Looking Back in Anger

Two accounts by hostages of cruelty and courage

Each hostage has his or her own story to tell of captivity in Iran, and the combined accounts make up a mosaic of remarkable courage during months of deprivation and degradation. To illuminate pieces of that mosaic, TIME Correspondent Christopher Redman last week interviewed Charles Jones, 40, of Detroit and Correspondent Dean Brelis talked at length with Michael Metrinko, 34, of Olyphant, Pa. Their reports:

Always in Trouble

"Wherever Charles goes, he takes trouble with him," jokes Mattie Jones, wife of the only black American imprisoned for all 444 days of the crisis. The son of a public works employee, Jones joined the State Department as a communications officer in 1965. He was stationed in Cairo in 1967 when the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War erupted. In 1975 he was one of the last Americans to flee Saigon. And then, on Aug. 23, 1979, he arrived in Tehran.

When militants stormed the American embassy 73 days later, Jones and other staffers rushed to a vault, locked the door and began destroying sensitive documents. Says Jones: "I was shredding things like mad. The militants brought one of our security officers to the door and said that if we didn't open up, they would execute him." The Americans obeyed and were quickly bound and blindfolded. When Jones muttered his name to a blindfolded colleague, a militant tore off the silver chain around Jones' neck. Says Jones: "He took my head, pulled it back and then smashed it into the wall."

For the first few days, Jones was kept upstairs in the embassy residence. Then he and about 25 other hostages were moved to the windowless basement, which they nicknamed the Mushroom.

Says Jones: "We were fed like hogs. They would take us into a filthy room and feed us with dirty utensils and plates."

When Jones and the others were moved from the Mushroom to the embassy's chancellery on March 17, 1980 --his wife's birthday--he learned for the first time that the eight other black male hostages had been released in late November. Jones is convinced that the militants did not free him as well because they suspected him of espionage. Says he:

"I was interrogated five times. They wanted to know what I had destroyed. They wanted me to open up safes. I refused."

Despite the harassment, Jones' stay in the chancellery was fairly comfortable. He exercised daily, voraciously read westerns, science fiction and history and ate "steak, chicken and a heck of a lot of hamburgers," all from the embassy commissary, which was well stocked at the time of the takeover.

That period ended abruptly after the aborted U.S. rescue mission on April 25.

Guards stormed into the chancellery and blindfolded and handcuffed the Americans. Jones and four others were flown to Mashhad near the Soviet border. They spent one night in an abandoned house, then two nights in a hotel, where they had to climb ten flights of stairs to their rooms. The next stop was an Iranian trade mission building. By June 26 they were back in Tehran, in a prison. Finally, on Dec. 17, Jones and his comrades were moved to a guesthouse in Tehran.

He and the other Americans constantly looked for omens of their release.

He explains: "If they gave us tea half an hour early, we would joke and say, 'Hey, that's a good sign. Maybe we're going home.' " In November they learned that Ronald Reagan had been elected President and started hoping that the comment by a guard named Ahmed ("There's a new era now") meant they would soon be free. When Christmas passed, says Jones, "we figured that we would be released some time after the Inauguration, and we were."

Jones did not really feel free until the plane carrying the hostages arrived in Wiesbaden. He says, "I saw all those friendly faces and knew it was for real."

Now Jones is too busy savoring his reunion with his wife and four daughters in Detroit to decide whether to continue in the Foreign Service. But Wife Mattie believes that even after Cairo, Saigon and Tehran, Charles Jones will soon be packing his bags for another post overseas.

Defiant to the End

After his first night at home, above his family's tavern in Olyphant (pop. 5,138), Michael Metrinko looked out the window at the gently falling snow. "I knew at that moment that at last it was over," he says. "There I was, standing in the bedroom of my boyhood. Nobody was threatening me. No one was calling for my death. I was home."

For Metrinko, a 1968 Georgetown University graduate who was a political officer at the embassy, it was a particularly blessed moment. He was one of the hostages treated most harshly by the militants. He spent a total of 261 days in solitary confinement because of his constant defiance. His captors were convinced that their Farsi-speaking prisoner was a CIA agent. They interrogated him more than a dozen times, usually late at night and for up to seven hours at a time. Says Metrinko: "They had broken into my office safe, and they had the names and phone numbers of all my Iranian friends. They would say, 'How do you know Mr. So-and-So?' and I'd say, 'He's a friend.' But they found it hard to believe. They thought that anyone I knew had to be part of a spy network. They didn't like my attitude or my answers."

After two weeks, the militants put Metrinko into a 6-ft. by 8-ft. basement storage room that was furnished with only a mattress. Says Metrinko: "When I was awake, I'd lean it against the wall because you couldn't move around with it on the floor." He spent four months there, volunteering to scrub toilets, mop floors, "do anything that got me out of that hole." He spent many of the hours reading, including The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's grim portrait of Soviet prison life. Says Metrinko dryly: "I can't imagine a better place to read it."

In April, Metrinko was suddenly moved to a large embassy office with two windows overlooking the main street. The reason quickly became apparent: within an hour a Red Cross representative came to visit him. A day later, he was moved into a smaller office. Says Metrinko: "The new room was at least large enough to exercise in, and it had a chair, a table and a mattress." To pass the time, he drew geometric patterns on the gray walls with red, blue and green pencils.

After the failed rescue mission, Metrinko was driven to the holy city of Qum and held for a week with two other hostages in a filthy, rat-infested prison cell whose windows were covered with blankets. He often heard the crack of a whip followed by screams; once when a blanket fell, he caught a glimpse of some Iranians being flogged.

Metrinko passed the next two months in more pleasant quarters: a room in a onetime art gallery. He never seriously considered trying to escape, since even when he was allowed to take a stroll in the courtyard he was surrounded by 20 or more armed guards. Says Metrinko ruefully: "It was like a grade-B movie, but I'm not James Cagney." The Ayatullah Khomeini's son Seyyed Ahmed talked to the hostages for half an hour one day. Metrinko complained to him that the food consisted of "rice and grease" and that he was not allowed to exercise. Seyyed Ahmed ordered the guards to let the hostages go outside for regular exercise. Says Metrinko: "They didn't obey. In the next month and a half, we were only allowed outside three times."

After he was moved to a prison in Tehran in late June, Metrinko cursed his guards in Farsi as "thieves" and "liars" for taking away his watch and glasses, and denounced Khomeini as a "killer." The militants blindfolded Metrinko, punched and slapped him, and put him in an isolation cell. For two weeks he slept on its bare floor with no heat or light, except for what little came over the transom of the steel door.

Even at the last moment, Metrinko was defiant. When he was boarding the bus to go to the Algerian plane that was to fly the hostages to freedom, a guard called him an "American bastard." Replied Metrinko: "Shut up, you son of a prostitute." Guards dragged Metrinko off the bus; as it left for the airport, they punched him a few times. But he was finally taken to the airport in a car. Says Metrinko: "I was awfully close to missing the whole show."

When Metrinko got home last week, he went immediately to Saints Cyril and Methodius Church, where he had been baptized as a child into the Ukrainian Catholic faith. He blew out the votive flame that had been lit on the 100th day of his captivity, and wept when the priest read the Sermon on the Mount. Metrinko now plans to retreat to a cabin deep in the woods for a few weeks. The hideaway has no phone or TV, but, he says "there's a wonderful fireplace, and I'm going to spend my time chopping a lot of wood to keep the fire going."

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