“Think what you want.”
From time to time Sheikh-ol-eslam would leave the room and Limbert would sit blindfolded for ten or fifteen minutes. Then he would return with a new question. At the end, Sheikh-ol-eslam simply said, “That’s it.”
Lieutenant Colonel Dave Roeder, a pilot, was questioned—with Ebtekar translating—about the embassy’s C-12. In the embassy files, they had evidently come upon a memo describing the first meeting Roeder had attended in Iran, one with the revolution’s air force officials. During that encounter, Roeder had asked for permission to bring back the embassy’s C-12, a small, two-prop aircraft that was used to ferry embassy officials to meetings around the country. It had been flown to Athens at the time of the shah’s departure, and it had not been allowed back into Iran. Roeder had a personal interest in getting the plane back; it was his best chance of being able to fly regularly.
What he did not know was that there had been an international scandal recently in South Africa when the government there discovered that the U.S. embassy had been using its C-12 to take surveillance photographs around the country. To the Iranian students, Roeder’s efforts to get the plane back proved he was a spy. Ebtekar explained the South African incident triumphantly.
“Did you have that same camera system on the C-12 you were using here?” he was asked.
“I have no idea what you are talking about,” he said. He was lying. In fact, he knew well that C-12s were used for surveillance purposes at U.S. embassies around the world. He had used one himself when he was based in Panama.
“What kind of system is it?” he was asked.
Roeder just stared ahead, silent.
The interrogator stormed from the room and another entered, a small man in a silk jacket. He was well groomed and looked studious. He spoke calmly. He warned Roeder that the first interrogator was a violent man and that he was very angry.
“I’m really worried about what he might do to you,” he said. He told Roeder that they wanted him to sign a statement admitting that the United States had used the C-12 to spy on Iran. Roeder knocked the paper and pen to the floor.
Ski Mask came back and began raging at him. Roeder was taken from the room and led to the building’s cargo elevator shaft. It was freezing. Way up at the top of the shaft they had opened doors to the winter outside and snow gently descended. They chained him to one of the metal bumpers inside the shaft and took away his shoes.
He began to shiver and decided that the only way to stay warm was to move. He had, by now, plenty of practice at exercising in a small space, so he fell easily into his rhythm of jogging in place. Then he would stop and do push-ups against the wall. When his captors tried to prevent him from moving by dragging in a chair and chaining him to it, Roeder picked the chair up and continued jogging with it in his arms. When they found him doing this, his guards brought in a cinder block and chained him to that. Draped in chains, holding the chair in one hand, Roeder defiantly picked up the block and kept moving.
They left him there all night and throughout the next day. Then he was brought back for more questioning. He was taken this time to an embassy living room, placed in a comfortable, stuffed chair, and his blindfold was removed.
Sitting across from him behind a table was another young man with a two-week growth of black beard and Ebtekar, draped in her black robes, smiling politely. On the table was a delicate teapot and glasses, a box of biscuits, and a pack of Marlboro cigarettes.
Okay, here’s the “good guy,” he thought, since the “bad guy” didn’t produce. And, sure enough, Ebtekar asked, “Would you like some tea?”
“No, thank you,” Roeder said.
“How about a cigarette?”
“Yes, I would.”
He lit the cigarette and took a deep drag. He hadn’t had many in the weeks he had been captive.
The young man spoke and Ebtekar translated. “Why are you here?”
“I’m the assistant air force attaché. I’m a lieutenant colonel, my name is David Roeder.”
“We have heard all that,” Ebtekar said translating the questioner’s response, “and we know that’s not what you are.”
Roeder clammed up again. He had told them the truth; if they were going to start playing games he wasn’t going to play.
There was a long period of consultation between Ebtekar and the interrogator in Farsi, and then she said, “You’ve got to answer questions here. We know that you are not an air force lieutenant colonel.”
What Roeder most felt was boredom, and he was genuinely curious about Ebtekar. Here was this young woman whose English was so fluent, and whose accent was so American, that she obviously had lived in the States at some point. She seemed bright and articulate. Why would she want to embrace this fundamentalist crap that denied her gender equal status with men? Why would she want to drape herself in dark robes?
“Why are you doing this?” he asked her.
She looked back at him startled.
“Look at your status as a woman in this society,” Roeder said. “Why would you want this?”
Ebtekar was off like a shot. She launched into her rationale for traditionalism, how it was, in fact, liberating for women. She and her revolutionary sisters were actually much freer than women in the Western world, who remained enslaved by the twin satanic values of commercialism and sexual exploitation. “I believe in the fundamentals of Islam,” she said. “And my faith requires women to do this.”
Roeder argued with her, and she argued back, and the interrogation session came undone. Ebtekar warmed up readily to her standard jeremiad about the evils of America and Western society and the transcendental wisdom of Iranian Islam, Ali Shariati, the imam, the world’s new Third Force. Roeder smoked and listened politely and relished the warmth. He felt sorry for her, and he felt pleased with himself for derailing his interrogation so easily. He thought, What amateurs!
Despite his crusty defiance, interrogators did finally manage to disturb Roeder. He was shown a picture of his wife, son, and daughter. It was a photograph he had kept on his office desk in a frame.
“Is this your wife and children?” he was asked.
“Yes. Where did you get that?”
The interrogator seemed to know a lot about his family. He knew that his son, Jimmy, was disabled. This shook up Roeder, although he tried not to show it. He had never considered that his family in Virginia would be at risk but, of course, there were many Iranians in the United States. His interrogator mentioned the stop where the school bus picked up his son every weekday.
“We know the route that bus takes,” he said.
If he did not start cooperating, they were going to take his son off the bus.
“We will start sending pieces of him to your wife,” he was told.
Roeder still refused to answer questions and was led back down to a cold basement room, but he was distressed. It was the lowest point so far in his captivity. His mind raced over the possibilities. Was his family under surveillance in Virginia? Was the U.S. government aware of this threat? Were they protecting his family? How seriously should he take it?
3. Happy New Year
After more than two months of captivity, the hostages and their guards were getting to know one another well and, in many cases, were getting along badly. One night Gary Lee heard an angry American voice say, “What the fuck makes you right and the whole world wrong?” It summed up perfectly the central complaint. Some of the hostages worked at tormenting their captors.
Marine guards Steve Kirtley and Jimmy Lopez, together in a room at the chancery, kept up a constant torrent of verbal abuse. Early on, Gunnery Sergeant Mike Moeller had begun substituting the word “Khomeini” for every foul word in the English language, and his fellow marines adopted it with relish. When they needed to use the toilet, they would tell the guard, “I need to take a Khomeini.” They tried to remember every Polish joke they had ever heard and substituted for “Polack” the term “raghead,” which they used for the Iranians in the mistaken assumption that they were Arabs. They would make sure to tell each other the jokes whenever a guard who spoke English was within earshot.