Subic kept talking. Hall overheard the sergeant say, “Well, I can take you and show you.”
Marines Sickmann and Persinger were bound next to each other. They were approached by an English-speaking Iranian who had a cameraman with him. He asked them their names and what their jobs were.
“We’re pizza runners,” said Sickmann.
“We work for the laundry department,” said Persinger. “We clean laundry, and this guy”—nodding toward Sickmann—“he gets pizzas for all the marines. In fact, I’d like a pizza right now.”
They speculated on how long they would be held. Some felt it might be until Christmas. Sickmann, who had heard that his captors were students, assumed that like American college students they would all be finishing their school year next May, so he predicted it might last until then.
Dinner was served in shifts in the residence kitchen. Young women in jilbabs threw frozen steaks into frying pans, cooked them until the outsides were brown, and served them—inside, the meat was still frozen. Richard Queen was not allowed to use a knife, so he picked up the slab of meat and tried to gnaw off a corner.
“Would you like a beer?” a young man asked him.
“Yes, I would,” said Queen.
The young man left and never returned.
After the moment captured in the much-reprinted photo of Bill Belk, he had been marched across the compound to one of the yellow cottages.
“We are going to teach you,” his captor told him.
Belk wondered what that meant.
“We will teach you about God,” the young man said. “We will teach the CIA not to interfere with our country.”
Uncomfortable with his hands tied behind his back with nylon rope, Belk fidgeted for about three hours, listening to the din outside. He kept asking his guards if they would give him one of the cigarettes in his shirt pocket.
“Don’t speak!” the guard said.
He persisted, and finally one of them removed a cigarette, put it between his lips, and lit it. Belk almost choked trying to smoke it. He had no way of taking it from his mouth. He did the best he could, but after a few puffs he spit it out. At one point, early in the evening, somebody fed him a spoonful of ice cream. Later he was escorted to the toilet, where his hands were unbound and, still blindfolded, he did his best to hit the bowl. When he finished his hands were retied and he was returned to the chair.
Belk was miserable, hungry, and increasingly worried about what would happen next. The nylon rope cut into his wrists. He finally managed to fall asleep in the chair.
Charles Jones finished the day in Bruce Laingen’s upstairs bedroom with some of the marines. He flopped on Laingen’s bed and fell asleep, snoring contentedly. Hermening watched him with admiration. How could he just fall asleep? Now and then a big, bearded Iranian would step into the room. In one hand he carried a club, which he tapped menacingly against his other hand and glared down at his American prisoners.
When Kupke’s questioning ended, he was taken to the ambassador’s residence and deposited on the floor in an upstairs bedroom, blindfolded and tied hand and foot. He turned on his side and tried to get comfortable on the carpet, but he was bruised and sore. His head was pounding with pain and it felt like his jaw was broken; he could not completely close his mouth.
In the middle of the night he was awakened by an Iranian.
“Can I get you anything?” he was asked.
Kupke asked for some water and was given some.
“I would give anything for some aspirin,” he said. His guard fetched him two tablets, then left. Kupke had forgotten to ask for more water, so he put them in his mouth and chewed them.
Queen and Limbert got beds of their own. After his long, harrowing day, Al Golacinski slept fitfully on the floor under his chair.
At the Foreign Ministry, Bruce Laingen, the chargé, dozed on a couch in the huge formal dining room.
Marine Kevin Hermening woke up at about three in the morning in the bed alongside two fellow hostages. He lifted his head and looked around and was surprised to see about twenty of the students in the room in various postures of sleep, some of them in chairs, others sprawled on the floor. It was like a big sleepover.
Downstairs, Joe Hall woke up at five. It took him a second or two to focus. Around him were guards and beneath the blanket one of his hands was still bound with cloth.
My God, he thought. It wasn’t just a nightmare!
14. Okay, Go Ahead and Shoot
There was to be little sleep for Bill Daugherty, who was taken early in the evening from the ambassador’s residence by a student with a .38 caliber pistol, who called out his name and told him that he was wanted for questioning. The novice CIA officer was escorted across the embassy grounds back to the chancery, up the steep staircase of the back entrance, and then up the central stairway to the second floor. He was taken into his own office, still bound and blindfolded, and leaned gently against the wall. It was well after midnight but crowds were still celebrating outside. He was exhausted and could still taste tear gas deep in his nose and throat.
He had more reason than most of the newly taken hostages to fear questioning. Daugherty had been assigned to Tehran only six months after joining the agency. He did not speak Farsi, and had been in Iran for only fifty-three days, barely long enough to figure out what his job was and how to get it done. Each of the spy agency’s employees at the embassy had a cover, a regular State Department job, but their identity was an open secret in-house. Everybody knew who worked in the suite of offices on the west end of the second floor. It included a small reception area manned by the agency’s secretary and the offices of Tom Ahern; Ahern’s senior field officer (who had left on home leave only a few weeks earlier); Malcolm Kalp, the newly arrived field officer; and Daugherty. There was a large vault in Daugherty’s office, which was ordinarily closed and locked. He figured there were only three obvious ways his role could become known to his captors: they would have to discover some written record of it in the embassy files, one of his colleagues would have to tell them, or he would have to break down and tell them himself. The only one of the three he could hope to control was the last.
The chancery had been ransacked. Already the Iranian intelligence agents at the core of the takeover, led by Hashemi, had collected all the intact documents they could find, boxed them up, and carted them off the compound for scrutiny. They planned to stay for only a day or two, so it was important to get this done quickly. They had been disappointed to discover the disintegrator in the coms vault. What unrecoverable mysteries did it contain? Had the Americans managed to destroy all the evidence of their counterrevolutionary plots? There was no hope of restoring the blue powder left by the disintegrator, but perhaps there was a way to reassemble the piles of paper that had been fed through the shredder. Surely anything the Americans had taken such pains to destroy must contain valuable information.
Daugherty tried to prepare himself for what was coming. He was new to the spy agency and to Tehran, but he wasn’t innocent. He knew most of the embassy’s secrets, the small string of Iranian spies on the agency’s payroll, the secret efforts to independently replace the Tacksman sites. He knew procedures, codes, and methods…a lot that his captors would like to find out. How should he handle himself? He was worried, but he was also determined not to act disgracefully. At the same time, there was no point in trying to play the hero. He was supposed to be a diplomat, that was his cover story, so he would act like one. The truth is he was so green that he could as easily assume the identity of a foreign officer as any other. He would engage his questioners, attempt to challenge them for this unwarranted outrage. It would not be an act.