hostage families.
At long last the
John Limbert enjoyed his garden view for only three days before being taken to a villa more in the center of Isfahan, near a river that he knew to be the Zayandeh. His new room had no view nor any good light, but he could overhear bits of radio reports that drifted in from somewhere outside, and it was here that he first caught snippets of a broadcast about a rescue attempt. The sound faded in and out, and he heard only bits, but that’s what it had sounded like. A mission, unsuccessful, and American casualties. This was confirmed when, on a visit to the bathroom, he found a week-old newspaper that one of the guards had used to line the top of a shelf. It carried a wire service story about the mission, so Limbert became the first of the hostages other than the three at the foreign ministry to learn that his government had tried a daring rescue and had failed. He wasn’t sure how to feel about it. On the one hand, it showed that he and the others had not been forgotten by President Carter and their countrymen, which lifted his spirits and filled him with hope and pride. On the other hand, it had failed, which meant that the prospects of being saved by military action, always remote, were now nil. He also felt a pang of sorrow and gratitude for his countrymen who had tried, especially those who had died in the effort.
As the long summer dragged on, Limbert was beset with boredom, loneliness, and despair. Occasional letters from his wife and two children helped sustain him. The children mailed their school report cards, and the fact that they were doing well heartened him enormously. He received, months late, a Valentine the children had made at school. Just to know that they were safe and thriving eliminated one of his biggest worries. He had been concerned early on that his wife Parvaneh might try to come to Iran to lobby for his freedom, which, given the present atmosphere in her home country, might well have landed her in jail. He worried whether his daughter and son would recognize him when they saw him next, whether they would remember him and whether he would be the same person he was when he had left. In his own letters (most of them never made it home) he left coded messages in the text. Counting on the students’ generally poor English, he constructed sentences with strings of words that barely made sense, but which, if you took the first letter of each, spelled out his message. For instance, he wrote, “Shervin [his son] every new defenseman needs energy with savvy.” The first letters of each word spelled out “s-e-n-d-n-e-w-s.” When Parveneh received the letters she knew that there was a code embedded but could not figure it out. She turned it over to the State Department and the CIA and neither of these agencies figured it out either.
Limbert was not the only one whose code scheme failed. In dozens of letters to his wife, Navy Commander Don Sharer spelled out secret messages, choosing the first letter of each paragraph so that when put together they would read, “TORTURE,” or “STARVING,” which wasn’t exactly true but which conveyed the message that things weren’t all hunky-dory. Years earlier he had told his wife about that code, which had been employed by some prisoners in Vietnam, and was sure she would be looking for it. Once, just to throw his captors off, he reversed the pattern, spelling out the hidden message backward. This, as it happens, was the only letter his wife received from him. She looked for the code, but because it was backward, she didn’t find it.
Eventually Limbert discovered that Malcolm Kalp, one of the embassy’s three CIA officers and the one he knew least, was in a room separated from his by a shared bathroom. Limbert tore the top off a paper box of raisins one day, wrote the word “hide” on it, and left it in a conspicuous spot on the toilet. He figured that if one of the guards found it they wouldn’t know what to make of it and if the person on the other side of the bathroom found it he could know what it meant. Kalp found it and understood immediately. He wrote, “Inside the Ajax container” on it and left it where he had found it. There was a box of powdered soap in the bathroom. Kalp figured that an American who left the note would know what “Ajax” was but that an Iranian would not. Sure enough, when he used the bathroom next there was a note from Limbert in the soap box. Later they found that there was a space between the washbasin and its pedestal that would serve even better. They passed messages four times a day. Limbert informed Kalp of the failed rescue mission, and it was Kalp who told him that Bill Belk, Kevin Hermening, and Joe Subic were also in the villa. In one of his notes Kalp wrote that he had not been mistreated but that he had been kept alone for a long time.
Summer turned suffocating in the windowless room in Qom where Michael Metrinko, Dave Roeder, and Regis Regan were imprisoned. They spent hours each day exercising, three pale, shaggy, bearded men in ill-fitting clothes bouncing up and down, running in place for hours at a time, then dropping down to do push-ups. The downside was that they would sweat heavily and, because they could shower only occasionally, their room reeked like a dirty gym locker. Regan was withdrawn, but Metrinko and Roeder hit it off. Metrinko admired Roeder’s sly military sense of humor, and Roeder admired the political officer’s intelligence and unyielding toughness. Metrinko taught Roeder how to swear in Farsi, more particularly, how to grievously and obscenely insult the guards. He still missed no opportunity to aggravate his captors.
One day they were visited by Ahmad Khomeini, the imam’s son, who greeted the three as “guests.” The false hospitality disgusted Metrinko, who had bottomless contempt for all of Iran’s new “spiritual” rulers; to him Ahmad just seemed a fat, greasy young man in robes and a black turban. The guards, however, were awestruck. Clearly anxious about hosting such an august figure, they had urged their three captives to say nice things about them.
“What can I do for you?” the cleric asked beneficently. “We want to make you more comfortable.”
Metrinko told him that they wished to be released. They were being treated worse than animals, he said, and their captivity was an insult to Islamic values and Iranian traditions.
“I haven’t been outside for several months,” Metrinko told him. “I want to see the sun. We need air. We would also like to have some meat with our food.”
Khomeini seemed shocked and the guards were chagrined.
“They haven’t been outside?” he said, turning to the guards, who looked panic-stricken. “They must go out every day!” he said.
“Oh, yes, your Excellency,” the nearest guard said. “Yes, sir, we will arrange it immediately.”
After that, Metrinko was taken to a courtyard, a standard feature of an Iranian house, and for the first time he had a better sense of where he was imprisoned. It was a fairly large building that had once been some kind of art school. The walls were covered with propaganda, mostly drawings of Khomeini and others in the new pantheon of Islamist leadership. Metrinko had no knowledge yet of the attempted rescue mission, but it was apparent that his guards had been spooked by something. After months of growing more and more lackadaisical, suddenly they were vigilant out of all proportion. They had been holding him now for six months and he had not made the slightest move to escape, yet in the small courtyard where he was permitted to stroll he was surrounded by more than a dozen armed guards who eyed him so warily it was comical. He ignored them and gave himself over to the rare pleasure of being outside. He basked in the sunshine, smells, and sounds. Metrinko had never considered himself a great lover of the outdoors, but in his captivity he discovered in himself a deep need for it. He had begun to fantasize about taking long walks in the woods, watching sunsets, drinking great gulps of glorious fresh air. In the little courtyard he walked back and forth aimlessly inside the circle of armed guards. It occurred to him that if he made a sudden move in any direction and they opened fire, they would probably all inadvertently shoot each other. It might be worth getting shot himself just to see it happen. His outdoor stroll lasted ten minutes. Despite the admonition of the imam’s son, he and the others got to go outside once more in the next two months.
It was sometime in July when the three were taken back to Tehran and placed in a cell at Qasr Prison, another of the shah’s notorious lockups. It was modeled after 19th century “panoptican” prisons, a central hub with arms that projected outward. They were placed in a large cell, the first genuine prison cell they had inhabited. It was concrete and clean, with a thin carpet stretched over the floor from wall to wall. It had one barred window, too high on the wall for them to look out. The door was made of solid iron and had a transom with a barred window that they could reach by gripping the top of the door and pulling themselves up. It afforded nothing more than a view of the empty hallway. Given a mattress and a pillow, they chose their spots and unpacked their few
