his delight and surprise, he popped it open. He eased the window up and looked out. They were three stories up in what looked like a middle-class neighborhood. There were no guards in sight, but chained beneath the window again was a big dog. Beyond the dog was a wall that he could easily climb.
Kalp placed a note in the pink bathroom announcing his intention to break out.
“We have to be careful not to hurt any of the guards, because if we hurt them they are going to shoot us for sure,” Kalp wrote.
Belk’s previous escape attempt in the first days of the takeover had ended badly. He remembered the beating and punishment he’d suffered after he was caught, and he had determined that if he ever saw the chance to run again he would not be taken alive. He had stolen a heavy metal drain stop, which, wrapped in his fist, could do serious damage. Kalp, however, had taken Limbert’s caution to heart and had reverted to his earlier position, he had ruled out attacking any of the guards. So Belk told him no. If attacking the guards was not part of the plan, he would stay put and wait for an opening that suited him.
Belk’s roommate Joe Subic, on the other hand, whose days of cozying up to his captors had long since stopped paying dividends, told Kalp he was game. The CIA officer now had the knack of picking locks, so when he was allowed to visit Belk and Subic he unlocked their window. To prepare for his break, Kalp kept careful watch out of his own window through the night. One problem was a floodlight that illuminated the yard outside all night. Kalp pulled out a wall socket in his room and played with the wires, crossing this one and that, until all the lights in the house suddenly went black. This was not unusual. There were frequent blackouts in Isfahan so the guards weren’t surprised. When they realized the short had occurred only at their location they reset the circuits. That, Kalp noted, was a trick that would come in handy.
The next problem was the dog, but he had an answer for that. He convinced the guards that he had a nervous condition that required regular treatment with Librium and Valium, and then hoarded the pills. He was not allowed to eat meat—a punishment from some earlier transgression—but Belk and Subic were, so Kalp got a hot dog from them. His plan was to stuff the hot dog with his pills and then throw it to the dog about half an hour before going out the window. With any luck, the animal would be unconscious, or at least mellow.
Still exchanging notes in the pink bathroom, Kalp and Subic decided at last that all was ready and set the time for their break at three o’clock the following morning. Kalp would tie the sheets from his bed into a rope, lower himself to the ground, check around to see if the coast was clear, and then, using a red lens he had scrounged, signal Subic to climb down. Kalp opened his own window a crack early that evening to check out the yard, and for the first time he saw a guard walking underneath. He quickly shut the window, asked the guard in the hallway to take him to the bathroom, and left a note for Subic that said, “Cancel.”
Another week of discussion ensued. By now it was late June, and the news—mostly what Kalp had learned from Limbert at the other house—was that the
“To hell with it,” he wrote. “The 27th of June I’m going.”
Subic reluctantly agreed to go along. Kalp would throw the spiked hot dog out, then wait for the dog to eat it and fall asleep. Then he would drop to the ground, signal Subic, wait for him to climb down, and the two of them would cross the yard, scale the wall, and drop down into the neighborhood outside. They would hide nearby until morning and wait for someone to start the motor on his car—neither knew how to hot-wire a vehicle. They would jump the driver, hit him over the head with a brick or stone, and drive the car in the direction of the Persian Gulf, hundreds of miles away, where they would steal a boat and row or motor themselves out to where American warships patrolled. Kalp figured he had about a fifty-fifty chance of getting over the wall and about a five percent chance of making it to the gulf. After eight months, it was chance enough.
At the last moment he decided not to use the rope he had painstakingly made. He could tie it down inside his room and it would serve nicely for descending, but he couldn’t figure out a way to then pull it down behind him. If it were left hanging, a guard might spot it and alert the others before he and Subic had a chance to scale the wall and find a good hiding place outside. Their best chance was to slip out without anyone noticing until the guards came for breakfast. That would give them a good four hours of darkness to flee the house and hide. Instead of climbing down, Kalp decided he would simply hang from the window, which was about eighteen feet from the ground, and drop. He figured he was five-ten, and his arms extended fully gave him another two feet, which meant about a ten-foot drop, which wasn’t too bad. He saved himself some of the pills just in case he hurt his ankle or legs in the jump.
On the night of June 26, he threw the stuffed hot dog down to the dog, but it landed in a place where the tethered animal couldn’t reach. Again he wrote “cancel.” He asked for another hot dog and left the note in the bathroom for Subic.
On the following night, he asked the guard to shut his door. Usually they left it open but the guard obliged. Kalp threw out the new spiked hot dog, and this time the dog gobbled it up and appeared to fall immediately asleep. Kalp stuffed all the things he wanted to take with him into his pillowcase—his pills, a bottle of water, some food he had scrounged, a change of clothes, and some letters from his family. He was doing this when a guard abruptly reopened the door to his room. Kalp was crouched in a far corner of the room with his bag, the mattress on the floor stripped and empty, but the guard just took a quick look, shut the door, and did nothing! Kalp couldn’t believe it. The best he could figure is that the guard was so bored with making bed checks he no longer actually looked.
At the last moment he decided not to carry the stuffed pillowcase. He worried it might throw off his balance, so using a long piece of string—Kalp collected things all the time in hopes they would come in handy—he gently lowered it out the window. When it touched ground he hesitated for a moment. Once he let go of the string and the bag was outside, he had to go. He knew his chances were slim, but he had been a soldier and CIA officer for a long time without ever having taken any truly big risks.
It was at this point that the dog suddenly sprang fully to life, lunging up at him from its chain, barking furiously. Kalp let go and landed hard on the balls of his feet. He rolled quickly away from the dog, badly scraping his elbows and knees. Bleeding now, with the dog raising holy hell, Kalp got to his feet. He had been lucky. His decision to move over the two feet to the ventilation ledge meant he had landed just out of the dog’s reach.
With the animal still making a racket, he sprinted down to peer around the corner of the building, where he saw no one, and then ran back the other way, beneath Belk’s and Subic’s window. Subic wasn’t there. The army sergeant had been waiting by the window, fully dressed, but when he heard the dog start to bark he had run back across the room, peeled off his shirt, and crawled back under the covers.
“I told you. I told you,” said Belk bitterly. “Now you’re going to get us both in trouble.”
Kalp was beneath their window, reaching in his pocket for the red lens, when a guard appeared, leveling a gun at him and shouting angrily in Farsi. Kalp jerked his hands up, but noticed that his pants were falling down. He instinctively reached to hike them up, then realized that a move like that could get him shot. He jerked his hands back into the air. The guard with the gun was screaming, the dog was raising a racket, his pants were falling down, and he was soon surrounded by irate Iranians.
He smiled sheepishly. “Good morning,” he said. “Good morning.”
Bound and blindfolded, he was led first up a long winding staircase, and then the guards changed their minds and brought him back down to the first floor and placed him in a bathroom. They stripped him, screamed at him, and then two began beating and kicking him.
When Kalp pleaded and protested the guards told him to shut up and kept up the beating. Subic and Belk could hear his cries and figured they were next, but the guards never came for them. Their room was checked, but no one took notice that Subic was fully dressed and that he had several full water bottles in a bag by his mattress. They also didn’t notice that the window was unlocked.
When they had finished beating Kalp, he was led back upstairs and placed in a chair with his hands cuffed behind its back. Then they tied his elbows together and bound his feet. Two strips of cloth were tied over his eyes and pulled so tight that a corner of the lower one dug painfully into his left eye. Kalp spent a day and a half like this with no food or water. Guards led him to the toilet at long intervals. They finally removed the outer blindfold, which eased the painful pressure on his eye. Sometime later they untied him, cuffed his hands in front, and took him to
