and took neither symptom very seriously. He had no reason to suspect his body would betray him in an important way. He didn’t look it, but Queen was an exceptional athlete. In high school his tall, lean frame had breezed through subminute quarter miles like clockwork. Ailments and injuries had always gone away quickly. But this felt truly odd, unlike anything he had experienced, and over time it didn’t diminish; it worsened. Finally he told a guard about it and they sent a young pharmacy student to look at him. The druggist-in-training diagnosed the numbness as a reaction to a draft coming from a vent over Queen’s space. He arranged to have his mattress moved to a warmer spot and for him to be left unbound—the guards were still using torn bedsheets to tie his hands day and night. When none of the changes helped, Queen was visited by a middle-aged Iranian doctor who claimed to have been trained in the United States. Queen found him unimpressive.
“It’s nothing, it’s nothing,” the doctor said after a cursory examination. He diagnosed a “twisted spine” and predicted that the symptoms would soon vanish. On his way out he asked Hall how he was doing.
“I’m sick, too,” Hall said. “Homesick. The cure is an airline ticket out of here.”
The Mushroom Inn had settled into a dull routine broken only by changes of guard shifts and trips to the bathroom. The shelves that divided each hostage’s cubicle were remnants of the library at the old Iranian- American high school, where in happier days the offspring of embassy workers attended classes, and the books to that library, hundreds of them, were also stored in the basement in boxes. When Queen asked, he was given permission to unpack them and operate a lending library. He brought to the task his delight for careful detail, sorting the hundreds of books by subject matter. There was even a catchall stack of books Queen believed no one would find interesting. Within each subject category he broke them down further into fiction and nonfiction. The fiction was sorted by author, the history chronologically. He arranged the books in vertical piles of fifteen on the floor, with a sign atop each indicating what subject it was.
Overseeing this effort was Hamid, a slight man in a green army jacket with a fair, angular face, reddish brown hair, and a sparse beard, who because of his propensity to cheerfully mislead his captives was dubbed “Hamid the Liar.” His hair and skin color were untypical for an Iranian, which he seemed to compensate for with an overabundance of zeal. Intensely suspicious, he had been the one on the second night of the takeover to warn Kathryn Koob against sending messages with her eyes. He was both ignorant and arrogant, traits which for the hostages seemed to sum up the revolution. When Hamid the Liar played checkers, he jumped over his own pieces on the board as if they weren’t there, a clear violation of universal rules, and when his opponent complained he would cheerfully explain, “In Iran we always play this way. These are my men and if I choose to jump over them it is up to me!”
Hamid had earned his nickname by routinely lying about the mail, telling the hostages that none came when everyone knew (from the other guards) that mail from the United States arrived daily in sacks. When he did hand out letters, he played favorites, rewarding some hostages and punishing others. He was, of course, ready to believe any theory of American malevolence, no matter how wild. When one letter arrived making the case that World War Two had resulted because Adolf Hitler was determined to prevent America from seizing the oil supplies of Peru, Hamid was so impressed that he photocopied it and passed it around. In his role as library supervisor, Hamid permitted books to be borrowed only after he had checked personally to make sure they weren’t “CIA”— even though his English was rudimentary at best. Returned books had to be given first to him, so he could check to make sure no secret messages had been written or inserted in them. In his fractured English, he wrote out rules:
1. You may never to take more than 20-twenty-20 of books from the month.
2. You may never to write in the twenty books your messages.
3. To stack you found them return your books—20.
4. A student good in English will check for messages you should not write, if he finds this library will be destroyed.
Given the borrowing limit, fat books were especially prized. Don Sharer read
Many of the bored, confined Americans began improvising exercise routines in their cramped spaces, though some had not worked out in years. Bill Royer, the assistant director of the now defunct Iran-America Society, was attempting a yoga move, lying flat on his back, raising his feet and reaching up to touch his toes, when he felt a sudden stab of pain in his chest. He thought he was having a heart attack at first, but the pain was in the wrong place, and very localized. After complaining to the guards a medical student gave him a cursory exam and reassured him that his heart was normal. It took weeks for the sharp pain to subside. He learned much later that he had broken his rib.
Enforced silence was defeated by a tap code, a system where letters of the alphabet were arrayed on a grid and words were spelled out painstakingly by tapping out numbers indicating each letter’s horizontal and vertical position. A diagram of the tap code was drawn on the inside of a chewing gum wrapper, which was balled up and then tossed from space to space. Sadly, there wasn’t much news to share. A hostage got one that, after much decoding effort, asked, “When do you think we’ll get out of here?”
Some of the hostages just ignored the petty procedures. When big Bill Keough needed to use the toilet, he would stand up, announce “Toilet,” and start in that direction. The guards would scurry behind him, more like his entourage than his captors. Traffic to the bathroom was constant, given that it was the only time the captives got to stand, walk, and leave their space. The guards must have been impressed by American dental hygiene; everyone brushed at least three times a day.
They were beginning to look ragged. Clean State Department and military faces sprouted stubble and then full beards; well-trimmed hair grew shaggy and then long. Beneath the oppressive boredom was constant tension, which sometimes boiled up. Colonel Chuck Scott, who had endured a difficult interrogation before his captors decided he was not the supposed CIA agent George Lambrakis, blew up after being served a supper of what had been billed as “chicken soup.” It consisted of a cup of lukewarm water with a partly dissolved bouillon cube floating in it. He threw his cup across the room and loudly complained and was immediately surrounded by guards with automatic weapons. Scott began venting a stream of angry Farsi—“You people treat us worse than dogs!”—when Golacinski looked across at the recently returned Dave Roeder and, without a word, they stepped between the angry colonel and the guards. Golacinski tried to calm Scott down. When guards demanded that Roeder and Golacinski go back to their places, they refused.
“As long as you’re pointing that weapon at me, I’m not going to move,” said Roeder. “I’m not going anywhere. Point your gun down and I’ll go, but I’m not moving until you do.”
The guards backed down. They lowered their weapons and Roeder and Golacinski returned to their cubicles. By that time Scott had calmed down, but he continued berating the guards.
One of them said, “Many people in Iran are eating less than you. This is not a hotel. You cannot order anything you want. You are a hostage, you have no rights. If you do not shut up and stop complaining, you will be in much trouble.”
The guard then vented his own anger at the Americans, claiming that all they did was eat, sleep, and make love. The standoff ended with Scott and the guard glaring at each other silently from across the room.
9. Escape
