Fitch was convinced of it. He put his heart into the work—the tactics they were perfecting had lots of potential applications, so none of the effort was wasted—but he believed that the chance something this risky would be attempted by this president was about nil. He didn’t believe Carter had the balls.
6. The Corrupt of the Earth
In early December, John Limbert was placed in a van and driven off the embassy grounds. Initially, he was elated; he was wired that way; his first instinct was always hope. Maybe they were being released! He knew he would make quite a picture on the evening news. He had lost weight and was unshaven and haggard. On the morning of the takeover he had wanted to get a haircut, now his thick dark hair was so long he doubted his wife, Parveneh, and their two children would recognize him. But it was soon clear that he wasn’t going home.
Instead he was led into a large private home with marble floors and a grand foyer with a high ceiling from which hung an enormous, gaudy chandelier. At the center of the house was a wide, curved staircase, which led up to a carpeted landing with hallways leading off in several directions. It was luxury abandoned in haste. Limbert and his two new roommates, State Department communicator Rick Kupke and the ICA chief John Graves, found expensive clothes still hanging in the closet. It must have been the home of someone important in the royal regime. The windows in their upstairs room had been sealed shut and blackened. They soon perceived that other hostages were there too. Dave Roeder and Bob Ode were down the hall.
Limbert took this move as bad news. It suggested a higher level of coordination and resolve and felt like a long step away from freedom. They were watched over by a guard they dubbed “Two Shirts,” because his wardrobe alternated invariably between a pink one and a green one. Two Shirts had no sympathy for his captives’ physical discomfort. He accused them constantly of surreptitiously communicating and ordered all three of them to face different walls. This meant Kupke and Graves had to lie in bed for the guard’s entire eight-hour shift, in the same position, staring at the tan walls. Limbert, who conversed with most of the guards at length, had such contempt for Two Shirts’ inflexibility that he would turn his back to him every time he came in the room. The other guards sometimes took pity on them. Kupke and Graves were allowed to sit up and place their feet on the floor, and once or twice they were allowed to stand and walk around the room, but not often.
Limbert spoke to the guards in Farsi, while Graves, a tall man with a full graying beard and a mustache he waxed and drew out to points at each end, seemed calm and aloof, puffing away obsessively on his pipe. Kupke retreated into hours of reverie, imagining himself as the star in football games he had watched as a boy from the stands, or taking long walks down Main Street in his hometown of Rensselaer, Indiana, stopping to chat with people in every store. Passing the hours on his mattress on the floor, Limbert finally let go of his expectation of early release, reconciled himself to open-ended confinement and uncertainty, and began the routines that would see him through the ordeal.
The goal was to structure this ocean of time and use it productively. He had read that keeping fit and clean were two simple things that passed time and fostered health in confinement, so he commenced doing sit-ups and leg lifts. He avoided working up a heavy sweat, because he was allowed to shower only once every few weeks and he didn’t want to smell worse than he already did. Meals came regularly, and the food was edible, but he was still dropping weight. His pants swam on him.
Day and night he read. Because he knew Farsi he had more options than the other hostages, and he made a point of asking the guards for books about their revolution. They were eager to oblige. They brought him first the writings and speeches of Ali Shariati, the intellectual father of the revolution, and then other books by revolutionary leaders. Limbert’s erudition and fluency intrigued his guards, and he made an effort to engage them in conversation whenever they came to the room. Kupke and Graves listened silently to long conversations they couldn’t understand. Limbert knew that hostages who made a connection with their captors had a better chance of surviving, so while steering away from political topics he asked the guards an endless stream of questions about themselves. Most of them were young, naive, and far too polite to tell him simply to shut up. When he asked a question about their religion, such as, “Explain martyrdom to me,” they would typically oblige with a lengthy and spirited answer, seeing an opportunity to enlighten the infidel spy. Limbert would listen patiently and ask still more questions. He had nothing but time. Drawing his captors out relieved his boredom, helped satisfy his curiosity about them, and had an element of self-preservation. He was determined to see his guards as individuals, and for them to see him as one, too, as someone with feelings and ideas rather than just another Yankee imperialist. It was a survival tactic. If he fell ill and needed help, it would be a lot easier to ignore someone you didn’t know or like. After a month, all of the hostages were devising their own strategies to cope, and his was conversation. If there was a rescue attempt, then the guard in the room with him might have thirty seconds to decide whether to shoot him. If he hesitated, even for only a few seconds, it might spare his life. So Limbert chatted with them and drew them out as though his life depended on it.
It wasn’t always easy or pleasant. Most were shockingly ill-informed and uneducated, and if they were abusive or arrogant it was easy to dislike them. Others he felt sorry for. He believed they were being manipulated for reasons they couldn’t begin to understand. He recognized certain types of young Iranians from his years of teaching in Shiraz. They were confused kids living in a bizarre society that for reasons of religion or tradition closed off most of the usual avenues of growth and self-improvement. It produced young people who were restless and ignorant, ripe for a demagogue, and in Khomeini they had found their man.
There was one young guard, a teenager, who spoke with such a pronounced Turkish accent that Limbert could tell he was from a provincial town in the Azerbaijan region. Clearly the most thrilling, important thing this young man had ever been asked to do was guard these American devils, and his excitement and anxiety were both evident. Limbert asked him at one point, “What part of Azerbaijan are you from?” The young man was shocked that his captive knew this about him. Afraid that he would be chastised for giving information to a hostage, but too polite to refuse an answer, he wrote down the name of his village on a piece of paper and handed it over. Limbert counted such small interactions as victories.
The captive diplomat had first visited Iran in 1962 as a young man stirred by the rhetoric of President Kennedy. A recent Harvard graduate, he had wanted to help less fortunate people and he wanted to travel, explore, and learn. Some of the guards told him that the only other Americans they had met were Peace Corps volunteers like himself, teaching in secondary schools in small towns. Several even said how much they had respected these teachers. It made Limbert want to laugh. These were, in effect, his students. This wasn’t how things were supposed to have turned out. But, then, he had never seen things accurately through Iranian eyes. How unprepared he had been to teach children in a culture and language entirely foreign to him! But if it had been difficult for him, then what must it have been like for his students? How patient they had been with him! If Kennedy had expected the Peace Corps experience would build political and cultural bridges to the Third World, he had underestimated the complexity of such a task. A bridge requires firm foundations on both sides of a divide. The Iranians he met and worked with had no desire to build a bridge to the United States. They were perfectly capable of liking and admiring him and the other volunteers personally, but they were distrustful and increasingly angry with the American government, its values, and its policies. He remembered listening to the radio in the summer of 1965 as President Johnson announced his decision to send more troops to Vietnam and then to bomb Hanoi. Many of his Iranian friends had been angry about that then, but it had never interfered with their warm feelings toward him. He was an American, yes, but he was first and foremost himself, a caring, decent young man, someone in love with all things Persian, a human being trying to do the right thing with his life. The personal and the political ran on separate tracks. It took something like a revolution to push these two tracks together, to make Iranians take out their anger with the U.S. government on individual Americans—which is what had so dramatically happened here. Afire with their new political power and visions of remaking the world, all their stored antipathy and resentment had demonized him. It was shocking, and yet when he had reflected on it more he concluded that it was something he should have seen coming a long time ago.