Part 6 (1/2)
With Anders leading the way, the first group took a circuitous route back to his apartment, walking past a komiteh guard post in single file in order to avoid suspicion. The one-room apartment was on the ground floor of a two-story building, with an entrance right off the street. The street was quiet, however, and when the group got inside they finally felt safe. They dried off and Anders handed out whatever extra clothes he had. Mark received a bright yellow sweater. Great, he thought, they're going to be able to spot me a mile away.
Next, Anders took some frozen leftover chicken curry out of the refrigerator, heated it up, and made everybody a late lunch.
Like all emba.s.sy personnel, he had a small standard-issue ”lunchbox” escape-and-evade radio, and everybody crowded around it to listen. Events at the chancery were still unfolding. At this point Golacinski had been captured, but the Americans on the second floor had yet to surrender. Occasionally a voice would come on the net speaking Farsi, indicating that someone's radio had been taken and the person most likely captured as well. They took note how as the day progressed more and more Farsi voices were coming on the net.
Someone calling himself by the code name Palm Tree was relaying information about the a.s.sault from somewhere off the compound. ”Now they're trying to break the lightning rods on the roof,” the voice said. ”The idiots must think they're the communications antennas or something.”
”Who the heck is that?” everyone wondered.
The voice, they would learn, belonged to Lee Schatz, a lanky northwesterner with a handlebar mustache and a mischievous grin, who was an agricultural attache working for the Department of Agriculture. Schatz worked in a commercial building about a block and a half down the street from the emba.s.sy.
Originally from northern Idaho, Schatz had joined the U.S. Department of Agriculture after obtaining his master's in agricultural economics from the University of Idaho in 1974. He spent the next several years working at the department in D.C., until in the spring of 1978 he got his first overseas posting to New Delhi. He enjoyed the work, which allowed him to travel. It was supposed to be a two-year posting, but after spending just three months in the country he was offered a post in Tehran, where he'd be in charge of the office. He was only thirty-one years old at the time and the opportunity seemed too good to pa.s.s up. Iran had a huge agricultural market for U.S. goods, and he would be right in the thick of it. As with the other Americans, by the time he arrived, however, the country was in the middle of its political spiral. It had gotten so bad that the minister of agriculture refused to allow him to travel outside Tehran to do inspections because he couldn't guarantee his safety.
As the agricultural attache, Schatz usually attended the morning meeting in the chancery. Then, on his way back, he would play a game with one of his secretaries, telling her he had ”forgotten” the mail so she could go over and get it and visit with some of her friends.
On November 4, as he was on his way back from the emba.s.sy to his office just down the street, he was forced to wait as a huge demonstration pa.s.sed by in front of the emba.s.sy's main gate. His office was on the second floor, overlooking the emba.s.sy's motor pool. After telling his secretary to go get the mail, he sat down at his desk and was surprised a few minutes later when he happened to look up and see her running back across the street toward the building. Then he saw why: a virtual tsunami of Iranians was pouring over the walls and through the gate of the emba.s.sy. The a.s.sault had just begun.
Alerted now, he stood by the window and watched. He had a small lunch-box radio with him, which immediately began to fill up with the frantic conversations of the day. Soon he heard Al Golacinski shouting, ”Recall! Recall! All marines to Post One!”
He was amazed by the coordination of the attack. He noticed how some of the militants would stop at strategic points where they could relay commands to one another in the absence of any radios or communication devices. He also noticed how, rather than being just a spontaneous rush toward the chancery, various groups broke off right away and headed in what appeared to be prearranged directions. He picked up his radio and reported what he saw. Everyone at the emba.s.sy had been a.s.signed code names, and his was Palm Tree.
At one point he paused to take lunch orders for his staff and sent his driver out to pick up the food. Later, while they were eating, Cecilia Lithander, a consular officer from the Swedish emba.s.sy upstairs, came in and told him the State Department was on the line and was trying to contact him.
Before going, he told his staff to tell anyone who came looking for him that they had seen him leave. Then he wished them all good luck and walked out the door.
Upstairs on the phone, the State Department asked for a running commentary on the a.s.sault. The Swedish emba.s.sy was on the fourth floor, and with a pair of binoculars he could see just about everything. He stayed on the phone late into the evening. By that time a crowd of nearly a million people had gathered in front of the emba.s.sy, clogging the road and sidewalks. The mood seemed festive, like a carnival. There were families, kids. People were chanting and cheering while vendors were milling through the crowd selling steamed beets.
Back in Anders's apartment, the group was getting antsy. Anders and Joe were trying to call the various apartments to see if anyone else had gotten out, when the line suddenly went dead. To make matters worse, the radio net was almost totally dominated by voices speaking Farsi. Palm Tree had long since disappeared. Then, a little after four thirty in the afternoon, they heard the remaining Americans holding out in the vault surrender. They were now on their own.
Near seven o'clock, Lorraine's Iranian husband showed up with some food, and everyone had dinner. Lorraine offered to take them all over to her place, but the Americans declined, not wanting to put her and her husband at further risk. (As it turned out, her husband would later be executed by the revolutionary government for something unrelated to the Americans.)
Without a working phone, Anders decided to go upstairs to make some calls from his landlady's phone. This made Mark even more nervous. A litany of potential scenarios played out in his head. It was rumored that the shah had had an extensive phone tapping operation going on, and n.o.body knew to what extent the Revolutionary Guard had coopted it. Besides, were they really safe in Anders's apartment? Most people in the neighborhood would probably know that an American lived in the building. Had somebody seen them enter and possibly called the militants? Mark had met a person working at the emba.s.sy who had lived in the apartment prior to Bob, so he knew that it had been in the emba.s.sy's housing records for quite some time. He doubted the militants had had time to discover the housing records yet, but who could be certain?
After one of his trips upstairs, Anders returned with some news. He'd been able to get through to Kathryn Koob, a forty-two-year-old devout Catholic who worked for the International Communication Agency (ICA), the branch of the Foreign Service concerned with cultural outreach. In Iran, she was the executive director of the Iran-America Society (IAS), a campuslike center with an auditorium, library, and cla.s.srooms located about two miles to the north of the U.S. emba.s.sy. Koob had explained to Anders that she and her deputy, Bill Royer, had been on the phone all day to the State Department, and if anyone wanted to they could come over and help to keep the line open. (If the line was dropped, there was no guarantee they could reestablish the connection to the State Department.)
Delighted by the chance to connect with Koob, whom everyone called Kate, both the Lijeks and the Staffords agreed to go. At eleven p.m., Koob's driver pulled up to Anders's house in a tiny Citroen Deux Chevaux, and everyone piled in for the anxious twenty-minute trip across town. Anders had decided to stay behind and take the morning s.h.i.+ft.
On the morning of November 4, Koob had been in the middle of a staff meeting when an Iranian employee had interrupted to tell everybody that the emba.s.sy was under attack. Following the security protocol established by Golacinski, she didn't call but instead waited by the phone. As late morning turned into afternoon, however, she began to get worried when no one bothered to contact her. Eventually, a little after one o'clock, she couldn't wait any longer and called the general line. An Iranian voice came through the phone. ”American emba.s.sy,” the voice said. She asked for the extension in the public affairs office. ”Emba.s.sy occupied,” came the reply, followed by a click. Finally, after calling a different extension, she was able to reach somebody in the communications vault, who told her to call the State Department, which she did. She then spent the better part of the afternoon talking to the State Department on one line, while Royer stayed on the other line with the staffers in the vault, continuing to get updates.
When the group got to the Iran-America Society a little before midnight, the Lijeks and Staffords took s.h.i.+fts manning the phones. They described their ordeal to State Department officials over and over. Anything to keep the line open.
Mark remembers Joe inexplicably picking up another line at one point and calling the U.S. emba.s.sy to speak with one of the hostages. The voice on the other end of the line told him no one was available. ”Well, are they being treated fairly?” Mark overheard Joe ask. The voice asked for his name. ”My name is Joe Stafford,” he said, using his real name. Click. The person hung up. Mark shook his head in amazement.
At one point during their time at the IAS they tried to get Koob and Royer to join the group and leave with them, but Koob reasoned that, because they ran a cultural center, they should be safe.
The Lijeks and Staffords left at six o'clock the following morning to avoid rush-hour traffic. Mark didn't want to stay at his and Cora's place because he felt their landlady was crazy. She was happy to take their American dollars but wouldn't let them park their car in her compound for fear that somebody would attach a bomb to it and blow up the building. Koob's driver just made a quick stop at the Lijeks' apartment so Mark and Cora could get some clothes. Afterward they were all dropped off at the Staffords', where they pa.s.sed the morning getting cleaned up and taking a nap.
Unbeknownst to the Americans, a major drama was now unfolding back at the IAS. Just hours after the couples' departure, Koob and Royer had been back on the phones when a group of militants had arrived. An Iranian staffer was able to warn them, and Koob and Royer quickly walked out the back door and into one of the secretary's cars. In a few minutes they were on the main road in front of the IAS heading for the nearby Goethe Inst.i.tut, run by the Germans.
They spent about an hour at the Goethe Inst.i.tut, until they heard that the Iranians had left the IAS, so they returned and reestablished a connection with Was.h.i.+ngton. The German inst.i.tute's director had volunteered to shelter Koob and Royer indefinitely, but Koob had declined. An hour or so later, however, the militants returned to IAS, this time surrounding the building. Koob tried hiding in a women's bathroom, but she was soon captured and taken to the emba.s.sy, along with Royer and an American secretary who had spent the first night hiding out at the Bijon apartments.