Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (23 page)

Laingen was bewildered. He was a true believer in the diplomatic calling, in the power of polite dialogue between nations. Iran was clearly hurting itself more than the United States by this assault on that tradition. It was, in his eyes, blindly self-destructive and utterly unwarranted. His entire professional frame of reference had been upended. He began a diary on the eighth of November, and in its first entry asked:

Why? To what end? What purpose is served? We have tried by every available means over the past months to demonstrate, by word and deed, that we accept the Iranian revolution, indeed, that we wish it well—that a society strongly motivated by religion is a society we, as a religious nation, can identify with. Far from wishing to see this nation, this government, stumble, we wish it well and hope it can strengthen Iran’s integrity and independence.

Laingen’s sympathetic spin on the revolution was of no use now. Perhaps the hardest part of his predicament was being rendered irrelevant. Trapped in the grand halls of Iran’s Foreign Ministry, he and Tomseth had ringside seats to the unfolding drama, but Laingen felt increasingly cut off from the powers in that country and his own. Watching the unanimous chorus of hatred directed at Americans from all directions, he saw early on that the embassy takeover, if it had in fact been conducted by idealistic students (and he doubted this), had evolved very quickly into something else. Less than a week into his velvet confinement, he wrote:

We feel compelled and obliged to watch the TV news, even though the constant barrage of anti-American propaganda becomes hard to take after a while. What is it doing to public opinion out there? What’s behind it? What is its purpose? Clearly it is the product of something more by now than an “unanticipated” attack by a crowd of students. Others have clearly seized upon it and are carrying this to ends not then planned or seen. Or is our assessment of this place again flawed, as it has been so often in the past?

His new irrelevance was brought bitterly home on the twelfth, when the newly appointed foreign minister, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, meeting with his staff for the first time, needed the reception room that had become home to the stranded Americans. Laingen, Tomseth, and Howland were removed to the big dining room, and while Bani-Sadr presided over his formal introduction in the next room, the three waited alone in grand emptiness next door, their shabby presence mocking the grandeur of their surroundings and the ritual in the next room. They sat at one end of a table built to accommodate forty. One played solitaire, one read a book, and the third took a long walk around the room, again and again, making circles.

Having accomplished more than they could have hoped, the students were at a loss. They owned the American mission, the embassy, the grounds, sixty-six Americans, and many thousands of pages of confidential files, but what were they going to do with it? They were convinced they knew in a general way exactly what had been going on in the embassy. The intelligence scandals of the 1970s in America had provided plenty of examples of CIA handiwork against revolutionary leaders—the clumsy attempts to assassinate the Cuban leader Fidel Castro, the successful hunting and killing of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the plot to kill the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, the overthrow and murder of leftist Chilean president Salvador Allende, to name just a few. They had the example of Mossadeq in their own modern history. But whatever the current plot was, it wasn’t immediately clear. Neither the students nor the clerics advising them had any practical understanding of how espionage or even how such a large embassy worked, or what all these people now in custody had been doing inside its high brick walls.

Before storming the compound, if the students had an idea about espionage it had been shaped more by Ian Fleming than by reality. This explained their suspicion of American watches, shoes, radios, and communications equipment. But apart from the apparatus of institutional secrecy, what they had found was for the most part opaquely pedestrian, an office building and its people. In their eyes, every American inside the compound was implicated in sinister doings, as either a spy or an employee in the service of the nefarious spy enterprise. Their task would now be to unravel the mystery.

Who had they actually taken hostage? At the Foreign Ministry were the embassy’s two highest-ranking officials, Laingen and Tomseth. Among those at the embassy were the heads of the mission’s eight sections: politics (headed by Tomseth), economics (Morehead “Mike” Kennedy), security (Golacinski), administration (Bert Moore), the consulate (Dick Morefield), the ICA (John Graves), the defense attaché (Colonel Tom Schaefer), and the military liaison group (Colonel Chuck Scott). Each section employed military or foreign service officers, and each had a support staff—clerks, secretaries, and several had communications specialists. The marines were under Golacinski. Koob and Royer, who had worked across town at the Iran-America Society, reported to Graves, as did the press attaché, Barry Rosen. Reporting to Laingen but operating with greater independence was the small CIA contingent, station chief Tom Ahern and his two subordinates, Daugherty and Kalp, who reported directly to Langley and had their own secure communications equipment. All had perfectly ordinary “cover” jobs at the embassy, so at first the students had no idea which of their captives they were. Thus the captors assumed everyone was a spy.

In the beginning, the students lacked this overview of the embassy bureaucracy. They had an overheated, sensational idea of what an embassy did that did not account for the more mundane tasks that formed the bulk of its activity. In that sense, their prize would prove to be something of a disappointment. They hadn’t imagined someone like, say, Bill Keough, the towering middle-aged former principal of the American school in Tehran, an institution that at one point had taught more than four thousand students, the sons and daughters of the then extensive U.S. government presence in Iran. To his captors, Keough was just a very large middle-aged white American of some importance, which meant he was probably a top spy. In fact, he was a lifelong educator who had spent most of his career teaching or managing schools in rural Vermont. He had been lured to the school in Iran by his love of classical history and literature—he had read of ancient travels in Persia and wanted to see the place himself. When his school had been depopulated and then closed after the revolution, Keough had transferred all the books and student records from the old building to the embassy grounds for safekeeping. He had since accepted a position as principal of the International School in Islamabad, Pakistan, and had briefly returned to Tehran to recover the most current of those old records—those for boys and girls still in school or applying to universities who needed their transcripts. He had been scheduled to fly back to Islamabad on November 5. When the students came over the walls he had been packing suitcases with the most critical of the old student files, and his biggest worry in the first days was that those files might be lost.

There had been some real spying going on at the embassy, but most of it had little to do with Iran itself. Major Neil Robinson, who worked for the defense attaché, was employed by the Defense Intelligence Agency and was trying to make sure that the sophisticated U.S. surveillance equipment used to monitor Soviet missile testing did not fall into the wrong hands. Navy Commander Donald Sharer had been working to make sure that some of the systems the American air force had installed on Iranian F-14s did not fall into Soviet hands. The plane itself was state-of-the-art, and it had the AWG-9 weapons system (Airborne Warning Group-9), which was capable of radar-tracking twenty-four targets simultaneously and firing upon six of them at the same time at a range of well over one hundred miles. It was classified. There were similar but less pressing issues surrounding Iran’s fleet of F4s, F5s, C-130 transports, and the surface-to-air antiaircraft I-Hawk weapons system. Sharer had managed to find and destroy an I-Hawk manual inadvertently left behind in Iran that contained secret electronic countermeasures, which had not been shared with the Iranian army. He had volunteered to help clean out old American offices and, discovering the manual in a safe, had tossed it on a pile of trash, which had been taken out and burned. He regarded it as the most significant thing he had accomplished in his brief stay in Iran.

These kinds of things were not, of course, what the Iranian students had in mind when they set about unearthing American plots. Certain that they had seized a gold mine of proof about America’s clandestine efforts, the students set about trying to solve the mystery for themselves. They would dissect this beast and lay its slimy entrails in the sun. It was not an objective study but one driven by prior conviction. They set about unearthing facts and confessions to substantiate their beliefs. Part of this effort involved cataloging all the “Spy Den” documents, including a project to painstakingly reassemble shredded files, but the other big part would be the methodical interrogation of nearly all the Americans in custody.

Colonel Chuck Scott was told to strip to his shorts, and as he sat and watched they tore apart his clothing inspecting pockets, linings, everything, looking for secret communications devices. He then endured an abusive session during which he was accused of being someone else, in particular, someone named George Lambrakis, a former embassy political officer who they were convinced had been CIA. Scott, a short, solid man with a square face and big glasses, resembled Lambrakis and had met him but could not convince his questioners that they were not the same person.

“You were born in Greece and you have worked many years for the CIA and the shah’s SAVAK to oppress, torture, imprison, and kill innocent Iranian people,” said his interrogator. “We have proof of this from files in the embassy and from some of your friends who have already given us information. We do not want to have to hurt you, or to kill you, but that is up to you.”

Scott found the accusation insulting. He regarded his position as chief of the military liaison group to be more significant than any post Lambrakis had held; why wasn’t his real identity interesting or significant enough?

Vice consul Richard Queen spent long hours explaining to his interrogators AVLOS, the new computer system in the consulate, the one he had been working on the day of the takeover. A precise man, he described in detail how it provided a database of visa applicants that could be readily accessed by American consulates around the world. He was telling the truth, but it was clear to him that his questioners didn’t believe him. Nothing about his work or his life was remotely secret; he was a relatively low-level functionary at the embassy, a beginner in the foreign service profession. But no matter what he told them, the truth wasn’t cutting it. There were no innocent explanations. Everyone was guilty; everyone was a spy. He could see his captors working hard to see through all the imagined lies in order to grasp the true devious machinery of the place. If it weren’t so sad it would have been funny.

“How much money do you earn?” he was asked.

“About eleven hundred a month,” he said.

“Don Cooke said you make thirteen hundred a month.”

Cooke, another vice consul, handled payroll, so Queen wondered if he had been given a raise without being informed.

Kathryn Koob walked her questioners patiently through her foreign service career, from the eight-hour foreign service exam she took in Denver in 1969 to her first posting in Abidjan, then on to Bucharest and then Zambia. She explained how she was drawn more to the job than to the place. A foreign service officer she had met early in her career had advised her, “If you have a miserable job in a wonderful place, you will be miserable, but take a wonderful job in a miserable place and you will be happy.” Iran was a “miserable place,” she explained, only in the sense that there was so much anger and mistrust of Americans. Koob’s life was devoted to knocking down barriers and grew right out of the prairie Lutheranism that she had absorbed growing up on a farm in Iowa. Her tradition informed her that all conflict was rooted in misunderstanding, and her passion was to crush misunderstanding with art. Koob laid it all out, from Iran backward, providing places and dates of arrivals and departures.

“You made that up,” her questioner said when she was done, pointing out how deftly she had produced places and dates off the top of her head. In fact, she had recently been asked by the ICA to write out a history of her employment, so the details were fresh in her mind.

A copy of that cable was in her files.

“You will find it in my office,” she told them.

Al Golacinski was questioned about his watch, which was a modern style with a blank face that lit up with a digital display of the time when a button was pressed on its side.

“Is this a radio?” he was asked.

“No, it’s a watch.”

“Well, if we find out it’s a radio you’re in big trouble.”

“It’s not a radio.”

One interrogator later threatened to put the security chief’s feet in a pan of boiling oil, an ultimatum Golacinski found too grotesque to actually believe. The line they had used on the day of the takeover, “You will see what we will do,” had been far better. It had left the terror to his own imagination. If you were going to scare a man with a pan of boiling oil, you would show him the red-hot pan and start taking off his shoes. The State Department security man felt professional disdain; he saw his questioners as amateurs playing at some cinematic notion of torture and interrogation.

John Limbert was questioned by a young man wearing a bag on his head, one of the embassy’s “burn bags.” He had cut holes in it for his eyes. It was all Limbert could do not to laugh. It seemed to him that they had things backward—he was the one being interrogated, shouldn’t he have the bag on his head?

“I am sorry to have to talk to you in this way,” the young man said.

“It’s all right,” Limbert told him. “Don’t worry about it.”

“What was your role in the coup of 1953?”

“I don’t know anything about it,” Limbert said. “I was ten years old at the time.”