beneath their dark robes, Iranian girls had the same charms as girls at home. He was particularly interested in a spirited young woman he had met at a party thrown by the marines a few weeks earlier. Once inside the door she had lifted off her black manteau to reveal an amazing skin-tight silver dress. Some of the girls at the marine parties were as wild as any girls they had ever met back home. Kupke had been scheduled to leave tomorrow, November fifth, and even had seven crisp hundred-dollars bills in his pocket for that travel, but he wasn’t eager to return to the desert and had asked to be extended a second time. He fully expected that his request would be approved, as it wasn’t easy at that point to find Americans who wanted to work in Tehran.
When he heard on the radio that protesters were in the building, Kupke put down his papers for a moment and stepped out in the hall for a look. People were sitting on the floor on both sides of the hallway, and some of the female Iranian staffers were wailing. Walking down the corridor, tear gas stinging his eyes and nose, he stepped into Laingen’s office to listen as Swift, Limbert, and the others worked the phones. He quickly gathered that help was not on the way. Phone lines were being kept open to a number of places, and at one point Kupke was handed a phone with an open line to the crisis operations center at the State Department. He was holding it to his ear when a voice came on and asked, “Have you started destroying files?”
“We are now,” Kupke told him.
“Have you destroyed the back channel?” This was the highest-level State Department information kept at the embassy, kept in a separate safe.
“No,” said Kupke.
“Can you confirm to me that you’ve destroyed it and get right back to me?” the crisis center man asked.
Kupke put down the phone and ran to the safe that contained those files. He scooped them up, mostly papers concerning the shah’s travel to the United States, and carried them back to the disintegrator. Kupke hurriedly fed this stack in, bunching the papers more thickly than before. The blades of the machine began loudly tearing at the pile. Then he ran back down the corridor and picked up the phone.
“Yeah, all the back channel stuff on the shah is gone,” he said.
Seeing Kupke arrive with that pile of documents sent Belk down the crowded corridor to ask the charge’s secretary, Liz Montagne, if there were any more classified documents in Laingen’s office that had to go. She said she had already handed over everything, but the charge’s personal safe was locked—Gallegos had earlier demanded that it be closed—and she didn’t know the combination.
Trying to escape the gas thickening in the hall, some of the staff began crowding into the vault. Kupke began handing out gas masks and bottled water. One woman gave Kupke her diamond ring and a wad of cash, saying, “Here, hold this for me, Rick.” When others who had not given their valuables to Walsh saw this they began pulling off their rings and producing more wads of money. Soon Kupke’s right front pocket bulged with money and jingled with jewelry. One Iranian woman became hysterical and began to hyperventilate inside the gas mask; Kupke noticed that she had not taken a tape off the air filter at the bottom and so was suffocating herself; he gently removed the mask and tried to calm her. An American woman, one of the secretaries, was sobbing. Kupke put his arm around her and assured her that it would be okay.
“We’re diplomats, they don’t just murder diplomats,” he said. He hoped it was true.
Not all the women were distraught. Terri Tedford, who worked on the clerical staff, was very poised.
“You’re not worried, are you?” Belk asked her.
“Oh, no,” she said. “I’m fine.” She was working to encourage the others to stay calm.
For some reason the tear gas didn’t bother Belk that much; it only made his eyes water a little, so he didn’t bother putting on a mask. He brought a small fan out to the hallway and started it in order to blow the gas away from the vault, but it quickly shorted out.
Until that point, the communicators had been picking out for destruction only the classified material from the piles, but now Kupke sensed that time was running out. He had seen how easily the machine had handled the stack of back channel files, and noticing that Barnes and Miele had finished feeding their CIA documents into the device he suggested, “Let’s just start destroying everything.” He felt odd giving directions, but nobody else was.
At the foot of the basement stairs, Corporal Gallegos heard a crash, and when he went to investigate he saw Iranians climbing back in through the broken window. He pulled the pin on another tear gas grenade, threw it, and backed up toward the stairs, calling for help on his handheld radio.
“If we can get somebody down there, we will,” said Sergeant Moeller.
Then Gallegos heard the order, “Everybody upstairs.” He opened the weapons cabinets at the foot of the stairs, wrapped both arms around shotguns and rifles, and started up the stairs. He got to the small landing on the second floor and the big door was already closed. It had a wood veneer but was steel inside, and it hurt his foot when he kicked it. He was wishing all the more he had his boots on. “It’s me! It’s me!” he shouted. “Open up!”
“Go downstairs,” someone shouted through the door. “Get the guns in the cabinets.”
Gallegos already had as many as he could carry, but he knew there were more radios and weapons in the lockers at the guard post. So he set down the weapons he had and ran back down to the first floor. Hermening was struggling with the combination locks. Gallegos knew the combination, but in his excitement he couldn’t make it work. So he found a pair of bolt cutters and severed the locks. He and Hermening pulled radios and weapons from the lockers.
The odor of tear gas was now mingled with smoke. The protesters downstairs were burning paper to ward off the sting of the gas. They would be coming up the steps any minute. The two marines broke the closed-circuit TV monitors, grabbed all the weapons they could carry, and ran up the stairs to the second floor. The door was opened for them and then slammed shut and locked. A barricade was pulled back into place against it, a table with a refrigerator on top and a couch wedged behind both.
Gallegos was surprised to find all the marines on the top floor unarmed.
“What the hell is going on?” he asked Moeller.
“Put your weapons up,” the sergeant said.
“You’re crazy!” said Gallegos. “I’m not giving up my weapon.”
Moeller yelled at him to obey orders, and then Ann Swift stepped out into the hallway, angry, harried, and not in the mood for discussion.
She pointed to all the weapons Gallegos and Hermening had hauled upstairs and said, “Put them away!”
Looking down from an upstairs chancery window through a determined gray drizzle, Hermening saw his boss, Al Golacinski, being led across the compound by a small mob of young Iranians. The security chief looked soaked and defeated. One of the protesters had a pistol pointed at his head.
Someone from another window shouted down, “Al, are you okay?”
“Yes, I’m okay!” he shouted back.
It was midafternoon, almost two hours since the protesters had come over the walls. Hermening leveled his weapon nervously and surveyed the chaos below. The spacious compound was now swarming with protesters, thousands of young bearded men, most of them in blue jeans and many wearing green khaki army jackets, and young women draped in long tunics and wearing head scarves like the nuns he had known as a boy back in Wisconsin. Golacinski’s decision to go out and reason with them now appeared to have been a mistake.
A muscular man with a thick mop of dark hair that now clung wetly to his head, Golacinski’s vision was blurry and his eyes stung from tear gas. He yelled up at the windows, “Have you gotten hold of Laingen?”
There was no answer. Golacinski bellowed up that he needed a phone number there. The ones who had taken him were demanding that he get the charge d’affaires on the phone.
“Look, this is just like February fourteenth!” Golacinski shouted up, referring to the brief invasion of the grounds nine months earlier. He wanted to reassure those inside that this was going to be over shortly, that they should sit tight. He was then led to the front of the building, where one of the protesters demanded that he tell the others to open up and come out.
“They can’t hear me inside,” Golacinski said.
Someone held a bullhorn up to his face.
