One night, as he lay beneath the window reading, a breeze from the cracked window was bothering him so he shifted the curtain in an effort to block it. From outside, it looked as though he were sneaking a peek outside, which was strictly forbidden. As he resumed reading the door to his room flung open and five or six armed guards stomped in, expecting to catch him in the act.
“What’s the problem?” he asked.
“You are looking out,” said one of the guards in his tentative English.
Daugherty looked up at the window, three feet over his head.
“I am not. I’m reading.” He laughed.
The men pulled him to his feet and approached him with handcuffs and a blindfold. He knew the drill. When a rule was broken he would be cuffed, blindfolded, and left to sit that way for hours. This time, innocent, Daugherty fought back. He pulled the lead guard over to the window and showed him how the breeze moved the curtain.
“I didn’t do this,” he shouted, trying to batter his way through the language barrier. “You just saw the wind blow the curtain.”
He decided that if he was going to be punished this time, he would earn it. He squared off to resist them and just then a gust of wind moved the curtain. The lead guard, looking disgusted, waved the others away from Daugherty and they left the room. He was so pumped up with adrenaline from that encounter that he walked back and forth for hours trying to let off steam.
Once his imaginary games got him in trouble. He was given a pencil and paper by Sheikh-ol-eslam so that he could write a letter home, and after he finished the letter he played with the pencil, sketching out plans on large sheets of paper for an imaginary airport, the terminal, runways, the concourses, the tower, parking lots, garages, the firehouse, and maintenance hangars for three or four airlines. It was something to occupy his mind, and when he was finished he balled the papers up and later threw them in the trash can in the bathroom.
He didn’t think about them again until a suspicious and angry delegation of guards showed up in his room. They accused him of drawing some kind of coded diagram. It took a moment for him to figure out what they were talking about, and when it occurred to him Daugherty laughed.
“Let’s look at this logically,” he said. “First of all, if I’m going to leave messages for the other guys, I’m not going to do it on paper this size and sort of halfway wad it up and stick it in a trash can in a bathroom that you guys use. Do you think I’m an idiot?”
The looks on their faces told him yes, because in their eyes this is precisely what he had done. He realized that part of the problem was that these young Iranians had never traveled, so they were not familiar with airports. His drawings made no sense to their eyes. Daugherty explained and answered their questions until they were satisfied. They gathered up the drawings and left the room. He heard no more about it.
When he was staying in this first-floor chancery room, Daugherty was visited by a representative of the Red Cross, a slender, clean-cut young man about his age, either Swiss or French, who seemed angry when he entered the room. Daugherty was surprised. Having been trained to expect the conditions American POWs experienced in North Vietnam, he had no severe complaints about his own treatment, but this Red Cross man was appalled. He asked how long Daugherty had been isolated.
“Since the first days of the takeover.”
The man sat on the floor and took notes.
“Have you been abused physically?”
“Yes.”
The man’s disgust was evident, and the two or three guards listening to the interview frowned heavily. The students were keen to be seen as benevolent and this was clearly off message. But they didn’t interfere with the interview. The Red Cross man thanked Daugherty before he left and expressed his anger over what he had heard.
Daugherty worried how his comments might affect people in the United States. He was worried they might conclude conditions in the embassy were worse than they really were, which would be hard on them. He wondered if he had done the right thing.
In mid-February, he was moved to the chancery basement. The room looked like it had once been part of a larger space, now halved by a flimsy-looking wall of acoustic tiles fitted to a wooden frame. The wall ran straight into a large air vent, about two feet by two feet, and he discovered that by standing with his ear to that corner he could hear what was going on in the next room. To his delight, he heard the voice of Colonel Tom Schaefer, the defense attache, and soon the two men were whispering to each other, the first contact either man had had with another American in months.
“When are we getting out of here?” Daugherty asked.
“Let’s make it interesting,” said Schaefer, who proposed a twenty-five-dollar prize for whoever picked a date that came closest to their release. They jotted their predictions on pieces of paper and then passed the notes to each other through the vents. Daugherty picked the seventeenth of April. Schaefer picked the fifteenth of November. Already the air force colonel believed there was no hope for their release until after the American presidential election.
They had to be careful. Daugherty was convinced the guards outside his room were listening, hoping to catch the two violating the rules.
Every time Daugherty moved into a new space, the moment he was left alone he conducted a thorough search. In his new room he found an inch-long stub of pencil and a small piece of broken glass, about twice the size of a fingernail, with one very sharp edge. He put the glass shard to work on a corner of the tile wall behind his sleeping pallet and soon pried a tile loose. He poked around inside the wall and cut loose the tile to Schaefer’s room.
“Check the loose tile in the corner,” he whispered to Schaefer the next time they had a chance to speak.
After that, they limited talking directly to each other to urgent questions and left messages inside the wall. Daugherty used blank pages he tore from the backs of his books. In this way they carried on a running dialogue. Daugherty tended to stay up late into the night and sleep long into the day. After his evening meal and his long “walk,” he got in the habit of sitting with his back against the wall with his legs drawn up to support a book. If anyone peeked in, it looked like he was reading. He would then write notes to Schaefer. When the lights went out, he pried loose the tile beside his pallet and slipped the note into the empty space between the walls. He would retrieve a return message from Schaefer when he woke up—the colonel was an early riser.
Neither man had much news to share, but the ability to communicate greatly buoyed their spirits. Daugherty wrote to Schaefer that when he was in Vietnam he noticed that military officers who became prisoners of war continued to receive promotions. “By the time we get out, maybe you’ll be a general,” he wrote. He made another wager, this one for twenty dollars, that they would be released before Easter, which the colonel accepted…and won. Daugherty asked where they would be taken when they were released, and Schaefer speculated that they would be flown to Wiesbaden, Germany. It was a nice thing to think about.
Sheikh-ol-eslam entered Daugherty’s room one night wearing the same open-collared shirt, blue jeans, and sneakers he had worn throughout the interrogations. He announced that a video crew was coming in to take pictures and interview him. When he left, Daugherty whispered into the vent, “Did you hear that?”
“No,” said Schaefer.
“They’re going to videotape me for something.”
“There’s only one answer you give,” said Schaefer.
“What.”
“No comment.”
When Sheikh-ol-eslam came back with the crew, lugging a big video camera, Daugherty noticed that they had placed and videotaped a hand-lettered sign on the outside of his door that read, “CIA Person.” There were ten other Iranians who had come to either assist or watch—ever since Daugherty’s admitted spy status, he had become an object of intense curiosity. Daugherty stayed on his sleeping pallet as they readied the equipment.
At last, Sheikh-ol-eslam asked, “How long have you been with the CIA?”
“No comment,” Daugherty said.
“Were you a spy here?”
“No comment.”
