them speak. For months, “No speak!” had been the most common expression they and the others had heard from the guards, and though Kupke and his roommates had been talking for months, it had always been in whispers, and always in fear that they would be punished. Now they could talk and laugh freely.
Kennedy asked the guards for a can of coffee grounds from the commissary and proceeded to make what he called “cowboy coffee.” He poured some grounds into the bottom of a pot, added water, and brought it to a boil on the heater. They scooped the coffee from the top of the pot.
Colonel Scott sensed that the mock execution had acted as a purgative, and afterward many of the guards felt guilty about it. At night, he and the others in the Mushroom Inn were allowed to resume playing checkers, something they had not been allowed to do since leaving the house in north Tehran before Christmas. The guards set up a folding table in the hallway outside the large room where the hostages could take turns playing. Scott kept telling the guards he wanted to play with Colonel Schaefer, who had been taken away weeks ago and had not returned. By asking for him, Scott was trying to learn something about what had happened to him.
“It is not possible to play with Colonel Schaefer,” said a guard they called Little Ali because he was the smaller of two guards with that name—neither was very big.
“Why not?” demanded Scott. “We were allowed to play together before.”
The colonel let loose a string of oaths and threats, which caused him to be carried off to a cold room and threatened with a beating. Little Ali waved a length of hard rubber hose and promised that if Scott did not behave he would use it. Left alone, he found evidence that Schaefer had been in the room. It was lined with steel lockers, and in one he found a slip of paper and a short pencil. On the paper in handwriting he recognized as Schaefer’s— they had been passing notes for months—was a list of songs. Scott guessed that his air force colleague had been trying to memorize them. On another slip of paper was a rudimentary calendar, again in Schaefer’s handwriting. One of the lessons they had been taught in survival school was to try to keep track of time. From the scraps, Scott determined that Schaefer had been held in this freezing room for thirteen days, and that he had been moved three days earlier.
He shook with cold. Little Ali had locked him up wearing just a T-shirt and slacks. He realized how pathetic he had become. The guards had refused them razors for fear of a suicide attempt, so his dark beard was long and unkempt and he found there was no way to keep soup drippings and chunks of food from falling into it. Without a comb or scissors he could not trim it or keep it clean. He had lost more than a dozen pounds—his clothes hung on him—and he hadn’t seen sunlight for anything more than a few fleeting minutes in months. He was pale, scruffy, dirty, and his teeth were chattering with the cold.
After a few hours, Little Ali returned, standing a safe distance away from Scott in the doorway, and suggested that the colonel apologize. If he did, he would be allowed to return to his warm cubicle—Scott insisted on calling it a “cell.”
The colonel refused. Whatever he had said or done was a lot less than what had been done to him in the previous months. Little Ali closed the door and left. Later that day, he was visited by Akbar, the kindly guard with whom Scott had established some rapport. The slender, mustachioed Iranian told Scott that Bani-Sadr had been elected president of Iran. Scott told him that he had no respect for a government that treated him and his fellow Americans as they had been treated, and complained to Akbar about the mock execution.
Akbar apologized for it and seemed genuinely chagrined. It had been “un-Islamic,” he said. He then led Scott out of the cold room and back to his cubicle.
“Be good,” he implored.
It was the first time Scott realized that Akbar outranked the other guards.
After the mock execution, mail was delivered more frequently. Most was from strangers, which remained a disappointment. Sometimes it seemed as if all of America had adopted the hostages as pen pals. Many of the letters continued to be from schoolchildren who had written as part of a classroom assignment.
“Dear Mr. Hall. Hi, my name is Jimmy. I am eight years old and I am writing this letter because my teacher says that I have to. What do you eat?” One of the letters was similarly chatty and upbeat and ended with, “I sure hope they don’t shoot you.” Hall received several from a man in Houston who had apparently chosen him as his hostage pen pal. These were cleverer than most and Hall actually enjoyed them. The writer always incorporated short parables that were ostensibly preachy little stories, the kind of thing his Iranian captors liked but which could be relatively easily deciphered to reveal important news developments. For instance, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Hall’s correspondent wrote a story about a large man, whom he likened to a bear, attacking his neighbor and insisting that the neighbor wear a bright red collar with a star on it.
The guards withheld mail to punish prisoners they didn’t like. Colonel Scott rarely received anything, and when he did it was usually from a stranger. Once, Hamid the Liar surprised him by offering to escort him to the mail table.
Behind the table, stacked high with letters, was a guard named Ahmad, a squat, thick, balding, cheerfully abusive man who was at least ten years older than the other guards. He made a pretense of shuffling through the stacks.
“I don’t see anything for you, Mr. Scott,” he said. “Are you sure your wife has not found another man?”
A guard alongside Ahmad handed him several letters, and the colonel found a spot on the floor to sit and read them. The first two were from strangers; one was addressed to “Lieutenant Colonel” Scott, which was annoying to a man very proud of his rank. One was a letter from his sister, and another from his wife, Betty, postmarked October 26, more than a week before he was taken hostage. It was terribly disappointing. Like most of the hostages, Scott worried a great deal about his wife and children and wondered how they were coping with this ordeal. The encouraging letter from his sister also revealed nothing about his family. The last letter was from a precocious grade-school girl in Nebraska, writing as part of a class assignment, who addressed him as “Lieutenant Scott” and confided that she thought it would have been smarter for President Carter to send the shah back to Iran instead of letting him go to Panama—it was the first he had heard that the shah was no longer in the United States. The little girl concluded by noting that Scott was forty-eight and that he was a “lieutenant.” She asked, “At your age, shouldn’t you be higher than that?”
Multiple copies of the comics and sports pages of the
8. Ham, They Are Crazy
On the same day as the mock execution, forty-nine members of a group calling itself the Committee for American-Iranian Crisis Resolution left New York for Tehran. It had been formed by a professor of industrial relations at the University of Kansas, Norm Forer, who had been active years earlier in efforts to publicize the shah’s human rights abuses and hoped that a dialogue between American citizens critical of their government and the hostage takers might help break the deadlock. He proposed that his group travel to Iran not to initiate a dialogue but simply to listen, to give the hostage takers an opportunity to vent before a group of sympathetic Americans. Many prominent leftist activists sought to be included but Forer, perhaps mindful that his own name would be eclipsed, wanted unknowns, what he called “grassroots.” He polled antiwar organizations for names and selected a cross section of people who shared his political outlook. The student hostage takers, who still felt their message to Americans was being distorted by government-controlled media, smelled enough opportunity for propaganda points to put up the money for the trip. Among those in the private mission were Hershel Jaffe, a rabbi from Newburgh, New York, and the Reverend Darrell Rupiper, an activist Catholic priest from Omaha,
