Mark Bowden discusses the Iranian hostage crisis that began 25 years ago

Twenty-five years ago today, radical Islamic students stormed the American Embassy in Tehran, taking the diplomatic team hostage. The students held 52 hostages for 444 days. Today, several thousand Iranians celebrated the anniversary by burning American flags and chanting, `Death to America.' My guest, Mark Bowden, has written an article for the December issue of The Atlantic Monthly magazine about the Iranian students who took the hostages. He's writing a book about the Iranian hostage crisis. He found that some of the hostage takers are now in the government while others regret their actions. Bowden is also the author of "Black Hawk Down" and has a new book collecting his articles called "Road Work."

In 1979, a grassroots revolution in Iran overthrew the shah's dictatorship. The Ayatollah Khomeini had returned to Iran from exile, and a new revolutionary council set up a provisional government. After the US allowed the shah to come here for cancer treatment, a group of revolutionaries took over the US Embassy in Tehran. I asked Mark Bowden to describe the reaction in the US to these events.

Mark, take us back 25 years ago. What was the reaction in America when Americans were taken hostage in the Iranian Embassy?

Mr. MARK BOWDEN (The Atlantic Monthly): Well, there was at first, of course, a big burst of media attention, you know, know a lot of television and newspaper reporting it was an outrage. You know, the United States Embassy had been overrun by what appeared to be a just sort of ragtag bunch of Iranian students who had taken hostage all of the American diplomats and the Marines and the staff of the embassy. And I think there's an instinctive feeling that most Americans had that we should do something. We should go in there and chase those people out and get our people back.

But, of course, it--on a practical level, it was a very difficult situation for the administration. Iran was a country that was extremely hostile to the United States. We had no military presence anywhere nearby. We really weren't in a position to do much. And then to double--to make it doubly more difficult, there was no--very quickly after the embassy was seized, the provisional government there folded, so there was no one to even negotiate with. So I think Americans were angry, confused, frustrated by what happened.

GROSS: And kind of afraid because suddenly we were the great Satan. I don't think--we've grown used to that but...

GROSS: ...I mean, at the time it was incredibly shocking to see Americans paraded around with blindfolds and being held hostage.

GROSS: Can you talk a little bit about how this was the beginning of what has become a conflict between parts of the West, like the United States, and the more extremist end of militant Islam?

Mr. BOWDEN: Well, it is, and it was--I remember being particularly shocked by it because it was one of those events that changed my understanding of America and its role in the world. I mean, I grew up during the Cold War when, you know, the United States and the Soviet Union formed these two great blocs, and so, you know, we would expect that the Americans would encounter hostility in a Soviet bloc country, but this was now a country that was not in the Soviet bloc, was not a Communist country, and there erupted this sort of vehement hatred of the United States, which was shocking to me, and something that I just didn't understand. I don't think most Americans understood it. And I didn't know enough about Iran or its history to know where it was coming from. But the idea that there were these people who, for religious and historic and cultural reasons just thought of the United States as the source of all evil.

GROSS: Well, the past few years you've made several trips to Iran, and you write that, `Going to Iran now is like visiting bizarre-o-world, a mirror universe in which everything is inverted.' What are some examples of that in the current Iran?

Mr. BOWDEN: Well, I think that the most obvious example are the images all over the city of Tehran. You see American symbols everywhere, but always in--sort of debased and in propaganda displays where, you know, the American flag is in the shape of a pistol or the American eagle is shown crashing in flames. So that's the first and most obvious way. I went over there--the last time I was in Tehran was in August during the Olympics, and here in the United States, you know, I was--as I was leaving, the television here in the United States is portraying sort of one glorious triumph after another of American athletes in the Olympics. And I got to Tehran, and there, you know, they were portraying one American defeat and humiliation after another. It's all a matter of emphasis. And so in those instances where an American would win a gold medal, it would be portrayed as a rare moment when, you know, the United States manages to sort of stave off humiliation. And, you know, things like that start to make you feel like you've entered into a warp where everything is backwards.

GROSS: What does the embassy compound that the hostages were held in look like now?

Mr. BOWDEN: Well, it's right in the heart of Tehran. It's a 27-acre compound and it really is striking. It's a kind of oasis because the city is just a teeming sprawl of 12 million people, very busy, congested, loud, noisy, dirty, and this is a basically 27-acre compound with a pine grove. And what it looks like today is pretty much what it looked like 25 years ago. The main building, the chancery building, is--they used to call it Henderson High. It looks like one of these high schools that was built in the 1940s. It's kind of orange brick, two stories tall, about a block long. A handsome building, but it has been decorated with anti-American propaganda, so on the brick wall all around the outside of the embassy are murals showing things like the Statue of Liberty with a death mask or, you know, again, you know, the American eagle going down in flames or slogans, `Death to the United States' or quotes from Khomeini, "We shall inflict a great defeat on the great Satan." So it's kind of festooned with this anti-American propaganda.

GROSS: What functions are these buildings in the former embassy compound used for?

Mr. BOWDEN: Well, the chancery itself is home to a permanent exhibition of anti-American propaganda, which is very--which I went through, and it's frankly pretty unimpressive. I think I could probably do a better job putting together an anti-American display.

Mr. BOWDEN: Well, there are these sort of papier-mache models of the Statue of Liberty with fangs and, you know, photographs of poor maimed children who are the victims of, you know, bombings or whatever. You know, big cartoonishlike paintings on the walls of Uncle Sam strangling babies and--it's just awful. It looks like--I described it in the story, I think, as something that a bunch of high school students with a bad attitude would put together. But that's the main building. And the compound itself is used as a base for the Revolutionary Guards who are the elite military unit that protects the regime.

The other half of the compound is the headquarters for the Majlis, which is a civilian organization which I compare to the sort of Fascist brown shirts, who are called out to--with sticks and just in by, you know, numbers, I guess, to put down any kind of anti-regime protests that go on, and also are used to enforce the regime's rules and regulations about the way women are allowed to dress. People are prohibited from holding hands, men and women, women and women and--nobody can hold hands, I guess, except for maybe mothers and daughters can hold hands. But, you know,these are the people who are fanatics, civilian fanatics who enforce the regime's rules and regulations.

GROSS: You were able to actually interview some of the people who took the Americans hostage 25 years ago. Were they all willing to talk with you?

Mr. BOWDEN: No, not all of them. Some--I would say even most of them weren't willing to talk to me. It's still a very volatile political situation in Iran, and involvement in the takeover of the embassy puts you in a peculiar position, because it's one of the sort of founding acts of this revolution, and if you're opposed to it, which some of the former hostage takers are, then to speak out honestly about it, you run the risk of being arrested and beaten or put in jail. A lot of the people who were involved would prefer not to talk about it at all just to avoid being put in that position.

Some of the people who took over the embassy remain very religious, highly connected with the regime, very anti-American, so they would just view me as probably a CIA agent or a, you know, military intelligence person, not a reporter, and they wouldn't trust me enough to sit and talk to me. So the people who would talk to me are those who--not all of them, but most of the ones I spoke with were the ones who've sort of put their neck out by publicly criticizing what happened.

GROSS: You spoke to the student who actually came up with the idea of taking Americans hostage in the Iranian Embassy--in the American Embassy in Iran. Tell us something about who this person was then and what they're doing now.

Mr. BOWDEN: Well, Ebrahim Asgharzadeh was an engineering student at Tehran University in 1979, and he had always been--I think he said he'd always been fairly political and, of course, Iran in the year prior to the takeover of the American Embassy had been through this wrenching revolution where the people have risen up and overthrown the regime of the shah, chased the shah basically out of Iran, and were in the process of sort of trying to create a new government. So a lot of young people like Ebrahim Asgharzadeh had sort of drifted away from their study and their planned career path and gotten caught up in the revolution.

He was a--had become a sort of political leader on campus at Tehran University, and he and four other students met in--as part of the small political organization that Asgharzadeh had formed, and were discussing ways of demonstrating or what they should do next, and they actually had a vote over whether to attack the American Embassy or the Soviet Embassy, and they voted and three of this original vote agreed that they wanted to go after the American Embassy, and that's what really started it. So that's who Asgharzadeh was then.

Today he's well-known for having been the instigator of the takeover of the embassy. He is a reform politician who has spent some time in jail for criticisms of the regime, and he's a newspaper editor whose newspaper, amazingly, is still being published in Iran at a time when most reform newspapers have been shut down.

GROSS: Now one proposal was to target the Soviet Embassy instead of the American Embassy because why?

Mr. BOWDEN: Well, because the Soviets represented a godless power that was a threat to Iran. The Soviet Union bordered on Iran. The foundation of the Iranian revolution was extreme Islam, the religious fervor, and so some of the Iranian students who were not Marxist leaning, who were more nationalist, viewed the Soviet Union as the greatest threat to their new country. Most of them, three of the five, viewed, you know, the United States as really being the biggest threat to Iran, and that goes back to a--frankly a rather dark episode in our history where, you know, we interfered with politics in Iran, and I think, you know, we deserve some of the antipathy that we have.

GROSS: This is 1953 that you're referring to when the CIA helped to overthrow Mossadegh, who was the democratically elected president of Iran.

Mr. BOWDEN: Right. And installed the shah, you know, which led to the, you know, next 20 years of Iranian history. So there was a great deal of honest resentment of the United States in Iran, and a growing fear that the United States was going to interfere with this new revolution.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Mark Bowden. He has an article called Among the Hostage-Takers in the December issue of The Atlantic Monthly, and it's about the men and women who took hostage Americans in the Iranian Embassy 25 years ago, and he's currently working on a book called "Guest of the Ayatollah"(ph) about what happened 25 years ago in Iran.

Well, you quote the student who instigated the hostage taking as saying, `Our aim was to object to the American government by going to their embassy and occupying it for several hours.' Well, it was 444 days, not several hours. What did you learn about what the original plan was and, you know, what they really expected to happen?

Mr. BOWDEN: Well, the students were very naive, as students tend to be, and they saw this as just a demonstration right out of the mold of demonstrations that they had seen in Europe and in the United States during the Vietnam War era where college students would take over the dean's office and hold it for, you know, a week or two as a way of publicizing their grievances and what out--this is what these students had in mind. But behind the students were--was a fairly sophisticated organization of mullahs, led by a cleric named Koaniha(ph), who was popular among the students, and I think, you know, if you want to talk about what the motives were, you have to differentiate the motives of someone like Koaniha from those of the students.

Koaniha is in the middle of a power struggle in Iran. What had happened was after the shah left, there was a real wrestling match going on inside of Iran between those Iranian politicians who wanted to create a secular democratic state, a more traditional government, and then there were the mullahs and the religious extremists who wanted something completely different than that. They wanted to try to create this new, holy, Islamic republic. But in their way, in the mullahs' way, was the provisional government that the Ayatollah Khomeini had established when he came back to Iran.

Now I think that someone, that Koaniha, who was sort of the guiding force behind the students, he was less interested in having a demonstration and announcing to the world their grievances. He saw an opportunity to rally public support behind anti-Americanism, to focus all of the anger toward the United States and bring it to bear on this political struggle that was taking place in Tehran. And, in fact, what happened was that the takeover of the embassy, you know, created an outpouring of anti-American demonstrations throughout Iran and put such pressure on the provisional government, which was obligated to protect the Americans who were part of that diplomatic mission, that they resigned the day after the embassy was taken.

So now suddenly these students, who walk into the embassy thinking that they're gonna be there for a day or two and do their demonstration, are in the middle of a raging political storm in their own country. The Ayatollah Khomeini announces that he supports what they've done, elevating them to the status of, you know, national heroes. It was a piece of political theater that tipped the scales in the power struggle toward the mullahs. And so the students found themselves, I think, trapped in much the same way that the Americans who were working at the embassy found themselves trapped in. There was no way for them to walk out after all this happened.

GROSS: Was there any Iranian students who participated in the hostage taking who felt that their efforts were coopted by the mullahs? In other words, that the students were being used by the mullahs?

Mr. BOWDEN: Many of them feel that way today. In fact, many of them felt that way at the time. There were a large number of those who were involved in the initial takeover of the embassy who just left and who refused to stay involved because what was going on was something that violated their own principals. So that what you had left after the first week were the hard-core of those who were willing to play along with this power play in Tehran, and then all the others who they recruited who came from the more fanatical reach of, you know--in the Islamic students' organizations who came in to be guards and to actually make the captivity work.

GROSS: You write about how the leader of this student group who initiated the idea of the hostage taking at the American Embassy met and proposed to his wife during the hostage crisis.

GROSS: What are some of the things you learned about the atmosphere inside the embassy for the students who were the hostage takers?

Mr. BOWDEN: Well, I think that's actually, Terry, one of the most interesting things about this story and, you know, we view things through, you know, an American lens, but if you can imagine being in a country that has lived under the sort of totalitarian heel of someone like the shah for your entire life, and then to have been part of an uprising and national revolution that overthrows this terrible dictator, and here you have, at age 18, 19, 20, an opportunity to take part in creating a new kind of country, so everyone, you know, called themselves brother and sister and there was this wonderful, almost euphoric feeling of possibility at the time and so, you know, love blossoms in such atmospheres. And so you had, you know, inside the embassy, a number of young men and women, you know, living and working together, side by side, month after month after month, and so it's not terribly surprising that romances ensued, and a number of the hostages I met and interviewed met and married, you know, during this whole episode.

GROSS: Yeah. Were the hostage takers able to leave the compound at all, or were they as stuck there as the hostages?

Mr. BOWDEN: No, the hostage takers did leave. They worked in shifts, so they would--you have just basically a regular work day. Clearly, though, for the leaders, you know, this became a full-time occupation, and many of them, you know, told me that in retrospect, how frustrated they were to have suddenly been yanked out of their schooling and their career path and their personal lives and to suddenly been saddled with this tremendous responsibility and--but at the same time, it made them very important people. I mean, if you can imagine, you know, you're a bunch of college students and you decide to make a demonstration, and suddenly you are a player on an international stage and, you know, make--helping to make policy for your country and dealing, you know, in very, very high stakes, the center of a whole lot of press attention and regarded as a national hero in your country. So I think there was a mix of sort of pride, of having been able to accomplish something, as they saw it, you know, terribly important, and also some sense of frustration that it dragged on and on and on, and kept them from maybe what they personally would have preferred to have been doing.

GROSS: Mark Bowden's article, Among the Hostage-Takers, is in the December edition of The Atlantic magazine. A new collection of his articles has just been published called "Road Work."

GROSS: This FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross, back with Mark Bowden. He's best known as the author of "Black Hawk Down." We're talking about his article in the December edition of The Atlantic magazine about the Iranian hostage crisis, which began 25 years ago when militant Iranian students took over the American Embassy in Iran, taking the Americans hostage. The article is based on Bowden's interviews with the hostage-takers. Bowden is writing a book about the crisis.

What are some of the positions of power that the former hostage-takers have risen to in Iran?

Mr. BOWDEN: Well, the two most powerful are a couple who actually met during the hostage-taking and married. One is Mohammad Hashemi, who became the deputy secretary in the intelligence ministry, which is a very nefarious, sinister and powerful organization in Iran. It's like the secret police in Iran. And he was one of the most powerful figures in the regime for many years; just recently stepped away from that and has gone into private business.

He's married to Massoumeh Ebtekar, who is now a vice president of Iran in charge of the environment, who was the most famous to Americans of the hostage-takers because she was raised partly in Philadelphia as a child and spoke fluent, American-accented English. And so she became, in the press conferences and things that the students held during this crisis, the spokesman for them. And so Americans would see this short of chubby-faced young Iranian woman who spoke absolutely perfect American English, you know, denouncing the United States on TV. And it made her, I think, the most notorious and the most hated of the hostage-takers.

GROSS: And who are some of those students who feel alienated or betrayed by the current Iranian government and feel that the revolution was hijacked, that it wasn't the idealistic vision that they had when they participated in the revolution 25 years ago?

Mr. BOWDEN: Well, Ebrahim Asgharzadeh is one. Abbas Abdi was one of the central figures who's now serving a prison sentence because he was a newspaper editor and he published a poll--the results of a poll which showed that 74 percent of Iranians wanted renewed ties with the United States, which so angered the regime that they threw him in jail. Abdi has made efforts to reach out to former hostages and to try to begin to repair some of the damage between the United States and Iran, for which he's, you know, serving a prison sentence.

Mohsen Miramadi--Mirdamadi, rather, was a member of the Maglis, a very high-ranking member of the Maglis, who was one of the founders of the students who took over the embassy. I was scheduled to interview Mirdamadi last December in Tehran. I was in Tehran planning to see him the next day. He was attacked and beaten by one of these groups of, you know, Iranian brown shirts as he was giving a speech at a local university and ended up being in the hospital, and I never got a chance to meet him. But he's spoken out very bitterly about the way that the revolution has turned out in Iran, saying that he felt that when they got rid of the shah that they had rid their country of totalitarianism and now all they've done is create a new kind of totalitarian state.

GROSS: Now a lot of people think that the future of Iran lies with the current students, and that the current students want freedom--or at least more freedom than they have--and they don't want to live in a religious theocracy. Did you speak to any young people who are students now in Iran and ask them about their perceptions of the students who took the Americans hostage 25 years ago?

Mr. BOWDEN: Yes, I spoke to a lot. And most of the people who I met and talked to are embarrassed by what happened in 1979. These are young Iranians. They despise the religious regime that runs their country. They chafe under the regulations that govern their lives--what they can wear, where they can go, what they can say. They're frightened of the regime. There were demonstrations--widespread student demonstrations a year ago in Iran that were violently cracked down on, and a number of the key student leaders from campuses have been sent to jail. This has intimidated young people to a great extent in Iran. So, you know, those who are opposed to the existing regime see the takeover of the American Embassy as a founding example of the sort of pariah status that their country has that they would like to end.

But by the same token, there are also still, you know, religious extremists, young people, as well, who are totally on board with the ideology of the regime and with the notion that the United States represents everything evil in the world and who would, I think, gladly sacrifice their lives and attack the United States if they had the opportunity.

GROSS: Has writing this book--and I know you're not finished with it yet, so you're not done with the process of thinking things through. But is the process of writing this book changing, in any fundamental way, your thoughts about what happened during the Iranian hostage crisis or what the meaning of that crisis has finally been?

Mr. BOWDEN: Well, it's changed my thinking about it in a lot of ways. I mean, I think I felt, as most Americans did, that this was a sort of unprovoked, illogical attack on the part of these sort of crazed, you know, Islamic students in Iran. And, in fact, you know, when you begin to study the history of Iran, the role of the United States in Iran, you can see how logically very sensible, idealistic people could have become enraged at the United States and could have become so suspicious of the United States and its role in the country. So I have a much better understanding of how and why it happened from an Iranian perspective.

I also, I think, have a much better understanding of how much it was political theater; you know, that the taking of the embassy was turned into--it's an active political theater based upon myths that Iranians fervently believe about the United States, in the same way that Americans have myths about people in other countries. And so, you know, there was, I think, a profound level of misunderstanding that's always there between two countries that don't know each other well. And then there were, I think, very clever people who manipulated these myths to accomplish their local political ends in Iran.

So I think I see the takeover of the American Embassy as a much more pivotal event in the history of Iran than anything else; that it's something that basically created the Iran that we face today.

Mr. BOWDEN: Well, the myths at the time were that the United States had this incredible intelligence capability and presence in Iran; that everything that happened that was a problem for the provisional government or for the, you know, revolutionary council was engineered by Americans, whether it was, you know, rebel uprisings in Kurdistan or resistance that they faced near the Soviet border, whether it--they even blamed hurricanes and train derailments, you know, the kind of natural disasters or accidents that happen in any country. Everything was blamed on the United States. And there was also this idea that the United States had this, you know, capability of doing just about whatever it wanted in Iran when the truth was, as I've discovered by working on the story--is that the entire CIA presence in Iran in 1979 consisted of three CIA officers, all of whom were taken hostage in the takeover of the embassy.

Tom Ahern, who had been there, who was the CIA station chief, had been there for only about eight months. Bill Daugherty, the other CIA officer, had been only recruited to become a CIA agent the previous January and had been in Tehran for about four weeks. And Malcolm Kalp, who is the other CIA officer--who was there for four days before the embassy was taken. None of those three men even spoke Farsi. They had no contacts with anybody in the government. They had no capability of influencing anything going on in Iran. But the myth of this American omnipresence and omnipotence was so powerful in Iran that those who wanted to could stir up fears that the United States was planning to overthrow the revolution, was planning to bring the shah back and put him back on the--all of which was just completely out of the question, something that the United States could not have done, even if it had fervently wanted to do so.

GROSS: Mark Bowden's article, Among the Hostage-Takers, is in the December edition of The Atlantic. A new collection of his articles has just been published called "Road Work."

Bowden's comments on Ebrahim Asgharzadeh, the instigator of the takeover.....

What a difference 25 years can make.

Did you speak to any young people who are students now in Iran and ask them about their perceptions of the students who took the Americans hostage 25 years ago?

Hey, I'm pretty pumped, all the guys I spoke with, we all insisted that we get autographed copies! :)

They said it wasn't a problem. :)

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200412/bowden

The Atlantic Monthly | December 2004

AMONG THE HOSTAGE-TAKERS

Twenty-five years ago in Tehran a group of Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy and took hostage the entire American diplomatic mission—igniting a fifteen-month international crisis whose impact is reverberating still. Now, for the first time, many of the leading hostage-takers speak candidly about their actions—which a surprising number deeply regret
BY MARK BOWDEN
.....
Nowadays the grand old U.S. embassy in Tehran looks forlorn, like a hostage left behind and long forgotten. A solid battleship of an office building in orange brick, two stories high and more than a block long, it was once the symbol of America's formidable presence in Iran. Today it still stands in the heart of the capital, facing a wide, busy thoroughfare called Taleghani Avenue, at the front of a leafy twenty-seven-acre oasis, a rare haven from the noisy hustle of this city of more than 12 million.

Long ago dubbed the "Den of Spies" by Islamic radicals, the old embassy building is now garishly covered with anti-American graffiti, banners, and propaganda displays to remind people of the nation's undying disdain for its once favorite ally. The embassy compound is home to the Revolutionary Guards, an elite military unit that reports to the black-turbaned clerics of Iran's authoritarian mullahocracy, and to the basij, Islamic brownshirts, the civilian goon squads that turn out en masse and at a moment's notice to demonstrate on behalf of the regime and to help put down those who engage in public displays of dissent and "immorality," such as women whose scarves do not fully cover their hair, or young people who hold hands. The former embassy itself serves as an anti-American museum, with a grim, ugly permanent display called "The Great Aban 13th Exhibition," commemorating one of the most important dates on the modern Iranian calendar.

Aban 13 corresponds to November 4, the date on which, twenty-five years ago, scores of Iranian students scaled the compound walls and took hostage the entire U.S. diplomatic mission, setting off a tense fifteen-month standoff between the United States and Iran. It was one of the founding events of the Islamic Republic, and its geopolitical repercussions are still being felt throughout the world.

The old embassy is supposed to be an official shrine to that bold act of national defiance, which defined for the world the glorious 1979 revolution, a kind of Iranian counterpart to America's Boston Tea Party—but more central and significant. Yet in the four times I went to the embassy during trips to Iran in the past year, it was empty of visitors.

A bookstore just outside the entrance, which was once known for selling anti-American literature and reprints of the thousands of secret embassy documents seized in the takeover (the infamous "spy den documents"), was vacant when I first saw it in December, its racks empty, but nine months later appeared ready to reopen as a bookstore for children. The slogans and spiteful artwork that had been spray-painted on the embassy's brick outer walls by angry crowds during the tumultuous hostage crisis had faded—including an image of the Statue of Liberty with its face portrayed as a death mask and a sign in English that said "DEATH TO THE USA."

This article is viewable only by Atlantic subscribers. If you are already a subscriber, and have previously registered for access to the Web site, please log in above.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.