Ex-hostage recalls days in Iran

Twenty-five years after Iranian captors handcuffed him, blindfolded him and threatened to kill him, Jerry Miele is retired, recently married and happy.

But the 66-year-old Mt. Pleasant man has not forgotten those 444 days in captivity. He describes the harrowing experience as "a monkey on my back."

It started Nov. 4, 1979, when Iranians stormed the U.S. Embassy in downtown Tehran, and held Miele and 51 other Americans at gunpoint. It ended Jan. 20, 1981, just as conservative icon Ronald Reagan swept into the White House.

"I was never afraid to die," Miele remembered, "but I was afraid of being tortured."

Miele arrived in Tehran in late February 1979 as a communications specialist who helped run the embassy's encrypting and decrypting hardware.

It was a period of unrest in Iran, with almost daily demonstrations in the streets against the government, which was seen by its critics as autocratic and corrupt.

Donald Cooke, at the time a 26-year-old vice consul at the embassy, recalled querying his father before leaving for Iran: "What would happen if I became a captive?"

In addition to sporadic mortar attacks on the embassy complex, armed militants briefly seized the embassy in February 1979. But an intrepid State Department security officer, Alan Golancinski, whose father had once lived in Wilkinsburg, was able to negotiate a peaceful resolution.

Several months later, in the summer, Miele was awakened by gunmen bursting into his room on the embassy grounds. He was held for several hours before Golancinski again came to the rescue.

"The situation was tense," Miele said.

The government of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the shah of Iran -- installed by the CIA in 1953 and toasted by President Carter in early 1979 as a U.S. friend -- was in shambles. Rocked by anti-shah protests, the government fell to a band of Iranian political moderates and religious militants, whose leader was the once-exiled Ayatollah Khomeini.

Carter allowed the shah, suffering from cancer and roaming the world in search of treatment, to enter the United States.

Two weeks later, the embassy was seized.

"I have no anger toward President Carter," said Golancinski, who retired in 1986 from the State Department. "He was under great pressure (to let the shah into the country). I think later he felt enormous guilt" for the embassy takeover.

Golancinski blamed the administration, though, for failing to provide advance warning of the decision to grant the shah exile. Golancinski said he needed at least three weeks' notice to evacuate nonessential personnel. He got just a week's notice.

American hostages were scattered among the complex of buildings on the embassy grounds and at locations elsewhere in Iran.

Miele said he was hauled back and forth between an apartment in Tehran and the embassy.

Shortly after Reagan took the oath of office on Jan. 20, 1981, the hostages were released and flown to an army hospital in West Germany. Carter was there to greet them.

The crisis ended because the hostages had become "a burden" to their captors, said then-acting ambassador to Iran Bruce Laingen.

Cooke, though, said the Iranians feared Reagan but never feared Carter.

For Miele, going home was all that mattered.

"I didn't think I was going to make it."