He heard the guards whispering excitedly among themselves about the visit of Ahmad Khomeini, and then, passing the word from guard to guard, they removed the blindfolds from Limbert and the other hostages in the room. They apparently did not want the imam’s son to see that they had blindfolded the hostages. When Limbert’s came off he saw that seated alongside him was Charles Jones, who kept trying to tell his captors that he had high blood pressure and needed his medicine. Jones asked Limbert to explain in Farsi. The two of them started nagging the guards, in English and in Farsi, pleading for the medication, which worked, although it took a few tries. The guards kept coming back with the wrong medicine, and each time Limbert complained to them about the seriousness of Jones’s condition. Were they trying to kill him?
Limbert sat up late in a downstairs bedroom talking earnestly with his young captors. They said they were staging the demonstration in order to force the United States to return the shah in order to stand trial for his crimes.
“I don’t think you have much of a chance,” said Limbert.
They tried to engage him further in a political discussion but Limbert avoided it. The little training he had been given about being taken captive warned against getting drawn into political discussions. So he kept changing the subject, asking questions. They were shocked at how well he spoke Farsi, and how much he knew about their country, its history and literature—more than they themselves did.
Throughout the residence, Americans were bound to chairs. Joe Hall, the warrant officer who was convinced his capture meant he would be sent home early, was in the basement TV room, which had a door to a storage area stocked with sodas, canned goods, and candy. He watched as a procession of the young Iranians raided the stash. One came out grinning, and with hands that seemed grubby to Hall he popped a piece of candy into the captive American’s mouth.
The same young Iranian who had earlier posed with a knife pressed against the side of marine guard Rocky Sickmann’s head now offered him candy.
“No, I don’t want your fucking candy,” said Sickmann.
“I’ll take it,” said vice consul Richard Queen. “I’m hungry.”
“The shah didn’t feed prisoners,” said one of the Iranians, who nevertheless placed a date in Queen’s mouth and then held up a small plastic bowl for him to spit out the pit.
As the hours dragged on, Hall’s hands, which were tied behind his back, began to hurt, and he asked if the cloth could be loosened.
“They’re cutting off my circulation,” he said.
A young Iranian bent over and removed them, and for a while Hall sat with his hands in his lap. Then an older student saw him untied and angrily instructed the others to retie him. This time his hands were bound in front, which was a little more comfortable.
In the room with him was an angry little guard with a big nose whom Hall dubbed “Rat Face.”
“You are See-ah [CIA],” he sneered at the bound American.
“I am not CIA.”
“Yes, you are all spies here.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” said Hall facetiously. “I’m See-ah.”
Rat Face brightened at this, accepting it as an admission.
“What was your job?” he asked.
Hall thought for a moment, and then said, again facetiously, “I was in charge of wheat mold.”
“What is wheat mold?”
“You know the wheat that grows and that you use to make bread?” Hall explained, warming to the joke. “Well, mold is something that happens to the wheat that makes it no good. I did all that. I was the CIA agent in charge of wheat mold.”
The young Iranian absorbed this intently—indeed, the CIA plot to destroy Iranian crops would become part of the list of “revelations” later claimed by the hostage takers.
“How long is this stuff going to go on anyway?” Hall asked. “You guys aren’t going to be able to carry this off very long.”
“Maybe one year,” said Rat Face.
He then bent over and removed one of Hall’s shoes. He pulled the TV cord from the wall, doubled it over, and, grabbing Hall’s foot by the toes and pulling it up, slapped the cord across the bottom of his foot.
“This is the way the shah’s army tortured innocent Iranians,” he said, and he slapped the cord across Hall’s foot again.
He didn’t hit Hall hard enough for it to hurt. When he dropped his foot, Hall slid it back into his shoe.
Later, he was taken upstairs, to one of the residence’s larger rooms, where the Iranians were intrigued by decorations left over from a Halloween party that had been organized the week before by Hall’s subordinate, Joe Subic. One of them fingered a hanging cartoon skeleton and asked, “What’s this?”
“It’s part of a holiday celebration, a holiday for children,” Hall said.
“You do this sort of stuff for children?” the Iranian asked, surveying the images of witches, goblins, and spooky pumpkin heads.
“It’s an old custom,” Hall started to explain but then realized how peculiar the holiday actually was. “We give candy to children.”
Hall saw Subic in that upstairs room, and true to form the eager young sergeant was volunteering to be helpful. He had a yellow legal pad and was pointing out all the captives and giving their names, job titles, and descriptions. He seemed to be enjoying himself. They would stop at a blindfolded prisoner, and Subic would say, “This is Greg Persinger. He’s a marine sergeant,” and then they would move on to the next person. Before Sharer, he said, “This is Commander Don Sharer, he’s an F-14 expert, he works for the United States Navy, and he was in Vietnam.” Sharer had earlier given his name as “Mickey Mouse.” Many of the top embassy officials had been trying to keep their status and responsibilities obscure. “It would probably be best to just drop ‘sir’ from your vocabulary for the time being,” consular officer Don Cooke had advised the marines bound to chairs near him. Whatever Subic’s instincts were, they didn’t run along these lines. Before Colonel Scott, Subic said, “This is Colonel Chuck Scott, the military liaison officer. He’s been in Iran many times before. He was an attaché here in the sixties and he speaks fluent Farsi.” Scott would like to have punched the young sergeant in the face, both for being so helpful to their captors and for calling him “Chuck,” a level of familiarity that ignored their difference in rank and actual relationship. Some of those identified asked Subic, “Why are you doing this?” or told him angrily, “Keep your mouth shut,” or “Leave it alone, Joe.” It didn’t seem to bother or deter him at all. Hall had found Subic a difficult employee ever since he had arrived in Tehran. The chubby soldier with glasses and dirty-blond hair was so eager to take on responsibility and to get involved with work others were doing in the embassy that he tended to neglect his own duties. Subic was a well-meaning busybody, who seemed compelled to be at the center of attention, and now he was doing it here, with all of his colleagues tied to chairs.
“Joe, sit down and mind your own business,” Hall told him.
“Shut up!” one of the guards shouted at him. “No speak!” The way the guards pronounced “speak” added a vowel to the front end, so it came out as “Eh-speak,” a phrase the hostages would hear again and again in the coming months.