Brit sailors say they feared for their lives in Iran

LONDON — Their greatest scare, they recalled, came on the second day, when they were flown to Tehran and backed up against a prison wall while their Iranian captors fiddled with weapons, cocking rifles to make them fear for their lives.

"We thought we were going to the British Embassy but we got taken to a detention center," said Royal Marine Joe Tindell, 21, one of 15 British sailors and marines seized by Iranian Revolutionary Guards in disputed waters in the Persian Gulf on March 23.

There, the mood turned drastically, as their captors changed from military dress into all black, their faces covered.

"We had a blindfold and plastic cuffs, hands behind our backs, heads against the wall," Tindell said in an interview with the BBC. "Someone, I'm not sure who, someone said, I quote, 'Lads, lads, I think we're going to get executed.'

"After that comment someone was sick, and as far as I was concerned he had just had his throat cut. From there we were rushed to a room, quick photo, and then stuffed into a cell and didn't see or speak to anyone for six days."

It was the beginning of days of psychological pressure that would ultimately extract televised "confessions" from some of the Britons that they had strayed into Iranian waters. The admissions tempered for some the joy at their safe return home to their families, with some military analysts expressing dismay that the sailors and marines had capitulated to their captor's demands.

"It was highly damaging that all of them apologized publicly for something they had not done," said Max Hastings, a military historian and former newspaper editor, in a BBC radio interview on Friday, comparing the Britons unfavorably to American pilots who withstood much crueler treatment in North Vietnam for much longer.

But the captives defended their decision to play along with their captors, saying they were subjected to a determined campaign of psychological intimidation. They were separated, stripped, put in pajamas and placed in small stone cells in complete isolation — not permitted even a whispered word with a fellow captive, they said. The lone woman among them was tricked into believing the men had all been released.

"There was a lot of trickery, and mind games being played," Lt. Felix Carman, 26, of the Royal Navy, said when six of the Britons, freed two days ago, appeared at a news conference Friday to chronicle for the first time in public a 14-day ordeal that began, by their account, when Iranian Revolutionary Guards apprehended them in Iraqi waters, executing what seemed a planned and heavily armed ambush.