Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (45 page)

He wasn’t always successful. The room where he spent the most time that winter was on the ground floor of the chancery’s back side; its windows faced the embassy grounds. It had ceilings that were at least fifteen feet high and the windows were accordingly very tall. The bottom of his window was about four feet from the floor. On mild days he managed to open the window a few inches to let in some fresh air. At night he would sit beneath it enjoying the slight breeze and listening to the guards outside laughing, talking, and toying incessantly with the bolts on their rifles. Occasionally someone fired a shot, but given the way they handled their weapons Daugherty assumed that most often it was an accident.

One night, as he lay beneath the window reading, a breeze from the cracked window was bothering him so he shifted the curtain in an effort to block it. From outside, it looked as though he were sneaking a peek outside, which was strictly forbidden. As he resumed reading the door to his room flung open and five or six armed guards stomped in, expecting to catch him in the act.

“What’s the problem?” he asked.

“You are looking out,” said one of the guards in his tentative English.

Daugherty looked up at the window, three feet over his head.

“I am not. I’m reading.” He laughed.

The men pulled him to his feet and approached him with handcuffs and a blindfold. He knew the drill. When a rule was broken he would be cuffed, blindfolded, and left to sit that way for hours. This time, innocent, Daugherty fought back. He pulled the lead guard over to the window and showed him how the breeze moved the curtain.

“I didn’t do this,” he shouted, trying to batter his way through the language barrier. “You just saw the wind blow the curtain.”

He decided that if he was going to be punished this time, he would earn it. He squared off to resist them and just then a gust of wind moved the curtain. The lead guard, looking disgusted, waved the others away from Daugherty and they left the room. He was so pumped up with adrenaline from that encounter that he walked back and forth for hours trying to let off steam.

Once his imaginary games got him in trouble. He was given a pencil and paper by Sheikh-ol-eslam so that he could write a letter home, and after he finished the letter he played with the pencil, sketching out plans on large sheets of paper for an imaginary airport, the terminal, runways, the concourses, the tower, parking lots, garages, the firehouse, and maintenance hangars for three or four airlines. It was something to occupy his mind, and when he was finished he balled the papers up and later threw them in the trash can in the bathroom.

He didn’t think about them again until a suspicious and angry delegation of guards showed up in his room. They accused him of drawing some kind of coded diagram. It took a moment for him to figure out what they were talking about, and when it occurred to him Daugherty laughed.

“Let’s look at this logically,” he said. “First of all, if I’m going to leave messages for the other guys, I’m not going to do it on paper this size and sort of halfway wad it up and stick it in a trash can in a bathroom that you guys use. Do you think I’m an idiot?”

The looks on their faces told him yes, because in their eyes this is precisely what he had done. He realized that part of the problem was that these young Iranians had never traveled, so they were not familiar with airports. His drawings made no sense to their eyes. Daugherty explained and answered their questions until they were satisfied. They gathered up the drawings and left the room. He heard no more about it.

When he was staying in this first-floor chancery room, Daugherty was visited by a representative of the Red Cross, a slender, clean-cut young man about his age, either Swiss or French, who seemed angry when he entered the room. Daugherty was surprised. Having been trained to expect the conditions American POWs experienced in North Vietnam, he had no severe complaints about his own treatment, but this Red Cross man was appalled. He asked how long Daugherty had been isolated.

“Since the first days of the takeover.”

The man sat on the floor and took notes.

“Have you been abused physically?”

“Yes.”

The man’s disgust was evident, and the two or three guards listening to the interview frowned heavily. The students were keen to be seen as benevolent and this was clearly off message. But they didn’t interfere with the interview. The Red Cross man thanked Daugherty before he left and expressed his anger over what he had heard.

Daugherty worried how his comments might affect people in the United States. He was worried they might conclude conditions in the embassy were worse than they really were, which would be hard on them. He wondered if he had done the right thing.

In mid-February, he was moved to the chancery basement. The room looked like it had once been part of a larger space, now halved by a flimsy-looking wall of acoustic tiles fitted to a wooden frame. The wall ran straight into a large air vent, about two feet by two feet, and he discovered that by standing with his ear to that corner he could hear what was going on in the next room. To his delight, he heard the voice of Colonel Tom Schaefer, the defense attaché, and soon the two men were whispering to each other, the first contact either man had had with another American in months.

“When are we getting out of here?” Daugherty asked.

“Let’s make it interesting,” said Schaefer, who proposed a twenty-five-dollar prize for whoever picked a date that came closest to their release. They jotted their predictions on pieces of paper and then passed the notes to each other through the vents. Daugherty picked the seventeenth of April. Schaefer picked the fifteenth of November. Already the air force colonel believed there was no hope for their release until after the American presidential election.

They had to be careful. Daugherty was convinced the guards outside his room were listening, hoping to catch the two violating the rules.

Every time Daugherty moved into a new space, the moment he was left alone he conducted a thorough search. In his new room he found an inch-long stub of pencil and a small piece of broken glass, about twice the size of a fingernail, with one very sharp edge. He put the glass shard to work on a corner of the tile wall behind his sleeping pallet and soon pried a tile loose. He poked around inside the wall and cut loose the tile to Schaefer’s room.

“Check the loose tile in the corner,” he whispered to Schaefer the next time they had a chance to speak.

After that, they limited talking directly to each other to urgent questions and left messages inside the wall. Daugherty used blank pages he tore from the backs of his books. In this way they carried on a running dialogue. Daugherty tended to stay up late into the night and sleep long into the day. After his evening meal and his long “walk,” he got in the habit of sitting with his back against the wall with his legs drawn up to support a book. If anyone peeked in, it looked like he was reading. He would then write notes to Schaefer. When the lights went out, he pried loose the tile beside his pallet and slipped the note into the empty space between the walls. He would retrieve a return message from Schaefer when he woke up—the colonel was an early riser.

Neither man had much news to share, but the ability to communicate greatly buoyed their spirits. Daugherty wrote to Schaefer that when he was in Vietnam he noticed that military officers who became prisoners of war continued to receive promotions. “By the time we get out, maybe you’ll be a general,” he wrote. He made another wager, this one for twenty dollars, that they would be released before Easter, which the colonel accepted…and won. Daugherty asked where they would be taken when they were released, and Schaefer speculated that they would be flown to Wiesbaden, Germany. It was a nice thing to think about.

Sheikh-ol-eslam entered Daugherty’s room one night wearing the same open-collared shirt, blue jeans, and sneakers he had worn throughout the interrogations. He announced that a video crew was coming in to take pictures and interview him. When he left, Daugherty whispered into the vent, “Did you hear that?”

“No,” said Schaefer.

“They’re going to videotape me for something.”

“There’s only one answer you give,” said Schaefer.

“What.”

“No comment.”

When Sheikh-ol-eslam came back with the crew, lugging a big video camera, Daugherty noticed that they had placed and videotaped a hand-lettered sign on the outside of his door that read, “CIA Person.” There were ten other Iranians who had come to either assist or watch—ever since Daugherty’s admitted spy status, he had become an object of intense curiosity. Daugherty stayed on his sleeping pallet as they readied the equipment.

At last, Sheikh-ol-eslam asked, “How long have you been with the CIA?”

“No comment,” Daugherty said.

“Were you a spy here?”

“No comment.”

Sheikh-ol-eslam grew increasingly angry as each of his next ten questions met with the same response. He then turned to the camera and spoke at some length in agitated Farsi. Then he and the whole crew picked up the camera and left, slamming the door behind them.

He was in that same room, listening at the air vent, when Schaefer was questioned by Ebtekar. Schaefer had dubbed her “Miss Philadelphia.” He endured repeated lectures from her about America’s centuries of barbarity and exploitation, the genocide of native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, the slaughter of Vietnamese. Daugherty was listening in one night while Ebtekar lectured Schaefer about the inhuman, racist decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“The Japanese started the war, and we ended it,” Schaefer said.

“What do you mean, the Japanese started the war?” Ebtekar asked.

“The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, so we bombed Hiroshima.”

“Pearl Harbor? Where’s Pearl Harbor?”

“Hawaii.”

Daugherty heard a moment of silence. Then Ebtekar asked, “The Japanese bombed Hawaii?”

“Yep,” said Schaefer. “They started it, and we ended it.”

Thus ended the interview.

CIA officers Ahern, Daugherty, and Kalp were not the only ones still being questioned repeatedly months after the takeover. Most of the higher-ranking members of the mission were hauled back for repeated interrogation.

John Limbert was awakened in the middle of the night, blindfolded, and marched from the Mushroom Inn through the cold to the chancery. This time he was taken to a room in the basement, where he was placed in a chair. The blindfold was tied sloppily so out of the bottom he could see a man in a black ski mask and Sheikh-ol-eslam’s reflection clearly in the glass. There were other Iranians in the room whom Limbert could not see but could hear. Their pens scratched furiously across paper whenever he spoke. Again, it seemed to Limbert that his captors had read a book about interrogation and had set the stage for this session carefully, trying to intimidate him, but their technique fell short. It was inauthentic. He did not consider himself to be a brave person, and he could readily imagine atmospherics alone that might terrify him, but this didn’t. He, too, had some experience with the literature of captivity and interrogation, and he knew from his reading of Solzhenitsyn that the right way to survive was to play dumb.

Sheikh-ol-eslam started with the same questions Limbert had answered weeks before.

“Who have you met with?” and “What did you discuss?”

The embassy political officer gave the same answers. He wondered why they didn’t just go through his Rolodex and ask him about each person listed, which would have made more sense. This way, asking him to remember names, gave him a chance to protect certain people. By marriage, he had extended family in Iran, but he never mentioned their names, although they were all listed in the Rolodex. When they asked him for an address, including his own, he made one up, knowing full well that the correct addresses were available to them. It all seemed ridiculously inept and he couldn’t take it seriously.

“Tell me about your agents in Kurdistan,” Sheikh-ol-eslam demanded.

Limbert smiled involuntarily.

“I can see you smiling at that,” Sheikh-ol-eslam said.

Limbert couldn’t help himself. It was like living in Wonderland. Limbert understood the reasoning behind the question about his “agents” in Kurdistan. There had been steady fighting in the northwestern part of Iran with Kurdish rebels. So of course Limbert, a high-ranking devil in the den of spies, would have “agents” there. When he smiled at the question, that became further evidence of its truth. It was groupthink, and it was unassailable.

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” he said.

“How do you communicate with your agents in Kurdistan?” Sheikh-ol-eslam asked.

“I don’t.”

“We know you communicate by radio.”

“I don’t know anything about radios.”

“Then how do you communicate?”

“I don’t know what you are talking about.”

He asked Limbert when he had last seen one of the prominent Kurdish leaders, and the embassy political officer said he had never met the man.

“Look, I don’t know anything about Kurdistan,” Limbert told Sheikh-ol-eslam.

Sheikh-ol-eslam lectured Limbert in Farsi. They knew he had friends in Kurdistan and that he had visited there. These things were true and Limbert admitted them. But he had not been to Kurdistan in seven years, and certainly not since he had come to work at the embassy, and his friends had nothing to do with the disturbances there. But just the admission that he had friends there seemed the only part of what he said that Sheikh-ol-eslam heard. He had caught Limbert in a lie. If he had something to hide, he must be guilty.

“It’s just not true,” Limbert said.

“You know what we do with spies,” Sheikh-ol-eslam said. “We can shoot spies.”

“You can do anything you want to me.”

The fear of being executed that had gripped him during the first two days had receded. It was there, but it had become background noise, a constant. Sheikh-ol-eslam’s reminder was unnecessary and didn’t alarm Limbert at all. If he felt anything, it was curiosity. He was so bored during the day that a session like this was a welcome break. The whole situation grew more and more irritating. What ate at him was not simply being held captive, his lack of freedom, his inability to see or communicate with his family, or even the uncertainty. All these things were, of course, deeply troubling, but on another level Limbert felt professionally disappointed—in himself and in his colleagues.