After a few hours, Little Ali returned, standing a safe distance away from Scott in the doorway, and suggested that the colonel apologize. If he did, he would be allowed to return to his warm cubicle—Scott insisted on calling it a “cell.”
The colonel refused. Whatever he had said or done was a lot less than what had been done to him in the previous months. Little Ali closed the door and left. Later that day, he was visited by Akbar, the kindly guard with whom Scott had established some rapport. The slender, mustachioed Iranian told Scott that Bani-Sadr had been elected president of Iran. Scott told him that he had no respect for a government that treated him and his fellow Americans as they had been treated, and complained to Akbar about the mock execution.
Akbar apologized for it and seemed genuinely chagrined. It had been “un-Islamic,” he said. He then led Scott out of the cold room and back to his cubicle.
“Be good,” he implored.
It was the first time Scott realized that Akbar outranked the other guards.
After the mock execution, mail was delivered more frequently. Most was from strangers, which remained a disappointment. Sometimes it seemed as if all of America had adopted the hostages as pen pals. Many of the letters continued to be from schoolchildren who had written as part of a classroom assignment.
“Dear Mr. Hall. Hi, my name is Jimmy. I am eight years old and I am writing this letter because my teacher says that I have to. What do you eat?” One of the letters was similarly chatty and upbeat and ended with, “I sure hope they don’t shoot you.” Hall received several from a man in Houston who had apparently chosen him as his hostage pen pal. These were cleverer than most and Hall actually enjoyed them. The writer always incorporated short parables that were ostensibly preachy little stories, the kind of thing his Iranian captors liked but which could be relatively easily deciphered to reveal important news developments. For instance, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Hall’s correspondent wrote a story about a large man, whom he likened to a bear, attacking his neighbor and insisting that the neighbor wear a bright red collar with a star on it.
The guards withheld mail to punish prisoners they didn’t like. Colonel Scott rarely received anything, and when he did it was usually from a stranger. Once, Hamid the Liar surprised him by offering to escort him to the mail table.
Behind the table, stacked high with letters, was a guard named Ahmad, a squat, thick, balding, cheerfully abusive man who was at least ten years older than the other guards. He made a pretense of shuffling through the stacks.
“I don’t see anything for you, Mr. Scott,” he said. “Are you sure your wife has not found another man?”
A guard alongside Ahmad handed him several letters, and the colonel found a spot on the floor to sit and read them. The first two were from strangers; one was addressed to “Lieutenant Colonel” Scott, which was annoying to a man very proud of his rank. One was a letter from his sister, and another from his wife, Betty, postmarked October 26, more than a week before he was taken hostage. It was terribly disappointing. Like most of the hostages, Scott worried a great deal about his wife and children and wondered how they were coping with this ordeal. The encouraging letter from his sister also revealed nothing about his family. The last letter was from a precocious grade-school girl in Nebraska, writing as part of a class assignment, who addressed him as “Lieutenant Scott” and confided that she thought it would have been smarter for President Carter to send the shah back to Iran instead of letting him go to Panama—it was the first he had heard that the shah was no longer in the United States. The little girl concluded by noting that Scott was forty-eight and that he was a “lieutenant.” She asked, “At your age, shouldn’t you be higher than that?”
Multiple copies of the comics and sports pages of the Boston Globe were being mailed to the hostages daily by someone from that city, and though the students saw no harm in passing them along, the cartoons and stories often disclosed useful information. Garry Trudeau, the cartoonist, was spoofing the Iranian students in his popular strip Doonesbury, which gave a heartening indication of how intense public interest remained in their plight after six months. When a letter from Bill Keough published in the United States thanked the anonymous sender, the Boston benefactor surfaced. He was a taxi driver who was thrilled to learn that his long-shot effort to help his kidnapped countrymen in Tehran had scored. He sent a card to Keough saying that he regarded the success of his gesture as the only “great thing” he had ever accomplished in his life. He promised to keep mailing the sections, and did.
8. Ham, They Are Crazy
On the same day as the mock execution, forty-nine members of a group calling itself the Committee for American-Iranian Crisis Resolution left New York for Tehran. It had been formed by a professor of industrial relations at the University of Kansas, Norm Forer, who had been active years earlier in efforts to publicize the shah’s human rights abuses and hoped that a dialogue between American citizens critical of their government and the hostage takers might help break the deadlock. He proposed that his group travel to Iran not to initiate a dialogue but simply to listen, to give the hostage takers an opportunity to vent before a group of sympathetic Americans. Many prominent leftist activists sought to be included but Forer, perhaps mindful that his own name would be eclipsed, wanted unknowns, what he called “grassroots.” He polled antiwar organizations for names and selected a cross section of people who shared his political outlook. The student hostage takers, who still felt their message to Americans was being distorted by government-controlled media, smelled enough opportunity for propaganda points to put up the money for the trip. Among those in the private mission were Hershel Jaffe, a rabbi from Newburgh, New York, and the Reverend Darrell Rupiper, an activist Catholic priest from Omaha, Nebraska.
Unlike most members of the mission, Jaffe was not a political activist. He had pushed to have himself included in part because he was something of a publicity hound—a garrulous, energetic man, he was already well known in the Newburgh area as the “running rabbi,” after running in the New York City marathon—and in part because he was concerned about the Jewish hostages feeling neglected. He was interviewed by Forer, who was also Jewish, and a group of furtive young Iranians in a bare room on the west side of Manhattan and explained that he had been following the story closely, and had been struck by the outpouring of Christmas cards for the hostages. It made him feel for the special isolation of Jewish hostages such as Barry Rosen and Jerry Plotkin. Reports of the Forer mission had portrayed it primarily as Christian outreach—Forer was not religious and its co-organizer, the Reverend Jack Bremer, was a Methodist minister from Lawrence, Kansas—and Jaffe felt that the group ought to include a rabbi, so he had volunteered. After Forer invited him, Jaffe arranged to be briefed by two Israeli agents about the situation he would encounter in Iran.
Rupiper, a tall, slender man with long dark hair and glasses, was a member of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, a small order of Catholic priests dedicated to the poor and those on society’s margins. He had been an activist priest for many years, and like many of those in the group he had been sharply critical of American foreign policy in Central and South America. He had been recommended to Forer by the group Nebraskans for Peace, who knew him from several trips to jail protesting at Strategic Air Command bases in that part of the country. Rupiper believed American foreign policy was often criminal and saw the CIA as a tool of oppression. He had been imprisoned in Brazil for protesting America’s actions there.