home. Everything about the place had fascinated him, its people, its history, its culture, its language. Limbert was a language sponge, and Farsi he found deeply melodic and beautiful. When he graduated from college he joined the Peace Corps and returned. He taught for two years in Kurdistan, where he had met and married Parvaneh. He had come back to the States to get a Ph.D. in history at Harvard, and then the two returned to Shiraz, where Limbert finished his thesis and took a job teaching at the university. He had left that to join the foreign service, and, given his background, he was immediately asked if he would like to be assigned to Tehran. He declined, in part because he wanted to try something new, but also because he disapproved of the relationship between the United States and the shah. He did not want to be party to that policy.
Only after the shah’s flight had he agreed to return, and when he did in August he had found the revolution’s potential to be thrilling. In former years, political discussion in Iran had always been fearful and muted. When people spoke about issues and current events they did so in hushed tones and in language laden with double meanings. Now politics was a loud public obsession. There were at least a hundred different newspapers, each barking a different line, and the TV, radio, and coffeehouses were filled with discussion and argument. The country was remaking itself, riding a burst of emotion and creative power that had been suppressed for a generation. Everything about the country was up for grabs. A new Iran was struggling to take shape, and Limbert was delighted to help design America’s new role in it.
At some point that first morning he was able to get a glimpse in the direction of the paper noise behind him and saw to his relief that one of his captors was reading a newspaper. Then the hostages were untied late in the afternoon, two at a time, and taken to the kitchen, where they were fed.
Limbert thought,
“What is your name?” Limbert was asked in English.
He told them.
“What do you do?”
“I am the second secretary.”
That was all he said. The others in the room responded in the same way, offering only their name and job title.
As the night wore on, he and the others nagged at the guards to let them out of the chairs so that they could sleep, and eventually this was allowed. A long rope was used to tie their feet together; Limbert was bound this way to Charlie Jones. They stretched out on their backs on the floor, and for the first time in two days the second secretary dropped off into a heavy sleep.
Through that long second day there were still nine Americans attached to the embassy who were at large in Tehran. Kathryn Koob had waited out the beginning of the hostage crisis across the city at her Iran-America Society campus. After losing touch with the men in the embassy vault, she and her assistant Bill Royer and their staff had stayed on the phone with Washington all day and into the night, relaying whatever information they could find.
Koob was an officer in the International Communications Agency (ICA), a branch of the American foreign service (soon to be called the U.S. Information Agency) that dealt with cultural affairs. She was a big, wide, soft woman of prodigious energy and idealism, who brought a missionary zeal to her work. As she saw it, politics dealt with the things that kept people apart, but culture—theater, painting, literature—dealt with the things that tied all people together. She was an idealist but not a cockeyed one. She knew her effort to forge creative ties with this hate-filled new order would be fraught with difficulty. At her apartment she had a bag packed at all times in case there was an emergency evacuation, and she had sat in on the regular security briefing at the embassy where the practical risks had been evaluated. She and Bill Royer, who had arrived six weeks earlier, had been issued two- way radios to monitor the frequency used by the marine guards. In the event of an emergency they had been instructed not to call the embassy; it would only add to the confusion. So as their colleagues were taken hostage, Koob and Royer had stayed by the phones in Koob’s office.
Close to midnight Mark and Cora Lijek, Bob Anders, and Kathy and Joe Stafford arrived. They had been among those who just walked away from the consulate and, unlike some of their less fortunate colleagues, had made it back to their apartments. They manned the society’s little phone bank through the night while Koob and Royer got some sleep, curling up on couches. In the morning of the second day, the others left to link up with Lee Schatz, the agricultural attache who had watched the takeover from his office in a high-rise across the street from the embassy and who was now being sheltered at the Swedish mission.
Suspecting that it was only a matter of time before her own complex would be overrun, Koob had some of the society’s most important papers—those defining its status as an Iranian organization—removed to the home of one of her board members, and even arranged to have several rugs she had borrowed from a local merchant returned. She and Royer were both on the phone to Washington when a staff member interrupted at about one- thirty in the afternoon to say, “They’re here.”
They both knew immediately who “they” were.
Koob and Royer set down the phones, walked quickly down a back staircase, and left the building through a door to the parking lot. A secretary was waiting in a car, and she pulled out of the lot and into the busy street in front of the campus. As part of her preparations for this, Koob had phoned the West German Goethe Institute and had been assured of safe haven there by its director. The institute was only three blocks away, and she and Royer were received warmly. They sipped tea and discussed their next move when a secretary from the society called to say that the “students” who had come for her had left. So Koob and Royer went back to their own complex and once again successfully dialed up the connection to Washington.
She kept the line open until the students arrived again late that afternoon. Koob and Royer tried to sneak out the back door again with Lillian Johnson, one of the embassy secretaries who had been stranded at the airport the day before waiting for a flight home, but this time the students had surrounded the building.
Koob and Johnson hid in a basement lavatory, crouched silently in a toilet stall, but were eventually found. As the three were being driven through slow-moving traffic across Tehran toward the embassy, Koob contemplated jumping from the car with her colleagues and making a run for it, but she decided against it. Where would they go? In the present climate, if Iranians on the street saw Americans being pursued they might attack. The students in the front seat were talking softly to each other and she strained to listen. They were speaking in Arabic. They must have known she understood some Farsi.
As they approached the embassy neighborhood, Koob could hear the roar of the demonstrators outside. It was an ugly, hateful sound, “
They were let out of the car near the motor pool gate and advised to keep their heads down as they ran the short distance into the compound. Once inside they were instructed to sit on a small plot of tall grass behind the chancery. It had been raining the day before but the ground and grass were already dry, even dusty. A short while later they were led to the second of the three staff cottages by a female guard in a chador, the full-length black drape worn over the head. Inside, passing the living room, Koob caught a glimpse of some of the embassy men tied to chairs. Royer found it strange that none of the Americans he saw, all of whom looked him up and down as they entered, uttered a word of greeting. Koob was searched, first hesitantly by a young woman clearly embarrassed to have her hands on her, and then a second time, more aggressively, by the same young woman after she had been instructed to do a more thorough job. This time she told Koob to remove her dress and then carefully patted down the American woman’s ample girth front and back and ran her fingers through Koob’s thin brown hair. Dressed again, she was reunited with Royer.
The guards demanded that they turn over their jewelry. Koob handed over her rings.
“One of our experts will examine these,” a guard told her.
“For what?” she asked and was amused to be informed that they were checking for communications or homing devices. If it hadn’t been so serious, Koob was inclined to laugh.
