Guests of the Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis

 

Guests of the Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis  by Mark Bowden

The are few international events over the last fifty years that are remembered with as much infamy as the Iran Hostage Crisis of 1979-1980.  I was fairly young at the time and wasn’t familiar with the intricacies, yet I distinctly remember the anger and sorrow of my fellow citizens.  Before November 4, 1979, I would guess most Americans couldn’t find Iran on the map. Nor were they familiar with names such as the Ayatollah Khomeni, or the recently exiled Shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.

When this book was written 25 years after the crisis, my guess is many still didn’t know much of the details, which was the entire point of this book. This is an excellent read. It’s a long read at about 700 pages, but it never feels that way. Mark Bowden knows how to keep this story at a high enough level to where he never gets mired too low in the weeds with too much detail.

The main focus is the hostages. The individuals that had the misfortune of simply working at the American Embassy in Tehran and were very familiar with the hostility of the residents of this country. When the tempers flared on that ignoble day and the compound was stormed by the radical students, the American workers at the embassy weren’t too concerned. They had all been through this before to some extent.

Well, as the dots get connected, it soon becomes apparent that this is not a temporal event to exorcize political futility. This is the real deal. Soon the crisis is the headline on every newspaper and the leading story on every news network for months.  Like most tragedies, the longer it goes on, the more the public forgets. No one expected the captives to be held hostage for a grueling 444 days, and after the first months pass, much of world forgets about the prisoners.

There are a lot of names to keep track of within this book. I’m not sure how many of the 53 hostages that Bowden focuses on, he goes back and forth rather quickly, and I had trouble keeping track of every hostage, their backgrounds, their roles, their history, etc. Yet this really doesn’t take much away from the overall reading experience. When we read about the travails of each hostage, the “who” really isn’t as important as the “what”. Which brings me to the title of this book. Although I would never minimize the horror that these individuals endured, the author asserts that the hostages, for the most part, were treated better than one might imagine. In some instances one might be able to argue that they were “guests” as opposed to “hostages”.  Some of the captors were much more friendly than others, and things such as Christmas parties and the ability to write letters home were part of the captivity. During the middle of the ordeal,  Iran finds itself at war with neighboring Iraq, and the students even entertain the possibility of arming their captives to assist them in fighting the enemy. That’s not to say it was all sunshine and roses. There were plenty of times when the captives would be beaten or isolated, usually for insubordination and for insults hurled by the hostages themselves. And we can never kid ourselves into thinking that anytime someone is a “hostage”, that it could ever be acceptable or tolerable.

One of the more unlikely elements of this tragedy is that Iran really didn’t have any kind of structural government in place, so the students who raided the embassy and started the whole event really didn’t have any authority to do so.  Once the crisis started, you almost got the impression that the captors, and the country itself, really didn’t know what to do next. Their only demand was that the Shah be returned, but once that became obviously impossible, you could tell that this whole event was perpetrated by amateurs. Add the fact that the country was essentially run by the hardcore cleric Khomeni, there wasn’t really much that could be done other than wait for some sort of unknown future event to somehow unfold to change the situation.

The author also spends good portions of the book describing the U.S. government under Jimmy Carter’s efforts to end the standoff, the planning and failure of the rescue attempt, and also the history of the relations between Iran and the United States. Sadly, what many Americans at the time failed to acknowledge was the fact that the United States wasn’t exactly squeakly clean when they orchestrated a coup in Iran back in 1953 that ousted leader Mohammed Mosaddegh that put the Shah back on the throne.  Let’s just say that the motivation of the United States was a far cry from anything altruistic or philanthropic.

The chapters are also nice and brief.  Most chapters are about 10-15 pages long which helps with such a thick volume. This also allows us to never get bored and we can quickly jump from one part of the story to another.  As someone who reads a lot of history, I wish many authors would learn such a method. The author also includes an epilogue that tells the reader “where are they now” 25 years after the conclusion of this horrific event.

Overall this was a great account of an infamous time in the history of America. I’m sure there have been multiple books written about this event, but my guess is that this is probably the best one to give the reader a strong sense of the whole picture of everything and everyone involved.