In the Shadow of the Ayatollah. William Daugherty
highly selective organization through an even more demanding program.
In August I flew to Washington for testing and interviews, including a polygraph. The only troubling part was a language aptitude test the first morning. Jetlag had left me sleepless the night before, and I actually dozed off during the test. The ability to learn foreign languages is essential to an overseas operations officer, and I was concerned that a poor showing would sink my chances. Everything else, including the polygraph, went well, however, and I departed Washington in an optimistic mood, a state of mind justified when, in October, Jim called and asked if I could join the January 1979 class. I could.
I entered on duty with the Central Intelligence Agency the morning of 8 January 1979, receiving the oath of office in a safe house in the Virginia suburbs from Jim’s immediate boss, with Jim looking on. We then drove through a light snow to CIA headquarters to complete the paperwork. Standing in Jim’s second-floor office in C Corridor, looking through the window at the snow dusting the inner courtyard, I was struck by the tranquility of the scene. I thought of this picture often in later years, and it was the image I recalled as I left headquarters for the last time in September 1996. The next morning, feeling odd at being introduced in alias, I joined the new CT class that had also entered on duty the day before, but sworn in as a class at headquarters.
For the next four weeks we shared our introduction to the CIA and the espionage business, lunched together, hit Friday night happy hours at various watering holes, partied on Saturdays, brunched on Sundays, and made lifelong friends. And then, full of piss and vinegar, we left Washington for the Agency’s primary training facility three hours away to begin the Initial Operations Course. This training period lasted another four weeks; on the last Friday my CT classmates headed back to headquarters to experience six months of “interims,” eight-week rotational assignments with two operational desks and one analytical office in the Directorate of Intelligence. At the end of interims, my classmates would return to the remote training facility for the Field Tradecraft Course (FTC), sixteen weeks of intense instruction and field practicum concluding in their certification as operations officers in the Directorate of Operations.
But I didn’t go with them; my program meant forgoing interim assignments and remaining at the training facility as a student in the next FTC. I spent a President’s Day long weekend at Chincoteague on the Chesapeake Bay and then met my new classmates on Monday morning. This was the class that had entered the Agency immediately prior to mine; they had just finished their interims and were returning for the FTC. The class had been together for a year and had bonded closely, as CT classes do; it was at first awkward for me and, perhaps, for some of them. But there were also eight “internal” DO employees joining the class, experienced officers who had been serving in operations support or non-operational assignments and had been selected for the FTC without moving through the CT program. We “outsiders” were grouped together for instruction and we bonded in our own way.
The FTC was challenging and intense, requiring long hours and hard work. Our instructors handed out frank but friendly criticism in response to honest mistakes, and other types of criticism when the mistakes were due to a lack of thought or effort. But it was also a hell of a lot of fun, made more so by the developing friendships with classmates and the positive teaching attitudes of the instructors. Many of the staff eschewed the traditional teacher-pupil relationship, instead interacting with the students more as colleagues working together in a mutual endeavor. This not only enhanced the learning experience but also turned many of the instructors into friends. This burgeoning professional collegiality did not in any way lessen their willingness to let us know in rather explicit terms when we royally screwed up. But it did inspire most of us to work harder for our mentors.
In all, the FTC was much more enjoyable than I had imagined it would be, and, rather to my surprise, I discovered that I possessed a modest talent and some instinct for operations work. I enjoyed it so much that I factored a tour as an instructor into my long-range career planning. Eleven years later, after serving as a CT recruiter, I returned to the training facility as a member of the instructor cadre and had the great pleasure of training many of those whom I had recently helped to hire. And to my joy, several of my former instructors, now retired, were back teaching in the FTC on contract. All of these elements melded to make this tour the very best of my Agency career. But in 1979, that pleasure lay far in the future.
There was one major advantage—and likewise, one related draw-back—to my special program. The advantage was graduation, certification as a field operations officer, and a full-grade promotion just six months after joining the Agency while the other CTs labored nearly eighteen months in training. The negative aspect—which actually came to be a blessing in disguise later in my term of captivity—was that I went overseas with an astonishingly small knowledge of the DO and how it did its business. By not sitting on operational desks, not writing cables to the overseas field stations, and not following actual operations in progress, I missed out on a chance to learn a great deal. But the program designers knew this, of course, and had always anticipated that graduates of the program would eventually catch up with their classmates. Our first chief of station (COS) had to be aware of this shortfall, of course, and willing to accept some initial limitations in return for the advantage of having a good officer in deep cover.
Despite my lack of experience I managed to do well in training, even against my veteran colleagues. I was particularly captivated by the stories told by the instructors from the DO’s Near East (NE) Division and by the challenging situations found in the Middle East; I decided that I wanted my home base in NE. Just at that point, during a Saturday visit to headquarters, the deputy chief of NE (DC/NE) raised the possibility of assignment to Tehran, currently among the highest national priorities in the intelligence community, even though I possessed no academic knowledge of or practical experience with anything Iranian.
By the time of this conversation in the spring of 1979, the Tehran station was in the midst of coping with postrevolutionary Iran. The shah of Iran had fled the country on 16 January, and soon thereafter—on 1 February—Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile in France to oversee a government founded on his perception of a fundamentalist Islamic state. Also of import to later events, U.S. embassy and station personnel had been taken hostage by Marxist guerrillas for several hours on 14 February 1979, in what came to be called the St. Valentine’s Day Open House.1 This event triggered an almost total drawdown of embassy and station personnel, along with a reduction of active-duty U.S. military forces in Iran from about ten thousand to a dozen or so, divided between the Defense Attaché’s Office (DAO) and the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG). It did not, however, generate any sentiment at the highest levels of the U.S. government for disrupting or breaking off diplomatic relations with Iran. In fact, it strengthened the Carter administration’s determination to reconcile with the Provisional Government of Iran (PGOI). Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs (NEA) Harold Saunders explained that “following the 14 February takeover we made a basic decision that Iran was so important that we should maintain a presence there.”2 For the president’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the “central strategic objective” for the United States was to “help Iran preserve its national integrity and independence.”3 There were humanitarian concerns as well, as expressed by Undersecretary of State David D. Newsom: “We particularly wished to maintain a consular presence to be able to assist Jews, Bahais, and other minorities in danger to leave Iran.”4
Although the United States took the initiative with the PGOI to retain a U.S. diplomatic presence, the Iranian leadership did not object. In what must have been a difficult dilemma, they understood that many Iranians, especially the religious fundamentalists, no longer desired an American presence in Iran, but neither did they want the Americans completely gone. Numerous multi-billion-dollar military sales and assistance programs, as well as equally costly civilian construction projects, had been left hanging from the shah’s era, and there remained a range of issues to work out between the Americans and the new regime. Charles W. Naas, director of Iranian affairs at State between 1974 and 1978, and deputy chief of mission (DCM) in the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1978–79, witnessed the transition from the shah to the PGOI in early to mid-1979. As he saw it, Iran’s new leaders wanted to maintain a relationship with the United States, but only if it conformed with accepted diplomatic