Guests of the Ayatollah

It was foolish. The guard was carrying a submachine gun and there were plenty more of them around the room. But in his shock at the sight of Golacinski towering over him, he backed away. The other guards came running with their weapons up.

Roeder and Don Sharer both stood up alongside Golacinski.

“You sit down!” the guards shouted at them.

“No,” said Sharer. “You stop pointing those weapons at us and I’ll sit down.”

One of the guards broke the standoff.

“We just want to talk to him,” he said of Cooke. “We’ll bring him right back.”

“If you don’t, there’s going to be trouble,” Golacinski said.

They did bring Cooke right back, and that was the end of it, but it had made them more wary of Golacinski than ever. After that, for a time, whenever he exercised, they would position a guard directly in front of him. For a few days a guard sat before his space looking bored as Golacinski did his calisthenics. So he start hacking, coughing, sneezing, and deliberately spraying sweat and spittle, and the practice was promptly discontinued.

Kathryn Koob came to know well the young women who guarded her. Despite their traditional garb and enthusiasm for the revolution, they were not especially religious. Koob was a devout Lutheran who had grown up steeped in her faith, and felt she knew sincere piety when she saw it. The girls who fluttered around Koob were surprisingly Western and worldly. Underneath their manteaus they wore trendy jeans and silky colorful blouses. They colored their nails and wore jewelry and makeup. They were caught up in a tide of nationalist idealism that borrowed the rhetoric of the mosques for political purposes. The chadors they wore expressed solidarity and were the opposite of modest; they were worn not to deter but to attract attention. For many, the veil and chador were a rebuke to their mothers, part of a generation that had welcomed the Westernization of Iran under the shah. Koob, who was forty-one, had met many such women her age in Iran, women who loved Western fashion or who openly wore bright colors and uncovered their hair. At universities, middle-aged female professors once considered the vanguard of the new Iran were being fired for refusing to cover their hair, while for their students, some of them the young girls guarding Koob and Ann Swift, the future ran in the opposite direction, toward Islam and village tradition. Ironically, the old ways symbolized the new Iran. Donning the head scarf and chador was as much a rebellion for the new generation as shedding them had been for their mothers and older sisters. The girls who sometimes huddled in Koob’s room would ask her why Catholic nuns in America had forsaken “their beautiful dresses.” Among this crowd were some very serious, modest, religious young women, but very few. The most stern and dangerous of her female captors were the older ones, some of them true zealots. There was one who had instructed the newly armed young women on the first day of the takeover, “If they speak, shoot them.”

One day a female guard came to her door with an old pair of her eyeglasses that Koob had kept in a drawer in her apartment. It upset Koob to be given such blatant evidence that they had broken into her home and rooted through her things.

“You asked for them,” the woman said.

“I did not,” said Koob. “I have my glasses. These are old ones for an emergency.” She knew full well that they had searched her apartment as a follow-up to her interrogation, and because that had violated their own rules—the imam had instructed the students not to break into any more buildings—she knew this supposed request for glasses was a pretext. If she played along, it would validate what they had done.

So she refused to play along. It was one more unprovoked outrage and indignity and she lost her temper. She vented her spleen on the young guard, who endured it silently and then left to fetch one of her older, male supervisors. He spoke to her with false politeness that masked insufferable condescension.

“Hahnum, you must not act like this. You are making the sister most uncomfortable.”

“You make me uncomfortable,” Koob told him. “I am a diplomat. You kidnapped me, brought me here, and now you break into my house.”

“You aren’t a diplomat and you know it,” he said.

“I am a diplomat and you know it. I’ve been accredited by several countries, including Iran, and you have broken all sorts of your own laws with this action. Now you’ve just broken another one, breaking into diplomatic property.”

“You asked for your glasses,” he said. “Besides, in some instances laws don’t matter. There are special cases.”

“‘Special cases’ if the laws don’t suit you.”

“We represent the people,” he said. “Besides, you sent for your glasses.”

“I most certainly did not. I have mine right here. These are old ones I keep for emergencies. You needed an excuse to break into my house and you used these,” she said, shaking the old glasses at him.

“The sister said you wanted them,” he said.

“Which sister? Bring her here.”

“I’ve told you, you asked for them,” he said.

“I didn’t! If I wanted something from my house, it wouldn’t be these. It would be a pair of shoes and a change of clothes. And books!”

The young man glared at her.

“I’ve told you three times that you asked for them.”

And that was that. He had said it three times. He was the captor, she was the prisoner. Unspoken but clear was the assertion: I am a man, you are a woman. End of discussion. It was so because he said it was so.

Not all of the interactions were hostile. Some of the Iranian students were genuinely well meaning and tried to find ways to ease their captives’ discomfort. Mahmoud, a small Turkish-Iranian guard with a boyish round face, announced that he had set up a barbershop in one of the rooms in the Mushroom Inn. Square-jawed Colonel Chuck Scott was one of the first to take advantage. A thoroughgoing army man, he was increasingly distressed with his shabby appearance; his hair was hanging in strings nearly to his shoulders and his beard had grown so long that the guards were teasing him that he was going to outdo the imam.

“I don’t have any money,” said Scott. “It was stolen by your friends.”

“You can pay me when you are free again,” said Mahmoud cheerfully.

When he was finished clipping Scott’s hair and trimming back his beard, Mahmoud handed his customer a cracked piece of mirror to admire the transformation.

“Now, if your people decide to shoot us, at least my corpse will look better,” said the colonel.

Mahmoud was distressed. He assured Scott that he and the others would not be shot, but then somewhat compromised that reassurance by adding, “If you are shot, it will not be our fault, it will be your government that should be blamed.”

Richard Queen decided to keep his beard, but he trimmed it and then sat for Mahmoud’s clippers. He emerged with a ridiculous bowl cut that made Queen look like Prince Valiant. To his chagrin, he was photographed not long afterward, and the pictures were published in Time and Newsweek. He felt not only abandoned, sick, and hopeless but silly. Mahmoud was disappointed that his clipwork had fallen short.

One day, when Bill Belk was standing at the broken window of his room in the chancery basement, looking up and watching snow fall, a young female guard with a G3 assault rifle stepped into his view. She smiled down to him.

“Hello, how are you?” she asked in English, as though they were meeting in a park. “It’s snowing!”

“It’s beautiful,” Belk said. “I wish I could be out in it.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” said Belk, but he didn’t sound convincing.

“Happy New Year,” she said and then rolled a small snowball and pushed it to him through the hole in the glass.

Even Hamid the Liar had his softer moments. One night he delivered a cassette tape with a message from Cheri Hall to her husband, Joe. She had called one of the lines at the embassy that no one answered anymore and left a message on its answering machine in the hope that it would somehow find him, a desperate, loving gesture akin to throwing a bottle with a note into the ocean.

Hall, Queen, and Hamid stood around the recorder and listened to her voice. She started off strong, saying that she wanted him to know she was coping well and that she loved him dearly, and that everyone they knew was