Tales off Torment and Triumph

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Throughout their captivity, the will of the hostages never broke

Mock executions carried out by white-masked "firing squads" that clicked rifle bolts behind the backs of hostages spread-eagled against a wall. Iranian guards playing Russian roulette with revolvers held to the heads of two bound American women. Prisoners confined in basement cells where they were prevented from seeing sunlight for months, forced to sleep for weeks in the clothes they were wearing when captured, denied baths for as long as three months, afraid even to look at each other because their captors thought they might be exchanging eye signals.

These are among the frightening and sordid circumstances of imprisonment reported by the 52 hostages in phone calls to their families during their first hours of liberty, or related by hostages who had been released months ago and at last felt free to speak. The full story of their ordeal is far from told. The first fragmentary reports indicated that the hostages were not subjected to the physical tortures that Iranians have inflicted on each other for centuries, but the Americans did suffer relentless psychological abuse and physical mistreatment that ring in American ears as a tale of horror.

The hostages' stories are also--and much more important--a tale of pride, studded throughout with gems of understated bravery. Though they were underfed, terrified and tempted at times to think the U.S. had forgotten them, none of the hostages seems truly to have given way psychologically to the captors. Instead, they fought back. At least three repeatedly tried to escape, though guards beat them with fists or rubber hoses when they were caught. Terri Tedford, 24, a secretary who was among the 13 freed in November 1979 after 16 days of captivity, told Iranian guards who held a gun to her head that they could go ahead and shoot. Michael Metrinko, 34, an embassy political officer who was released last week, valiantly denounced his captors as "liars, bums, everything" before Iranian TV cameras that were filming propaganda pictures of the hostages; the film was supplied to U.S. networks last Christmas but the Iranians had erased the sound.

The hostages' stories begin with a previously unpublicized narrative of the heroism of Sergeant James M. Lopez, 22, the lone Marine guard on duty at the consulate building in the U.S. embassy when Iranian militants stormed the compound on Nov. 4, 1979. For nearly three hours, Lopez singlehandedly kept the invaders out of the consulate, primarily by using tear-gas grenades. "At one point, the students tried to break into the consulate through one of the windows, but he beat them back," reported Mark Lijek, 29, a U.S. consular official.

While the invaders were recovering from the tear gas and regrouping for fresh assaults, Lopez herded some 60 people --14 Americans, the rest Iranians who had gone to the consulate for visas--upstairs to the second floor. There he divided them into small groups that he dispatched downstairs to slip out onto the streets through a side door. Five Americans, including Lijek, managed to steal through back streets to the Canadian embassy, where they were hidden and soon joined by a sixth. They were all spirited back to the U.S. just a year ago this week.

Lopez joined the last group to leave the consulate. They got out of the embassy compound but were captured by a group of militants on a nearby street. When he was finally released last week, Lopez told his parents in Globe, Ariz., that for much of the past 14 1/2 months he had been "kept in some really bad-hole places, like closets," and beaten several times. But he added, "At least I got some of the others out, right?"

Once the embassy was captured, the worst period of the hostages' ordeal began. Fresh details of the early days of captivity were disclosed last week by some of the eight black men and five women who were released after 16 days by the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini as a propaganda move, and by Richard I. Queen, 29, the embassy's vice consul, who was let go last July because he was suffering from multiple sclerosis.

Immediately after the capture, said Queen, several of the hostages were held in small rooms at the embassy, while others were led blindfolded through streets filled with mobs screaming for their death. Two weeks after the takeover, many of the hostages were herded into the "Mushroom Inn," their nickname for the windowless basement of the main embassy building, which their captors had divided into small rooms to serve as cells. The hostages' hands were bound, and some were forced to sit for as long as 16 hours a day, facing blank walls. Queen was imprisoned with a roommate, Joseph Hall, 31, the operations coordinator in the defense attache's office, to whom he was not allowed to speak (though they did exchange whispers now and then). No sunlight penetrated the rooms. Said Queen: "You couldn't hear the outside world. It was like living in a tomb. I stayed in the Mushroom from late November to mid-March."

In those early weeks, some hostages were repeatedly led out for interrogations by guards who tried to get them to divulge secret information or admit that they were spies. Lloyd Rollins, one of the black hostages released early, described to a TV reporter last week how guards played Russian roulette with two female secretaries: "They stuck bullets in the chambers of pistols, and they pulled the triggers as they were trying to force them to open up official files of the embassy." One of the secretaries was Terri Tedford, whose father Orville told TIME that his daughter had been strapped blindfolded to a chair for nine hours. He added: "The gun was held to her head for the entire time as they accused her of being a CIA agent. She figured that they were going to kill her anyway, so she told them they were a bunch of s.o.b.s."

Airman James O. Hughes, 31, another hostage released after 16 days, spent most of his captivity tied to a chair blindfolded; guards sometimes placed a blanket over his head. During repeated interrogations, his guards constantly played with their guns. Said Hughes: "I thought they might kill me just for the hell of it." Though he told his captors nothing, he said, the experience so unnerved him that he sought psychiatric help after his release. Explained Hughes: "Sometimes I still dream that I open a door and an Iranian wearing this big face of Khomeini on his chest shoots a gun at me."

This period of extreme psychological stress seems to have gone on for months. The most grisly incident occurred last February. Queen's full account of it, as related last week to TIME Correspondent Mary Cronin:

"It was 1 a.m. I was in the bathroom washing up when a guy in a white mask came in and told me to get out. I told him I'd finish washing; he grabbed me and started pushing me along the hall toward a big room. I had never seen that kind of behavior before: pushing, shoving, yelling. All the hostages from the Mushroom were there, lined up against the wall. They pushed me against the wall and kicked my feet apart. After the shouting there was complete silence. That's when I heard the clicking of the [rifle] bolts. I was really sure that I was breathing my last. I said the Lord's Prayer and tried to give myself last rites. I waited for the loud noise. Nothing happened." After what he believes to have been about 45 minutes, Queen became aware that the hostages were being led away one by one. Eventually, he was taken into a side room where guards stripped him to his underpants ("I guess you would call it searching"), then back to his own room, which had been torn apart by militants apparently looking for weapons.

Other hostages added further details to what Queen calls "the night of the Gestapo raid." One group of captives was ordered to lie down, but Navy Commander Don Sharer, chief of the Air Force section in the embassy's defense liaison office, shouted defiantly that if he was going to be shot anyway he would die standing. So the hostages were spread-eagled against the wall instead. Hostage John E. Graves, 53, a public affairs officer, could not hold both his arms up against the wall for a prolonged time; when he let one drop, he was beaten on the head.

From the Americans' accounts to their families, it appears that there was one other mass mock execution some time in March and at least one involving a single American, Moorhead Kennedy, 50, economic counselor of the embassy. He told his son Mark that early in his captivity he was dragged outside on a freezing night, a gun was jammed into his back, and he was forced up against a wall. Guards then fired blank cartridges near his ear.

What happened after the initial period of extreme pressure varied according to the hostage and the personalities of his or her guards. When they talked to their relatives last week, the hostages frequently did not distinguish at what period of their captivity various incidents occurred --if, indeed, they remembered clearly.

Moreover, because they were held in small groups, the hostages had little knowledge of what was happening to captives who were not their roommates. Thus each essentially could tell only his or her own story.

There does seem to have been a period of relaxation last spring. Some of the hostages were moved into larger and more comfortable rooms. Queen was transferred from the Mushroom to a room in the chancellery building. Its window was bricked up, but some light seeped through cracks in the mortar. Said Queen: "I can't describe what it was like to wake up one morning and see light and hear people again. I remember there were a couple of schoolgirls just walking along and talking and singing outside. It can't be described what it meant to feel life again."

The harassment let up also, at least for some hostages. Richard Morefield, 51, consul general at the embassy, who was confined in the Mushroom until late March, was moved several times after that; one transfer was to a maximum-security prison, but another was to an apartment block.

After the American rescue effort failed in late April, conditions abruptly worsened. William B. Royer Jr., 49, assistant director of the Iran-American Society, was removed from the 8-ft. by 10-ft. room that he had shared at the embassy with three or four other hostages, bund-folded and taken to another location that he did not specify--if he knew. Again he shared a small room with three other hostages, but the windows of this one were heavily whitewashed so that light could not get through. Also, he told his mother, his meals got worse in both quantity and quality. Said he: "The food decreased and the grease increased." The food seems not to have been very nourishing--by U.S. standards--for any of the hostages at any point of their captivity. Several lost 40 to 50 Ibs.

Kathryn Koob, 42, director of the Iran-American Society and one of the two women held for the full 444 days, reported that early on she had been threatened with nightsticks, but the threat seeemed to be essentially psychological. Said she: "It was not a physical threat. They were not swung at me or anything like that." She said she "was treated fairly well physically."

But some hostages seem to have been singled out for especially harsh treatment. John D. McKeel, 27, a Marine guard, was told early in his confinement that his mother had died, and that he would not be released to go to her funeral unless he gave information to his guards--just what they sought from him he did not specify. He did not discover that his mother Wynona was actually alive until he phoned home last week. He told her that he had refused to tell the guards anything but his name, rank and serial number. As a result, he was beaten and one of his teeth was knocked out. Most of the hostages were allowed 20-minute walks outside their rooms once a week without harassment, but Jerry Miele, 42, a communications officer, had to beg for his walk. When he did get out, a guard kept playing with the trigger of an automatic weapon pointed at Miele's chest.

The maltreatment seemed to fall into definite patterns. Among the several hostages kept in solitary confinement for long periods were two senior captives: Lieut. Colonel David Roeder, 41, assistant air attache at the embassy, and Elizabeth Ann Swift, 40, chief of the political section. The captives given the most severe treatment of all were the most rebellious, of whom there were several.

Malcolm Kalp, 43, a communications employee, was kept in solitary for 374 of the 444 days and frequently beaten. The reason: he tried several times to escape. Clair Barnes, who served in the communications section, said that other hostages who attempted to flee in the first days of the occupation were beaten with rubber hoses.

Sergeant Donald Hohman, 38, an Army medic, repeatedly fasted to protest the treatment of the hostages. Said he: "They would throw me into solitary every time I would fast. I guess I bugged them by not cooperating with anything they wanted me to do. Until we got onto the plane Tuesday, I hadn't really seen many of the other hostages."

Robert O. Blucker, 53, a State Department petroleum economist, got off the plane in Algiers looking rather natty in a three-piece suit and tie. In a phone call to his mother, Mrs. Hazel Albin of North Little Rock, Ark., he said that he had been wearing the suit when captured and had been given no other clothing during his detention except another pair of pants. He had once slept in the suit for 45 straight nights, and had not been allowed to take a bath for three months. The reason, he assumed, was that he had been "belligerent and uncooperative." He explained: "I had a shouting match with the guards about every day." Had he been punished otherwise? Said Blucker: "Yeah, they knocked me around a couple of times at the beginning, but toward the end I don't think they wanted to beat anybody up if they could help it."

Besides the harassment, the Iranians tried more subtle ways to break the hostages' will. They allowed little mail to get through to the captives. Roeder said the guards burned "millions of Christmas cards" sent to the hostages in 1979; others tell of mail torn up before their eyes.

The captives were allowed only heavily censored accounts of what was going on in the outside world. Stories about Iran and their plight were torn out of magazines, including TIME and Newsweek, that were circulated to the prisoners, but the guards did not censor the tables of contents, so the hostages could tell what stories were missing. Petty indignities continued to the very end. Richard Ode, at 64 the oldest hostage, had his shoes taken away the day he was captured. He shuffled about barefoot or in socks until he was about to board the plane taking him to freedom--and then the guards gave him only a pair of plastic bedroom slippers. Why? Ode said he did not know: "They're all insane anyway."

Despite the almost constant surveillance of the captors, the isolated hostages figured out ways to communicate with each other. In the early days they were taken to the bathroom with a guard; initially the guard would enter the bathroom with a hostage, but the Iranians themselves were embarrassed and soon stood outside. So a hostage would scribble a quick note on toilet paper and leave it to be read by the next captive to enter the bathroom. The hostages also worked out a code of raps with the knuckles on a wall at the Mushroom, as do prisoners the world over.

At times the hostages were tempted to despair. Barry Rosen, 36, a press attache, told a reporter that some feared their nation did not trouble itself about their plight. Said Rosen: "We'd say to ourselves, 'They don't care. The economy is the big thing, not some foreign policy thing.' We figured that people thought, 'Fifty-two hostages, yeah, and what's for dinner?' " But enough mail got through to let other captives know that their countrymen were indeed thinking of them. Jerry Miele received one message from a stranger in the U.S. containing a drawing of two sets of footprints merging into one. He interpreted the drawing to mean that God was walking with him, and it raised his morale.

The hostages devised other, sometimes quite mundane, ways of keeping up their spirits. Like some other captives, William Keough, 50, a school superintendent, jogged endlessly around his tiny room for miles at a clip. Royer, another would-be runner, clocked up to 2 1/2 miles a day, jogging in place in his cramped quarters. When released last week, he said the first thing he wanted to do after coming home was to buy some good jogging shoes and running clothes --and some sturdy socks.

The mental torment continued to the very end. As the hostages were actually being escorted to the planes that were to take them to freedom, the guards implied that only some would be let go and others would be left behind, possibly even shot. Said Hohman of the last suspenseful hours in Tehran and at the airport: "They split us into two groups. I was in the second group; I thought it was because I had been so obnoxious. Just when the planes were warming up, some of the guards asked me to say nice things about Iran and the revolution. At that point I was willing to do whatever would get me the hell out of there, so I said one quick thing and off I went." Even while walking across the tarmac through a jeering crowd, Jerry Miele would not permit himself to believe that he was actually being released. He steeled himself mentally to being yanked back and returned to the tomblike existence of a hostage.

But the captives were flown to freedom. William Keough, in a phone call to his brother Paul, pronounced the last word on the 444-day ordeal of the hostages: "We won this thing. We really beat them around mentally. They had the guns --but we won." --By George J. Church.

Reported by Joelle Attinger/Wiesbaden, Dean Brelis/New York, and reports from other U.S. Bureaus

With reporting by Joelle Attinger, Dean Brelis

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