“Time is up,” said Ebtekar, and without ceremony Hermening was pulled up off the couch by the arm, blindfolded, and led from the room.
Timm broke down sobbing. Ebtekar sat next to her and tried to put an arm around her and Timm shoved her away, swore at her, and then sat crying for a long time. Her husband was led in then, and they were made to watch a movie about the revolution, full of grotesque images of the dead, wounded, tortured, and executed. It was horrible. It went on and on, well over an hour.
“When the hell does this end?” Timm asked.
“It never will end,” said Ebtekar.
“Oh, Jesus,” said Timm.
“Our revolution has not ended and it won’t end until all the oppressed people of the world are free with us,” said the robed young woman.
Unlike the revolution, the film did eventually end. Afterward they were led to a room where a feast had been prepared for them, steaks, vegetables, potatoes, and salad. Timm said she wasn’t hungry, but Ebtekar and the others insisted that they eat.
She sat and picked at the food while her Iranian hosts stood around and watched.
“Is this not a delicious meal?” they kept asking.
The Timms nodded and ate and tried to appear thankful enough to satisfy them.
“This is a fine meal,” Timm said finally. “Now I’d like to just get back to the United States.”
“You can go back and let your people know that this is what the hostages are eating every day,” said Ebtekar.
Ken Timm called her a liar, which did not seem to startle or bother Ebtekar. It was dark when they were finally led from the compound. They were handed blindfolds and instructed to tie them on, but once in the car the driver told them they didn’t have to do so.
“Just put your heads down in your laps,” he said.
They were driven away hunched over in the backseat. After a few minutes of driving they were told they could sit up again. At their hotel a mob of reporters was waiting with cameras, and they were filmed as they left the car and entered the lobby. Back upstairs, McAfee wanted them to return to the lobby to answer questions, but Timm refused. She had had enough. But McAfee waited until she cooled down and then led her downstairs. She was worried about saying anything that might prevent them from going home, but before the cameras she seemed composed and happy. In answer to one question, she said she would go home and work for a peaceful settlement of the standoff. She said that she had found her son to be “in excellent health and very, very happy to see me. He was surprised and overjoyed that I had traveled across the globe to be with him.”
What was the reunion like?
“We never quit holding hands. There was a lot of hugging, a lot of touching. I kept telling him how strong he was, and he kept telling me how strong I was. He says he has not lost faith. He said, ‘I’ve become a better person and a stronger person.’ I told him I had come to give him strength and faith.”
Timm portrayed the six hours inside the embassy as a happy social occasion. She and the militant students had “talked and talked and talked. I still can’t understand or justify an embassy being taken over. But I had to live with one of two choices, either going on hating these people and having that destroy our family or trying to understand these people.”
The captors showed her and her husband “nothing but the best of hospitality. I found human beings…. The government has said these people are brainwashed. I really don’t know what that means, but I can’t agree. What would be the sign?”
Hermening returned to his chancery room in a daze.
“You’re not going to believe this,” he told Golacinski.
“What?”
“I just saw my mother.”
“What do you mean you saw your mother?”
“I just met with my mother.”
They talked for hours, with Hermening reconstructing the dialogue as best he could. Golacinski kept pressing for more details—“Try to remember,” he said. “Try to remember. What did she say?”—until it dawned on him that his young friend was embarrassed. He realized that Hermening felt bad for him and for Miele.
As she waited the next few days in a Tehran hotel for her flight home on Friday, Barbara Timm prayed that her son would be allowed to join her. She had played along with his captors in every way she could, nodding sympathetically to their stories of the abusive shah and the evil designs her country had on theirs.
Inside the chancery, the guards fed the same hope in Hermening. Several days after the meeting the guards brought him a box of photos and long letters from just about everyone in his family. One of his guards even told him it might happen. Hermening had mixed feelings. There was no question that he would go if he got the chance, but he wondered if it might brand him for life as a “mama’s boy.” He was prepared to live with that.
“If you let me go, I’ll make sure that the American public hears about what the shah did,” he promised.
He closed his eyes Thursday night nursing hope that tomorrow might be the day of his release.
Bruce Laingen composed a secret letter for his colleagues in Washington in mid-April and passed it to the Swiss emissary who visited him on occasion. It expressed his growing sense that the crisis was at a hopeless impasse, and while it was not Laingen’s intent, it was received in the White House as a request from the hostage action:
We welcome steps announced by the president this past week [the expulsion of Iranian diplomats, among other sanctions]. They can only succeed if they in fact hurt and if the prospect for further hurt looks real to those who seek to guide and influence the way the Majlis handles this issue. It is vital that we have the maximum support of our allies and friends…. [Iran] can now only hope to limit the damage that is being done to its own vital interests…that damage will increase each additional day the hostages were held.
The imprisoned chargé had in mind economic and political sanctions, not a military mission, but Carter would see in those words a call to arms.
Howland became convinced that there would be a rescue attempt. He knew that if commandos came in, they would come through either doors or windows, loud and fast. He knew they would shoot anyone who didn’t comply.
“If some guys come bursting through the windows, don’t get up and start yelling,” he told Laingen and Tomseth. “Just do exactly what they tell you. Because they’re going to pick you up and physically carry you out. They will not let you walk. They will physically carry you.”
If the raiders came in downstairs, they would have to fight their way up the stairs, which would give the guards upstairs time to shoot them, so Howland started sleeping in the nude again, figuring the split-second advantage it gave him would help. He found a heavy stick that he put under his mattress. He put it next to the door every night, figuring he could jump the first guard to come through. He knew their pistols could fire only one round, so all he had to do was make a gunman miss that first shot.
The evening of April 24 was clear, and the view out the windows of the Foreign Ministry was quite beautiful. Laingen watched the mountains at sunset, admiring the blush of bright green spring growth in the gardens below. He continued watching until the Iranian sky faded into darkness.
4. Welcome to World War Three
Through that falling darkness a lone plane was moving fast and low toward Iran over the dark waters of the Gulf of Oman. It was a big, four-propeller U.S. Air Force workhorse, a C-130 Hercules, painted in a mottled black and green camouflage that made it all but invisible against the black water and night sky. It flew with no lights. Inside, in the eerie red glow of the plane’s blackout lamps, seventy-four men struggled to get comfortable in a cramped, unaccommodating space. Only the plane’s usual eleven-man crew had assigned seats; the others sprawled on and around a jeep, five motorcycles, and two long sheets of heavy aluminum—which would be placed under the plane’s tires if it became stuck in desert sand—and a bulky portable guidance system that would help the planes and helicopters to home in on Desert One. It had taken all the ingenuity of the plane’s loadmaster to squeeze it all in. As they had been working on it, one of the air force crewmen had wondered aloud, “With all this added weight, I hope we can get off the ground,” which had set off the already edgy Colonel Beckwith like a firecracker. He had to be reassured by the loadmaster that the excess cargo had been carefully weighed and was within the plane’s limits. The Hercules was designed primarily to carry sixty-four paratroopers, with webbing on the sides and fold-out aluminum seats, but even those spare comforts had been stripped to make more room. The men had spread mattresses on the steel floor of the fuselage, which got frigid once airborne. Some were napping on their gear. There was the vaguely sweet smell of fuel and, other than the drone of four big propellers, mostly silence.