Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (26 page)

For each of the sessions he was taken to the top floor of the chancery. The last three sessions were in the bubble. Each time his interrogator was Hussein Sheikh-ol-eslam, the former Berkeley student with the missing front tooth. The work seemed to be wearing Sheikh-ol-eslam down; he looked exhausted, with big bags under his eyes. With him were two others, a large Kurdish man and a high-strung young man who spoke little but who had also spent some time in the United States.

Sheikh-ol-eslam asked most of the questions. For the first two nights, blindfolded and handcuffed in his chair, Daugherty was harangued. He was shown grotesque photographs of dead men stretched on slabs at the morgue, their bodies mutilated. There were books filled with such pictures, all purported victims of SAVAK and, by proxy, the CIA. It seemed very important to Sheikh-ol-eslam and the others that Daugherty understand that their revolution, the widespread arrests and executions that followed, and this seizure of the U.S. embassy were morally justified. So Daugherty deliberately challenged them on it, to waste time. He argued with them and asked questions that he knew would set them off. He stuck to his story of being a foreign service officer. The three did their best to maintain the atmospherics of an interrogation session—each claimed to have been interrogated by SAVAK—but they were not especially good at it. Their problem was not getting their subject to talk but to get him to stop talking. Daugherty led them into long conversations about American life and values, taking advantage of any opportunity to turn the discussion back to the familiar safe ground of home.

“We’re not interested in what you did in the United States!” Sheikh-ol-eslam would complain. “We are only interested in what you have been doing here in Iran.”

Daugherty frequently asked to use the toilet and would be given a break. He would splash water on his face, do deep breathing exercises, and collect his thoughts. There were further breaks for tea, during which the conversation would proceed informally. Eventually his questioners dispensed with the blindfold. Daugherty felt that he had the process so well in hand he began looking forward to the sessions. It was better than sitting alone in his room and listening to the mob outside.

In the third interrogation the tone changed. Sheikh-ol-eslam seemed to have very specific information about him, things he had either just learned or been deliberately holding back during the first two sessions. He asked where Daugherty had been on certain nights, who he had been with, what they had been doing. Not long before the takeover, the CIA officer had accompanied a group from several other embassies on an overnight pleasure trip to Isfahan. These were the dates Sheikh-ol-eslam harped on. Isfahan was regarded as a center for American spying because it had been a helicopter air base for the shah’s army and air force and had employed a fairly large number of American military technicians. Sheikh-ol-eslam and the others scoffed at Daugherty’s story that this had been an informal sightseeing trip. He wanted to know everything Daugherty had done in Isfahan.

The American was happy to oblige. It had been a pleasure trip. He told them of his visit to the city’s beautiful mosque and its bazaar. He described each of his companions, their conversations in transit, where they dined, and what they ate. It grew tedious, so Daugherty decided to have some fun. He had spent much of his time with a woman from the Austrian embassy, just a friend, but as Sheikh-ol-eslam pressed for more and more detail, Daugherty began to spice up the story by fabricating a romantic relationship—to liven things up and to bruise his questioners’ delicate Islamic sensibilities. He had himself tearing off the woman’s clothes in a hotel room when his questioners shouted, “Shut up! Shut up!”

Daugherty got another bathroom break, and then the four men sat together around the table in the bubble sipping tea and chatting as though the previous unpleasantness hadn’t happened. Then Sheikh-ol-eslam stood.

“You are telling us that you are not CIA?” he asked.

“That’s what I’m telling you,” said Daugherty, feeling cocksure.

Sheikh-ol-eslam picked up a slip of paper, walked around the desk, and handed it to Daugherty.

“Read this,” he said.

Daugherty read with mounting shock and disappointment. It was a cable, something that had apparently come from Bruce Laingen’s safe, written some weeks before he and Kalp had arrived in Tehran. It began:

S.[secret]—Entire text.I concur in assignments Malcolm Kalp and William Daugherty as described Reftels [in reference to prior telecoms].With opportunity available to us in the sense that we are starting from a clean slate in SRF [Special Reporting Facilities, a euphemism for the CIA] coverage at this mission, but with regard also for the great sensitivity locally to any hint of CIA activity, it is of the highest importance that cover be the best we can come up with. Hence there is no question as to the need for second and third secretary titles for these two officers. We must have it.I believe cover arrangements in terms of assignments within embassy are appropriate to present overall staffing pattern. We should however hold to the present total of four SRF officer assignments for the foreseeable future, keeping supporting staff as sparse as possible as well, until we see how things go here.We are making effort to limit knowledge within emb of all SRF assignments; that effort applies particularly to Daugherty, pursuant to new program of which he is a product and about which I have been informed.I suppose I need not remind the Department that the old and apparently insoluble problem of R designation [“R” stood for “reserve” foreign service officer, the traditional way of designating CIA officers with a State Department cover] will inevitably complicate and to some degree weaken our cover efforts locally, no matter how much we work at it.LAINGEN

Daugherty’s mouth went dry. There was no doubt the cable was authentic; he had seen a copy of it in Washington before he left. Laingen was giving his nod to bringing him and Kalp on as CIA officers in the embassy and worrying about their cover status. Daugherty had no idea why such a thing had been put to paper and was flabbergasted, since it had been, that no one had destroyed it months ago! There was no reason to keep it. For God’s sake, it concerned the extreme importance of protecting their spy status even within the embassy! He sat there in disbelief with the cable in his hands and read it again, and then looked up. Sheikh-ol-eslam was sporting a wide, gap-toothed grin. The others clearly shared his delight. They had him red-handed. The language in the cable was only slightly obscure—they wouldn’t know what “Reftels” were or “SRF,” but the thrust of it could not have been more clear.

“Well?” said Sheikh-ol-eslam.

“Okay, I’m CIA, so what?” Daugherty said, handing the cable back to him. He couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Now it was their turn to be shocked. The last thing they expected, even after showing Daugherty the document, was for him to admit it. At that time and place such an admission almost certainly meant death. Daugherty’s flat acknowledgment left them momentarily speechless. They looked at one another, and then back at Daugherty, who smiled at them.

Then they erupted. All three of them shouted at him at once, venting their anger about the United States, the shah, SAVAK, all the primary sources of evil in their world. Here sat the personification of all they feared and despised. He would be the first one of the hostages executed, promised Sheikh-ol-eslam. No need for a trial. He admitted it!

“You’ve lied to us all along,” said Sheikh-ol-eslam. “You’ve wasted our time. You really are CIA. You’re an enemy of our country.”

Then Daugherty lost his temper and began shouting back at them, cursing them, calling them lousy Muslims and idiots. The four men sat in the strange little plastic room bellowing at one another.

“You guys don’t know jack shit about the world,” said Daugherty. “This is going to be terrible for your country in the long run.”

He felt hopelessly trapped in the web of their vicious mythmaking. The idea that his job with the CIA, in reality fairly minor and posing no threat whatsoever to the emerging government of Iran, made him the devil incarnate in their breathless cockeyed worldview, and that their ignorance might well cost him his life, made him suddenly both furious and fearless. Out spilled weeks of outrage. He had watched and listened as this un-washed, arrogant young rabble had insulted and humiliated his country and his colleagues. He was madder than he had ever been in his life and with nothing to lose he unloaded on them, resurrecting an awful extravagance of obscenity collected in military school and eight years as a marine, insulting their intelligence, their cause, their leaders, their parents, their sisters…and their culture.

“You think you’re civilized because you had civilization here three thousand years ago! Well, there’s no fucking trace of it anymore. You guys are nothing but animals!”

They were too busy with their own insults and accusations to even hear. All this anger roiled and then, as abruptly as it had begun, it subsided. Daugherty leaned back in his chair, exhausted. They had more tea.

Sheikh-ol-eslam, weary but determined, resumed questioning.

“Okay, look, we’ve got to get into this now,” he said. “We know you’re CIA, so let’s just start at the beginning. We want to know where you were trained and who trained you and who you work with in Washington.”

“Wait a minute,” Daugherty said. “All along you’ve been telling me that you didn’t care what I had done in the United States, all you cared about was what I’ve done in Iran. And here you accuse me of hurting your country, of harming your people. I’m not going to tell you what I’ve done in the United States. You only care about what I’ve done in Iran and that’s all I’m going to talk about.”

Sheikh-ol-eslam sat back and thought this over for a moment.

“Okay,” he said finally.

And they never again asked him questions about his recruitment or training. Daugherty couldn’t believe it. It was too good to be true. It eliminated a large category of concern. Everyone he had worked and trained with in the States maintained a cover, and those who had prepared him for Iran had been in and out of the country themselves in undercover roles for years. Each had contacts and cover stories he felt obliged to protect. He knew at least twenty of them. If that all remained off-limits (and it did), what a relief!

“Look, I may be a CIA officer instead of state, but I still only got here on the twelfth of September,” he said. “I still was only here for seven or eight weeks, or whatever it was. I still don’t even know the city.”

Sheikh-ol-eslam wasn’t buying that.

“You must know all the spies,” he said summarily.

“I’m a new guy,” Daugherty explained. “I’ve never done this before. No boss, no espionage boss is going to immediately give spies to an officer so newly arrived in a country he has never visited, where he knows virtually nothing of the circumstances, customs, culture, or language. The first thing you have to do is learn the city. I could barely find my way from here to my apartment behind the building!”

Their own prized captured document confirmed that he had not been in the country for long.

And the part about finding his way around the city was true, too. Ahern had given him the first two weeks just to explore. After that he had concentrated on doing his State Department cover job during the day and had started feeling his way into agency work at night. For about five weeks he had met with some of the contacts the agency had wanted him to explore. The CIA had not been actively spying in Iran for years. That was part of the problem. It was why no one had adequately foreseen the collapse of the shah’s regime. The agency had more or less ceded all intelligence work inside the country to SAVAK, since the shah’s enemies tended also to be enemies of the United States. For years, little intelligence was collected from Iran that did not originate with the shah’s own regime, who of course downplayed civil unrest and political opposition. Now, with Iran suddenly under new masters and the situation in constant, confusing flux, the agency was starting from scratch—note the reference to a “clean slate” in Laingen’s cable—and it was desperate for anyone who could help explain what was going on, anyone close or potentially close to those in power. The agency was pathetically far from being able to influence events, despite the overblown fears of most Iranians, who saw the CIA as omnipresent and omnipotent. The members of the recently resigned provisional government were now being accused of working secretly for the CIA, and the satanic agency was accused of orchestrating everything from natural disasters to civil disturbances to running a troublesome insurgency in Kurdistan. The feverish effort under way to patch together and decipher all of the embassy’s files would in the coming months “confirm” such links and send many to prison or execution.

In fact, the agency had never been so lacking in power and influence. Ahern was running an operation that consisted of himself, his secretary, Daugherty, Kalp, and three communicators—Jerry Miele, Cort Barnes, and Phil Ward, who handled communications in the embassy vault. No one working for the agency in Tehran even spoke Farsi!

Still, in his roughly five weeks on the job, Daugherty had met with a number of Iranians the agency was eager to recruit, and had even had some luck with two of them. He hoped those contacts had had the good sense to leave the country.

“You were at Berkeley,” he told Sheikh-ol-eslam. “You were in San Francisco. Did you come to know American customs and the layout of the city of San Francisco in the first week you were there? No? Well, then how should I know the customs and the city of Tehran the first week I’m here?”

His interrogators were flabbergasted and disbelieving. Why would the CIA send an officer to their country who knew nothing of Iran and who didn’t even speak the language?

“There were many Iran specialists in our government who could have come here, but they all turned down the assignment,” Daugherty said.

“Why wouldn’t they come?” asked the younger man, who seemed to take it as an insult.

“Because they were afraid.”