PART FOUR
One Hundred and Thirty-two Men
1. Bunny Sadr
Forcing grown men to live together in a small space day and night, month after month, is a form of slow torture.
The way one man chews his food, sniffles, coughs, farts, snores, or clears his throat becomes a torment. Bob Ode’s garrulousness drove his roommates crazy. He was guilty of a failing that afflicts many men as they age, the tendency to tell the same stories over and over again. ICA chief John Graves’s patrician disdain for meticulous personal hygiene—he stank—had his roommates contemplating roommate-icide. Economics officer Bob Blucker’s hatred of tobacco smoke finally drove him to isolation; he would stuff toilet-paper wads under the crack of his door to keep smoke out of his space. Opinions become deadly, and anything can provoke argument—the rules of a card game, the coming American elections, the likelihood of snow in Tehran in February, the advantages of French cooking…anything. Rocky Sickmann and Jerry Plotkin grew intensely envious of their roommate Billy Gallegos because for some reason—reasons were hard to come by—he had been given back his shoes after the visit from Norm Forer’s crowd, and his roommates had not. It engendered weeks of ill will.
The three primary beats of each day were meals. Immediately after breakfast, speculation would begin about what would come for lunch and, after lunch, what would be served for dinner. It was pathetic. Many of the hostages coped with boredom by sleeping half the day. Some of the hostages took up arts and crafts. Al Golacinski received a paint-by-number set in the mail from someone and spent hours patiently coloring in the intricate patterns, producing paintings that the guards vied to take home. At the Foreign Ministry, Bruce Laingen took up watercolors, painting scenes outside the tall windows on the third floor. Michael Metrinko drew complex geometric designs on the walls of his cell, using his food bowl and the top of his drinking cup, and then colored them in.
The main pastime was making life difficult for the guards, who obliged, many of them, by being exquisitely sensitive to slight.
Hamid the Liar stepped into Sickmann’s room one night and complained about the marine’s use of the word “guard” in reference to him. The term, he said, was “too cruel.”
“We don’t want you to feel that you are in a prison,” he said. “We want you to feel that you are our guests.”
Sickmann and his roommates were visited one day by an Iranian professor who encouraged them not to despair so much about going home.
“It is good to take four months off work and have a rest,” he said.
Then he went home.
America’s long lack of a military response to Iran’s provocation prompted a popular joke; in which President Carter was visited by the ghost of Theodore Roosevelt, who wondered what was going on in the world.
“The Soviets have invaded Afghanistan,” Carter says.
“Are you retaliating with conventional forces or with nuclear weapons?” Roosevelt asks.
“Uh, neither one,” says Carter. “We’re boycotting the Olympics in Moscow.”
“What else is going on?” the former Rough Rider asks.
“Iranians have taken over an embassy in Tehran and they’re holding fifty-three of our diplomats hostage.”
“How many bombers have you sent over?” Roosevelt asks. “How many divisions have you committed?”
“None,” says Carter. “We’re using diplomatic restraint.”
Roosevelt looks stunned, and then bursts into laughter.
“I get it,” he says, “you’re joking! Next you’re gonna tell me you gave away the Panama Canal!”
Jimmy Carter’s patience was not just principled forbearance, nor was his determination to end the crisis peacefully fed by wishful thinking. It was based on the belief that nations were guided ultimately by self-interest. Even in the swirling currents of Iran, he was convinced that cooler heads would eventually prevail. By any realistic calculation, sustaining the standoff hurt Iran far more than it did America. Khomeini’s new Islamist state was struggling to define itself while battling ethnic separatists and Soviet-backed leftists inside its borders and fending off increasingly bold incursions by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Russian armies had occupied its neighbor Afghanistan. The country was imperiled by both civil war and invasion. Even as it disdained Western allies, Iran needed trading partners and military suppliers. So why jeopardize these things for the sake of holding a few score Americans captive? The move made sense only in the imaginary world of the student hostage takers and their hard-core clerical supporters, who were motivated more by symbols than by reality. In their eyes, the embassy occupation had become the revolution’s defining moment, a dramatic uprooting of all American interests and values and a hopeful beacon to all the world’s oppressed. The various downsides to drawing it out were dismissed by the faithful with a wave of the hand; Allah would defend and provide.
Less well understood by Carter and even the foreign service professionals who advised him were the practical political benefits to religious hardliners inside Iran of sustaining this crisis. Stories of American subterfuge undercut the efforts of popular rivals such as Bani-Sadr and Ghotbzadeh to create a more democratic, secular state. The embattled president and foreign minister made one last effort to wrest control of the hostages from the students in April. With support from the Revolutionary Council, Bani-Sadr once again demanded that the hostages be delivered to the Foreign Ministry, where Laingen, Tomseth, and Howland oversaw new preparations to receive them. For once, the students appeared to have been outmaneuvered. Instead of repeating their defiance, a spokesman for the hostage takers declined public comment, fueling hopes in Washington that at last they were prepared to submit. Carter was so encouraged that he took the unusual step of inviting reporters into the Oval Office on the morning of April 1 to share the good news. It appeared at last that this long, embarrassing, confusing ordeal was at an end.
“This morning the president of Iran has announced that the hostages’ control will be transferred to the government of Iran, which we consider to be a positive step,” the president told the journalists. The shift came at a propitious moment for Carter, who was facing off against Senator Kennedy that day in two primaries, in Wisconsin and Kansas.
Carter was not just preening. He had prearranged with Ghotbzadeh to make such public remarks. Bani- Sadr was to announce that the Revolutionary Council had approved the transfer, and the White House would respond by welcoming the move and promising not to impose additional sanctions. Carter made a point of repeating the promise three times to reporters. He had met the afternoon before with Ben Bradlee, editor of the
By the end of the day the president had carried both election primaries, but his hopes for a resolution of the hostage standoff were once again dashed. For reasons the White House did not understand, Bani-Sadr had
