Guests of the Ayatollah

chair.

“Joan Walsh, political section, secretary,” said the second, and so on, around the room, until they came to Ann Swift.

“Ann Swift, first secretary, political section,” she said. Swift spoke some Farsi, and when she heard her job title being translated as “typist,” her ego bristled and she immediately corrected them, a reflex she would live to regret.

“I’m not a typist,” she corrected. “I’m the first secretary,” and went on to explain that she was, in effect, the highest-ranking embassy official they had in captivity.

A small group came for Limbert in the ambassador’s residence. He asked where they were taking him.

“We want you to come with us to the vault,” one said.

“Oh, of course, I’d be pleased,” Limbert said. “Nothing would make me happier. It would be an honor.”

Relaxed now after the ordeal on the staircase, he fell back on the elaborate formal courtesies of Farsi. So long as they spoke to him nicely, as this student had, then he would respond in kind. He was, after all, a diplomat. And under the circumstances it didn’t hurt to remind them of their culture’s traditional politeness.

They escorted him across the darkening compound to the chancery, showed him the basement window where they had broken in, and then led him to the top floor. The coms vault at the west end looked like it had been ransacked. He saw Ahern, Jones, Barnes, and the others who had evidently locked themselves inside for hours sitting outside it on the corridor floor against the wall with their hands tied. Limbert was led into the vault.

“What is the combination to this safe?” they asked.

“I don’t know,” Limbert said. “I don’t work here.”

“What is in these safes?” they asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, truthfully.

“What are they in here for?”

“I presume for safekeeping,” he said. “I am not even allowed to enter here.”

Then they showed him his wallet. He had left it in the vault early that afternoon before stepping out to talk to the students on the steps. Ordinarily he was not allowed in the vault, but today it had seemed prudent to leave his wallet there.

“If you don’t give us the combination, we’ll shoot everybody here,” his questioner said.

It seemed unlikely. In the few hours he had spent with this crowd so far he had judged them to be amateurish and, in their own way, well intentioned.

“That’s an empty threat,” Limbert said. “I can’t give the combinations to you because I don’t know them.”

Taken back to the residence, Limbert passed Barry Rosen in the hall and said, “Barry, here it goes again,” referring to the February takeover, in which Rosen had been briefly held captive. “You should have known better than to hang around.”

Rosen, the embassy’s press attache, was a cipher to his captors. He was short, dark-skinned, and bearded, and he spoke such fluent Farsi that they were reluctant to believe he was an American.

“I’m an American and proud of it,” he told them, still cocky and still convinced that these renegades would be chased off the embassy in short order.

He was taken to the bedroom of the Pakistani chef who lived and worked at the ambassador’s residence, where he was briefly questioned by a young woman who wore a long brown jilbab, or robe, and khimar, or head scarf, which covered most of her face. She had beautiful eyes, Rosen thought, but nothing else about her was appealing. She seemed to regard him as the personification of evil. Here before her was the architect of everything wrong in Iran in modern history, and she nearly spat out the words she spoke.

“What is your job?” she asked.

Rosen told her the truth.

“What is the true function of a ‘press attache,’” she asked, implying that the job description was a cover. “Who are the Iranian ‘journalists’ you had contact with?”

He told her that he would be happy to discuss his job with her at some other time.

“This isn’t the time or place,” he said. “This is the territory of the United States, which you have invaded.”

She responded angrily. This was their country, not his. The so-called embassy was actually a spy den, and now she and the other students had taken it back. He and his colleagues were the invaders, planning their “conspiracies and corruptions.”

Rosen had noticed that Yusef, the chef, had a large bottle of scotch on a nearby shelf, so instead of engaging in pointless argument with the woman he reached out to the bottle and suggested that they both have a drink. Her eyes widened in horror. In the new Iran to offer alcohol to a pious daughter of the faith was unforgivably rude, an insult to the purity of Muslim womanhood. She threw up her arms in disgust and exited the room, slamming the door behind her in a dismissive swish of fabric.

* * *

Ibrahim Yazdi, the foreign minister, had left Laingen, Tomseth, and Howland at midafternoon for the hour- and-a-half drive to Qom to meet with Khomeini. Before leaving, Yazdi asked Laingen, “Where do you and your colleagues propose to go?”

The charge, still hot, told Yazdi that it was up to the provisional government.

“You have an obligation to protect us,” Laingen told him. There were anti-American mobs on the streets all over Tehran; indeed, the charge had learned that an armed gang had already been asking for him and the other two Americans at the front gates of the Foreign Ministry.

Yazdi said he didn’t believe the situation was that bad but made arrangements for the three to spend the night in the Foreign Ministry building. He was exhausted. His plane from Algiers had flown through the night and arrived only that morning, and he had not slept for two days. He snoozed in the car on the drive east to the holy city.

Khomeini normally rested in the afternoon and received guests early in the evening. When Yazdi was shown into the imam’s receiving room he sat on a floor cushion alongside the white-bearded cleric and told him what had happened at the U.S. embassy. It was his impression that Khomeini was hearing the news for the first time.

“Who are they?” he asked. “Why have they done this?”

Yazdi explained that the hostage takers appeared to be university students, and that they were demanding the immediate return of the shah and his assets.

“Go and kick them out,” Khomeini said.

Yazdi did nothing with those instructions at first. There didn’t seem to be any reason for haste. The takeover was accomplished. With the imam’s permission it would be a simple matter to clear out the students and give the compound back to the American mission, and it might be best to let things cool off for a few hours before starting. He briefed Khomeini on the now controversial meeting he and Bazargan had held with Brzezinski in the prime minister’s hotel room in Algiers. Then he got back in a car for the drive to Tehran and figured he would relay the imam’s instructions about the embassy to Bazargan when he returned.

So the weary foreign minister was startled that evening in Tehran, after he had been driven back from Qom, when he heard on the radio the imam’s first public statement endorsing the takeover and the goals of the students. It wasn’t halfhearted either. In a complete reversal of the sentiments he had expressed earlier, Khomeini warmly supported the move and praised the students. Yazdi was not surprised. He had come to know Khomeini, and despite the ayatollah’s fierce visage, he was a maddeningly vacillating man. In political matters, he tended to side with whomever last had his ear, and because he often regarded the affairs of state as trivial compared to his spiritual concerns, he was usually reluctant to make unpopular decisions. The jubilant scene outside the embassy was being shown on television throughout the country. Yazdi was impressed by the way this stunt had been orchestrated. Whoever was responsible, he thought, had wisely avoided informing the imam in advance, knowing that Khomeini would be less likely to oppose a popular fait accompli than a half-baked idea. The planners had done a great job of getting out the crowd, too. Yazdi had reports of food being served, street performances, and people being delivered by the busload from all over the region. Some of it might have been spontaneous, and the celebratory mood was definitely real, but some serious planning had gone into it.