institution that at one point had taught more than four thousand students, the sons and daughters of the then extensive U.S. government presence in Iran. To his captors, Keough was just a very large middle-aged white American of some importance, which meant he was probably a top spy. In fact, he was a lifelong educator who had spent most of his career teaching or managing schools in rural Vermont. He had been lured to the school in Iran by his love of classical history and literature—he had read of ancient travels in Persia and wanted to see the place himself. When his school had been depopulated and then closed after the revolution, Keough had transferred all the books and student records from the old building to the embassy grounds for safekeeping. He had since accepted a position as principal of the International School in Islamabad, Pakistan, and had briefly returned to Tehran to recover the most current of those old records—those for boys and girls still in school or applying to universities who needed their transcripts. He had been scheduled to fly back to Islamabad on November 5. When the students came over the walls he had been packing suitcases with the most critical of the old student files, and his biggest worry in the first days was that those files might be lost.
There had been some real spying going on at the embassy, but most of it had little to do with Iran itself. Major Neil Robinson, who worked for the defense attache, was employed by the Defense Intelligence Agency and was trying to make sure that the sophisticated U.S. surveillance equipment used to monitor Soviet missile testing did not fall into the wrong hands. Navy Commander Donald Sharer had been working to make sure that some of the systems the American air force had installed on Iranian F-14s did not fall into Soviet hands. The plane itself was state-of-the-art, and it had the AWG-9 weapons system (Airborne Warning Group-9), which was capable of radar-tracking twenty-four targets simultaneously and firing upon six of them at the same time at a range of well over one hundred miles. It was classified. There were similar but less pressing issues surrounding Iran’s fleet of F4s, F5s, C-130 transports, and the surface-to-air antiaircraft I-Hawk weapons system. Sharer had managed to find and destroy an I-Hawk manual inadvertently left behind in Iran that contained secret electronic countermeasures, which had not been shared with the Iranian army. He had volunteered to help clean out old American offices and, discovering the manual in a safe, had tossed it on a pile of trash, which had been taken out and burned. He regarded it as the most significant thing he had accomplished in his brief stay in Iran.
These kinds of things were not, of course, what the Iranian students had in mind when they set about unearthing American plots. Certain that they had seized a gold mine of proof about America’s clandestine efforts, the students set about trying to solve the mystery for themselves. They would dissect this beast and lay its slimy entrails in the sun. It was not an objective study but one driven by prior conviction. They set about unearthing facts and confessions to substantiate their beliefs. Part of this effort involved cataloging all the “Spy Den” documents, including a project to painstakingly reassemble shredded files, but the other big part would be the methodical interrogation of nearly all the Americans in custody.
Colonel Chuck Scott was told to strip to his shorts, and as he sat and watched they tore apart his clothing inspecting pockets, linings, everything, looking for secret communications devices. He then endured an abusive session during which he was accused of being someone else, in particular, someone named George Lambrakis, a former embassy political officer who they were convinced had been CIA. Scott, a short, solid man with a square face and big glasses, resembled Lambrakis and had met him but could not convince his questioners that they were not the same person.
“You were born in Greece and you have worked many years for the CIA and the shah’s SAVAK to oppress, torture, imprison, and kill innocent Iranian people,” said his interrogator. “We have proof of this from files in the embassy and from some of your friends who have already given us information. We do not want to have to hurt you, or to kill you, but that is up to you.”
Scott found the accusation insulting. He regarded his position as chief of the military liaison group to be more significant than any post Lambrakis had held; why wasn’t his real identity interesting or significant enough?
Vice consul Richard Queen spent long hours explaining to his interrogators AVLOS, the new computer system in the consulate, the one he had been working on the day of the takeover. A precise man, he described in detail how it provided a database of visa applicants that could be readily accessed by American consulates around the world. He was telling the truth, but it was clear to him that his questioners didn’t believe him. Nothing about his work or his life was remotely secret; he was a relatively low-level functionary at the embassy, a beginner in the foreign service profession. But no matter what he told them, the truth wasn’t cutting it. There were no innocent explanations. Everyone was guilty; everyone was a spy. He could see his captors working hard to see through all the imagined lies in order to grasp the true devious machinery of the place. If it weren’t so sad it would have been funny.
“How much money do you earn?” he was asked.
“About eleven hundred a month,” he said.
“Don Cooke said you make thirteen hundred a month.”
Cooke, another vice consul, handled payroll, so Queen wondered if he had been given a raise without being informed.
Kathryn Koob walked her questioners patiently through her foreign service career, from the eight-hour foreign service exam she took in Denver in 1969 to her first posting in Abidjan, then on to Bucharest and then Zambia. She explained how she was drawn more to the job than to the place. A foreign service officer she had met early in her career had advised her, “If you have a miserable job in a wonderful place, you will be miserable, but take a wonderful job in a miserable place and you will be happy.” Iran was a “miserable place,” she explained, only in the sense that there was so much anger and mistrust of Americans. Koob’s life was devoted to knocking down barriers and grew right out of the prairie Lutheranism that she had absorbed growing up on a farm in Iowa. Her tradition informed her that all conflict was rooted in misunderstanding, and her passion was to crush misunderstanding with art. Koob laid it all out, from Iran backward, providing places and dates of arrivals and departures.
“You made that up,” her questioner said when she was done, pointing out how deftly she had produced places and dates off the top of her head. In fact, she had recently been asked by the ICA to write out a history of her employment, so the details were fresh in her mind.
A copy of that cable was in her files.
“You will find it in my office,” she told them.
Al Golacinski was questioned about his watch, which was a modern style with a blank face that lit up with a digital display of the time when a button was pressed on its side.
“Is this a radio?” he was asked.
“No, it’s a watch.”
“Well, if we find out it’s a radio you’re in big trouble.”
“It’s not a radio.”
One interrogator later threatened to put the security chief’s feet in a pan of boiling oil, an ultimatum Golacinski found too grotesque to actually believe. The line they had used on the day of the takeover, “You will see what we will do,” had been far better. It had left the terror to his own imagination. If you were going to scare a man with a pan of boiling oil, you would show him the red-hot pan and start taking off his shoes. The State Department security man felt professional disdain; he saw his questioners as amateurs playing at some cinematic notion of torture and interrogation.
John Limbert was questioned by a young man wearing a bag on his head, one of the embassy’s “burn bags.” He had cut holes in it for his eyes. It was all Limbert could do not to laugh. It seemed to him that they had things backward—he was the one being interrogated, shouldn’t
“I am sorry to have to talk to you in this way,” the young man said.
“It’s all right,” Limbert told him. “Don’t worry about it.”
“What was your role in the coup of 1953?”
“I don’t know anything about it,” Limbert said. “I was ten years old at the time.”
Those interrogated were struck by how determined their captors were to believe any scrap of information that buttressed their theory, and by how dismissive they were of anything that contradicted it. Joe Hall, the army warrant officer, found himself being questioned about the “wheat mold” plot he himself had made up as a joke on the night of the takeover.
Many of these sessions were conducted by Hussein Sheikh-ol-eslam, the gap-toothed former Berkeley
