Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (13 page)

Kupke’s pockets were emptied of cash and jewelry and he was taken down the hall to Laingen’s office, where he had the distinction of being the first American hostage to meet Hussein Sheikh-ol-eslam, a skinny young man with a dreamy, distracted manner, a thick unruly mop of curly black hair, and a full black beard, a radical filled with the absolute certainty of divine purpose, whose occasional sweetness itself was in service of a brutal righteousness. He was missing his left front tooth, and the hostages, who would come to know him well, called him “Gaptooth,” or “Snaggle-tooth.” Because he spoke perfect English, he would become for them the most visible member of the students’ leadership. In the early seventies he had studied at the University of California, Berkeley, a center of student radicalism in America during the anti–Vietnam War era. Sheikh-ol-eslam had digested the fervent rhetoric of those activist years, the rants against the “tyrannical,” “racist,” “imperialist” American establishment, and now, back in Iran, where there had been a real tyrant to oppose, he had taken part in something the old fire-breathers at Berkeley had only dreamed about—an actual revolution. And here, at his mercy, were the very agents of American imperialism denounced in that hyperbolic campus rhetoric. He would make the most of it.

Outside the tall windows it was growing dark; Kupke figured it was about five o’clock.

“Who do you work for?” Sheikh-ol-eslam asked.

“I work for the State Department,” Kupke told him.

“Why didn’t you surrender with everyone else?”

“I was destroying documents.”

“Why were you destroying documents? What were you hiding?”

“Nothing. Those documents were the property of the United States,” Kupke told him. “It’s our job to destroy them before letting them fall into your hands.”

The questioning went on. Clearly, the circumstances of his capture, hiding out, and destroying documents made Kupke and the others in the vault particularly suspicious. Sheikh-ol-eslam asked where he had been hiding when the others were taken from the vault. Kupke, afraid that the students would find the weapons on the roof, said that he had crouched behind the incinerator. It occurred to him that there was information in the vault that might reinforce the idea he was a spy. When he had been working in the Sinai outpost, he had obtained two sets of passports, one for passage into Arab countries and the other for traveling to Israel—Arab nations would not let anyone enter whose passport had been stamped in Israel.

“You know, eventually you’re going to find a lot of IDs in one of those safes, both Arab and Israeli,” Kupke said. “And that doesn’t mean I’m a spy. It just means I was working and passing through the Sinai Desert on both sides.”

Sheikh-ol-eslam listened and nodded with evident disbelief.

With men grabbing both his arms, CIA station chief Tom Ahern was led down the littered second-floor corridor to his office. How did they already know which one was his? Ahern figured somebody in the first hours must have started helping these thugs. He was alarmed but not terribly surprised. He remembered a conversation he had shortly before leaving on this assignment, with an agency friend who had just returned from Tehran. He had asked how much he might count on the staff there to protect his identity.

“If they bring everybody in the embassy staff out and they line them up against the wall and they say, ‘Now, we want to know who the CIA people are,’” Ahern had asked, “are my embassy colleagues going to protect me?”

His friend had laughed.

Ahern was pushed into a chair, his blindfold was removed, and the first thing he noticed was a file folder on his desk that he had overlooked. He was the one who all morning had been most concerned about destroying sensitive material and, indeed, he thought he had rounded up everything of his own, but there, sitting on his desk, was an informal report he had written the day before to “Edward J. Ganin” (a code name for CIA director Stansfield Turner) under his own cover name, “Donald C. Paquin,” and with his title “Station Chief, Tehran.” It was a routine summary for headquarters of everything he and his agents had been doing, and his assessment of what was likely to happen in Iran, nothing very dramatic or important (and, as time would show, mostly wrong) but under the circumstances a very damaging document.

In it, he described the four months he had been in Iran as a period of “elbowing and maneuvering for position” among the country’s various political factions, and predicted “the gradual erosion of Khomeini’s personal authority.” This would lead, he had written, to a period of disorderly—sometimes violent—competition, with no single contender possessing enough guns or popularity to prevail. “Things could be very different if the military chooses sides,” he had written, “but they are still thoroughly intimidated. Discipline is poor, professional élan practically nonexistent, and no prospective leaders have yet emerged who look as if they can restore institutional pride.”

It went on:

You asked me to comment at some point about our prospects for influencing the course of events. Only marginally, I would say, until the military recovers, and that is a process we can do almost nothing to affect. What we can do, and I am now working on, is to identify and prepare to support the potential leaders of a coalition of westernized political liberals, moderate religious figures, and (when they begin to emerge) western oriented military leaders. The most likely catalyst for such a coalition is Ayatollah [Kazem] Shariatmadari; I have compartmented contacts with several of his supporters.Prospects are not bright for resuming operation of the TACKS MAN sites in a role which will provide us telemetry on Soviet missile testing. The reason is that this would require a degree of American participation which the Iranians are not likely to find politically acceptable. Accordingly, we are proceeding with an operation designed to provide clandestine collection of telemetry; this is proceeding well, and with some luck could be functioning fairly early in 1980.

Ahern had concluded the cable by requesting an additional case officer, and by acknowledging the help he had received weeks earlier in the form of Bill Daugherty, whom he had named in the cable!

He tried not to stare at the folder but was stunned at his oversight. There was, in summary, the current feeble efforts of the CIA to sort out what was going on in Iran. Given in particular that the letter named Ayatollah Shariatmadari, and discussed the deeply clandestine effort to replace the Tacksman telemetry collection effort, it was an egregious lapse. The paragraph about potential for “influencing the course of events” would confirm the Iranians worst suspicions about American intentions in their country, particularly in light of the 1953 coup. That effort had succeeded with the help of Western military leaders, too. It was a shock, an embarrassment, and sure to be trouble.

For the moment, his captors paid no attention to the folder on his desk. They wanted Ahern to open the office safe. He refused. There wasn’t much in it, only what little was left of his files, some correspondence related to the earlier regime, and some chemicals used in preparing or reading invisible ink. Ahern wasn’t eager to share it with them, and if help was going to be arriving soon—as he and the other captives all assumed—then there was much to be gained by delay. He also didn’t want to acknowledge that it was his safe.

Then one of the older captors produced a .38 caliber handgun and pointed it at his face. He told Ahern to open it or be shot.

The veteran CIA officer was unconvinced. He’s not going to shoot me, maybe later, but not now. Ahern knew that it was always a mistake to open an interrogation with your heaviest threat. If these people wanted the combination to his safe, then shooting him would be self-defeating.

“It’s not my safe,” Ahern lied.

The man with the gun grumbled at him threateningly, but gave up and walked away.

By midafternoon nearly all of the Americans seized on the compound had been herded into the ambassador’s residence or into the four small cottages behind the chancery. Most were blindfolded and had their hands tied. Their captors were giddy with success but seemed not to know what to do next. The five American women seized during the takeover were taken to a separate room, where they were tied to chairs and blindfolded. They were asked to state their name, section, and title.

“Terri Tedford, administrative section, secretary,” said the slight, brown-haired woman in the first chair.

“Joan Walsh, political section, secretary,” said the second, and so on, around the room, until they came to Ann Swift.

“Ann Swift, first secretary, political section,” she said. Swift spoke some Farsi, and when she heard her job title being translated as “typist,” her ego bristled and she immediately corrected them, a reflex she would live to regret.

“I’m not a typist,” she corrected. “I’m the first secretary,” and went on to explain that she was, in effect, the highest-ranking embassy official they had in captivity.

A small group came for Limbert in the ambassador’s residence. He asked where they were taking him.

“We want you to come with us to the vault,” one said.

“Oh, of course, I’d be pleased,” Limbert said. “Nothing would make me happier. It would be an honor.”

Relaxed now after the ordeal on the staircase, he fell back on the elaborate formal courtesies of Farsi. So long as they spoke to him nicely, as this student had, then he would respond in kind. He was, after all, a diplomat. And under the circumstances it didn’t hurt to remind them of their culture’s traditional politeness.

They escorted him across the darkening compound to the chancery, showed him the basement window where they had broken in, and then led him to the top floor. The coms vault at the west end looked like it had been ransacked. He saw Ahern, Jones, Barnes, and the others who had evidently locked themselves inside for hours sitting outside it on the corridor floor against the wall with their hands tied. Limbert was led into the vault.

“What is the combination to this safe?” they asked.

“I don’t know,” Limbert said. “I don’t work here.”

“What is in these safes?” they asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, truthfully.

“What are they in here for?”

“I presume for safekeeping,” he said. “I am not even allowed to enter here.”

Then they showed him his wallet. He had left it in the vault early that afternoon before stepping out to talk to the students on the steps. Ordinarily he was not allowed in the vault, but today it had seemed prudent to leave his wallet there.

“If you don’t give us the combination, we’ll shoot everybody here,” his questioner said.

It seemed unlikely. In the few hours he had spent with this crowd so far he had judged them to be amateurish and, in their own way, well intentioned.

“That’s an empty threat,” Limbert said. “I can’t give the combinations to you because I don’t know them.”

Taken back to the residence, Limbert passed Barry Rosen in the hall and said, “Barry, here it goes again,” referring to the February takeover, in which Rosen had been briefly held captive. “You should have known better than to hang around.”

Rosen, the embassy’s press attaché, was a cipher to his captors. He was short, dark-skinned, and bearded, and he spoke such fluent Farsi that they were reluctant to believe he was an American.

“I’m an American and proud of it,” he told them, still cocky and still convinced that these renegades would be chased off the embassy in short order.

He was taken to the bedroom of the Pakistani chef who lived and worked at the ambassador’s residence, where he was briefly questioned by a young woman who wore a long brown jilbab, or robe, and khimar, or head scarf, which covered most of her face. She had beautiful eyes, Rosen thought, but nothing else about her was appealing. She seemed to regard him as the personification of evil. Here before her was the architect of everything wrong in Iran in modern history, and she nearly spat out the words she spoke.

“What is your job?” she asked.

Rosen told her the truth.

“What is the true function of a ‘press attaché,’” she asked, implying that the job description was a cover. “Who are the Iranian ‘journalists’ you had contact with?”

He told her that he would be happy to discuss his job with her at some other time.

“This isn’t the time or place,” he said. “This is the territory of the United States, which you have invaded.”

She responded angrily. This was their country, not his. The so-called embassy was actually a spy den, and now she and the other students had taken it back. He and his colleagues were the invaders, planning their “conspiracies and corruptions.”

Rosen had noticed that Yusef, the chef, had a large bottle of scotch on a nearby shelf, so instead of engaging in pointless argument with the woman he reached out to the bottle and suggested that they both have a drink. Her eyes widened in horror. In the new Iran to offer alcohol to a pious daughter of the faith was unforgivably rude, an insult to the purity of Muslim womanhood. She threw up her arms in disgust and exited the room, slamming the door behind her in a dismissive swish of fabric.

Ibrahim Yazdi, the foreign minister, had left Laingen, Tomseth, and Howland at midafternoon for the hour-and-a-half drive to Qom to meet with Khomeini. Before leaving, Yazdi asked Laingen, “Where do you and your colleagues propose to go?”

The chargé, still hot, told Yazdi that it was up to the provisional government.

“You have an obligation to protect us,” Laingen told him. There were anti-American mobs on the streets all over Tehran; indeed, the chargé had learned that an armed gang had already been asking for him and the other two Americans at the front gates of the Foreign Ministry.

Yazdi said he didn’t believe the situation was that bad but made arrangements for the three to spend the night in the Foreign Ministry building. He was exhausted. His plane from Algiers had flown through the night and arrived only that morning, and he had not slept for two days. He snoozed in the car on the drive east to the holy city.

Khomeini normally rested in the afternoon and received guests early in the evening. When Yazdi was shown into the imam’s receiving room he sat on a floor cushion alongside the white-bearded cleric and told him what had happened at the U.S. embassy. It was his impression that Khomeini was hearing the news for the first time.