“Tom, couldn’t you have at least taken a head count?” complained Kupke. “You left me. I had guns scattered around. I was on the roof by myself, only to find out there was a bunch of Iranians down there when I decided to come down.”
“Well, Al convinced me they were going to shoot him,” Ahern said, “and Al promised me that they wouldn’t hurt anybody.”
Metrinko was at peace with his own behavior. He had fought his captors and insulted them every day, right up to the ride to the airport, and he had fresh scrapes and bruises to show for it. His fifteen months in captivity would be summed up many years later by Ebtekar: “We thought [him] to be deranged; [he] hated everyone and was hated in return.” Always the loner, he sat quietly and contentedly in the midst of the celebration taking long swigs of champagne. He felt different, and he tried to define to himself how. It was partly the champagne, but that alone didn’t account for the luxurious sensation that seemed to settle him deeper into his seat. Then he realized what it was. It was a feeling he had almost forgotten. For the first time in four hundred and forty-four days, he felt relaxed.
President Reagan made the announcement. He stood up in the Capitol Rotunda, where he was the guest of honor for a congressional luncheon, and raised a glass of champagne.
“The plane bearing our prisoners has left Iranian airspace,” he said to the cheers of the revelers. Then he took a long gulp of bubbly.
Carter made the same announcement in soft rain on a platform erected to welcome him home to Plains, disappointed not to have been able to make the announcement to the whole nation but relieved nevertheless.
He said, “Just a few moments ago on Air Force One, before we landed at Warner Robins, I received word officially for the first time that the aircraft carrying the fifty-two American hostages”—and then his voice broke and tears choked his words; he took a second to swallow and continued—“has cleared Iranian airspace. Every one of the fifty-two hostages is alive, well, and free.”
After that Carter smiled, the crowd cheered, a band started playing, and the former president slipped his arm around his wife’s waist and they started to dance.
Epilogue
Looking for Akbar in Ayatollahville
Nowadays the grand old embassy in Tehran looks forlorn, like a hostage left behind and long forgotten. The chancery, a solid battleship of an office building in orange brick, two stories high and more than a block long, was once the symbol of America’s formidable presence in Iran. Today it remains standing in the heart of the capital, facing a wide, busy thoroughfare renamed Taleghani Avenue, after the murdered cleric whose sons Michael Metrinko was waiting to meet on the morning of the takeover. Although more crowded with structures, the grounds are still a large, leafy oasis, a haven from the noisy hustle of this city of now more than twelve million. Long ago dubbed by its invaders and occupiers the “den of spies,” this old symbol of America’s friendship with Iran is festooned with hateful garnish: anti-American graffiti, banners, and propaganda displays to remind people of the nation’s undying disdain. The compound is now home to the Revolutionary Guards, an elite military unit that reports to the black-turbaned elite of Iran’s authoritarian mullahocracy, and to the
The museum is supposed to be an official shrine to that bold act of national defiance, but in the four times I went there in 2003 and 2004 it was empty of visitors. A bookstore just outside the entrance that was once known for selling anti-American literature and reprints of the infamous “Spy Den Documents” was vacant when I first saw it, its racks empty, and when I visited again nine months later it appeared ready to reopen as a bookstore for children. The anti-American slogans and spiteful artwork that had been spray-painted on the embassy’s outer brick walls by angry crowds during the fourteen-month crisis had faded, including an image of the Statue of Liberty with a death mask for a face and a sign in English that said “Death to the USA.” The official shield of the United States on the front gate has been chipped or sandblasted away beyond recognition.
Even the guardhouse on the southeast corner, where visitors enter, was in shambles. On my first visit, two friendly, unshaven Revolutionary Guards stood behind the counter in a small marble-veneered reception area that looked like a frat house on Sunday morning, with battered furniture, an old swivel chair leaning precariously on its stem with cushion stuffing hanging out, dirt caked on the floors and walls, and muddy boot prints everywhere. I pointed quizzically at a complete boot print on the ceiling and, grinning, asked my guide and translator, Ramin, to tell the guards that, as an American citizen, I protested the abuse of what could arguably be called American property.
“Tell them that if they are going to steal it, the least they could do is take care of it,” I said.
When Ramin relayed my comments, the guards laughed, looked around sheepishly at the mess, and shrugged happily. They were conscripts serving out the last few months of their duty at a gravy post. “It’s great here,” one said. “Nothing ever happens.”
It took some doing and a few bribes to the guards’ higher-ups to get inside. The exhibit is amateurish, as if put together by a group of high school students with a bad attitude. On the front steps are two cartoonish statues that appear to have been fashioned out of papier-mache and thickly coated with bronze-colored paint. One is of a surrendering marine—apparently based on a photograph of Sergeant Steve Kirtley—with his arms up and his hands clasped behind his head; the other is a replica of the Statue of Liberty with a white bird (a symbol of Islam) caged in her abdomen. Inside was more of the same: displays illustrating America’s “role of evil” in the world over the past several decades; lots of gory photographs of wounded children presented as victims of American bombings; and a framed copy of an important-looking “spy document,” stamped “Classified” and “Top Secret,” but which on closer inspection turned out to be a memo requesting additional drivers for the embassy’s motor pool. There were also pieces of the helicopter engines recovered in the Iranian desert following the failed rescue mission, photographs of the hostages themselves, and somewhat dated propaganda showcasing America and Saddam Hussein as partners in crime. In its preoccupation with American symbols, the whole exhibit is more a defacement than an indictment, like drawing a big nose and mustache on a poster of someone famous. That such a gloating, adolescent display has endured in the heart of Tehran for a quarter century says more about Iran than it does about America.
The taking of the embassy in Tehran was a crime. The argument of the hostage takers that it was engaged in a massive spy operation intent on stopping the revolution, killing Khomeini, and restoring the Peacock Throne
