Eventually he was led back out to the hall and a gas mask bag was pulled over his head. He heard someone being beaten in the room behind him.
Golacinski was on the floor with them, blindfolded again, his head still ringing, when he saw out of the bottom of the blindfold that one of the Iranians was unscrewing a wall socket.
“We’re going to burn you,” he said. They were still trying to force someone to open the safes for them.
Golacinski spoke up to his colleagues in a loud voice, “If any of you can open the safes, open the damn safes!”
Everyone still refused. Golacinski was taken into the vault and ordered to open them.
“None of us can,” he said. “All of the combinations were written down and they have been destroyed. They burned them all.”
In the midst of all this conflict over the safes, a group of young Iranians showed up with food—bread and eggs and pickles. It was strange; one minute Hermening had a gun pressed to his head and in the next an Iranian was offering him an egg salad sandwich. How was he supposed to feel like eating?
He refused the food and was taken to one of the offices down the hall. The door was shut behind him. When the bag was taken off his head he faced several protesters seated in the office chairs and on the desk. The office had been ransacked, the drawers pulled out, pictures were crooked on the walls. Framed photos of President Carter and Secretary of State Vance had been thrown to the floor and their glass covers smashed. He thought it was his turn to be beaten and his tough marine mask crumbled. He was instead a frightened nineteen-year-old, and he started to cry.
“I don’t know the combinations!” he pleaded. “I’m just a security guard!”
One of his captors was clearly in charge. He told Hermening in English that unless he was more helpful, the others were going to be “turned loose” on him. The marine fought to free his hands so that he could fend off the blows, but apparently he had managed to convince his questioner that he knew nothing. He was not assaulted. Instead, he was led downstairs.
“We want to see where you work,” the Iranian told him.
On the foyer floor downstairs he saw the American flag, scuffed and dirty. One of the protesters was sitting in a chair at the front entrance guard post wearing a marine helmet. Scattered around were the half-burned newspaper torches the protesters had used to battle the tear gas. He was taken into Gunnery Sergeant Mike Moeller’s office, where earlier he had been working on the meal accounting. Hermening showed them the money box and the papers he had been working on and explained what he had been doing. Then they took him to the guard post’s electric switchboard, which controlled locks for various portions of the building. They had been unable to open a door that led to the east-side hallway on the first floor. They told him to push the right buttons to release the locks. Hermening reached under the switchbox, where they could not see his hands, and yanked out the wires that connected the switches to the electric locks. Then he pushed buttons at random. Of course, nothing happened.
He looked up with a confused expression. “It’s always worked before,” he said.
11. Gaptooth
Kupke’s pockets were emptied of cash and jewelry and he was taken down the hall to Laingen’s office, where he had the distinction of being the first American hostage to meet Hussein Sheikh-ol-eslam, a skinny young man with a dreamy, distracted manner, a thick unruly mop of curly black hair, and a full black beard, a radical filled with the absolute certainty of divine purpose, whose occasional sweetness itself was in service of a brutal righteousness. He was missing his left front tooth, and the hostages, who would come to know him well, called him “Gaptooth,” or “Snaggle-tooth.” Because he spoke perfect English, he would become for them the most visible member of the students’ leadership. In the early seventies he had studied at the University of California, Berkeley, a center of student radicalism in America during the anti–Vietnam War era. Sheikh-ol-eslam had digested the fervent rhetoric of those activist years, the rants against the “tyrannical,” “racist,” “imperialist” American establishment, and now, back in Iran, where there had been a real tyrant to oppose, he had taken part in something the old fire-breathers at Berkeley had only dreamed about—an actual revolution. And here, at his mercy, were the very agents of American imperialism denounced in that hyperbolic campus rhetoric. He would make the most of it.
Outside the tall windows it was growing dark; Kupke figured it was about five o’clock.
“Who do you work for?” Sheikh-ol-eslam asked.
“I work for the State Department,” Kupke told him.
“Why didn’t you surrender with everyone else?”
“I was destroying documents.”
“Why were you destroying documents? What were you hiding?”
“Nothing. Those documents were the property of the United States,” Kupke told him. “It’s our job to destroy them before letting them fall into your hands.”
The questioning went on. Clearly, the circumstances of his capture, hiding out, and destroying documents made Kupke and the others in the vault particularly suspicious. Sheikh-ol-eslam asked where he had been hiding when the others were taken from the vault. Kupke, afraid that the students would find the weapons on the roof, said that he had crouched behind the incinerator. It occurred to him that there was information in the vault that might reinforce the idea he was a spy. When he had been working in the Sinai outpost, he had obtained two sets of passports, one for passage into Arab countries and the other for traveling to Israel—Arab nations would not let anyone enter whose passport had been stamped in Israel.
“You know, eventually you’re going to find a lot of IDs in one of those safes, both Arab and Israeli,” Kupke said. “And that doesn’t mean I’m a spy. It just means I was working and passing through the Sinai Desert on both sides.”
Sheikh-ol-eslam listened and nodded with evident disbelief.
With men grabbing both his arms, CIA station chief Tom Ahern was led down the littered second-floor corridor to his office. How did they already know which one was his? Ahern figured somebody in the first hours must have started helping these thugs. He was alarmed but not terribly surprised. He remembered a conversation he had shortly before leaving on this assignment, with an agency friend who had just returned from Tehran. He had asked how much he might count on the staff there to protect his identity.
“If they bring everybody in the embassy staff out and they line them up against the wall and they say, ‘Now, we want to know who the CIA people are,’” Ahern had asked, “are my embassy colleagues going to protect me?”
His friend had laughed.
Ahern was pushed into a chair, his blindfold was removed, and the first thing he noticed was a file folder on his desk that he had overlooked. He was the one who all morning had been most concerned about destroying sensitive material and, indeed, he thought he had rounded up everything of his own, but there, sitting on his desk, was an informal report he had written the day before to “Edward J. Ganin” (a code name for CIA director Stansfield Turner) under his own cover name, “Donald C. Paquin,” and with his title “Station Chief, Tehran.” It was a routine summary for headquarters of everything he and his agents had been doing, and his assessment of what was likely to happen in Iran, nothing very dramatic or important (and, as time would show, mostly wrong) but under the circumstances a very damaging document.
In it, he described the four months he had been in Iran as a period of “elbowing and maneuvering for position” among the country’s various political factions, and predicted “the gradual erosion of Khomeini’s personal authority.” This would lead, he had written, to a period of disorderly—sometimes violent—competition, with no single contender possessing enough guns or popularity to prevail. “Things could be very different if the military chooses sides,” he had written, “but they are still thoroughly intimidated. Discipline is poor, professional élan practically nonexistent, and no prospective leaders have yet emerged who look as if they can restore institutional pride.”