the basement. He felt that the worst was over. They probably wouldn’t shoot him. How mad could they be at him? He hadn’t hurt anyone and even the Geneva Convention, he thought, recognized that prisoners of war were entitled to try to escape.
In the basement he was questioned about the note-passing system, which he denied. Then he was beaten again. His head was smacked against the concrete wall and he was kicked in the groin. They showed him a note he had left for Subic and Belk. He denied that he had written it, even though it was clearly his handwriting and on paper he had brought with him from the embassy in Tehran. Next he was asked about his escape plan.
“I was going to go into Isfahan and find a Westerner,” he told them.
“Why did you think there would be Westerners there?” he was asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t been out of here. I don’t know who is in Isfahan.”
They brought him back upstairs and kept him tied to a chair for a few more days, and then they threw him into a car and returned him to the villa where he had been staying before the move. They took away his knife and fork.
Kalp went quietly to work with the spoon, scraping away the mortar between the bricks.
Both Belk and Subic were punished for Kalp’s attempted escape. When the guards found braided sheets in their room they were separated.
Belk responded by refusing to eat. When they brought him tea on the first day there was no sugar. He asked for some and was told no. So he refused the tea and everything else. He took only water for nine days, and then decided to stop even that. He soon discovered that it is a lot harder to stop drinking than to stop eating. Inside of one day his mouth was like cotton. He gave up and started eating his meals again.
All John Limbert knew was that one day Kalp had disappeared, and then, about a week later, he was back, with a note describing his adventure. Kalp had hidden a ballpoint pen in his room months ago and was delighted to find it still there when he returned. His escape had ended as Limbert thought it would, but he admired Kalp for trying.
Limbert said he had wondered what happened to him, whether he had been moved to a different place or just to another part of the villa, and Kalp promised that in the future he would make a small soap mark on the mirror whenever he used the bathroom. If the mark was gone, he was gone. In the next few days they exchanged notes about the possibility of another rescue attempt. Kalp knew more about the military’s capabilities than Limbert and corrected him when the diplomat speculated that the United States could not reach far into Iran on helicopters. Kalp explained that there were many different ways to refuel en route.
Clearly, another American raid was on the minds of their guards. Limbert overheard a number of them discussing the possibility one night. He heard one say, “Well, if something happens, make sure the explosives are placed right.”
He had seen no explosives at the villa and figured if they were around, he would have noticed them. He suspected the conversation had been staged for his benefit, although for what reason exactly he could not fathom. Apparently the guards still feared their captives were secretly communicating with Washington.
For three days after his return Kalp was kept handcuffed in his room and was denied reading material. He easily picked the lock on the cuffs, refastening them quickly when a guard approached. To pass the time, he began trying to count to a billion. He had read somewhere that if a person tried counting to a billion, his whole life would pass before he finished. He was up somewhere around 20,000 when, on the night of the third of July, a guard gave him a tranquilizer to swallow, removed his glasses, and then took him, blindfolded and cuffed, to a van, where five or six other Iranians and a group of hostages were already waiting. He was handcuffed to Belk—he heard the wheeze. They had agreed that the next time they were together on a move, they would jump the guards and try to escape, and on the long drive he felt Belk trying to pick the lock on the cuffs, though by this time Kalp knew they didn’t have a prayer. They were outnumbered, the guards probably had weapons, he was woozy from the tranquilizer, and without his glasses he couldn’t even see. He patted Belk’s hand gently and whispered, “No, no, no.”
The drive took ten hours. The guards played loudly a tape of their revolutionary songs, which to Kalp felt like torture.
The logistics of moving the captives around the country strained the resources of their student captors, who had to arrange guard shifts, food delivery, and other services wherever their charges were housed. In the month after the rescue attempt they shuffled hostages from place to place, trying to get the makeshift new system to work, but by midsummer they had begun driving them all back to Tehran, to several of the city’s old prisons, which were designed to hold captives and could be heavily fortified against assault. The students took pains to disguise these shifts, mindful of how vulnerable they had been in April when the rescue mission was attempted. When marine Jimmy Lopez was taken from a country house, where he had been kept all summer, the guards kept his guitar, and every evening at the same time Lopez normally practiced one of them stayed behind to pluck at the strings so that anyone listening from outside would think the hostages were still there.
Among the first to be moved were Joe Hall, John Graves, and the marines Greg Persinger and Steve Kirtley. On June 18, they were being driven from Isfahan when their transport van had a severe accident.
The four were blindfolded and handcuffed in the back—Hall to Persinger and Graves to Kirtley—and had ridden for hours through the night when they were awakened by violent bumping, and then were suddenly thrown wildly into the walls of the van as it left the road at high speed and rolled several times before coming to a stop. They were tumbled inside like markers in a Bingo hopper. Hall blacked out. He came to with his blindfold off, lying in thick dust at the bottom of the van, staring at Persinger. Both had bloody faces and were twisted in awkward positions. They untangled themselves slowly, checking for cuts and broken bones, and then crawled outside. Surveying the battered remains of the vehicle, Hall noticed a leg that looked bent in a peculiar position, and his first thought was,
There was no sign of the guards. All four had been riding for so long that they had to urinate urgently, so the two shackled pairs ran off a short distance to do that. When they returned, neither guard nor driver had emerged from the battered front of the van.
Kirtley’s first thought was,
They were gaping at it, wondering at their good fortune in having escaped with only minor injury, when the guard they called Big Ali, who had been riding shotgun in front, emerged slowly from the wreckage with his gun. He had apparently just come to. It was the first time Hall had seen Big Ali with a weapon, and the Iranian gruffly ordered them to do what they had already decided.
“Stay here,” he said.
Not long afterward an ambulance arrived; it had been coming along the same road a distance behind them. Big Ali told them to climb in, where they were surprised to find hostage Jerry Miele on a stretcher. They were squeezed in around him, and when Big Ali told them to put their blindfolds back on, which he had retrieved, they all refused. He and the other guards were too shaken and distressed to push the issue—the hostages learned later that the driver of the van had been killed—so the hostages had an opportunity to talk freely for the rest of the drive.
Miele’s head was bandaged. He was particularly surprised to see Kirtley again. They had been together until a few days earlier, when Miele had made a bizarre and futile attempt to kill himself. He was known to be CIA—he was a communicator, a technician—and the guards constantly harassed him about it. They had told him repeatedly since the day of the takeover that, once the trials began, he would be the first to be killed. A short, bald man with a long hooked nose and protruding eyes with deep dark circles under them, Miele looked ill, old, tired, and broken. He was naturally withdrawn, and over months of captivity he had grown increasingly silent and sullen, convinced his life was over. The method most frequently mentioned was electrocution, and on one occasion the guards had rigged a chair with wires to drive home the threat. Occasionally Miele would mutter fearfully, “They were going to plug me in.” Before the rescue attempt, Miele had regressed to an extent that was alarming to his
