On the then emerging (now prevailing) popular notion that those who have experienced any sort of trauma need professional help to cope, he and the rest of the hostages were subjected to a daunting series of medical and psychological examinations in Wiesbaden. Waiting with noses pressed to the window were American and international reporters. They would impose a different kind of captivity. When Metrinko phoned home for the first time he felt a little sheepish; it was the middle of the night in Olyphant. His parents not only didn’t mind, they had been waiting with a TV crew for his call. His mother explained that they had been deluged by the press.
“This one is particularly nice,” she said. “Would you talk to him?”
In Germany he was given a free satellite phone with an answering service, and once the number got out to family and friends, messages began to pile up. It seemed like everybody in the world was waiting in line to talk to him.
One call was from an Iranian professor in Bonn, a man he had met when he was in Tabriz, who had an unusual invitation. It seemed a daughter of Imam Khomeini was visiting in Germany and wanted to meet with Metrinko and discuss what had happened. He turned her down. He wanted nothing further to do with the Khomeinis and Iran.
Some old friends living in Germany had a more welcome suggestion. They offered to pick him up and take him touring through the country by car, just to get away from everything. His minders in Wiesbaden were appalled. They had a full agenda of activities planned, more tests, meetings, debriefings. They said he couldn’t possibly go.
“Am I a prisoner?” Metrinko asked.
The question brought looks of horror.
So he went touring, eating, drinking, and talking his way down the Rhine.
In the months and years that followed, some of the freed captives became, in effect, professional hostages, writing and lecturing and popping up whenever events called the crisis to mind. Most just got on with their lives. When I interviewed Greg Persinger, who now works in Roanoke, Virginia, for a company that makes electronic devices for the military and law enforcement, he said that few of his friends or coworkers had even been aware that he was once one of the hostages in Iran until the company newsletter ran a small feature story about him several years ago. Some of the hostages have never spoken of their ordeal and refused to do so with me, and when I started working on this book in 2001, ten of the hostages were dead: Malcolm Kalp, Bill Keough, Richard Queen, John Graves, Bob Blucker, Lee Holland, Bert Moore, Jerry Plotkin, Bob Ode, and John McKeel. Ann Swift was killed in a horseback riding accident while I was working on the book.
I heard a story about Kalp from Keith Hall, a fellow CIA operative, who said he spent a long night with the former hostage in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, in 1989, on the tenth anniversary of the embassy takeover. Kalp was drinking and had a tube-shaped grenade launcher in the backseat of his car. He and Hall and another agency man went off in search of the Iranian embassy, into which Kalp announced his intent to mark the occasion by lobbing a grenade. It turned out, fortunately for all concerned, that there was no Iranian embassy in Tegucigalpa.
Metrinko came home and completely renovated his family’s sprawling home in Olyphant along the lines of the meticulous plans he had made in his head during all those months alone. Today he is officially retired from the U.S. State Department, but he is busier than ever putting his language skills and experience in that part of the world to work for the United States. During his long career in foreign service, in addition to his seven years of service in Iran, he spent four years in Turkey, four in Israel, over a year in Yemen (on two separate tours), six months in Syria, seven months in Afghanistan, and years at Department headquarters, where he served as deputy director of Iran and Iraq affairs. He served as consul general in Tel Aviv, and then spent three years as a director in the refuge bureau. His small home in the Virginia suburbs is furnished with mementos of his travels, and he is still frequently gone. During the years I worked on this book, Metrinko was away for months at a time on government contract work in Afghanistan and Iraq. He still has the bowl and spoon he used in captivity and the collection of poetry that he took from the chancery library.
In answer to an e-mailed question in July 2005, he sent me the following:
This response comes to you from my military base at Farah in southwestern Afghanistan, a
John Limbert spent a long and distinguished State Department career in the Middle and Near East, including tours in Algeria, Djibouti, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. He served as U.S. ambassador to Mauritania. He also taught political science at the U.S. Naval Academy and was a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Center for International Affairs. After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, he went to Baghdad with the Organization for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, where he was responsible for trying to restore the looted Iraqi Museum. When I interviewed him he was serving as president of the American Foreign Service Association, a group that represents the interests of career diplomats.
Tom Ahern retired from the CIA in 1989, having spent the bulk of his career in Southeast Asia, and accepted a contract with the agency’s Center for the Study of Intelligence. When I met him he was working on the seventh in a series of classified books on both the operational and the analytical aspects of the CIA’s participation in the Vietnam War. He lives with his wife in a Virginia suburb, where he kindly agreed to discuss with me his experiences in captivity for the first time, and did so with remarkable candor. Bill Daugherty served out his career for the agency and then made real the imaginary classes he had taught in his long months of solitary confinement. He is a professor of political science at Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah, Georgia, and is the author of a book about his hostage experience,
Dave Roeder retired from the air force in 1989 as a full colonel and, from his home in Alexandria, Virginia, has on occasion served as an informal leader and spokesman for the hostages’ ongoing effort to sue the Iranian government for damages related to their captivity. As lead plaintiff, Roeder won a default verdict in federal court that would award each of the hostages $4.4 million. Iran declined to defend itself, but no payout appears likely. The judgment was vacated, and appeals have been fruitless. Lawyers for the former hostages continue to pursue remedy through legislation. The damages theoretically would be paid out of millions of dollars of Iranian assets still tied up in litigation before an international court. Contesting the awards, as I have said, is the American government.
“It never occurred to me when I was getting the crap beat out of me in a Tehran jail cell that I would have to one day fight the same government that I was defending,” said Roeder. “It’s just so demoralizing. So discouraging.”
Colonel Chuck Scott retired from the army when he returned from Tehran and wrote a book about his experience, entitled
Joe Subic, the man so many of the former hostages regard as a turn-coat, was back in the army and serving in Iraq where my friend the journalist and author Christina Asquith interviewed him on my behalf in the summer of 2004. Subic said he was a different man today than he was twenty-five years ago, and acknowledged that under duress he occasionally cooperated with his captors, but not to the extent some of his fellow captives have alleged, and no more, he says, than did others. He was in Iraq with a National Guard unit from Florida, where he is the police chief in a small town.
Kathryn Koob, who had a religious awakening in captivity, is now a part-time professor at her old school, Wartburg College, in Waverly, Iowa. Joe Hall, who pined so for his wife, Cheri, through all those months in captivity, split up with her when he returned. They had grown apart during the fourteen months and could never
