In early 1979, diplomat Michael Metrinko was told he could leave his post in the city of Tabriz, Iran, whenever he wanted. Iran was undergoing a revolution that was growing increasingly violent, and Tabriz was an early flash point.
Revolutionaries had repeatedly threatened the U.S. consulate there, which Metrinko was in charge of. He was also the only American diplomat stationed there.
He chose to stay behind despite the risk. As the revolution quickly consumed Tabriz and the rest of Iran, his choice nearly cost him his life.
Metrinko had lived and worked in Iran and Turkey in the Peace Corps and the Foreign Service for almost a decade in total before being assigned to Tabriz. He was fluent in Farsi, Iran’s primary language, and had made many friends and connections.
As the diplomat in charge of the U.S. Consulate in Tabriz, one of Metrinko’s main responsibilities was to help Americans traveling or living in the area. Everything from replacing a lost passport or serving as a notary, to more serious problems such as helping those who’ve landed in prison, fell into his hands. Consulates, like embassies, regularly provide this help.
Four young American men and four others from Western Europe and Australia found themselves in the Tabriz prison. All eight were victims of a fraudulent scheme to import luxury cars into Iran, lured by newspaper ads promising them easy money for driving cars into Iran after buying them in Europe.
It was a terrible time to be in Tabriz’s prison. The justice system in Iran had slowly crumbled as the revolution churned. Instead of their cases being quickly resolved, the eight prisoners languished month after month. To make matters worse, the prison was filling up with revolutionaries who had been arrested by the government that was slowly losing control.
In his role as the U.S. consul in Tabriz, Michael Metrinko regularly visited the Americans at the prison to help them file paperwork, navigate the legal system, and generally check up on their well-being. He tried unsuccessfully to convince officials to drop their cases.
By January 1979, almost a year after the first riots that kicked off the revolution, the government of Iran had effectively collapsed. Iran’s leader, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, fled the country with his family. On February 1st, the religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran from exile in neighboring Iraq. Through the early months of 1979, the country grappled with a rapidly changing political situation.
In Tabriz, nearly 400 miles from Tehran, Metrinko watched the situation grow more uncertain and violent by the day. He was certain that the revolutionaries would inevitably overthrow the prison to free their fellow revolutionaries who had been jailed over the past year.
“So I went to the prison on what turned [out] to be one of my last visits and said, ‘Look, guys.’ I gave them all small maps to my house that I had done,” Metrinko recalled in his 1999 oral history.
Michael Metrinko, 1999
“Each one had his own map. I just said, ‘I will stay in Tabriz until you get out of prison. Once you get out, don’t join in the fighting, just get out the door as fast as you can and get to [the consulate compound], and then we’ll get you all out of Iran.’”
Not long after, on February 13, revolutionaries attacked and overthrew the prison. Watching a local TV station, Metrinko saw an announcement that the city prison was on fire and that volunteers were needed “to save the lives of the prisoners.” Just as he was rushing to leave for the prison, four of the prisoners showed up at the front gate. The other four turned up the next day.
The city of Tabriz had become completely lawless by the time the prison was overthrown. The armory was broken into and weapons poured into the streets. In an official memorandum Michael Metrinko wrote recounting the entire ordeal, he recalled:
“By the second night of the [former prisoners’] stay the city was in a state of open warfare (…) we did a one-minute count of shots fired: Forty-seven shots in a sixty-second period.”
The gunfire was not only from revolutionaries fighting government officials, but vigilante groups settling personal scores, and fighting between two rival revolutionary “committees.” In the span of two days, 12 people were hanged from trees—victims of various lynch mobs. It was impossible for Metrinko and the now-former prisoners to safely leave Tabriz.
The violence was so bad that Metrinko and his new guests literally had to go underground to stay safe: “…Rather than [being] in a comfortable house with beds, they soon found themselves sleeping on the floor in the cellar [of the consul’s residence]—the bedrooms were simply all too exposed to the firing,” he wrote in his memorandum.
On February 14th, revolutionaries temporarily took over the embassy compound in Iran’s capital, Tehran. This foreshadowed the takeover which began nine months later on November 4, 1979, and turned into the 444-day hostage crisis.
Back in Tabriz, the consulate compound was soon attacked. A group of men in Iranian Air Force uniforms armed with machine guns shot out the compound’s windows and stormed it.
As he watched men climb over the compound’s walls, Metrinko took cover and grabbed a phone to call an Iranian friend. The friend’s mother answered the phone. He told her to tell her son that the consulate was under attack and that their help was needed.
Minutes after making the call, the armed men arrested Metrinko and his guests. The men placed a noose around Metrinko’s neck, but then a second armed group appeared and overruled his pending execution. They instead hauled him and the eight prison escapees to a new prison controlled by revolutionaries.
Arriving at the new prison, Metrinko quickly recognized some of its occupants. They were contacts of his who were associated with the now-former Iranian regime.
The makeshift prison was a picture of chaos. Outside the building, large crowds gathered and revolutionaries kept bringing in new captives. Inside, Metrinko wrote in his memorandum, “the corridors were packed with jostling groups bellowing orders and asking questions” while very young, curious, and heavily armed revolutionary militia would wander in and out of their holding cell.
Fortunately, Metrinko’s quick phone call to his Iranian friend paid off. After many hours of hostile treatment and rising tensions, his friend appeared and was able to calm the situation. Metrinko recalled in his oral history:
“[My friend and the revolutionaries holding us] were all guys who knew each other. They had all been in these street gangs during the fighting. It didn’t mean they liked each other, but they all knew each other and they all had their own revolutionary credentials. And my friend got permission for me to leave.”
Michael Metrinko
However, the eight former (and once again) prisoners were to be kept, given that they had escaped prison without having gone on trial for their car smuggling. Metrinko refused to leave without them.
As they argued back and forth, Metrinko capitalized on some of the revolutionaries’ “acute discomfort” at his arguably inexcusable imprisonment, given his status as a diplomat and a friend of some of their fellow revolutionaries. “[I] said that I simply would not abandon my non-Persian [Farsi] speaking charges (…) If they had to stay, I would stay in prison with them,” Metrinko wrote in his memorandum.
To solve this problem, a quick two-hour trial was held, resulting in clearing all charges against the eight. Michael Metrinko’s connections and negotiating skills paid off; they were all released together.
The newly freed group went to his friend’s family home, but then opted to return to the consulate compound. Metrinko was assured by his friends that it would be safe and kept under protection.
Photos of the Consulate Tabriz compound taken in 1972. State Department photo.
Photos of the Consulate Tabriz compound taken in 1972. State Department photo.
Photos of the Consulate Tabriz compound taken in 1972. State Department photo.
Photos of the Consulate Tabriz compound taken in 1972. State Department photo.
Photos of the Consulate Tabriz compound taken in 1972. State Department photo.
Despite assurances, Metrinko and company became prisoners again. The guard force that his friend assured him would keep them safe at the consulate instead began treating them as captives. They were forced to sit at gunpoint, cursed at, and threatened.
The guards spoke to each other in Turkish rather than Farsi, Iran’s primary language. Fortunately, Metrinko’s previous experience in the Peace Corps in Turkey meant he knew the language well.
“[They] did not know that I spoke Turkish. They thought I might speak Farsi, but I was communicating only in English because I didn’t want them to know I could speak their languages. And a couple of them started to talk in Turkish about how they would have to kill us but they would wait until all these various inspection teams [were no longer there],” Metrinko recalled in his oral history.
He kept the possibility of their imminent execution to himself, so the guards wouldn’t know he knew what they were saying—plus, his eight fellow prisoners were already so nervous they were “jars of pudding.”
By a bit of luck, a member of the Iranian Air Force who Metrinko believed was of higher rank than the other guards suddenly showed up.
“As soon as he walked in, I just took a chance,” Metrinko remembered. “I stood up, said I wanted to show him something in the back room, and before any of the other guards could say anything, I took him to a back room and told him very quickly what was happening. I had to trust somebody.”
The officer told Metrinko to sit and wait a moment. He approached the lower-ranking guards, explaining to them that Metrinko needed to show him something about the consulate’s communication system.
The officer then left and returned about 15 minutes later. He took Metrinko to a room where there was a telephone and said, “Call your embassy [the U.S. embassy in Tehran].”
The embassy was able to get in touch with the newly formed Iranian government’s prime minister, who was able to arrange for a cargo plane to fly to Tabriz to retrieve Metrinko and his fellow captives.
While they were waiting for the plane, the officer who had allowed the phone call arranged for new, trusted guards to replace the group who had threatened to execute Metrinko and his eight charges. It was a very delicate situation for the officer as well. He admitted to Metrinko, “I can’t do anything until [the new guards arrive] because if I try to take you out now, they’ll kill me.”
A new guard force was put in place, calming the situation. Soon after, news came that the cargo plane from Tehran was on its way to pick up the group. They flew back to Tehran.
“We arrived at the embassy, which was in the throes of a massive evacuation. It had finally sunk in to the embassy staff that a revolution was occurring in the country, and they had decided to order an evacuation,” Metrinko recalled in his oral history.
“I turned over my four American prisoners immediately to the evacuation staff, and they were whisked out, and they left Iran that day. They were given new passports, and that was it. They left Iran and were taken back to Germany and processed out. That was those four. I got the Australian, the Austrian, and the two West Germans back to their embassies [to be processed out].”
Michael Metrinko was reassigned to the embassy in Tehran, which was still operating but kept to a minimal level of staffing. It was February 1979 and a new interim government was, as Metrinko put it,“trying to pull its act together.”
Months later, in November, the shifting political winds of the revolution would result in the embassy being taken over by Iranian students, and Metrinko and more than 50 of his colleagues taken hostage. The Iranian hostage crisis, as it would become known in the United States, lasted 444 days before the hostages’ release on January 20, 1981.
Upon their release, the former hostages received the State Department’s Award for Valor. The award is given to those who exhibit “sustained superior performance while under threat of physical attack or harassment” or “an individual act of courage or exceptional performance at the risk of personal safety.”
FROM THE COLLECTION
Michael Metrinko's Medal of Valor
Michael Metrinko, uniquely, received two Awards for Valor. One for his experience as a hostage for 444 days, and the other for staying behind to protect—and ultimately save the lives of— the four Americans and four others who found themselves stuck in prison in Tabriz during the revolution.
Both of Metrinko’s awards are part of the museum’s permanent collection, representing his heroism in saving the lives of others in a highly volatile situation.
In 2006, Tom Burchill published a book, Razi Crossing, recounting the true story of two American college students who were jailed in Iran for smuggling cars and “find themselves trapped as the Iranian Revolution explodes all around them.”
Burchill dedicated the book to Michael Metrinko, the U.S. diplomat “who was instrumental in saving my brother’s life” in Tabriz, Iran, in February 1979.
The cover page of Razi Crossing by Tom Burchill. Gift of Michael J. Metrinko.
The dedication page of Razi Crossing by Tom Burchill. Gift of Michael J. Metrinko.
The 1979 Hostage Crisis: Down and Out in Tehran, The Foreign Service Journal (March 2015)
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