One night the medic stood up from his mattress and walked over to pour a glass of water from the pitcher they kept by the window. There was a hole in the window from the break-in, and they had stuffed a rag into it, but enough cold air still flowed through to keep the pitcher chilled. On his way to the window Hohman blacked out.
“You’ve got to eat,” Belk said, helping him back to his mattress and pleading with him. “You’re scaring the hell out of me. You’re going to die here and I’m going to be here by myself.”
Hohman took his next meal.
Next door, Limbert had discovered a small opening where the thin partition wall imperfectly joined the more permanent basement wall. It allowed him to see enough so that he could tell when Belk and Hohman were alone. They didn’t dare speak—the guard outside would have heard them—but Limbert tore blank pages from the front and back of his books and they began passing written messages back and forth, carrying on a running conversation. Limbert told them what news he had and they shared what they knew. He learned of Belk’s attempted escape, and that Hohman had at last started eating. Because they had a window, Hohman and Belk told Limbert what kind of day it was outside.
One day, Limbert received the following message:
“We have a small radio. I guess you can understand Persian. Will this be useful to you?”
Limbert wrote back, “Is the pope Catholic?”
Belk had stolen the radio from one of the guards when he’d dozed off. He slid it deep in the back of a drawer at the guard’s desk—that way, if it was missed and they searched rooms for it, he wouldn’t be caught with it. Apparently the guard hadn’t had the thing long enough to miss it, either that or he assumed another guard had taken it, because the radio’s disappearance seemed to go unnoticed. After a few days, Belk retrieved it from the desk drawer and hid it someplace else. Then he offered it to Limbert.
They arranged for a drop in the bathroom. Late at night Limbert would wait until Belk had gone to the bathroom, and then immediately ask to go himself. That way he was ushered in right behind the tall State Department communicator, who had left the radio tucked behind a radiator on the floor. Limbert returned with it bundled under the waist of his pants. He unzipped the sofa cushion he used as a pillow and hollowed out a small place in the foam. With the radio nestled there, he could lay with his ear close to the speaker and play it quietly enough so that the guards couldn’t hear. To preserve the batteries, he would switch it on for news reports only when he napped at two in the afternoon, at eight in the evening, and then again at midnight.
He wrote Belk a note, complimenting him on his “marvelous coup!”
6. A New and Mutually Beneficial Relationship
With a secret process in place to secure the hostages’ release, the Carter White House subtly changed its tone. There was no more talk of sanctions, blockades, and punitive strikes, and instead came reminders of shared interests, particularly of the danger posed by the Soviet armies just over the border. The threat of a Russian move toward Persian Gulf oil fields was of course a tremendous anxiety, not just in Iran but throughout the Western world. To reporters who knew nothing of the secret talks, the new strategy was, in the words of one pundit, “Talk softly and remind Iran of the Red Menace next door.”
Privately, the pieces seemed to be falling into place. Bani-Sadr was sworn in as president in late January by Khomeini and then named head of the Revolutionary Council. The odd-looking little Iranian with the pompadour, clipped mustache, and black glasses was now, at least on paper, the most powerful figure in the country next to Khomeini. In an early speech he referred to the hostage crisis as a “minor affair,” and suggested that a solution was within reach if the United States would only agree to cease meddling in Iranian affairs.
Patience was the message to the American people, who were still watching the days of captivity enumerated nightly on TV. For the time being, doing nothing was the best strategy, argued Carter’s press spokesman Jody Powell.
“Iran is on the verge of disintegration,” he said in a TV interview. “Nothing is the same from one day to the next. They are paying a terrible price for their fascination, their preoccupation with the hostages. The question arises of who in fact is determining the fate of Iran: Is it the Ayatollah Khomeini? Is it the Revolutionary Council? Is it this small group of terrorists who are holding the hostages? Meanwhile, the economy is in shambles. The military is in many ways nonexistent, and disorder and chaos increase every day.”
In his State of the Union address, President Carter emphasized that the United States was ready to be friends with Iran again, to form “a new and mutually beneficial relationship.”
“We have no basic quarrel with the nation, the revolution, or the people of Iran,” he said. “The threat to them comes not from American policy but from Soviet actions in that region.” Carter suggested that retribution was unlikely if the hostages were returned unharmed, but warned that “our patience is not unlimited.”
Although it now seemed happily less necessary, preparations for a rescue mission progressed. “Bob,” the CIA operative who had flown into Mehrabad Airport and breezed through customs a month earlier, had been in and out of the country several times in the previous month, shuttling from Tehran to Athens and Rome. Working with a wealthy Iranian exile who had volunteered to help, he had rented a warehouse and bought five Ford trucks and two Mazda vans to drive the assault force to the embassy from their hiding place south of the city on the second night of the mission. He had purchased material to form a wall of fake cargo at the back end of the truck in order to hide the force in case the vehicles were stopped and inspected at a checkpoint.
To solve the helicopter-refueling problem, Air Force Colonel James H. Kyle had arranged for three-thousand-gallon fuel blivits to be placed inside C-130s, instead of being dropped from them. This meant that six of the four-propeller workhorses would have to land in the desert on the first night of the mission, refuel the eight helicopters, and then fly back out of Iran. Since the plan now called for the planes to go in ahead of the helicopters, Delta Force could ride into Iran on the C-130s, camped out on top of the fuel bladders, an especially welcome development because Charlie Beckwith’s assault teams had swollen from the original forty-five men to ninety-five, the new counterterrorism unit’s full complement. Those numbers would have badly strained the eight RH-53D Sea Stallion helicopters that were now waiting beneath the deck of the aircraft carrier Nimitz, which had replaced the Kitty Hawk in the Indian Ocean.
Delta had been through several more full-dress rehearsals for the raid in the Utah, Nevada, and Arizona deserts. They were a mob of crusty, sunburned mountain men in blue jeans and T-shirts cadging supplies without explanation from every military unit in the region. All of the men assigned to the mission were given top priority but were not allowed to reveal what they were doing, which created confusing and sometimes very satisfying clashes with the regular military command. Major Jim Schaefer, one of the marine helicopter pilots, was told to report immediately with his crew to the Nimitz to inspect the helicopters. He hopped a military plane to Hawaii and then the Philippines and was preparing to board another flight at Clark Air Force Base to Guam when a naval officer somewhat dismissively told him that he would have to wait for the next plane.