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CHAPTER 1

THE ASSIGNMENT

You’d think I would remember the exact moment in which I was offered Tehran, Iran, for my first overseas tour as a newly certified field operations officer for the Central Intelligence Agency. It was, after all, an offer that changed my career, not to mention my life, and somehow it doesn’t seem possible that this detail has fled my memory. But it has. I have no recollection today of who made the offer, although the logical person would have been the chief of the Iran Operations branch in the Agency’s Directorate of Operations (DO). I do know that I did not hesitate a second to say yes. For the most part I have not regretted that decision, although for some years afterward a certain effort was required to keep it and the events that followed in some sort of reasonable perspective. After all, it is rare, even for an organization in which risk is an everyday part of the business, that a newly minted case officer spends his first tour in jail.

It was only by happenstance that I entered the Agency in the first place. In the spring of 1978 I was in the midst of my last year of doctoral work at the Claremont Graduate School, and although graduation was only eight months away, I had given no thought to life after graduate school. My preference was for public service rather than a job in the private sector, but I wasn’t sure I could find a position in California that would allow me to utilize my education. Constitutional law and U.S. foreign policy were my majors, with a minor in U.S. government. My particular interest was the relationship between the Executive Branch and Congress, specifically in the constitutional law of foreign policy and the war powers. I had no interest in working for the State Department and even less in being a civilian employee at the Pentagon. There was always the possibility of a position on Capitol Hill, but I didn’t want to deal with the egos that invest that venue. Truth be told, I had enrolled in graduate school simply because I was interested in these subjects and still had nearly three years left on the GI Bill, and I did not really want to leave Southern California. I was content with the notion that I would not find a career in my field of expertise. Rather than dwelling on future employment, however, I was focusing on surviving the next eight months. There was coursework to finish, written and oral doctoral exams to pass, and a dissertation to polish and defend. The postgraduation future was still far away.

Nevertheless, when there came a surprise opportunity to send a résumé to the regional CIA recruiter, I didn’t pass it up. I knew what the CIA was and had a good idea of what it did, having read a number of books on espionage in general and the CIA in particular. Although I was intrigued by the work and believed the Agency was making a valuable contribution to the nation, I had never envisioned myself joining up. But if I really was going to go to Washington, this would be the organization to work for. The initial interview with the recruiter went well, and in May I was contacted by Jim, a senior officer in the DO’s Career Management Staff (CMS) in Washington, who invited me to an in-depth interview.

Jim was staying at the Marina Del Ray Hotel. I arrived at the appointed hour, unsure what to expect but dressed in a rare (and detested) coat and tie for that important first impression. Jim didn’t look like a spy, or a spymaster for that matter—although I didn’t have the slightest notion what a spy should look like—but the setting did generate a sense of the clandestine. The drapes were closed tightly, and the medium-wattage table lamp lent an air of secrecy to the affair. For most of two hours Jim asked questions and, when appropriate, provided explanations or background information. I thought I had done well, but Jim said only that he would be in touch. I left, assuming that it would be weeks, if not months, before I heard anything further.

I was not particularly concerned or anxious in any case. Summer school was coming up, and I was committed to reserve duty as the assistant officer in charge of an air traffic control unit at Marine Corps Air Station El Toro; and there was always my dissertation. Odds seemed long that the Agency would actually accept me, and it wasn’t anything I had my heart set on, anyway. To my surprise, though, Jim called the very next day and asked if I could again make the hour-long drive to Marina Del Ray, as there was one other issue he wanted to discuss. I didn’t mind the drive, but I wasn’t thrilled about hauling out the coat and tie again.

In this second interview Jim laid out the basics of a special program managed by CMS in addition to the standard Career Training (CT) program entered by the great majority of DO officers. This CMS program was designed to place a few selected first-tour officers overseas as quickly as feasible, reducing the amount of time the trainee spent in Washington, where one of the favorite pastimes among its more knowledgeable denizens is playing “spot the spook.” Participants in this special program (of which there were but one or two per class, if that) were given a more solid background, or “cover,” making it harder for observers to discern their true employment. Graduates of the program were expected to be less detectable to host government security services and hostile intelligence services operating in the same locale. The increased operational security was expected to translate into more effective recruiting and handling of sensitive sources. The program sounded fine to me, and the possibility of participating in it served to jump-start my interest in an Agency career. I had been attracted to the Marine Corps in part because of its reputation as an elite, action-oriented, can-do organization, and now I appeared to be on the verge of entering another 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 standards and eliminated the previous unique ties that had bound the United States more to the shah personally than to the country of Iran. One more factor impelled the Iranians to sustain the American presence in Iran: hostile neighbors to the north and west.⁵

Naas understood that Iran’s new prime minister, a secular politician named Mehdi Bazargan, and his key advisers (also secularists for the most part) recognized the potential threats posed by the USSR and Iraq and wanted to retain Iran’s traditional security arrangements with the United States. Of the two, the USSR was deemed the primary menace. Faced with potential aggression from these foes, Bazargan believed that an American presence would deter any adventurism. Naas held a series of discussions with Bazargan and his advisers in which the Iranians made this point “very clear.”⁶ And in fact, these fears were borne out more than once after the U.S. embassy was captured in November 1979 and the United States was no longer Iran’s ally.

Soon after the embassy takeover in November 1979 the CIA acquired indisputable intelligence that the Soviets were dusting off contingency plans for a military occupation of the northern third of Iran contingent on hostile action by the United States or any other perceived threat to Soviet interests. This was followed by equally convincing intelligence that the Red Army was conducting training maneuvers north of their joint border with Iran. By August 1980 intelligence assessments indicated that the Soviets were training for a large-scale invasion of Iran with the Persian Gulf a potential objective. In a report to the president examining the potential for a political “break-up of Iran,” Brzezinski noted that the United States “can’t really influence the outcome of an Iranian civil war [should one eventuate], while we do know the Soviets have started training for military operations directed at Iran.”⁷

Nor were U.S. government officials the only ones concerned about a possible Soviet move into Iran. A prominent scholar who had long followed U.S.-Iran relations met with presidential assistant Hedley Donavon in late January 1980 to discuss the same issue. In the meeting Professor James Bill appeared to Donavon to be “extremely apprehensive” regarding Soviet intentions vis-à-vis Iran. Bill expressed concern that the Soviets might use Iran’s support for Islamic resistance fighters in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan as a “provocation” to move into Iran. If the Soviets did move, Bill projected an airborne assault on Iran’s oilfields.⁸

Following the earlier short-lived embassy takeover in February 1979, the Carter administration had reduced the embassy staff to about sixty, including State officers, the CIA station, military attachés and the MAAG cadre, administrative personnel, and Marine security guards.⁹ The Marines were to serve in their traditional role of furnishing internal embassy security and protecting classified materials and U.S. government property. External security—the defense of the embassy grounds and compound from intrusion—was a different matter. The guardianship of every American embassy is vested in the host government, usually in police units, military forces, or, in some locales, contracted private security firms. But after 14 February, “security” at the American embassy in Tehran was courtesy of a ratty, unkempt, undisciplined group of Iranian “revolutionaries” who roamed the grounds at will with automatic weapons, making everyone uncomfortable.¹⁰ Only at the end of the summer was anything resembling a legitimate guard force placed at the embassy gates. When the demonstrators came to the gates on 4 November, these “guards,” to the surprise of no one in the embassy, melted away into the crowds.

By March 1979 the Tehran station consisted of case officers rotating in and out on a temporary duty (TDY) basis. But NE Division was looking ahead to the time when the station could again be staffed with permanently assigned personnel and functioning as a station should—recruiting agents and collecting intelligence. And that was the state of affairs when I met DC/NE in Langley on that spring day.

The deputy division chief’s decision to assign me to Tehran was, I suppose, a matter of balancing the plusses and minuses. On the positive side of the ledger, my special program had kept my cover clean: I had no visible affiliation with the U.S. government, much less with the Agency or any of its usual cover providers. I did have military service—eight years of active duty with the U.S. Marine Corps—but between those years and my entry on duty with the Agency I had spent five and a half years as a university student. Moreover, it was just eight years since the end of the draft and four years after the conclusion of the Vietnam War, and most male government employees at that time possessed a military background. So this was no reason for a hostile intelligence or security service to suspect automatically that a particular U.S. government official was an intelligence officer.

Second, the nature of my military experience and education weighed in my favor. The majority of my military service was in the aviation community, first as an air traffic controller, and then flying with Marine fighter-attack squadrons, including a Vietnam tour. On leaving active duty in 1974, I returned to academia, earning a B.S. in social sciences from the University of California-Irvine. Next it was off to Claremont for the Ph.D. Thus, at age thirty-two I was not the usual career trainee.

If the positive aspects of my assignment to Tehran were evident, the negatives were at least equally so: I had no actual operational experience in the espionage business; I spoke not a word of Farsi; I knew nothing about either modern Iran or Persian history and had no knowledge of the country’s culture and customs; and I had only limited knowledge about the organization that was sending me overseas. These shortcomings may make my assignment to Tehran seem like an act of madness, but in the weighing at that time, the scales apparently tipped to the positive side. My lack of Farsi was mitigated by my cover assignment as the embassy’s political-military affairs officer. In that position I would be meeting regularly with officials in the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Defense, individuals who usually spoke excellent English. In any case, I was pleased with the assignment and confident that I would accomplish what was expected of me.

Near the end of the FTC, however, the offer of the Tehran assignment was withdrawn. When the acting chief of station (ACOS) was offered an inexperienced first-tour officer, he not unwisely rejected me. His position was that Tehran was a hostile operating environment for intelligence officers and their contacts. As most Iranians considered anyone in the U.S. embassy to be CIA, even innocuous encounters with an American official could imperil an Iranian. For recruited agents (who do the actual spying), discovery by Iranian authorities while meeting clandestinely with a CIA officer was a death sentence.¹¹ The ACOS maintained that our Iranian assets deserved to be handled by experienced officers with proven track records. Further, any operational compromise whatsoever would unquestionably carry severe repercussions for U.S.-Iranian relations, which the Carter administration was striving mightily to preserve and improve. I was offered another station as an alternative. I understood, accepted, and even agreed with the ACOS’s decision at the time; and years later its wisdom is still clear to me.

I graduated from the FTC on 7 June 1979 and was assigned another position in NE Division. But in late June or early July I was again offered Tehran. A permanent COS had finally arrived, and when my candidacy was raised with him, he said yes. Later, he told me that given a choice between a well-trained, aggressive, and smart first-tour officer (all of which he apparently assumed I was, sight unseen) who wanted to be there and a more experienced officer who would rather have been somewhere else, he would take the first-tour officer. I thought then, and have ever since, that the COS made a courageous decision—I probably would have decided differently had I been the chief. He earned my respect even before we met, and it has never waned. He was a professionally demanding boss but also scrupulously fair, possessing the highest standards of personal and professional integrity. I was fortunate to be working for him, especially at the beginning of my career.

I accepted the Tehran assignment on the spot, never giving it a second thought. When I am asked today what in the hell I was thinking when I took that assignment, my answer is simple: that’s where the action was. I was always disappointed that I never made it to Vietnam as an enlisted Marine, and even more so that I couldn’t do more when I was there as a carrier aviator. As the junior officer and least experienced aviator in the squadron, I was not fully combat qualified when we arrived on station and so was limited for some time in the types of missions I could fly. This last circumstance left me perpetually frustrated and, more than a few times, unreasonably angry; Vietnam was to have been my war, probably the only one I would ever experience, and I wanted to make the most of it. It didn’t happen that way. Tehran seemed to be a second chance to serve in an assignment that was potentially more meaningful and demanding than routine operations. I was elated at the thought of going to a high-visibility post of significance to policymakers.

Also, I remembered a story recounted to my CT class in the early days of our training by Don Gregg, a senior Agency officer.¹² In the course of making several points, Gregg told us what things had been like after he joined the Agency during the Korean War. While in training, his class was asked if they would be willing to parachute into North Korea and undertake secret missions. Gregg told us that he and his classmates responded in the affirmative without bothering to mull it over, even for a minute. Why? Because if that is what your country and your Agency asked you to do, you did it. There was nothing to think over. That’s what the business was about and that’s what you did when you made your living serving your country.

When the day came to depart for Tehran, I made the standard courtesy call on DC/NE. He ushered me into his office, chatted a minute or two about my itinerary, and wished me well. Then he walked me to the door, shook my hand, looked me in the eye, and sagely advised, “Don’t fuck up.” It was a heartwarming send-off.

I arrived in Tehran on 12 September 1979 and began the first of what turned out to be only fifty-three days of freedom. I worked at least eight hours a day as the political-military affairs officer and found that I enjoyed that assignment almost as much as my “real” job—which I was doing in the evenings and on weekends. It made for long days, but it was all interesting and fun. I also discovered that if I knew little about Iran, I knew even less about Iranians.

My entire exposure to Iranian history and culture, beyond the evening television news, came from a three-week area studies course at the State Department and what I had picked up during five weeks on the desk reading operational files and intelligence reports. Virtually all my insights into the Persian mind and personality came from a lengthy memo written by John Stempel, the recently reassigned political counselor, that described in detail (the accuracy of which I would have ample time to confirm) how Iranians viewed the world and why and how they thought and believed as they did. It did not take much effort to discern that even friendly and pro-Western Iranians could at times be difficult for an American to deal with or comprehend.

The thrust of Stempel’s memo was neatly summed up by U.S. Navy captain Gary Sick, the Iran action officer on the National Security Council (NSC) staff under President Carter, in the book he wrote about the hostage crisis: “Iranians assume that a simple forthright explanation of events is merely camouflage concealing the devious intricacies of ‘reality.’ Thus, to Iranians, any significant political, economic, or social upheaval in Iran must be traceable to the manipulation of external powers. As such, events are perceived as neither random nor aimless; rather, they must be understood as purposeful and integral to some grand scheme or strategy, however difficult it is to fathom.”¹³

My first encounter with the Iranian elite several weeks after my arrival served as a memorable introduction to this cultural phenomenon. I was meeting with an Iranian woman who, with her husband, owned a successful construction company. This couple was wealthy and highly educated, well traveled and experienced in foreign cultures. This background notwithstanding, the woman insisted that the Iranian government was directly controlled by the CIA—a common perception in Iran ever since the 1953 coup. She was positive the chief of the Iranian desk at CIA headquarters talked every day to the shah by telephone to give him his instructions for that particular day. She asserted that the U.S. government had made a deliberate decision to rid Iran of the shah for some unknown reason. Since the U.S. government had not, in her scenario, decided who should replace the shah as ruler, Khomeini had been installed as the temporary puppet until the CIA could select a new shah. Once the Agency had made that decision, it would manipulate events to place the lucky man on the Peacock Throne. She held no edifying insights into what the CIA’s plans were for Khomeini once his utility to the American government had been exhausted.

I was both fascinated and stupefied by this exposition. The woman’s unshakable theory did not encompass an explanation of why the United States would have permitted the bloody street riots in 1977 and 1978. Nor did it explain why, if the U.S. government (or the CIA) wanted the shah to leave as early as 1977, he was not just ordered to go, thereby avoiding the enormous problems visited on revolutionary Iran. To an American it was just plain nuts; to an Iranian it made perfect sense.¹⁴

My initial weeks in Tehran passed quickly. The chargé d’affaires ad interim, a courtly and highly respected career Foreign Service officer named L. Bruce Laingen, was both gracious and enormously helpful in seeing that I was included in high-level meetings with Iranian officials, as was air force major general Phillip Gast, head of MAAG.¹⁵ Both of these exceptional gentlemen generously ensured that I participated in substantive meetings at the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Defense, and at the Iranian General Staffs headquarters. I worked essentially full-time during the day on my cover duties, which were much more interesting than onerous and dealt with issues of genuine import; in the evenings, I reverted to my “true” persona as a CIA case officer. I was thirty-two years old and at the top of my form, physically and, especially, mentally, and during those fifty-three days on the streets of Tehran I reveled in it all. On 21 October, however, I realized that my euphoria would probably be short-lived.