something that felt like wet cardboard. It didn’t hurt, but it surprised him and dazed him a little. Once again he heard Ebtekar enter the room and speak to the man in Farsi, and then leave.
This time he heard or sensed something coming, because he ducked and the blow missed him. His chair was violently upended, leaving him on his back, still tied to it, his feet sticking up in the air. He was being kicked, but the arms of the chair prevented his attacker from landing a solid blow. Then it stopped. He lay there a long time on his back, blindfolded, until about an hour later someone came in, untied him, and led him back upstairs.
If they had a hard time believing in the innocent intentions of Queen, Koob, Golacinski, and others, there was no way the students were ready to accept that Michael Metrinko was just a diplomat. Multilingual, well connected, widely traveled and hyperkinetic, he was made to order for spying.
He possessed a stubborn streak that at times made him oblivious to danger. He had spent the first few days of the takeover tied to a chair, irate about missing his dinner engagement and standing up his friends. He didn’t have time for this nonsense. What did they think they were going to accomplish by this stunt? One of the students offered him a cigarette and Metrinko had reflexively said no. He was dying for a smoke…but, no. It was a standard politeness; if you were going to light a cigarette, first you offered one to anyone else in the room. But under these circumstances the gesture was jarring. Accepting anything from these bastards, no matter how small, was acquiescence; it would imply that there was something normal or acceptable about the situation, which there was not. Metrinko resolved right then that, no matter how long this took, he would take nothing from them. He would deny them even the smallest satisfaction.
“This is ridiculous,” Metrinko told one of the students who spoke English. “The American government has accepted your revolution. We were trying to come to terms with it. We’re trying to find mutual interests, something to build on. What you’ve done is counterproductive.”
The Iranian shrugged off Metrinko’s argument. He made it clear that he didn’t believe a word of it, that he regarded everything this American spy said as a lie.
Metrinko didn’t speak to him in Farsi because he felt he would lose an important advantage if they knew he was fluent in the language. They were all conversing around him freely in their own language, assuming that he couldn’t understand. Having that secret had saved his life and that of eight other Westerners ten months earlier in Tabriz.
He had been there in the weeks after the shah fled, camped out at the empty American consulate. Iran was in its ecstasy of fulfillment and expectation. The executions had not yet begun. Metrinko was the only American in any official capacity to stay on in the northwestern city. When the facility was evacuated, he had offered to remain in part to keep watch on things, and in part because he felt responsible for four young Americans who had been locked up in a car-smuggling operation several months earlier. The consulate was a fifteen-acre walled estate with beautiful gardens, tennis courts, and a swimming pool. He had opened up the grounds to local Iranians the previous summer. Now whatever goodwill that gesture earned was forgotten in a tidal wave of anti-Americanism. Demonstrators gathered to stone and jeer the compound and to taunt its Iranian guards, who like most of the police and army (as opposed to the air force) had stayed loyal to the shah. They felt angry and betrayed by his departure. There had been a few testy moments at the gates. Once, when his army guards had responded to taunting demonstrators by leveling their guns, Metrinko had stepped between them and talked the guards into backing down. He felt relieved and even vindicated in those days, being the one American in Tabriz who had judged the situation safe enough to stay. At that point, no matter what was happening outside his walls, the maid and the cook were still showing up for work, the guards were still keeping watch, and he was enjoying himself, watching TV at night, drinking, smoking cigarettes, and playing cards. He was excited to be there, by the buzz of possibility in the air.
He was also glad that the shah was gone. The whole story of American involvement in Iran twenty-five years earlier was a disgrace. As a freedom-loving American, he was embarrassed by his country’s abandonment of its basic principles and by its support of the shah’s often heavy-handed regime. Back when he was a Peace Corps volunteer, he had seen some of his students hauled off to jail by the police just for speaking critically of government policy. He was in Tabriz because of his enthusiasm and fascination with the unfolding changes. He was looking forward to rebuilding relations between America and Iran on sounder footing. Metrinko wished the revolution well. He understood what most Iranians wanted from it. On the first of February he had watched on TV as Khomeini returned to Tehran, a day of intense national celebration. He and the guards heard the cheers and blasts and blaring car horns outside their walls. It wasn’t a bad thing, he thought. Public enthusiasm had elevated Khomeini to the status of a king, or a god, which made him dangerous, but most indications were that he would retire to Qom and continue leading a nice, quiet, religious life. The more secular revolutionaries who had surrounded him in Paris, men like Bazargan, Yazdi, and Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, had advocated free elections and an Islamic-flavored but essentially democratic state. There was reason to hope for a return to stability and a whole new and better Iran. America would have a lot of repair work to do, but there were deep connections between the two countries—financial, military, and geopolitical—that would be foolish to discard.
Those weeks before Khomeini’s return were like living in the calm before a pending eruption. The headless regime’s army and police were still in place, people were still going to work every day, things appeared normal but you could feel the pressure building. When Khomeini’s plane landed all hell had broken loose. Revolutionary forces rose up everywhere to tear down all remnants of the shah’s power. In the days before it happened, Metrinko got a tip from some Iranian friends allied with the revolt that the prison in Tabriz was going to be liberated, so he had visited the young Americans locked up there and advised them to come directly to the consulate when they were freed. He gave them small maps to show them the way and promised not to leave without them. He liked them. They were victims, nice, adventurous kids who had been given two hundred dollars each to drive cars to Tehran during their school break. They had delivered the cars as promised, but had been arrested when they tried to take the train west out of Iran with their money back to Europe. Their passports indicated they had entered the country with cars, and now they were leaving without cars, and without having paid the customs fee. So they went to jail, charged with smuggling. They had been there through Iran’s eruption. Now they were an afterthought, accused of a minor crime by a regime that no longer existed. As predicted, the prison was stormed and all of its inmates freed. The four arrived on foot, elated, still wearing their inmate pajamas and slippers, enormously relieved to be free but now imprisoned with Metrinko in the consulate with the country coming apart all around them. They were joined by four fellow escapees, two Germans, an Austrian, and an Australian.
Tabriz was in chaos. Anger, revenge, religious fervor, and revolutionary zeal combined to unleash a nationwide spasm of bloodletting, a season of murder. Many associated with the former regime were hunted down and killed, policemen, bureaucrats, local and national leaders, civilian and military. In some cities the entire police force was executed. Nobody was even keeping track. The raid on the prison had been followed by an attack on the main military base and a general collapse of authority. The armory had been looted and the streets were full of excited amateur gunmen with a seemingly limitless supply of ammunition. It seemed as if everybody was fighting everybody. Metrinko heard by radio that the American embassy in Tehran was in danger of being overrun. Telephone service was up and down, but mostly down. Much of the fury at large was anti-American, but for a time it seemed to bypass the consulate, which looked empty. His guards and staff had melted away. Metrinko and his eight charges huddled down. It was too dangerous to go outdoors, even inside the compound. Next door, a SAVAK crew was cornered and fighting for its life. Once they counted more than seventy rounds fired in a minute. Metrinko had been able to arrange with the besieged staff in Tehran to have a team of Americans waiting for him and the students across the border in Turkey, but with the violence in the streets there was no safe way to move. They were stuck and for a time, it appeared, forgotten. Metrinko had put his charges to work helping him to destroy every letter, file, memo, note, and report in his office.
On Valentine’s Day, the embassy in Tehran was invaded. In Tabriz, Metrinko was in his office when he saw a group of armed men in Iranian air force uniforms come over the compound’s back wall. They opened fire on the consulate, shooting out the windows. He dropped to the floor behind the desk and made a quick phone call—the phone was working!—to an Iranian friend, Ali, who was part of an activist group allied with the revolution. The man’s mother-in-law picked up the phone. Metrinko told her who he was and what was happening before the armed invaders burst in, grabbed him, and tied his hands.
Metrinko and his charges were marched to one of the kangaroo courts that were in full swing throughout the city. This one was a former government building, the Youth Palace, which had been commandeered. There
