Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (43 page)

“Don’t worry,” said Saliman, promising that the extradition process would be purely for show. “Besides, I don’t even think the Iranians want him back.”

He explained that the return of the shah to Iran, a year after his departure, would set off a big fight among Iranians over what to do with him. “They wouldn’t know whether to torture him, shoot him, or hang him,” he said.

Six days later, Jordan was in a London hotel room meeting again with Villalon, who explained how the embassy seizure had strengthened the hand of religious extremists in Iran against more moderate, democratic elements, who were eager to see it ended. Bourget arrived later that day from Tehran, and the two men—Villalon, a dandy with jet-black hair combed straight back on his head, and Bourget, who looked like a hippie lawyer, his head framed with bushy shoulder-length hair and a long thick beard—delivered their message for obtaining the release of the hostages: “Return the shah to Iran.”

Jordan’s hopes deflated.

“It is absolutely impossible!” he said, visibly irritated. Among those around Carter, Jordan had been the one most sanguine about this clandestine avenue. Now he felt duped.

The more they talked, however, Jordan realized that the demand had been offered only as a necessary opening gambit. Again, Villalon and Bourget explained that the remnants of Bazargan’s crowd and the more secular men who had worked for Khomeini in Paris prior to the revolution were still in the fight. Though Abolhassan Bani-Sadr had been removed from the Foreign Ministry, he still held an important post and was a serious candidate for president, as was Ghotbzadeh, who had once been his boss in Paris. Under the new constitution, the president of Iran held considerably less power than the equivalent position in the United States, because the entire new government would remain subordinate to Khomeini, but the office was still important. Both Bani-Sadr and Ghotbzadeh, they said, privately deplored the taking of hostages but had to be careful about expressing that opinion publicly. The best they could do was applaud the takeover and suggest that the point had been made, as Bani-Sadr had already done. Ghotbzadeh was not prepared to go that far, but he was ambitious. An American concession of some kind might improve his standing prior to the vote, which could lead to a breakthrough. The moderates were, in any event, willing to talk. But before even considering a release of the hostages, they were demanding an international commission to study the crimes of the shah.

Here was where a strategic retreat by the White House might break the stalemate, they suggested. Carter had already said that he would not oppose such a commission, but only after the hostages were released. If he were to back off that position and allow the UN commission to visit Iran and meet with government officials, the student captors, and the hostages, there was a chance that the situation might improve.

The meeting ended with an agreement to continue talking. Bourget impressed Jordan with his access to Ghotbzadeh by picking up the phone in the hotel room and promptly getting the Iranian foreign minister on the line. The French lawyer tried to convince Ghotbzadeh to speak to Jordan, but the embattled Iranian declined. Talking directly to American officials had become a dangerous business in Iran.

Nilufar Ebtekar with Kathryn Koob (left). (Courtesy: Russ Kick, thememoryhole.org)

Demonstrators outside the U.S. embassy in Tehran. (Courtesy: AP)

Christmas 1979. From left to right: Barry Rosen (back to camera), Hamid the Liar, Rick Kupke, Hussein Sheikh-ol-eslam, Jerry Miele, Morehead Kennedy, Joe Subic, John Graves. The Rev. William Sloane Coffin is at the piano. (Courtesy: Russ Kick, thememoryhole.org)

After his questioners had backed off from beating the soles of his feet with a rubber hose, CIA station chief Tom Ahern was never again threatened with torture. His interrogators regularly promised him trial and execution but, for whatever reason, beating him was a line they would no longer cross. It surprised Ahern, because their revolution was hardly squeamish about such things. But it pleasantly surprised him to discover that his captors had limits…at least so far. He still did not expect to leave Tehran alive.

His chief interrogator, Hussein Sheikh-ol-eslam, seemed convinced that Ahern’s goal had been nothing short of assassinating Khomeini, derailing their holy revolution, and installing another American puppet. They did not just suspect this, they knew it, and what they wanted from Ahern was the whole plot, in detail, along with the names of every traitorous coconspirator and spy.

It was not so much the fear of death that undid him. What finally broke Ahern’s will was the fear of a public death, of a show trial and execution; this the singularly private man found particularly horrifying. It unnerved him. He had seen the grotesque images broadcast and printed in Tehran of the regime’s enemies being shot, hung, or beheaded, particularly the Bahai, a religious minority. He knew the fear stemmed partially from what such images would do to his mother, his wife, and the rest of his family. But there was a deeper personal revulsion that he couldn’t fully explain. It was the thing that worked at him most.

The fear and the pressure wore on Ahern until he schemed how to take his own life, which seemed the only way to escape a grim public spectacle. He played with the idea of electrocuting himself. He had found a paper clip and thought that if he put it into an electric outlet and dipped his other hand in a can of water on top of the radiator, that might do it. He never got to the point of trying it, but he rehearsed it and decided that if it appeared as though they were going to make good on their threats he would electrocute himself first. At one point he gave up eating and drinking for four days but was surprised to discover how hard it was to starve. He was a slender man, and naturally ascetic, so he ate very little anyway. After several days the hunger became uncomfortable, but he hadn’t lost much strength or mental acuity. He decided that well before he died he would become terribly disabled, still at the mercy of his captors but severely damaged. The problem was that he wasn’t suicidal, and couldn’t make himself so, no matter how frightened and depressed he felt. No matter how bad things got, he would rather live and hope.

For some reason, the questions he dreaded most in these interrogations never came. The draft of his cable to CIA director Stansfield Turner, the one he had left on his desk on the day of the takeover, was enough all by itself to condemn him. The paragraph about waiting for the military situation to settle down before finding new allies, and the mention of Ayatollah Shariatmadari, who had emerged as such a rival to Khomeini, was especially damaging. He expected to have the document placed on the desk before him at any moment. In between sessions he would pace his cell working out ways to deny and evade what he had written, ways of limiting the damage it might do. He set detailed priorities of those things he would admit, under duress, those things he would admit only under severe duress, and those things he would try never to admit. Among the latter were names of agents and the secret project under way to purchase land in the mountains and get the clandestine Soviet missile observation project up and running. But his interrogators never brought these things up. They weren’t interested in what he had actually been doing; they were interested only in what they thought he was doing.

At one point he was moved downstairs from his old chancery office to a small windowless closet either on the first floor or in the basement, he wasn’t sure. It rattled him more than he imagined it would. It was a little like being placed in his own coffin. It was then, early in the new year, that he began to buckle.

Early on, Ahern had admitted who he was. He knew that alone probably meant he would eventually be killed, but he saw it as a first step down a long road. He would give in little by little, buying himself time. His identity and role were the most obvious bits of information they already had. That much was clear from the documents they kept bringing him from the State Department files, week after week, and, eventually, some of the restored ones that he and Daugherty had shredded. It was pointless to keep denying the obvious.

The students held a press conference to announce their outing of the embassy’s CIA officers. They displayed Ahern’s false Belgian passport and showed off the copy of Laingen’s cable identifying Daugherty and Kalp by name. In the United States, these documents were displayed on TV along with the allegations without much comment. Network reporters noted that Ahern had been an Eagle Scout as a boy, and that he had attended Notre Dame University before joining the foreign service. Daugherty was shown in his marine uniform. The reports neither denied nor acknowledged that the men were spies and did not explain that it was standard practice for agency officers to work at American embassies under cover of the foreign service.

Despite a national obsession with the story, there was at this point little or no reporting in the United States, on TV or in print, about the revelations in the “spy den” documents. While they contained nothing like the conspiracy theories the students imagined, they were revealing. They confirmed the agency’s presence in Iran, which was hardly surprising, and in many cases unveiled what it had been doing, or trying to do. One of the most significant revelations was the agency’s relationship with Simon Farzami, a Jewish journalist known in the agency files as SDTRAMP. Farzami had been raised in Lebanon and Switzerland and first came to Iran after World War Two with his brother, David, to visit their stepfather’s brother, Ebrahim Hakimi, who later became prime minister of Iran. Both brothers had been hired by PARS, the Iranian news agency, and over the years Farzami had worked for a variety of foreign newspapers and agencies, including the Associated Press and London’s Daily Telegraph. David died young, but Simon had a long career in Tehran, becoming editor of the French-language newspaper Journal de Teheran. He was an avuncular, sophisticated, portly man who had excellent contacts in local power circles, having once served in the Ministry of Information, and played both sides during the Cold War. His connection with the CIA was long-standing, but at times he had been a kind of double agent, undertaking two trips to Israel at the behest of the Soviets to “gather information on Israeli policies,” and to “establish contacts” with Israeli journalists and academics. He was paid 120,000 rials (about $1,700) for those trips, money that, according to one of the reassembled documents, he had been “allowed to keep” by the CIA—suggesting that the agency owned a certain priority of allegiance. Ahern had met with Farzami several times in his four months, a new station chief on unfamiliar terrain reaching out to a long-standing source for general guidance. It seemed to Ahern that the older gentleman enjoyed their orientation sessions. Farzami was not happy with his country’s drift toward Islamic theocracy, and he appeared to be eager to offer whatever help he could. He deciphered for Ahern the byzantine Shiite subculture that had been thrust so unexpectedly into power, and he met with Barry Rosen, the embassy’s press attaché, to discuss setting up an international newspaper in Switzerland that would present, according to one of the documents, “a true image” of Iran’s revolution to the West.

Nevertheless, these relatively benign ties with the agency were enough to spell doom for Farzami unless he had fled. Ahern tried to buy him more time, telling Sheikh-ol-eslam that he couldn’t remember SDTRAMP’s last name, only his first. He said he couldn’t remember the name of the newspaper where he worked. He was helped in this sort of stalling by Sheikh-ol-eslam’s obsession with uncovering a plot to assassinate or unseat Khomeini. This is what the students were determined to find and were convinced existed. So the minor revelations in the documents were sometimes overlooked. In Farzami’s case, however, it was not. Here was a person who had collaborated with the devil. He was arrested, charged with deliberately “mistranslating” government documents and with spying for the CIA. He would be executed by firing squad on December 16, 1980.

There were others. Under further questioning Ahern confirmed the identity of SDROTTER/4, a tribal leader from southwest Iran named Khosrow Qashqai, who had been encouraged and funded by the agency in his efforts to rouse local resistance to the emerging mullah-led regime; Rear Admiral Ahmad Mandani, a former governor of Khuzestan and more recently a losing candidate for president in the January elections; and Amir Entezam, a diplomat who was involved with the effort to establish a Swiss-based Iranian newspaper. Qashqai would be captured in the summer of 1980 and publicly hanged in 1982. Mandani fled Iran and eventually settled in the United States. Entezam was arrested and jailed for life. The documents would reveal, and Ahern would confirm, earlier efforts made by the CIA to recruit Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the current finance minister, who had been helpful to the agency in the past. Ahern’s interrogation assumed a pattern. Instead of pushing him to tell them everything he knew, they would present him with documents and information that in most cases he would eventually confirm. He tried to confine himself to acknowledging only information they already had found on their own.

In time, Ahern rationalized his capitulation in another way. By helping them understand exactly what the “spy den” documents said, it might dispel some of their wilder fantasies about American spying in Iran. The contacts with Farzami and the others had been exploratory at best, and though there was no doubt that the United States was supporting Qashqai’s efforts to oppose the new regime, and had hopes of doing more in the future, they did not reveal the plot the students were looking for.

Ahern’s interrogations gradually ended. There would be days between sessions, then weeks. Finally, Ahern figured they were done with him, and his captivity became a struggle to fill time.

He was kept alone at all times. During the long months of interrogations he used every minute preparing for the next session, working out ways to delay, confuse, or avoid giving his captors information, but once the questioning stopped he was on his own with the four walls. He coped by finding activities that would bring him some lasting personal benefit, so that if he were ever released he could say that he had not wasted his time. He knew how to play the piano and was a lover of classical music, and when he asked his guards if he could have some of the sheet music he had kept in his apartment they shocked him by handing it over within days. He spent hours memorizing Schumann’s Carnaval and piano works by Chopin, playing the music in his mind. He was given access to the library Richard Queen had set up in the chancery, and he chose mostly classics, plays by William Shakespeare, novels by Charles Dickens. He read Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre twice in French, and then, discovering two books of German grammar in the library, he set about teaching himself German, his wife’s first language. It would be something he could surprise her with if he was ever released.