Bruce Laingen, his deputy Vic Tomseth, and security officer Mike Howland were still walking in circles on the third floor of the Foreign Ministry, involuntary “guests” of the Iranian government. Their hair had grown long and their clothes looked worn and wrinkled. They were able to shower—Laingen noted in his diary on January 2 the first hot one since the day he had arrived. Toward the end of the month they were finally given mattresses, and now they no longer had to sleep curled up on the lumpy sofas in the reception dining hall. Both Laingen and Howland had taken up watercolor painting and stood for hours by the big third-floor windows painting the views north toward the mountains. Tomseth spent most of his time reading, grabbing for the thickest books he could find. He got lost in novels set in faraway places and times.
Howland was still secretly exploring every corner of the old ministry building. He had started sneaking around at night in the nude; knowing how squeamish Iranian men were about nudity, he figured nakedness would give him a momentary advantage if he were discovered. One night he had crept downstairs to a foyer when two guards surprised him, and he hid beneath a table just a few feet away, his heart beating so loudly he felt sure they would hear it. They had passed on without noticing him.
Gradually, Howland expanded his range, and in time he had explored the whole building. He found a phone in a VIP waiting area that he used to call friends in north Tehran and to place calls to the British and Danish embassies, which gave them a line of communications that, unlike the phone in their quarters upstairs, was probably not monitored—at least no one suspected the Americans of having access to it. With the British ambassador’s office he worked out a system for passing coded messages keyed to the page numbers and lines of a book they agreed upon. This gave them another secret line of communication if they needed it. In fact, the Swiss ambassador was able to carry messages in and out of his meetings with them without being searched, and Laingen was already using that method to send private messages to Washington. Howland’s girlfriend Joan Walsh, one of the women among the thirteen hostages released in November, sent him a small file buried in a packet of pipe tobacco; she also sent him a hacksaw blade hidden in the spine of a book. Howland used the file to whittle down the blade of his pocketknife into a shim, which he then used to break into the guards’ key box in the kitchen and steal a key to the attic door.
There was nothing for him up there except for the feeling of having put one over on his captors. Howland did these things as much for personal amusement as for any practical reason. He thought a lot about what might happen if the American military tried to rescue them and planned for that contingency in part by disabling the pistols carried by their interior guards. One afternoon, sitting with two of the guards in their small kitchen, Howland offered to show them how to field-strip their Spanish-made pistols. He broke them down and put them back together quickly, and then set about teaching them how to do it themselves. It got so they felt comfortable enough to leave him alone with them for brief periods when they were disassembled.
Howland borrowed Tomseth’s toenail clippers and cut the recoil springs on the weapons, which meant they could fire one round but then the pistol would fail to successfully chamber a second round.
They watched Iranian TV with Tomseth providing a running translation, listened to the
When Khomeini fell ill with a heart ailment in January, there were stories of Iranian zealots offering to give up their lives in order to provide the imam with a fresh heart. Tomseth wrote a letter to the editor of a Tehran newspaper endorsing the idea, but suggesting that the wrong organ was being offered. Khomeini already had demonstrated by his behavior after the embassy takeover that he could function perfectly well without a heart, but “he could do very nicely with a new brain.” He showed the letter to Laingen, and they thought better of it. Tomseth tore it up.
The ordeal was a special strain on the idealistic Laingen, who every day suffered a fresh outrage. Nothing angered him more than Americans like Thomas, the native American activist, or the Kansas activist group headed by Forer, people Laingen felt were lending sympathy to his kidnappers. In America they were free to criticize and oppose, but how could they travel to a foreign country where America itself was under attack and applaud its enemies? How long would their defiant free speech and oppositionist politics last in a country ruled by the imam? By the third month of the standoff, even Iranians were beginning to sour on the young radicals holding the embassy, with their nightly telecasts revealing “spy documents,” which gave them a national platform to denounce the nation’s highest officials on the basis of revealed “contacts” with the American embassy, usually casual and routine. The students were very selective in these denunciations. Laingen knew well that plenty of the top clerics in the country, heroes of the revolution, had precisely the same kinds of contacts with the embassy, some of them more than routine, but their names never surfaced in the press conference. Exposing those ties was not politically advantageous. The increasingly embittered charge saw that the students, unable to find any evidence for the most outlandish of their theories, had found another more cynical use for their treasure of stolen paper. The documents and revelations were being used to cow and ruin moderate politicians who threatened their vision of a “pure” Islamist state.
He wrote in his diary:
It is so degrading to Iran. Surely an intelligent Iranian watching this kind of performance must be repelled…allowing a group of “students” to claim TV time to denigrate leaders in the present government. But beyond that, allowing “students” to continue defying all standards of conduct and decency—looting a foreign government’s files…It is so outrageous I could choke the first Iranian I see. A gang of thieves, condoned by another gang of thieves. Fie on them all…
Former prime minister Mehdi Bazargan was quoted in a newspaper complaining, “Now the country is run by a bunch of kids, and this is regrettable. It is not correct to devote the TV screen to the most shameful accusations against people without asking the other side to defend themselves. You jeopardize the honor and nobility of the people with this.”
Precisely at this moment, Forer’s group appeared in Tehran seeking “reconciliation,” and effectively endorsing the takeover. The Kansas professor’s words were gladly reproduced in Tehran newspapers.
Laingen found Forer’s use of language from the New Testament especially galling, rhetorically linking the American government and diplomatic mission to the Pharisees and venal usurers of the ancient Jewish temple and, by implication, comparing the students to an angry Jesus Christ the Lord himself, chasing blasphemers from God’s house. And Forer was Jewish! Did he realize how anti-Semitic this new regime was? What could he be thinking? From his third-floor prison, Laingen wrote, “Good grief, if that is the way he interprets U.S. restraint on this issue, he isn’t fit to teach kindergarten.”
All pretense of keeping the three for their own protection was gone. They were now treated simply as hostages, with the doors to their living space chained and padlocked. They slept on the dining room floor and washed their socks and underclothes in the bathroom. Laingen discovered that the best way to clean his sheets was to soak them in the washbasin in soapy water and then, with the wet, soapy sheet draped over his shoulders in the shower, rinse it. The sheet could then be wrung out and hung up to dry, which didn’t take long in air so free of moisture. When the weather grew warmer they were allowed outside to exercise for an hour each day in the minister’s spacious garden. Laingen walked for ten minutes, jogged for thirty, and then did ten minutes of calisthenics. They were given a Ping-Pong table to help pass the time. Archbishop Hilarion Capucci, the Greek cleric, sent them a record player and a cassette player, along with some music—including the song “Tie a Yellow Ribbon,” which had become an anthem of sorts to the hostages thanks to Laingen’s wife Penne’s yellow ribbon campaign. That and the tunes of Elton John could be heard echoing in the cavernous chambers.
It was a strange existence. On the first day of March, looking out the window across the gray city toward the mountains, Howland spotted Laingen’s Italian cook and his Iranian driver on the sidewalk outside the ministry building looking up. They had evidently driven over hoping to catch a glimpse of their former employer, and when they caught Howland’s eye, and he brought Laingen and Tomseth to the window, they waved back and forth vigorously for a few moments until the Americans, worried that the ministry guards would see, gestured for their
