Guests of the Ayatollah

Looking for Akbar in Ayatollahville

Nowadays the grand old embassy in Tehran looks forlorn, like a hostage left behind and long forgotten. The chancery, a solid battleship of an office building in orange brick, two stories high and more than a block long, was once the symbol of America’s formidable presence in Iran. Today it remains standing in the heart of the capital, facing a wide, busy thoroughfare renamed Taleghani Avenue, after the murdered cleric whose sons Michael Metrinko was waiting to meet on the morning of the takeover. Although more crowded with structures, the grounds are still a large, leafy oasis, a haven from the noisy hustle of this city of now more than twelve million. Long ago dubbed by its invaders and occupiers the “den of spies,” this old symbol of America’s friendship with Iran is festooned with hateful garnish: anti-American graffiti, banners, and propaganda displays to remind people of the nation’s undying disdain. The compound is now home to the Revolutionary Guards, an elite military unit that reports to the black-turbaned elite of Iran’s authoritarian mullahocracy, and to the Basij, Islamic brownshirts, the civilian goon squads who turn out in large numbers at a moment’s notice to demonstrate on behalf of the regime and to help put down public displays of dissent and “immorality,” such as women whose scarves do not fully cover their hair or young people holding hands. The chancery itself now serves as an anti-American museum, with a grim, ugly, permanent display called the “Great Aban 13th” exhibition. The takeover is remembered as one of the founding events of the Islamic “republic,” for better or worse, and one whose repercussions are still being felt throughout the world.

The museum is supposed to be an official shrine to that bold act of national defiance, but in the four times I went there in 2003 and 2004 it was empty of visitors. A bookstore just outside the entrance that was once known for selling anti-American literature and reprints of the infamous “Spy Den Documents” was vacant when I first saw it, its racks empty, and when I visited again nine months later it appeared ready to reopen as a bookstore for children. The anti-American slogans and spiteful artwork that had been spray-painted on the embassy’s outer brick walls by angry crowds during the fourteen-month crisis had faded, including an image of the Statue of Liberty with a death mask for a face and a sign in English that said “Death to the USA.” The official shield of the United States on the front gate has been chipped or sandblasted away beyond recognition.

Even the guardhouse on the southeast corner, where visitors enter, was in shambles. On my first visit, two friendly, unshaven Revolutionary Guards stood behind the counter in a small marble-veneered reception area that looked like a frat house on Sunday morning, with battered furniture, an old swivel chair leaning precariously on its stem with cushion stuffing hanging out, dirt caked on the floors and walls, and muddy boot prints everywhere. I pointed quizzically at a complete boot print on the ceiling and, grinning, asked my guide and translator, Ramin, to tell the guards that, as an American citizen, I protested the abuse of what could arguably be called American property.

“Tell them that if they are going to steal it, the least they could do is take care of it,” I said.

When Ramin relayed my comments, the guards laughed, looked around sheepishly at the mess, and shrugged happily. They were conscripts serving out the last few months of their duty at a gravy post. “It’s great here,” one said. “Nothing ever happens.”

It took some doing and a few bribes to the guards’ higher-ups to get inside. The exhibit is amateurish, as if put together by a group of high school students with a bad attitude. On the front steps are two cartoonish statues that appear to have been fashioned out of papier-mâché and thickly coated with bronze-colored paint. One is of a surrendering marine—apparently based on a photograph of Sergeant Steve Kirtley—with his arms up and his hands clasped behind his head; the other is a replica of the Statue of Liberty with a white bird (a symbol of Islam) caged in her abdomen. Inside was more of the same: displays illustrating America’s “role of evil” in the world over the past several decades; lots of gory photographs of wounded children presented as victims of American bombings; and a framed copy of an important-looking “spy document,” stamped “Classified” and “Top Secret,” but which on closer inspection turned out to be a memo requesting additional drivers for the embassy’s motor pool. There were also pieces of the helicopter engines recovered in the Iranian desert following the failed rescue mission, photographs of the hostages themselves, and somewhat dated propaganda showcasing America and Saddam Hussein as partners in crime. In its preoccupation with American symbols, the whole exhibit is more a defacement than an indictment, like drawing a big nose and mustache on a poster of someone famous. That such a gloating, adolescent display has endured in the heart of Tehran for a quarter century says more about Iran than it does about America.

The taking of the embassy in Tehran was a crime. The argument of the hostage takers that it was engaged in a massive spy operation intent on stopping the revolution, killing Khomeini, and restoring the Peacock Throne was false. None of the thousands of documents they seized and published supports it, and a close look at the hostages themselves reveals only a handful who were engaged in spying, and those by their own admission ineffectually. The strongest argument in defense of the takeover is that Iran had legitimate grievances against the United States, which was true, but what two nations with long histories do not have grievances? They are a fact of international life. Diplomacy exists because it offers a chance of rising above them.

Indeed, the hostage crisis, an assault on diplomacy, itself ultimately depended on diplomacy for resolution. A quarter century later Iran’s stature in the world community remains diminished, and will remain so until the act itself is renounced. Diplomats serve at the pleasure of the host nation, and when they are no longer welcome they can be readily expelled. Holding America’s emissaries hostage was a crime not just against those held captive and their country but against the entire civilized world. President Carter deserves credit for his restraint, and the world community deserves blame for failing to respond adequately to the insult. Apart from pronouncements, the United Nations and most of our allies were content to leave the captive American mission to its fate. Anyone who believes in the importance of diplomacy as an alternative to war ought to regard that failure as significant, and those who see the UN as an answer to the world’s conflicts ought to take note.

The failure of the rescue mission spurred the U.S. military to place a greater emphasis on special operations. The tactical issues that confronted mission planners in 1979 would pose little problem for today’s more flexible and multifaceted force. Veterans of the rescue mission remain bitterly disappointed about the loss of life and their failure to reach Tehran but regard the mission as a vital step into the modern age of warfare. Those familiar with the details of their audacious plan are amused by the perception of Carter as a timid commander in chief.

The Iran hostage crisis was for most Americans their first encounter with Islamo-facism and, as such, can be seen as the first battle in that ongoing world conflict. Iran’s hatred of the United States was in part a consequence of heavy-handed, arrogant, and sometimes criminal twentieth-century American foreign policy, but it was also rooted in something that has nothing to do with that. It grew out of anger over the erosion of tradition. The modern Western world does not recognize revelation and divine right as the root of government authority. The trend of history has long been away from strict tribal authority grounded in one holy book or the other, whether the Koran, the Torah, the Bible, or any other ancient text, and toward those strictly human values distilled so well in the Declaration of Independence as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The murderous terrorism that has become a fact of modern life is part of the death throes of an ancient way of life. The glorious Islamist revolution in Iran, which a quarter century later has produced a despised, corrupt, and ineffectual religious dictatorship, will wind up little more than a footnote in the long and colorful history of that nation, and probably an embarrassing one, judging by the disgruntlement of many Iranians, including at least some of the old hostage takers.

In that sense, the hostage crisis is a case study in the futility of governing a country by fantasy. The stirring symbolism of the embassy takeover excited the nation, and in that sense served the political goals of the mullahs as they skillfully maneuvered for power. Indeed, even as the hostages were flying home in 1981, Iran’s chief negotiator was proclaiming a great victory, and gloating, “We rubbed dirt in the nose of the world’s greatest superpower.” But glee over that symbolic triumph had given way months earlier to real-life concerns, namely, the urgent need for military supplies to fend off the armies of Saddam Hussein. In the quarter century since, the fever of revolution in Iran has given way to a deep and widespread resentment of religious figures who presume to dictate the smallest, most personal details of people’s lives. Extremism, religious or otherwise, is by definition the province of a small minority. God speaks to very few, if any of us. The great majority of those who are not so blessed hold beliefs tinctured with doubt and basic decency.

The ordeal of the American hostages is easy to minimize in retrospect. All of them were released, most of them physically unharmed. Given the tragic and brutal progress of the Islamo-fascists in the years since, the videotaped beheadings and horrific mass slaughters, the embassy takeover seems almost polite. But as Philip Roth noted in the brief passage quoted at the front of this book, the “terror of the unforeseen is what…history hides.” The Americans taken prisoner on November 4, 1979, did not know if they would ever come home. Every day they lived with the threat of trial and execution, of becoming victims of Iranian political violence or an American rescue attempt. They lived with the arrogance of Islamist certainty, which prompts otherwise decent men to acts of unflinching cruelty. My goal was to reconstruct their experience as they lived it. The men and women held hostage in Iran survived nearly fifteen months of unrelenting fear. They were the first victims of the inaptly named “war on terror.”

Today a number of them are trying to sue the Iranian government for damages but are blocked by the agreement the United States signed to secure their release. It seems wrong to me that any country should be bound by an agreement signed under duress, yet the administration of President George W. Bush continues to oppose the hostages’ action.

The sorry course of Iran’s revolution suggests a pattern for the whole retrograde Islamist movement currently terrorizing the world. Driven by a vague goal of establishing a Koranic utopia, a fanatical fringe allies itself with mainstream political disaffection, but instead of opening the doors to liberty and prosperity it succeeds only in creating a closed and stunted society under the thumb of so-called spiritual leaders who prove, in the end, to be merely human, subject to the same temptations of power and wealth as rulers everywhere and always. The only political system that serves the majority is one that respects true human spirituality, something deeply personal and almost infinitely various.

The Hostages

The returning American hostages stepped off a plane in Wiesbaden, West Germany, into a whirl of unexpected and, for many, unwanted celebrity. Few of them felt heroic—indeed, some wrestled with feelings of shame—but they were heroes to their countrymen whether they liked it or not, complete with fan mail, flashing cameras, unceasing demands for interviews, honors, and even ticker-tape parades. The Miami Beach Convention Bureau donated a free weeklong vacation to all the hostages; Bill Royer was given a yellow Cadillac by wealthy admirers in Houston; Kevin Hermening was awarded a free lifetime pass to Milwaukee Brewers baseball games. Major League Baseball then awarded similar lifetime passes to all the hostages. There was much discussion over whether their treatment had amounted to “torture,” with divisions among the hostages themselves. Asked about it, one marine commander took a gentle swipe at the civilian foreign service. “Torture is a subjective term,” he said. “What some soft-living State Department types might consider torture is just normal living conditions for a marine.” The ever cantankerous and blunt Bob Ode knew that nothing about his experience was heroic, “unless there is a new definition of hero as being in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Nevertheless, President Reagan invited the lot of them to the White House, where he pinned small American flags to their lapels and thanked them for their service. The State Department employees were given the prestigious Medal of Valor; Michael Metrinko got two, one for his time as a hostage and another for his daring rescue of the young Americans who had been jailed in Tabriz months before the embassy takeover. The CIA employees received both the State Department award and the agency’s Exceptional Service Medallion. All of the military hostages were awarded meritorious service medals except Joe Subic, “Brother Subic,” the army sergeant whose self-serving behavior in captivity had earned the undying scorn of most of his fellow hostages, but not all.

“I think Joe has gotten a bum rap,” says Al Golacinski, who now works as a consultant in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. “He was a young man who was just more eager than most to be the center of attention and to please whoever was in charge. He is guilty of poor judgment in a difficult situation, that’s all. Nothing he did really harmed anybody.” Golacinski feels that Subic’s public mistakes were less harmful than some of the capitulations behind the scenes of other high-ranking hostages.

They all had stories about returning to their country’s smothering embrace. My favorite was Metrinko’s, the man in love with distant lands. He was accustomed to deliberately low-key homecomings after his frequent travels. Once, after being away for two years in the Peace Corps, he had come home to Pennsylvania without announcing his arrival, taken a cab from the bus station in Scranton, entered the big old family house in Olyphant quietly through the cellar door, taken a seat in the kitchen, and just said hello to whoever walked in. It was fun watching the startled, delighted reactions. But there would be no understated return this time.

On the then emerging (now prevailing) popular notion that those who have experienced any sort of trauma need professional help to cope, he and the rest of the hostages were subjected to a daunting series of medical and psychological examinations in Wiesbaden. Waiting with noses pressed to the window were American and international reporters. They would impose a different kind of captivity. When Metrinko phoned home for the first time he felt a little sheepish; it was the middle of the night in Olyphant. His parents not only didn’t mind, they had been waiting with a TV crew for his call. His mother explained that they had been deluged by the press.

“This one is particularly nice,” she said. “Would you talk to him?”

In Germany he was given a free satellite phone with an answering service, and once the number got out to family and friends, messages began to pile up. It seemed like everybody in the world was waiting in line to talk to him.

One call was from an Iranian professor in Bonn, a man he had met when he was in Tabriz, who had an unusual invitation. It seemed a daughter of Imam Khomeini was visiting in Germany and wanted to meet with Metrinko and discuss what had happened. He turned her down. He wanted nothing further to do with the Khomeinis and Iran.

Some old friends living in Germany had a more welcome suggestion. They offered to pick him up and take him touring through the country by car, just to get away from everything. His minders in Wiesbaden were appalled. They had a full agenda of activities planned, more tests, meetings, debriefings. They said he couldn’t possibly go.

“Am I a prisoner?” Metrinko asked.

The question brought looks of horror.

So he went touring, eating, drinking, and talking his way down the Rhine.

In the months and years that followed, some of the freed captives became, in effect, professional hostages, writing and lecturing and popping up whenever events called the crisis to mind. Most just got on with their lives. When I interviewed Greg Persinger, who now works in Roanoke, Virginia, for a company that makes electronic devices for the military and law enforcement, he said that few of his friends or coworkers had even been aware that he was once one of the hostages in Iran until the company newsletter ran a small feature story about him several years ago. Some of the hostages have never spoken of their ordeal and refused to do so with me, and when I started working on this book in 2001, ten of the hostages were dead: Malcolm Kalp, Bill Keough, Richard Queen, John Graves, Bob Blucker, Lee Holland, Bert Moore, Jerry Plotkin, Bob Ode, and John McKeel. Ann Swift was killed in a horseback riding accident while I was working on the book.

I heard a story about Kalp from Keith Hall, a fellow CIA operative, who said he spent a long night with the former hostage in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, in 1989, on the tenth anniversary of the embassy takeover. Kalp was drinking and had a tube-shaped grenade launcher in the backseat of his car. He and Hall and another agency man went off in search of the Iranian embassy, into which Kalp announced his intent to mark the occasion by lobbing a grenade. It turned out, fortunately for all concerned, that there was no Iranian embassy in Tegucigalpa.

Metrinko came home and completely renovated his family’s sprawling home in Olyphant along the lines of the meticulous plans he had made in his head during all those months alone. Today he is officially retired from the U.S. State Department, but he is busier than ever putting his language skills and experience in that part of the world to work for the United States. During his long career in foreign service, in addition to his seven years of service in Iran, he spent four years in Turkey, four in Israel, over a year in Yemen (on two separate tours), six months in Syria, seven months in Afghanistan, and years at Department headquarters, where he served as deputy director of Iran and Iraq affairs. He served as consul general in Tel Aviv, and then spent three years as a director in the refuge bureau. His small home in the Virginia suburbs is furnished with mementos of his travels, and he is still frequently gone. During the years I worked on this book, Metrinko was away for months at a time on government contract work in Afghanistan and Iraq. He still has the bowl and spoon he used in captivity and the collection of poetry that he took from the chancery library.

In answer to an e-mailed question in July 2005, he sent me the following:

John Limbert spent a long and distinguished State Department career in the Middle and Near East, including tours in Algeria, Djibouti, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. He served as U.S. ambassador to Mauritania. He also taught political science at the U.S. Naval Academy and was a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Center for International Affairs. After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, he went to Baghdad with the Organization for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, where he was responsible for trying to restore the looted Iraqi Museum. When I interviewed him he was serving as president of the American Foreign Service Association, a group that represents the interests of career diplomats.

Tom Ahern retired from the CIA in 1989, having spent the bulk of his career in Southeast Asia, and accepted a contract with the agency’s Center for the Study of Intelligence. When I met him he was working on the seventh in a series of classified books on both the operational and the analytical aspects of the CIA’s participation in the Vietnam War. He lives with his wife in a Virginia suburb, where he kindly agreed to discuss with me his experiences in captivity for the first time, and did so with remarkable candor. Bill Daugherty served out his career for the agency and then made real the imaginary classes he had taught in his long months of solitary confinement. He is a professor of political science at Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah, Georgia, and is the author of a book about his hostage experience, In the Shadow of the Ayatollah, and a book of CIA case studies, Executive Secrets, Covert Action and the Presidency.

Dave Roeder retired from the air force in 1989 as a full colonel and, from his home in Alexandria, Virginia, has on occasion served as an informal leader and spokesman for the hostages’ ongoing effort to sue the Iranian government for damages related to their captivity. As lead plaintiff, Roeder won a default verdict in federal court that would award each of the hostages $4.4 million. Iran declined to defend itself, but no payout appears likely. The judgment was vacated, and appeals have been fruitless. Lawyers for the former hostages continue to pursue remedy through legislation. The damages theoretically would be paid out of millions of dollars of Iranian assets still tied up in litigation before an international court. Contesting the awards, as I have said, is the American government.

“It never occurred to me when I was getting the crap beat out of me in a Tehran jail cell that I would have to one day fight the same government that I was defending,” said Roeder. “It’s just so demoralizing. So discouraging.”

Colonel Chuck Scott retired from the army when he returned from Tehran and wrote a book about his experience, entitled Pieces of the Game, which tells both his own story and that of the guard he knew as Akbar Housseini, the most sympathetic of the students who held him and the others captive. He received a letter from Akbar some years ago but has since lost track of him. Scott travels to make motivational speeches and to talk of the Islamist threat.

Joe Subic, the man so many of the former hostages regard as a turn-coat, was back in the army and serving in Iraq where my friend the journalist and author Christina Asquith interviewed him on my behalf in the summer of 2004. Subic said he was a different man today than he was twenty-five years ago, and acknowledged that under duress he occasionally cooperated with his captors, but not to the extent some of his fellow captives have alleged, and no more, he says, than did others. He was in Iraq with a National Guard unit from Florida, where he is the police chief in a small town.

Kathryn Koob, who had a religious awakening in captivity, is now a part-time professor at her old school, Wartburg College, in Waverly, Iowa. Joe Hall, who pined so for his wife, Cheri, through all those months in captivity, split up with her when he returned. They had grown apart during the fourteen months and could never completely reconnect. Hall, who is now a lobbyist in Washington, D.C., cites the breakup of “a good marriage” as one of the lasting consequences of the ordeal.

Among those who wrote books about their experiences was Morehead “Mike” Kennedy, who now makes a living as a writer and lecturer. His book, The Ayatollah in the Cathedral, describes his own religious awakening in captivity. Kathryn Koob wrote Guests of the Revolution about hers. The late Richard Queen, the hostage released early because of multiple sclerosis, wrote a dramatic account of his ordeal called Inside and Out. Barry Rosen, an administrator at Columbia Teachers College in New York, wrote a book with his wife, Barbara, entitled, The Destined Hour, which tells both of their stories during the ordeal; Rocky Sickmann, the ever cheerful marine, married his girlfriend Jill when he got back home to St. Louis. He was allowed to return with his diary, which was published as Hostage, A Personal Diary. Bruce Laingen, the long-suffering chargé locked on the third floor of Iran’s Foreign Ministry, published his diary under the title Yellow Ribbon: The Secret Journal of Bruce Laingen. I have learned much from them all.

Laingen is now retired from a long career in the foreign service. When he returned from Iran he was named vice president of the National Defense University, where he stayed until his retirement in 1987. He was executive director of the National Commission on the Public Service (the Volcker Commission) from 1987 until the commission completed its work in 1990. He became president of the American Academy of Diplomacy in 1991. He still frequently lectures on the hostage crisis. Victor Tomseth, his old roommate, served a variety of posts in the State Department, and was U.S. ambassador to Laos from 1993 to 1996. Mike Howland, who prowled the Iran Foreign Ministry nude, now runs his own security company in Virginia and is married to former hostage Joan Walsh.

Kevin Hermening became a financial adviser and formed his own firm in Wausau, Wisconsin. He’s still enjoying his free seats at Brewers baseball games. His mother, Barbara Timm, lives in Phoenix.

On round-numbered anniversaries, most recently the twenty-fifth, the hostages are accustomed to being tracked down by local and national news reporters, and often when there are major events in Iran their insight and comments are sought. The surprising Iranian election in June 2005 of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president brought several of the former hostages back to the front pages. Some claim to remember the new Iranian leader as one of their former jailers and interrogators.

The Land of BordBari

The Muslim Students Following the Imam’s Line had taken part in a grand experiment that ought to be familiar to Americans. They were out to build a new world, a utopia, their own version of a “City on the Hill.” Their vision borrowed from both sides of the Cold War. They would blend American democracy with a Soviet-style state-run economy, a system they believed to be both revolutionary and ancient. In their view, the perfect society had been described centuries ago in the Koran. Inspired by the vision of Ali Shariati, one of the ideological fathers of their revolution, they were striving toward the umma, the perfect Muslim community, a classless, crimeless community infused with the “spirit of God.”

Twenty-five years on, what does the experiment look like?

Tehran today is a bland, teeming, gray-brown sprawl swimming in a miasma of smog and dust that coats everything with a patina of grit, especially in the summer, when you can literally taste the air. It is a remarkably colorless city, except for occasional patches of faded green, apparently the only color that pleases Allah. Spreading down the southern slopes of the towering brown Alborz Mountains, it is a metropolis of low, dense construction cut into irregular squares by busy streets and expressways with only occasional isolated patches of open space. There are a few tall buildings of ten stories or more, and here and there the onion dome of a mosque, but otherwise the architecture is singularly uninspired. Most of the structures are shaped like building blocks, sometimes elongated and stacked on end. There’s a lot of dirt-streaked prefab concrete. Trees and bushes are plentiful, but they tend to be stunted, pale, and hanging on for dear life. Streets are bordered on both sides by the open canals called jubes, which, in lieu of an underground water and sewer system, channel flowing water downhill to every corner of the city. The farther south one goes the more clogged the canals are with litter and garbage. The only large structure in the city that grabs your eye is the graceful Azadi monument, a towering concrete arch just outside the airport supported by four sweeping buttresses, which was designed and built in the time of the shah.

The city is choking in traffic, a galaxy of small cars rushing everywhere pell-mell. The good news is that apparently everyone in Iran can afford a car and gasoline, and they all seem impressively busy, all the time, judging by the hurry. A downside is that the city smells like the back end of an old bus. Road manners are mad in most Third World cities, but in Tehran recklessness rises to the level of a cultural statement. It is said that an Iranian dies every twenty-two minutes in an auto accident, which is an impossibly low figure. The truth must be closer to twenty-two seconds. Traffic signals are purely ornamental. Most intersections have flashing reds or yellows, but neither color has any discernible effect. Drivers in Tehran see only one color behind the wheel, a pure Islamic green. Rules of the road are strictly optional. I was sitting once in an outer office in Tehran where they had a picture book on the coffee table, a collection of “pretty” photographs of the city, a challenging concept. Most of the pictures were taken at night (which hides the dirt), and the one on the cover was a time-lapse aerial shot. In it, a divided three-lane highway bends through downtown forming two distinct rivers of light, one white, formed by headlamps, and the other red, formed by taillights. If you looked closely, however, there are thin, wavy red lines inside the white river. It is subtle, and you might dismiss it as some anomaly in the printing of the photograph, but no, these are the taillights of motorbikes braving the onslaught and driving the wrong way on the busy interstate. It is something hard to believe until you actually see it.

Efforts are under way to ease this madness. In recent years, Tehran has completed a modern subway system consisting of two wide tunnels that form a crooked X pattern under the city’s streets. The stops along this system—Taleghani Station is just outside the southeast corner of the former U.S. embassy—are amazingly wide, clean, well ventilated, and well lit, with smooth granite walls inlaid with decorative red stones. The underground offers a striking refuge from the madness at ground level. The enormous engineering and construction contract for this massive project went, of course, to the son of then-president Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani. Tehranis are clearly thrilled to have it; the trains are jammed day and night.

For a visiting American, Iran is like an inverse world. Bad is good and good is bad. In Tehran patriotic symbols of the United States are everywhere, but always as images of violence, evil, and defeat. The American flag is shown in the shape of a gun; a bald eagle is shown going down in flames. In the West we are bombarded with advertising images of youth, beauty, sex, and life; in Tehran the preponderance of advertising images celebrate death. There are murals everywhere honoring martyrs—primarily those who died in the eight-year Iran–Iraq War, in the 1980s, but also more recent Islamic martyrs, including Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas, who was assassinated by Israeli forces in Gaza in 2004. Billboards in the West often feature scantily dressed, provocatively posed teens, but in Tehran the gigantic wall murals tend to depict robed grandpas and grumpy-looking white-bearded clerics, especially common are the bespectacled face of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the more imposing, threatening visage of the late Imam Khomeini.

This inverse nature is pervasive. In August of 2004, when I left on one of my visits to Iran, a media blitz at home was trumpeting a more or less nonstop parade of American triumphs in the Olympic Games in Greece. When I arrived in Tehran, I was greeted with pleased accounts of American defeats. The Tehran Times reported an “anguished reaction” in Washington, D.C., over three losses by the U.S. men’s basketball team and its failure to win a gold medal (it won the bronze), and when American boxer Andre Ward advanced toward a gold medal, it ran the headline “Saves U.S. Team from Historic Failure.” Coverage of the Iraq War in Tehran’s newspapers cheers the savage insurgent violence there and portrays the Iraqi Shia Ayatollah Ali Sistani—not the American and British armies that actually toppled the tyrant Saddam Hussein—as the real force for democracy and independence.

And just when one seems to have the place in full inverse focus, there comes some wildly discordant note—such as the blocks-long open-air drug market in the center of Tehran, where dealers hawk Viagra, ecstasy, and opium at rock-bottom infidel prices. In this pious city where women are forced to cover their bodies and heads, even in stifling summer heat, it is common to see prostitutes—duly scarved and draped—freely patrolling the streets, sending with a slightly heavier application of makeup, flamboyant jewelry, and a few straying strands of hair the same message sent by spike heels and a G-string in Atlantic City.

Nowhere is the inverse nature of Iran more evident than in its memory of the gerogan-giri, the “hostage taking.” The different ways this event is remembered in Iran and in the United States illustrate how nations invent their own pasts, and how the simplification of history can create impossible gulfs between peoples. To Americans, for whom the incident has become little more than an embarrassing historical footnote, it was an unprovoked kidnapping carried out by a scruffy band of half-crazy Islamist zealots driven by a senseless hatred of all things American. It was a terrifying ordeal for the hostages and their families, fatal for eight of the would-be rescuers and some of the Iranians who had taken American money to spy, and a political disaster for Jimmy Carter—perhaps the single most important factor in making him a one-term president. It was a protracted public humiliation.

For many Iranians, however, the hostage crisis was an unalloyed triumph. From the earliest moments of the takeover, artists, poets, journalists, politicians, mullahs, and historians began wrapping it in the cloak of legend, shading the actual incident with historical and mystical significance. It remains for the true believers a keystone of the national mythology, the epic tale of a small group of devout young gerogan-girha who, armed only with prayer and purity of heart, stormed the fortress gates of the most evil, potent empire on the planet, faced down the infidels’ rifles and tear gas, and secured it without shedding a drop of blood, reclaiming the heart of Iran from the clutches of the devil himself. The poignant and poetic story continues, telling how these innocent servants of Allah treated their often crude and abusive captives with kindness and respect even as they pieced together shredded embassy documents to expose and thwart their plots to destroy the revolution and reinstate the criminal shah. And when the Great Satan dispatched its deadly commandos to slay these young heroes (this is the part that fires the blood of the faithful), Allah stirred haboobs in the desert to down the infidel helicopters and turn back the invaders. This is the story taught to schoolchildren who are bused in to see the “Great Aban 13th” exhibition, where they can measure the reality of the miracle for themselves by touching remains of the aircraft that Allah scorched while the innocent gerogan-girha slept.

Apart from the fantasy, and aside from the heavy price the country continues to pay, the embassy takeover served an important purpose during revolutionary days. For those Iranians who were waiting for the Islamist fervor to die down and for the forces formerly allied with the United States to reassert themselves, it crushed any hope for a return to Western-style normalcy. The standoff and the allegations of American plotting purveyed by the students undermined every political faction in Iran except the Islamists and, as we have seen, carried them firmly into power. It also was a wildly popular assertion of national pride, a symbolic casting-off of colonial subservience and a reassertion of that nation’s greatness and distinction.

In this sense, the fairy tale of the gerogan-giri may still manage to stir a piece of the Persian soul, but many (if not most) Iranians today aren’t buying it. When I was posing before a Khomeini mural for a snapshot one afternoon in the winter of 2003, a young Iranian passerby asked me in English, “Why do you want a picture of that asshole?”

On arriving at the airport in Tehran, my American passport—unusual in Iran these days—provoked a grimace and an annoyed grunt from the customs agent. My traveling companion, the filmmaker David Keane, and I were both waved back into the waiting area while various officials argued spiritedly in Farsi over the correct protocol for ushering two vipers of iniquity across their borders. We sat while extra forms were prepared, inspected, signed, and stamped, and we were fingerprinted, every finger. Everyone was polite but we passed through customs hours after the rest of our flight had departed.

Traveling to Iran isn’t really hard, just expensive. Early in 2002 I applied for a visa to the Iranian UN mission in New York, then waited for months. When I learned that sometimes years are spent in limbo following this procedure, I sought other means. In Iran there is no such thing as a bribe, but happily there is something called reshveh, or a “success fee”—just as in Iranian banking there are karmozd, or “banking fees,” because usury is forbidden by the Koran. It turns out that in the right hands, a reshveh can generate a visa application within hours. The engineer of this miracle in our case was one Kamal Taheri, an oily gentleman with a great soft belly and perpetual week-old gray stubble who directs something called Reseneh Yar, the “Foreign Media Guide Centre.” For roughly five thousand dollars (Taheri will dicker), he will produce a perfectly valid visa and, to facilitate reporting in Iran, an able fixer and translator (who does all the actual work). On arrival, a few hundred dollars more is extracted for the mandatory “press pass,” a laminated photo ID decked with elaborate Farsi that is good for startling cops in rural Pennsylvania but which serves no purpose whatsoever in Iran; in my two trips, no one ever asked to see it. Taheri is a former mid-level intelligence ministry official with friends in high places, hence he gets to run this “business,” which has effectively privatized the ministry’s tradition of assigning a “minder” to visiting journalists. All our requests for interviews went through Taheri, and taped copies of them must be turned over to him. Privatization is a big deal right now in Iran, but it just serves as an excuse for flagrant cronyism. Taheri and a few smaller, less well connected rivals operate as gatekeepers and babysitters for all foreign journalists in Iran.

The country is governed in a way that differs fundamentally from any conventional Western power structure. Most hierarchies can be diagrammed in a pyramid; Iran’s is more like a string of prayer beads suspended vertically. The beads are of various sizes so that one’s rank in the descending row does not necessarily indicate one’s power. Nepotism and friendship count for a lot in Iran, and even if someone holds a relatively unimportant office, or none at all, he may wield disproportionate clout. Many areas of authority overlap. Plotting the overall design is a little like trying to trace the pattern on a Persian rug.

The use of the term “republic” is double-talk. The elected government is run by a small group of privileged clerics who decide what candidates and what laws are acceptable, who control the military and the secret police, and whatever else they wish, and who stifle dissent, beating up or locking up those they don’t like. The ruling clerics are led by Khamenei, who in the years since he made periodic visits to the hostages has become an avuncular old ayatollah with big glasses and the mandatory long white beard. He was appointed by an “assembly of experts” after the death of the Imam Khomeini in 1989 and, by all accounts, is comfortable seeing himself as the hand of Allah Himself in Iran. All laws and candidates for any public post must be approved by him and the Guardians Council, a twelve-member body of clerics and judges that he appoints. The elected government of Iran is a kind of toy democracy that serves at his pleasure. It consists of an elected president, currently the populist ultraconservative former mayor of Tehran, Ahmadinejad, the Majlis, and a judiciary. The mullahs tolerate just enough of a semblance of democracy and freedom to maintain the pretense of democracy.

It is a clever despotism, a combination of full oppression leavened with an appreciation for appearances. Iran’s leaders have learned from the mistakes of past dictators. Stalin and Mao were brutal and unapologetic; they saw communism as the wave of the future and were molding a so-called new man. Those who opposed or disagreed were dealt with summarily. Saddam Hussein, who ruled Iraq next door for decades through sheer terror, was unapologetically in business for himself and his family. The mullahocracy is kinder and gentler. Iran is the land of bordbari, or “toleration.” If you are not a true believer, or even if you are but you disagree with official policy, you are tolerated by the regime provided you don’t make too much trouble. Indeed, certain kinds of criticism from certain quarters, so long as it does not deal with religion or politics, are duly licensed and authorized and are “well tolerated.”

Bordbari is something the government takes seriously, as with the case of a literary scholar who sought to publish a Farsi translation of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The story was told to me by an Iranian friend, and is so delicious that it must be apocryphal, but it illustrates a point. A censor predictably objected to some of the steamier passages in the novel, which offended Islamic moral standards. The scholar refused to cut the passages. “The book is a classic,” he told the censor. “I refuse to publish it with pieces cut out.” He was prepared to leave it at that but the censor persisted. “This is a great book, let’s find a solution,” he said. The scholar then proposed publishing the objectionable passages, exactly as Joyce wrote them, in English. But the censor objected again, saying that too many Iranians could read English. It was decided that the sexy bits would be printed in Italian, an oddly appropriate solution that I suspect would have especially amused the novel’s famously multilingual author.

Flexibility and compromise make this system palatable for the educated upper middle class, and nurtures hope among the more liberal-minded that real change will eventually come. Meanwhile, they cope by getting out. Iranians are free to travel, if they can afford it. Many well-to-do citizens spend large portions of their year overseas, free of petty religious dictates, and when they return home they live in relatively unharassed enclaves on the mountain slopes at the north side of the city. Inside shopping malls and food courts in this part of town the only obvious difference with the West is the reduced number and variety of retail shops. The same products and brand names—clothing, electronics, sporting goods—line the shelves. The women in these places turn hijab into a fashion statement. They wear sheer, colorful head scarves and sleek, clinging roupoosh, or “manteaus,” that mock the intent of vice laws. In one popular food court I observed a rainbow of lovely roupoosh in pink, white, orange, turquoise, and powder blue. The merchants pay a reshveh to the local morality thugs to keep them at bay, but if a camera crew records such excesses, perhaps catching pictures of couples actually holding hands, then the Basij in their “Mobile Units of God’s Vengeance” descend with long sticks and fines and restore Islamic order. This usually lasts for just a few weeks, when divine vigilance relaxes and, for the usual fee, standards are allowed to quietly slip again.

There is a similar pattern to bordbari on a larger scale. Near the end of his two-term presidency, Rafsanjani was permitted to loosen the political bonds countrywide in 1996, when the ruling mullahs decided to allow the relatively liberal Mohammed Khatami to run for president with a slate of reform-minded Majlis candidates. By all accounts, the balloting was allowed to proceed unmolested; Iran held an honest election. It produced a walloping landslide for Khatami and reform, and the newly elected legislators and president felt emboldened enough to seek real change. There was a brief blossoming of free speech and debate, opposition newspapers sprang up, and Iran began to smell the prospect of real freedom. There was heady talk of Iran “evolving” peacefully toward democracy. Khatami encoded the hopes of many in legislation that would have freed Iran’s law-makers from the veto power of the Guardians Council.

The mullahs stopped that fast. Ayatollah Khamenei vetoed the legislation, which provoked some rioting on college campuses in 2003 and some spontaneous heretical pro-American displays, but such outbursts were quickly subdued. Early in 2005, the Guardians Council simply crossed all reform candidates off the ballot. The conservatives were back in the saddle. The elevation of the blunt true believer Ahmadinejad, who as of this writing had called the Holocaust a myth and urged the destruction of Israel, has for a time stripped the kindly mask from the face of the regime.

Writers and artists must be licensed to work for any of the major news outlets, or for their work to be published or shown. A jury representing the ministries of information and culture weighs applicants and decides which pass political and religious muster. To be “authorized” supposedly means that you have the talent, the skills, and the experience to be taken seriously in your field, and to the extent that a broad range of journalism, literature, and art are tolerated, it lends credibility to the link between “authorized” and “qualified.” An unauthorized writer might even have some things published here or abroad and be tolerated for a time. Nothing might happen to him if the climate is right, or if he or she has important enough friends to be “well tolerated.” But if the climate changes, as it has recently, licensed publications live in daily fear of being shut down. In the current crackdown more than a hundred reform newspapers and magazines have been banned. Many formerly tolerated journalists are out of work. To attempt any unlicensed work means risking being hauled in to chat with a polished but unyielding middle-management Information Ministry zealot with the power to fire, arrest, torture, and even execute enemies of the state, although in the Land of Bordbari, such measures are no longer frequently required. Some writers are silenced by threats to keep their children from acceptance at universities, a critical path to future success.

Without a free press it is hard to know how most people feel about progress toward the umma. There are without doubt many true believers in Iran who see their nation as the seed of future worldwide salvation. David and I visited a small retail mall adjacent to Tehran University filled with shops selling pro-regime literature and Islamic fundamentalist knickknacks, cassette tapes of inspirational sermons and chants, and paintings of the familiar whitebeards and martyrs—the rough Iranian equivalent of Elvis portraits on black velvet. One of the merchants stepped out and handed us a small sample of what looked like holy cards, which they were, but of a different sort than I was familiar with. The Catholic holy cards I had seen often enough depicted saints and martyrs, but in romantic, classical paintings. These were grisly little battlefield snapshots, one showing a young martyr with half his head blown away, another with just a gory severed foot in a high-topped tennis shoe—“American” atrocities, we were assured.

Then again, later that day, when we stopped to buy cans of cold orange juice from a small store, the two men behind the counter asked our translator, Ramin, who we were. He told them we were American journalists.

“Why are they here?” one of the men asked.

“They are writing about the gerogan-giri,” Ramin said.

The men nodded appreciatively. Then one said, “Tell them that the thieves that did it are now in power, robbing all of us blind. Tell them we love America.”

Ramin passed this along and we thanked them for the kind words. Both men bowed, pressing their hands to their chests in a gesture of sincerity.

We Americans would like to believe that such sentiments are in the majority, and that, given time, Iranians will shrug off the smothering hold of religious dogma. But there is no way to tell. A determined tyranny can last for many lifetimes no matter how unpopular. I did note that on both flights out of Tehran (admittedly an affluent sample), all of the women aboard quickly shed head scarves and roupoosh the moment the plane left the ground.

The Gerogan-girha

The complicated role the hostage crisis plays in current Iranian politics was suggested after Ahmadinejad’s election in July 2005. News reports from the United States linked him to the embassy takeover. Former hostages Roeder, Scott, Daugherty, and several others claimed that they recognized the president-elect from still and moving pictures and named him as one of their captors. Roeder was particularly adamant, saying that Ahmadinejad was one of those who, in an effort to get him to talk, threatened to kidnap his disabled son in suburban Virginia and begin cutting off his fingers and toes. The diminutive, bearded former appointed mayor of Tehran promptly denied it, and members of the Muslim Students Following the Imam’s Line, clearly encouraged by the regime, held press conferences to help him put distance between himself and the takeover.

The denial itself was revealing. There was a time in Iran when any association with the gerogan-giri would have been a tremendous boon to a politician. In the past, a politician might be expected to exaggerate his connection rather than downplay it. Instead, Ahmadinejad admitted, as I have reported in this book, that while he was one of the original five members of “Strengthen the Unity,” the student coalition led by Ibrahim Asgharzadeh that initiated the embassy takeover, he identified himself as one of the two members who preferred directing political action against the Soviet Union and who had backed away from the protest when he was voted down and the United States embassy became the target. He said he subsequently supported the takeover when Khomeini blessed it, which took place shortly after the embassy was seized, but denied personally invading the grounds or holding and interrogating hostages. An old photograph showing a bearded student resembling him was widely reprinted, but it’s impossible to tell if it is the same man. Without any doubt Ahmadinejad was one of the central players in the group that seized the embassy and held hostages.

The new president’s prompt disavowal was a tacit acknowledgment that the episode today comes with distinct political liabilities, both foreign and domestic. This despite the fact that many of those involved in the takeover have risen to the highest positions in Iran’s government. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, the former president and losing candidate in the most recent election, were directly involved in endorsing the gerogan-giri and in supervising negotiations for its eventual end. Habibullah Bitaraf, Iran’s minister of energy, was one of the leaders of the takeover and lists his connection proudly on his Web site. Nilufar Ebtekar, the notorious spokesman for the students who has since changed her first name to Massoumeh, now serves as a vice president of Iran and minister for the environment. Her husband, Mohammad Hashemi, another of the primary architects of the takeover, rose to become deputy minister for information, Iran’s second most powerful intelligence official. Mohsen Mirdamadi was serving in the Majlis before he and other reformers were crossed off the ballots by the mullahs. Mohammed Reza Khatami, speaker of the Majlis and brother of Iran’s former two-term president, was one of the original planners of the takeover, and among other student leaders who have served in the Majlis are Asgharzadeh and the infamous guard and interrogator known to the hostages as “Gaptooth,” Hussein Sheikh-ol-eslam, who was primarily responsible for translating the seized documents and is the man who took a rubber hose to Ahern and Daugherty. Sheikh-ol-eslam reportedly blames the United States for his inability to pursue a career in diplomacy. It seems the only country that would accept him as ambassador was Syria. It may well be that America has had a hand in this, but pursuing a career in diplomacy after seizing and holding any diplomatic mission hostage for more than a year would be like trying to join an exclusive club after first urinating on its front steps.

We tried to approach Sheikh-ol-eslam through his brother, a psychiatrist, who reported back that there was no point in talking to American journalists. He said his brother believed that I could never comprehend the “mysticism” of the event, which is probably true.

Once celebrated as national heroes, the gerogan-girha are today viewed critically from both ends of Iran’s political spectrum. Those on the left, who want to topple the mullahs and create a true democracy, rightly blame the students for turning their revolutionary dreams into a religious autocracy. On the right, religious extremists attack the old students as opportunists and celebrate only the “pure” gerogan-girha who after the takeover heeded the imam’s call to the martyr brigades and perished with most of the rest of their generation in the war with Iraq. Conspiracy buffs on both sides suspect today that the gerogan-giri itself, which helped prompt the disastrous Iran–Iraq War and twenty-five years of international troubles for Iran, was a secret CIA plot, which makes the students either stooges or, at worst, American agents. To Americans this is laughable, but in Iran it is taken seriously by many, even well-educated people.

Reza Ghapour, a young fundamentalist “scholar” who recently compiled a book illustrating this theory of the takeover, told me with a straight face and strong voice that the CIA was responsible for installing and preserving the shah, for engineering his overthrow and secretly planning his return, for propping up the provisional government that followed the coup and fomenting the national unrest that ultimately undermined and toppled it, and for secretly engineering the seizure of the “den of spies” and keeping fifty-two Americans imprisoned for more than a year.

“Aren’t some of these things mutually contradictory?” I asked. “For instance, why would the CIA wish to foment trouble for a provisional government it was secretly supporting?”

Ghapour smiled sweetly.

“You must view the world through the lens of Islam to see the logic of these things,” he said.

I heard the same idea several times. Once from Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the former president of Iran who was elected during the hostage crisis and who eventually fled to Paris—accused of being a CIA agent himself—where he lives today under protection of the French police. (His foreign minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, who had warned Hamilton Jordan that he was sticking out his neck by engaging in secret talks with America, was convicted of plotting against the state and executed in 1982.) Bani-Sadr is of the school that believes earth-shattering events generally do not happen spontaneously, and finds it hard to accept that a group of college students cooked up by themselves a protest with such profound consequences for Iran, not to mention his own life. “There needs to be a person who is the intermediary who receives the project and can transform that project into a revolutionary one that is passed on to the students,” he says, naming as his prime suspect Mohammad Mousavi Khoeniha, the relatively unknown cleric who served as the so-called spiritual adviser to the gerogan-girha. Bani-Sadr thinks Khoeniha was put up to it by the CIA.

I also heard the theory from a liberal magazine editor and critic of the current regime, a worn-looking man with a concave face and tobacco stains on his fingertips, who argued vigorously, “If you consider the event backwards, from where we are today to the point twenty-five years ago when the takeover took place, and you consider who was hurt most by it and who most benefited from it, then you would have to conclude that the answer is Iran in the first place and America in the second place.”

He went on for a while, outlining the details of his hypothesis, and then waited with a pleased look on his face as the whole torrent of Farsi was translated to me. I said nothing in response, so he asked, “What do you think?”

“I think you’re crackers,” I said.

My translator looked at me quizzically.

“Just use the word ‘crackers,’ I told him.

The editor seemed confused by my response but nodded sagely.

The wild conspiracy theories suggest a recognition that the embassy takeover was a mistake but an unwillingness to admit responsibility for it. Some, though, are ready to do that.

“To my mind, the taking of the embassy was emotional but ill considered,” said Alizera Alavitabar, a professor of public policy who did not take part but who enthusiastically supported the takeover when it happened. “I personally was very naive at that time. For example, sometimes I thought that if I would get a chance to have an interview on American television, I could tell them what their administration had done to us and soon we would have all the American people behind us…. In those days I thought you can build a paradise out of the world. My utopia was a society of mysticism, Sufism, and love, in addition to brotherhood and equality. I never thought of equality only for religious people. I also never believed in discrimination against women. I always thought men and women are equals…. [The takeover] strengthened and endorsed the radical movements and ideas in Iran instead of liberal ones…. It promoted fundamentalism. Fundamentalism was not the main drive behind our revolution. Modernism was. Bear in mind that all of this impact was not foreseen. If you want my opinion today I should say that if I had the same mind I have today, I would not support that action, but if you take me back to the same time, same social environment, same age, and same views, I would be supportive of the takeover again. I am not the same age with the same ideas and the conditions are different therefore I am not happy with what happened.”

“Do you ever wish it had never happened?” I asked.

“You know, I am not sure if that would be a good wish. As I said, if you take me back to the same time and condition I would say go ahead and attack the embassy. In those conditions it was inevitable. There would have been an emotional reaction toward America anyways…. The society was so ready for it…. But considering the things that happened afterward, it wasn’t to our benefit…. It kept us unified and together in a time when there were conflicts in the society, but the cost of it was high.”

So ambivalence and conspiracy-theorizing have left the gerogan-girha themselves well known, but hardly cultural heroes.

“At the time, I was so happy my friends and I went three nights in a row to the embassy and stayed up all night long,” said a bookseller who operates a street stand in central Tehran. “It was fun. There was food and chanting and marching, boys and girls. Now, I don’t know. I’m not sure why it happened, or who planned it. I do not see the hostage takers as heroes.”

Mohammad Hashemi, one of the student leaders, who recently stepped down from his powerful position in the Intelligence Ministry to become an entrepreneur developer, dismisses such talk with an impatient wave of his chubby hand. Seated before a big color map of the world in his office several flights up from a wet, busy street in downtown Tehran, he served small glasses of tea and chatted jovially. Today he is an animated middle-aged fat man, dark, short, thick, and wide, with great round cheeks, a goatee framing voluptuous pouting lips, aviator-style glasses tinted faintly orange, and a wild spray of bushy gray hair that widens from his ears down to his round shoulders. He was talkative, imperious, animated, and proud.

Hashemi was eager to put the episode in the past but breezily unapologetic.

“One of the characteristics of the Iranian people is that they are strongly against oppression and injustice,” he said. “Second, our pride is very important to us. We might die from hunger, lose many advantages, but we will never sacrifice our dignity.” His role in the takeover was just an early step on a path to respect and power in his country. He is proud not only of what he and the others did but how they did it. “We knew that there is an end to everything, like there is peace after every war,” he said. “We wanted it to be a hostage taking without any kind of harshness and scuffle, unique in history, a hostage taking that represented a nation and its concerns, and that is what we are proud of.”

This, he believes, was the essence of the embassy seizure, an emotional act by angry young idealists who felt wronged by decades of U.S. policy. The action shaped not only his career but his personal life. During the fourteen-month takeover, he courted and eventually married Nilufar Ebtekar. Of all the gerogan-girha, none have achieved such high-ranking roles in the ruling regime as this couple. Not surprisingly, they are its most prominent defenders. Which explains in part why both were willing to meet with me.

Yet they had, it seems, another motive. The Iranian power couple was looking for publicity. They were heavily invested in an ambitious new vacation resort on the Caspian Sea called Cham Paradise. On my first visit to Tehran in December 2003, Hashemi showed me slick brochures and advertisements for the venture printed in both Farsi and English, clearly designed to help attract foreign visitors as well as Iranians. Hashemi predicted that soon there will be a significant thaw in relations between Iran and the Western world, including the United States. The project seemed to rest in part on that supposition, and in the hope that English-speaking tourists would be drawn to the beauties of the Caspian shore despite the forbidding piety of its regime. Hashemi was obviously excited. He showed me a detailed model of the project, a cluster of modern apartment buildings, hotels, villas, lakes, restaurants, and other features arrayed on the tip of a peninsula that juts into the sea. Then he had an idea.

“Perhaps, in a few years, we might invite back the Americans we held hostage, and they can all stay at the resort as our guests!”

“This time, can they go home when they want?” I asked, then waited for my question to be translated to him.

Listening to the Farsi, Hashemi first scowled and then reeled with laughter. He said to me in English, “You make a joke!”

On my trips to Tehran I made efforts to meet all of the original hostage takers. What I discovered was a group of graying politicians and intellectuals with a broad range of views about the event. How they felt about the gerogan-giri tended to define where they stood on Iran’s wide political spectrum. Some remain true believers and have prospered in the mullahocracy they helped create, and even as they acknowledge that the embassy seizure permanently stained their nation in the eyes of the world, they defend it as necessary and just. They see the problems of modern Iran as growing pains and are heartened by the upsurge in Islamist fundamentalism around the world. Some of these true believers refused to speak to an American reporter, who they suspected would misunderstand or distort their words. Other gerogan-girha are ambivalent about what they did, weighing the pride and satisfaction of their youthful defiance against a more mature understanding of world politics. These people tend to stay in the shadows, afraid of getting into trouble or drawing attention to themselves. But a surprising number of gerogan-girha, constituting a third group, are outspokenly embarrassed by their role and regard their actions as a monumental mistake—a criminal act that disrupted not just the lives of the American hostages but ultimately the structure of their own country, which has yet to live down its outlaw status among nations.

Some of the gerogan-girha have gone into exile and taken up arms against the religious rulers; others have been harassed, denounced, beaten, or imprisoned for advocating democratic changes. In some cases they have been persecuted by their former colleagues. “None of us in the revolution believed Iran would ever have an autocratic regime again,” said Mohsen Mirdamadi, a leader of the gerogan-girha who is today a controversial reform politician, in an interview with a Knight Ridder correspondent earlier this year. “Yet here we are.”

Ibrahim Asgharzadeh was a reed-thin, intense engineering student with a neatly trimmed beard when he came up with the idea, in September of 1979, of seizing the American embassy. “The initial idea was mine,” he told me in an interview in December 2003 at the office of his newspaper, Hambastegi, off an alley in Tehran. “Ever since high school I had been outraged by American policies.”

In addition to his terms in the Majlis, Asgharzadeh has been president of the Tehran City Council and ran unsuccessfully for president in 2001. In his politics and journalism he has strongly urged the mullahs to adopt democratic reforms, such as freedom of the press and the elimination of the veto powers they wield over political candidates and legislation. He has been banned from seeking public office and, in 1992, served a term in solitary confinement. When I interviewed Asgharzadeh, he looked entirely different from the images I had seen of him in the hostage-crisis days; he looked much too prosperous and at ease for his outlaw status. Despite appearances he has become the most prominent of the gerogan-girha who have turned against the mullahocracy. He chose his words carefully (to denounce the takeover is, in a sense, to debunk one of the founding myths of the regime), but his feelings about the episode were clear:

“Hostage taking is not an acceptable action under international norms and standards. The hostages underwent severe emotional difficulties. Prolonging it affected both countries in a negative way. The chaos caused such tension between Iran and the United States that even now, after two decades, no one knows how to resolve it. We failed in enforcing it the way it was meant to be. We lost control of events very quickly—within twenty-four hours! Unfortunately, things got out of hand and took their own course. The initial hours were quite pleasant for us, because [the protest] had a clear purpose and justification. But once the event got out of its student mold and turned into a hostage taking, it became a long, drawn-out, and corrosive phenomenon.”

Asgharzadeh and his fellow planners knew at the time that seizing the embassy would be dramatic and popular with large portions of the Iranian people; they had even thought it might lead eventually to the fall of Bazargan’s provisional government. But he and the others had not anticipated how explosive the public response would be. Hundreds of thousands of jubilant Iranians jammed the streets around the embassy to celebrate and rant against the evil U.S. plotters. He said the students spent much of their first day on the embassy grounds fending off these rivals, who they feared would muddy the purity of their protest with ideological cant, or even harm the Americans. In the confusion, Asgharzadeh recalled, they failed to fully control even their own members.

“American hostages were not supposed to be paraded blindfolded in front of the press,” he told me. “The blindfolding was done only for security reasons. In order to control the hostages we used strips of cloth to blindfold them. Unfortunately, our humane objectives were really distorted. We objected strongly to this behavior, and the people who did this were reprimanded, but the damage had been done. These things did happen, even though we tried very hard to prevent the operation from being manipulated and abused by political groups and factions.” Asgharzadeh and his fellow students eventually chased the other political groups out of the compound and locked the gates.

How would President Carter respond? Would there be military action? Sanctions? A blockade? This was an unprecedented event, amplified by around-the-clock global television coverage, and it seemed to herald something completely new and unpredictable in international affairs. The thing began to take on a life of its own. With the provisional government in tatters, the United States had no one with whom to negotiate a solution, and the students, locked inside the embassy compound with their hostages, unprepared for a drawn-out ordeal and with no plan for ending it, watched the great storm swirling outside the embassy walls and began to see themselves as captives too.

Still, the episode remained thrilling for them, romantic even. During the long occupation, Asgharzadeh met and proposed to his wife, Tahereh Rezazadeh, one of the guards, at the embassy compound.

Asgharzadeh realizes that he cannot change the past. But knowing what he knows now he would not do it again. “If today I was to devise a plan or political action, for myself personally or for the team of comrades that we were, it would certainly not be an action along the lines of the takeover of the American embassy,” he said. “Five years ago I had a speech in front of the American embassy, in which I mentioned that this big wall between us should be demolished. I was attacked and criticized by my own friends and accused by the opposing parties. In that speech I said that we were concerned then that some of the diplomats were working for the CIA. Some of the documents we found were in favor of this opinion. They were working beyond regular tasks of a diplomat. Many of them were simple diplomats and had nothing to do with these activities. Five years ago in my speech I mentioned that we should invite back those hostages to make up for what they went through, and to show that we had good intentions.

“I think that the revolution was like a big earthquake. We know that every earthquake has some aftershocks, which could be almost as strong. In an atmosphere like that I think the situation with the American embassy could be viewed as an aftershock, especially with that atmosphere of anti-Americanism. For students who were nationalists or some that were religious, we were in an environment where even the air you breathed was anti-American. So this was not a strange event to take place. We should have stayed with the plan. We failed in enforcing it the way it was meant to be. If everything was going by plan, the mass media, our society, and the whole world would have helped us to pass on our message.”

Instead, the takeover poisoned ties between the two countries and created a situation that benefits neither.

“All this is like a dysfunctional cycle which needs to be stopped at some point,” Asgharzadeh continued. “I do not like to bring back all those bitter memories because it will not help the situation. Instead I think that both countries need to change their policies and behavior. Changing policies and behavior is accepted and understandable in international law, but if one wants to exterminate the other, it is the right of the other to take any kind of action for defense and survival…. I hope that the people of the United States, intellectuals and politicians, understand the situation that we were involved in during those days and what caused us to take such action. We know that an event like the hostage taking could not and should not be repeated again and we are willing to come to a better understanding and relationship today.”

Among the old hostage takers, Asgharzadeh is not the only one who has found himself at odds with the current regime. On the day before I was supposed to interview Mirdamadi, another of the students’ founding members, he was beaten by stick-wielding Basij. The slightly built, balding man was delivering a speech at a university when his assailants stormed the lecture hall and attacked him. A photograph on the front pages of the next morning’s newspapers in Tehran showed his head and chest bloodied and bandaged.

Abbas Abdi, another gerogan-gir who became a journalist, has been jailed repeatedly for criticizing the regime and for advocating renewed talks with the United States. He spent eight months in solitary confinement in 1993, and on both of my visits he was serving a four-and-a-half-year term in the notorious Evin prison—where some of his former hostages were kept—for publishing poll results showing that 74 percent of Iranians favored renewing ties with the United States. The newspaper for which he served as editor in chief, Salam, was banned in the late 1990s, and several years ago Abdi got into trouble with the government when he attended a much publicized meeting in Paris with one of his hostages, Barry Rosen, the embassy’s press attaché, in an attempt to begin what Abdi described as a “healing process.” The meeting of the two men fell well short of a warm and fuzzy reunion, however. Rosen condemned the seizure of the hostages and Abdi refused to apologize for it. Indeed, Abdi’s old captives feel little sympathy for his current plight. Dave Roeder told me, “It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”

Perhaps the treatment of reformers like Mirdamadi and Abdi explains why some of the gerogan-girha tend to speak in stilted euphemisms, even when they are discussing events now a quarter of a century old. Mohammad Naimipoor, a friend and political ally of Abdi’s who was also one of the gerogan-girha, would say, “What happened overall between Iran and the U.S. could have been handled much better. Even the taking of hostages, in my opinion, could have been handled much better.”

When we interviewed Naimipoor, in December of 2003, he was an elected member of the Majlis, but both he and Mirdamadi had been crossed off the list of eligible candidates by the Guardians Council. Thickset and graying, Naimipoor at forty-eight regards himself as “an old man.”

“Because of all the stress and pressures we have had to live with, we have all aged well beyond our actual years,” he told me. Several months after our interview, he suffered a debilitating stroke. “The taking of hostages could have alerted everyone—the world, the Americans—about what had taken place in Iran. I don’t think American politicians really care about ordinary people and nations, and do not want to be troubled by them. Instead they would rather deal with governments and rulers. That is why I think after the taking of hostages the Americans did whatever was in their power against Iran.

“For example, I cannot conceive of the war with Iraq without the American role and involvement [in support of Iraq]. This attitude has only deepened the sense of hostility and concern among our people. I think a solution to the U.S.–Iranian relations requires rather delicate methods, which are beyond the reach of the rough and harsh methods used by politicians, who much too readily resort to power and to force. I think even now that the U.S. is [the sole superpower]. All the evidence shows that if they continue in their present course they will only create further resentment among third world people, and especially among Muslims. Under such circumstances, even with normal diplomatic relations in place, the relations between people and the U.S. will not be normal and appropriate. In effect the U.S. will not have a place in people’s hearts. In an era when we all agree we are living in a global village and in the age of communication, in my opinion, staying on this course is politically shortsighted.”

Naimipoor was hopeful that some of the initiatives proposed by former President Khatami would renew a dialogue between the United States and Iran, but he has been disappointed by America’s more confrontational pose under President Bush. At the same time, he welcomed the U.S. invasion of neighboring Iraq and the toppling of Saddam.

“Let me say something unambiguously. The Iraqis used to live under absolute terror during Saddam’s reign,” Naimipoor said. “During a trip I made to Iraq I could clearly sense and detect the fear in the very fiber of ordinary Iraqis. I had lived under the shah, and had been a political prisoner of the SAVAK. I had experienced [torture] with my own body. But my impression of Iraq was far more bitter and disturbing. The vast majority of Iraqis are certainly happy that the Americans have come and saved them.”

The former hostage taker would like to see ties between America and Iran reestablished.

“I do not see the U.S.–Iranian relations as a taboo at all,” he said. “I think this taboo should be broken, and I have done whatever was in my power to do this. I think nations should have relations with each other. Even now I believe it is in our national interest to establish this relationship in a reasonable manner.”

If anyone at the time had a clear vision of what the embassy takeover’s full consequences would be, it was Mohammad Mousavi Khoeniha, the man Bani-Sadr believed engineered the whole thing. Khoeniha was the black-bearded young cleric to whom the students took their plan in October of 1979. He has long been a somewhat mysterious figure, the clerical hand behind the scenes. His criticism of the regime in recent years has pushed him to the periphery—his newspaper has been banned—and when I sought an interview with him he sent word, “Consider me dead.” He had resurrected himself enough by the time I returned to Tehran to meet with me, and we did so in his spacious, sunny office two flights up in a leafy neighborhood in the north of the city. His long black beard had turned white. He was a small, precise man dressed in an elegant gray tunic and wearing a white turban.

“We didn’t foresee [the provisional government’s] resignation,” Khoeniha said. “We merely had thought that it would oppose us, and that the imam either would decide to accept the interim government’s request, and in that case would order the students to evacuate the embassy compound, or support us. But that the interim government, as a sign of opposition, would go to the degree of resigning, we hadn’t thought of that. We had so many bitter memories from the government of the United States that such actions seemed absolutely legitimate and reasonable to us.”

If there was concern about activities at the embassy, why wasn’t the diplomatic mission simply asked to leave?

“Our goal was not expelling the Americans from Iran, but [because] in those days, when the shah was allowed to enter the United States supposedly for medical treatment, our analysis was that this was nothing but an excuse and America would make the shah an axis for all the people who had fled Iran, both military personnel and civilians. With the shah an axis for those fugitives, America would organize some measures against the Islamic Revolution there. We made our move in order to prevent such an action.”

In 1999 Khoeniha was charged with publishing lies and classified information and was found guilty by a special court for the clergy. He was given a three-and-a-half-year prison term and was sentenced to be flogged, but because of his sterling revolutionary credentials the penalty was reduced to a fine. Despite his feelings about the current regime, Khoeniha remains a staunch defender of the embassy takeover, and he still thinks the United States owes Iran an apology for meddling in its affairs. As I was leaving his office, located over the former offices of his newspaper, I noticed a gray four-drawer metal filing cabinet in the corner with a combination lock on the front. It bore a plate with the inscription “Property of the General Services Administration.”

Khoeniha smiled when I asked where it had come from. It was a souvenir from the U.S. embassy.

He dismissed as immaterial the popular American theory of an “October surprise,” the theory mounted most compellingly by former Carter adviser Gary Sick in a book by that name. Sick shows that several of Reagan’s advisers, most notably his campaign manager William Casey (later CIA director), intervened through Iranian friends in the summer and fall of 1980 in an effort to prolong the hostages’ ordeal until after the November elections. Sick makes a strong case that such contacts were made, and the efforts were confirmed by Khoeniha, several of the other hostage takers, and also Sadegh Tabatabai, the former provisional government official who instigated the talks with Warren Christopher that eventually led to the hostages’ release. Like the cleric, they found the Reagan campaign’s efforts a revealing peek at the cynical underside of American politics but said they had little bearing on Iran’s decision to hang on to the hostages until Carter officially left office.

Despite Carter’s image at home of being conciliatory to a fault, and the most human rights–conscious president in modern times, during the 1978–79 revolution he had come to personify for Iranians the Great Satan, and, as we have seen, where the gerogan-giri was concerned, symbols mattered more than reality. Reagan may have been perceived as more of a hard-liner, but to Iran he merely represented a change, and a triumph. Carter’s defeat was tangible proof that the hostage takers had changed history; they had brought down the leader of the free world. It didn’t take any push from Reagan’s minions for them to see an advantage in waiting until after the elections to free the hostages.

Still, despite that obvious advantage, Iran was desperate enough in its need for military parts by the fall to consider releasing the hostages early. Thus Tabatabai’s efforts in September, blessed by the imam himself, which he believes would have borne fruit before the U.S. Election Day were it not for the outbreak of war with Iraq. Even with the distraction of the war, Iran’s leadership made one last effort to tempt Carter just days before the vote, floating a complex new offer and urging the president to respond immediately via a press conference. It seems apparent to me that neither of these efforts would have been made if Iran had already struck a deal with the Reagan campaign. Likewise, if such a deal had been made, and if Iran had already gotten what it wanted from the president-elect, why keep the hostages after Carter’s defeat for almost three months more? The nation was in desperate need of its military parts, and the students themselves were weary of serving as jailers. In this case the most likely explanation seems the obvious one. The deal to release the hostages was complicated, and it took three months of difficult negotiations to achieve.

All of the hostage takers I interviewed said that the decision to wait until Carter officially left office was deliberate, a final insult to the man they had propped up as the representative of the devil on earth.

That’s the memory of the most famous of the hostage takers, Nilufar Ebtekar, whom I met on my second trip to Tehran in a conference room upstairs in the Ministry of the Environment. In the six months since I had met with her husband, Mohammad Hashmei, their ambitious resort venture had gone bankrupt. They had sold their home to pay off their debts and, according to Ebtekar, were living with her mother.

The Iranian vice president is a plump middle-aged woman with a soft round face and pretty smile, who was wrapped from head to toe in the same manner of the Sisters of Mercy who’d taught me in grade school. Most of the hostages hold a special scorn for “Mother Mary,” or “Screaming Mary,” which may be undeserved. She has written a book about the episode called Takeover in Tehran, which is the best explanation I have seen of what motivated her and the other students, and evokes the naive, heady romanticism of the time. Harsh feelings about Ebtekar seem to stem in part from her fluent, American-accented English, which casts her perhaps undeservedly as a “Tokyo Rose” figure, as though anyone with such clear familiarity with America who would take part in denouncing it was somehow a traitor. During the hostage crisis, she was often encountered by the hostages with cameras in tow, trying to elicit comments from them that would frame their ordeal in favorable terms. She would ask leading questions, such as, “You have been treated well, haven’t you?” Michael Metrinko summed up his feelings about Ebtekar in this way: “If she were on fire on the street I wouldn’t piss on her to put it out.” She has a smarmy, self-certain manner that anyone would find annoying. And she has not moderated her views of the United States one bit.

“Did you know that no American publisher would publish my book?” she asked me.

I had purchased it at a bookstore in Pennsylvania without any difficulty, and hadn’t noticed that the book had a Canadian publisher. She was convinced this was a result of U.S. government censorship.

“I originally intended to publish the book in the United States,” she said. “And we approached fifty major American publishers through a well-respected literary agent in New York.” She was very confident that the book would be published. Then, after two or three years, she felt there was something that prevented the book from getting published.

“There are publishers in the United States who specialize in publishing tracts against the United States government,” I said.

“Not big publishers,” she said.

“No, they’re not. Big publishing houses tend to buy books that they think will sell well enough to make a profit. I suspect they didn’t think yours would.”

She wasn’t buying it. The notion of government censorship made more sense to her than the idea that a self-serving book by a generally despised Iranian about a twenty-five-year-old incident would lack commercial appeal.

Ebtekar seems to have missed the uglier parts of the Iranian revolution. She still has a warm feeling about the gerogan-giri and talks of it in dreamy, idealistic tones.

“It was more or less clear for all of us that this action would prevent further interference of the Americans in Iranian affairs,” she said. “At least it would for some time delay the different plots that they had against the Islamic Revolution. This was clear in our minds. This action would serve as an impediment to American policy in Iran. As it took longer and as different developments took place, both in Iran and at the international level, the students understood how important and how decisive this action was after changing the direction of affairs in Iran and in the region, and also how inspirational it was for many other freedom-seeking movements in the world. Because at that time, the general idea was that either governments have to be under American influence or under Russian influence, Soviet influence at that time. So either the East or the West, nothing in between. Freedom-seeking movements were usually just somehow affiliated with the East. Socialist or communist, I suppose. But what happened in Iran was affiliated to the East and the West. And I think this event, the actions the students took, was in a sense quite inspirational for many freedom-seeking countries in the world and for many nations who were looking for a sense of identity.”

She lectured me further about the universal principles of democracy. She still feels that the reason why the American public did not rise up as one to support holding scores of its fellow citizens hostage was U.S. government censorship: “The government, the American administration, was keeping the American public unaware of what happened in Iran.” If the truth had been reported, she believes, things would have gone differently.

“Because if you go back to the basics, if you go back to the principles, if you go back to the Declaration of Independence of America, the Constitution, what the students were speaking about were common values, values that are appreciated by people in America, in Iran, in Europe,” Ebtekar said. “And I think that many of the ideas and the concepts that the students, Iran, the Islamic Revolution had in mind were concepts very close to the concepts inherent in the American Constitution, the Declaration of Independence. What were we after other than independence? We were after the right to determine our future. We were after the right to decide about our destiny. That’s all. And we were after religious principles, which are highly regarded in American society.”

Just days after this conversation, when I was in London, I turned on the TV in my hotel room and was startled to see Ebtekar’s wrapped face. She was being interviewed on a split screen with a BBC announcer and Iran’s new Nobel Peace Prize winner, Shirin Ebadi, talking about how proud everyone in Iran was of her, even though Ebadi was awarded the prize for work opposing the oppressive regime Ebtekar so ably represents and defends.

The announcer asked the Iranian vice president how she, as a woman, could defend a regime that forbade Ebadi to travel to Stockholm and receive her award without permission from her husband.

If Ebtekar squirmed, it was only for a split second. She smiled and segued smoothly into a recitation of the gains women had made under Iran’s Islamic regime.

Yeah George Bush!

In my search for the hostage takers I was particularly eager to find and interview the guard known as Akbar, whose open-mindedness during that time was such a surprise and comfort to many of the hostages. I wasn’t even sure of his name. It had been reported by Scott and others as Akbar Housseini.

There were more than four hundred young Iranians involved in the takeover, the bulk of whom worked as guards or performed other menial tasks. Akbar was by all accounts a significant player. He was a few years older than most of the students, and unlike the others he is remembered with a touch of fondness by his former captives, a well-educated young man with mixed feelings about what he and his comrades were doing, who seemed troubled by the fact that this prolonged piece of dangerous political theater, so thrilling to his young comrades, was toying with the lives of scores of people in a way that was painful for them and in some cases deeply unfair. Akbar treated his prisoners with kindness and understanding, sometimes even defying the leadership of his own group to hand-carry letters out of the embassy from particularly isolated hostages and post them himself. When Colonel Scott wrote his own account of the ordeal, he devoted nearly half the book to Akbar, writing out the stories his friendly captor had told him about prison and torture under the shah, and detailing their running dialogue during the long ordeal. There is a picture of him in the book, a slender modish-looking young man in bell-bottom jeans and army jacket, clean shaven except for a neatly trimmed mustache, carefully styled hair, and sideburns, and holding a rifle while posing rakishly on the hood of a jeep before one of the embassy gates. Scott had received one letter from him not long after his release, but had not heard from him since. He did not believe the name “Akbar Housseini” was a pseudonym but didn’t know for sure. The last he had heard, sometime in the late 1980s his former jailer was working for the PARS news agency.

I checked with the news agency and they had never heard of him.

None of the hostage takers I interviewed seemed to know who he was. With his central role in the takeover and his long career in intelligence, I figured Mohammad Hashemi was a good bet, but when I asked he twisted his bullfrog features into a look of bewilderment.

“Who?” was the answer relayed by my translator.

“Akbar Housseini.” I spelled it.

Hashemi shrugged.

“Is a pseudonym,” he suggested, ignoring the translator and suddenly speaking directly to me in English. “No one used real names. I don’t know him. If he was with us, I would know.”

I finally got a lead on Akbar on the day before I had to leave Iran. It turned out that Kamal Taheri, the fellow who, for a fee, procured our visas, had been involved himself in the embassy takeover, as a young intelligence agent working for Hashemi. He examined the photograph of Akbar and said, “It looks like Lavasani. He became an ambassador and now nobody knows where he is.”

I quickly did a Google search on the creaking dial-up Internet connection at Tehran’s Laleh Hotel and found two Lavasanis. There was a Hassan Lavasani, who was foreign editor of IRNA (Iran National News Agency), and there was a Mohammad Hussein Lavasani, who had served as Iran’s ambassador to Canada and to Turkey. Scott remembered that Akbar had worked for a news agency years ago, so that lent credence to him being Hassan, and Taheri remembered that he had been an ambassador, which suggested Mohammad.

It was a national holiday, so Hassan Lavasani wasn’t in at the IRNA offices. A man at the front desk eyed the photograph carefully and shook his head.

“No,” he said. “It isn’t him. Not even close.”

There was an interesting story about Mohammad Lavasani, which, if he was one of the hostage takers, hinted at a kind of brutal poetic justice—even if visited upon the wrong former hostage taker. In 1993, when he was serving as ambassador to Canada, agents of the militant Iranian MKO climbed the walls of the Iranian embassy, broke into the ambassador’s residence, and beat Lavasani brutally, breaking an arm and several ribs. Even though the assailants videotaped the beating, the men subsequently arrested and charged with the crime were later acquitted in Canadian courts. Lavasani had more recently served as Iranian ambassador to Turkey.

The Canadian embassy in Tehran had no knowledge of Lavasani’s whereabouts, and he was no longer at the post in Ankara, so we went looking at the Iranian Foreign Ministry. It is a complex of buildings constructed in the traditional, ornate Persian style, a rare sight in the city today.

We stopped some officious young men on the sidewalk and they directed us to a reception desk in one of the buildings. Sure enough, Lavasani had an office in that building but had not been in it for some time.

“He’s a grouchy man,” said the receptionist, which didn’t sound like the man the hostages remembered as being so kindly and cheerful, but then, twenty-five years and a good hiding in Ottawa could sour a man. The receptionist looked hard at the photograph and shook his head.

“It doesn’t look like the same person,” he said.

We tried one more building in the complex, where a man said that Lavasani was out of the country.

“We don’t know where,” he said.

At that, the trail went cold. I’m still looking for Akbar.

I also tried to reach Amir Entezam. Other than the two Iranians—the Education Ministry official Victoria Bassiri and the journalist Simon Farzami—who were executed as a direct result of the embassy takeover, Entezam is the man who has arguably suffered the most from it. A respected diplomat in 1979, his name cropped up in some of the documents seized in the embassy. The CIA had approached Entezam in Stockholm during the postrevolutionary period to see if he was willing to provide information. By all accounts, Entezam refused. But in the furor of anti-Americanism after the embassy seizure, merely having met with someone identified as a CIA officer was tantamount to treason. Entezam was sentenced to prison and he has been locked up ever since.

Today he is elderly and infirm. For the past year he has been confined at home, although he is still technically a prisoner. He reluctantly declined to talk. A friend said that Entezam would like nothing better than to tell his story, but several years ago, when he had been let out on probation, he attended a memorial service for an Iranian poet and was briefly interviewed by a reporter. He offered some innocuous comments about the state literature and sports in Iran. He was put back in prison for three years.

Ramin, our interpreter, explained that any interview would have official authorization.

“You live in Iran, right?” the friend asked him. “Then you know that just because you receive permission from one official, it doesn’t mean that another official won’t object and punish him. His back is bad and he can no longer use the Iranian squat toilets they have in prison. We are afraid he will not survive if he goes back.”

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 is at some level an enduring embarrassment.

On our last day in Tehran, we visited the “den of spies” one more time. David wanted to shoot some film inside the compound and chancery. We stopped in at the guardhouse on the southeast corner and saw that it had been spruced up! There were no more boot prints on the walls and ceiling, which looked to have been given a new coat of paint, and the old busted furniture had been replaced. Another bored team of young Revolutionary Guards sat behind the marble-veneered reception counter. We had stopped by the “den” three days before, unexpectedly, and had been turned away—the empty exhibit hall was off-limits. This time we had made an appointment. The guard rang an official to announce our arrival and we sat down to wait for an escort inside.

Hours later, a mid-level official in an open-collared pale blue shirt stopped by to say that we could walk through the exhibit but that no filming would be allowed.

“It’s an exhibit,” I argued. “The whole idea is for people to see it. If we film it, millions of people will.”

On our previous visit, we had gotten through initial resistance with a small reshveh, at which point we were given a bang-up tour. But David had not brought a movie camera that day. We suggested that Ramin offer a similar incentive. No, Ramin said, this group of officials was new to the job—management of the grounds had turned over since our last visit—and too nervous to bend the rules. Blue Shirt disappeared, and we waited for another hour. He came back with exciting news. We would be allowed to film inside the exhibit hall but David would have to use their camera. This prompted further discussion. What kind of camera did they have? Would it be compatible with the digital cassettes David used in his camera? He left with those questions, then returned to report that they could not find their camera.

“You will have to hire a camera,” he said.

“But I have a camera!” shouted David, holding up his impressive Sony model. “You can inspect it if you like.”

Even the Revolutionary Guards behind the counter felt our frustration. They joined in the argument—“What’s the big deal? Let them take pictures with their camera.” No, a camera would have to be rented. As a car pulled away to find a rental shop, another official came running with the news that they had located their own.

After a long day of waiting, David and I were finally escorted through the small pine grove at the east end of the compound, past the old two-story white ambassador’s residence where most of the hostages had spent their first days in captivity tied to chairs, and into a small new office building at the rear of the site where the tennis courts had once been. The “official” camera turned out to be exactly the same as the model David was carrying. After exchanging a round of thank-yous and handshakes, he clipped a cassette in it and we set off at last for the chancery building to film the exhibit.

We got about ten steps. Blue Shirt came running back out.

“No, it has been decided that you can only take still pictures, no moving pictures,” he said.

We gave up. We had taken still pictures on the first visit. As we left, crossing the sidewalk out on Taleghani Avenue to hail a cab, the three young Revolutionary Guards from the guardhouse came running out after us. We thought for a minute that the rules had changed again.

They all spoke to Ramin in Farsi, smiling and gesturing toward us, and then he relayed their comments.

“They want me to tell you that they are embarrassed. That they think this is silly. They want to apologize on behalf of their country.”

Ramin grinned as the soldiers kept pulling at him.

“They want me to tell you that they love America. And to tell you, ‘Yeah George Bush!’”

And right there in front of the “Death to the USA” sign, in front of the faded banners denouncing the Great Satan, one of the soldiers stuck his thumb into the air, and said in halting English:

“Okay for George W. Bush!”