Guests of the Ayatollah

by Mark Bowden

"The Iran hostage crisis was a watershed moment in American history. It was America's first showdown with Islamist fundamentalism, a confrontation that has remained at the forefront of American policy to this day: In Iran, following the ouster of the shah, a provisional government was established, and for a critical moment in the modern age's first Islamist revolution, a more open and democratic society seemed possible. But the religious hardliners on the Revolutionary Council used the hostage crisis as an opportunity to purge moderates from the leadership ranks. They altered the course of the revolution and set Iran on the extreme path it follows to this day." "The Iran hostage crisis was also a dramatic story that captivated the American people. Communities across the country launched yellow-ribbon campaigns. ABC began a new late-night television program - which became Nightline - recapping the latest events in the crisis and counting up the days of captivity. The hostages' families became celebrities, and the never-ending criticism of the government's response crippled Jimmy Carter's reelection campaign." Guests of the Ayatollah tells this story through the eyes of the people who lived it, on both sides of the crisis. Mark Bowden takes us inside the hostages' cells, detailing the Americans' terror, confusion, boredom, and ingenuity in the face of absurd interrogations, mock executions, and a seemingly endless imprisonment. He recreates the exuberance and naivete of the Iranian hostage takers. He chronicles the diplomatic efforts to secure the hostages' release and offers a remarkable view of President Jimmy Carter's Oval Office, where the most powerful man in the world was handcuffed by irrational fanatics halfway around the world. Throughout this all, Bowden weaves the dramatic story of Delta Force, a new Special Forces unit poised for their first mission, Operation Eagle Claw.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Middle East, Iran, Politics, War, Military Fiction

680 pages, Paperback

First published March 27, 2006

About the author

Mark Bowden is an American journalist and writer. He is a former national correspondent and longtime contributor to The Atlantic. Bowden is best known for his book Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War (1999) about the 1993 U.S. military raid in Mogadishu, which was later adapted into a motion picture of the same name that received two Academy Awards.
Bowden is also known for the books Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw (2001), about the efforts to take down Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, and Hue 1968, an account of the Battle of Huế.

Reviews

[JD · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like all things Mark Bowden, this book is thorough in its details and well written. The book goes into great detail from start to finish of the US Embassy takeover in Iran in 1979 through to its 444-day conclusion in 1981. It shows how from the start everything on both sides was a mess on both sides and how this single event shaped the Iran of today that is still ruled by the clerics and how it stays a pariah on the international scene.

The students who took over the embassy only wanted a sit in of a day or so, but almost immediately lost control of events where the clerics in Qom seized their opportunity to take complete control of the country. The Americans tried in vain to negotiate, but the goal post kept being moved by the Iranians. The hostages lived in fear of being executed as spies by their "hosts", yet most were not mistreated. They just kind of lived in limbo not knowing when, if ever they were going home.

Covered in detail also is the attempted rescue of the hostages, code named Operation Eagle Claw that turned into a bit of a fiasco for various reason, but not because of lack of effort and bravery by the US servicemen involved. Yet almost no mention is made of the Canadian Caper made famous by the movie Argo a few years after the release of the book.

This is a very good, though heavy read that leaves no stone unturned to tell the true story of this event that is but a footnote in American history, yet the major event in shaping the modern Iran. Highly recommended.

[Helga · Rating 3 out of 5]

First off, this book’s title should have been: The Extremely Detailed Lives and Opinions of the Hostages and Their Second by Second Account During the Crisis.

This book was agonizingly detailed and repetitive. We are told how many cups of water the hostages drink, how many cigarettes they smoke, how and why one of them had quit but started again, how many times they went to the toilet, in lengthy details.
Every time a hostage-taker is being introduced, we are told he has a beard. Da! Most of them had beards. Wouldn’t it be much better writing-wise if you mentioned the none-bearded individuals, as they were very few?

The writing is also amateurish. It felt like someone had just spoken whatever came to mind and another person typed it and sent it for publication. The book could have been edited down to half its size and it would have been much more interesting.
Right in the middle of say talking about the present hostage situation we are thrown back to when a particular hostage was in Vietnam War. There are pages about him and his past which we the ordinary, impatient readers don’t need to know.
Dialogues are stilted and kind of unnatural, which makes one doubt their authenticity. The details are also too detailed. Did the hostages later go home and write how many times did they pee or who said what at the time they were fighting for they lives?

The author, wisely, quotes other people’s opinion about the late Shah saying he was introvert/playboy/arrogant/a monster dictator, etc. Characteristics which, by the way, don’t go together.
If Shah was a dictator and a monster, don’t you think he would have gunned down the protesters early on? What kind of a dictator would say “ من نمی‌خواهم تاج و تختم رابا ریختن خون مردمم نگاه دارم ”
Roughly translated: “I don't want to keep my throne by shedding my people's blood.” And leave the country holding a handful of Iran’s soil in a box?

You are talking about violation of human rights, quoting again wisely American diplomats. But let me ask you, which country dropped the atomic bombs and killed many innocent people? Which country enslaved and tortured Africans. At the time that we are criticizing Shah’s actions, black people faced discrimination and segregation. That is not a violation of human rights?

The negative quotes kept piling up, so much so that a reader who doesn't know anything about Iran and her history and politics would believe Shah was some evil person who plotted evil plots and killed people by the thousands.

Anyway. Enough politics for me. I’m no writer, but in my opinion if the book was much shorter and focused more on the rescue mission it would have been much more palatable.

[Sharon Orlopp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mark Bowden does an exceptional job with Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America's War With Militant Islam. It is about the Iran hostage crisis where radical Islamic students stormed the US embassy in Tehran and captured 52 Americans. The Americans were held hostage for 444 days.

I listened to it on audiobook and it is narrated superbly by Bowden. I love it when an author does their own narration. Bowden's detailed research included interviews with the hostages, their captors, hostage families, and political and military leaders.

The failed rescue attempt is covered in jaw dropping detail. The epilogue indicates how Iran has treated the history and memorialization of the failed rescue. Bowden does an excellent job detailing the US presidential race between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. And, by-the-way, Iraq began a war against Iran right in the midst of the hostage negotiations.

Highly recommend!

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I preferred David Harris's handling of the political maneuverings in his book The Crisis, Bowden does a much better job here of blending previously published captivity narratives and his interviews to give a sense of what the hostages' experiences were like. While it's successful in being highly readable and in conveying a lot of information, I did have some problems with the tone of the book.

Bowden heavily criticizes the pro-hostage-taker rhetoric of some American lefties at the time, in particular clergy members who visited the hostages in Tehran, and I agree that their insensitivity and irresponsibility are shocking. He points at numerous examples throughout of how not only the students but their sympathizers repeatedly attempted to minimize the shittiness of the hostage taking, when any reasonable, ethical person must admit that being held captive for 444 days is an incredibly shitty thing that cannot be justified or excused.

Unfortunately, I think Bowden got too sucked into taking sides, and the result is a bias and lack of objectivity that I felt undermined the book. There were many places where he seemed to be trying extra hard to make the Iranians look bad, when objective language would have gotten his points across more effectively. For example, an incident that occurred during the disastrous US rescue attempt is described in language that is, simply put, jacked-up. The elite Delta Force is shocked when they encounter a bus full of Iranian civilians traveling through the nighttime desert where the Americans are staging to refuel their helicopters:

[The passengers] were all instructed in Farsi to remain silent, without effect. Most of the passengers were women, all of them wearing chadors and wailing eerily in their distress. Sergeant Eric Haney had trouble silencing one of the few young men among them, who insisted on loudly whispering to the others despite even their apparent desire for him to shut up. Haney put the muzzle of his automatic rifle under the man's nose and repeated, in Farsi, for him to be silent. But soon the offender was whispering again, so Haney roughly put the muzzle of his weapon in his ear and dragged him away from the group. Fearing he was being taken off to be shot, the young man began crying and begging, holding both hands up beseechingly. Haney sat him down on the road a good distance from the others and left him there, whimpering and praying. (p. 443)

To me, what is striking about this scene is that it is so much like the encounters between the Iranian students and American diplomats that have been recounted in the book to this point, only the roles and nationalities have been reversed (Their solution is that the bus passengers be forcibly flown out of Iran in a C-130, to be returned home after the mission!). But rather than acknowledging the irony or locating any empathy, Bowden describes the Iranian hostages in condescending and dehumanizing terms: the women are "wailing eerily," the man who believes he will be shot is "crying and begging," "whimpering and praying." In a similar scene, that of the harrowing mock execution of American captives, a hostage does not cry or whimper but shouts "Oh my God!" and "No! No! No!" These seem to me to be pretty much the same reaction to very similar situations, and for me the point was that oh man, it really sucks when you think someone is about to shoot you, whether you come from America or Iran.

I don't think showing some empathy for Iranians condones the students' actions at all, and throughout the book I think Bowden's writing gave support for the view of Americans as arrogant and spoiled bearers of a double standard, which could have been avoided and if it had been, his book would have been better. The hostages' experiences speak for themselves. I am a super lefty and I totally get why Iranians might have gotten irate with the US -- we DID organize a coup against their democratically elected prime minister, and we WERE involved in running their country in a sucky way, and our culture DID threaten these students' Islamic beliefs. I strongly believe you can understand other people's perspectives while still clearly seeing their actions as wrong. This is part of what makes me not a fundamentalist, and it's why I can't trust things that remind me at all of propaganda, as this book did at times.

Still, it's not a bad book and I feel I have a much better picture now of the hostages' experiences. I do think Bowden was basically trying to be fair -- he does explain the Iranians' grievances and repeatedly notes how little effort was made to do this by the American media at the time -- but I felt he was worried that he needed to make his allegiance to the Americans clear and that his efforts sort of weakened the book. An American audience is naturally going to "side" with the hostages, though I'm not sure taking sides in a historical incident does any of us much good in the end.

[Woman Reading (is away exploring) · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 ☆

Like most of the great turning points in history, it was obvious and yet no one saw it coming.

After finishing All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror, I was curious enough about the 1979 takeover of the American embassy in Iran to brave this nearly 700 page tome. Once I got past the first few chapters, the comprehensive recounting just took off and I was eager to keep reading.

In retrospect, it was all too predictable.

[Washington DC] had not foreseen the gathering threat to its longtime Cold War ally Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the now reviled, self-exiled shah. A CIA analysis in August 1978, just six months before Pahlavi fled Iran for good, had concluded that the country "is not in a revolutionary or even prerevolutionary situation."

Oh, the mistakes in judgment on both sides. There were many moving parts to this 444-day pivotal international drama that had begun in November 1979. Three zealous University students --Mohsen Murdamadi, Ibrahim Asgharzadeh, and Habibullah Bitaraf -- conceived the dream of freeing their nation from scheming American interlopers and reasserting Iran's greatness and independence from "colonial subservience." They had claimed that they only wanted a peaceful protest at the US Embassy that would last no more than three days. But they had not correctly foreseen events and how other political factions would capitalize on their endeavor.

President Carter had not been sitting on his hands during this hostage ordeal. He had even expressed concern that the US Embassy would be taken again after an attempt earlier in February had failed, to which his foreign policy people offered no reply. With the Shah's exit, Iran's governance was in a state of flux which made diplomatic efforts more challenging and likelier to stall. And the US military was not capable of mounting surgically precise ops in the late 1970s.

Mark Bowden provided a comprehensive account of the hostage crisis. It made for compelling reading. On a minor critical note, he did incorporate his personal opinions and / or speculative musings at times. They weren't totally off-base but I would have preferred them to be minimized lest he be guilty of one of his own opinions --

... nations invent their own pasts, and how the simplification of history can create impossible gulfs between peoples.

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author does an admirable job weaving in the mindsets of the hostages, Islamic Republic revolutionaries, news media, and members of the Carter Administration over the course of the 444 days of crisis.

While I barely remember the mood of the nation, yellow ribbons around the city, and the gloomy nightly new cast, the book really brought to light with many intricate details that are rarely mentioned in the context of this crisis, such as, the birth of Delta Force and their tragic accident, Russian invasion of Afghanistan, and a Presidential election. Bowden does a great job bringing all of his in-depth interviews and research into one compelling book.

[Jerome Otte · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd been meaning to read this for quite some time, and I'm glad I finally did. The specifics of the Iran hostage crisis were always obscure to me, and I've read only fragmentary accounts by various participants, mainly by members of the Delta Force element. The added perspective of the hostages and their centrality to the story is what makes this book such a gem.

The Iran hostage crisis is little remembered today, but when it is, it is unfortunately presented in a way that that reeks of partisan politics. It the subject of little public debate, except silly, contrived "liberal vs. conservative" arguments that just distort things like they always do.

Flag-waving, catchphrase-spouting, chronic-labelist conservatives use the crisis merely to attack Carter and accuse him of making America weak, impotent, and apologetic. They claim that if Reagan wa sin office, the hostages would have been rescued sooner and Iran would somehow have been too scared of the big bad U.S. of A. to be as aggressive and bellicose as they are today. That is sheer speculation.

For one, the decision to abort the rescue operation was not Carter's. Carter approved the operation, and when it went sour (as a result of a tragic accident that was in no way influenced by Carter), the ground commander, Beckwith (not Carter) aborted the mission. Carter was not involved in the decision to abort, and it was probably the right call, anyway. And, as Bowden notes, the mission's chances of success under any circumstances would have been iffy at best.

There's also the myth that the Iranians finally released the hostages because they were scared of big, bad Ronald Reagan and his tougher national security policies and promises to make America great and strong. Again, wrong. The Iranians released the hostages after Reagan got elected because they wanted to discredit Carter, not because of anything Reagan said, did, or would have said or done. If the Iranians were so scared of Reagan ,why did their Hezbollah proxies attack Americans in Lebanon? And while Reagan blasted Carter for "doing nothing", neither did Reagan propose what should have been done instead.

Speaking of American ignorance, allow me to recall an episode from the book: When a reporter asked an American citizen what should eb done about the crisis, the citizen replied, "Force should be used." When the reporter asked "But what if responding militarily would mean that the hostages would be harmed?", the American, with extensive knowledge and experience of hostage rescues (*rolls eyes*) replied, "No , then we shouldn't use force. I don't want them to be harmed."

Now for some liberal myths about the crisis: many of them claim that the revolution was a legitimate response to the CIA-sponsored coup of 1953 that deposed the "democratic" Mossadegh and put the Shah in power. Thus, they claim that the US got itself into this mess by deposing a democracy and installing a dictatorship. There's some flaws in this theory, mainly since Mossadegh was anything but a democratic politician, and was hardly missed when he was deposed.

Bowden covers this in detail as he explores the reactions of the US public and media to the crisis. While their protests were justified, none of the American public demonstrated much wisdom or tact in how to handle it better than Carter. Some US protestors shouted "Nagasaki, Hiroshima, why not Iran?" Amazing.

The pious second-guessers of the News-Tribune of Tacoma, Washington boldly concluded that, "It may be too early to make a judgment, but first impressions are that the US badly bungled the rescue mission. Further, although Carter certainly deserves the benefit of the doubt at this point, it apperas he failed miserably in judgement and leadership."

The Phoenix Gazette accused Carter of undermining the rescue operation by trying to manage it himself from Wahsington instead of leaving it to the professionals in the field.

The Baltimore Evening Sun laughably offered the ridiculous opinion that authorizing the operation had been wrong because there was a chance it might not succeed. "any possibility of failure should ahve ruled it out." Hmmm, aren't all operations like that by nature?

Some Iranian protesters were similarly naive, as Bowden shows. Some of them thought that World War II had resulted because Hitler was determined to prevent America from seizing the oil supply of Peru. One of the students told an American hostage, the CIA station chief that America had been Iran's enemy for "four hundred years." When the station chief told the apparently well-educated student that America had been around for only some two hundred years, the Iranian simply dismissed it with a wave of his hand.

Thankfully, Bowden's book presents a balanced, panoramic study of the crisis. He details the experiences of both the hostages and their captors, of the media's coverage, and the friction between the revolution's radical and moderate elements. For example, Bowden shows that the moderates were sidelined as the ayatollah's backed the students that took over the embassy. While Americans today, with their disdain for intellectualism, their inability to grasp complexity, their obvious lack of nuance, and their unfortunate and eager tendency to lump all Muslim revolutionaries together and label all of them "radicals" or "terrorists", Bowden shows that this was clearly not the case.

The ostensible trigger for the crisis was the decision by the US to admit the shah to this country for treatment of the cancer that would eventually kill him. However, that decision was sold to President Carter by his Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, who in turn was sold on it by Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller. As the years roll on, it's interesting how many disastrous US foreign policy decisions come back to Kissinger.

Further, the CIA was no better then at understanding and predicting events in the Islamic world than they are now. Shortly before the crisis erupted, the agency reported that the religious radicals would soon be relegated to the background there, so the US could deal with an emerging secular state with confidence. In reality, the country degenerated into a hurricane of religious nuttiness that soon swept aside all of the secular leaders. Quite literally, no one at all was really in charge of anything in Iran, and that's the reason the crisis dragged on for over a year.

This brings us to the role of President Carter. Nearly everyone felt at the time that he was too weak and vacillating to resolve the crisis. Not so; he tirelessly attempted to find a way to deal with the situation, but every attempt failed when the connection at the Iranian end fell apart. No one could have done much more, which is why presidential candidate Ronald Reagan continually criticized Carter, but never offered a word of explanation about what he would do.

The failed rescue attempt was blamed on Carter, too, but as Bowden makes clear, it had little chance of succeeding, mostly because the equipment available at the time was inadequate, and the situation was impossible. Even if Delta Force had made it to Tehran, it's likely that most or all of the hostages and rescuers would have died in the operation. Carter and the troops deserve credit for daring the attempt, even in the face of near-certain failure.

Bowden takes us inside the U.S. embassy just as the takeover was about to be launched. In short order, we meet an incredible cast of real-life characters, from street savvy embassy staffers like Michael Metrinko to clueless government officials and over-confident radicals. As the hostage crisis unfolds, we can see how the self-righteous "joy" over the initial takeover quickly degenerated into a sad drama of suspicion, prejudice and incompetence that dragged on for 444 days - much longer than anyone really wanted, including the hostage takers themselves.

To make matters even worse, the very same radicals who launched this tragic episode are now largely in control of the Iranian government. Many Americans are still clueless about the events that got us to this place. It's a bad dream that just won't go away...

Both Iran and the U.S. get their fair share of criticism in this exhaustively researched book. If you're looking for an "us vs. them, good guys vs. bad guys" treatment, don't look here. Bowden properly points out our massive intelligence failures before, during AND after the initial embassy seizure. Even the aborted rescue mission seems rooted in a fantasy cloud of wishful thinking. For their part, the Islamic radicals come across as typical "true believers" who never let the facts get in the way of the "truth." Like the Taliban, the ultimate legacy of the hostage-takers was to establish a dysfunctional, paranoid regime that poisons the soul of Islam and breeds violence throughout the Middle East. Lord save us all.

In this book, Bowden provides the intense, all-inclusive details from start to finish of the 444 day Iranian Hostage Crisis. The reader is taken inside the holding cell of each hostage and witnesses in vivid detail the daily routines, abuse, and emotions each hostage endured during their stay. I quickly became a fan of certain hostages such as diplomat Michael Metrinko, who so adamantly despised his captivity and insulted his captors for which he suffered solitary confinement and severe beatings up to the 444th day. While Bowden shares the heroic stories of the hostages, he doesn't disregard certain hostages who fellow captives felt were cowards and swine.

Bowden has become widely acclaimed for his ability to investigate the subject of each book and then transpose his research into dramatic details for readers, and Guests of the Ayatollah is no exception to his method. Where Guests of the Ayatollah differs from other Bowden books is in its significant focus on the Iranian and American political environments during the hostage crisis. Bowden provides an in depth summary of the Carter administrations options and its secretive negotiations with what still existed of the volatile Iranian government. Rather than provide his opinion on the performance of the Carter administration, Bowden does a fine job of avoiding personal bias, and allows the reader to reach an informed conclusion in regard to the politics surrounding the Hostage Crisis.

Some reviewers seem to feel that Bowden provides justification for the actions of the hostage takers. I don't believe this is accurate given that Bowden spends very little time examining the Shah's government other then to acknowledge America's continued support for the Pahlavi government up to the revolution. I found that on the controversial issues Bowden provides the facts and allows the reader draw his/her own conclusions. However, Bowden offers one prevailing conclusion that the Iranian Hostage Crisis established the power of the mullahocrasy in Iran, which runs the government to this day. The epilogue goes on to examine whether or not the hostage crisis benefited Iran, and concludes the establishment of the mullahocracy has done more harm to the country.

In all, Bowden has written an impressive account of the crisis and adequately explores the reactions of the US media and public to it.

[Oleksandr Zholud · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a non-fiction account of the Iran hostage crisis in 1979. The author delves deep into the complexities of the situation, offering a detailed narrative of (1) motivations, (2) participants and (3) attempts to solve the crisis by various means, including military. I’m curious how would have Americans reacted if this happened now, bearing in mind the recent fallout of October 7th atrocities committed by HAMAS in Israel. I read it as a part of the monthly reading for December 2023 at Non Fiction Book Club group.

The book starts with Iranian students planning to capture the US embassy to show to the whole world that perfidious den of spies. As is repeated multiple times during the book, they were sure that the embassy is just a cover to CIA operations, all (!) embassy workers are CIA spies and their main goal was an assassination of Khomeini. And while there (as is ‘normal’ for any embassy, not only US one) were representatives of intelligence agencies, their work is much more mundane than Bond movies.

One of such was a political officer Michael Metrinko. His surname is Ukrainian, which picked my interest (the book value mentions “he thickening features of his Pennsylvania Slav ancestry” and yes, he is a US citizen born and bred). During the captivity he was maybe the most isolated of the captives because the document haven’t been successfully destroyed and it has been known that he is CIA. The man had an interesting life, as one of his earlier adventures showed.

The book follows a score of 52 captives in a great detail, including their interrogations, their daily lives and attitudes toward captors. This is a great study of how people react on such adverse conditions, from finding God to telling the captors everything he knew about his colleagues.

There is some info how the US presidential elections of 1980 were affected by the crisis. The author definitely sides with then-president Carter against other candidates, from Kennedy, who shot himself in the leg by siding with Iran demands to the ultimate winner Reagan, whose familiar chiseled features recalled an era of seemingly limitless American potential, skillfully played off Carter’s powerlessness. The Gipper’s broad-shouldered, cinematic swagger alone was anodyne to Carter’s “malaise.” America had received enough doses of bitter medicine from the peanut-farmer president and was eager to sail off into a dreamworld of patriotic bliss. Reagan deliberately dithered when pressed for specifics, but his well-articulated dreams were rooted in the country’s fondest fantasy of itself Arriving in a blizzard of brilliant red, white, and blue, the Republican convention was a restorative to the country’s sagging spirits, and it gave Reagan a big enough boost to overtake the president in most polls.

Another important lesson from the debacle is that quite often chance plays a much greater role than thoughtful calculations of possible moves: from the fact that Khomeini initially told his interior minister to throw back students and stop the whole mess, just a day before he turned 180 degrees and praised them; to the attempt of armed intervention to rescue the captives, which was meticulously planned but stopped with loss of life and material even before they met Iranian forces!

Finally, it helped me to see a greater picture: that during the 444-day detention of embassy personnel the USSR invaded Afghanistan and the Iraqi-Iranian war has begun – I knew about both but never linked them to this crisis. Overall, it is a thought-provoking and well-researched account.

[Jeffrey (Akiva) Savett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even prior to Argo's popularity, I always found myself incredibly interested in the Iranian Revolution. This is for two primary reasons: 1. it was a revolution in which the outcome wasn't preordained or even mass imagined. Indeed, it was described by both its actors and American observers as "unthinkable." The revolutionaries themselves were not a monolithic group; it was a surprising assembly of leftest students, religious madrassa students, secular intellectuals, and Shia islamists intent upon seeing Ayatollah Khomeini's world vision realized in Iran.

What these groups shared was a deep hatred for the American supported Shah and the decades of torture, corruption, and cruelty to which he and his secret police, the SAVAK, subjected the Iranian people to. Which brings me to my second reason: 2. Despite Iran's current backwards mullah-dominated "government," and the direction in which the revolution eventually went, I find myself empathizing with the sentiments of Iranians on this one: they were tired of the Shah, resentful of the CIA orchestrated coup that brought him to power OVER the democratically elected leader at the time, suspicious of further American meddling in their domestic choices.

Granted, the world was different then.

Kermit Rooselvelt designed the coup to keep Soviet expansion in check. The Shah promised America "stability" and easy access to his country's oil. It was a complicated, interesting Iran, and Bowden's fine book captures one of the key events--the US Embassy takeover by a group of students inspired by and loyal to Khomeini.

All of that said, many of those involved in the embassy takeover were thugs, and the arrogance and criminality of that act was indicative of the ideology which would come today to be known as Islamism or Islamofascism. These "students" claimed allegiance to the Ayatollah Khomeini and ascribe to a world view which is Manichean (black and white, good and evil), and thus desirous of bulldozing the very complexity with which the revolution burgeoned. These students and their leaders claim to know the will of God, to believe that modern politics and foreign policy should be dictated by holy books that are centuries old, and that the takeover of the American Embassy was necessary because (despite all evidence to the contrary) they were SURE that it was a "den of spies." These views are illustrative of a desire to return to an imagined idyllic and simple past where choice was circumscribed by God's constant involvement in mankind's affairs. Very few of us live in or desire a reality like that, despite its obvious offers of peace of mind and simplicity. The hostage crisis was, in some ways, the first conflict of these ideologies; ironically, as Bowden points out, while the takeover was a REJECTION of diplomacy as a manner of politic, it was ended solely through diplomacy. An important lesson indeed. As Bowden points out, however, the conflict didn't HAVE to end that way, as many Americans and Iranians pushed for very different conclusions.

Bowden shares amazing anecdotes about the relationship between the hostages and their captors while keeping an eye on the impossibly patient political machinations of the Carter administration in attempting, but repeatedly failing to get the hostages released. Granted, he had few good choices, and all of them were likely to make life for the hostages worse.

It is a delicious irony that Saddam Hussein's surprise bombing and invasion of Iran led to the hostages being released. Iran released the hostages so that America would honor Iran's previous arms purchases and unfreeze Iranian investments in America which she needed to defend herself against Iraq.

This book is tremendous, and Bowden's tone and selection of detail suggest that he, too, views these events as endlessly fascinating, enormously complex, and still influential.

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've always wanted to know more about the events that led to the American hostage crisis over in Iran in 1979, and this book does not disappoint when it comes to providing exhaustive details drawn from a multitude of sources (including interviews with many of the 53 hostages themselves). I now feel as though I can say, after over 600 pages of reading, I have a pretty firm grasp of what happened. So, much appreciation to Mark Bowden and Guests of the Ayatollah, which gave me all of the information (and then some) to form a well-educated opinion of those 444 chaotic days.

As other reviewers have noted, my only real issue with the book was at times the author's clear pro-America stance. Yes, the embassy takeover was ridiculous and unorganized. Yes, Iran's "government" at that time was in such shambles, that a high school student council could have worked out much more solid and timely negotiations. No one is disagreeing that what the Iranian students did was reckless and wrong, and that the hostages were held far longer than was necessary simply to "make a point" against America.

But as for the civilians - not the students, not the politicians, the ayatollahs, the mullahs (all of the ones milking this situation and its publicity for all it was worth) - Bowden could have been a bit more sympathetic to their terror of Americans. For instance, when the rescue mission goes awry and Delta Special Forces comes across a busload of Iranian civilians traveling across the desert. Bowden doesn't seem to recognize the irony in the way Delta and other American army personnel treated innocent Iranians - putting pistols to their heads, almost mockingly describing their fear as "wailing" - that sort of thing - with the way the largely innocent American diplomats were treated by the student hostage takers, when they weren't the ones trying to interfere in Iranian affairs (although to be fair, I'd say Middle Eastern countries have a right to be just a little pissed off considering the extent of meddling we HAVE done in their affairs).

All in all a solid read that I would recommend to anyone looking to learn more about what specifically led to the crisis, and why it was drawn out as long as it was. I had always known of it as the "reason Jimmy Carter was a one-term president", and it's now easy to see why. It's not that he did anything wrong... there just weren't any "right" options. How exactly can you negotiate not only with a country that's being completely illogical, but one in which there is no one true source of power that can be spoken to on the matter? It is quite a long read, to be sure, but in my opinion, one that is worth the time.

[Ross · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book about the Iranian Hostage crisis. Being born in the late 1970s, I do not remember this on TV (obviously). But some of the action was riveting...at times it felt like a novel. I really liked the parts where Bowden takes the reader inside the Carter Administration. For those of you who criticize his handling of the situation, how would YOU have handled it?? It was an impossible situation. Also, similar to "The Looming Tower", by Lawrence Wright, the book helps us answer the question, "Why do they hate us so much?" And in Iran's case, I kind of agree with their views (not to the point of taking hostages...but the U.S. did treat Iran like crap). Another tidbit from the book that I enjoyed was the revelation that one of the hostage-takers did not know that Japan had started WWII with the U.S. She thought we dropped the atomic bomb for no reason! UNBELIEVABLE!

[Anne (Booklady) Molinarolo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was a Senior at Spring Hill College and working for the CBS affiliate in Mobile, Alabama when this occurred. I was undergoing a transformation in my politics also at this time. Having met and listened to Ronald Reagan for over 3 hours in September of 1976, I fell in love with both the man and his ideas; I became a Reagan Democrat turned Republican, and never turned toward the left again. I voted for the former President in the 1976 Republican primary rather than Gerald Ford. I proudly cast my vote for Reagan again in 1980, mainly because of this hostage situation and the feckless handling of this situation by the Carter Administration. My schoolmates and station friends were constantly discussing the hostage situation among ourselves. Uncle Walter words were repeated ad nauseam as I recalled. I wasn't surprised than the hostages were freed as Reagan took his Presidential Oath of office. Leaders of nations understood that a new sheriff was in D.C. and were afraid as they should've been. We cheered in the studio as the News Bulletin aired.

When I first read this book a couple of years ago, I was horrified by actions of the hostage takers. It is still horrific to read, but this time I was also repulsed by their actions. I was very surprised by how ineffectual Carter was; there is never guarantees that military action will succeed or be doomed to fail. Everything must be on the table and everything must be tried to save American lives - i.e. Benghazi in 2012. Carter was more involved with the decision making than I believe he should of been, but Mark Bowden gives readers much more details of the Washington front than the network news departments did in 1979 - 1980. And I found that fascinating. Bpwden retells stories of bravery, endurance, and resistance from the survivors. There's even a traitor in their midst.

Though quite long, Guests of the Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis: The First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam reads like fiction mostly. Some parts do read like dry toilet papered textbooks, but these parts are few and far between in Bowden's prose.

[John Devlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nothing to criticize here. Bowden’s take is engaging and top notch.

From the early takeover in February and the complete lack of defense of the embassy to the escape attempts by the hostages and the outlandish mindset of many Iranians this book brims with insight and enlightenment.

Also, Bowden does a solid job of depicting how one can quickly become compromising with ones captors.

[Doreen Petersen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book! A very dark period we could all stand to learn from.

[Osama · Rating 1 out of 5]

من أفشل ما قرأت من كتب في هذا المجال.

[Carrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fascinating, gripping non-fiction account of the Iran Hostage Crisis of 1979-1981. I bought this book after seeing "Argo." This book is definitely not an account of the true "Argo" story; in fact, the six workers who were the subject of that film are mentioned only very briefly in this book (as in, maybe ten sentences).

This book gives a brief background of the events leading up to the overthrow of the shah and the Iranian Revolution in the late 70s. Prior to reading this book, I only knew that there had been a revolution and that it had involved a retreat to a more fundamentalist Islamist state. That was the extent of my knowledge of the revolution. I knew nothing about the crisis itself. "Guests of the Ayatollah" starts with a concise history of shah's rule, the revolution, and America's involvement in putting the shah into power. There is definitely more in-depth reading available on the subject, but the details provided in the book gave me enough background to sufficiently understand the political climate at the time of the takeover.

The book weaves the story of the takeover with the ongoing political change in Iran, the stories of the hostages' experiences in captivity, the failed rescue attempt by a U.S. special forces outfit, and the Carter Administration's response to the crisis. The book jumps around among these different topics, but it's in chronological order, is easy to follow, and is very engrossing.

The only real issue I had was keeping track of the various hostages. The author doesn't provide accounts of all 52 hostages who spent the entire 444 days in captivity. But he follows enough people, who for the most part all seemed to have similar diplomatic roles, that I did get their jobs/titles/responsibilities confused. It turns out that this doesn't matter much - you become acquainted with the hostages throughout the book as they endure their captivity, and the author re-references some of their background details.

Some other reviews of this book have complained that the descriptions about the hostages' daily life got tired and tedious. I did not find that to be the case. I found that reading about how they developed communications systems when they couldn't talk, interacted with the guards, and got on each others' nerves was extremely interesting. Different people responded differently to the captivity, and the ways some of them tried to torment their guards were actually pretty amusing.

The inside account of the Carter Administration's approach to the crisis was also very interesting. I walked away from this book feeling as though Carter made decisions based on what would preserve lives, and not what was politically advantageous.

One final note: I recommend buying this book on an e-reader if possible. I ordered the paperback version, and it's pretty hefty. So I returned it and bought the e-book. The Kindle version was properly formatted and contained all the same pictures as the paperback version. (There aren't many photos in this book. If you are looking for pictures of all the hostages, you won't find that here.)

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read other books where the taking of the American Embassy in Tehran in 1979 was a side note to the main story I was reading about and I have seen movies and documentaries on this event but Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America's War With Militant Islam by Mark Bowden is the first detailed account that I have read of what actually happened as told by many of the actual hostages, some of the students, and the soldiers who took part in an ill-fated rescue attempt about their interactions with and treatment by these students during their long captivity. On November 4, 1979, a group of radical Islamist students, inspired by the revolutionary Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini, stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran. They took fifty-two Americans hostage, and kept nearly all of them hostage for 444 days. The author takes us inside the hostages' cells and inside the Oval Office for meetings with President Carter and his exhausted team. He covers the many international meetings and negotiations around the world that focused on helping to resolve this hostage crisis. He also dedicated five years to this research, including numerous trips to Iran and countless interviews with those involved on both sides. Guests of the Ayatollah is a detailed, brilliantly re-created, and suspenseful account of a crisis that gripped and ultimately changed the world.

[Anita · Rating 4 out of 5]

A comprehensive treatise on the Iran hostage crisis in 1979. Bowden wrote about the lives of the hostages during their 455 days from his interviews. He covered the attempts to negotiate their return and the failed rescue mission.

[Regina Lindsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love history. I love politics. I love current events. There were two seminal events that influenced that love. The Iranian hostage crisis was one of those two events. During those 444 days I was glued to the TV watching every unfolding moment that related to the attempts to resolve the crisis and the upcoming 1980 election. Lately, I've been reminded that I view those incidents through the lens of a pre-teen and wanted to delve into a study to understand the context more.

On November 4, 1979, five college students that included Mahmoud Ahmadinejad planned and executed the siege of the US Embassy in Tehran citing US "crimes" in admitting the Shah into the US for medical treatment. Bowden, also author of Black Hawk Down provides excellent context on the US-Iranian relations twenty-five years prior to this incident, the factions competing for power within Iran at the time, details on the behind-the-scenes negotiations to release the hostages, mecahanisms the hostages employed to survive the ordeal, the role the press played, how American citizens developed ways individually and collectively to support the hostages, how this incident changed the trajectory of Iranian history, and how Iranians today view those 444 days.

Some of the things I learned:

1. Some of the students attended Berkeley at a time that student demonstrations were impacting the view Americans held on the Vietnam War. Returning home these students employed many of the same strategies, assuming American citizens would have a similar response "once they learned the truth about American involvement in Iran." Due to this misguided assumption the students allowed incredible access to the hostages by media and clergy. <

2. Even today we hear about Iranian misinterpretation of historical facts (i.e. Holocaust). It was amazing to see just how many other areas of history are skewed.

3. I was suprised to learn how many marines were on site and not allowed to defend the embassy.

4. Even though there is blatant bias (discussed more n a moment) on Bowden's part, I felt like I had a much better understanding of the severe missteps by Carter administration in the months leading up to November, the missteps in the decision making process during the crisis, and why the Shah's medical treatment in the US was such an issue. I'm not so sure I have a better understanding of the missteps in the rescue attempt, as Bowden seems to go against every other historian's view on this point.

5. How the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and the war with Iraq influenced the negotiations and release of the hostages.

Bowden's overt bias kept me from rating this a 5 star book. Actually I'd rather the bias be this evident because it is then easy to separate fact from opinion; however, I still cannot bring myself to give a wok on history 5 stars when the author tries to push an agenda.

[Sai Deogekar · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book describes the 444 days long ordeal faced by the people in the American embassy at Tehran. What I loved about this book was that the author has tried to be unbiased (except probably in some parts of the epilogue where he tries to portray that the strained US-Iran relations are responsible for the miserable state of Tehran, but he ends up describing any normal third world country). At times, I found myself rooting for the American victims and getting absolutely enraged by the blatant violation of basic diplomatic courtesy, while at other times I found myself sympathizing with the Iranians and understanding the reasons behind their drastic actions. I finally came to peace with the conclusion: 'why' they did it seems justified, but 'how' they did does not.

The author doesn't mince with words when it comes to describing the oppression of the shah and pointing out CIA's mistake in helping the shah overthrow an elected government. At the same time, the book describes the boredom faced by the hostages and how each one of them devises different ways of dealing with it. The writing is such that you can literally imagine being with the hostages! You can feel your frustration building up, especially in the end when the deal after deal just fell apart because nobody knew who was the puppeteer directing the happenings in Iran.

The book also talks about the general reaction of the American citizens and the press and also about the trauma that families of the hostages went through. It talks about how this crisis was handled in the White House and the remarkable patience and restraint demonstrated by Jimmy Carter. It also narrates the story of the special delta force, their formation, their meticulous preparations, the unexpected obstacles they encountered in their mission and the tragic accident that followed when the forces were returning after abortion of the mission.

I began with sympathizing with the Iranians' grievances, but then slowly losing patience with the Iranian students (especially after the death of the shah), and finally getting anxious for the safe return of the hostages. Overall, it was a long, detailed book, but narrated in a way that keeps you hooked on to every word.

[Liz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was amazing. I cannot believe that I read over 700 pages of exhaustively researched material on a single event (the Iranian hostage crisis in the late 1970's) and stayed riveted the entire time. I was worried after reading Black Hawk Down by the same author that I would have the same trouble of keeping people/events straight, but I didn't at all - Bowden kept the characters alive, distinct, and memorable.

The book covers as many angles as possible - it tries to tell what it was like for the hostages, and also for the Carter administration as they tried repeatedly to resolve the crisis. I knew the bare bones of the story (how long they were kept, whether the ending was happy/sad), but I was still on the edge of my seat for the entire book. It was suspenseful, and detailed, and really, really captivating. Highly recommended non-fiction reading.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book represents the art of storytelling with a vivid presentation of the Iran Hostage Crisis. The American diplomats captivity is primarily expressed in graphic detail which illuminates the authenticity of their 444 day imprisonment.

"Guests of the Ayatollah" also brings to life the response by President Carter, the Iranian students who seized the embassy, the daring rescue attempt by the U.S. Delta Force, and the role geopolitics would play with the Iraq-Iran war.

While this event occurred nearly 40 years ago, it is still relevant to our contemporary history as it shows how this crisis would dramatically reshape American-Middle Eastern relations for the next four decades.

[Jeff Hooper · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really excellent research and very well written. A story that deserved to be told at this depth. I found the first third or so a bit tough to follow as there were a lot of names to learn and it started slowly for me. Really gained steam though.

[Bart Thanhauser · Rating 3 out of 5]

Guests of the Ayatollah is about the 1979 Iran Hostage Crisis in which Iranian university students took over the US Embassy in Tehran and held 66 Americans hostage for over a year.

The embassy takeover and subsequent hostage crisis was, in many ways, a continuation of the Iranian Revolution that had taken place the year before and dethroned Iran’s decades-long dictator, Shah Pahlavi.

There were many motives for the embassy takeover, but the most visible motive was the desire to safeguard the recent revolution. In 1953, the CIA had helped to depose Iran’s first democratically elected president, Mohammed Mossadeq. The memory of this event, as well as evidence of US (and CIA) excesses in other parts of the world made Iranians fearful (and a bit paranoid) that the US would intervene again into Iranian politics. By holding white-collar employees hostage, the students aimed to protect Iranian sovereignty and the drastic political reorganization of the revolution.

However, as Bowden emphasizes, there were many other motives to the takeover. Some politicians and clerics had purely political motives and used the takeover as a means to increase their own power. Others (mostly students) were motivated by the heady dream that the takeover would spark a worldwide revolt to emancipate the third world from the bipolar grip of the Godless Soviets and the meddlesome Americans.

Led by students from across the political spectrum, the embassy takeover was a wildly popular David-versus-Goliath story for many Iranians. For the American public, it was a frustrating story of ordinary government workers caught in the middle of a turbulent, confused, developing nation: the most powerful nation on earth was left powerless. Both these story lines persist today.

What's more the takeover had big and immediate reverberations. In Iran, the takeover helped bring religious conservatives to power and establish a type of government that Bowden cynically terms a “mullocracy”—one part democracy and one part repressive theocracy. In America, the event hijacked Carter’s presidency and helped sweep him out of office. In the region, the takeover prompted Saddam Hussein to declare war on Iran, as he tried to take advantage of Iran’s new pariah status. And to this day, the hostage crisis looms large in the US and Iranian memories. We will extend a hand if you will unclench your fist.

But for such a big event, the actual details of the day-to-day captivity are a bit mundane. Bowden is also the author of Black Hawk Down, and while he tries to bring a Fox Search Light pace to the book, this is tough to accomplish as a 400+ day hostage crisis does not lend itself to an action packed read.

What I found most interesting about this book were the larger themes that Bowden describes--the domestic and foreign policy issues underlying the embassy takeover. The idea that the Iranian revolution and the embassy takeover were watershed moments for Iran, the world, and Islam. Bowden acknowledges this draw early in the book writing, “For a student of politics, being in Tehran just then was like being a geologist camped on the rim of an active volcano” (22). I read this book because I wanted a spot on this rim.

At times, Bowden does a good job of capturing this context--of looking into the volcano. But Bowden spends too much time detailing the day-to-day lives of the hostages. Their exercise regiments, limited clothing choices, and diets. Meh. Also, in describing the lives of the hostages, Bowden assumes a vantage point that is hokey and reads as too Team American (“I guess we’re going to have to go show this ayatollah you don’t mess with Arkansas boys” (451)). And the book is occasionally dismissive of Iranian sentiments: Bowden describes the protesters outside of the embassy as a “mindless, insatiable, million-throated monster, screaming for American blood” (64) and makes vague references to the lurking "Islamist threat".

These shortcomings becomes especially apparent in the book’s epilogue where Bowden tries to ideologically refute the motives of the hostage takers. To me this seemed like a waste of energy: few would disagree that the embassy takeover was illegal and that it had lasting negative effects for both Iran and the US. Yet Bowden concerns himself too much with refuting the hostage takers motives rather than in describing the more interesting messy world from which these motives arose. Bowden argues a point that is dramatically less important and less interesting than most of the other issues.

But there are many redeeming qualities to this book. For one, Bowden fills the book with interesting facts that were new to me. Bowden describes a few escape attempts by hostages and gives exciting detail to the failed rescue mission, Operation Eagle Claw. Bowden also succeeds in depicting Carter as a patient, aggressive (and at times even hawkish) leader--not as the overly-dovish push-over he is often labeled today. And Bowden describes the US media frenzy and the feedback effect they had on the revolution. One final interesting fact that Bowden provides is that in the waning days of the hostage crisis, Ronald Reagan’s advisers reached out to Iranian officials to try to delay the release of the hostages in order to hurt Carter’s election chances. According to Bowden, it didn’t have any real effects on the election, but it's a hell of a fun fact.

But I'm getting lost in the muck. The takeaway point is that with too great a focus on the day-to-day monotony of prisoner life, too great a focus on the Apple-Pie vantage point of the prisoners, some none-too-clever chapter titles (they're just quotes and bad ones at that!), and some disappointing scholarship towards the end of the book (which reads as neo-con paranoia of the "Islamist Threat"), Bowden weakens what is otherwise a highly readable, smart history of sitting on the rim of a volcanic world. He chooses to count the rocks at the crater's edge rather than look down on the bubbling lava. Ah well.

2.5

[John DiConsiglio · Rating 3 out of 5]

Once you get passed its doorstop length & kinda ridiculous epilogue, this briskly-written narrative of the Iranian hostage crisis shows off what veteran journalist Bowden does best: The you-are-there storytelling he brought to the American military in Somalia (Black Hawk Down) & the hunt for drug kingpin Pablo Escobar (Killing Pablo). Forget his clumsy attempts to define “Islamofascism.” (It was written in the shadow of 9/11.) He’s best with fly-on-the-wall access to White House frustrations, the rescue fiasco &, his main focus, the day-to-day ordeal of the 52 hostages & his supersized cast.

[Alain DeWitt · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1979 when the hostage crisis began I had just turned 12. I recall how this story dominated the nightly news headlines. My father worked for the US Department of State so our family probably followed this story a little more closely than most.

(In fact our family has a very tangential connection to the story. My father was a Regional Security Officer. This means that he was in charge of security for all the agencies doing business under the auspices of the embassy. In late 1979 when the shah of Iran came to Panama, I was one of the first people to hear the news. I recall feeling thrilled that my father would trust me with such a big secret.

I also recall vacationing in London in 1982. We were having lunch in the US Embassy cafeteria and I recognized former hostage Ricahrd Queen. Queen had been released early because he had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.)

This book was quite interesting to read because it gave us an insider's view of the hostage crisis. Bowden interviewed all the living hostages as part of his research for this book. And for those hostages that were deceased he relied on interviews conducted for other books.

For those of us watching at home, it wasn't immediately apparent some of the abuse being suffered by the hostages, but Bowden lays it all bare for the reader. In addition Bowden provides great detail about the living conditions and the various moves of the hostages, the amount of contact they had with each other and the sheer psychological strain they endured.

I learned a lot. For instance, I hadn't known that three of the hostages (L. Bruce Laingen, the mission chief - I attended boarding school with his son; Victor Tomseth, the political chief; and Mike Howland, the assistant security chief) spent almost their entire captivity in the Foreign Ministry, separated from the other hostages.

The nucleus of Iran's grievances against the United States date back to the CIA-sponsored coup in 1953, Operation Ajax, which deposed Mohammed Mossadeq from power and installed the shah with absolute authority. Gradually the shah's rule became more and more oppressive and behind it all Iranians saw the unseen hand of the United States.

When Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran from exile, the shah fled the country and the Islamic Republic of Iran was born with Khomeini wielding ultimate authority.

The United States maintained relations with Iran and tried to cultivate contacts with the new regime. I think Bowden shows that the Iranians were so blinded by the past wrongs committed by the United States that they were unable to see that in the Carter administration they would have had a partner willing to try and make up for those past wrongs.

The proverbial straw that broke the camel's back was the US decision - disastrous in hindsight - to admit the shah into the US for medical treatment. The average Iranian learning of this decision assumed that the US was plotting a way to restore the shah to power.

Another huge mistake was, having made the decision to admit the shah to the US, the embassy should have been evacuated, at least temporarily.

The really unique (to me, at least) feature of the book is that Bowden also tells the story from the perspective of the hostage-takers. Here is where the book really excels because Bowden shows that, far from being a well-thought-out, well-orchestrated plot, it was a stunt staged by a group of Islamist students that really spiraled out of control. The students expected the occupation of the embassy to last three days and then they expected to go home. But there was such a groundswell of popular support that it actually toppled the provisional government (Iran was in the throes of the Islamist revolution sparked by the return of Ayatollah Khomeini) and turned the student group into a player in internal politics.

It also had the unintended consequence of leaving the US no-one with whom to negotiate with for the hostages' release. At several different moments the US thought it had reached agreements with representatives of the provisional government only to have the rug pulled out from underneath them by Khomeini.

In the course of his research into this book, Bowden traveled to Tehran and intereviewed as many of the hostage-takers as he could. Some of them have risen to prominence in the government while others have become disillusioned by the theocracy.

Not surprisingly those who attained prominence in the regime stand by their actions as a legitimate course of action. These figures seem to not understand that any benefit attainted by Iran is more than outweighed by the harm of 25+ years as an international pariah.

(An aside: it is apparently without irony that some of the hostage takers protested at US interference in Iran's internal affairs. What do these people think the Iranian government does in Iraq? Afghanistan? Syria? Lebanon?)

With regard to the failed rescue attempt, I have read several books about the special forces community (including Charlie Beckwith's 'Delta Force') and was quite familiar with Operation Eagle Claw. So I didn't learn anything new there. Oh, I did learn that Charlie Beckwith was an asshole.

All in all, though, this was quite a well-written and informative book about an important episode in our relations with the Middle East.

[John Higgins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good read,bit drawn out and long winded at times,3.5 stars for me

[Babak Fakhamzadeh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bowden focuses on events surrounding the Iranian hostage crisis, the 444-day period, during which student proxies of the new Iranian regime held hostage 66 diplomats and citizens of the United States inside the U.S. embassy in Tehran. Historians consider the crisis to have been an important reason for United States President Jimmy Carter's loss in his re-election bid for the presidency in 1980.

The book is not as good as Biden's own Black Hawk Down, but it's also a revelation on several levels. The strength of the book is in the opening and closing chapters where Bowden deals extensively with the underlying strategies of the individuals involved in the takeover of the embassy and the political aftermath.
The author shows how a small group of individuals with understandable, if questionable, ideals, initiated an event which very quickly went over their heads, themselves as well as their captors becoming pawns in what mostly was an internal (to Iran) struggle of political supremacy, eventually resulting in bringing the hard-liner clerics to power and making Iran into what it is today, a mullahcracy.
Although Bowden takes too much time describing the individual ordeals of the hostages, interesting, but without an apparent underlying pattern, these lists of events turn into pure anecdotal offerings, he also tries and succeeds quite well in supplying a balanced view of the events over the 14 months the crisis lasted.

However, the book's most interesting part is near the end, where Bowden tries to investigate the effect those events, now some three decades old, had and still have on Iran and is politics. Most people now realise, including several of the former hostage takers originally involved as instigators, that a lot more harm was done and that not only were the effects averse to their objective of enlisting the American people in their fight against the American government, who had been meddling in Iranian affairs since world war two, the overall effects on Iran as a country were quite devastating, bringing a system into being, not nearly democratic, under which many people suffered, even decades later.
Bowden also shows how the somehow long lasting need for consistency (but also terror!) by the Iranian regime still accounts for the very sour relations between the US and Iran. Suggesting, to me, that perhaps the only way to resolve this whole issue is not by slow evolutionary changes to the political structure of Iran, if this has happened at all since the death of Khomeini, but really needs a jolt to force some much needed changes.

One of Bowden's closing paragraphs sum up his own experiences, as well as the Iranian people's, quite well:

"The standard practice of journalists writing about a foreign country is to assume a commanding overview, offer important insights, and arrive at impressive conclusions. I can offer only these observations, experiences, and conversations, which amount to nothing more than random pieces of an unsolvable puzzle. My impression, for what it's worth, is that Iranians today are conflicted and ambivalent about the embassy takeover. Despite all the flamboyant rhetoric, the great show of resolute anti-Americanism, and divinely sanctioned purpose, the "Great Aban 13th" exhibition [at the former embassy, celebrating the hostage taking] is at some level an enduring embarrassment."

Bowden linked an important series of events together, each intertwined with the next:

+ Carter's failure to be reelected
+ The death of the Shah, which happened during the crisis.
+ The Soviet Union entering Afghanistan.
+ Saddam Hussein's declaring war on Iran.
+ The emergence of a hard-liner clerical government in Iran.

Bowden shows how the hostage crisis was used by the clerics to slowly take in more and more power (although he also suggests that, to a certain extent, even Khomeini himself might have been something of a pawn in this, not acting according to a greater plan but constantly submitting to what appeared to be spur of the moment decisions and changes), thus benefiting from a long and protracted crisis. Also, Bowden doesn't believe the supposed Reagan-administration intervention (before the man was inaugurated as president) had any effect on the hostage crisis as such.

One gripe: Bowden could have done with a better editor. He repeats himself quite often, and even though this is useful at times, considering the many characters who play a role in the book, on several occasions he obviously forgot mentioning the same tidbit of information earlier on.
And he calls 'Afghan' a language. That's sad.

[Alli · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a solid book on this topic. Well researched and detailed, reads pretty well for nonfiction as well. Good audiobook too.

*the author is pretty biased toward Carter but he acknowledges other opinions, so I thought he did well

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Being in high school when this came down, flailling my typeing klass, I've been curious for years. Iran has been paying the price for this errant deed, both internally and externally, for thirty years now. The religious powerbrokers were able to solidify their hold on the populace by eleminating political enemies and keeping citizens in a fever of revolt and hate.

Many times there was a deal on the table only to have the conditions change once the US agreed. I believe Carter did the best he could and behaved honorably. Blatent militarism could have met with the hostages death, and the martyrdom of thousands. Time was the best course of action. If only the European nations had stood with us stronger a successful resolution might have come sooner.

Colonel Beckwith assumed all responsibility for the mission failures. He made the decision to abort based on being one less chopper (5) that the stated minimum. That was three less than what he started. One turned back to the carrier during the encounter with the dust cloud. ( We get those clouds here in Ariz. let me tell you they can get to be huge and blinding). The second lost it's back up hydralics the pilot grounded the craft. #3? While lifting of in the desert. In a cloud of it's own dust. The pilot became disoriented, came up and around, sliced into a C-130 airplane loaded with extra fuel, then straddled and sat down on the fuselage. Everything went up in flames. Eight men died. I'm just not gonna buy into the idea that the actuarial tables would have accounted for that level of loss. Only one loss could be attributed to reliability (mechanical) issues and the mission could have still gone on.

Carter, being a nuclear submarine captian, would have known the dangers of a civilian becoming involved with the inner workings of a military mission. Had he done so there would have been strong criticism for micromanaging.

One thing that struck me was Bowdens glossing over the possibility of interference from Reagan during the final days of the election. I've always suspected Ronny of dastardly deeds. Bowden said he couldnt find anything, but I would have liked to know more of his efforts.

It seems like Reagan gets credit for the hostage release. But they were released on inauguration day after Carter stepped down. The low class moment of that day was Reagan not deferring to Carter to make the announcement to the world.

After the bare bones story the best part for me was the epilog. The chapters that dealt with Iran society in 2005. Thirty years later we see the losses and ramifications of this event that quickly got out of hand. Iran had some legitimate complaints of the United States but international backlash from kidnapping diplomatic personnel and the strengthing of the Mullahs internally has crippled life on the street for the regular citizen.

All in all, a terrific book.