The commission members were pictured boarding a plane in Tehran. The hostage families were back on TV at home with long, worried faces.
For his part, Bani-Sadr immediately scurried back into the radical camp. The same students he had called “self-centered children” and “dictators” weeks before, he now praised as “young patriots,” and argued that the label “moderate,” which had been applied to those trying to compromise over the hostage issue, certainly did not apply to him. Carter’s hopes were dashed and, worse, he appeared to have been snookered. All that had come of it was the creation of a UN commission that seemed certain to find fault with the United States.
“I am amazed at the naiveté of the American authorities,” said Bani-Sadr.
Carter was fed up. He was an extraordinarily patient man, but in him that virtue was now nearly exhausted. The government officials he was dealing with in Iran were powerless. He felt the last chance to free the captives peacefully had failed. Polls taken immediately after this disappointment showed that a majority of Americans believed the administration’s Iran policy had failed. Brzezinski sent a memo to Carter reporting this latest indignity, and the president scribbled in the margin, “The polls are accurate.”
Near the end of February, a guard named Mohammed told Joe Hall and Richard Queen that he was leaving. Mohammed had always treated them well, allowing them to whisper back and forth when it was forbidden to speak and sometimes bringing them candy and extra helpings of a dinner they especially liked. He told them that he was tired of the thing. It was going nowhere, and he had lost too much time away from his studies.
“I don’t believe anymore that it is the right thing to do,” he told them.
And then he was gone.
9. Fie on Them All
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 Voice of America and BBC broadcasts, and devoured the local newspapers and magazines. Their hopes had soared when the UN panel arrived in Tehran and then were dashed when its mission came apart. They pored over every statement from Qom, Washington, and Tehran like runes, trying to divine what was taking place behind the scenes. Tomseth, who had met his wife during his first State Department assignment in Thailand, would speak with her in Oregon periodically on the phone in fluent Thai, a language he felt sure would not be understood by the Iranians who monitored their calls. So he had yet another unfiltered source of information about what was going on in the United States.
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 chargé 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.