cottages, where a marine showed him how to slip a piece of wire into the lock of his handcuffs and pop them open at will, a great relief. He wore the cuffs whenever the guards were present, but when he could, such as at night with his hands under a blanket, he would slip them off. On the evening of November 22, he was taken from a cottage and placed alone in the office of Tom Ahern, his boss. Everything had been removed from the room but a desk, a chair, and a foam-rubber pallet on the floor. Its windows overlooked the front of the chancery and Takht- e-Jamshid Avenue, which seemed permanently jammed with demonstrators. Their angry din echoed in the empty space beneath the room’s high ceiling, rattling Daugherty, who fantasized about easing down over the city in his old F-4 and painting the crowded avenue with a long string of napalm.
After a few days alone in this space, Daugherty was taken for six interrogations over the next two weeks. He was prepared for them, and had given a lot of thought about how to handle himself. Years earlier he had taken a training program for marine aviators who might find themselves in a North Vietnamese prison camp and had been through exercises designed to help resist hostile interrogation—he had even been locked for several hours in a small metal box. He had already decided that his circumstances in Iran did not require him to adhere to the military code of “name, rank, and serial number.” Since he was in Iran ostensibly as a foreign service officer, not a spy, he was determined to act like a State Department employee, that is, he would talk at length and try to engage his captors in dialogue. He had two personal guidelines. He would do his best not to reveal secrets or to say or do anything that might make life harder for his fellow captives.
For each of the sessions he was taken to the top floor of the chancery. The last three sessions were in the bubble. Each time his interrogator was Hussein Sheikh-ol-eslam, the former Berkeley student with the missing front tooth. The work seemed to be wearing Sheikh-ol-eslam down; he looked exhausted, with big bags under his eyes. With him were two others, a large Kurdish man and a high-strung young man who spoke little but who had also spent some time in the United States.
Sheikh-ol-eslam asked most of the questions. For the first two nights, blindfolded and handcuffed in his chair, Daugherty was harangued. He was shown grotesque photographs of dead men stretched on slabs at the morgue, their bodies mutilated. There were books filled with such pictures, all purported victims of SAVAK and, by proxy, the CIA. It seemed very important to Sheikh-ol-eslam and the others that Daugherty understand that their revolution, the widespread arrests and executions that followed, and this seizure of the U.S. embassy were morally justified. So Daugherty deliberately challenged them on it, to waste time. He argued with them and asked questions that he knew would set them off. He stuck to his story of being a foreign service officer. The three did their best to maintain the atmospherics of an interrogation session—each claimed to have been interrogated by SAVAK—but they were not especially good at it. Their problem was not getting their subject to talk but to get him to stop talking. Daugherty led them into long conversations about American life and values, taking advantage of any opportunity to turn the discussion back to the familiar safe ground of home.
“We’re not interested in what you did in the United States!” Sheikh-ol-eslam would complain. “We are only interested in what you have been doing here in Iran.”
Daugherty frequently asked to use the toilet and would be given a break. He would splash water on his face, do deep breathing exercises, and collect his thoughts. There were further breaks for tea, during which the conversation would proceed informally. Eventually his questioners dispensed with the blindfold. Daugherty felt that he had the process so well in hand he began looking forward to the sessions. It was better than sitting alone in his room and listening to the mob outside.
In the third interrogation the tone changed. Sheikh-ol-eslam seemed to have very specific information about him, things he had either just learned or been deliberately holding back during the first two sessions. He asked where Daugherty had been on certain nights, who he had been with, what they had been doing. Not long before the takeover, the CIA officer had accompanied a group from several other embassies on an overnight pleasure trip to Isfahan. These were the dates Sheikh-ol-eslam harped on. Isfahan was regarded as a center for American spying because it had been a helicopter air base for the shah’s army and air force and had employed a fairly large number of American military technicians. Sheikh-ol-eslam and the others scoffed at Daugherty’s story that this had been an informal sightseeing trip. He wanted to know everything Daugherty had done in Isfahan.
The American was happy to oblige. It had been a pleasure trip. He told them of his visit to the city’s beautiful mosque and its bazaar. He described each of his companions, their conversations in transit, where they dined, and what they ate. It grew tedious, so Daugherty decided to have some fun. He had spent much of his time with a woman from the Austrian embassy, just a friend, but as Sheikh-ol-eslam pressed for more and more detail, Daugherty began to spice up the story by fabricating a romantic relationship—to liven things up and to bruise his questioners’ delicate Islamic sensibilities. He had himself tearing off the woman’s clothes in a hotel room when his questioners shouted, “Shut up! Shut up!”
Daugherty got another bathroom break, and then the four men sat together around the table in the bubble sipping tea and chatting as though the previous unpleasantness hadn’t happened. Then Sheikh-ol-eslam stood.
“You are telling us that you are not CIA?” he asked.
“That’s what I’m telling you,” said Daugherty, feeling cocksure.
Sheikh-ol-eslam picked up a slip of paper, walked around the desk, and handed it to Daugherty.
“Read this,” he said.
Daugherty read with mounting shock and disappointment. It was a cable, something that had apparently come from Bruce Laingen’s safe, written some weeks before he and Kalp had arrived in Tehran. It began:
1. S.[secret]—Entire text.
2. I concur in assignments Malcolm Kalp and William Daugherty as described Reftels [in reference to prior telecoms].
3. With opportunity available to us in the sense that we are starting from a clean slate in SRF [Special Reporting Facilities, a euphemism for the CIA] coverage at this mission, but with regard also for the great sensitivity locally to any hint of CIA activity, it is of the highest importance that cover be the best we can come up with. Hence there is no question as to the need for second and third secretary titles for these two officers. We must have it.
4. I believe cover arrangements in terms of assignments within embassy are appropriate to present overall staffing pattern. We should however hold to the present total of four SRF officer assignments for the foreseeable future, keeping supporting staff as sparse as possible as well, until we see how things go here.
5. We are making effort to limit knowledge within embassy of all SRF assignments; that effort applies particularly to Daugherty, pursuant to new program of which he is a product and about which I have been informed.
6. I suppose I need not remind the Department that the old and apparently insoluble problem of R designation [“R” stood for “reserve” foreign service officer, the traditional way of designating CIA officers with a State Department cover] will inevitably complicate and to some degree weaken our cover efforts locally, no matter how much we work at it.
Daugherty’s mouth went dry. There was no doubt the cable was authentic; he had seen a copy of it in Washington before he left. Laingen was giving his nod to bringing him and Kalp on as CIA officers in the embassy and worrying about their cover status. Daugherty had no idea why such a thing had been put to paper and was flabbergasted, since it had been, that no one had destroyed it months ago! There was no reason to keep it. For God’s sake, it
“Well?” said Sheikh-ol-eslam.
“Okay, I’m CIA, so what?” Daugherty said, handing the cable back to him. He couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Now it was their turn to be shocked. The last thing they expected, even after showing Daugherty the document, was for him to admit it. At that time and place such an admission almost certainly meant death.
