Guests of the Ayatollah

States toward you.

With all respect, Mr. President, this can only reflect a complete misunderstanding of the American government and its people.

There is no hostility toward Iran that one single act will not remove. That is the release of the American diplomats held hostage for the last eight months…. The United States has only one other interest in Iran, that is the maintenance of Iran’s independence and territorial integrity by a people and government pursuing policies of their own choosing and without outside interference.

Sincerely,

L. Bruce Laingen

Charge d’Affaires

For all his anti-American pronouncements, Bani-Sadr and his foreign minister, Ghotbzadeh, remained publicly opposed to further holding hostages. Laingen figured that in their position they saw every day the damage being done to Iran’s standing in the world and to its internal security. All the ambitious construction projects under way when the shah fled were still suspended—the great empty cranes on the city’s low skyline were rusting—and all forms of international credit had virtually dried up. The true believers didn’t care, of course; Allah would provide. The imam said he would rather see the country return to donkey transport than make the smallest concession to the Great Satan. And Allah was providing. The great dragon of anti- Americanism loose in the land was devouring all the enemies of the turbaned class. Practical men concerned about Iran’s place in the world, and who looked to more earthly solutions, ran the risk of being branded traitor or incompetent. Cherished Western ideals became subversive, and no one criticized the emerging regime without fear. Ghotbzadeh had been attacked in the government-controlled press and had been summoned to appear before the Majlis to explain his “mis-handling of the ministry.” Khomeini himself blasted Bani-Sadr for failing to adequately cope with the country’s mounting economic difficulties. The president, of course, blamed America, which, by refusing to resolve the hostage crisis, was trying to “sink me in trivial issues so that I fail to battle against U.S. economic pressure.” Still, the Iranian president reserved some ire for the student captors. At the end of August, he was quoted in the newspapers two days in a row speaking critically of the hostage takers. He said the Americans ought to be released, that the continuing standoff had, in effect, “made Iran a hostage of the United States,” because American influence around the world ensured that the new Islamic republic was seen as a pariah. Whatever their reasons, these two primarily secular men were taking a huge risk opposing the hard-liners.

Still, nothing changed. The death of the shah, the seating of the Majlis, the opposition of the president and his foreign minister…the hostage issue bobbed like a cork in a restless sea of change. Laingen had come to suspect that they might not see the end until after the coming American elections and what looked increasingly like Carter’s eventual defeat.

It makes one wonder sometimes…whether the objective is to hold the hostages through the elections in hopes of seeing Carter defeated. You will ask, ah yes, but surely [they] realize that Reagan would be more difficult? I don’t think that matters. The hatred of Jimmy Carter among some of the fundamentalists is so intense as to regard his defeat as an end in itself, an end or objective that if it can be achieved would be hailed as one more example of the justice of Iran’s cause—Allahuakbar. God is great, and He is on our side. That is not a very pleasant prognosis as to intentions here, but, among some of them, I do not exclude it at all.

After all these months of isolation in the ministry, the three Americans were still regarded as a threat. On the first day of July, one of the guards barged into their room with a soldier and the two men stood scrutinizing one of the windows overlooking the garden, apparently convinced that a coded message had been written there by the captives. What they had seen were just a few random splashes of bird droppings.

In mid-August, the ministry guards suddenly delivered a big plastic bag filled with Valentines that had been mailed almost six months earlier. Most were from schoolchildren.

One suggested, “I hope you can sneak out of Iran when the people go to bed. Then you can go back home.”

A girl wrote Laingen, “Hi, Dream Boat. I wish you a lot of luck. I am going to give you a plan to get out. Number one: Cry for food, then hit them in the face and run out. If this isn’t a good plan, hear [sic] is another one. If there is a key by there, all of you should each get a sock and try to throw the sock and get the key. Try your own [idea] if it doesn’t work.”

5. I’m Going

Others responded to the continuing ordeal of captivity very differently. The irrepressible CIA officer Malcolm Kalp had always been a man whose motor ran fast, and being confined to a small space made him increasingly desperate to escape. Confined to the same villa in Isfahan as John Limbert, with whom he regularly passed notes in their shared bathroom, he tried to enlist the gentle embassy political officer in his plans. His first involved overpowering a guard and taking his weapon.

“Then what are we going to do, shoot our way out?” Limbert wrote back, to which Kalp responded, “Is that something you are willing to do?”

Limbert wasn’t. He didn’t think he could. Besides, there were many armed guards, not just one or two. If they knocked down a guard and took his weapon, they would soon have to use it. On reflection, Kalp agreed that trying to shoot their way out would be suicidal, but he continued to scheme. Perhaps they could sneak out. Limbert noted that even if they were able to slip outside the villa, the area immediately surrounding it was patrolled by a guard dog and encircled by a wall. Beyond the wall were floodlights that turned night into day. Assuming they made it over the wall and across the floodlit area beyond, what would they do then, without money, ID, or proper clothing? Kalp suggested looking for a foreign consulate, or perhaps finding someone sympathetic on the street. Limbert wondered how many people like that there were in Isfahan, Iranians so sympathetic they would risk their lives to help them. None of these entirely sensible obtacles deterred Kalp in the least. He was going, Limbert was not. The political officer admired his colleague’s determination and ingenuity but wondered at his sanity.

Kalp had a nine-inch-long hacksaw blade he had scrounged from the chancery basement and kept hidden in his shoe, and he had been using it to saw through the iron bars over his window. Whenever there was a loud demonstration or the lawn mower started outside, Kalp sawed furiously.

It took some time, but eventually he cut completely through one of the bars before his guards, inspecting his room, noticed. Then they bricked over his window.

“No more windows for you,” the guard told him.

A lesser man would have given up.

One morning in June, Kalp was led out and placed in the back of a station wagon with Bill Belk and Joe Subic, who had been kept in another part of the same villa. He knew Belk was sitting in front of him because the State Department communicator had asthma and wheezed. Kalp recognized the sound. He didn’t learn until later that the other American was Subic. There were three Iranians in the front.

All he could think about, sitting in the back, was that this was the perfect time to escape. There were just three Iranians and three Americans, and Kalp liked the odds. He didn’t know if the guards had weapons but he felt that, if the three of them moved fast, it wouldn’t matter. Without the cooperation of his colleagues it wouldn’t work, and he had no way to enlist them without alerting the guards. As soon as they got to the new place, again with a shared bathroom, this one painted and decorated totally in pink, Kalp wrote a note saying that, if they were moved like that again, he would cough and that would be the signal to attack.

On the way, the guards had promised them that the new place would be cooler, but it wasn’t true. The air-conditioning units were shot. The days were brutal. Kalp immediately went to work on the locks on his room’s windows. He might have been a spy, but he had never learned to pick a lock. It was something he had always wanted to know how to do but he’d never gotten instruction, and whenever he had tried as a boy he had failed. Now, with nothing but time on his hands, he spent hour after hour probing the mechanism with a pin until, much to