them in their own rooms. Some had heard no news of their friends and coworkers since the day of the takeover. Questions and information started flying back and forth.
“Hey, what do you know?”
“Did you hear that the shah died?”
“Did you hear about the rescue attempt?”
CIA officer Bill Daugherty was alone in his cell, standing on a chair and looking out the open vent over the steel door. When he whispered out there was a momentary hush. Everyone was surprised to hear his voice. Some thought he might have been executed.
“How are you, Bill?” several shouted happily.
“I’m okay,” he said. “Keeping myself very busy. The only thing is the food. Is there still something in the world to eat besides bread?”
Barry Rosen heard his old roommate Dave Roeder’s voice and they exchanged greetings.
Information was pooled in those minutes of hurried, hushed conversation. Limbert explained to those who had not figured it out that the jets dropping bombs were Iraqi, and that Iran was now at war with Saddam Hussein. In overlapping whispers hostages compared notes about whom they had seen, what they had heard. Daugherty was delighted to find his friend Colonel Schaefer in the cell directly across from his. Schaefer told Daugherty all about the failed rescue attempt, which explained why they had been so suddenly moved and scattered in April. He told about Richard Queen’s serious illness and his release. Daugherty was enormously pleased to hear that at least one of them had gotten home, and was both stunned and heartened by news of the rescue effort.
One of the men asked, “Hey, did any of you guys see that film of Rupiper, the one that priest did?”
Everyone had. The guards were especially proud of it and showed it repeatedly.
“They must have given him a blow job before he made that film,” the voice said, and everyone collapsed into laughter.
Then the guard woke up.
“No speak!” he shouted, and silence returned. Moments later, Keough started banging on the door. He still had to use the toilet. For some reason everyone up and down the hall started to laugh.
The guard Abbas liked to debate with his captives and instruct them in language borrowed from the common rants about the evil practices of the United States.
Vice consul Donald Cooke looked up once from his book and said, “You know, Abbas, you’re right. Even before I was born my parents decided that what they wanted me to do was to become a ruthless exploiter of the oppressed people of the third world. And from the time I was small I can remember them teaching me how to be a ruthless exploiter of the oppressed people of the third world. And when it came time for me to decide what kind of job I was going to get, I said to myself, I know what I want. I want to become a ruthless exploiter of the oppressed people of the third world. And here I am. I got a job with the United States government as a ruthless exploiter of the oppressed people of the third world and my parents, they’re so proud of me they thank God every day. They get up in the morning and say thank you Lord for making our son a ruthless exploiter of the oppressed people of the third world.”
Even Abbas was laughing by the time he was finished.
“I see we are being facetious today, Mr. Cooke,” he said.
When Abbas lectured about racial, ethnic, and religious oppression in the United States, Cooke went off.
“Abbas, you have got to be kidding me,” he said, and asked the guard, “In your embassy in London, how many Jews do you have serving there? How many Christians? How many Baha’i?” In contrast, Cooke noted the ethnic and racial mix among the embassy employees they had kidnapped. “My embassy looks like my country,” he said. “Do your embassies look like that overseas?”
Abbas had to admit that they didn’t.
Wound up now, Cooke described the fear he had seen in the eyes of visa applicants who had lined up by the thousands before the embassy seizure to apply for visas to escape Iran. “These were people trying to escape,” he said.
“Tell me there’s a long line outside of the Iranian embassy in Washington of blacks and Indians or Hispanics and whatever, seeking to try to escape the United States in order to come to Iran, you know, for their protection. Well, by God, there was a line half a mile long outside of my embassy the day we opened, of people who were just that. Religious and ethnic minorities trying to escape your government. Real oppression. Firing squads, executions.”
As time wore on in the prison, Abbas was among those guards who became openly disgusted with their role in this hostage taking. He admitted that the whole standoff had gotten tiresomely bogged down. He said he and the others who had been involved from the beginning were weary of it and powerless to end it. He complained that the students had lost control of the protest right at the start, and that ever since they had become nothing more than jailers, trapped in a crisis of their own devising.
Not long after the attacks, Michael Metrinko was taken away from Dave Roeder and again placed in solitary in a basement cell at Qasr prison. The combative embassy political officer was always picking fights with his captors. Every time things started to feel a little bit too chummy, Metrinko would lash out. One night, after several had lingered in his cell for a long time lamenting how badly the war with Iraq was going, Metrinko suddenly announced: “You know, the imam is not a man.”
The words immediately stilled the conversation. After a stunned moment, one of the guards asked, “What?”
“The Ayatollah Khomeini, he is not a man,” said Metrinko.
“He is a man,” said one of the guards.
“He is not a man,” said Metrinko. “He does not have a wife.”
“He does have a wife.”
“No, he doesn’t,” Metrinko said. “The Ayatollah Khomeini does not have a wife.”
“He does have a wife,” one of the guards insisted. “There are pictures.”
“The only pictures I have ever seen of the ayatollah with anyone else are always pictures of him with a small boy beside him,” said Metrinko.
The guards caught his drift; he was suggesting that their imam was a pederast. Metrinko was grabbed by the hair—it had grown quite long—and dragged from the room. The angry guards took turns kicking and punching him. He was thrown into a cell at the end of the hall where a blanket was draped over him and he was beaten some more. Then they locked the door and left him there and refused to bring him food for three days. Then he was driven to Qasr, where he was placed alone in a “punishment” cell. They took away his watch and his glasses and left him. The room was dark and cold. At first he upbraided himself for provoking the guards, but he also felt good about standing up to them. He would pay a heavy price.
When they saw how much time Metrinko spent reading, they took away his books for days at a time. For two weeks he was left alone in the cell, freezing. They fed him bread and water. He spent his days and nights shivering in his blanket, pacing or jogging in place to keep warm, and brooding. After some time, he was visited by several of the student leaders.
“You have insulted the guards, who have complained that they can no longer bring you food or take you to the toilet,” the head of the group explained.
Metrinko was eventually taken back to Evin and placed again in a cell by himself. Now and then he was let out into a small courtyard to exercise. He walked in circles in the yard, just like prisoners in old Hollywood movies. Sometimes there were others walking in circles with him. That was how he discovered which hostages were being kept in that part of the prison, a discovery he found disconcerting. They were all embassy workers with the most sensitive jobs. There was Swift, the second-ranking political officer; Thomas Ahern, the CIA station chief; CIA officer Bill Daugherty; Lee Holland, an assistant defense attache, and his boss, Tom Schaefer, the military attache; and others. If the students were planning to put any of the hostages on trial, this would be the group.
He still lived with the guards’ special enmity. One day one of them entered his cell with a stack of letters.
