstration scheduled at the university. One of the parade routes for demonstrations at the university went by the front gate of the embassy. About 10:30 in the morning one of the groups stopped in front of the embassy, and began shouting slogans. That wasn’t unusual but instead of continuing to march towards the university the demonstrators attacked the front gate.We had some local security in police uniforms. Whoever they were, if they were actually police, Iranian police or just neighborhood vigilantes dressed up in police uniforms, they melted away. They were not going to confront the crowd. They came into the compound, they breached the gates. The gates were nothing like today’s security arrangements, the barriers were nothing like you see today in embassies, with all the high-tech stuff and the razor wire and the bollards and all that sort of thing. It was essentially an ornamental fence. And they came into the compound. We shut down the doors of the chancery. We shut down the doors of the consulate building. The embassy is a series of buildings spread over about thirty acres in the middle of town. And figured that the best thing to do would be to shut them out physically, and keep them out until the host government could respond. As they had responded some nine months earlier, on February 14th, when a group had also attacked and the authorities did respond, and sent a force in to kick out the attackers. So we figured they would do something similar and in the meantime the best thing to do was to shut down and lock down the building.I was in the main chancery. We were on the phone with Washington. It was like two or three in the morning, Sunday morning in Washington. It’s an example I’ve always used. We got the Operations Center, they patched us through to either Hal Saunders, the assistant secretary for Near East, or one of the deputy assistant secretaries. I’ve used that example since when I noticed that recently some of our bureaus have appointed less than experienced people to be deputy assistant secretaries. I said, “Look, in a situation like that we needed somebody with judgment and experience on the other end of the line. I don’t care how damn brilliant they are or who they know. We need somebody good.” You can see of course by the results how effective that has been. But that’s parenthetical. We were on the phone with Washington. Ann Swift, who was our number two political officer, was the ranking Foreign Service person in the embassy at the time. She was on the phone with Washington. I got on the phone with the Iranian government. Mike Metrinko got on the phone with some of his contacts. First I called was the Foreign Ministry, then the prime minister’s office. The Foreign Ministry was surreal. First of all I called and the woman at the other end thought I was Metrinko. We were two of the Persian speakers there and before I could describe what was going on, she said, “Oh, Mr. Metrinko, it’s nice to talk to you. Those passports we sent over, are the visas ready yet?” And all I could say was, “Lady, one this isn’t Metrinko, two if you don’t do something about this situation you can kiss those visas of yours good-bye. You’re never going to see them.” I don’t know if they ever saw them or not. But that was the tenor of the time. “I want my visa and I can shout my anti-American slogan at the same time.”I called the prime minister’s office and they reassured us me that, “Oh, don’t worry, we’re going to send some help. All these people want to do is read a statement and leave.” I said, “That’s fine. Let ‘em read it quickly and get out of here before something happens.” I kept reminding them, “Listen, you are responsible. This is your responsibility. Our safety, the safety of this compound, is your responsibility. If there is bloodshed, if somebody gets hurt, you will be responsible.” That made no impact at all. They said that there’s a force on the way or some group on the way to get these people out, and it will be there at any time, very soon. After a short period of time it became clear that no force was on the way, there was none one coming to help. So I called back, I pressed them, I said, “I don’t see any evidence of this.” “Oh, no, no, don’t worry.” And I said, “Well, tell me what you are doing about this.” And they said, (this is about eleven o’clock in the morning) “Oh, well, for this afternoon we’ve scheduled a meeting to decide what to do about it.” I just hung up on this guy. I remember saying to Ann Swift, I said, “Ann, we’re on our own. Whatever happens is here.”Again, presumably, had there been a functioning government able to do something, Hal Saunders in Washington could have woken up somebody at a high enough level to call someone in the Iranian government to get these people out and remind them of the seriousness. But there was no one to talk to. There was no one to answer the phone at the other side. All you could get was a lot of hand wringing. The mob enters the embassyQ: Well what was happening while you were making the call? Were people pounding on the door?LIMBERT: First they were outside the main building and then they got into the main building. They broke a window, and they pulled out some bars. They found a vulnerable spot. I don’t know if they had cased the place or not but they found a vulnerable spot, pulled out some bars and got into the chancery basement. The marines tried to slow them down with teargas. Eventually we got everybody, including our Iranians employees, (there were probably more Iranian employees than American) up onto the second floor of the building, which is behind a steel door. We shut the steel door, and tried to delay. Eventually they got up the stairs, were outside the steel door. We weren’t quite sure what was going on over at the consulate building. There were people whose offices were outside of the chancery. We weren’t sure what happened to them. Our security officer earlier had gone out to try to defuse this. He eventually became a hostage or was taken prisoner. So there we were. They were outside the door, we were inside the door and we didn’t know what was going on. We were worried they might try to burn us out. As far as we knew there hadn’t been any bloodshed. We hadn’t seen anybody armed with anything but sticks at this point. As far as we were aware nobody had been hurt, from either side. No shots had been fired.We were in radio contact with the Chargé at the Foreign Ministry and we told him, “See what you can do there. You’re better off there, if you can get some help for us. Don’t come back here.” And ever since that time, ever since that day, for the rest of my Foreign Service career I have been a great pain in the neck to my employees about radio communication, because I think it was a lifesaver for our people at the Foreign Ministry that day.Anyway, so they were at the door. It was a stalemate. We had reached a stalemate but we were on our own. “I did probably one of the most stupid things I’ve ever done in my Foreign Service career” The Americans and the Iranians in the consulate were able to get out. As I mentioned, we weren’t doing visa services that day and there was a direct door between the consulate and the alley, the small street, behind the compound and the students hadn’t attacked from there. So a group of them slipped out. When they got out on the street of course the question is what do they do now? And I think half went right, half went left. Those that went right eventually made their way to safety and were hidden by the Canadians. There were six of them, including two spouses who were working as consular assistants. And the others were captured .Q: So there you are behind the locked door. LIMBERT: There behind the locked door, and people are destroying documents. We were in communication by telephone with Washington. We were in communication by radio with the Chargé at the Foreign Ministry. But there we are. It’s a standoff. What do you do?Well, I did probably one of the most stupid things I’ve ever done in my Foreign Service career. I volunteered to go out and talk to these guys. I’m a Persian speaker, so perhaps I can go out and see if we can defuse this someway, or delay it, defuse it, divert it. We did not see these guys being armed or anybody getting hurt. So that’s what I did. I went out, they opened the door, I went out the door and started talking to these guys. And at first they were shocked, because they thought I was an Iranian. I kept reassuring them, “No, no, no, I’m not an Iranian, I’m an American employee of the embassy, you should get out of here.” I took my most professorial tone with them and was as overbearing as I could be and saying, “You are where you should not be. You have no business here. You should get out as soon as you can. You are causing trouble. Who do you think you are?” So forth and so on. And they weren’t having any of it. I’ll tell you a little story about this. About 1991 or ’92 there was a made-for-TV movie about the hostage taking. It wasn’t a great bit of moviemaking but it was not bad. And part of the movie shows this particular incident, where the actor playing me goes out to talk to these guys and gets taken. I was showing this at one point to an audience, using this as an example and one of the people in the audience, perhaps he didn’t realize this character was supposed to be me and in this stage whisper said, “God, what an idiot!” although he didn’t use the word “idiot.” He used a more anatomical descriptor. True, I must admit he had a point. I’ve always called this the low point of my Foreign Service career and my least successful negotiation.So I spent a few minutes palavering with these guys, who were high and nervous and they didn’t know what was going to go on. They didn’t know if the Marines were going to come out shooting or not, so they didn’t know what to expect. But I did see somebody with a pistol, at that point, which wasn’t very reassuring. But anyway, I became a captive early on. And then they announced if we didn’t open the door in five minutes they were going to shoot me and the security officer, whom they also had. Well, Ann Swift and Bruce Laingen, God love ‘em both, they eventually agreed. They didn’t call the bluff and they did open the door and then most of the staff was taken there. There were some people who locked themselves in the vault and they managed to hold out for another couple of hours.Under normal circumstances there would have been plenty of time for the host country, for the Iranian authorities, to send some help, but they did not. And to this day, I blame those who had the power to react and didn’t take the responsibility to do so….I was very glad to be alive. I didn’t know whether we were going to survive this or not. We didn’t know what was going to happen. We were facing a mob. So after this immediate capture was over, the fact that I was still alive, that was a pretty good thing, given the alternative.Second was that, “This can’t go on very long. Somebody is going to sort this out. Whoever is in charge cannot permit something like this to stand, and in a day, two days, three days, it’ll be sorted out and either these guys will leave or we’ll be put on a plane. The third was a little different, when we discovered that the ostensible reason they were holding us was the return of the Shah, my first thought was, that’s absurd. Then after a while I thought, “Well, what’s the Shah ever done for me? Sounds okay to me, if they want us to return the Shah, if they want us to throw in Henry Kissinger in the bargain we can do that, too. It’s all right. Sounds like a reasonable trade.”…Well, we’re tied up, blindfolded and led out the front door and there are very famous pictures of that incident, with us being led down the front stairs. I remember it was a cold and rainy day, and it was good to get out of the gas and smoke inside. I felt good getting out in the fresh air and being alive. Then we were taken across the embassy grounds to I think it was either the ambassador’s or the DCM’s house and put in rooms there… .“They dragged us out and tied us to chairs in the living room and blindfolded us” Once we got there we started talking with the students. There was no plan. As far as we could tell, these guys did not know what they were going to do next. Now they had done this, the question was kind of “Now what?” There was no particular plan. The plan was just to take the embassy and improvise from there. So one of the things they tell you in a situation like this, I remembered this from a half-day course I had taken before, was to establish some common ground with these people. They’re less likely to kill you if they see you as an individual. So I started talking, just talked with them I might with my own students. Q: So how did things develop then, the first day or two? LIMBERT: They deteriorated seriously. Basically we were waiting for somebody to come around and get us out of there and nobody ever came. The first day or two we were able to listen to news and the students were just dying to know how they were being portrayed in the international news. We listened to Tehran news, we listened to BBC Persian. But things took a bad turn the next day. I spent the night in the cook’s room of the DCM’s house and the next morning, they came in about nine or ten o’clock in the morning and dragged us out and tied us to chairs in the living room and blindfolded. Sitting there in this room blindfolded, tied up to chairs and hearing the screaming crowds outside. That was about as bad as it ever got for me. I didn’t know what was going to happen but I figured if those people outside got in either they were going to shoot us right then or if those mobs got into the embassy we were going to be dead….They were doing this for some reason but Rule One of being prisoner is you don’t expect any logic or reason for what happens. You cast aside logic and reason at that point. That’s the way you survive. You do whatever you can do to keep other people calm, but you couldn’t do much, beyond Day One, because we couldn’t communicate with each other. I think, for the most part, from what I saw and heard, most people took this very professionally….We’re sitting there. The radio is on. I’m thinking the worst possible thoughts. It’s very bizarre, I’ll never forget this, they’re playing the Funeral Music for Queen Mary by Henry Purcell. Remember A Clockwork Orange?It’s the music from A Clockwork Orange. It’s beautiful, absolutely gorgeous music. But not what I really wanted to hear. Not very upbeat. And this went on. We were in this state for a couple of hours until around noontime they fed us, brought in some food. I forget what it was. I took that as a good sign. I said, “Well, if they were going to shoot us they probably wouldn’t feed us.” And that went on through most of the day. But it’s amazing what you can get used to. I think eventually the put us in separate bedrooms. I remember one of the colleagues needed some medicine and I took the role of designated nagger and I would just nag at them to get him his medicine, because they couldn’t understand his English. But again there was a sense of not knowing what was coming next. Once again, I think we were all grasping at that straw that, “Well, this doesn’t happen and this can’t go on and somebody’s going to straighten it out.” So that was my thought through the next few days. I remember hearing the news about the resigning of the Provisional Government. Not good news. And so we spent the next few days in various rooms of either the DCM’s or the ambassador’s residence, sleeping on the floor, tied up.The one thing I do remember from that time was they gave me a Time magazine to read and there was an article in there about admitting the Shah to the U.S. and in this article they quoted President Carter as saying he was opposed to it but agreed anyway. And when he agreed, though, he said, “What are you going to advise me to do when our embassy is overrun and our people are taken hostage?” You could imagine what that made me feel like . The blindfolds they would take off during most of the day. They only used the blindfolds when they were going to move us somewhere. I don’t remember the exact day but it was a after few days, they came in the middle of the night and said, “Okay, get up, we’re going.” My first thought, “Oh, that’s good. Finally somebody has done something.” But I got hustled off with some others and got in the back of a car. We drove for a while. I ended up, with a group of others, in a villa up in the northern part of town. What had happened, I learned subsequently, there had been rumors of some rescue attempt and so they took some of us and scattered us around the city. So this was a villa that had obviously belonged to some wealthy Iranian who’d either been executed or had taken off, because his shirts were still hanging in the closet. And so I ended up in the bedroom, had a mattress on the floor. Our public affairs officer was there and one of our communicators was there. And the three of us just sat there for about ten days or two weeks. There were other people also in the house….They brought me some books in Persian. I would read something and I would use it to begin a conversation. I would say, “Could you explain this idea to me? Explain what this is about. What does the author mean here?” Or “Here’s a word I don’t understand.” And then we’d end up talking about that. That was about the extent of the interaction. “You live an hour at a time” There were some interrogations later on, half-hearted stuff. In terms of trying to convince me of something, they didn’t do much. I know that others got into more extended arguments. I wasn’t really interested in getting in political discussions with them. When they would try, I would say, “Listen, you don’t do a political discussion under these conditions. If you want a free discussion you need a free setting. If you want to talk about this you let us go and we’ll go sit in a cafe somewhere and we’ll talk about it. But not under these conditions.” Again, one of the things they taught in this three-hour course, whatever it was, is avoid the political discussions. They’re not trying to convince you. If they tried to convince you they wouldn’t have done what they did. And I’m not going to convince them.I can work on them psychologically and I did, to catch them out in little lies and things. One of the things I liked to do was to catch them out in a lie somewhere and I would say, “Oh, it’s really too bad that you’re lying because to do that means that your prayers and your fasts are invalid and that’s really too bad, isn’t it?” Just kind of get under their skin a little bit or I would say things like, “That coat you’re wearing, I recognize it. That belongs to one of us, doesn’t it. That’s stolen goods and what kind of a person steals or uses stolen goods? I’m sure if you had asked the owner he would have been happy to have you use it.” Or I’d say, “If you say prayers on a usurped area, or on somebody else’s property without their permission, those prayers are not valid. Too bad. People used to visit my house and before they would pray they would always ask permission.” Little psychological warfare. I don’t know if it made any impact or not. Some of these guys were simple enough that it would. Made me feel a little better, anyway….Wherever you were you could adjust to that. You got accustomed to it. You said, “Okay, I’ll make my nest here for the time being and see whatever happens.” And basically what you learn is that you live an hour at a time or a day at a time or a week at a time . I don’t remember when it was, but there must have been a point at which we figured this is more than we had bargained for. I remember, the attack happened on a Sunday, and I had an airline ticket on Friday to go to Saudi Arabia to visit my family. The first day I kept thinking, “Boy, am I going to have a story to tell!” And then as this got on I said, “I hope I get out in time so I don’t miss that flight.” Well, of course, as things went on, it dragged on and on. When the message really came home to me was after the first Christmas in 1979. I got a care package from my family and there were some books in it and the books were things like War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, Middlemarch, average length about 1100 pages. And I’m thinking, “Someone is trying to tell me something.”They had their routines, they had their shifts. I don’t know what their routines were or what their organization was but somebody out there was obviously running this thing, if only to manage the food and the other logistics. I do remember, this must have been after a month and a half or so, I was back in the embassy compound and they came over and they pulled me out, it was during the day, to an interrogation. I went over and they took me to my own office and there was a guy sitting there with a burn bag over his head, so I wouldn’t know him. And I’m thinking, “Now what’s wrong with this picture? I’m supposed to have the burn bag over my head, not him!” “They were publishing embassy documents” And it was funny, he asked me about the 1953 coup, the coup that overthrew Mossadegh, organized by Kermit Roosevelt and the CIA. He asked, “What was your role in that?” And I said, “Well, I was about ten years old at the time. I don’t think I had much of a role.”And he said, “What do you know about it?” I said, “Basically what I’ve read.” And he said, “What have you read?” I said, “Well I read this book by Professor Richard Cottam at the University of Pittsburgh.” And he said, “Oh, you mean the book Nationalism in Iran?” I was very surprised because very few people in Iran knew about that book and it was definitely not available there. It was written in English. I don’t know if it had been translated into Persian. Maybe there was a bootleg translation somewhere, but very few Iranians that I knew were familiar with it, although it was one of the standard books on the Mossadegh period. So obviously I was dealing with somebody who was a cut above the 19-year-olds that we saw most of the time.But in terms of the interrogation, I don’t know what they were after. They asked me, “What Iranians do you have contact with?” So I said, “Well, the guy at the dry cleaners, the baker, Ayatollah Montazeri, this minister, that minister” Basically I gave them everybody I could think of. I figured if I gave them three hundred names and let them sort out if there was anybody there. But I couldn’t see any rhyme or reason to what they were doing . Q: Did you feel that you were part of the Iranian power struggle? LIMBERT: The awakening came gradually, but I did get an inkling of it in a couple of ways. At one point, I think I mentioned when they questioned me the focus was not on what the U.S. was doing or the U.S. embassy was doing. They wanted to know, “What Iranians did you know?” And I knew three thousand Iranians so I started reciting my list of three thousand Iranians, until they realized that was a dead end.But the other piece was, sometime in late February, early March, the people in the next cell stole a transistor radio from the guards and smuggled it to me. So I was able to listen to Radio Tehran broadcasts. Until that time we were cut off from news, except what bits and pieces I could pick up. It was the first time I learned, for example, that the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan. I hadn’t know that had happened. Then the students were holding media sessions.They would hold a press conference, and they would call it “a press conference with revelations” and they would publish a series of embassy documents. They were going through embassy documents and there were a lot of them. And they were hunting for Iranians they didn’t like. Not royalists. They were after nationalists, secularists, liberals, people who had been part of their own coalition and selectively releasing documents about them. And they were holding press conferences and presumably they had enough allies in the system that they had access to radio and TV. And their targets, as I said, were not former royal officials or Americans, but people associated with the old National Front, people associated with the social democratic movement, people they called “the liberals.” I think they shared Ronald Reagan’s view of “the liberals.” And they would go through the embassy files, they would find a mention of one of these people, they would find a meeting with one of these people and use that fact to launch a campaign against their former coalition partners.In other words, I sometimes compare what was going on at that point to a chess game but it was more like a three-dimensional chess game. A three-dimensional chess game that became a contact sport…. “People came in at two in the morning and dragged us out, lined us up against a wall and pretended they were going to shoot us” We were in groups but we weren’t supposed to talk to each other, not that we had much to talk about. But we might be four in an area, six in an area but we were not supposed to talk to each other. Then sometime around January they put a group of us in this basement of one of the buildings, a large open room and they set up cubicles there. It was called the “Mushroom Inn.” Although, again, we weren’t supposed to talk to each other we could see each other and eventually I ended up playing chess with one of the other hostages. It was, for me, anyway, a source of reassurance that other people were there. Q: Were your keepers sort of keeping an eye on each other? LIMBERT: I think so. I think they had to worry about their own rogue elements. For example, as near as I could tell, this was pretty much a seat-of-the-pants operation but, for example, if they got near us most of the time they did not come armed because they didn’t want one of us trying to take their weapon away. Occasionally there would be words between one of us and one of them and generally they would move that guard around, try to keep him out of contact because we were in close quarters for a long time. Politically, one of the things that we tried to do and I tried to do was sow a few seeds of distrust, to drop hints, when I picked up something from some source like the radio or somewhere else, I might just drop a hint that I knew something that I wasn’t supposed to know, ‘cause I wanted them to think that I was getting it from one of their own people…. At one point people came in at two in the morning and dragged us out, lined us up against a wall and pretended they were going to shoot us. I guess that doesn’t fall into the same category. Q: Well, no, but I mean, what was behind that? LIMBERT: Never knew. We never figured it out. They came in and dragged us out of our places, lined us up, started chambering rounds and said, “Okay, go back.” Never figured it out. I’ve often asked myself what it was.One of the things I guess every prisoner has learned since Biblical times is that there is no reason or rationality to what happens to you. You are in the hands of an irrational system and the sooner you adapt to that the better. So you don’t ask questions like, “Why are they doing this or what’s the reasoning behind it?” They’re doing it because they can do it, I suppose…. Q: Did you ever feel the United States had let you down? LIMBERT: Not really. I don’t think I ever thought that. I think the Iranians would have liked us to think that but you could see how difficult this was going to be, when there’s no government to talk to, when power had been left to the mobs in the street. What are you going to do? What alternatives do they have? So I never felt that. And then there were occasionally, between the lines of letters or something we might see, hints of how much concern there was back here.Q: Were you able to communicate with the others? Were there sort of topics of conversation, without moving your lips, talking to your comrades?LIMBERT: Very difficult. We had notes, we had ways of passing notes back and forth. We had tap codes with each other but the subject matter, because our outside contacts were so limited, was “How are you? Who have you seen? What happened? Are you okay? Is somebody else okay? Where have you been?” This kind of internal thing. “Do you know anything?” For example I found out about our six colleagues who escaped with help from the Canadians [made famous in the movie Argo]. I was able to spread that around. People who knew about the rescue mission spread that around. People who knew that the Shah had died spread that around. That kind of thing… . We were moved out of Tehran after April. What happened was this. We knew things were coming to a crisis of some kind. You could read that almost in the tone of the demonstrations in front of the embassy and there was kind of a growing hysteria in these demonstrations….These were almost daily events. The tempo of them picked up in April 1980. I didn’t know it, but this was the period when relations were broken, officially and there was a sense of a growing crisis. And so you had a much more strident and shrill tone of the demonstrations. You could almost tell the difference between sort of the large-scale, religious-based demonstrations and the much more shrill and strident and smaller leftist demonstrations that were going on outside. The latter had an almost hysterical quality about them….The problem was, the functioning government, such as it was, had distanced itself from this event. They said, “Look, we don’t have anything to do with this. We’re as appalled by this event as you are.” The problem was, they had no power to do anything. So there was this facade or pretense of correct relations. For example, our three people at the Foreign Ministry were using a Foreign Ministry telex to communicate with the State Department.And it was useful, I guess, for us to maintain this fiction for a number of months, in the hope that the so-called government, whatever government there was, could take some action. And that was the whole basis of the aborted UN mission that went to Tehran in February-March of ’80. And at one point it looked like we were going to be turned over to “the government,” And that deal fell apart at the last moment…. Q: What about living conditions or food? LIMBERT: Again, one of the things they taught us in this training course was “Whatever it is, eat it. You will survive.” I hadn’t been in the Army but I’m told if you had been in the Army it would have been good training for the food. It wasn’t very good but it kept us alive. I think what happened was that the Chargé d’affaires’ cook, a Pakistani, stayed on for a while and he did some cooking for us. He did the best he could with whatever was available. Q: Did you get any feeling for looting of the embassy? Were people showing up with clothing or watches or what have you from embassy quarters? LIMBERT: As a matter of fact, they did. One day while we were still in this large communal area, some fellow walked in wearing our security officer’s jacket or overcoat. These kids didn’t have a lot of money, so this was a chance for them to get some nice clothes. So he was wearing this jacket and the security officer said, “Hey, that’s my jacket, that’s my jacket.” So when he came near me, I said, “It’s too bad, isn’t it?” He said, “Why?” “All your prayers are all your fasts are invalid, now, because you have taken stolen goods and you have taken them without the consent of the owner. And as I understand things, that means that everything else that you do is invalid.” Dig at them a little bit. But, yeah, they did do that. They took jewelry, they took watches. I’m sure that’s been redistributed.I did lose a few things. I had a very nice collection of Iranian music on tape, in those days it was reel to reel tape, that I had made over many years and I had taped things from the radio, from archives. Some of it was quite rare. And I remember at one point being in the basement of the embassy and I was close to the wall and I could hear some of my music being played. Those bastards, they stole my music! Q: What did they do after the abortive rescue attempt? LIMBERT: They came in, they told us, pack up, you’re moving. Of course we had been moved around a lot, usually from room to room or building to building, but now they said, “No, no, this is a long move. So prepare for that.” And they put us in vans and cars, around sundown, and scattered us around the country. Talk about things being stolen — Col. Holland said later that one of his worst experiences was being blindfolded, having his hands tied and being taken around the country in his own car. “The bastards stole my car and then used it to move me around the country!” But anyway, we were in a van. I ended up in Esfahan, which was about three hundred kilometers south of Tehran. “‘I know how you must feel as a prisoner. After all, I’m in the second grade’” Physically, [conditions] were probably a little bit better, in the sense we were in somebody’s private house that these guys had confiscated, but the difficulty there was the isolation. I had very little contact with anyone else. I was in solitary there the whole time. And the fact psychologically that the farther away we were from Tehran, there was absolutely no chance of our being released….There were a lot of books around. That was basically the activity, reading, and then they showed up with some music tapes at one point. They even let me watch a little bit of the 1980 Olympics. Q: And you were there, you say, from April until August. And then what happened? LIMBERT: They moved us all back to Tehran.Q: Did you get any feel that something was happening, anything? LIMBERT: No, that was the hard part. The only thing I found out, and this was shortly after we got to Esfahan, was about the rescue mission. I did learn about that. I stole a newspaper and there was a sketchy account of it. I knew about the rescue mission but that was about it. There wasn’t much else. They weren’t letting anything slip. Oh, and the other thing I found out, in July, was that the Shah had died….It did remove the pretext for us being there….I think the biggest change, after we got back in August happened once the Iran-Iraq War started in September. That was, I think that was a tremendous shock to the Iranians. Up until then I think they had been kind of playacting at revolution and now all of a sudden things got much more serious. A very bloody war and the Iranians took some serious losses at the beginning…. Q: Were you getting letters? LIMBERT: I was. It’s hard to know what you don’t get, but I estimate, of the letters from my family or friends, I would get one out of twenty. And of the letters that I wrote, maybe one out of ten would get through. But that was something….You didn’t really know the depth of what had happened, what was going on back here. The worst part of it, if you got a letter it might be from your family, it might be from some fourth grader in Illinois who was writing a letter as part of some class project. Now, that’s all very nice but given a choice you’d much rather have the letter from your family but that displaces the letter from your family, it’s not necessarily a good thing.Somebody wrote me, though, I forget, it was some kid wrote a letter, “I know how you must feel as a prisoner. After all, I’m in the second grade. https://adst.org/2013/10/444-days-memoirs-of-an-iranian-hostage/ https://web.archive.org/web/20131031233133/https://adst.org/2013/10/444-days-memoirs-of-an-iranian-hostage/

---

The following section is from another site, and they are ressponsible for the graphics:

http://www.findagrave.com/index.html

 

Iran Hostage
Iran Rescue Mission Memorial [cenotaph]

http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=1910
Memorial plaque.
Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Arlington County, Virginia, USA
Plot: Section 46 Grid O/P-23.5

Keough, William b. September 11, 1930 d. November 27, 1985
Iranian Hostage. One of the 52 Americans held hostage by Iran from 1979 to 1981. Served as Superintendent of the American School in Tehran. (Bio by: Erik Lander)
Calvary Cemetery and Mausoleum, Waltham, Middlesex County, Massachusetts, USA
Plot: Section 20 Grave 538

Moore, Bert C. b. March 3, 1935 d. June 8, 2000
Iranian Hostage. A Foreign Service Officer with the United States Department of State, he was one of the 52 Americans held hostage by Iran from 1979 to 1981. (Bio by: Erik Lander)
Mound View Cemetery, Mount Vernon, Knox County, Ohio, USA
Plot: Cremated in Homosassa, FL-ashes at Mound View.

Kalp, Malcolm b. 1939 d. April 7, 2002
Employee of the United States Department of State in the US Embassy in Tehran, Iran. One of the 52 Americans held hostage by Iran from 1979 to 1981. He attempted to escape three times and was kept in solitary confinement for most of the time he was held. He was killed when the vehicle he was driving was hit from behind by a drunk driver. (Bio by: Erik Lander)
Congregation Chai Odom Cemetery (Dedham), Dedham, Norfolk County, Massachusetts, USA

Plotkin, Gerald Jerry b. January 4, 1934 d. June 6, 1996
One of the 52 Americans held hostage by Iran from 1979 to 1981. He was the only non-governmental employee amongst the hostages. (Bio by: Erik Lander)
Mount Sinai Memorial Park, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County, California, USA

Holland, Col. Leland James b. August 2, 1927 d. October 2, 1990
United States Army Colonel. One of the 52 Americans held hostage by Iran from 1979 to 1981. (Bio by: Erik Lander)
Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Arlington County, Virginia, USA

Ode, Robert C b. December 1, 1915 d. September 8, 1995
Foreign Service Officer with the United States Department of State. One of the 52 Americans held hostage by Iran from 1979 to 1981. (Bio by: Erik Lander)
Cremated
Plot: Ashes interred in Church of the Advent (Episcopal) Sun City West, Maricopa County, Arizona

Graves, John Earl b. May 16, 1927 d. April 27, 2001
Information officer for the United States Department of State. One of the 52 Americans held hostage by Iran from 1979 to 1981 (Bio by: Erik Lander)
Cremated

Queen, Richard Ivan b. 1951 d. August 14, 2002
Irainian Hostage. Employee of the United States Department of State in the U.S Embassy in Tehran Iran when the embassy was seized by Islamic militants on November 4 1979. He was held hostage for 250 days, but was released on July 11 1980 due to an illness which was later diagnosed as multiple sclerosis. The 52 remaining hostages were released on January 20 1981 after 444 days in captivity. He died of complications of Multiple Sclerosis.
Unknown*
*Editor’s note: Find A Grave is currently seeking additional burial information for this individual. Please email with any updates you may have. Thank you!

McKeel Jr., John D b. June 26, 1953 d. November 1, 1991
Unites States Marine Sergeant. One of the 52 Americans held hostage by Iran from 1979 to 1981. Shot to death while trying to help a woman who was being robbed. (Bio by: Erik Lander)
Riverside National Cemetery, Riverside, Riverside County, California, USA

Blucker, Robert Olof b. October 21, 1927 d. April 3, 2003
Iranian Hostage. An economics officer with the United States Department of State, he was assigned to the US Embassy in Tehran Iran when it was seized by Iranian militants on November 4 1979. Sixty-six Americans were held hostage. Thirteen were released on November 20 1979. One was released due to illness on July 11, 1980. The remaining fifty-two, including Robert Blucker were held a total of 444 days. They were finally released on January 20, 1981. Blucker earned a bachelor of science degree in…[Read More] (Bio by: Erik Lander)
Cremated

Cronin, Elizabeth Ann b. 1940 d. May 7, 2004
Iranian Hostage. Employee of the United States Department of State. She was the Deputy Political Officer at the US Embassy In Tehran Iran when it was seized by Islamic militants on November 4, 1979. She and 51 others were held hostage for 444 days until they were finally released on January 20, 1981. She was one of only two women who were held for the entire 444 days. Her assignment in Tehran was a part of a long dipomatic career that spanned from 1963 to 1995 and included assignments in…[Read More] (Bio by: Erik Lander)
Trinity Episcopal Church Cemetery, Upperville, Fauquier County, Virginia, USA

The man mentioned below is almost unknown in the history of the Hostage Crisis:

Sobhani, Mohi b. March 12, 1935 d. July 13, 2005
Iranian Hostage. Iranian born naturalized American citizen, he was one of the over 60 Americans taken hostage by Iranian students in 1980. He was one of a few hostages who was not part of the diplomatic corps but was an engineer for the Hughes Corporation. He was released on February 4 1981, 15 days after most of the other hostages were released. (Bio by: Erik Lander)
Pierce Brothers Valhalla Memorial Park, North Hollywood, Los Angeles County, California, USA
The men below were not Hostages but deserve special recognition for their work in attempting to free the hostages from Iran:

Beckwith, Charles A. b. January 22, 1929 d. June 13, 1994
United States Army Officer. He was the founder and first Commander of the United States Army’s Counter-terrorist 1st Special Operations Detachment – Delta, also known as “Delta Force”. He is remembered for its most decisive failure, the attempt to rescue the 52 hostages held in the American Embassy in Teheran, Iran in 1980. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, affectionately known as Chargin’ Charlie, was a six foot, 3 inch Green Beret (Army Special Forces) officer and decorated hero of the Vietnam War…[Read More] (Bio by: Kit and Morgan Benson)
Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery, San Antonio, Bexar County, Texas, USA
Plot: Section 9, Grave 1132
GPS coordinates: 29.28633, -98.25512 (hddd.dddd)

Meadows, Maj. Richard J. b. June 16, 1931 d. July 29, 1995
Military Figure. A career U.S. Army Ranger, Green Beret, and Studies and Observations Group (SOG) commander, Major Richard J. ‘Dick’ Meadows achieved legendary fame with his worldwide covert operations and military service. His record spans the globe from Asia to the Middle East and even South America. Born in Covington Virginia, Dick Meadows enlisted in the U.S. Army at 15 years old. Advancing quickly in rank, he made Master Sergeant by age 20 and was assigned to the 187th Regimental Combat…[Read More] (Bio by: RCB)
Barrancas National Cemetery, Pensacola, Escambia County, Florida, USA
Plot: 39, 0, 254

Other names of interest:

Vance, Cyrus Roberts b. March 27, 1917 d. January 12, 2002
Presidential Cabinet Secretary. He served as United States Secretary of State from 1977 to 1980 in President Jimmy Carter’s Administration. He resigned under protest over the failed attempt to rescue Americans held hostatge in Iran.
Despite the death date of January 10th on his gravestone, most sources state his death date as January 12th.
Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Arlington County, Virginia, USA
Plot: Section 64, Lot 6551

The Iranian Royal Family:

Pahlavi, Reza ‘The Great’ b. March 14, 1878 d. July 25, 1944
He was the first King of the Pahlavi Dynasty. He died in exile at St. Morris Island. (Bio by: K. Shadmehr)
Tomb of Reza Pahlavi, Rey, Iran

Pahlavi, Leila b. March 27, 1970 d. June 10, 2001
Iranian royalty. She was the youngest daughter of the last Shah of Iran. Forced to flee her navive land by the revolution in 1979, she moved to the United States with her family after her father died in 1980. Educated in private schools, she graduated from Brown University in 1992. She worked as a fashion model for Valentino, and continued to use her royal title; Princess Leila suffered from depression and anorexia, and was found dead in her room at the Leonard Hotel under still unexplained…[Read More] (Bio by: Bob Hufford)
Cimetiere de Passy, Paris, France

Pahlavi, Mohammad-Reza ‘Shah-in-Shah’ b. October 26, 1919 d. July 27, 1980
Shah of Persia, the last king of the Pahlavi Dynasty. (Bio by: K. Shadmehr)
Al-Refai Mosque, Cairo, Egypt
Esfandiary Bakhtiari, Soraya b. June 22, 1932 d. October 25, 2001
Empress of Iran, second wife of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlevi. Daughter of Khalil Esfandiary – Bakhtiari, later Ambassador of Iran to the Federal Republic of Germany, and Eva Karl, Princess Esfandiary – Bakhtiari. In the summer of 1950 she was introduced to Mohammad Reza Pahlevi. They fell in love and the engagement was celebrated in October. A sudden illness nearly prevented her to attend her own marriage. Unknown to anyone this illness had made her infertile. This was the main reason why the…[Read More] (Bio by: Lutetia)
Westfriedhof, Munich (Muenchen), Germany

 

 

and, in case you have some old eggs you want to get rid of…

Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah b. September 24, 1902 d. June 3, 1989

http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=10150
Religious Figure, Iranian Political Leader. A Shiite religious Leader and leader of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, he was born Ruhollah ibn Mustafa Musawi Khomeini in the town of Khomein in Iran, from a family with a long line of religious scholarship. His father was Seyed Moustafa Hindi, who died when Ruhollah was just five months old. Khomeini began his formal religious education by memorizing the Koran at a local maktab (religious school). In 1918, his mother, Hajar, and his aunt, Sahiba…[Read More] (Bio by: Kit and Morgan Benson)
Cause of death: heart failure
Behest-e-Zahra Cemetery, Tehran, Iran

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/search?firstname=&middlename=&lastname=&birthyear=&birthyearfilter=&deathyear=&deathyearfilter=&location=&locationId=&bio=52+Americans+held+hostage+by+Iran&linkedToName=&plot=&memorialid=&mcid=&datefilter=&orderby=r&page=1#sr-5942742