Golacinski stood and got everyone’s attention. He announced in a loud voice that Clark was coming to start discussions, which created a stir. “Are there any questions?” he said, and when he was promptly pulled from the chair the big room echoed with laughter.
Light moments like this were rare. All of the Americans had been threatened repeatedly with execution, and they took it seriously. Golacinski and Roeder had been handcuffed together one night and, with blankets thrown over their heads, taken upstairs and outside, where they were told to stand against the wall.
“Nothing will happen to you,” the guard told him reassuringly, and then added, less so, “It will be quick.”
The guard didn’t speak English well, so he probably meant that they would not be left standing there long, but the expression had chilling implications. Golacinski doubted that they would be shot, and the longer he stood there he doubted it more. It turned out that they were just being moved to a new spot.
Richard Queen, the gangly vice consul, felt himself slipping into depression. He knew the symptoms. Long hours of sleep, a general listlessness, a chronic sense of despair and hopelessness. Tehran was his first assignment as a foreign service officer. He had grown up in suburban New York and distinguished himself as a middle-distance runner on his high school track team, fast enough to be among the better runners in the state, but not fast enough to compete beyond that level. Running suited Queen because it was a solitary pursuit, and he was in all things a solitary, precise man with extraordinary patience for detail work. He loved, for instance, a Civil War board game that came with a set of instructions that totaled more than three hundred pages, and which took months to play. His interest in war and history prompted him to apply to West Point, where he had been accepted, only to be turned away because of poor eyesight, a disappointment that had led to what he considered the happiest four years of his life at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, where he had majored in history. He had gone on to earn a master’s degree at the University of Michigan and had been proceeding halfheartedly toward a Ph.D. when he had taken the foreign service exam and done surprisingly well. Making history, traveling to exotic places on a government payroll, sounded a lot more interesting and secure than teaching it at a community college somewhere, so when the job was offered Queen grabbed it. He liked Tehran, despite the hardships. The work itself didn’t appeal to him, but he enjoyed the informal, fraternal atmosphere, which he imagined was like soldiering together in a besieged fort. He also liked going to work in blue jeans.
Even before he was taken hostage, Queen had come to dislike Iranians. He fought against it, because he knew such a feeling was unfair, but in his visa work he had spent long parts of every workday interviewing applicants, who one after another lied to him. It was a desperate time for many Iranians trying to escape the ongoing political tumult and violence. His job was to avoid giving visas to those who were looking only for an excuse to get to the United States, who had no intention of coming back. So-called students would bring school records with them that were obviously forged—Queen would hold the paper up to the light and see through the smudges and erasures. He had begun to believe that cheating the American consulate was a national pastime. It seemed every Iranian he met, on or off the job, wanted him to help them get a visa, if not for themselves then for a family member or friend.
Once, returning from a small party in north Tehran, he and fellow vice consul Mark Lijek had been stopped at a roadblock manned by a motley crew of Revolutionary Guards. The diplomatic license plates on their car prompted questions, and their American citizenship earned them a trip to the guards’ local headquarters. Queen had been drinking enough that it showed, and the session there began with a pious official berating them for violating the “Islamic purity” of the nation. One of the guards in the room had sat spinning an automatic pistol around his finger. They were lectured about America’s sins and asked what their jobs were at the embassy. When Lijek said that they worked at the consulate, the tone of the session abruptly and dramatically changed.
“Can you help us get a visa?” the official asked, and out came a familiar tale of woe.
They heard the same sob stories often, as if there were stories circulating on the black market that were guaranteed to unlock the stone heart of American officials. He got so tired of hearing them that he found himself rewarding the occasional applicant who appeared honest. One young woman told him that she needed a visa because she wanted to attend high school in the United States.
“We don’t give visas for high school,” he told her.
“Oh.”
She appeared ready to leave it at that, which was so refreshing that Queen had pressed on.
“Why do you want to go to high school in America?”
“I’d like to go because my parents are arranging a marriage for me and I don’t want to get married.”
Queen was startled by her candor. This sounded like an honest reason. It wasn’t up to the usual standards for granting a visa but Queen was impressed.
“What happens if you don’t get the visa?”
“Then, I don’t get the visa,” the woman said simply, shrugging. Here was someone looking for a way out of a difficult spot.
“Okay,” he had told her. “You’re honest. You get the visa.”
As a captive now, he passed most of his time in slumber so heavy he felt drugged. Even when he was awake he spaced out. He worked at remembering and imagining the pretty girls he had known in college, some of whom he had admired urgently from a distance but never approached, and he kicked himself for his lack of gumption. This stint in Tehran had enriched his appreciation for girls, particularly American girls, with their laughter and their gorgeous long legs in tight Levi’s and clean sneakers and beautiful white teeth. Why hadn’t he approached one of them when he had the chance? They surely wouldn’t find him appealing now. He was unshaven, his hair hung down over his ears, and he reeked. He had not been allowed to shower or change his clothes in weeks. His underclothes were filthy. When he was finally allowed to take a shower, he washed out his clothing and was given a clean pair of underpants, only they were in a boy’s size. His complaints were shrugged off. Feeling humiliated, he stretched the underpants and squeezed himself uncomfortably into them. Better discomfort than disease. He became obsessive about cleanliness, policing the space around his mattress for every mote of dust or crumb of food. It gave him something to do that had a marginal claim of importance.
The two remaining female hostages, Kathryn Koob and Ann Swift, were kept apart from the men and watched over for the most part by female guards.
Like Queen, Koob’s response to solitude and boredom was to turn inward, but for her the experience was spiritual, and exhilarating. On the second night of her captivity she experienced something that, the more she thought about it (and she had plenty of time to think), seemed to be a miracle. She had been sleeping on a bed in one of the staff cottages under a cape her grandmother had made for her years before when she was awakened by someone sitting down next to her on the bed. There was no sound, and no one touched her, which was the way her older sisters would sometimes gently awaken her at home when she was a child. One or the other would sit on the bed beside her and, instead of poking or shaking her or even speaking to her, would wait patiently for her to stir. As Koob surfaced from sleep, she realized that this “sister” was surely one of her Iranian guards. She opened her eyes—
In that moment she no longer felt alone. She believed she had been visited by an angel, her guardian angel, and was reminded of the constant presence of God, and after that she increasingly found solace in prayer. She had been raised on a farm with her five sisters in the Lutheran tradition her German great-grandparents had brought with them to Iowa. As a girl she had worked at a local Lutheran church to earn a scholarship to little Wartburg College, the Lutheran school. Her original ambition had been to become a high school drama teacher, and she taught speech and drama until she earned a master’s degree from the University of Denver in 1968, where she first learned about the foreign service. It had appealed to a part of her that had no obvious antecedent; the wanderlust seemed hers alone. Years of travel had pulled her away from her family, her religion, her roots. Now, ironically, alone in captivity, alone with her thoughts day and night, she felt herself more than ever before surrounded with love and family. Emotionally, she had rediscovered home.
It gave her a sense of calm and of purpose. She set about disarming her guards’ hostility with submission and kindness, as a novitiate in a nunnery might submit joyfully to religious discipline. When they insisted on binding her hands with a strip of cloth during the night, removing it in the morning, she took the cloth strip and neatly folded it like a bandage and tied it with a few unraveled threads. When the guard came looking for the cloth strip to tie her the following evening, she handed him the tidy bundle and he held it in his palm with wonder. He laughed and took it off to show the others, and didn’t come back. In the first few weeks she got to know the young women who guarded her in shifts. They loved to talk and to practice their English. They were all romantic and
