We moved into the vault, there is a double-door system there. You move through one steel door from the corridor to an ante-room, and then through another steel door into the vault itself, which is a room, which is where we spent the rest of the afternoon. You sort of have to picture this as 80 people in a room that could probably hardly take about ten or fifteen, Marines outside, holding off first a mob and secondly a fire, and a very great lack of communication. Let’s take each one by itself, because it is hard to put all this together.
At first the mob came up to the door and tried to enter. The Marines had rolled tear gas canisters out into the corridor and had held off the mob this way.
The best we can figure out as to what happened was that then, seeing that they couldn’t get in, the mob at that point set fire to the Embassy, hoping to drive us out by smoke. Many of us who have now seen the Embassy from the outside and talked with enough people, have the feeling that they weren’t trying to drive us out — they were trying to get rid of us.