and he met with Barry Rosen, the embassy’s press attache, to discuss setting up an international newspaper in Switzerland that would present, according to one of the documents, “a true image” of Iran’s revolution to the West.
Nevertheless, these relatively benign ties with the agency were enough to spell doom for Farzami unless he had fled. Ahern tried to buy him more time, telling Sheikh-ol-eslam that he couldn’t remember SDTRAMP’s last name, only his first. He said he couldn’t remember the name of the newspaper where he worked. He was helped in this sort of stalling by Sheikh-ol-eslam’s obsession with uncovering a plot to assassinate or unseat Khomeini. This is what the students were determined to find and were convinced existed. So the minor revelations in the documents were sometimes overlooked. In Farzami’s case, however, it was not. Here was a person who had collaborated with the devil. He was arrested, charged with deliberately “mistranslating” government documents and with spying for the CIA. He would be executed by firing squad on December 16, 1980.
There were others. Under further questioning Ahern confirmed the identity of SDROTTER/4, a tribal leader from southwest Iran named Khosrow Qashqai, who had been encouraged and funded by the agency in his efforts to rouse local resistance to the emerging mullah-led regime; Rear Admiral Ahmad Mandani, a former governor of Khuzestan and more recently a losing candidate for president in the January elections; and Amir Entezam, a diplomat who was involved with the effort to establish a Swiss-based Iranian newspaper. Qashqai would be captured in the summer of 1980 and publicly hanged in 1982. Mandani fled Iran and eventually settled in the United States. Entezam was arrested and jailed for life. The documents would reveal, and Ahern would confirm, earlier efforts made by the CIA to recruit Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the current finance minister, who had been helpful to the agency in the past. Ahern’s interrogation assumed a pattern. Instead of pushing him to tell them everything he knew, they would present him with documents and information that in most cases he would eventually confirm. He tried to confine himself to acknowledging only information they already had found on their own.
In time, Ahern rationalized his capitulation in another way. By helping them understand exactly what the “spy den” documents said, it might dispel some of their wilder fantasies about American spying in Iran. The contacts with Farzami and the others had been exploratory at best, and though there was no doubt that the United States was supporting Qashqai’s efforts to oppose the new regime, and had hopes of doing more in the future, they did not reveal the plot the students were looking for.
Ahern’s interrogations gradually ended. There would be days between sessions, then weeks. Finally, Ahern figured they were done with him, and his captivity became a struggle to fill time.
He was kept alone at all times. During the long months of interrogations he used every minute preparing for the next session, working out ways to delay, confuse, or avoid giving his captors information, but once the questioning stopped he was on his own with the four walls. He coped by finding activities that would bring him some lasting personal benefit, so that if he were ever released he could say that he had not wasted his time. He knew how to play the piano and was a lover of classical music, and when he asked his guards if he could have some of the sheet music he had kept in his apartment they shocked him by handing it over within days. He spent hours memorizing Schumann’s
He did calisthenics and high-stepped around the room to simulate jogging, which he found had psychological benefits even greater than physical ones. It raised his spirits. If only to help break the monotony, he skipped the exercises every tenth day. He had always been a light eater, but now found himself voraciously hungry. The guards let him eat as much as he wanted, so Ahern would request three or four hamburgers at a sitting, or multiple servings of chicken. He had always been slender, and it seemed now that no matter how much he ate he did not gain weight. His face had always been slightly concave, and now there were caverns under his cheekbones and his eyes seemed to recede into deep sockets. His thin, straight brown hair grew down to his shoulders. He looked old, worn, harmless. He became emotionally numb.
Mornings were the worst times. He would be awakened early for breakfast, usually flat bread, butter, jam, and tea, and taken to the bathroom; then he would go back to sleep until about noon. After awaking again he would begin his routines—exercising, reading, “playing” music, “watching” a play. Sometimes he would read until three or four in the morning. Late at night was the best time. There were few interruptions from the guards. Ahern could drift off in his books or into his imagination until his eyes fell shut.
Ahern’s colleague Bill Daugherty was making his own compromises, and dealing with the consequences. On the night of Valentine’s Day, Sheikh-ol-eslam brought the CIA officer a standard State Department cable and asked him about the long lists of code at the top.
“It’s just in-house stuff,” said Daugherty. “It tracks where the cable originated, where it was sent, and how it was routed. It’s all very simple.”
Ahern had said the same thing but Sheikh-ol-eslam wasn’t buying it. Daugherty grew impatient with him. He deliberately talked to him like a child. He said that if Sheikh-ol-eslam had ever had any experience with a large organization, he would know that such tracking policies were routine.
“You such a smart guy, why are you bothering me with things like this?” he said.
“You aren’t being very helpful,” the gap-toothed Iranian complained.
“No, I’m not,” Daugherty admitted.
“You don’t like doing this?”
“No, of course not.”
He felt bad about any help he had given them, and when he asked about the fate of Victoria Bassiri, the Iranian woman whom he had met with the previous summer, Sheikh-ol-eslam told him curtly, “She was shot.”
Shot? Daugherty was stunned. He pictured the woman laughing with him over dinner, doing her limited best to help him understand the shifting sands of local politics. She had been killed for that? Why hadn’t she fled the country immediately when the embassy was taken? Maybe she had stayed because of her husband and children. Perhaps she believed her connection to the embassy had been so insignificant that it would never be noticed, or that he would have been able to protect her identity. If so, she had paid for those misjudgments with her life. Daugherty was appalled. She had done so little, nothing of consequence. He had tried hard to convince Sheikh-ol- eslam and the others that Bassiri was not a serious spy, hardly even worth their effort. She had never even been asked to gather sensitive information, assuming she would have been in a position to do so. He felt terrible about it but finally concluded that spies accepted such risks. How could she have been so foolish to stay?
After he had spelled out his real job, Daugherty was left alone for months. While the zealots did their best to spin conspiracy theories out of the mostly pedestrian cables and memos, the documents utterly exploded the myth of CIA omnipresence and omnipotence. They revealed that the agency’s operation in Iran in November 1979 consisted of four Americans (one of the officers had been on home leave when the embassy was taken) who had been desperately knocking on doors and offering cash to anyone willing to help explain to them what was going on. Sheikh-ol-eslam found it incredible that the vaunted CIA had not one officer in his country that could speak Farsi. But the cables confirmed it. Their evil dragon had turned out to be a mouse. Daugherty sensed a palpable feeling of disappointment.
Always a solitary soul, he didn’t mind spending his days and nights alone. When he was a child and his mother disciplined him by sending him to his room, she would complain that it fell short of real punishment because he seemed actually to enjoy it. As an adult he had always valued the time he spent living by himself. When he had gone back to school after returning from Vietnam he was older than most of his classmates and didn’t have much in common with them, so he spent a lot of time alone, studying. In the chancery now there were plenty of books to choose from, and Daugherty was an avid reader. Books made all the difference. In his survival training he heard the story of Private Jacob DeShazer, who had survived the daring Doolittle raid over Tokyo early in World War Two and had been kept in solitary confinement by Japanese troops in China for forty months with absolutely nothing to do but stare at the walls. Daugherty felt that would have driven him crazy. But so long as he could escape into books he was okay.
