The Foreign Service Journal, March 2015

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MARCH 2015 35 a quickie, just to show the world that they could do it. Instead, so much solidarity cropped up for them—and Ayatollah Rouholla Khomeini suddenly supported them—that they stayed, and that was that. We were taken to the ambassador’s residence first, held for a while there, kept tied up. Well, I got singled out fairly quickly. I did not tell anyone in the group, and they had no reason to know, at least initially, that I could speak Persian. I had learned my lesson in Tabriz. You do not tell captors your entire life story and what languages you speak as soon as you meet them. In fact, you hope you never have to tell them. By the second day, I was taken over to the cafeteria area, where they had mattresses spread out on the floor. We were placed on the mattresses, which we were sort of forced to sit and sleep on. At one point a new group walked in, went up to somebody and started speaking to him in Persian. They were going from bed to bed. One of my embassy col- leagues blurted out, “I don’t speak Farsi. Ask Metrinko. He speaks Farsi really well.” And they came over and hauled me away, and I never saw an American again for many months. The fact that you’re a Foreign Service officer doesn’t stop you from being an idiot, necessarily. They purposely tried to separate the ones who spoke Persian and also the ones who were the heads of offices in the embassy. I went to solitary on Nov. 6 and came out sometime in May 1980 for the first time, briefly. A Lot of Interrogation For the first month or two there was a lot of interrogation. Who do you know? What did you do? Who did you talk to? I had to give them information about figures who were public revolutionary figures. They went on repeating and repeat- ing and repeating the same questions. They weren’t very profes- sional. First, they ordered me to open up the safe in my office, and I did that. If someone’s pointing a gun at you and telling you to open up an office safe, it encourages you. Besides, the break-in time for one of these safes is approximately three minutes anyway, so I just saved them the trouble. By chance I had very little in my safe. They had my list of phone numbers from the office; but, luck- ily, the ones in the office were standard professional contacts. And the ones in the house they had not gotten. (I found out much later that a friend of mine, hearing over the radio the news about what was happening at the embassy, had immediately rushed to my house, gone inside and removed every piece of paper to be found in my apartment. All the paper that was in the house, including telephone numbers of friends, things like that, was removed frommy house and destroyed. And that prob- ably saved a number of people’s lives. It certainly saved them a fair amount of discomfort.) My impression of my interrogators was that they were very idealistic, and not too bright in the sense of having had practical experience—just sort of know-it-all students, people who were Metrinko’s return to his hometown, Olyphant, Pa., in January 1981 received national TV coverage.