Finally, one of them loosed the cuffs. He was taken to another room in the basement and tied with nylon ropes hand and foot to a straight-backed wooden chair. He was untied only to eat and use the toilet. This is how he spent the Christmas holidays.
The approach of Christmas was a very emotional time for Kathryn Koob, who felt both joyful and sad. Like the rest of her colleagues, she stood accused of being a spy and had been told to expect a trial and what seemed like a strong chance of execution. Since she had been moved from the ambassador’s residence in early December to a small room on the top floor of the chancery, what had been the political section’s library, she was much closer to the chanting multitudes outside the compound’s front walls, and because she understood at least some Farsi it meant living with calls for American blood—her blood!—ringing in her ears day and night. In the crowd she could also hear vendors circulating drinks and snacks. It was bizarre, an ongoing festival of death and revenge. Her greatest fear, even greater than trial and the hanging judge, was that her captors would give her to this mob.
Ever since Ann Swift had disappeared after Thanksgiving, Koob had been held alone. She spent her days sitting in an armchair reading novels under the watchful eye of the punctilious female guard she had dubbed Queenie. Koob ate sparingly and savored what she was given at mealtimes, and she could feel the excess pounds she had accumulated over years falling off rapidly. She was still wearing the green wool dress she had on the day of her capture, although she also had a pair of slacks and a pullover shirt that the guards had brought from the embassy co-op. After weeks of such rigid confinement, she decided that she needed some sort of exercise regimen to supplement the ten minutes a day she was allowed to stand and do calisthenics. She worked out isometric routines she could do in the chair, stretching, lifting herself by pressing down with her hands, pushing her hands together, alternately flexing and relaxing sets of muscles. As she grew thinner she also grew stronger and despite the restrictions felt herself becoming more flexible. On the wall opposite her chair one of the students had spray-painted the words, “Down With the Carter,” and some weeks later another had brought in an idealized portrait of Khomeini and tacked it over part of the slogan, so she now faced the imam’s portrait under the words “Down With.” Since none of her guards spoke English very well, nobody noticed the ironic juxtaposition, and she was silently amused by it. It symbolized for her the intellectual clumsiness of this whole terrifying exercise.
She, too, contemplated escape. There was a good chance that an Iranian family she knew who lived only a few blocks from the embassy would hide her if she could get there. A woman in Iran had a better chance of staying hidden than a man, because she could drape herself from head to toe in a chador and move around with relative freedom. Her Farsi was limited but serviceable. She tried to remember exactly how far it was from the ambassador’s house to the wall. There were trees along the inside of it. With her newfound agility, she might be able to pull herself up to a low branch, which would give her the step up she would need to get over. All she had to do was wait for her guard to fall asleep, which happened often enough.
But she had never tried it. Partly because the attempt would have been risky and bold, Koob always found a reason, or was given one, to delay. Then one day a young woman named Sheroor, who was the kindest of her guards, allowed her to spend a few minutes on the front porch of the residence. It was the only time she had been allowed outside since the day of the takeover. Standing in the clean winter air, savoring blue skies and the sweet odor of the pine grove that filled that side of the compound, admiring the glimmer of moisture on the grass from a recent shower, Koob also scouted for an escape avenue. She was dismayed to see that the wall was much higher and farther from the house than she had remembered. None of the trees had branches low enough for her to reach, and the inside perimeter was busy with armed guards. There was no chance she could escape in the way she had imagined.
When the interrogation sessions ended after the first days, Koob concluded that the documents in her office at the Iran-America Society had confirmed her stories and quashed any remaining suspicions of her work in Tehran. But then she noticed Queenie surreptitiously taking notes after they spoke. Her chief guard would seize upon some comment or phrase and twist its meaning into something sinister. Chatting one day about the Iran- America Society, her efforts to revive the Cultural Center in Tehran, Koob mentioned that she had been interviewed from time to time by reporters about the organization’s events or plans. Queenie seemed particularly interested in this.
“How did you relate to them?” she asked. As Koob described how she had tried to be helpful with the reporters, how she had welcomed the publicity and tried to encourage their interest and coverage, she noticed that her chief guard was scribbling furiously behind a stack of books. It dawned on her that Queenie had a completely different take on what she was talking about.
So she asked, “Hahnum, when you were just talking about reporters, you were talking about Iranian reporters who came to me to find out about American things, right?”
“No,” said Queenie, and she explained that she had been talking about
She coped with her isolation and boredom by imagining her confinement as a religious retreat. The comforting miracle of her sister’s presence that she believed she had experienced on her first night in captivity fired her religious convictions. She had often wondered about and admired Catholic women who entered convents or contemplative communities to live in self-imposed isolation, silence, and prayer. She began to emulate what she knew of such lives, creating for herself prayer schedules and disciplines. Her captivity was a chance to direct the ambition and energy she had poured into her career into spiritual pursuit. It was hard work. She found it difficult to sustain prayer; anything more than a simple request for strength or deliverance or blessings on her family and friends challenged her patience and creativity. So she created categories, morning, afternoon, and evening devotions, and assigned different objectives for each. In her morning devotions, she set aside Mondays to pray for church institutions, Tuesdays for human crises around the world, Wednesdays for her family, and so on. To sustain prayer for her family she sought divine favors for each member individually, one by one, beginning with her parents in Iowa and then moving around the United States to each of her siblings and kin. She designed a worship ceremony for herself and began to see her religion not just as a backdrop to her life but as a practice, something that demanded mindfulness and effort at every moment. When she was allowed to keep an armed forces hymnal she’d found on a shelf in the residence library, she memorized the songs and sang them to herself. Later she was given a Bible.
In the weeks before Christmas, Koob had felt all of these currents coming together, her fear, her sadness, and her joy in the new religious life she had built for herself. Surrounded by hatred, she was determined to turn herself into a beacon of Christian love. She talked to her guards about the way her family celebrated Christmas at home, the cookies, candies, the oyster stew they always ate early before setting out for evening services. Given a branch from an artificial tree, she placed it upright in a flag holder and turned it into a Christmas tree. She tore pink routing slips she’d found in a desk drawer into strips and fastened them together with tape to create a chain she wrapped around it. She folded sheets of white and brown paper into snowflake designs, and shaped one sheet into a small cross and placed it on top. Then she got more ambitious, creating a whole manger scene complete with Mary, Joseph, and the Christ child and even an angel to hover over the scene. Her guards were so intrigued by her labors that they began imitating her, fashioning their own paper ornaments and hanging them on her “tree.”
10. Captivity Pageant
On Christmas morning, marine Kevin Hermening was given a clean turtleneck sweater and he, Joe Subic, embassy administration officer Steve Lauterbach, and Jerry Plotkin were taken to an office at the motor pool where TV cameras were waiting.
Their captors wanted them to make a statement on camera as part of the Christmas party they would hold later that day. Over in the Mushroom Inn, unbeknownst to Hermening, his fellow marines had refused. He had been separated from the others several days earlier after threatening a guard and tearing the startled Iranian’s schoolbook in half. Locked in a basement room for nine hours, blindfolded, cuffed, and tied to a chair, the
