Book Review | Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America's War With Militant Islam

CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence
Studies in Intelligence, 2006

Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America's War With Militant Islam

Mark Bowden. (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006), 680 pp., endnotes, appendix, maps, photos, index. (audio CD; abridged)

Reviewed by Hayden B. Peake, curator of the CIA's Historical Intelligence Collection

Onetime physics student, Mohammad Hashemi, certain the Marine guards would shoot to kill, said the Muslim prayer for martyrdom on 4 November 1979 and set off to lead a four-day "set in" of university students inside the American Embassy in Tehran. No one stopped them when they stormed the compound. Then the Ayatollah encouraged them to stay, and 444 days later on 20 January 1981, 52 hostages went home. Guests of the Ayatollah tells the story from both sides, from start to finish.

In addition to utilizing contemporaneous newspaper and TV accounts—which he sharply critiques—author Mark Bowden makes full use of material he gathered during five years of interviewing former hostages and former hostage takers, members of the governments on both sides, and participants in the failed attempt to rescue the hostages. The result is a forceful, stimulating, yet often disturbing, account that explains why the onetime Iranian students viewed United States as the Great Satan, what they thought they could accomplish, why both sides were surprised in different ways, and what went on in Iran and Washington during those 444 days.

The book is divided into five parts and an epilogue. Part one deals with the planning, occupation, initial interrogations and consequent unexpected events on both sides. The embassy in Tehran had been occupied briefly earlier in the year, and the hostages at first assumed the occupation would be more of the same. And in fact, the leaders—including the current president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—had not prepared for a prolonged stay nor had they informed the country's political and religious authorities beforehand of their intent. In the initial confusion, several of the embassy staff and visitors avoided capture and Bowden tells how, with the help of the CIA and the Canadians, they made their way home. But overall, it is surprising how rapidly administrative, logistical, and the initially conflicting political issues were dealt with. The routine that was established quickly included hostage identification, interrogation, feeding, and housing.

Parts two and three cover the initial Western press coverage, the reactions at home, the routines the hostages adopted, and how they dealt with periods of blind-folded isolation between interrogations. It is here that we first learn of the students, calling the embassy a "den of spies," one reason given for holding the hostages. They truly believed that the foreign services officers were just spies under cover, and that made life more difficult for genuine foreign service officers. The captors quickly realized the power of television to grab world attention and began allowing radical American pro-Iranian activists to call and visit the hostages in hopes of influencing US public opinion. Bowden goes on to explain that while this was going on the first of several CIA agents were inserted into Tehran as plans for the unfortunate hostage rescue attempt took shape. This he, too, describes in all of its sorry detail.

The initial group of hostages was reduced by 13 when all but two of the women and African-Americans were released. At the same time, the Ayatollah announced that the remaining 53 would be tried as spies, although it never happened. After one more was released because he had a serious health problem, 52 stayed the course involuntarily. Three of them were held at the Iranian Foreign Ministry, where they had a telephone line to the State Department for much of the time, but even their confinement took its toll. In an unusual form of rebellion, Bowden tells how one took to wandering the ministry building in the nude at night in search of escape routes.

The officers and staff at the embassy included only three fluent in Farsi. From their exchanges with the interrogators, one gets a sense of the Iranian ignorance in Western matters, even though several had been educated and lived in the United States. Bowden's characterization of Nilufar Ebtekar—as "screaming Mary"—who became the spokeswoman for the hostage takers, is a fine example. She had grown up in Philadelphia and spoke English with an American accent. After berating the United States for "the inhuman, racist decision" to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, she was shocked to learn that Japan had started the war by bombing Pearl Harbor. Later she asked Bowden to help find an agent for the book she planned to write.

Three of the embassy hostages were CIA officers. Bowden interviewed the two who are still alive. Tom Ahern, in the only interview he has given on the subject, tells how he had been chief of station just four months at the time of the takeover and the error that led to his exposure as CIA. William Daugherty's story was the subject of a memoir, In the Shadow of the Ayatollah: A CIA Hostage in Iran but Bowden fills in blanks and adds names where Daugherty could not, as for example the name of the soldier who revealed Daugherty's CIA affiliation. It was Daugherty who told Ebtekar about Pearl Harbor. The treatment these officers endured, the devices they employed to deal with their interrogators despite physical abuse, and the clever schemes they adopted to cope with solitary confinement, is essential but often not pleasant reading.

Guests of the Ayatollah also attempts to answer the question that arises in any discussion of the embassy takeover: why did they do it? Bowden argues that at the outset, the student radicals really believed that the entire embassy was in fact a "den of spies" who sought to restore the deposed shah as had happened in 1953. This conviction grew, he suggests, when the shah was allowed into the United States for cancer treatment and when President Carter refused to return him to Tehran. Understanding this as anything but a direct insult to Islam was beyond the radicals. The intensity of the student movement was unexpected, Bowden explains, because, at the shah's insistence, "For years, little intelligence was collected from Iran that did not originate with the shah's own regime." In other words the CIA was dependent on SAVAK, the shah's secret service, and had a distorted picture of Iranian political reality.

In part five, Guests of the Ayatollah concentrates on the gradual realization of Iran's rulers that holding the hostages was doing more economic, financial, and political harm than good. At several points during the crisis secret talks had been held to resolve the issue, but Iran always demanded too much. Bowden tells how the Ayatollah rationalized dealing with the Great Satan and describes the negotiations that led to the hostages' release, adding that all the hostage takers were convinced that the decision to wait until President Carter was out of office was a deliberate insult to the man who helped the shah. (629) In the epilogue, Bowden describes what has happened to the hostages since their return to the United States. Guests of the Ayatollah is a superb book that shows how Americans dealt with a national historical humiliation at the hands of Muslims of a mediocre mindset and emerged the stronger for the experience.