had lost her mind.
Despite the gloominess of the new place, Limbert was happy. He was surrounded again by his colleagues, which was reassuring, and there were two mattresses! He had a roommate, Lee Holland, the embassy’s army attache. Holland was a small fireplug of a man who was nicknamed “Jumper” because he had enrolled and passed jump school at Fort Bragg relatively late in his career. He was more than a decade older than Limbert, with thinning straight hair that now hung limply around his broad forehead. He had grown a gray beard. Holland had also spent some time in Tehran before the revolution, so both he and Limbert remembered the country in what they considered better days. They dubbed their new home the “Hitler Hilton.”
After seven months of being alone, Limbert was thrilled to have company, and he found Holland to be especially pleasant. The first few days they were thrown together they sat up until the wee hours every morning conversing—so much that a guard came in and complained, “Don’t you people ever sleep?” They talked about their lives, their families, their children, and what they knew about their situation. Holland had not heard about the rescue mission and had not learned of the shah’s death. Holland told Limbert about his experiences since the day of the takeover, and about his past, about his service in Vietnam and in Germany. They played cards. Holland taught Limbert to play euchre, and Limbert taught him to play casino. Limbert was impressed by Holland’s imperturbability. He was a gruff, steady man, not easily impressed or frightened, who treated his captors with steadfast contempt without deliberately courting trouble. A little of Holland’s defiance rubbed off on the pliant political officer.
Limbert recognized that small acts of defiance preserved the prisoner’s sense of self-worth and remembered how good it had felt when he had been listening at night to his stolen radio, putting one over on the guards.
He began practicing this new, measured belligerence on their guard, a young man named Gholam Reza, who was so perpetually glum that he had been nicknamed “Smiley.” He was one of the true believers, someone who in Limbert’s eyes embodied Iran’s “New Man,” appalling ignorance combined with absolute conviction. He found Reza too high-strung and impassioned to argue with directly, so he began leaving him mocking messages on the walls. In one, he wrote in Farsi:
Limbert made posters and drew cartoons. In one, he contrasted in Farsi the perfect Muslim state described in the Koran with the kind of system created by the radical students, comparing the generous historical acts of Muhammad with the students’ authoritarian methods. Muhammad, for instance, had freed all of the prisoners after one battle, had not bothered the people of Mecca after his conquest, and treated foreigners in his country as honored guests. The students, on the other hand, had attacked defenseless people, harmed those in their protection, and had stolen from them. Reza began writing responses on the wall when Limbert went to the toilet. It got so that every time Limbert left for the bathroom he would return to find something new Reza had added to his wall drawings. The guard never spoke to him about it. For instance, in response to Limbert’s point about visitors being treated as honored guests, the guard wrote, “Islam protects diplomats, not spies.” Limbert then wrote, “For example, a businessman and a nurse are spies, like those you have taken hostage.” This went on until his posters were so defaced that Limbert put them in a corner, hung clean paper in another part of the room, and labeled it “Free Speech Area.” Reza continued the dialogue there. They never spoke to each other but carried on this written exchange for weeks.
In the hallway, the guards often played revolutionary songs. Limbert was a lover of old Persian folk music and regarded the new songs as dreadful. The words to one tune just repeated the familiar “
He teased Reza by replacing the lyrics with a loud singsong, “Hee-haw! Hee-haw! Hee-haw!”
7. Buy Iraqi War Bonds
Summer is long in Tehran. It was still sunning weather in early October when Mike Howland, stretched out on the balcony over the ministry garden one afternoon, was approached by a new guard named Isfahani, who asked the embassy security officer if he would show him how to field-strip his Spanish pistol. Howland had done so for some of the others. The big embassy security chief liked Isfahani. He was a slender reed, a slight, inoffensive man whose commitment to the pieties of Islam was suspect—he had asked Howland once if he could get him special American sunglasses that would enable him to see through women’s robes.
They sat together on the third-floor balcony, just under the eave of the roof, and Howland broke down the weapon, explaining as he went. The hardest part about putting the .45 back together was holding down the recoil spring cap as you locked it back beneath the gun barrel. More than one trainee had injured himself by letting the spring cap slip and having it fly up into his eye or forehead. Howland demonstrated the tricky maneuver with his thick thumb pressed hard on the spring cap. Then he handed the pistol to the guard to try it himself.
“Isfahani, you’ve got to be careful or that thing will fly off and hit you,” Howland warned him.
“
Isfahani’s thumb slipped. The cap missed him, flying high into the air and landing on the upper roof, where it rolled down and came to rest in the gutter high overhead. The young guard went white with panic. How was he going to explain breaking his own gun or letting his hostage take his weapon apart? He was so beside himself that Howland took pity on him.
“Okay, Isfahani,” he said. “Come with me.”
The other guards were sleeping. Howland led the panic-stricken Iranian quietly into the kitchen and, much to the guard’s amazement, slipped open the key box and removed the key to the attic.
“Shhh,” Howland told him, a finger to his lips.
There was a dormer near the point on the roof where the spring cap had landed, and Howland led the amazed guard up the stairs and into the attic. He took him to the window and pointed down to the place in the gutter where he would find the cap.
The guard said he was too afraid of heights to climb out on the roof. Howland looked down. There were guards in the garden below.
“Bullshit, Isfahani, I’m not going out there,” he said. “Those guards down there see me, they’re liable to start shooting. You’re going to have to go out there.”
He showed him how he could hang on to the dormer on his way down and use it to help pull himself back up when he had retrieved the spring cap. Howland promised to stand in the window the whole time and direct him.
He was standing in the window, encouraging the trembling guard as he eased his way down toward the gutter, when suddenly they both heard explosions in the distance. Howland was shocked. He knew the sound; he remembered it from Vietnam. It sounded like an air strike, coming from the direction of Mehrabad Airport. Off to the west he saw rising columns of smoke. Isfahani looked back up at Howland, stricken and confused.
Just then a MiG-23 fighter bomber flew right past the window. Howland was at eye level with the pilot. The
