In early January one of these visitors was Native American activist John Thomas, who would participate in a student-led seminar that branded the United States the major enemy of all the oppressed nations of the world and ended up leading the mob outside the embassy in chants of “Death to Carter,” urging his new Iranian friends to put all the hostages on trial. They were all spies, Thomas said.
In the days before his arrival the possibility of a meeting with the activist was offered to Rick Kupke, because of his Native American heritage. Kupke was told that he first must write a letter to President Carter explaining what he and the others and the embassy had done wrong and urging the president to take the necessary steps for their release.
Kupke was given a pen and a piece of paper. He was less than eager to meet with Thomas—he and his family had never felt much kinship with the native American political movement—but he did like the idea of something to break the monotony, and he worried about what might happen to him if he disappointed his captors, who seemed quite eager to make the session happen. At the time he was being held in the basement of the chancery with Mike Kennedy and John Graves. Kupke confessed to them, “I don’t know what to do.”
Graves, the embassy’s press attache, was a flamboyant man with a long graying beard, a world-weary but playful air, and a cutting sense of humor. He had worked in Vietnam and had been involved there in the interrogation of Vietnamese prisoners.
“I’ll give you a trick,” he said. “If you pull it off, they probably won’t bother you, but if you get caught you’ll probably regret the day you were born.”
Graves suggested that Kupke write four or five pages of nothing, just doodle verbally, and if they got mad when they read it, tell them, “Okay, bring me more paper, I’ll redo it.”
“Then do the same thing again,” Graves said. “I’ve only known you for two or three months, but if anybody can play stupid, you can.”
Kupke swallowed the insult and took the advice. He decided to write like a third grader. He began his letter, “Dear Jimmy.” Then he wrote, “How are you? I am fine. I find myself laying here on this floor. I’m not sure how I got here, but I sure find myself here a lot. Any way you can figure to get us out of here is good. The way I see things is that a lot of things happened…” It went on like this four pages.
Mailman, one of their guards, returned with the papers, flushed with anger.
“Are you joking or something?” he asked.
“No, no,” said Kupke. “What’s wrong?”
“This is no good.”
“Can I have more paper?”
Mailman gave him more, telling him, “You do a better job.”
“Okay,” Kupke said. “I like doing this.”
And he started another letter. “Dear Jimmy. How are you? I am fine. But there are several things that I’d like to tell you. Above all, it’s just how hard this floor is that I’m sleeping on. And I think there’s things that ought to be done immediately…”
Mailman took his pencil away and Kupke was never asked to write another letter.
Graves’s advice was good, but his superior attitude grated on Kupke. The fifty-three-year-old foreign service officer had actually been held hostage briefly once before in his career, on the island of Fernando Poo off the coast of Nigeria. He saw himself as a modern Renaissance man: he was an avid tennis player, motorcyclist, skier, and scuba diver, the father of six, and an unabashed and unapologetic egotist. He was half-French and leaned toward Gallic in most things. He regarded that country’s style, food, and international acumen as entirely superior to America’s. His children were being raised French, he said proudly, and went on and on about their sophistication, brilliance, and accomplishment—in sharp contrast, it went without saying, to Kupke’s own. Graves had nothing but scorn for the American policies that had created the situation in Iran and regarded the Iranian students’ anger, if not their actions, as entirely justified. He thought Iran did deserve at least an apology from the United States, and held forth at length about the idiots in Washington who had allowed this situation to develop. Graves had other annoying traits. He smoked his pipe constantly, clouding the room with smoke, and chewed with his mouth open, loudly smacking his lips. He was routinely insulting in an offhand way. At one point in his career he had been an English teacher and he had never lost the habit of instruction. Kupke’s usage was strictly rural colloquial and Graves could not curb his contempt.
Once, pacing impatiently as he waited for the single bathroom to open, Kupke complained, “Somebody must have went in there and died.”
“No,” Graves corrected. “Somebody must have
“Whatever.”
“I can tell you’re from the Midwest by the way you’re pacing,” Graves said. “Why?”
“Because you drag your heels like a midwestern shitkicker.”
One day Graves came back from the bathroom and his hair and beard, which had been a graying brown, were suddenly completely white. At first Kupke thought the captivity had scared his hair white, but then he realized that Graves had been dying his hair. He’d evidently decided to shampoo in the bathroom sink.
Kupke both admired Graves and was put off by his airs. The marines Jimmy Lopez, Rocky Sickmann, and Greg Persinger loathed him. His Gallic superiority was to them simple anti-Americanism, and they didn’t get his prickly sense of humor. He was less diligent than they about washing himself and his clothing, so he gave off a stench that in such constant close quarters was considered abusive. Like so many of the hostages, Graves had been immediately and mistakenly tagged as CIA, partly because of his age and senior status—the students now had access to the embassy’s payroll records, so they knew how much their prisoners were being paid. Graves’s check was near the top of the list. But they also assumed he was a spy because his name had turned up on a list of suspected CIA agents in a book that was published in East Germany. He had been awakened one night about two weeks after the takeover by a rough-looking Iranian whom he had not seen before. The man showed him the East German book, which had an old picture of Graves and his name.
“That’s not me,” Graves said, lying.
He was hauled off, certain that he was going to be shot. Instead, he was thrown into the back of a station wagon and driven somewhere off the compound, where he was kept for about three weeks and interrogated continually, always at night. He didn’t have much to tell. They all wanted to know about the plot to kill Khomeini. Graves told them it was silly, which convinced them all the more that he was in on it.
Shortly before John Thomas’s arrival, Bruce German, the embassy’s budget management officer who, more than most of the embassy workers, had been ill-prepared emotionally for such a trial and who had spent much of his time in captivity without word from his wife or family, wrote an angry letter addressed to Ben Bradlee, the executive editor of the
Our future is very uncertain, and I am not overdramatizing when I say that our very lives hang in the balance. Needless to say, we have become rather bitter, disillusioned, and frustrated, because we are the victims of poor judgment and lack of foresight on the part of the U.S. The Shah is still in the U.S…. something which totally defies logic. [
Lending credence to the student captors’ allegations of secret American plots, German, who would not have been privy to any classified American operations, suggested that the Carter administration was reluctant to return
