Guests of the Ayatollah

torment. He began doing calisthenics to fill the time and to wear himself out enough to sleep. He lost all sense of day and night. He would sleep for an hour or so, wake up, prop the big air mattress against the wall, and run in place and do sit-ups for an hour or so—he was doing hundreds of sit-ups a day. His time was spent alternately sleeping, running in place, doing push-ups and sit-ups, reading, brooding, going to the toilet, and waiting for food. He seized on any opportunity to break the tedium. Given some colored pencils, he began drawing on the walls. Using his food bowl, a glass, or a dish, he would trace interlocking circles, forming elaborate patterns, and then carefully color them in. He began a mental project. At home in Olyphant, Pennsylvania, his family owned a huge building, a onetime inn, with more than fifty rooms. He loved the place, and decided to completely renovate and decorate it, room by room. He remembered every corner of it vividly from his childhood. He tore wings off the building, stripping it down in his imagination to its original structure, then rebuilt the wings from scratch. He picked out colors for the walls, furniture, and rugs, redesigned the kitchens…

Books were the only consistent diversion from his own thoughts, and he devoured them. He read Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War, a massive nine-hundred-page volume, in two days, then opened the first page and began again. He read the Bible and reread the New Testament several times. He pored over the Psalms, committing certain favorites to memory. Poetry was a source of great pleasure, because he could read and reread it with increased enjoyment. In a pile of books he was shown, he found The Book of Living Verse and A Little Treasure of American Poetry and never returned them. He practically wore them out. He read Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and found its myriad accounts of men coping with captivity very useful in dealing with his own. He was pleased to read, for instance, that in captivity Solzhenitsyn thought mostly about his stomach. A myth about imprisonment is that isolation and deprivation incline men to great spiritual and philosophical insights, that in solitude the mind settles into great thoughts. Metrinko obsessed about food. He would think about lunch for three hours before it came: What will they bring for lunch? How long until they do? Will it be hot or cold? Then he would savor the memory of the meal for two hours after it was eaten, at which point it was time to start thinking about dinner. He felt guilty about the smallness of his thoughts and was relieved to read that he was not alone. The food was not bad, lots of rice and bread, occasionally a stew, but Metrinko’s weight plummeted. He dropped thirty pounds in the first month of captivity. His jeans drooped badly and his captors had taken away his belt. He bunched up the waist in front and fastened it with a paper clip.

He welcomed the interrogation sessions and drew them out for as long as he could. Anything was a welcome break from his solitude and boredom. Even the prospect of being put on trial and executed didn’t disturb him. He found himself perversely looking forward to it. The trial would at least be interesting. Months of sitting alone had made him desperate for any kind of stimulation, even death.

When he lashed out at his interrogators or guards, he would be punished. Sometimes he was dragged out into the basement hall and beaten. Once, after a particularly vicious outburst in which he had insulted the Ayatollah Khomeini and refused to wear a blindfold, he was handcuffed for two weeks. It was misery. His wrists were clamped in metal at his front, and after a day or so they rubbed his skin raw. Any movement that disturbed the cuffs became painful. He couldn’t sleep comfortably. There was no place to put his hands that felt natural, and when he changed position he was shocked awake by the pain. When he moved his bowels he could not wipe himself clean, so he developed a painful rash. It was hard to eat. His food would come in a bowl, and he had a spoon, but it was difficult to put the spoon to his mouth without spilling it back into the bowl.

He endured this for two weeks.

11. Invasion and Opportunity

Charlie Beckwith decided to give his men a break for Christmas. Delta had been preparing for the rescue mission nonstop for more than a month, and the basic plan was in place, despite lingering problems with fuel delivery and hiding choppers and men outside Tehran on the second day of the mission. The Delta major from Texas, Logan Fitch, and his men had been completely out of touch with their families since they had been summoned home from their “training” on the ski slopes in Colorado.

Fitch’s wife, Sandi, was nine months pregnant. She knew that the nature of her husband’s work meant he would simply drop off the face of the earth from time to time, and accepted it, but under the circumstances he was enormously relieved to have permission to return to Fort Bragg. None of the men was allowed to discuss where they had been or what they were doing, but nearly everyone around them understood.

* * *

Two other things happened on Christmas Day that would have important consequences for the hostage crisis, one of them shockingly public and the other a well-kept secret.

The public event was the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan, the nation that shared Iran’s eastern border and that, with Iran, lived in the Russian shadow. Concerned about a growing Islamist fundamentalist movement in that country, about four thousand Russian troops had seized government buildings in Kabul and installed a new, Soviet-approved leadership. It was news enough to chase Iran off American front pages and posed an entirely new, threatening, and unexpected twist to the confusion in that part of the world. There had been fears of Iran’s clerics cozying up to the Soviets in the previous weeks, but they would certainly respond with alarm to this assault on Islam and the implied threat of an expanded Russian presence along their border. With ethnic unrest in provinces along the Soviet border to its north, and with mounting military probes by the Soviet- backed regime of Saddam Hussein to their west, Iran’s world of trouble had just grown darker.

As had America’s. The Soviet invasion altered the strategic map. Iran and the United States were no longer officially on speaking terms, but where the Soviet Union was concerned they had shared interests. Resistance to the Soviet putsch would come from the region’s Islamic fundamentalists, which meant that there was not only less danger of Iran falling into the Soviet sphere, but incentive to form a tactical alliance with the West. The stakes were high. Brzezinski had long feared that Moscow would take advantage of Iran’s confusion and lack of American backing to make a move on the Middle East, and Afghanistan looked as if it could be just a first step. In the White House, they war-gamed what the United States would do if the Soviet army pushed into Iran, bearing down on the valuable oil fields to the west. If it came to that, Iran’s relationship with the United States would be irrelevant. The Soviets would have to be stopped. There was even discussion of employing tactical nuclear weapons to close potential gaps in the Zagros Mountains and bottle up a Soviet thrust.

The other significant event was the arrival of two men, Hector Villalon, a wealthy Argentinian expatriate and Cuban cigar distributor living in France, and Christian Bourget, a French lawyer and human rights activist, at the international airport in Panama City. They had flown there to deliver a formal request from Iran to Omar Torrijos, asking his government to extradite the shah and send him back to Tehran to face revolutionary justice. It was at best a perfunctory gesture. Torrijos was not about to send the shah back to Tehran, but that was the visitors’ only announced purpose. What they told Marcel Saliman, a Torrijos assistant, was something else. They said they knew that there was no chance Panama would return the ailing shah, but the formalities might serve as a pretext to cover secret negotiations to free the American hostages. Iran was ready to talk.

Both men were friendly with Foreign Minister Ghotbzadeh, who, they explained, was officially hamstrung by the radicals who had seized the embassy. He and other moderates were being driven out of power by these young militants, who with their weekly press conference and “disclosures” were plucking them off one by one, exposing them as “traitors” and spies because they had met at one time or another with an American official. Ghotbzadeh wanted the sideshow to end. Sending the hostages home would disband the students and effectively end their reign of political terror.

Villalon and Bourget wanted to know if Torrijos could arrange a secret meeting with Hamilton Jordan. Why Jordan? They said that Ghotbzadeh did not trust the U.S. State Department, which he believed was controlled by Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller, and knew that through Jordan they would have the president’s ear.

* * *

In the second week of January, Hamilton Jordan, the president’s chief of staff, was contacted by an old friend in Panama, who urged him to meet privately and soon with an aide to Panama’s dictator Torrijos. He wouldn’t say what it was about, but Jordan was intrigued enough to fly down to Homestead Air Force Base, twenty-five miles south of Miami, on a mystery mission. Negotiations to hand over control of the Panama Canal in