1. A Prison-like Place
On the day after the failed rescue mission most of the hostages were moved from the embassy and scattered around Iran. Stunned by the audacity of the American rescue effort, and alarmed by how vulnerable they had been, the student hostage takers quickly corrected the major mistake of keeping all of the hostages in the same place.
Without knowing why, the Americans were hustled out of Tehran in cars and vans, bound and blindfolded, sometimes taken for drives that went on straight through the night. Bill Keough, Bill Royer, Cort Barnes, and Charles Jones were driven to an airport and flown to a southern city on a commercial airliner. The hostages, who had grown accustomed to being shuffled around for no apparent reason, sensed that something important had happened. The guards were all wearing gas masks and seemed especially skittish. They carried more weapons than usual and seemed unwilling to look the hostages in the eye. Kevin Hermening guessed that his chances of going home with his mother were dashed. His roommate, embassy security chief Al Golacinski, wondered if there had been an attempted coup d’etat.
After a long drive through the night, CIA station chief Tom Ahern was deposited in an empty room in what appeared to have once been a large private residence or a small school. There was a giant bush outside filled with birds, hundreds of them. At first the chirping of this mob entertained him, but gradually it became annoying. He still had his music sheets and one or two books and resumed his solitary routines. He would be there for more than a month.
Speeding along in the back of a different van, John Limbert could tell that the landscape was flat, which indicated he and the others with him were being driven south, since to the north were mountains. He knew that part of Iran well from many drives he had taken back and forth between Tehran and Shiraz during his years as a teacher, so he could picture the small towns and open spaces even though he couldn’t see. They drove for seven to eight hours. He was glad he had eaten and gone to the toilet not long before they’d left. When he could see the light of dawn glowing at the edges of his blindfold, they came to a stop in what he figured was Isfahan.
Limbert was left in a room by himself again, which he did not like, but there was a bay window in which he could sit and look out into a large garden. He was doing that on his first evening when he saw Colonel Lee Holland standing in a window across the way. Holland didn’t see him and Limbert didn’t dare call out. But it was the first American he had seen since February.
Michael Metrinko bounced blindfolded in the back of a van for two hours, and was then led up some stairs and left in a prison cell with, to his delight, two other Americans, CIA technician Phil Ward and army Master Sergeant Regis Regan. It was the first time the embassy political officer had been out of isolation since the previous November. Metrinko recognized Regan, although he didn’t know him well. They had been together once escorting a group of visitors on official embassy business. He had no memory of Ward and thought he might be a plant. But Regan vouched for him, and soon the pleasure of having company overcame any sense of caution. The three men sat up all night talking. It was the first time Metrinko had spoken more than a few words of English in almost six months and it felt wonderful. The cell was very hot and had iron cots with thin, soiled mattresses on them. They knew they weren’t in the mountains because it was too warm, and they concluded that they had been driven south. The taste of the water was extremely sour, which was peculiar to just a few places, and they heard the whistle of a train. They finally concluded with certainty that they had been driven to the holy city of Qom, the Ayatollah Khomeini’s home base.
When one of the guards asked if they knew where they were, Metrinko told him, “Of course.”
“Where are you?” the guard asked.
“I will tell you if you will go out and get us some
The guard laughed and confirmed the deduction.
Ward was taken away without explanation soon after they arrived. Metrinko and Regan were moved to better quarters, an old art school. They were given a bigger room that had mattresses on the floor and a new roommate, Dave Roeder.
CIA officer Bill Daugherty was one of the last to be moved after the rescue attempt. Late in the afternoon that day he noticed a peculiar quiet had fallen over the embassy. Usually things picked up before dusk, when the day-shift guards were replaced by the night shift. When he pounded on his door to be taken to the toilet no one came. In the hall outside he could hear only what sounded like a news broadcast on the radio. He sensed that something had happened, or was about to happen, and in his experience such changes were almost always for the worse. Instead of his usual well-rounded dinner he was brought just a thin bowl of chili. In the middle of the night, guards entered his room, cuffed his hands, and slipped a canvas bag over his head. He was led to the back of a van, where he joined several other American captives similarly bound and hooded, and taken on a silent drive that lasted only a half hour. Daugherty was escorted into a building—he had the sense that he was passing through a huge room—up several flights of metal stairs, and into a room, where he was told to remove his hood.
It was a prison cell, an oddly shaped room about six by eight feet, with a stainless steel toilet in a corner. The entrance to the room was a steel door with a slot at the bottom big enough for a food tray and a small window at eye level that was closed by a sliding panel on the outside. Some light filtered in from a small window high above, but otherwise the cell was lit by a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, fifteen feet up. Daugherty was furious. One of his persistent fears was of being hauled off for trial and execution, and being placed in a prison cell seemed a big step closer to that fate. No one responded when he banged on the door, so he began pacing back and forth—three steps forward, turn, three steps back. About the only reassurance he had was that he had arrived with other captives, and he had heard other doors slamming nearby, so at least he wasn’t here alone.
One of the student leaders paid him a visit the next morning. He seemed calm and he assured Daugherty that he and the others had been moved “for their own safety.” He told Daugherty that he was not in a prison but “a prison-like place.” He would learn later that he was, in fact, in Evin Prison, the most notorious of the jails in Tehran. Set in the foothills of the snowcapped peaks north of the city, Evin was an ugly, self-contained city of incarceration, a sprawling complex of older, dungeon-like buildings and more modern administrative ones surrounded by high stone walls that climbed and dipped with the steep contours of the landscape. The color and construction of the walls varied from brown to brick, reflecting the patchwork nature of the place, which had been expanded, renovated, and rebuilt over its seventy-five-year history.
On his second day there, for the first time since being taken hostage, Daugherty got a cellmate. Bruce German, the embassy’s budget officer, introduced himself. The two men had seen each other in the embassy but had never been acquainted. German had spent much of the previous night sobbing and weeping in a cell in another part of the same building, which may be why the guards decided to put him in with someone else. The two men compared notes about where they had been and who they had been with. Daugherty had precious little to contribute to the conversation. He had been held alone for nearly the entire time and had not been able to communicate with any of his former colleagues, much less anyone at home. German shared some of his experiences, but not all. He had been allowed to send letters home and had received mail and had even been allowed to speak on the phone with his family in the Maryland suburbs of Washington. He didn’t mention this to Daugherty, and even after the CIA officer said, “I heard somebody talking on the phone with their wife,” German didn’t mention that it might have been him.
Daugherty noticed that German still had his watch, which surprised him. All of his own possessions except the clothes he wore had been taken on the first night, along with those of everybody else as they sat around the big table in the ambassador’s residence. The two men were together very briefly. German was taken away after only four hours, and Daugherty did not see him there again. He had felt uneasy about German—he wondered if he was helping their captors—and the episode reinforced his preference for solitude.
