“I have to get the university baseball team on this airplane,” the officer said.
“No, I don’t think you’re going to do that,” said Schaefer.
“Sir, you don’t understand,” the navy man said firmly. “I am the navy liaison officer, and I’m in charge of this, and I have to bounce you off. We’ll get you on the next available flight.”
“You don’t understand,” Schaefer said.
“Sir, the flight is closed. I’m going to have to do this.”
“This flight is not leaving without me,” said Schaefer.
On the airport wall was a poster with the photograph of the base’s commanding general. The poster welcomed all comers to Clark Air Force Base and invited anyone with a problem to call the commanding general directly. Schaefer called.
After a series of conversations, during which certain orders and their priority were clarified, Schaefer was connected to the general at home at three o’clock in the morning.
“This is Major Jim Schaefer,” he said. “I’ve got a little problem down here at the terminal and I saw your sign offering to help. General, would you help?”
The general drove directly to the terminal. He was wearing a flowery tropical shirt, shorts, and flip-flops. He looked, Schaefer thought, exactly as the commanding general of a Philippines air force base should look.
“Who’s Major Schaefer?” the general asked.
“I am, sir.”
Schaefer showed him the letter giving him his orders. The general, suddenly wide awake, told the naval liaison officer, “Lieutenant, release that airplane, now.”
Training sessions in the western American deserts created their own local stir. The region was sparsely populated, and the rescue force did its best to stay out of sight during the day, but there were bound to be run-ins with the locals. Just before the holiday break, one of the helicopters on a night training run had unknowingly tried to snatch a Christmas tree from some local’s roof. The pilots oriented their choppers at night with flashing infrared markers on the ground, and when the training exercise was over they were required to retrieve them. They had a pincer attached to a rope and would hover over the flashing light, grab it, and haul it back aboard without landing. One night, when a pilot searching for his last marker found a blinking light, he hovered and lowered the aircraft over it and, before he could drop the rope, the light moved.
Confused, he decided to set the chopper down for a closer look, and suddenly the landing area was flooded with light. He was about to land on a house. The light had been blinking on a rooftop Christmas tree decoration. The downdraft from the choppers created winds in the 150 miles per hour range, considerably more than any visit by Santa’s nimble-footed reindeer, and the decoration had taken flight and landed somewhere out on the highway. The shocked home owner, no doubt alarmed by the sudden violent storm, had turned on the lights to investigate. The chopper pulled up and flew away. The unit sent someone out to the house the next day with a hundred bucks and an apology.
The Delta “operators,” as they called themselves, were hardly timid souls, but they were terrified by the helicopter rides in darkness. All of them complained about the marine pilots’ skills. The fliers were being asked to do things they had never tried. They were working hard to learn and adapt. When the ever changing plan called for them to land in a soccer stadium in Tehran, they began practicing blacked-out landings at a football stadium at Twenty-nine Palms, the marine base in California. The newfangled night-vision goggles, which enabled them to fly without any lights, were so heavy that after an hour or two it became difficult to hold their heads upright. Everyone in the unit had a stiff neck. Then one of the pilots hit upon the idea of fastening a garter belt to the roof of the cockpit just over his head and latching the goggles to it so that the belt took some of the weight. The garter’s flexibility allowed him to turn and bend his head. It worked so well that the pilots cleaned out the PX at the nearest military base. To practice night flying over a city without land lights, they got permission to practice low-level flights over San Diego.
Beckwith remained skeptical about the CIA’s “Bob” and was unwilling despite CIA assurances to trust his elite, handpicked force to this swarthy, slippery-seeming foreigner. He began making plans to get one of his own men into the city in advance of the mission.
The way things were shaping up, however, it appeared less likely than ever that a rescue mission would be attempted. Iran’s newly elected president had turned up the heat on the students and appeared headed for a showdown with them over the hostages. Bani-Sadr publicly called them “children” who behave “like a government within a government.” When they responded by condemning one of Bani-Sadr’s cabinet as an American spy and had him arrested, the president intervened to have the man released and condemned the students as “lawless dictators.”
The students were feeling the pressure. Near the end of January three of their star hostages were caught trying to escape. Joe Subic had cooked up a half-baked plan to make ropes and climb out of a second-floor window of the ambassador’s house the next time he and his roommates, Kevin Hermening and Steve Lauterbach, were taken for showers. He had a vague notion about stealing a car and driving to Turkey. Hermening was excited about it and helped make the ropes, and Lauterbach, while filled with reservation, went along with the plan. They didn’t get anywhere. On the day of their attempt, all three were caught with their ropes and marched off to stretches of solitary confinement.
Lauterbach was locked in a basement room of the chancery with his hands tightly cuffed. Sitting alone in the darkness for days, his hands aching badly, he grew increasingly despondent. His guards had given him a water glass embossed with the embassy’s emblem, and it began beckoning him. In the deeper sense, he was not suicidal. He loved life and wanted to keep on living it, but not here, not in pain, alone, with no idea of when or if his circumstances would ease. He was angry. Hurting himself was the only way he had with which to lash out at his captors. On the fourth day he stopped arguing with himself, broke the glass, and slashed his wrists.
He didn’t make a sound. When a guard entered his room some time later he found Lauterbach woozy and bloody. He was rushed to a hospital, startled at how alarmed and angry his captors were. There was plenty of blood but the wounds were not deep enough to have severed his arteries. A doctor patched him up, and after that Lauterbach’s treatment dramatically improved. His captors were apparently afraid that word of his suicide attempt would put the lie to their claims of treating the hostages as “guests.” He was given a room of his own on the upper floor of the chancery, one with a couch made up as a bed. His guards became solicitous, even kind.
7. SAVAK! SAVAK!
Inside Iran, the students remained extraordinarily popular. Some were offered positions in the government, others received offers of marriage in the mail. But at least some of the group’s leaders wanted out. Ibrahim Asgharzadeh, the author of the takeover, felt trapped. He believed they had backed themselves into a corner by demanding the shah’s return, a condition they had never seriously expected would be met. Now even if they had wanted to back down they could not, because their continued occupation of the U.S. embassy gave leverage to hard-line clerical elements opposed to the government—no mullahs had been allowed to run for office. With their hostages, the students had become pawns in the battle over the future of Iran.