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 attaché, 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.”
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.