destroy. Things were happening fast. He heard some of his colleagues being taken from their offices down the hall. Rosen was not unduly concerned. When it had happened nine months earlier he had been convinced as he was led out into the tear-gas-filled compound that he was going to be shot. When he had not been, along with the enormous sense of relief came a reduced fear of the demonstrators. Their bark was worse than their bite. He assumed this would be another rude interruption; his biggest concern was that it might convince Washington to close the embassy and bring everyone home. He hoped that didn’t happen. He was enjoying the work too much to go home now.
Rosen figured the bar on the outer door would buy him enough time to destroy the most vital papers, so he was surprised when he heard the scrape of metal. His secretary, an Armenian woman apparently frightened by threats from behind the door, was removing the metal bar.
“Don’t!” Rosen shouted.
It was too late. He was at once surrounded by young Iranians, boys and girls, the girls in manteaus and the boys carrying clubs, many of them with kerchiefs wrapped around their faces.
“Get out!” he shouted in Farsi.
“Either you move out of this room or we are going to drag you out,” one of the invaders said.
“This is United States property. Get out of this building immediately.”
Rosen’s defiance was not simply bravado. He found it hard to take this bunch seriously. They were so young, for one thing, shabbily dressed and clearly nervous. He was more angry than frightened.
The growing crowd in his office didn’t budge. Some of them began pulling open drawers to his desk and file cabinets and removing his files. His secretary was curled in the corner, frightened.
“Leave this room immediately or you will be hurt,” one of the demonstrators ordered Rosen. “This is no joke. We’re now in control of this place. You are flouting the will of the Iranian people.”
“
When a club was waved in his face, Rosen relented. He was led out of his office.
Inside the front door to the chancery, Golacinski felt events slipping out of control. He flipped the switch on his radio and with unmistakable urgency in his voice ordered, “Recall! Recall! All marines to Post One!”
The plan Golacinski and Mike Howland had put together in case of an invasion, which was designed to prevent Americans from being taken hostage, involved locking down part of the workforce and encouraging others to flee. The second floor of the chancery could be closed off behind a steel door, so employees had been instructed to congregate there in an emergency and wait for help from the provisional government. If the door to the second floor were breached, the communication vault on the west end was a final fallback position. It was large enough to accommodate dozens of people and was well stocked with food and water, so theoretically it could protect the chancery staff long enough for help to arrive. Those working in the buildings spread out across the campus would be told to move toward the relatively quiet back gates, where protesters rarely gathered, and slip out toward the British, Canadian, or Swiss embassies. Ordinarily Howland would have helped coordinate this response, but he had gone to the Foreign Ministry with Laingen and Tomseth. By radio, Golacinski told his assistant to stay there and press for an immediate local rescue force.
Several of the young Iranians who had climbed the gate now severed its chains with bolt cutters and swung the doors open wide. Protesters flooded in. On his radio, Golacinski heard reports from the various marine guard posts.
“They’re coming over the walls!” shouted Corporal Rocky Sickmann from another spot on the compound.
This was clearly a coordinated action.
Golacinski’s emergency call had awakened four marines who had worked the night shift and were asleep in the apartment building behind the compound. They quickly dressed but, as they prepared to leave the building, saw protesters and Iranian police massed around their building.
“Stay where you’re at,” said Golacinski.
Usually there would have been only three or four marines in the chancery at that hour, but today there were about a dozen. Some had come in to get paid and others had been attending a language class. Corporals Billy Gallegos and Sickmann had just come running through the front door, having abandoned their guard posts, as instructed. Gunnery Sergeant Mike Moeller, the top-ranking marine at the embassy, gathered his force together and couldn’t contain his enthusiasm.
“All right, guys,” he said with a grin. “Let’s go for it.”
Sickmann noticed that his hands were trembling as he fed rounds into his shotgun and .38 pistol. Outside, the protesters were now ramming a long wooden pole into the large, locked front doors. Inside, every impact shook bits of plaster off the frame. He watched this until the frame was almost completely shattered and then called Sergeant Moeller on his walkie-talkie to tell him that the doors were not going to last much longer.
Outside the door, demonstrators with bullhorns were repeating reassurances in both Farsi and English, “We do not wish to harm you. We only wish to set-in.”
Staffers throughout the building were standing on chairs in their offices, watching the drama unfold. The security barriers on the windows blocked the view on the lower half, so they had to climb to see outside. Joan Walsh, the blond-haired secretary in the political section, was frightened as she watched the now dozens of protesters running around the building. She knew the chancery was virtually a fortress but also that one of the windows on the basement floor was not barred like the others. It had been secured only by a single lock to provide ready egress in case of fire. Seeing some of the protesters with bolt cutters, she assumed it would be only a matter of time before they were in the building.
Gallegos ran to the front door duty station and changed clothes quickly, donning fatigues. He was annoyed because he had polished his combat boots the night before and had left them in his apartment. He had reported to work in the regulation short-sleeve tan shirt, blue pants, and black dress shoes, but the dress shoes looked stupid with the cammies, and it bugged him, but there was nothing to do. He pulled on his emergency gear and ran to his post upstairs, which was in the ambassador’s spacious office. There were floor-to-ceiling windows looking south over the compound. Gallegos saw that the safe doors were still open in Laingen’s office—his secretary, Liz Montagne, had not finished emptying them—and ordered them shut and locked. He stretched himself prone on the floor pointing his weapon out the window. It was a great spot. If he were ordered to shoot, he could pick off targets all day. He kept cocking and aiming his empty rifle at the demonstrators below, pretending to shoot. Corporal Greg Persinger saw this and worried that his buddy, always a little too gung ho, was going to get them all killed.
Golacinski pulled on riot gear and watched images of disorder on an array of closed-circuit TV screens. There were easily thousands of protesters on the grounds now. Four of his marines had surrendered to the mob, and he suspected correctly that Rosen, Graves, and the others in the motor pool office building had also been taken. He had told the marines still in the Bijon Apartments to stay there.
Laingen phoned.
“I’m coming back,” he told Golacinski.
“No, you won’t be able to get near the embassy,” Golacinski said. He could picture the charge d’affaires’ limo engulfed in a sea of hostile Iranians. Laingen, Howland, and Tomseth might be torn limb from limb. He advised them to turn right around and go back into the Foreign Ministry building and stay there.
Laingen said that under no circumstances were the guards to open fire on the demonstrators. Golacinski asked if, as a last resort, they could use tear gas.
“Only as a last resort,” Laingen said.
In earlier discussions, when they had expected trouble immediately after the shah had been allowed to enter the United States, they agreed that tear gas was not to be used anywhere on the embassy grounds, only inside the buildings. Tehran’s protesters were accustomed to tear gas and had learned how to cope with it during the months of their uprising—that explained the kerchiefs many of them wore wrapped across their faces. Using it would only further incite them. Given that the grounds were completely overrun, the buildings were now the line of defense. Most areas of the second floor were off-limits to those without the highest levels of security clearance, so Golacinski ordered all the local employees to the basement and all Americans to the top floor. Howland came up on the radio seeking an update.
