Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis by Mark Bowden Read Free Book Online Page A

embassy and bring everyone home. He hoped that didn’t happen. He was enjoying the work too much to go home now.
    Rosen figured the bar on the outer door would buy him enough time to destroy the most vital papers, so he was surprised when he heard the scrape of metal. His secretary, an Armenian woman apparently frightened by threats from behind the door, was removing the metal bar.
    “Don’t!” Rosen shouted.
    It was too late. He was at once surrounded by young Iranians, boys and girls, the girls in manteaus and the boys carrying clubs, many of them with kerchiefs wrapped around their faces.
    “Get out!” he shouted in Farsi.
    “Either you move out of this room or we are going to drag you out,” one of the invaders said.
    “This is United States property. Get out of this building immediately.”
    Rosen’s defiance was not simply bravado. He found it hard to take this bunch seriously. They were so young, for one thing, shabbily dressed and clearly nervous. He was more angry than frightened.
    The growing crowd in his office didn’t budge. Some of them began pulling open drawers to his desk and file cabinets and removing his files. His secretary was curled in the corner, frightened.
    “Leave this room immediately or you will be hurt,” one of the demonstrators ordered Rosen. “This is no joke. We’re now in control of this place. You are flouting the will of the Iranian people.”
    “You leave immediately,” said Rosen. “You have no right to set foot in here, any of you. You are violating diplomatic immunity. It is totally illegal.”
    When a club was waved in his face, Rosen relented. He was led out of his office.
    Inside the front door to the chancery, Golacinski felt events slipping out of control. He flipped the switch on his radio and with unmistakable urgency in his voice ordered, “Recall! Recall! All marines to Post One!”
    The plan Golacinski and Mike Howland had put together in case of an invasion, which was designed to prevent Americans from being taken hostage, involved locking down part of the workforce and encouraging others to flee. The second floor of the chancery could be closed off behind a steel door, so employees had been instructed to congregate there in an emergency and wait for help from the provisional government. If the door to the second floor were breached, the communication vault on the west end was a final fallback position. It was large enough to accommodate dozens of people and was well stocked with food and water, so theoretically it could protect the chancery staff long enough for help to arrive. Those working in the buildings spread out across the campus would be told to move toward the relatively quiet back gates, where protesters rarely gathered, and slip out toward the British, Canadian, or Swiss embassies. Ordinarily Howland would have helped coordinate this response, but he had gone to the Foreign Ministry with Laingen and Tomseth. By radio, Golacinski told his assistant to stay there and press for an immediate local rescue force.
    Several of the young Iranians who had climbed the gate now severed its chains with bolt cutters and swung the doors open wide. Protesters flooded in. On his radio, Golacinski heard reports from the various marine guard posts.
    “They’re coming over the walls!” shouted Corporal Rocky Sickmann from another spot on the compound.
    This was clearly a coordinated action.
    Golacinski’s emergency call had awakened four marines who had worked the night shift and were asleep in the apartment building behind the compound. They quickly dressed but, as they prepared to leave the building, saw protesters and Iranian police massed around their building.
    “Stay where you’re at,” said Golacinski.
    Usually there would have been only three or four marines in the chancery at that hour, but today there were about a dozen. Some had come in to get paid and others had been attending a language class. Corporals Billy Gallegos and Sickmann had just come