In the Shadow of the Ayatollah by William Daugherty

Author:William Daugherty
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781612516547
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
Published: 2016-07-19T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

7 – 22 NOVEMBER 1979

Tehran

I spent two more days as a guest in the Mushroom Inn with about forty others, and then I was moved into one of the four TDY bungalows. For the next eight days I was rotated among the bungalows for no reason that I could discern. We were no longer blindfolded, but our hands were continually bound, usually by strips of cloth. On occasion, and just for the hell of it, the Iranians would come in with handcuffs and delight in using them. There was no reason for this, but it did underscore our defenselessness. While this bit of chickenshit harassment was frustrating, life was easier after one of the Marines showed me how to get out of them without the key.

During this time I was taken back up to my office for another interrogation similar to that of the first night. I was blindfolded, placed against a wall, and questioned by the same interrogator. I maintained my cover story, and this man, to my surprise, never pressed to disprove it although he was clearly skeptical. I was politely threatened with summary execution a couple of times, but I did not take it seriously because the interrogator was so casual about it that it sounded like a pro forma exercise.

What was truly frightening were the huge crowds that gathered almost nightly outside the embassy compound walls and were frequently driven to near-hysteria by the demagogic speakers. I think most of us feared that the mobs, whipped into a frenzy, would break into the compound and slaughter the lot of us.

On Saturday, 17 November, Khomeini made two significant announcements: Black Americans and women were to be released because they had already been sufficiently “oppressed” by American society; and any remaining Americans who were determined to be “spies” would be placed on trial before the Revolutionary Courts. Only the return of the shah, proclaimed the ayatollah, could prevent such trials.1 In keeping with Khomeini’s edict, three African Americans and one woman staff member were put on a plane to Germany the next day, and nine more followed on the twentieth. The Iranians now held fifty-three Americans, including one remaining African American and two women who were not released with the others.

On the night of 22 November I was taken back into the chancery and placed in the COS’s former office, which was now vacant save for a desk, a chair, and a foam-rubber pallet on the floor. I would remain there until after the first of the year. The room, at the front of the chancery and overlooking the wide boulevard that ran before the compound, was sufficiently close to the street to make the collective roar of several hundred thousand demonstrators a frightening experience for the first several nights, and unsettling thereafter. Eventually I would become so angry and frustrated that I would dream of flying low in an F-4 down this broad expanse of concrete when it was jammed with a half-million screaming and chanting Iranians—and dropping canister after canister of napalm.

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