He read voraciously. To his deep delight he found in the old high school library an edition of the two-volume classic Kelly and Harbison study
Occasionally, Sheikh-ol-eslam would stop by to chat. Their conversations had become relaxed. He would ask if Daugherty was getting enough food, or sometimes simply ask how he was doing. He seemed to enjoy their exchanges.
One night between Christmas and New Year’s, Sheikh-ol-eslam confessed that he was disappointed in the response their action had provoked in the United States.
“How can we convince the American people that what we’ve done is justified?” he asked.
On previous occasions, Sheikh-ol-eslam had told Daugherty of riots in the streets at home, stories he apparently believed. He had been at Berkeley in the late Vietnam War period when the campus produced some of the most extreme leftist rhetoric, and had come home with the belief that overthrowing the shah would be an important blow in the world revolution. So why weren’t young Americans taking to the streets in solidarity?
“You’re crazy,” Daugherty said. “You want
The CIA officer’s days fell into an almost comfortable routine, a breakfast of bread, butter, jam or cheese, and tea. He would then lean his sleeping pallet against a wall and spend several hours pacing back and forth. Ten paces took him from one corner of the room to the other, and he would walk until his feet were sore or he grew tired. The room was never cleaned, so in time his exercise rubbed a smooth path through the layer of dust on the floor. As he walked he developed elaborate fantasies to occupy his mind. He designed houses, imagined them being built, landscaped the yards, furnished the interiors, and chose colors for the walls and rugs. Then he would imagine parties in them, inviting beautiful women. He thought a lot about flying, dreaming up record-breaking challenges for himself, such as breaking the speed record in a turbo-prop plane from Honolulu to Dallas, deciding what kind of plane would be best and how to configure the gas tanks and electronic instrumentation, calculating the speed and fuel-consumption ratios, what altitudes to fly, how best to utilize the prevailing winds, and so on.
Applying the Kelly and Harbison volumes, he invented an imaginary class in constitutional studies with eight students. He was the professor. In his mind, lost completely in the fantasy, he would say, “Okay, today the course is judicial politics and strategies and we’re going to talk about building a consensus on the Supreme Court.” Then he would lecture on a case where initially the court had been divided, not only between conservatives and liberals but where there were opinions all over the map. Then he would explain how the justices hammered out compromises and arrived at an opinion. His imagination improved with exercise and soon he had the sessions fleshed out in extraordinary detail. He had just finished graduate school the year before, so the setting was familiar to him. He gave the students names and personalities, roughly based on students he had known at Claremont. He had a class clown and a student who was very serious, always taking notes, but who never spoke. Other students were frequent questioners, and held differing political philosophies, and there would be arguments and debates that he would moderate and steer. In those months he felt his mind was as sharp as it had ever been. Between the reading, thinking, and imaginary lecturing, he arrived at insights and ideas that had never before occurred to him.
This would occupy Daugherty until lunch, which tended to be American-style food that he assumed had been seized after thousands of American advisory troops had left Iran in the previous years. Some of it had been sitting around for too long. There was plenty of it, but much of it was unappetizing and he had begun to lose weight. He spent some time each afternoon picking the worms out of his powdered milk. He would repeat his morning routines after lunch, which kept him occupied until dinner. He considered how he might handle this crisis if he were president of the United States, drawing on his familiarity with military assets—what U.S. forces could and could not do. It galled him that he and the others were still in captivity as the weeks and months droned by. How could the American government let so many of its emissaries be abducted by these kids? How could Carter have allowed the shah in? And then he’d think of the anti-American graffiti he’d seen on the walls and the insults and he’d work up a slow boil over it. He thought the way to go would be to coerce Iran into backing down. As president, he would summon the Iranian military attache, bring him into the Oval Office, and say, “General, in five hours I am going to launch all the B-52s and it’s going to take them fourteen hours to fly to Iranian airspace. So that’s nineteen hours. If within those nineteen hours our Americans, all of them, are not out of your country in good health, then the B-52s are going to destroy Qom, Isfahan, and Mashhad, or the oil refineries.”
Then as president he would turn to his chief of staff and the chairman of the joint chiefs and order them to take the Iranian attache to the tank in the Pentagon and let him monitor the B-52s’ flight so that he could see them taking off and moving out over the ocean. Daugherty imagined the Iranian general watching the bombers reach Europe and then close in on Iranian airspace. He would know that it was not a bluff. Sometimes in Daugherty’s mind the general would rush to a phone and convey the importance of immediately releasing the hostages, and other times he would have him sit and watch as the B-52s dropped their devastating loads on the country’s cities. Daugherty would play through the scenarios in his mind. The one thing he considered too far-fetched for serious consideration was a rescue attempt. He had heard, of course, about the Israeli raid at Entebbe, and figured if commandos stormed the building he would sit with his hands in the air. But Iran was a landlocked country, and the distance from Tehran to any nonhostile border was probably four hundred to five hundred miles. He knew there were no helicopters for a mission like that. Even if they had such choppers, in-flight refueling over enemy territory was generally considered too risky. Rescue was, he thought, practically impossible.
Sometimes in the afternoons he would nap. On the days when they let him take a shower he would step into the water fully clothed, soap up his shirt and pants, peel them off, wring them out, do the same with his underwear, and then wash himself. He had the yellow Brooks Brothers shirt he had been wearing on the day of the takeover and a pair of brown polyester pants, and the guards had brought him jeans, a sweatshirt, and several changes of underwear from his apartment. When he was finished showering he would don the dry set of clothes and carry the wet ones back to his room, where he would stretch them out to dry. After dinner he walked again. It helped tire him out enough to sleep.
Daugherty got along reasonably well with his guards. They tended to be very young men, in their teens or early twenties, and were educated far better in math and the sciences than in history or politics and had absorbed from their religious leaders strong opinions about people, places, and events about which they knew next to nothing. They had wild fantasies about the United States and the CIA. Most spoke little or no English, so even if he had wanted to converse with them he could not. There was little point anyway, he thought. Anything out of the mouth of an American was automatically suspect, and none of the guards he met showed the slightest propensity for critical thinking. Their minds traveled on fixed rails. To think for themselves or critically examine their own paths was nothing less than sinful, a temptation to stray from the One True Path. How do you converse with people like that? For a time, a guard was posted in the room with him twenty-four hours a day. Daugherty would do his best to make the poor young man’s life miserable, offending his sense of modesty by wearing only boxer shorts, breaking wind, or coughing on him. Once, suffering a cold, he went out of his way to spread infection and was pleased to hear some days later that his guard had succumbed to the virus. Mostly, he minded his own business and tried to avoid trouble.
He wasn’t always successful. The room where he spent the most time that winter was on the ground floor of the chancery’s back side; its windows faced the embassy grounds. It had ceilings that were at least fifteen feet high and the windows were accordingly very tall. The bottom of his window was about four feet from the floor. On mild days he managed to open the window a few inches to let in some fresh air. At night he would sit beneath it enjoying the slight breeze and listening to the guards outside laughing, talking, and toying incessantly with the bolts on their rifles. Occasionally someone fired a shot, but given the way they handled their weapons Daugherty assumed that most often it was an accident.
