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Kevin Tham
Author's Bio
Mark Robert Bowden was born on 17 July 1951. A graduate of Loyola College (Maryland), he has written for the Philadelphia Enquirer, Rolling Stone, and Sports Illustrated. He has garnered international acclaim for earlier works, including Killing Pablo, about the life, pursuit of and death of Columbian cartel boss Pablo Escobar, and Black Hawk Down, about the attempted raid to capture lieutenants of Somalian warlord Mohamed Farah Aidid (Operation: Code Irene) and the subsequent firefight.
One Star Service
It's been about a year since Mohammad Resa Pahlavi, the shah the government supported, has fled the country. The embassy has already been attacked once; only some quick talking has kept the grounds intact and the staff alive. The intelligence agency suggests that "the country 'is not in a revolutionary or even a prerevolutionary situation,'" but the students outside the gates screaming for your death, denouncing you as a spy, and asserting your association with the shah's secret police seriously belie that claim.1 Religious leaders call for increased attacks on the "devils of modernity," namely the embassy.2 Just another day at the office at the American embassy in Tehran, at least until the students make good on their threats, storm the walls, and take everyone hostage. Welcome to the Tehran Terrace!
So begins the 1979 hostage crisis, and Mark Bowden's latest book, Guests of the Ayatollah--The Iranian Hostage Crisis: The First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam. Bowden's latest book covers the hostage crisis from its beginnings on 4 November 1979 to Ronald Reagan's inauguration on 20 January 1981. As suggested by the introduction above, Bowden, despite his journalistic style, designed the book's organization to recall that "for the detainees," the crisis "was a harrowing emotional rollercoaster."3
Part One of the book, The Set-In, focuses primarily on the initial hostage taking, the reaction of the embassy staff, and the first interrogations by the occupiers. Some sections, however, relate to Carter's reaction to the hostage taking and the lead-up to the hostage crisis, both with the shah and student planning. It becomes immediately apparent that the Iranian students, calling themselves the Muslim Students Following the Imam's Line, have ridiculously overblown beliefs on the nature of the embassy; they celebrate the capture of the "Den of Spies" as an incredible victory for the students.4 Interrogations of the hostages have a similar tragicomic element: one man, Joe Hall, is told to his face that he is CIA (or, as pronounced by the students, "See-ah"). Playing along, Hall says that he is that CIA agent responsible for the distribution of wheat mold--this joke of "the CIA plot to destroy Iranian crops would become part of the list of 'revelations' later claimed by the hostage takers."5 It would be almost funny, but the occupiers are also brutal; they physically abuse most of the hostages at least once, and occasionally subject uncooperative hostages to mock executions (everything except a loaded gun).
Parts Two and Three, titled Den of Spies and Waiting, focus on the response of the world to the hostage crisis, and continues the hostage interrogations, crazy occupiers, and the copings of the hostages. The American media would play a large role in putting the hostage crisis into the spotlight and keeping it there; the same regular updates and analyses, and even a few apologists, that came up during the most recent Iranian hostage crisis involving fifteen British marines applied in 1979. The hostage crisis was, after all, "a real life cliff-hanger...a conundrum, a scandal," and the families of the hostages became instant celebrities.6 Public opinion split on whether Carter did the right thing by advocating patience or should have used force, and a few even suggested that Carter should issue an apology for various American transgressions. Although the students released 13 of the hostages near Thanksgiving, they would not moderate their anti-Americanism nor let up on the treatment of prisoners, although they did attempt to enlist them and a group of American sympathizers to help publish their grievances. Some predicted that the hostage situation would last a long time, and some were convinced that Carter's refusal to "'...acknowledge [the U.S.'s] guilt for the abuses of the past twenty-five years [in support of the shah]'" would only worsen matters.7 Diplomatic pressure would not work, as even with diplomatic isolation the Iranian government would feel perfectly fine with its "alliance with Allah," and so Carter began pursuing a secret military operation involving the newly christened Special Forces group Delta Force.8
With the occasional cut to Delta Force planning and training in earlier sections, Part Four, One Hundred and Thirty-Two Men, concentrates on the botched rescue operation. It also, however, describes incidences from the hostages and Carter's staff attempting negotiations. One of the relatives of a hostage, Barbara Timm, is given special consideration as she travels to Iran to meet the hostage takers, trying to convince them to release her son. The remainder of the section is dedicated to the failed Delta Force operation. The Delta group seems to take the mission somewhat lightly at first--one operative calls jocularly to another coming in on a different plane, "'Welcome to World War Three!'"9 The commander of the mission orders an abort, however, when they lack the helicopter carry capacity to do the mission--as the planes take off, an airplane and a helicopter crash on the makeshift runway. Although the initial impact is described only as "two loud dull thunks," the resulting fire kills eight servicemen and renders inoperable two aircraft and most of the weaponry.10 Afterwards, Delta Force is depressed, Carter is forced to make a public statement about the rescue, and radicals in Iran increase their anti-American leanings. Some even go so far as to assert that the failed rescue is "proof of divine intervention: Allah supposedly roused dust storms to save the hostage takers."11 The new religious fanaticism of the Muslim Students Following the Imam's line is again apparent.
The final section, Part Five, Haggling with the Barbarians, discusses the Iranian reaction to the failed rescue attempt, the final days the hostages spent in captivity, the negotiations and the eventual release. Most newspapers in the country hammer Carter's rescue attempt, suggesting that Carter "'...failed miserably in judgment and leadership,'" although the text refers to these editors as "pious second-guessers."12 The media circus calmed down somewhat as the hostage situation developed into a national tedium, but family and friends kept awareness of the hostage situation in the public eye. The Iran-Iraq War caused a drop in the popularity of the students (as they were holing up in the embassy rather than fighting in Iraq), and a general morale boost for the hostages, one of whom calls out, "'Buy Iraqi war bonds!" 13 The actual negotiations for the hostages began in West Germany and Algeria, some time before the beginning of the Iran-Iraq War, with the Iranians represented by Sadegh Tabatabai. Although the war set negotiations back, Iran and the students agreed to let the hostages go by January--and contrary to "October Surprise" enthusiasts, the hostage takers themselves noted that the timing was designed as "a final insult to the man they had propped up as the representative of the devil on earth."14 Before leaving, the hostages were asked to make recordings by the occupiers; the questions were designed to suggest the hostages had been treated politely, that "they had been happy 'guests' of the ayatollah," hence the title of the book.15 The hostages refused to cooperate, discussing the beatings and mock executions, and asking whether there would be anything positive to report about begin held against one's will. Still, by 20 January they are bussed to the airport and shipped out of Iran.
Bowden is primarily descriptive in Guests of the Ayatollah; his main purpose is an analysis of what happened during those 444 days when a band of determined students held representatives of one of the world's superpowers by the pants. More specifically, he mostly examines the hostage crisis from the captives' point of view, apart from the first two chapters which put the reader in the minds of the hostage takers. After the initial planning phases, the main view we get of the students is of their ranting and berating the detainees, sometimes comically, for example the students examining watches for James Bond-like gadgets. One of the more sympathetic portrayals of the hostage takers--as romantic, but very misguided students radicalized on anti-Americanism--comes with Massoumeh Ebtekar, also known as "Screaming Mary" due to her anti-American rants, as she denounces the United States in front of hostage Tim Schaefer for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When Schaefer notes that the Japanese started the war by attacking Pearl Harbor, Ebtekar's reaction is disbelief: "'Pearl Harbor? Where's Pearl Harbor...the Japanese bombed Hawaii?"16 If her post-hostage-crisis role as a senior government official and prominent presence in the book as one of the occupiers to be mentioned more than once is any indication, Ebtekar was a fairly major force in the hostage crisis. That she doesn't know basic facts about World War II suggests innocence or naÏveté, but threats, beatings, and mock executions by her colleagues undercut this view. This dichotomy does give credence to Bowden's statement that "Iran is like an inverse world."17
Since the book was first published in 2006, Guests of the Ayatollah naturally shows influence of the events of September 11, 2001. The subtitle, The First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam, makes this very clear. Also, since Mark Bowden is an American, he is naturally very sympathetic to the American hostages; although he occasionally presents the student radicals in a manner evoking thought, such as with Ebtekar above, he can also be very patronizing towards them. For example, he listens to a magazine editor craft a conspiracy theory that both Iran and the United States conspired to execute the hostage plot (a moderate version, that the Republican committee negotiated with Iran to keep the hostages until after the 1980 election, is known as the "October Surprise" in the United States), then dismisses him with "'I think you're crackers.'"18 He does note that some of those who once supported the takeover of the embassy have repented once they realized what fundamentalist movements and governments the action propped up. Some other theories exist. For example, the CIA supposedly simultaneously supported the shah and engineered the unrest that would lead to his exile. It then organized his return and the seizure of the embassy. When Bowden notes the internal contradictions of such a theory, he is told that he "must view the world through the lens of Islam to see the logic" of the idea.19 The connotation proposes that the "lens of Islam" is not very logical at all.
Reviews for Bowden's latest book have been generally positive and also offer their own take on the "first battle with radical Islam." Duncan Currie, writing for the conservative magazine National Review, called Guests of the Ayatollah "a magisterial work of historical journalism" covering an event that caused Carter's popularity to collapse and radical Islam to take root in the Middle East.20 Although he notes that Bowden for the most part keeps his biases out of the book, he offers that if the hostage situation was that "'first battle'...then winning that battle, not simply protecting the hostages, should have been our paramount objective."21 Reuel Marc Gerecht writes in the Wall Street Journal that the book is "essentially...a variation of prison literature...[yet his writing] accomplishes its task [of keeping readers interested] sublimely well."22 He takes a somewhat different stance from Currie, stating that Guests' idea that Islamic fundamentalism is dictatorship plus religion is somewhat overblown, and that Carter was "not complacent" in engaging the hostages.23 Afshin Molavi, with the Washington Post, notes that, although "Guests of the Ayatollah provides only glimpses of the thoughts of the foreign antagonists," the book is admirable for humanizing the Carter administration and its internal splits, and specifically the hostages themselves attempting to strike back against their captors.24 Taking a character from the book, Molavi notes that pundits who keep their eye on Iran frequently have "'Bruce Laingen moments,'" named for one of the hostages who wrote long diary entries speculating why the students acted as they did. 25
Guests of the Ayatollah is not perfect by any means. The major problem with Bowden's book is that there are so many names as to be unwieldy--eventually the characters Al Golacinski, John Limbert, Michael Metrinko, and Bruce Laingen begin to mix in one's mind with continued reading. Also, although this may have been a stylistic choice to convey the confusion of the hostages, there is very little sense of time in the book--the only dates given with any specificity are the beginning of the hostage crisis on 4 November 1979, the parties and propaganda given on Christmases 1979 and 1980, and the release of the hostages on 20 January 1981. Further, the book covers the 444 days of the incident in 630 pages. Although the page count makes for faster reading, it will disappoint those wanting a more detailed account of the crisis. Nonetheless, taken slowly--read over perhaps four to six days--the plight of the hostages can be utterly engrossing. It is somewhat tempting to stand up and give a cheer that the hostages made it out alive in the final scene where "Carter smiled, the crowd cheered, a band started playing."26 Stylistically, Bowden channels Tom Wolfe and "New Journalism" in combining journalistic fact-finding with tropes of fiction such as dialogue, focus on a single character's thoughts and actions, and foreshadowing--throughout, Guests of the Ayatollah reads like a real-life prison thriller. Although the repeated chronicles of beatings and mock executions can get tedious if read in a single sitting, together they carry a message of the seriousness of the hostage crisis.
As the book's subtitle suggests, the Iranian hostage crisis acted as America's first look at radical Islam. Before this, CIA and military examinations "had pursued 'third country' targets" such as the "Soviets, East Europeans, [and] communist Chinese" from its post in the Tehran embassy--in 1979 the Cold War was still in place.27 Carter had "toasted the elaborately bedeck, gray-haired shah's 'stability'" in early 1979, oblivious to the idea that the shah could have been toppled and forced into exile by the highly devout, radical Islam mullahs, including Ayatollah Khomeini.28 Bowden writes that the mullahs may have been brazen with their rhetoric, but most simply thought this was rhetoric; "[like] most of the great turning points in history, it was obvious and yet no one saw it coming."29
Bowden was very correct in identifying the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis as the first time radical Islam reared its head. In fact the incident is responsible for the rise of two radical Islams--the fundamentalist Shiites of Iran and its mullahs and the subsequent rise of Sunni Wahhabism and Deobandism of Saudi Arabia which developed as a counter, "lest Iran's Shiite fundamentalists rule the roost."30 Incidents from the 1983 Beirut, Lebanon truck bombing to the most recent Ethiopian-Somalian wars can be traced to these two religions or their proxies such as Hezbollah, literally the party of Allah. Some criticize the proposed "three-state solution" in Iraq because of these divisions--the southern Sunnis and eastern Shiites would fall under the spheres of influence of the two groups. The recent hostage situation involving fifteen British sailors and the current problems involving several U.S. citizens reveal that the same militant Shiite fundamentalism is continuing to skirmish in the old battleground of Iran.
If one believes the concept of radical Islam was a recent phenomenon, he should read Guests of the Ayatollah and see just how far back that fundamentalism goes. He should also consider taking a trip to the Tehran Terrace, the old U.S. Embassy in Iran, now a museum commemorating the hostage taking. And don't worry, "this time, [he can] go home when [he] want[s]!" 31
Endnotes
1. Bowden, Mark. Guests of the Ayatollah--The Iranian Hostage Crisis: The First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam. New York: Grove Press, 2006, 4
2. Bowden, Mark 5
3. Currie, Duncan. "A Dark Era Dawns." Rev. of Guests of the Ayatollah--The Iranian Hostage Crisis: The First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam, by Mark Bowden. National Review 7 August 2006; 45
4. Bowden, Mark 69
5. Bowden, Mark 97
6. Bowden, Mark 191
7. Bowden, Mark 359
8. Bowden, Mark 289
9. Bowden, Mark 444
10. Bowden, Mark 460
11. Currie, Duncan 47
12. Bowden, Mark 481
13. Bowden, Mark 538
14. Bowden, Mark 629
15. Bowden, Mark 572
16. Bowden, Mark 310
17. Bowden, Mark 606
18. Bowden, Mark 618
19. Bowden, Mark 617
20. Currie, Duncan 45
21. Currie, Duncan 47
22. Gerecht, Reuel Marc. "Radical Islam's Eruption." Rev. of Guests of the Ayatollah--The Iranian Hostage Crisis: The First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam, by Mark Bowden. Wall Street Journal Online. 29 April 2006. 24 May 2007. , 2
23. Gerecht, Reuel Marc 3
24. Molavi, Afshin. "Tehran Rising". Rev. of Guests of the Ayatollah--The Iranian Hostage Crisis: The First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam, by Mark Bowden. Washington Post Online. 7 May 2006. 24 May 2007. , 2
25. Molavi Afshin 2
26. Bowden, Mark 589
27. Gerecht, Reuel Marc 1
28. Bowden, Mark 119
29. Bowden, Mark 4
30. Currie, Duncan 1
31. Bowden, Mark 620
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