Guests of the Ayatollah

Sheikh-ol-eslam grew increasingly angry as each of his next ten questions met with the same response. He then turned to the camera and spoke at some length in agitated Farsi. Then he and the whole crew picked up the camera and left, slamming the door behind them.

He was in that same room, listening at the air vent, when Schaefer was questioned by Ebtekar. Schaefer had dubbed her “Miss Philadelphia.” He endured repeated lectures from her about America’s centuries of barbarity and exploitation, the genocide of native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, the slaughter of Vietnamese. Daugherty was listening in one night while Ebtekar lectured Schaefer about the inhuman, racist decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“The Japanese started the war, and we ended it,” Schaefer said.

“What do you mean, the Japanese started the war?” Ebtekar asked.

“The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, so we bombed Hiroshima.”

“Pearl Harbor? Where’s Pearl Harbor?”

“Hawaii.”

Daugherty heard a moment of silence. Then Ebtekar asked, “The Japanese bombed Hawaii?”

“Yep,” said Schaefer. “They started it, and we ended it.”

Thus ended the interview.

2. We Know What Route That Bus Takes

CIA officers Ahern, Daugherty, and Kalp were not the only ones still being questioned repeatedly months after the takeover. Most of the higher-ranking members of the mission were hauled back for repeated interrogation.

John Limbert was awakened in the middle of the night, blindfolded, and marched from the Mushroom Inn through the cold to the chancery. This time he was taken to a room in the basement, where he was placed in a chair. The blindfold was tied sloppily so out of the bottom he could see a man in a black ski mask and Sheikh-ol- eslam’s reflection clearly in the glass. There were other Iranians in the room whom Limbert could not see but could hear. Their pens scratched furiously across paper whenever he spoke. Again, it seemed to Limbert that his captors had read a book about interrogation and had set the stage for this session carefully, trying to intimidate him, but their technique fell short. It was inauthentic. He did not consider himself to be a brave person, and he could readily imagine atmospherics alone that might terrify him, but this didn’t. He, too, had some experience with the literature of captivity and interrogation, and he knew from his reading of Solzhenitsyn that the right way to survive was to play dumb.

Sheikh-ol-eslam started with the same questions Limbert had answered weeks before.

“Who have you met with?” and “What did you discuss?”

The embassy political officer gave the same answers. He wondered why they didn’t just go through his Rolodex and ask him about each person listed, which would have made more sense. This way, asking him to remember names, gave him a chance to protect certain people. By marriage, he had extended family in Iran, but he never mentioned their names, although they were all listed in the Rolodex. When they asked him for an address, including his own, he made one up, knowing full well that the correct addresses were available to them. It all seemed ridiculously inept and he couldn’t take it seriously.

“Tell me about your agents in Kurdistan,” Sheikh-ol-eslam demanded.

Limbert smiled involuntarily.

“I can see you smiling at that,” Sheikh-ol-eslam said.

Limbert couldn’t help himself. It was like living in Wonderland. Limbert understood the reasoning behind the question about his “agents” in Kurdistan. There had been steady fighting in the northwestern part of Iran with Kurdish rebels. So of course Limbert, a high-ranking devil in the den of spies, would have “agents” there. When he smiled at the question, that became further evidence of its truth. It was groupthink, and it was unassailable.

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” he said.

“How do you communicate with your agents in Kurdistan?” Sheikh-ol-eslam asked.

“I don’t.”

“We know you communicate by radio.”

“I don’t know anything about radios.”

“Then how do you communicate?”

“I don’t know what you are talking about.”

He asked Limbert when he had last seen one of the prominent Kurdish leaders, and the embassy political officer said he had never met the man.

“Look, I don’t know anything about Kurdistan,” Limbert told Sheikh-ol-eslam.

Sheikh-ol-eslam lectured Limbert in Farsi. They knew he had friends in Kurdistan and that he had visited there. These things were true and Limbert admitted them. But he had not been to Kurdistan in seven years, and certainly not since he had come to work at the embassy, and his friends had nothing to do with the disturbances there. But just the admission that he had friends there seemed the only part of what he said that Sheikh-ol-eslam heard. He had caught Limbert in a lie. If he had something to hide, he must be guilty.

“It’s just not true,” Limbert said.

“You know what we do with spies,” Sheikh-ol-eslam said. “We can shoot spies.”

“You can do anything you want to me.”

The fear of being executed that had gripped him during the first two days had receded. It was there, but it had become background noise, a constant. Sheikh-ol-eslam’s reminder was unnecessary and didn’t alarm Limbert at all. If he felt anything, it was curiosity. He was so bored during the day that a session like this was a welcome break. The whole situation grew more and more irritating. What ate at him was not simply being held captive, his lack of freedom, his inability to see or communicate with his family, or even the uncertainty. All these things were, of course, deeply troubling, but on another level Limbert felt professionally disappointed—in himself and in his colleagues.

How could they all have been so blind? Just weeks before this had all begun, Limbert had shepherded around Henry Precht, director of Iranian Affairs for the State Department, on his last visit. They had gone to see Ayatollah Montazari, the leader of Friday prayers, and the ayatollah had asked who else they were planning to see. Precht named some of the people on his itinerary, all of them old-line nationalists, and Montazari had suggested that he add to his calendar the weekly prayer meeting at the University of Tehran. Limbert later warned that they would be wading into an unfriendly ocean of Muslims, but Precht liked the idea. So they went, accompanied by a representative of the Foreign Ministry, parking several blocks away from the university and walking in with the crowds. Limbert was content with a spot well outside the large tentlike enclosure where the prayer meeting was held, where they could see and hear at a relatively safe distance, but the Foreign Ministry man insisted they go all the way in. “My job is to get you two into the Friday prayers,” he had said. They had some trouble getting past the armed guards at the front gate but were eventually let in after their minder somehow convinced the young guards that they were distinguished guests from the nation of Senegal! Never mind their white faces. Their escort warned them to avoid speaking English inside. When the meeting got revved up, the crowd began chanting slogans. Someone would step up to the microphone, scream something into it, and then everyone else would repeat it. Limbert and Precht felt compelled to shout along, so they found themselves chanting in Farsi the usual condemnations, including one that went, “Death to the Three Spreaders of Corruption, Sadat, Carter, and Begin!”

“Didn’t that last one say something about Carter?” Precht whispered.

“Henry, just chant and don’t ask questions,” Limbert told him.

Their ministry escort was throwing himself into the work, red-faced with effort, rhetorically raining down the wrath of Allah on America and Israel and all their works, and when they were done he turned to them, the two official representatives of the Great Satan, and asked sweetly, “Would you care to join me for lunch?”

Moments like that had lulled Limbert, had lulled them all, into thinking that the hatred and malevolence was just rhetoric, that polite officialdom was somehow going to continue to control this whirlwind.