"I Thought I Was Dead"

The first phone call from Gary Earl Lee came at 2 a.m. Wednesday, and his wife Pat wept uncontrollably when she first heard his voice, clear and firm, from Wiesbaden. Lee, 37, the son of a missionary in India, had been in Tehran since May 1979, serving as an administrative officer. His posting to Tehran was his sixth overseas assignment, including duty as coordinator of logistics for Henry Kissinger's "shuttle diplomacy." Now, some 24 hours after Lee's plane had lifted off from Tehran Mehrabad Airport, Pat Lee, 37, waited for the phone to ring again. With her was TIME Correspondent. Susan Schindehette. Her report:

Pat Lee beamed joyfully as neighbors filed into her modest house in suburban Washington to help clean up after the freedom celebration. One friend tried to buff away the cigarette burns on the living room furniture; another stacked empty champagne bottles in a back room. At 2:10 p.m. the phone rang, and a friend laughed into the receiver, then shouted: "Well, it's about time you called! Ask your wife what happened at your house last night."

Mrs. Lee took the phone. "Hi, baby, how are you?" She ticked off a list of friends who had called from around the world, then asked: "Did I tell you that you got a promotion? Are you excited?" She asked her husband about the hostages' treatment by their Iranian captors and listened now with a grimmer face. "We'll talk about it when I get home," Gary Lee replied.

Suddenly Mrs. Lee handed the receiver to me. "I just wanted you to know that we're all glad you're home," I said. There was a slight pause on the other end, marred by the clicks and scratches of a distant connection. Then came his reply: "Well, if it weren't for the press and the Algerians and the American people, we would never have gotten out of this mess."

Lee outlined events of his long captivity. "In the first days, we began to realize that it was going to go to the table rather than to the gun. We knew then that it was going to be a long-drawn-out baby." He said he preferred a military solution at first, hoping for a rescue mission. He and fellow hostages found out about the April mission three months after it failed. Said Lee: "We thought the timing was lousy --too little, too late. But it's easy for me to be brave now that I'm sitting here safe."

Indeed, Lee thought the end had come when he and a number of other captives were subjected to a grotesque mock execution. For Lee, the ruse was all too real: "I bought it. I thought I was a dead man." After the doomed rescue attempt, Lee and the other hostages were removed from the embassy compound and taken from jail to jail. He also spent some time in solitary confinement and had not been outdoors since last June. Lee's summation was terse and chilling: "I was just cannon fodder to them, just another body."

As President Reagan's Inauguration grew closer, the hostages speculated about their prospects, discussing what might happen if the crisis were not resolved by then. Said Lee: "We thought that if Reagan came in, we'd be right back to ground zero, that the whole thing could take another year or two."

Lee was shifted to a hotel near Tehran on Dec. 17, and there he awaited the end of the negotiations. He knew he was finally going to be free when his captors took him to the airport. "When I looked up and realized that it was an Algerian plane, I said to myself, 'This one's going home.' "

Once the hostages were aboard, there was reunion and jubilation: "Bruce German is a good friend; I hadn't talked with him since the Thursday before the takeover. And no one had seen the girls, Kathryn Koob and Elizabeth Ann Swift. There was clapping, screaming and shouting." As soon as the plane was airborne, the celebration began: "The Algerians popped open the champagne before we were even out of Iranian airspace." Summed up Lee: "I can't speak for everyone, but for myself--I belong to the American people for the next two weeks. If some little kid wants my autograph, he's going to get it. I'm glad to be out. And I'm glad to be alive."

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