excited and completely transported by their cause, by the rightness and importance of it. One of the girls—they were all in their late teens—was happily expecting to be killed.
“Obviously, the United States will send its military people in and we shall all die, and I shall be a martyr,” she said.
“No, no,” Koob protested. She said the United States would not want any of them to die, hostages or students.
The Iranian girls were surprised that Koob had never married. They asked her question after question about things that she regarded as strictly personal, and Koob did her best to give them answers. She was moved in the second week to the living room of the ambassador’s residence, the same room where they had gathered for a Halloween party weeks ago. Jack-o’-lanterns leered down at her from the walls. She felt dumpy and ragged. She had been living in the same green wool dress for weeks. It was limp and shapeless. Her stockings had runs in them and, with a needle and various colors of thread given her by the guards, she stitched them back together. She had not been allowed to bathe, and when her captors agreed to take her underwear and launder it, they didn’t bring it back. She waited for a day or two and then complained.
“They are being washed,” said the imperious young woman who had taken charge of guarding them. Koob called her “Queenie.”
“Can you find me some in the commissary?”
“
“You said that two days ago. In my country, only whores go without underwear. I would like some panties and a bra. I am as embarrassed to go around without underclothing as you are to go out in public without your chador.”
She got clean underwear that day.
Eventually, Koob and Swift roomed together in the residence’s library, a small room painted yellow with pale blue drapes. It had been vandalized by the invaders, furniture had been heaped in the corners, much of it broken, and the walls were spray-painted with the usual revolutionary slogans. The room filled up at night with the female guards. They stretched out, twenty or thirty of them, and slept between their shifts. If a male guard came to the door before all the women had had a chance to throw chadors over their blue jeans and shirts the girls would scream in mock horror. They were clearly having fun.
One day, when Swift was taken off to the bathroom, Queenie questioned Koob about their professional relationship.
“What do you report to Miss Swift?” she asked.
“I don’t report to Miss Swift. I report to Mr. Graves, my supervisor,” she said.
“Miss Swift said you report to her. What kind of things do you tell her about?”
“I don’t report to her.”
“She says you do. Are you calling her a liar?”
Koob said she didn’t understand why Swift would have said such a thing, if in fact she had. Swift had held a higher-ranking position at the embassy, so in that sense she “reported” to her, but not literally. Their exchange ended when Swift returned.
On Thanksgiving night Swift was taken away.
4. World-Devouring Ghouls
Perhaps because he seemed so listless and beaten, Richard Queen was the first hostage asked to sign the petition the students had drafted demanding the return of the shah. The young vice consul actually thought Iran had a good case for demanding the former monarch’s return, but at first he refused to sign.
“I thought your country was a free country,” the student with the petition asked. “If you agree, why don’t you sign it?”
“I don’t
When he was shown the same document the next day with thirty hostage signatures at the bottom, he relented.
“It doesn’t make any difference anyway,” he said.
He signed his name so illegibly that they demanded he print it alongside the signature, and he managed to do that so imprecisely that later reprints of the document would identify him as “Richard Owen.”
Thirty-three hostages signed the petition, more than half of those in captivity. Most saw it as meaningless, clearly a document signed under duress, and that under the circumstances no one would take it seriously at home. But the petition caused a sensation in the United States. Written in awkward English ostensibly in the voice of the hostages, it called for the shah to be returned immediately.
“In this way, we will be free,” it said.
It had been carried out of Iran by the Swiss ambassador. The White House dismissed it summarily. State Department spokesman Hodding Carter said that it could hardly be accepted as a freely expressed appeal under the circumstances.
“If such a document does exist and if it’s authentic, it’s understood that statements made under duress have absolutely no validity and their only impact is to reflect adversely on the captors,” said Jody Powell.
“Everyone ought to understand that such statements or petitions will have absolutely no bearing upon the actions of the United States. They simply do not exist.”
Public opinion in America was at a boil. Television coverage was unrelenting. The three networks focused on the crisis as though nothing else of importance was happening in the world. It wasn’t simply several score American citizens held hostage, it was “America” held hostage, as if every part of the government had been paralyzed. And journalists continued to receive more access to Iranian leaders and the captors than anyone in officialdom.
A reporter from the University of Dayton’s radio station, WHIO, scored a minor coup by phoning the occupied embassy and, through an Iranian student translator, spoke for nearly an hour with the Iranian occupier who picked up the phone. The voice on the phone in Tehran identified himself only as “Mr. X.”
“Will you release the hostages once you have made your point?” the reporter asked.
“We cannot at this time, but we will have a statement later,” stated Mr. X, who said the students would not negotiate with the United States government.
The reporter suggested that they release one hostage as a show of good faith.
“We’ll think it over,” said Mr. X.
Most Americans wanted to strike back, and there was no shortage of ideas, everything from severe economic sanctions to nuclear weapons. Senator Barry Goldwater, the former Republican presidential nominee well known for his hard-nosed approach to foreign crises, proposed that the U.S. Air Force destroy Iran’s oil industry, “and let them sit there and starve to death.” A message hung on the front of the Chronicle building in San Francisco read, “Expel all Iranian students.” Those Iranians who dared rally in the United States in support of the embassy takeover were challenged by large, unruly crowds. After a number of violent incidents around the country, shows of revolutionary solidarity by Iranian students in America came to a halt. One group in Washington obtained a permit for a march, but when the day came for the march no one showed up. An Iran Air flight to New York had to be diverted to Montreal when union workers at JFK International refused to service the plane. Long- shoremen were refusing to load or unload any ships flying the Iranian flag.
Protesters burned the Iranian flag before that country’s consulate in Houston. In Riverside, California, an Iranian student was found shot to death, “execution style,” according to the police. At St. Louis University, a man with a shotgun was disarmed after he walked into an administration building demanding to know the names of Iranian students attending the school.
A small portion of the anger was directed at the White House. Some blamed Carter for creating the circumstances that led to the takeover, others for failing to take immediate military action. Conservatives saw America’s restraint as a sign of weakness—“Keep the Shah and send them Carter” read a placard carried by a protester in Texas.
