jet turned, hit its afterburners, and shot away from them. Howland braced himself for a bomb to hit but nothing happened. The startled guards below, looking up, saw Isfahani on the roof.
“Isfahani, get the goddamn cap and get back in here!” Howland shouted. Suddenly spry, the guard eased himself down to the gutter, scooped out the cap, and made it back to the window. He was so happy that he hugged and kissed Howland when he got back inside. Then the American helped him put the pistol back together. Isfahani had a perfect excuse for being on the roof. He told his comrades that he had reacted quickly when he heard the jets and had climbed out to shoot at it. His fellows were tremendously impressed with his alert and fearless response.
Laingen saw two jets. While Howland was watching Isfahani out on the attic dormer, the charge had been sitting at an open third-floor window below, painting. The explosions to the west turned his head and at once he saw two low-flying MiG-23s with Iraqi insignia move directly over the ministry. They were less than a thousand feet from his window, and the angle of their approach made them seem to be moving slowly. One was trailing a drag chute, presumably deployed in error. They seemed bigger than Laingen imagined they would be and, in their apparent leisure, appeared to be flaunting their presence in enemy skies. “As they crossed over us, they swung to the west slightly and then gunned their speed as we watched their afterburners,” he wrote later in his diary.
Holland and Limbert were together at Komiteh prison when they heard the roar of jet engines pass low overhead, a powerful
“Goddamn, John! They’re playing our song!” Holland said gleefully.
“What is it?” Limbert asked.
Holland explained that Tehran had just been attacked from the air. A siren began to scream just outside their window.
In a nearby cell, Chuck Scott and Don Sharer went right to work on the sounds. The jet engines sounded like something Sharer had heard once at an air base in Nevada.
“Chuck, I think those were air-dropped bombs, and that jet was a MiG,” he said, referring to the Soviet-built fighter.
Five minutes later two more jets passed over.
“What were they?” asked Scott.
“J-79 engines, must be F-4 Phantoms,” said Sharer. The Iranian air force’s F-4s were one of the models he had come to Iran to discuss with the new government. “Somebody has attacked somebody.”
Then all the lights went out. Antiaircraft guns opened up loudly nearby.
“That was a hundred-twenty millimeter,” said Scott.
Sharer beat on the door, shouting, “I have to go to the head!”
“Can’t go, can’t go,” the guard answered through the door.
“I have diarrhea!” Sharer lied.
The door was opened and he was taken to the bathroom, where he could stand on the toilet and look out a window. It confirmed Scott’s assessment. He could see tracers arcing skyward from nearby rooftops.
They deduced that the likely culprit was Iraq, because other than the Soviet Union it was the only country close enough with MiGs. If the Soviets were attacking it wouldn’t be just two fighters streaking over Tehran. It had to be Saddam Hussein.
In his cell, Daugherty arrived at the same point by a different route. The distant explosions and jets made him believe for a moment that President Carter had launched an attack…then he thought better of it. He sat on the floor of his darkened cell watching the flashes of what he assumed were antiaircraft guns in the small window overhead, trying to figure out what was going on. If Carter were going to attack Iran, it would have happened months ago. The Russians would have no reason to bomb Tehran. The most logical conclusion was Iraq. Saddam Hussein had always been at odds with Iran, even under the shah. Maybe now he sensed weakness and realized he could get some support—under these circumstances, even the United States might be helping him.
Daugherty felt good about it. He wasn’t frightened. He reckoned that if he was going to sit through an aerial assault, few places were better than a prison. Its walls were many times thicker than a normal building. It was probably the safest spot in all of Tehran. At one point the guards opened the door and poked their heads in his room. They looked terrified. Daugherty figured they were checking to make sure he wasn’t secretly communicating with the planes. They were watching when the large
In a nearby cell, Metrinko and Roeder heard bombs falling close enough to rattle the walls.
“That’s incoming,” said Roeder.
Metrinko asked what was exploding.
“I can’t tell,” Roeder told him.
“You must know,” said Metrinko. “You were in Vietnam all those years.”
“Yeah, but all I ever heard was the sound from the top going down, not on the ground listening to them coming in. I’ve never been on the receiving end.”
Roeder knew his jets, and listening intently to the sounds overhead he told Metrinko that they were MiG- 23s, Soviet-built fighters. It took him just a few seconds to figure Saddam was behind the assault.
A panicked guard burst into their cell and asked if they were “weapons trained.” Both men said they could handle a weapon.
“You might be issued weapons to help defend the prison,” the guard told them.
Metrinko was shocked at the suggestion that he and Roeder might be asked to help their guards defend the prison.
“Please give me a gun,” Metrinko said. “I’ll use it all right.”
Blaring loudspeakers spelled out the story for Limbert, who translated for his roommate Holland. Iraq had invaded Iran. Thirty-five people had been killed at the Iran National Works, where the bombs had exploded. The broadcasts urged citizens to postpone going to hospitals except for emergencies.
Suddenly, Iran was at war. At the various prisons guards began enforcing strict blackout rules and distributed candles. On the first night of the blackout, looking out the large windows that had framed his world for so long, Laingen had never seen such blackness since the moonless nights of his boyhood in rural Minnesota. There seemed to be universal compliance with the new blackout regulations. The city was not just black but silent, dead. Nothing was moving. The events of the day shook the charge d’affaires out of hostage mode and back into gear as a foreign service officer. He recorded his analysis of the situation in his journal.
In a series of simultaneous strikes against Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport and air force facilities in six other cities, Iraq has suddenly escalated what has been for several weeks a low-level border conflict into a full-scale invasion. Saddam Hussein’s purpose appears to be to demonstrate, by a quick and successful military assault, that Iraq is now the dominant military power in the Persian Gulf region—taking advantage of Iran’s weakened military strength and its self-imposed political isolation intentionally to accomplish that purpose.
Laingen went on to describe the 1975 Iran–Iraq border accord, which Saddam Hussein had signed with the shah, and surmised correctly that, with Pahlavi dead and with Iran having cast off its alliance with the United States to pursue its divine destiny, Saddam had seized the moment to grab contested lands along the Shatt al- Arab (the Arab River) and possibly steal some of Iran’s oil-rich territory in Khuzestan. The attacks prompted a surge of patriotism and calls for glorious martyrdom from Khomeini—“Everything we are doing is for Islam. What matter if we die? We shall go to Paradise.” The imprisoned American, even with his professional objectivity, couldn’t help but express a little satisfaction over Iran’s predicament.
Not a few Iranians, we suspect, recall that during the Shah’s period, whatever his faults, such an attack by Iraq would have been out of the question, given the sheer preponderance of Iran’s military power, real or imagined (in any event, untested)…. To what degree did Iran’s international isolation, itself certainly a
