In his speech that day, Khomeini called the takeover “a second revolution, more glorious than the first.”
In Washington all this removed the best hope for an early resolution. At a second meeting of the National Security Council that afternoon, General Jones presented the rescue option he had heard from Burruss that morning with his own pessimistic assessment of its chances. Ramsey Clark and William Miller flew from Washington to Greece, and then to Turkey, awaiting permission to enter Iran and deliver the letter crafted so carefully by Precht and White House officials. Their mission stalled there, as they waited for confirmation that they would be welcomed in Tehran. NBC’s Richard Valeriani, who had been sitting on the story, finally aired it on the Today show after the State Department relented. The network had cameras pointed at the stalled plane in Turkey, where it sat and sat. Finally official word came from Tehran that the emissaries would not be allowed into the country. To make matters worse, the students issued a statement promising to execute the hostages if America made an effort to free them. Carter was hamstrung. He lacked a viable military option and there seemed to be no one in Iran willing to negotiate.
As Hamilton Jordan left the White House that evening, November 6, he noticed a big crowd outside the Iranian embassy on Massachusetts Avenue.
“Let our people go!” they chanted, as passing cars honked in approval.
Jordan was struck by the contrast: the powers in Iran applauding the seizure of America’s embassy, while in D.C. police had carefully roped off an area around the Iranian embassy and were busily protecting it from angry Americans.
18. Yes, and This Is for You
The hostages at the embassy had no idea what effect their kidnapping was having around the world. They lived in enforced silence, cut off from anything outside the four walls of whatever room held them. With mobs howling outside for their blood, it was hard to think past their immediate predicament.
Bill Belk spent most of his first week in captivity tied to a chair in one of the cottages. A picture of him snapped on the day of the takeover, a tall man with longish hair and long sideburns, blindfolded, bound, and proudly erect, standing a good foot taller than his captors with his head held high, had been reprinted in newspapers and magazines all over the world. Unbeknownst to Belk, his image had come to symbolize the crisis.
He was a well-traveled member of the foreign service, an adventurer who often volunteered for difficult assignments around the world. He had discovered that the danger in these places was often overstated, that prices were generally low and the food was good. He had known little about Iran before taking the post in Tehran. He knew there had been a revolution only weeks before he had arrived, but he neither knew nor cared much about how or why it had happened. His job was to operate the new communications equipment called TERP, which had simplified a lot of the old teletype rigmarole by projecting a video image of the received message before it was printed out. It eliminated the need to retype the coded material because an optical character reader translated the messages and gave the communicator a chance to make small corrections on the video screen before printing it out. The flow of messages in and out was brisk, and keeping track of it was a full-time job. His was a narrow but necessary skill, and with it Belk had seen the world. Of all the places he had been in his career, mostly in Asia and Africa, he thought Iran was the prettiest, with its beautiful snowcapped mountains and endless deserts. Tehran was inexpensive and had good restaurants and shops. People would stop him on the street, grabbing his hand to admire his diamond rings and watch. Belk collected beautiful things, and he enjoyed shopping for exotic treasures. In Iran he had particularly admired the delicate workmanship on picture frames fashioned out of camel hair, copper, and wood.
Being tied to a chair for three days was mighty uncomfortable, but even worse, thought Belk, were the windy lectures of a pious guard named Seyyed. Filled with the arrogance of youth and flush with triumph, he held forth endlessly in passable English to his captive audience on the theocratic and philosophical underpinnings of the revolution. It held little interest for Belk, who was tired, hungry, stiff, and sore, and who was disinclined to deal in deep abstraction under the best of circumstances. To him, all this heated reasoning was Seyyed’s way of convincing himself that it was right to hold diplomats hostage.
The nylon rope that dug sharply into Belk’s wrists was finally replaced by a strip of white cloth, which was a tremendous relief. The cloth was more a token than actual restraint, because it would have been easy to slip his hands out. On the fourth day he was placed in a room with Don Hohman, a lean, red-haired army medic who had been deployed to Tehran for six months because the State Department had been unable to find a civilian nurse who would take the job. He was the embassy’s official doc. Hohman was less stoic than most about the treatment they were receiving, and he amused Belk by his sturdy defiance—Belk saw him as a typical red-haired hothead. He complained to the guards constantly and about everything. He refused the mashed peas and rice they offered at mealtime—“I don’t want your goddamn food”—and even water—“I don’t want your goddamn water.” He constantly interrupted Seyyed with such determined insults that Belk was certain the medic was going to be taken out and shot.
After several days together, Belk felt the sting of an insect bite and, shortly afterward, the symptoms of an allergic reaction. His breathing began to grow labored.
Hohman knew exactly what was happening. Belk’s windpipe was swelling up, choking him from the inside. He screamed at the bewildered guards that his colleague needed a shot of adrenaline immediately or he was going to die. Two of the Iranians were medical students, and they could see that Hohman was right. Belk’s skin was flushed and forming hives, and his breathing was so strained he looked ready to pass out. They untied Hohman and he took off running for his medical office. The guards ran after, trying to maintain the pretense of escorting him. There was a real danger of Hohman being shot as an escapee; that’s what he looked like, racing across the compound with armed guards in hot pursuit, and when he got to the chancery a startled guard there hit him with the butt of his weapon. He then pointed it at the two Iranian guards who came running up behind the stunned medic.