444 days in Iran reverberate still

On Nov. 4, 1979, the unthinkable happened. Anti-American university students from around Iran took control of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. All these years later, a powerful new book tries to make sense of the seemingly inexplicable, with the overarching question reading something like this: Why did nobody halt the embassy takeover?

There is no question about the consequences: Jimmy Carter, the White House occupant, lost his grip on the presidency. Except for the takeover of the embassy, Carter might have served a second term in the White House and might have won international respect for the United States within the Islamic world through carefully crafted diplomacy. With Carter out and Reagan in, world affairs took an entirely different course that can be traced back to Nov. 4, 1979, and the 443 days that followed.

Twenty-six years later, the siege of the embassy might seem like irrelevant history to those who know little or nothing about it. As talented journalist Mark Bowden shows in "Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam" (Atlantic Monthly Press, 680 pp., $26), the 444-day standoff involving 52 American hostages is anything but irrelevant.

Bowden's painstaking reconstruction of those days, followed by a where-are-they-now update, together suggest that so-called U.S. military pre-eminence will never halt determined insurgents fueled by half-blind religious fervor. U.S. presidents since Carter, their civilian advisers and their military commanders should have learned their lessons in Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq and on Sept. 11, 2001. But what happened in Tehran from late 1979 until early 1981 should serve as the primary lesson.

After all, the Iranian students lacked training, lacked effective weaponry, lacked worldliness, lacked financing, acted without a plan — and yet rendered the entire U.S. government and military helpless.

So many characters in one book can often sink narrative storytelling. Yet Bowden focuses on a couple dozen hostages, a half-dozen captors, a few U.S. military commandos, Carter, Reagan, the deposed Shah of Iran, the nation's spiritual leader Ayatollah Khomeini, plus plenty of walk-ons — all without causing confusion.

One of Bowden's accomplishments is conveying simultaneously the often boring daily-ness of the hostages' lives, while building melodrama about whether they will undergo torture, die or survive to return to loved ones across the United States.

Author appearance


Mark Bowden will read from "Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in

America's War with Militant Islam," 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Kane Hall,

University of Washington, Seattle; free (206-634-3400 or www.ubookstore.com).

Some of the hostages received relatively benign treatment. Some suffered physical abuse and psychological grillings. The variations depended on numerous factors, including how the mostly politically naïve student captors perceived the role of each captive within the U.S. embassy, whether each captor believed in a gentle or harsh doctrine of Islam, and the level of defiance shown by the prisoners. At one extreme, nobody died in captivity. On the other hand, no captive came through the 444 days unscathed. Some picked up their lives successfully, others never recovered fully.

Because the book is so fully sourced, the credibility level seems high. Bowden draws conclusions from his extensive research, conclusions that might become controversial but that surely provide lots of grist for thought.

The failure of the Central Intelligence Agency and other covert information-gathering offices within the U.S. government to understand the embassy's vulnerability is difficult to comprehend. Such failures have continued through Sept. 11, 2001, and beyond, Bowden implies.

As for the diplomatic efforts undertaken after Nov. 4, 1979, Bowden goes easy on Carter, considering the president to have been placed in a nearly impossible situation. Bowden is critical of the diplomatic community, spread among many nations, for the failure to isolate Iran. After all, Bowden notes, "Diplomats serve at the pleasure of the host nation, and when they are no longer welcome they can be readily expelled. Holding America's emissaries hostage was a crime not just against those held captive and their country but against the entire civilized world. President Carter deserves credit for his restraint, and the world community deserves blame for failing to respond adequately to the insult."