Gallegos ran to the front door duty station and changed clothes quickly, donning fatigues. He was annoyed because he had polished his combat boots the night before and had left them in his apartment. He had reported to work in the regulation short-sleeve tan shirt, blue pants, and black dress shoes, but the dress shoes looked stupid with the cammies, and it bugged him, but there was nothing to do. He pulled on his emergency gear and ran to his post upstairs, which was in the ambassador’s spacious office. There were floor-to-ceiling windows looking south over the compound. Gallegos saw that the safe doors were still open in Laingen’s office—his secretary, Liz Montagne, had not finished emptying them—and ordered them shut and locked. He stretched himself prone on the floor pointing his weapon out the window. It was a great spot. If he were ordered to shoot, he could pick off targets all day. He kept cocking and aiming his empty rifle at the demonstrators below, pretending to shoot. Corporal Greg Persinger saw this and worried that his buddy, always a little too gung ho, was going to get them all killed.
Golacinski pulled on riot gear and watched images of disorder on an array of closed-circuit TV screens. There were easily thousands of protesters on the grounds now. Four of his marines had surrendered to the mob, and he suspected correctly that Rosen, Graves, and the others in the motor pool office building had also been taken. He had told the marines still in the Bijon Apartments to stay there.
Laingen phoned.
“I’m coming back,” he told Golacinski.
“No, you won’t be able to get near the embassy,” Golacinski said. He could picture the chargé d’affaires’ limo engulfed in a sea of hostile Iranians. Laingen, Howland, and Tomseth might be torn limb from limb. He advised them to turn right around and go back into the Foreign Ministry building and stay there.
Laingen said that under no circumstances were the guards to open fire on the demonstrators. Golacinski asked if, as a last resort, they could use tear gas.
“Only as a last resort,” Laingen said.
In earlier discussions, when they had expected trouble immediately after the shah had been allowed to enter the United States, they agreed that tear gas was not to be used anywhere on the embassy grounds, only inside the buildings. Tehran’s protesters were accustomed to tear gas and had learned how to cope with it during the months of their uprising—that explained the kerchiefs many of them wore wrapped across their faces. Using it would only further incite them. Given that the grounds were completely overrun, the buildings were now the line of defense. Most areas of the second floor were off-limits to those without the highest levels of security clearance, so Golacinski ordered all the local employees to the basement and all Americans to the top floor. Howland came up on the radio seeking an update.
“Look, I can’t talk to you right now,” Golacinski told him. “I’m trying to get this under control.”
At the Foreign Ministry, an impressive collection of large ornate buildings several miles east, Laingen and Tomseth implored Deputy Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi to send help to their besieged embassy. Only a short while earlier they had concluded a polite lower-level meeting over sugary tea, in which Laingen had officially thanked the provisional government for its help in controlling the large demonstrations outside the embassy the week before. They had discussed obtaining diplomatic immunity—a touchy subject in Iran—for the embassy’s new military liaison group, commanded by Army Colonel Chuck Scott. After leaving that meeting, Laingen had gone out to the courtyard to his car, where Howland told him what was going on. They had driven only about two blocks from the ministry when Golacinski advised them to turn back. The chargé and his deputy had raced back into the ministry building, where they first confronted the chief of protocol. He was a gentle, nervous man, who immediately began wringing his hands with anxiety. He was sympathetic but powerless. He had led them back in to Kharrazi.
Ibrahim Yazdi, the foreign minister, and Mehdi Bazargan, the prime minister, had been away for a few days to attend the conference in Algiers, where the informal meeting with President Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski had set off alarms in Tehran. Yazdi was due back that day but had not returned to his office.
So Laingen and Tomseth listened impatiently as Kharrazi phoned various police and security officials trying to get some force over to the embassy to restore order. It was clear from the tenor of his conversations that no one was eager to intervene. The police had their hands full dealing with the mass demonstrations at Tehran University. Help would come eventually, Kharrazi said, but it would take more time.
5. Michael, I’m Really Sorry
Inside the consulate, on the east side of the compound, there were a small number of staff and about sixty Iranians who had made appointments that day to discuss their visa applications. Consul general Richard Morefield had closed the building to the normal flood of applicants while the graffiti painted on the new walls was removed, but scheduled appointments were being honored and most of the staff was at work. Among them was Bob Ode, a retired foreign service officer who had taken a temporary assignment to help out in Tehran. He had a backlog of about three hundred visas to review and hoped that a quiet morning would allow him to put a dent in it. Another was Richard Queen, a lanky, shy, bookish vice consul with big glasses, who was working with three other consulate officers typing data into AVLOS, the building’s new computer system. Assisted by four of his colleagues, he was pulling from the files of rejected visa applicants those who had been convicted of crimes or who had been turned down within the past year and entering that information into the computer, which was linked to American consulates around the world. That way, if the same applicant popped up at an office in a different country, there would be a record of what the Tehran office had discovered. It was boring work, and Queen was looking forward to finishing early and spending some time exploring Tehran.
Ode was helping a pretty young American woman, married to an Iranian, who wanted to check on her mother-in-law’s passport. He got up from his desk with the passport number and was flipping through his files when outside his office he heard Morefield urgently announce, “All right, everybody upstairs! Everybody upstairs!”
“What’s the matter?” the young woman asked.
“I don’t know,” said Ode.
“Does this sort of thing happen often?” she asked.
“I have no idea,” said Ode. “It’s never happened before since I’ve been here, but I’ve only been here a short time.”
Ode cleared the paperwork off his desk and locked it in a small safe, which contained his personal things, passport, travel orders, American money, and some letters and other items that he thought were more secure in the office safe than at the apartment where he had been staying. Then he accompanied the young woman upstairs.
“Stay away from the windows,” Morefield said as people filed past him. Queen saw clumps of young Iranians milling around in the compound below, and noted the curious laminated photos of Khomeini that hung from their necks. They didn’t look too menacing, but some had makeshift weapons. One carried nunchucks, another had what looked like a croquet mallet, and another held a length of broken board.