Guests of the Ayatollah

apartment building right behind the embassy. I haven’t had time to find my way around. I’m just here, this is a new job for me, what do I know?”

Daugherty talked about how he had just finished his doctoral studies in California. It was all true…mostly. He said the man who normally had that office was in the United States—indeed, the senior field officer had left on home leave only weeks before—and that he was the only one he had ever seen open the vault. He had no idea himself.

He had been standing for a long time. At one point he said he had to use the toilet and, much to his surprise, the questions stopped and he was led down the hall to the bathroom. He used the toilet and then splashed water on his face and collected his thoughts.

When he returned the interrogator pressed harder about the vault. He never raised his voice but he wanted the vault opened.

Daugherty tried to fight back with indignation. The invasion and interrogation were against all rules of diplomatic behavior. He demanded to be returned to his colleagues and that they all be released. He knew it was ridiculous of him to be making demands, but he said anything that came into his head to change the subject.

The truth was, of course, that it was his office and he did know how to open the vault. There wasn’t anything in it, so far as he knew, that merited a heroic defense. But unlike the State Department, the spy agency had a strict culture of secrecy. No documents were kept at the embassy beyond thirty days, and the rule specified that the amount of files should not exceed a pile that could be destroyed in thirty minutes. The most sensitive material was kept in the larger coms vault, where Ahern and the others had locked themselves. That morning, as soon as the embassy grounds were invaded, Daugherty had emptied the four safes in his own vault and personally passed all of it through a shredder. He had left the shredded paper in a big pile on the floor when he had closed the door on it earlier. He had thought about flipping a match into the pile but he decided against it, figuring this demonstration would probably be over in a few hours and he didn’t want to damage the interior of the vault. How could a government allow a bunch of college kids to seize a foreign embassy, the embassy of a country that had been so important to it, a country that, to consider only the practical concerns, was holding more than six billion dollars of Iran’s assets in military contracts? To grab the embassy made no sense. If the contracts were to be canceled, then the money would have to be returned. These were matters that required discussion, planning…the kind of things embassies did. When a country was unhappy with another nation’s diplomatic mission, that country’s authorities simply ordered diplomatic personnel to leave. It happened all the time. But to seize the embassy, these buildings and twenty-seven acres, at the risk of forfeiting billions…how would that figure? It was self-defeating beyond belief. If this was all going to be over in a few hours, Daugherty didn’t want to be known as the guy who panicked and burned down an American embassy. So he hadn’t thrown the match.

He knew there was no overwhelming reason to keep them out of the vault, except his reluctance to cooperate. But now his cover story depended on it. If they found out now that he could open it, they would know he had been lying to them. He kept insisting that he didn’t know how.

The interrogator left. Daugherty was led into the agency secretary’s office and his blindfold was removed. He was surrounded now by an angry group, about a dozen men, all of them a lot smaller than he, very young— they looked like college students—wearing the standard jeans and army jackets or worn sweaters, with long hair and beards or half beards. Several had automatic weapons, including Uzi machine pistols.

What looked like the eldest of the group, one with a .38 pistol, ordered him to open the vault.

“I just got here. I don’t know how,” said Daugherty.

This set them off. Now they were all shouting at him at once, waving weapons.

“Open the vault!” one of them screamed at him.

“I can’t open it, I can’t open it,” Daugherty told them.

Voices were heard shouting down the hall. He smelled smoke and heard gunshots from somewhere on the grounds. Something was burning inside the building. The crowd noise outside seemed to have grown louder, even though it was now nearly two in the morning. It all notched up his sense of alarm.

One of the young men with an Uzi, a teenager, then pointed at the secretary’s desk.

“Who sits here?” he asked.

“A secretary.”

“Can she open it?”

“Like I said before, she’s the other guy’s secretary. I don’t know. I’ve never seen her open it. I don’t think she can open it. She never came in that office. I don’t think she knows how to open it.”

“Go get the secretary,” the elder of the group told one of the others, in English. “Go bring her up here.”

That did it for Daugherty. He had carried on the charade as long as he could. He did not want to subject the woman to this scene. Daugherty had a courtly manner with women, and the idea of putting the secretary—even if she was a CIA employee—in this position was not acceptable to him. She was not getting paid to take the same risks that he was taking. He was not going to let them bring that woman up here and subject her to their guns and threats. She was just a secretary, and tended to be fairly high strung.

“No, leave her be,” he said. “I’ll open it for you.”

And he did. They would know he had been lying to them but he would simply have to deal with the consequences.

He got a big laugh out of the astonished looks on their faces when they swung open the unlocked door. It was empty, lined with open safes with drawers hanging out, and a pile of shredded paper on the floor. The clicking sound had been coming from the door’s alarm system, which had been set improperly. They looked at him as if he were crazy and then pushed him across the room, shoving him hard in the back.

“Who was in the vault?” one of them demanded. “Who shredded the paper?”

Minutes later, deposited in the chair behind the secretary’s desk, he watched a parade of Iranians file into his office for a look in the vault. They moved in groups, silently, shuffling through papers that were scattered across the floor, moving around him as though he wasn’t there. Among them were three junior clerics in turbans, one in a powder blue robe, another in cherry red, and the other slate gray, all wearing Reebok athletic shoes. They stopped to stare at Daugherty, no doubt, he thought, looking for horns on his forehead. He glared back at them with contempt. When he was left alone, he saw a pack of matches on the secretary’s desk and again considered setting fire to the drapes. He decided against it.

When the line of gapers ended, Daugherty’s group of young tormentors lifted him and threw him against the wall alongside another safe. He had been told when he first arrived that no one knew the combination for that safe; it had been lost in one of the changeovers of personnel. The secretary had been using the safe as a plant stand.

“Open it!” the leader demanded. One of the younger men had his Uzi pointed at Daugherty’s belly. He noticed that the gun’s safety was off.

“I can’t,” he said.

“You said you couldn’t open the vault and you did, so open the safe,” the young man said.

“This one I really can’t open.”

“Open it or I will shoot you,” he said.

“Okay, go ahead and shoot,” Daugherty said.

They were stumped. It was not the answer they had expected. He saw them looking at one another, as if to say, Okay, what do we do now? The young man with the Uzi had a look on his face that Daugherty interpreted as a mental shrug.

“What about the secretary?” the leader suggested. It had worked before, and at the suggestion they all stared at him, waiting for him to capitulate again.

“Okay, bring her up,” Daugherty said. “I don’t care. She can’t open it either.”

At that they gave up. They didn’t send for the secretary. Instead, Daugherty was blindfolded again and led back across the compound. He felt like sunrise must be close, but he could see out of the edges of his blindfold that it was still dark. He was taken to the residence dining room and placed in a wooden chair. At the center of the room was a long table, a beautiful piece of furniture made of highly polished maple, which one of the invaders had apparently marred deliberately with a long, nasty scratch down the center. Around the table were eight other hostages, including Ahern and Golacinski.