confiscated his jewelry, concerned particularly about losing his precious rings, one given to him by his parents on his long-ago twenty-first birthday and his wedding ring—he had met and married his wife, Rita, a fellow foreign service officer, twenty-two years earlier. He clenched his hands into fists and resisted as the guards tried to pry his fingers open.
“Leave him alone,” protested marine guard Rocky Sickmann. “He’s just an old guy.”
At sixty-four, Ode still bristled when he was called “old,” but he was grateful for the marine’s sentiment.
“You’re a bunch of goddamn thieves,” he told the guards, who eventually got his hands open and removed the rings, assuring him that he would get them back.
“Look,” said one, holding up a big yellow envelope with “Odie” written on it.
“You don’t even have my name spelled correctly. How in the hell are you ever going to get these things back to me?”
They took the rings.
“Goddamn thieves,” said Ode.
Ode was tall and thin, with a face that looked like it belonged in a Norman Rockwell painting, long and narrow with a high forehead and a chin that got lost somewhere between his lower lip and his collarbone. He wore big glasses that accentuated the narrowness of his face and magnified his eyes, which gave him, with his big nose, the slightly comical appearance of someone peering into a fish-eye lens. Four years earlier he had been forced out of the State Department because of its mandatory retirement age of sixty. The postwork lifestyle hadn’t suited him, or his family budget. He had gotten himself a real estate license and was making a decent living at that, but he had always been a world traveler, a kind of professional tourist, and selling homes in the Virginia suburbs didn’t excite him. So when the department began offering retirees a chance to take temporary postings around the world, filling in for full-time officers who needed a break, Ode had embarked on a series of foreign adventures. He had gone to Guyana to help out after the messianic preacher Jim Jones and his followers committed mass suicide, and had taken a three-month posting to Jamaica. In Tehran he was filling in for a consular officer who was taking a three-month medical leave. Ode had not even agreed to the full three months. He had stipulated that he would take the job only if he could be home in time for Christmas, so the department had enlisted him for only forty-five days, thirty of which were gone. He had spent his free time in Tehran taking long walks around the city and snapping pictures.
He lost his defiant, seen-it-all attitude only once in the first weeks, when his captors demanded that he tell them where he had been living. He had been using the apartment of the vice consul on leave, and he realized he didn’t know the address. He knew how to walk to the apartment, however, so he drew them a map.
A navy veteran of World War Two, he was so certain in the beginning that President Carter would attempt a rescue that he refused to remove his shoes. They were new ones, Hush Puppy loafers, and were still a little stiff and hard to pull on without a shoehorn. He had taken them off the first night, and it had been such a struggle to get them back on that he kept them on, for fear of being shoeless when the time came to run. He could see how disorganized and amateurish his captors were and figured they would be a pushover for any military unit with the smallest level of discipline and training. Surely somewhere in the multibillion-dollar American military arsenal was a commando unit similar to the Israelis who had made the rescue at Entebbe. He tried to picture in his mind how the attack would happen, how the American force would enter the building, how they would take them out. He was good to go.
He had no patience whatsoever for the idealism or rhetoric of his tormentors, and more than most of the hostages, perhaps with the license of old age, Ode flaunted his contempt. On the night of the second day the students had brought a camera crew through the residence and had awakened him with its bright lights. He rolled over and elevated a long, bony middle finger.
“This is for television!” one of the crew gasped.
Said Ode, lifting the finger still higher, “Yes, and this is for you.”
In the first week of his confinement, Limbert was roughly awakened.
“Come on,” the guard said. “Get up.”
His first thought was they were being released. A blanket was thrown over his head and he was led downstairs and placed in the back of an open truck with several other hostages. As they drove off, he reluctantly concluded that they were not bound for freedom. They stopped just a short distance away, still inside the compound, and were led into a large waiting room at the consulate. It was the room where visa applicants were lined up as they waited to submit their applications, windowless, with parallel rows of railings to control the flow of the lines, brightly lit by fluorescent ceiling strips. Limbert and the others were assigned blankets that were spread out on the hard floor. He counted nineteen other hostages, about one-third of the staff. Two armed guards roamed among them rapping long sticks against the railings, enforcing the rules against speaking or standing, and a third guard with a machine gun stood at one end of the room. They would spend the next two weeks there.
They communicated with gestures and facial expressions. Limbert was pleased to see that no one seemed unduly intimidated or upset. There were occasional chances to whisper to the person on the next blanket over, and a rumor made its way around the room that they were to be visited by some international figure, which made sense, because they continued to count the passing days with disbelief. Surely there would be a resolution soon. Occasionally the students would pass around copies of a document they had found in the seized files that they considered particularly damning. The only time Limbert got to stir from his blanket was when he had to use the toilet. He would stand, wait to be blindfolded, and then was led to the bathroom. The students distributed some magazines and books—Limbert got a copy of
The first group of students who had taken them hostage was largely replaced. The new guards were about the same age as the first crowd but seemed all business. They rarely spoke to Limbert; he could see that any of them who began to converse with him was glared at by the others, so clearly they were under instructions not to interact with the American devils.
Limbert found a small way to break through that reserve at mealtime. He exploited
“Please, before I take a bite, go ahead and have some of my food.”
“No, thank you,” the server would respond.
“But you must,” Limbert would insist.
“No, please, excuse me, but I wouldn’t dream of it,” the server would say, following the standard rules of this game.
The guards were disarmed by his fluency with their language and customs. As Limbert saw it, such moments forced them to set aside their stern demeanor and act more human.
Some of the military officers were annoyed by this behavior, which they interpreted as inappropriate cozying up to the enemy. It particularly bothered Colonel Leland Holland, an assistant defense attache. When he overheard one of the young naval officers addressing a guard with what he regarded as excessive politeness, he took advantage of the first opportunity to whisper to his colleague, “Tell these motherfuckers to shove it. Don’t be so goddamn nice to them.”
After a few days on the hard consulate floor, the hostages were given mattresses, which were a terrific comfort, and which had the effect of more clearly defining each man’s space, which some found vaguely reassuring. The fear of execution was still strong. Richard Queen requested a pencil and piece of paper and wrote out a will to his parents, telling them, “I don’t expect to ever be seeing you again,…I love you more than I can say. Thank you for being my parents.”
Occasionally the higher-ranking students would come through trying to confirm the name and job of each captive. Limbert noticed that his colleagues were being taken off one by one, and would return hours, or sometimes days, later. He assumed they were being interrogated.
Bruce Laingen, the embassy’s indignant but ever hopeful charge d’affaires, along with Tomseth and the embassy’s second-ranking security officer, Mike Howland, were undergoing captivity of a different sort. Still
