His questioners were persistent but not abusive. The daily sessions continued over weeks. Eventually they stopped blindfolding him, which he saw as a bad sign; it suggested that they were not afraid of his knowing who they were. Over time, they grew more irritated and hostile. He was not telling them what they wanted to hear. They told him that they knew he was lying and tried to coerce him by keeping him awake all night, but then they would leave him alone for hours during the day. Metrinko had a fortunate facility for dozing. He had always been able to put his head back and nod off. It was a talent that had gotten him in trouble in meetings from time to time, but now it served him well. Whenever he was left alone, even briefly, he would nap. It was enough to foil their amateur efforts at sleep deprivation. Metrinko had not been trained in methods of resisting interrogation, but he found he could manage quite well. The sessions were a welcome break from staring at the walls. He was able to figure some things out from the questions they asked. For instance, he was heartened by the realization that his captors had no access to Laingen or Tomseth, who had left for the Foreign Ministry before the takeover. They were asking him questions that both men could and would have answered readily, but which Metrinko could not. That meant the chargé and his assistant had either gotten away or were being protected by the provisional government (he did not know that it had resigned).
Like Koob, Metrinko went through his entire history in the foreign service with them, from high school in Scranton to Georgetown, to his work in Turkey for the Peace Corps. He talked their ears off. He gladly told them about the two years he had spent teaching English at a literacy training center outside Tehran, how he had joined the foreign service five years earlier, and then had spent two more years in Turkey, as a staff aide, before moving to Damascus. He had been in Tabriz since 1977 and had come to Tehran only after bozos like them had closed the consulate there. Of the things he could be open about he spoke freely. He was especially glad to tell them about the lovely dinners and drinks, cocktails and wine—especially the cocktails and wine—he had shared with the families of prominent religious leaders. Still angry at the Taleghani brothers for what he thought had been a setup, making sure he was at the embassy to be taken along with the others, Metrinko talked freely about the late ayatollah, about how strongly it appeared that he had been set up and murdered by their pious religious bosses. What his captors saw as divinely inspired leadership, Metrinko saw as simply another ugly political faction using treachery and violence to prevail. He tried very hard to avoid mentioning the names of his friends. He would talk only about those he knew had already fled the country. After a session he would sit alone and go back over every question and answer, examining his performance and analyzing the questions they had asked to figure out what was going on. In a sense, he was still doing his job.
In the beginning, Metrinko was kept with a large group of his colleagues on the floor of the consulate waiting room, but in mid-November he was isolated in a chancery basement room. It was a very small, windowless storeroom that was about ten feet long and narrow enough so that when he held his arms outstretched he could touch both walls. When he held his hands over his head they touched the ceiling. The air was stale and there was a fluorescent light overhead that was left on continuously. He was given an air mattress that pretty much covered the floor space.
This is where he would spend the next five months.
20. “R” Designation
Despite their clumsy and sometimes comical methods, the students did make some headway toward sorting out the embassy and learned things that would have dire, even fatal, consequences for some Iranians who had cooperated with the American mission. They suspected from the start that Bill Daugherty, the former marine flier, was a spy, and believed wrongly that he was the station chief. He was the one whose office on the east wing of the chancery’s top floor had the biggest safe, and under duress on the first night he had relented and opened it. They knew from preliminary interviews with several hostages that that part of the chancery was CIA.
Daugherty was treated like any other hostage in the first days, shuffled from room to room in the staff cottages, where a marine showed him how to slip a piece of wire into the lock of his handcuffs and pop them open at will, a great relief. He wore the cuffs whenever the guards were present, but when he could, such as at night with his hands under a blanket, he would slip them off. On the evening of November 22, he was taken from a cottage and placed alone in the office of Tom Ahern, his boss. Everything had been removed from the room but a desk, a chair, and a foam-rubber pallet on the floor. Its windows overlooked the front of the chancery and Takht-e-Jamshid Avenue, which seemed permanently jammed with demonstrators. Their angry din echoed in the empty space beneath the room’s high ceiling, rattling Daugherty, who fantasized about easing down over the city in his old F-4 and painting the crowded avenue with a long string of napalm.
After a few days alone in this space, Daugherty was taken for six interrogations over the next two weeks. He was prepared for them, and had given a lot of thought about how to handle himself. Years earlier he had taken a training program for marine aviators who might find themselves in a North Vietnamese prison camp and had been through exercises designed to help resist hostile interrogation—he had even been locked for several hours in a small metal box. He had already decided that his circumstances in Iran did not require him to adhere to the military code of “name, rank, and serial number.” Since he was in Iran ostensibly as a foreign service officer, not a spy, he was determined to act like a State Department employee, that is, he would talk at length and try to engage his captors in dialogue. He had two personal guidelines. He would do his best not to reveal secrets or to say or do anything that might make life harder for his fellow captives.
For each of the sessions he was taken to the top floor of the chancery. The last three sessions were in the bubble. Each time his interrogator was Hussein Sheikh-ol-eslam, the former Berkeley student with the missing front tooth. The work seemed to be wearing Sheikh-ol-eslam down; he looked exhausted, with big bags under his eyes. With him were two others, a large Kurdish man and a high-strung young man who spoke little but who had also spent some time in the United States.
Sheikh-ol-eslam asked most of the questions. For the first two nights, blindfolded and handcuffed in his chair, Daugherty was harangued. He was shown grotesque photographs of dead men stretched on slabs at the morgue, their bodies mutilated. There were books filled with such pictures, all purported victims of SAVAK and, by proxy, the CIA. It seemed very important to Sheikh-ol-eslam and the others that Daugherty understand that their revolution, the widespread arrests and executions that followed, and this seizure of the U.S. embassy were morally justified. So Daugherty deliberately challenged them on it, to waste time. He argued with them and asked questions that he knew would set them off. He stuck to his story of being a foreign service officer. The three did their best to maintain the atmospherics of an interrogation session—each claimed to have been interrogated by SAVAK—but they were not especially good at it. Their problem was not getting their subject to talk but to get him to stop talking. Daugherty led them into long conversations about American life and values, taking advantage of any opportunity to turn the discussion back to the familiar safe ground of home.