The Sergeant's Saga

He stepped off a jet at Washington's Andrews Air Force Base and embraced his mother and his fiancee while his three beaming sisters looked on. Then, as a band launched into the Marines' Hymn, Sergeant Kenneth Kraus drew his 5-ft. 6-in. frame to proud attention. Navy Secretary W. Graham Claytor pinned the Navy Commendation Medal on his chest, and the Marine commandant, General Louis Wilson, awarded him a Purple Heart. Said Claytor: "You acted like a Marine should, and that's the finest thing we can say."

How Kraus, a 22-year-old from Lansdale, Pa., got his decorations says much about the postrevolution confusion in Iran. On the morning of Feb. 14, six weeks after he joined the 20-member Marine guard at the U.S. embassy in Tehran, he was just coming off duty when he heard the sound of gunfire. Over his VHF radio he heard someone shout, "They're attacking ... they're coming over the wall!" Grabbing a shotgun, he ran to the commissary, helped lead some U.S. and Iranian staffers to safety, then moved to a nearby restaurant. Bullets smashed the windows, and fists began banging on the locked door. Kraus radioed Ambassador William H. Sullivan. "I told him it's best that we surrender," he recalled. "There were noncombatants in there. They'd be killed." Sullivan agreed, and Kraus and the two other Marines with him and the civilians in the room began chanting the Persian word for surrender.

The attackers burst in. A machine-gun round cut down an Iranian employee standing next to Kraus. The gunmen took the Marines' flak jackets, helmets, wallets, watches and shotguns. One attacker leveled a shotgun at Kraus. "I shuddered," he says. "I heard the blast," but that was all. Hit on his face and scalp, Kraus passed out.

He awoke in a hospital. His wounds--which turned out to be superficial--were dressed and he was given injections. That night, when a nurse woke him to tell him that he was "going to an army hospital," he knew he was in trouble. The men who came for him handcuffed and blindfolded him and carried him away. He was questioned harshly: "Why do you shoot Iranian people? Who commands the forces that are attacking Tehran?" Next day he was thrown into a cell with 20 Iranian prisoners. From there he was led to a small office and given a "trial" that lasted eight minutes. His three judges accused him of killing three Iranian soldiers, all the while shouting at him, "You're CIA! You're SAVAK! You're mercenary!" Sent back to his cell, he was threatened with execution every day until last Wednesday. Then, suddenly, he was allowed to phone the embassy, and shortly thereafter was freed.

Kraus says that it was "almost a miracle." Until then, he had not known whether any of his comrades at the embassy had survived. He had been spirited away from the hospital by leftists and turned over to the Komiteh, an offshoot of Ayatullah Khomeini's Islamic Revolutionary Council. Early efforts by the embassy to arrange Kraus' release were unsuccessful because the Komiteh did not inform the Bazargan government that it had him in custody. Before long, the Kraus case reached Jimmy Carter's attention. The White House pressed hard for information on Kraus, and even got the French government to bring its contacts with Khomeini to bear.

In the end, the Bazargan government was forced to negotiate Kraus' release with the Komiteh. To mask their own lack of control of events in Tehran, Bazargan aides blandly announced that Kraus had been held legitimately, on suspicion that he had killed some Iranians during the embassy assault. It was well established, however, that he had never even fired a shot.

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