Guests Of The Ayatollah – Mark Bowden, 2006 ★★★

So Much for Diplomacy

For many of us, Orwell’s 1984 is arriving later than advertised. For Iran, it came five years early.

In the newspeak of the Islamic Revolution, “freedom” meant total adherence to rigidly-interpreted doctrine, “peace” was squashing anyone who thought differently, and 66 Americans became “guests” when their nation’s embassy in Tehran, Iran’s capital, was attacked on November 4, 1979.

For most of them, liberation came after 444 days. For the country they were trapped in, it is taking much longer.

Mark Bowden’s examination of the Iran Hostage Crisis is, for better or not, focused almost solely on the personal experiences of people who were there. What emerges are several different, subjective tales of the experience, and a lens on how one of the world’s most civilized lands lost its mind and soul in a righteous fury that would not be controlled.

Mostly-peaceful demonstrations like this outside the U. S. embassy in Tehran became common in late 1979, especially after the deposed Shah was allowed into the United States for cancer treatments.
Image from https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3809923

“Like most of the great turning points in history, it was obvious and yet no one saw it coming,” Bowden explains about the revolution which deposed the U. S.-backed Shah in early 1979 and installed a cleric, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, as its new dictator. As the year went on, Bowden notes the future of the country was very much up in the air, with everyone waiting to see what kind of country Khomeini wanted:

The revolution was shaping up as a struggle between leftist nationalists who wanted a secular, socialist-style democracy and young Islamists like these who wanted something the world had not yet seen, an Islamist Republic.

To sway Khomeini, a few dozen young turks calling themselves “Muslim Student Followers of the Imam’s Line” came up with a bold idea: seize the embassy of a major superpower, thus proclaiming Iranian independence from foreign interference. Initially, there was talk of seizing the Soviet embassy, which would have ended the Revolution in nanoseconds. The U. S. Embassy proved a safer target.

As Bowden describes it, the attack was more confused than violent, with demonstrators rushing the gate using bolt-cutters hidden under chadors to get at embassy personnel huddled inside. Some wore placards saying: “Don’t be afraid. We just want to set-in,” but once inside, they brandished weapons and began beating and tying up the Americans.

After taking over the embassy, the students paraded the captive personnel for the cameras. Was future Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the man at center clutching blindfolded communications staffer Jerry Miele? Bowden examines this mystery.
Image from https://www.bbc.com/news/av/stories-50391547  

“We’re diplomats, they don’t just murder diplomats,” one of them, communications staffer Rick Kupke, recalled thinking in shock.

The student demonstrators didn’t kill any hostages; in the next two weeks they even released 13 of them, all but one of the African Americans and all but two of the women – both as a gesture of good will and agitprop for the ever-present cameras that transformed the ordeal into a media circus. The other 53 would stay much longer, under constant threat of trial and execution for spying.

Embassy staff included three CIA agents: Thomas Ahern, William Daugherty, and Malcolm Kalp. According to Bowden, the work they were doing was neither particularly insidious nor very far along. But in the eyes of the students, the embassy was a nexus for anti-Islam intrigue, and every embassy staffer was already guilty.

Bowden explains how some hostages angrily played along with this idea, thinking they were being transparently sarcastic in doing so:

“You know the wheat that grows and that you use to make bread?” [Warrant Officer Joe] Hall explained, warming to the joke. “Well, mold is something that happens to the wheat that makes it no good. I did all that. I was the CIA agent in charge of wheat mold.”

The young Iranian absorbed this intently – indeed, the CIA plot to destroy Iranian crops would become part of the list of “revelations” later claimed by the hostage takers.

Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, was dictatorial but, according to Bowden, not so much brutal as lazy and corrupt, allowing some reforms. "Historians say that revolutions come in a country not when things are at their worst but when they begin to improve..." Bowden writes.
Image from https://billofrightsinstitute.org/essays/jimmy-carter-and-the-iran-hostage-crisis 

For others, interrogations were less whimsical. Tom Ahern, the CIA station chief, discovered several of his Iranian contacts had been exposed through documents the staff left undestroyed. At least two Iranians were executed, low-level contacts being cultivated for general information who were accused of assassination plots and the like.

It wasn’t what he knew, but what they wanted him to confirm, that mattered to Ahern’s interrogators, he came to discover. The embassy proved a treasure trove to the hostage takers, not of enemy information, but for making accusations of collaboration against political opponents, especially members of the “provisional government” then nominally in charge of the country as well as other moderates who argued for sending the Americans home.

For all of Bowden’s focus on the dreary minutia of the hostages’ captivity, not to mention his drawn-out account of a Delta Forces rescue operation that collapsed at the starting line, it is this element of Guests Of The Ayatollah that stuck out for me, how handy a tool it became for oppressing not only embassy staff, but the Iranian people:

The members of the recently resigned provisional government were now being accused of working secretly for the CIA, and the satanic agency was accused of orchestrating everything from natural disasters to civil disturbances to running a troublesome insurgency in Kurdistan. The feverish effort under way to patch together and decipher all of the embassy’s files would in the coming months “confirm” such links and send many to prison or execution.

Executions under Iran's new regime were common, and the hostages were frequently threatened with them. Above, a famous Pulitzer Prize-winning photo by Jahangir Razmi of Kurdish prisoners being executed in August 1979. Razmi kept his identity hidden for decades.
Image from https://www.pulitzer.org/article/anonymous-no-more

The hostages were also put in prisons after the U. S. rescue mission met with fiery failure in the desert. The so-called “students” who invaded the embassy, many of whom had not seen a classroom in years, varied in type. Some were sympathetic, even kind, but most were cruel.

Masoumeh Ebtekar, nicknamed “Mother Mary,” became a familiar face at press conferences, and often lectured the hostages about the evilness of their country and the goodness of their captivity. “She had the smug self-righteousness of her cause,” Bowden writes.

Other hostage takers employed threats and regular physical abuse. At one point, several hostages were assembled for a mock execution, later sheepishly explained away as an attempt to placate some bored guards.

The ostensible reason given for holding the embassy personnel hostage was that Khomeini wanted the Shah returned to stand trial, but when the Shah died in Egypt in July 1980 the hostages stayed in Iran.

Angry Iranian crowds like this were a constant presence outside the captured embassy, their chants constantly audible to the blindfolded hostages as they were worked up by both captors and clerics. "Don't you feel sorry for these people?" the hostages were asked.
Image from https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/world-news/beatings-mock-executions--inside-25949198

Isolated, kept in small rooms, forbidden to talk to each other, the hostages lived lives of deepening despair. Michael Metrinko, a political officer who emerges as a hero in the book, takes on his captors with bluntly expressed contempt in perfect Farsi, and relishes the anger it provokes. But as the months go on, he finds himself losing spirit:

He was going to sit in this miserable cell until the day he died and it didn’t matter to a soul, his life was forgotten and meaningless, all his dreams were illusions, and when he was dead and gone the great idiot pageant would keep on rolling right along, heedless, pointless, and cruel.

Bowden does this with a lot of the hostages he interviewed for this book: Rather than quoting them directly at any length, he synopsizes what they told him. This is called “narrative journalism,” a style Bowden has likened in approach to novel-writing. I found it annoying. Too often, Bowden shapes their words to fit the narrative, rather than letting their different shadings add complexity to a broader work.

Only Bruce Laingen, the lead U. S. emissary who happened to be visiting the foreign ministry office when the embassy was seized and was kept there under looser guard, is quoted at any length in the form of diary extracts. For most of the hostages, keeping a journal was not possible as they were forbidden to pass notes.

President Jimmy Carter prepared to address the nation on April 25, 1980, to announce the failure of a military operation to rescue the hostages. Eight Americans and one Iranian were killed in the mission.
Image from https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-01-21/iran-hostage-crisis-a-hot-potato-for-reagan

Bowden spends time on U. S. President Jimmy Carter, another hostage of the situation. In fact, according to Bowden, Carter’s centrist presidency was sunk solely because of the hostage crisis.

From the beginning, Carter avoided harsh rhetoric, trying to appeal instead to Iran’s practicality and humanity. Seeing this, the hardliners around Khomeini enjoyed offering up deals that were then withdrawn. Late in the negotiations, they even put a gag order on what the White House could say about what they were doing to their “guests:”

In other words Iran, having kidnapped American diplomats, was entitled to imprison them until it decided upon the terms of their release, and the United States should agree not to publicly complain. Carter acquiesced to even these galling demands. A message essentially complying to them was drafted and sent to Iran but to no avail.

Bowden credits Carter for being the best man for an impossible position, keeping the hostages alive by avoiding conflict, but it is easy to look past this and see Carter as the perfect foil for militant Iranians, using his acquiescence to whip their country into a totalitarian state.

Author Mark Bowden interviewed on C-Span2 in 2006. Best known for Blackhawk Down, his account on a failed U. S. military operation in Somalia, he specializes in non-fiction accounts of war and crime.
Image from https://www.c-span.org/video/?192800-1/depth-mark-bowden

Iran remains a global pariah over 40 years later, but many of the hostage takers would pay a more personal price. Two of the three men who led the embassy takeover, Ebrahim Asgharzadeh and Mohsen Mirdamadi, would ironically become prisoners of the regime themselves for supporting democratic reforms.

Another supporter of the embassy seizure, Alizera Alavitabar, tells Bowden: “It kept us unified and together in a time when there were conflicts in the society, but the cost of it was high.”

Other hostage takers, like the ever-zealous Ebtekar, would disagree. This Orwellian nightmare remains a utopia for her, and for others, too. Bowden’s book rambles a fair amount but lands its main point: More than just a few dozen Americans were taken hostage that November day.