The Foreign Service Journal, March 2015

34 MARCH 2015 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL on the phone with Chargé Bruce Laingen, who was trying to give orders from the Foreign Minister’s office, saying Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had ordered that the protest be broken up immediately and that there were people on the way to help us, just to hang tight. I dialed the number of my revolution- ary friend who had asked me to be at the meeting, and got his security guard, whom I also knew quite well. I told him I just wanted to speak to Mehdi; he was silent for a moment, and then said, “Michael, Mehdi won’t come to the telephone.” “You know what’s happening here at the embassy, where I’ve been waiting for Mehdi to come?” I asked. “Yes, we know,” he said. I realized then that they had set me up. So I just said, “Okay, I guess this is goodbye.” And he said, “Michael, I’m really sorry.” And that was that. And That Was That Then one of our regional security officers went outside, despite recom- mendations that he not do so—and shortly thereafter wanted us to open the doors and let them in because they said they were going to kill him if we didn’t. He had gone out thinking he could talk to the mob, using mid-American English and with no sense at all of Iran, Iranians or anything that was happening. He was going to go out there and say, “I am the American diplomat. You are breaking the Geneva Convention...” “Oh, shit!” was our group’s collective reaction. Still, the general feeling was that we'd be taken, but that the situation would be managed because the government was going to come back in and break this up. And in fact, the captors, the “students” that had arranged all this, also believed it was going to be a one-day event. They told us that at the time, some of the more pleasant ones. “Don’t worry,” they said. “You’ll be in your own home by midnight tonight.” Even in later years, as they talked about it, giving interviews about it, they still said they had planned that this was going to be Michael Metrinko was a Foreign Service political officer in Iran when the U.S. embassy was overrun on Nov. 4, 1979, by some 3,000 radical Iranian stu- dents. Before joining the Foreign Service in 1974, he had been a Peace Corps Volunteer for five years, two in Turkey and three in Iran. His first State De- partment assignment was back to Turkey, followed by six months on temporary duty. After only a fewmonths in the Tehran visa unit, he was assigned as principal officer to Tabriz, where his Turkish and Persian fluency, and the large network of friends from his Peace Corps days, gave him access to a wide spectrum of Iranian society. He served in Tabriz as the revolution began to build up, returning to Tehran in February 1979, after his consulate in Tabriz had been overrun by revolutionary militia and he had been briefly jailed. In 1981 he received two Medals of Valor for his time in Iran, the first for saving American lives in Tabriz and the second for his 14 months in captivity. Embassy Tehran had been taken over earlier in 1979, but the problemwas resolved quickly and most believed Nov. 4, 1979, would be similar. Ira- nians were angry over President Jimmy Carter’s decision to allow the shah of Iran, who had been forced out of the country earlier amidst widespread discontent over his reign, into the United States for medical treatment. What was expected to be a short demonstration turned into a 444-day hostage crisis. Now retired, Michael Metrinko’s lifelong interest in the Islamic world led to post-9/11 assignments in Yemen, Iraq and more than five years in Afghanistan, places he continues to follow from his home in central Pennsylvania. He remains in touch with a number of old and new Iranian friends. As the third generation of his family to live in Iran, he hopes that someone from his younger generation of relatives will also have that opportunity someday. Metrinko’s account of his experience has been adapted from the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training’s “Moments in U.S. Diplomatic History,” excerpted fromMetrinko’s oral history with permission fromADST and Michael Metrinko. The oral history was recorded in interviews with Charles Stuart Kennedy beginning in August 1999. All photos are courtesy of Michael Metrinko. Michael Metrinko, a Peace Corps Volunteer, at the door to his house in Songhor in 1971 and, in Kurdish costume, visiting Kurdish friends in Mahabad in 1972.