The Foreign Service Journal, March 2015

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MARCH 2015 37 season—it was unworkable, unwinnable and if they had succeeded, we would have been dead. It could not have gotten us out. Guards came into my cell one day and said, “Pack your things, you’re being moved.” I packed my things into a tiny bag. I think I had an extra shirt, an extra pair of under- pants. They came back to my room a while later, blindfolded me, put these heavy plas- tic restraints on my hands, led me out and put me in the back of a van, lying on the floor. There were other people lying there next to me. We were not allowed to talk. And we started to move. I was on the floor of the van, bouncing around for a couple of hours. We got to a different place, and they led me out, blindfolded, from the van and into a building. Various doors slammed and shut and opened and closed. You’d hear voices. Eventually, they sat me down, took off my blindfold, took off my restraints. I looked around, and I was with two other people (Americans) in the room. We were, as it turned out, in a former SAVAK (Iranian secret police) prison in the city of Qom. I had no idea who the others were at first, and it was the first time I had talked to an American since November. So it took a while to start speaking English, which I hadn’t spoken since November. We lived together for the next month or two. A Real Prison I’m not sure how long I stayed in Qom. I knew it was Qom. They didn’t want to tell us where we were, but I figured it out because I could hear a train in the distance the first evening, and I knew that Qom was on a railroad track. And when I tasted the water, I knew that we weren’t in Tehran any more. Water in Iran has very distinct tastes depending on the city you’re in. The water of Qom is infamous because it tastes like salt water. It’s very brackish. Tea and coffee made there are almost undrink- able. When I had some water, I knew immediately that we had to be in Qom or somewhere near there. We were then taken away fromQom—this was the time the hos- tages were spread out all across the country—and brought back to Tehran to what was called the Ghasr Prison, also known as Komiteh Prison, that had been built by Germans in the reign of Shah Reza. It was the first time I was in a real prison, with cells and little apertures and no windows. You could hear screaming and things like that at night where people were being tortured, because there were lots of Iranians in prison with us at the same time. I had a cellmate there. Then I was taken to Evin Prison, and went back into solitary. It was winter. Evin is in the northern part of the city of Tehran. My cell was excruciatingly cold. It was below freezing, especially at night. We had no heat. This was already after the Iran-Iraq War had started. But one day I was really, really cold. I had been told that the guards also had no heat, that they didn’t have any way to stay warm either, and there was nothing that anybody could do about this. Conditions were harsh all over the country. Fine, I could accept that, except one day when I was going out to the bathroom—they were leading me out blindfolded—I brushed up against a stove that was on, a heater. I immediately knew it was a heater, and I just started to go on and on about what bastards they were. They threw me back in my cell, and a little while later a Large crowds lined the streets to honor the former hostages as they made their way to the White House in January 1981. You do not tell captors your entire life story and what languages you speak as soon as you meet them.