fifty-three days, barely long enough to figure out what his job was and how to get it done. Each of the spy agency’s employees at the embassy had a cover, a regular State Department job, but their identity was an open secret in-house. Everybody knew who worked in the suite of offices on the west end of the second floor. It included a small reception area manned by the agency’s secretary and the offices of Tom Ahern; Ahern’s senior field officer (who had left on home leave only a few weeks earlier); Malcolm Kalp, the newly arrived field officer; and Daugherty. There was a large vault in Daugherty’s office, which was ordinarily closed and locked. He figured there were only three obvious ways his role could become known to his captors: they would have to discover some written record of it in the embassy files, one of his colleagues would have to tell them, or he would have to break down and tell them himself. The only one of the three he could hope to control was the last.
The chancery had been ransacked. Already the Iranian intelligence agents at the core of the takeover, led by Hashemi, had collected all the intact documents they could find, boxed them up, and carted them off the compound for scrutiny. They planned to stay for only a day or two, so it was important to get this done quickly. They had been disappointed to discover the disintegrator in the coms vault. What unrecoverable mysteries did it contain? Had the Americans managed to destroy all the evidence of their counterrevolutionary plots? There was no hope of restoring the blue powder left by the disintegrator, but perhaps there was a way to reassemble the piles of paper that had been fed through the shredder. Surely anything the Americans had taken such pains to destroy must contain valuable information.
Daugherty tried to prepare himself for what was coming. He was new to the spy agency and to Tehran, but he wasn’t innocent. He knew most of the embassy’s secrets, the small string of Iranian spies on the agency’s payroll, the secret efforts to independently replace the Tacksman sites. He knew procedures, codes, and methods…a lot that his captors would like to find out. How should he handle himself? He was worried, but he was also determined not to act disgracefully. At the same time, there was no point in trying to play the hero. He was supposed to be a diplomat, that was his cover story, so he would act like one. The truth is he was so green that he could as easily assume the identity of a foreign officer as any other. He would engage his questioners, attempt to challenge them for this unwarranted outrage. It would not be an act.
It occurred to him that his captors must believe him to be someone more important than he was. His office was large and well furnished, and it was the only one in the suite with a walk-in safe. Sure enough, when the questions began, he was accused of being the “real power” in the embassy.
Daugherty was blindfolded so he couldn’t see his questioner, but the voice was male and soft, and the English was very good, only lightly accented and with an educated vocabulary. The CIA officer would later write out a reconstruction of the session.
“Is this your office?” he was asked.
“Well, not really.”
“What do you mean, ‘Not really’?”
“Well, I’m here temporarily because I’m a new arrival and my office—you can go see—it’s down the hall. It’s the room that serves as the library, but they haven’t gotten around to moving the books out yet.”
“Okay,” said his questioner. “Who sits here outside this office?”
“The secretary who works for the guy in the other office [Ahern’s suite].”
“Who’s the guy in the other office?”
“He’s the drug enforcement representative.” This was Ahern’s official cover.
“What’s his name?”
“I’m not sure. Like I said, I’m new here, and I haven’t gotten to know everyone yet.”
“What does he do?”
“He works with your police forces, I think, to try to do something about stopping drugs. I don’t know. I don’t really know him well.”
His interrogator pressed on in a steady, unemotional way and followed up quickly, probing, testing. This was not an amateur. He never lost control of the dialogue, even though Daugherty was looking for a way to derail it.
“You mean they put you in this office with people you don’t know?”
“Yeah, because my office isn’t ready yet.”
“Who’s your secretary?”
“I don’t have one.”
“Do you write cables back to Washington?”
“Yes.”
“Well, who does that for you?”
“The secretary across the hall who works in the political section, because I’m a political officer.”
“What about this secretary out here?”
“No, she just sits outside this office. I’m just here temporarily.”
The questioner was getting frustrated but he kept his cool. He didn’t raise his voice, though he spoke a little faster. The questions came back more quickly. He doubled back over the same ground, asking the same questions several times, waiting for Daugherty’s story to slip up. He was not buying the answers. He mentioned the possibility of a firing squad and how many Iranians were familiar with torture methods, having been practiced upon by SAVAK. He played with an apparently empty pistol as he spoke, spinning the cylinder, cocking the hammer, and then easing it back down. He would pull the trigger when he wanted to emphasize a point, which made a sound that concentrated Daugherty’s mind.
He didn’t believe he would be shot…at least not yet. If they were going to shoot people, it wouldn’t make sense to do it right away, not when they were looking for information. Daugherty could see that the embassy invaders were trying to figure the place out, who was who, what their jobs were, what exactly they were doing here. He had already deduced that these “students” did not have official government approval and were unsure how this sit-in, if you could call it that, was going to play. If they were going to be chased out of the embassy, which Daugherty still believed was the most likely outcome, they wouldn’t want to have American blood on their hands.
Still, his interrogator seemed to know that Daugherty wasn’t telling the truth. He had already learned from someone that Daugherty was CIA. How could he be simply a junior foreign service officer when no one else had such a giant vault in his office, not even Bruce Laingen, who was supposedly in charge? His questioner pointed out that Daugherty’s age disproved his claim of subordinate status—he was six or seven years older than most of the junior staff members. He wanted Daugherty to confess that he was running America’s “spy operations” in Iran. And he wanted him to open the vault. There was a clicking noise coming from inside it that sounded like it might be someone tapping on an electric typewriter. The Iranians were convinced that someone was communicating with Washington from inside, and they were determined to open it and find out.
Daugherty forced himself to laugh at the suggestion that he was secretly in charge, but inwardly he was stunned by how rapidly they had homed in on him. Was it only a coincidence? Did they know he was CIA? If they knew, how did they know?
He kept talking.
“I
“Are you sure you didn’t sneak in?”
“Go to the personnel section, look at my arrival date.”
“We will.”
“Go to the airport authorities and check there. You’ve got my passport.”
“These documents can be faked. You can pay people off to get them.”
“Talk to the Iranians who work here at the embassy,” Daugherty suggested. “Ask them when I came.”
“Well, who do you know in the embassy?”
“I hardly know anybody.”
“Where have you been in Iran?”
“I’ve been to a couple of restaurants in town, and I’ve been, as your records will show, I’ve been with the charge down at the Ministry of Defense a couple of times and to the Foreign Ministry. But otherwise I’m in the
