Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (44 page)

He did calisthenics and high-stepped around the room to simulate jogging, which he found had psychological benefits even greater than physical ones. It raised his spirits. If only to help break the monotony, he skipped the exercises every tenth day. He had always been a light eater, but now found himself voraciously hungry. The guards let him eat as much as he wanted, so Ahern would request three or four hamburgers at a sitting, or multiple servings of chicken. He had always been slender, and it seemed now that no matter how much he ate he did not gain weight. His face had always been slightly concave, and now there were caverns under his cheekbones and his eyes seemed to recede into deep sockets. His thin, straight brown hair grew down to his shoulders. He looked old, worn, harmless. He became emotionally numb.

Mornings were the worst times. He would be awakened early for breakfast, usually flat bread, butter, jam, and tea, and taken to the bathroom; then he would go back to sleep until about noon. After awaking again he would begin his routines—exercising, reading, “playing” music, “watching” a play. Sometimes he would read until three or four in the morning. Late at night was the best time. There were few interruptions from the guards. Ahern could drift off in his books or into his imagination until his eyes fell shut.

Ahern’s colleague Bill Daugherty was making his own compromises, and dealing with the consequences. On the night of Valentine’s Day, Sheikh-ol-eslam brought the CIA officer a standard State Department cable and asked him about the long lists of code at the top.

“It’s just in-house stuff,” said Daugherty. “It tracks where the cable originated, where it was sent, and how it was routed. It’s all very simple.”

Ahern had said the same thing but Sheikh-ol-eslam wasn’t buying it. Daugherty grew impatient with him. He deliberately talked to him like a child. He said that if Sheikh-ol-eslam had ever had any experience with a large organization, he would know that such tracking policies were routine.

“You such a smart guy, why are you bothering me with things like this?” he said.

“You aren’t being very helpful,” the gap-toothed Iranian complained.

“No, I’m not,” Daugherty admitted.

“You don’t like doing this?”

“No, of course not.”

He felt bad about any help he had given them, and when he asked about the fate of Victoria Bassiri, the Iranian woman whom he had met with the previous summer, Sheikh-ol-eslam told him curtly, “She was shot.”

Shot? Daugherty was stunned. He pictured the woman laughing with him over dinner, doing her limited best to help him understand the shifting sands of local politics. She had been killed for that? Why hadn’t she fled the country immediately when the embassy was taken? Maybe she had stayed because of her husband and children. Perhaps she believed her connection to the embassy had been so insignificant that it would never be noticed, or that he would have been able to protect her identity. If so, she had paid for those misjudgments with her life. Daugherty was appalled. She had done so little, nothing of consequence. He had tried hard to convince Sheikh-ol-eslam and the others that Bassiri was not a serious spy, hardly even worth their effort. She had never even been asked to gather sensitive information, assuming she would have been in a position to do so. He felt terrible about it but finally concluded that spies accepted such risks. How could she have been so foolish to stay?

After he had spelled out his real job, Daugherty was left alone for months. While the zealots did their best to spin conspiracy theories out of the mostly pedestrian cables and memos, the documents utterly exploded the myth of CIA omnipresence and omnipotence. They revealed that the agency’s operation in Iran in November 1979 consisted of four Americans (one of the officers had been on home leave when the embassy was taken) who had been desperately knocking on doors and offering cash to anyone willing to help explain to them what was going on. Sheikh-ol-eslam found it incredible that the vaunted CIA had not one officer in his country that could speak Farsi. But the cables confirmed it. Their evil dragon had turned out to be a mouse. Daugherty sensed a palpable feeling of disappointment.

Always a solitary soul, he didn’t mind spending his days and nights alone. When he was a child and his mother disciplined him by sending him to his room, she would complain that it fell short of real punishment because he seemed actually to enjoy it. As an adult he had always valued the time he spent living by himself. When he had gone back to school after returning from Vietnam he was older than most of his classmates and didn’t have much in common with them, so he spent a lot of time alone, studying. In the chancery now there were plenty of books to choose from, and Daugherty was an avid reader. Books made all the difference. In his survival training he heard the story of Private Jacob DeShazer, who had survived the daring Doolittle raid over Tokyo early in World War Two and had been kept in solitary confinement by Japanese troops in China for forty months with absolutely nothing to do but stare at the walls. Daugherty felt that would have driven him crazy. But so long as he could escape into books he was okay.

He read voraciously. To his deep delight he found in the old high school library an edition of the two-volume classic Kelly and Harbison study The American Constitution: Its Origins and Development, which carried him off into his favorite field of study for as long as he cared to read. He used the back of these books to record a diary of his captivity, noting the passing days and, in a personal shorthand, any events that he wanted to remember. He also delved into novels and history books, including many that under normal circumstances he probably never would have read, such as the great novels of Charles Dickens and mysteries by Agatha Christie and Ruth Rendell. He plowed through thick volumes on British and American history and became particularly engrossed in a biography of Blanche of Castile, the wife of French King Louis VIII and the mother of Louis XI, Saint Louis. He resented being held captive, but he was grateful for the long stretches of time he was left alone. He believed that sharing a small space with one or two others would have been far more difficult.

Occasionally, Sheikh-ol-eslam would stop by to chat. Their conversations had become relaxed. He would ask if Daugherty was getting enough food, or sometimes simply ask how he was doing. He seemed to enjoy their exchanges.

One night between Christmas and New Year’s, Sheikh-ol-eslam confessed that he was disappointed in the response their action had provoked in the United States.

“How can we convince the American people that what we’ve done is justified?” he asked.

On previous occasions, Sheikh-ol-eslam had told Daugherty of riots in the streets at home, stories he apparently believed. He had been at Berkeley in the late Vietnam War period when the campus produced some of the most extreme leftist rhetoric, and had come home with the belief that overthrowing the shah would be an important blow in the world revolution. So why weren’t young Americans taking to the streets in solidarity?

“You’re crazy,” Daugherty said. “You want me to help you with your propaganda to convince my countrymen that what you’ve done is right?”

The CIA officer’s days fell into an almost comfortable routine, a breakfast of bread, butter, jam or cheese, and tea. He would then lean his sleeping pallet against a wall and spend several hours pacing back and forth. Ten paces took him from one corner of the room to the other, and he would walk until his feet were sore or he grew tired. The room was never cleaned, so in time his exercise rubbed a smooth path through the layer of dust on the floor. As he walked he developed elaborate fantasies to occupy his mind. He designed houses, imagined them being built, landscaped the yards, furnished the interiors, and chose colors for the walls and rugs. Then he would imagine parties in them, inviting beautiful women. He thought a lot about flying, dreaming up record-breaking challenges for himself, such as breaking the speed record in a turbo-prop plane from Honolulu to Dallas, deciding what kind of plane would be best and how to configure the gas tanks and electronic instrumentation, calculating the speed and fuel-consumption ratios, what altitudes to fly, how best to utilize the prevailing winds, and so on.

Applying the Kelly and Harbison volumes, he invented an imaginary class in constitutional studies with eight students. He was the professor. In his mind, lost completely in the fantasy, he would say, “Okay, today the course is judicial politics and strategies and we’re going to talk about building a consensus on the Supreme Court.” Then he would lecture on a case where initially the court had been divided, not only between conservatives and liberals but where there were opinions all over the map. Then he would explain how the justices hammered out compromises and arrived at an opinion. His imagination improved with exercise and soon he had the sessions fleshed out in extraordinary detail. He had just finished graduate school the year before, so the setting was familiar to him. He gave the students names and personalities, roughly based on students he had known at Claremont. He had a class clown and a student who was very serious, always taking notes, but who never spoke. Other students were frequent questioners, and held differing political philosophies, and there would be arguments and debates that he would moderate and steer. In those months he felt his mind was as sharp as it had ever been. Between the reading, thinking, and imaginary lecturing, he arrived at insights and ideas that had never before occurred to him.

This would occupy Daugherty until lunch, which tended to be American-style food that he assumed had been seized after thousands of American advisory troops had left Iran in the previous years. Some of it had been sitting around for too long. There was plenty of it, but much of it was unappetizing and he had begun to lose weight. He spent some time each afternoon picking the worms out of his powdered milk. He would repeat his morning routines after lunch, which kept him occupied until dinner. He considered how he might handle this crisis if he were president of the United States, drawing on his familiarity with military assets—what U.S. forces could and could not do. It galled him that he and the others were still in captivity as the weeks and months droned by. How could the American government let so many of its emissaries be abducted by these kids? How could Carter have allowed the shah in? And then he’d think of the anti-American graffiti he’d seen on the walls and the insults and he’d work up a slow boil over it. He thought the way to go would be to coerce Iran into backing down. As president, he would summon the Iranian military attaché, bring him into the Oval Office, and say, “General, in five hours I am going to launch all the B-52s and it’s going to take them fourteen hours to fly to Iranian airspace. So that’s nineteen hours. If within those nineteen hours our Americans, all of them, are not out of your country in good health, then the B-52s are going to destroy Qom, Isfahan, and Mashhad, or the oil refineries.”

Then as president he would turn to his chief of staff and the chairman of the joint chiefs and order them to take the Iranian attaché to the tank in the Pentagon and let him monitor the B-52s’ flight so that he could see them taking off and moving out over the ocean. Daugherty imagined the Iranian general watching the bombers reach Europe and then close in on Iranian airspace. He would know that it was not a bluff. Sometimes in Daugherty’s mind the general would rush to a phone and convey the importance of immediately releasing the hostages, and other times he would have him sit and watch as the B-52s dropped their devastating loads on the country’s cities. Daugherty would play through the scenarios in his mind. The one thing he considered too far-fetched for serious consideration was a rescue attempt. He had heard, of course, about the Israeli raid at Entebbe, and figured if commandos stormed the building he would sit with his hands in the air. But Iran was a landlocked country, and the distance from Tehran to any nonhostile border was probably four hundred to five hundred miles. He knew there were no helicopters for a mission like that. Even if they had such choppers, in-flight refueling over enemy territory was generally considered too risky. Rescue was, he thought, practically impossible.

Sometimes in the afternoons he would nap. On the days when they let him take a shower he would step into the water fully clothed, soap up his shirt and pants, peel them off, wring them out, do the same with his underwear, and then wash himself. He had the yellow Brooks Brothers shirt he had been wearing on the day of the takeover and a pair of brown polyester pants, and the guards had brought him jeans, a sweatshirt, and several changes of underwear from his apartment. When he was finished showering he would don the dry set of clothes and carry the wet ones back to his room, where he would stretch them out to dry. After dinner he walked again. It helped tire him out enough to sleep.

Daugherty got along reasonably well with his guards. They tended to be very young men, in their teens or early twenties, and were educated far better in math and the sciences than in history or politics and had absorbed from their religious leaders strong opinions about people, places, and events about which they knew next to nothing. They had wild fantasies about the United States and the CIA. Most spoke little or no English, so even if he had wanted to converse with them he could not. There was little point anyway, he thought. Anything out of the mouth of an American was automatically suspect, and none of the guards he met showed the slightest propensity for critical thinking. Their minds traveled on fixed rails. To think for themselves or critically examine their own paths was nothing less than sinful, a temptation to stray from the One True Path. How do you converse with people like that? For a time, a guard was posted in the room with him twenty-four hours a day. Daugherty would do his best to make the poor young man’s life miserable, offending his sense of modesty by wearing only boxer shorts, breaking wind, or coughing on him. Once, suffering a cold, he went out of his way to spread infection and was pleased to hear some days later that his guard had succumbed to the virus. Mostly, he minded his own business and tried to avoid trouble.