Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (15 page)

“Would you like a beer?” a young man asked him.

“Yes, I would,” said Queen.

The young man left and never returned.

After the moment captured in the much-reprinted photo of Bill Belk, he had been marched across the compound to one of the yellow cottages.

“We are going to teach you,” his captor told him.

Belk wondered what that meant.

“We will teach you about God,” the young man said. “We will teach the CIA not to interfere with our country.”

Uncomfortable with his hands tied behind his back with nylon rope, Belk fidgeted for about three hours, listening to the din outside. He kept asking his guards if they would give him one of the cigarettes in his shirt pocket.

“Don’t speak!” the guard said.

He persisted, and finally one of them removed a cigarette, put it between his lips, and lit it. Belk almost choked trying to smoke it. He had no way of taking it from his mouth. He did the best he could, but after a few puffs he spit it out. At one point, early in the evening, somebody fed him a spoonful of ice cream. Later he was escorted to the toilet, where his hands were unbound and, still blindfolded, he did his best to hit the bowl. When he finished his hands were retied and he was returned to the chair.

Belk was miserable, hungry, and increasingly worried about what would happen next. The nylon rope cut into his wrists. He finally managed to fall asleep in the chair.

Charles Jones finished the day in Bruce Laingen’s upstairs bedroom with some of the marines. He flopped on Laingen’s bed and fell asleep, snoring contentedly. Hermening watched him with admiration. How could he just fall asleep? Now and then a big, bearded Iranian would step into the room. In one hand he carried a club, which he tapped menacingly against his other hand and glared down at his American prisoners.

When Kupke’s questioning ended, he was taken to the ambassador’s residence and deposited on the floor in an upstairs bedroom, blindfolded and tied hand and foot. He turned on his side and tried to get comfortable on the carpet, but he was bruised and sore. His head was pounding with pain and it felt like his jaw was broken; he could not completely close his mouth.

In the middle of the night he was awakened by an Iranian.

“Can I get you anything?” he was asked.

Kupke asked for some water and was given some.

“I would give anything for some aspirin,” he said. His guard fetched him two tablets, then left. Kupke had forgotten to ask for more water, so he put them in his mouth and chewed them.

Queen and Limbert got beds of their own. After his long, harrowing day, Al Golacinski slept fitfully on the floor under his chair.

At the Foreign Ministry, Bruce Laingen, the chargé, dozed on a couch in the huge formal dining room.

Marine Kevin Hermening woke up at about three in the morning in the bed alongside two fellow hostages. He lifted his head and looked around and was surprised to see about twenty of the students in the room in various postures of sleep, some of them in chairs, others sprawled on the floor. It was like a big sleepover.

Downstairs, Joe Hall woke up at five. It took him a second or two to focus. Around him were guards and beneath the blanket one of his hands was still bound with cloth.

My God, he thought. It wasn’t just a nightmare!

There was to be little sleep for Bill Daugherty, who was taken early in the evening from the ambassador’s residence by a student with a .38 caliber pistol, who called out his name and told him that he was wanted for questioning. The novice CIA officer was escorted across the embassy grounds back to the chancery, up the steep staircase of the back entrance, and then up the central stairway to the second floor. He was taken into his own office, still bound and blindfolded, and leaned gently against the wall. It was well after midnight but crowds were still celebrating outside. He was exhausted and could still taste tear gas deep in his nose and throat.

He had more reason than most of the newly taken hostages to fear questioning. Daugherty had been assigned to Tehran only six months after joining the agency. He did not speak Farsi, and had been in Iran for only fifty-three days, barely long enough to figure out what his job was and how to get it done. Each of the spy agency’s employees at the embassy had a cover, a regular State Department job, but their identity was an open secret in-house. Everybody knew who worked in the suite of offices on the west end of the second floor. It included a small reception area manned by the agency’s secretary and the offices of Tom Ahern; Ahern’s senior field officer (who had left on home leave only a few weeks earlier); Malcolm Kalp, the newly arrived field officer; and Daugherty. There was a large vault in Daugherty’s office, which was ordinarily closed and locked. He figured there were only three obvious ways his role could become known to his captors: they would have to discover some written record of it in the embassy files, one of his colleagues would have to tell them, or he would have to break down and tell them himself. The only one of the three he could hope to control was the last.

The chancery had been ransacked. Already the Iranian intelligence agents at the core of the takeover, led by Hashemi, had collected all the intact documents they could find, boxed them up, and carted them off the compound for scrutiny. They planned to stay for only a day or two, so it was important to get this done quickly. They had been disappointed to discover the disintegrator in the coms vault. What unrecoverable mysteries did it contain? Had the Americans managed to destroy all the evidence of their counterrevolutionary plots? There was no hope of restoring the blue powder left by the disintegrator, but perhaps there was a way to reassemble the piles of paper that had been fed through the shredder. Surely anything the Americans had taken such pains to destroy must contain valuable information.

Daugherty tried to prepare himself for what was coming. He was new to the spy agency and to Tehran, but he wasn’t innocent. He knew most of the embassy’s secrets, the small string of Iranian spies on the agency’s payroll, the secret efforts to independently replace the Tacksman sites. He knew procedures, codes, and methods…a lot that his captors would like to find out. How should he handle himself? He was worried, but he was also determined not to act disgracefully. At the same time, there was no point in trying to play the hero. He was supposed to be a diplomat, that was his cover story, so he would act like one. The truth is he was so green that he could as easily assume the identity of a foreign officer as any other. He would engage his questioners, attempt to challenge them for this unwarranted outrage. It would not be an act.

It occurred to him that his captors must believe him to be someone more important than he was. His office was large and well furnished, and it was the only one in the suite with a walk-in safe. Sure enough, when the questions began, he was accused of being the “real power” in the embassy.

Daugherty was blindfolded so he couldn’t see his questioner, but the voice was male and soft, and the English was very good, only lightly accented and with an educated vocabulary. The CIA officer would later write out a reconstruction of the session.

“Is this your office?” he was asked.

“Well, not really.”

“What do you mean, ‘Not really’?”

“Well, I’m here temporarily because I’m a new arrival and my office—you can go see—it’s down the hall. It’s the room that serves as the library, but they haven’t gotten around to moving the books out yet.”

“Okay,” said his questioner. “Who sits here outside this office?”

“The secretary who works for the guy in the other office [Ahern’s suite].”

“Who’s the guy in the other office?”

“He’s the drug enforcement representative.” This was Ahern’s official cover.

“What’s his name?”

“I’m not sure. Like I said, I’m new here, and I haven’t gotten to know everyone yet.”

“What does he do?”

“He works with your police forces, I think, to try to do something about stopping drugs. I don’t know. I don’t really know him well.”

His interrogator pressed on in a steady, unemotional way and followed up quickly, probing, testing. This was not an amateur. He never lost control of the dialogue, even though Daugherty was looking for a way to derail it.

“You mean they put you in this office with people you don’t know?”

“Yeah, because my office isn’t ready yet.”

“Who’s your secretary?”

“I don’t have one.”

“Do you write cables back to Washington?”

“Yes.”

“Well, who does that for you?”

“The secretary across the hall who works in the political section, because I’m a political officer.”

“What about this secretary out here?”

“No, she just sits outside this office. I’m just here temporarily.”

The questioner was getting frustrated but he kept his cool. He didn’t raise his voice, though he spoke a little faster. The questions came back more quickly. He doubled back over the same ground, asking the same questions several times, waiting for Daugherty’s story to slip up. He was not buying the answers. He mentioned the possibility of a firing squad and how many Iranians were familiar with torture methods, having been practiced upon by SAVAK. He played with an apparently empty pistol as he spoke, spinning the cylinder, cocking the hammer, and then easing it back down. He would pull the trigger when he wanted to emphasize a point, which made a sound that concentrated Daugherty’s mind.

He didn’t believe he would be shot…at least not yet. If they were going to shoot people, it wouldn’t make sense to do it right away, not when they were looking for information. Daugherty could see that the embassy invaders were trying to figure the place out, who was who, what their jobs were, what exactly they were doing here. He had already deduced that these “students” did not have official government approval and were unsure how this sit-in, if you could call it that, was going to play. If they were going to be chased out of the embassy, which Daugherty still believed was the most likely outcome, they wouldn’t want to have American blood on their hands.

Still, his interrogator seemed to know that Daugherty wasn’t telling the truth. He had already learned from someone that Daugherty was CIA. How could he be simply a junior foreign service officer when no one else had such a giant vault in his office, not even Bruce Laingen, who was supposedly in charge? His questioner pointed out that Daugherty’s age disproved his claim of subordinate status—he was six or seven years older than most of the junior staff members. He wanted Daugherty to confess that he was running America’s “spy operations” in Iran. And he wanted him to open the vault. There was a clicking noise coming from inside it that sounded like it might be someone tapping on an electric typewriter. The Iranians were convinced that someone was communicating with Washington from inside, and they were determined to open it and find out.

Daugherty forced himself to laugh at the suggestion that he was secretly in charge, but inwardly he was stunned by how rapidly they had homed in on him. Was it only a coincidence? Did they know he was CIA? If they knew, how did they know?

He kept talking.

“I am just a junior officer,” he said. “I’ve only been here for less than two months. You can verify that. You guys have my wallet. Go look at my embassy ID card, it’s got the date of issue in it, which was a couple of days after I arrived. They checked me in through the border control at the airport, go pull up my arrival card.”

“Are you sure you didn’t sneak in?”

“Go to the personnel section, look at my arrival date.”

“We will.”

“Go to the airport authorities and check there. You’ve got my passport.”

“These documents can be faked. You can pay people off to get them.”

“Talk to the Iranians who work here at the embassy,” Daugherty suggested. “Ask them when I came.”

“Well, who do you know in the embassy?”

“I hardly know anybody.”

“Where have you been in Iran?”

“I’ve been to a couple of restaurants in town, and I’ve been, as your records will show, I’ve been with the chargé down at the Ministry of Defense a couple of times and to the Foreign Ministry. But otherwise I’m in the apartment building right behind the embassy. I haven’t had time to find my way around. I’m just here, this is a new job for me, what do I know?”

Daugherty talked about how he had just finished his doctoral studies in California. It was all true…mostly. He said the man who normally had that office was in the United States—indeed, the senior field officer had left on home leave only weeks before—and that he was the only one he had ever seen open the vault. He had no idea himself.

He had been standing for a long time. At one point he said he had to use the toilet and, much to his surprise, the questions stopped and he was led down the hall to the bathroom. He used the toilet and then splashed water on his face and collected his thoughts.

When he returned the interrogator pressed harder about the vault. He never raised his voice but he wanted the vault opened.

Daugherty tried to fight back with indignation. The invasion and interrogation were against all rules of diplomatic behavior. He demanded to be returned to his colleagues and that they all be released. He knew it was ridiculous of him to be making demands, but he said anything that came into his head to change the subject.

The truth was, of course, that it was his office and he did know how to open the vault. There wasn’t anything in it, so far as he knew, that merited a heroic defense. But unlike the State Department, the spy agency had a strict culture of secrecy. No documents were kept at the embassy beyond thirty days, and the rule specified that the amount of files should not exceed a pile that could be destroyed in thirty minutes. The most sensitive material was kept in the larger coms vault, where Ahern and the others had locked themselves. That morning, as soon as the embassy grounds were invaded, Daugherty had emptied the four safes in his own vault and personally passed all of it through a shredder. He had left the shredded paper in a big pile on the floor when he had closed the door on it earlier. He had thought about flipping a match into the pile but he decided against it, figuring this demonstration would probably be over in a few hours and he didn’t want to damage the interior of the vault. How could a government allow a bunch of college kids to seize a foreign embassy, the embassy of a country that had been so important to it, a country that, to consider only the practical concerns, was holding more than six billion dollars of Iran’s assets in military contracts? To grab the embassy made no sense. If the contracts were to be canceled, then the money would have to be returned. These were matters that required discussion, planning…the kind of things embassies did. When a country was unhappy with another nation’s diplomatic mission, that country’s authorities simply ordered diplomatic personnel to leave. It happened all the time. But to seize the embassy, these buildings and twenty-seven acres, at the risk of forfeiting billions…how would that figure? It was self-defeating beyond belief. If this was all going to be over in a few hours, Daugherty didn’t want to be known as the guy who panicked and burned down an American embassy. So he hadn’t thrown the match.