The French lawyer tried to convince Ghotbzadeh to speak to Jordan, but the embattled Iranian declined. Talking directly to American officials had become a dangerous business in Iran.
PART THREE
Waiting
1. They Started It, We Ended It
After his questioners had backed off from beating the soles of his feet with a rubber hose, CIA station chief Tom Ahern was never again threatened with torture. His interrogators regularly promised him trial and execution but, for whatever reason, beating him was a line they would no longer cross. It surprised Ahern, because their revolution was hardly squeamish about such things. But it pleasantly surprised him to discover that his captors had limits…at least so far. He still did not expect to leave Tehran alive.
His chief interrogator, Hussein Sheikh-ol-eslam, seemed convinced that Ahern’s goal had been nothing short of assassinating Khomeini, derailing their holy revolution, and installing another American puppet. They did not just suspect this, they
It was not so much the fear of death that undid him. What finally broke Ahern’s will was the fear of a
The fear and the pressure wore on Ahern until he schemed how to take his own life, which seemed the only way to escape a grim public spectacle. He played with the idea of electrocuting himself. He had found a paper clip and thought that if he put it into an electric outlet and dipped his other hand in a can of water on top of the radiator, that might do it. He never got to the point of trying it, but he rehearsed it and decided that if it appeared as though they were going to make good on their threats he would electrocute himself first. At one point he gave up eating and drinking for four days but was surprised to discover how hard it was to starve. He was a slender man, and naturally ascetic, so he ate very little anyway. After several days the hunger became uncomfortable, but he hadn’t lost much strength or mental acuity. He decided that well before he died he would become terribly disabled, still at the mercy of his captors but severely damaged. The problem was that he wasn’t suicidal, and couldn’t make himself so, no matter how frightened and depressed he felt. No matter how bad things got, he would rather live and hope.
For some reason, the questions he dreaded most in these interrogations never came. The draft of his cable to CIA director Stansfield Turner, the one he had left on his desk on the day of the takeover, was enough all by itself to condemn him. The paragraph about waiting for the military situation to settle down before finding new allies, and the mention of Ayatollah Shariatmadari, who had emerged as such a rival to Khomeini, was especially damaging. He expected to have the document placed on the desk before him at any moment. In between sessions he would pace his cell working out ways to deny and evade what he had written, ways of limiting the damage it might do. He set detailed priorities of those things he would admit, under duress, those things he would admit only under severe duress, and those things he would try never to admit. Among the latter were names of agents and the secret project under way to purchase land in the mountains and get the clandestine Soviet missile observation project up and running. But his interrogators never brought these things up. They weren’t interested in what he had actually been doing; they were interested only in what they
At one point he was moved downstairs from his old chancery office to a small windowless closet either on the first floor or in the basement, he wasn’t sure. It rattled him more than he imagined it would. It was a little like being placed in his own coffin. It was then, early in the new year, that he began to buckle.
Early on, Ahern had admitted who he was. He knew that alone probably meant he would eventually be killed, but he saw it as a first step down a long road. He would give in little by little, buying himself time. His identity and role were the most obvious bits of information they already had. That much was clear from the documents they kept bringing him from the State Department files, week after week, and, eventually, some of the restored ones that he and Daugherty had shredded. It was pointless to keep denying the obvious.
The students held a press conference to announce their outing of the embassy’s CIA officers. They displayed Ahern’s false Belgian passport and showed off the copy of Laingen’s cable identifying Daugherty and Kalp by name. In the United States, these documents were displayed on TV along with the allegations without much comment. Network reporters noted that Ahern had been an Eagle Scout as a boy, and that he had attended Notre Dame University before joining the foreign service. Daugherty was shown in his marine uniform. The reports neither denied nor acknowledged that the men were spies and did not explain that it was standard practice for agency officers to work at American embassies under cover of the foreign service.
Despite a national obsession with the story, there was at this point little or no reporting in the United States, on TV or in print, about the revelations in the “spy den” documents. While they contained nothing like the conspiracy theories the students imagined, they were revealing. They confirmed the agency’s presence in Iran, which was hardly surprising, and in many cases unveiled what it had been doing, or trying to do. One of the most significant revelations was the agency’s relationship with Simon Farzami, a Jewish journalist known in the agency files as SDTRAMP. Farzami had been raised in Lebanon and Switzerland and first came to Iran after World War Two with his brother, David, to visit their stepfather’s brother, Ebrahim Hakimi, who later became prime minister of Iran. Both brothers had been hired by PARS, the Iranian news agency, and over the years Farzami had worked for a variety of foreign newspapers and agencies, including the Associated Press and London’s
