They were geeks with guns—hundreds of Muslim medical and engineering students who stormed the U.S. embassy in the heart of Tehran on November 4, 1979. In brazen violation of international law, they triumphantly seized as hostages sixty-six Americans. The Americans were CIA, they claimed, and the embassy a "nest of spies."
Nine time zones away, President Jimmy Carter assumed that the Iranian government would swiftly quash the occupation, as it had done with a similar incident the previous February. But those expectations were demolished when, days later, the provisional government fell. It would be months before the president knew who was actually in charge in Iran, and 444 days before the hostages returned home.
During those fourteen and a half months, America discovered to its surprise that millions of Iranians loathed our government. As the students told the world, a CIA-led coup in 1953 had overthrown Mohammed Mossadeq, the prime minister of Iran, and replaced him with the Shah, a puppet dictator in thrall to the West. In the weeks before the takeover, President Carter had allowed the dying Shah, who had fled Iran, into the U.S. This, the students believed, was proof that America was planning yet another coup.
Rallying behind the charismatic cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and caught up in his romantic vision of an Iran cleansed of Western influence, the students demanded that the U.S. return the Shah so that he could stand trial. Only later did they realize Khomeini was using them to consolidate his own power.
Thirty years later, it's clear that the takeover of the embassy in Tehran changed the world in ways we're still coming to understand. The power struggle that Khomeini won put Iran's immense oil revenues into the hands of radical mullahs who used them to help fund modern Islamic jihad. And when Khomeini died in 1989, he left behind a political culture so repressive that today many of the hostage-takers themselves are leading the effort to reform it.
GQ spoke with more than fifty men and women—hostages, hostage-takers, commandos from the ill-fated U.S. rescue mission, and Iranian and American politicians and policymakers—to re-create this fateful historical moment and explore its ongoing impact.
Mohsen Mirdamadi Hostage-taker; now a reformist and defendant in ongoing show trials
When the revolution happened in Iran, young people were concerned about the intentions of the United States regarding the new regime. We believed the United States was against the revolution and that it was preparing another coup. When the Shah went to America, it was a confirmation of this belief.
Saeed Hajjarian Hostage-taker; now jailed for dissent
The U.S. made a mistake taking in the Shah. People in Iran were very sensitive to this issue. If they had not admitted him, nothing would have happened.
Mirdamadi: There is a difference between a revolutionary atmosphere and a normal atmosphere. In a revolutionary atmosphere, you aren't afraid of anything.
Ebrahim Asgharzadeh Chief architect of the takeover; now a reformist, jailed for dissent
"Imperialism" was the biggest word for me: It signaled what the U.S. was all about. We didn't see complexities; we saw the U.S. as one bloc. But we were engineers, students; we weren't fundamentalists. In fact, we saw fundamentalism as a danger.
Mirdamadi: We believed we had a right to do this—that if we didn't attack the embassy, they could attack us. We thought we needed two or three days to see all the documents. If there was a plan [for a coup], we would find something.
Asgharzadeh: It was supposed to be a small, short-term affair. We were just a bunch of students who wanted to show our dismay at the United States. After that, it got out of control.
Elaheh Mojarradi Hostage guard; wife of Mohsen Mirdamadi
Were we exploited? Definitely. Certain groups used the crisis for their own ends.
Asgharzadeh: It turned into a power battle. The temporary government was crushed, and the more revolutionary and radical forces gained self-confidence and self-assurance.
Mirdamadi: The reason it lasted so long was that when we captured the embassy, we got the support of Ayatollah Khomeini. He was a charismatic leader, and his influence over the people was exceptional in history. I don't know any other example like it.
Asgharzadeh: It came to a point where no one could say any longer when the hostages could be freed, even after the Shah was gone. It became an international affair, with repercussions we hadn't foreseen. We were taken out of the decision-making process. We were basically just hostages of the hostages.
William Gallegos Marine guard, U.S. embassy
Early that morning, I'm doing my security checks on the second floor. I look out the window, and I see thousands and thousands of people outside of the gates. They weren't screaming, they were just moving around and talking, but you could hear a strange buzz in the air, even inside the embassy.
Michael Metrinko Political officer, U.S. embassy
Normally, my schedule was I would go out every night until one or two in the morning. (There were some great parties—revolutions are always good for parties.) So I would never ordinarily have been in the office that early in the morning. But I was at the embassy, waiting for Iranian friends to show up for a meeting. It was fairly early when I started to hear noise outside my office window.
Rocky Sickmann Marine guard, U.S. embassy
All of a sudden, my walkie-talkie said, "Recall! Recall!" which means report back to the embassy immediately. I was right in front of the gate, and I will never forget as long as I live that the two Iranian guards, who were supposed to be protecting us, walked into their hut like nothing was happening.
Gallegos: I said, "Shut the door, they're breaching the walls!" The embassy had magnetic steel doors, bombproof. Once you close them, they're not gonna open for anything. Here comes Rocky, and the door's almost closed, and he sticks his arm out and I just pull him in.
Sickmann: We had the embassy secured, locked down. Now it was the responsibility of the host government to come and protect us.
Charles Jones Communications officer, U.S. embassy
We all retreated to the vault where classified material was stored. There's a protocol to destroy the top-secret stuff first, and then you work down. We had shredders and an incinerator to actually burn the stuff.
Bruce Laingen Chargé d'affaires and acting ambassador, U.S. embassy
That morning I had an appointment at the Iranian Foreign Ministry, on the other side of town. My deputy and a security officer, Mike Howland, were with me. We tried to return to the embassy, but it was so overrun that we had to go back to the Foreign Ministry.
Paul Lewis Marine guard, U.S. embassy
Over the radio, we could hear Billy Gallegos in the basement. By then they had cut the lock off the fire escape. The embassy basement was full of Iranians.
Gallegos: I remember the females had assault rifles under their chadors. You could see the guns swinging underneath. I racked a round and they stopped and moved back.
Metrinko: I called the friend of mine who was supposed to meet with me that morning. He was a powerful figure—head of a large group of revolutionaries. His bodyguard answered. I told him I wanted to speak with my friend, and his response was, "He won't talk to you, Michael." That's exactly the way he said it. "He won't talk to you." I asked him, "Do you know what's happened?" And he said, "Yes, we know." Then he said, "I personally am very sorry." And he hung up. I realized then that I'd been set up by my friends to make sure that I was in the embassy when it got hit.
Gallegos: Then they started coming forward again. I'm getting ready to shoot, I have my rifle at my shoulder, and suddenly I hear, "Don't shoot, don't shoot!" It was Al Golacinski.
Al Golacinski Chief security officer, U.S. embassy
Our rules of engagement said that we were not allowed to use deadly force. I was able to pull the leader out of the crowd; he spoke English. He said, "We want to speak to the ambassador." I said, "Let me see what I can do." That's the way you did things there. You had to dialogue with them, find out what they wanted, let them save face.
Mike Howland Security officer, U.S. embassy
Because the ambassador and I couldn't get back to the compound, we had people in charge of the embassy who really were not trained to be making decisions like this. Al called me on the radio and said he wanted to go out and try to talk to these guys. I was absolutely opposed to it. So far, all of our people were still safe. I told Al that I'd pass his request on to the ambassador, but before I could he decided to go out. I was really upset when I found out.
Golacinski: Going out there violates just about any tactical effort that anybody would ever do. But I don't think it changed anything. I went out there, and I turned over my weapon. I was getting it settled down. Then things started coming apart. They took me out in front of the embassy, tied me up, and they started yelling for the people inside to come out. They produced a weapon, cocked it, and put it to my head.
Howland: Over the radio, I could hear Al screaming for his life and saying, "They're gonna kill me if you don't open the door!" I was telling them, "For God's sake, don't open the door!"
Laingen: I remain convinced to this day that it was not their intention at any time to shoot.
Golacinski: All of a sudden, I feel an intense heat at my face. What they had done was light newspapers on fire to dissipate tear gas, but at the time I thought they were torching me. I remember yelling, "Shoot me, don't burn me!"
John Limbert Political officer, U.S. embassy
I finally went out there; nobody had a better idea at this point. I speak Farsi, I had taught in Iran. I put on the rather arrogant air of a professor: "What is this you're doing? You're disgracing yourself." They put a gun to my head, too.
Gallegos: The next thing I know, our people were saying, "The ambassador has ordered the Marines to stand down."
Laingen: From what I knew at the time, speaking by radio and telephone from across town, it looked hopeless for us to begin some Custer's Last Stand operation. I thought that would be very dangerous.
Limbert: They opened the door. The embassy fell.
Gallegos: They tied us up, blindfolded us, dragged us outside. I remember shaking, and I was like, Why am I shaking? And then I realized it wasn't me; it was the two guys holding me.
Limbert: It was a cool, rainy day. I felt good about two things: One was to get out into the fresh air, because there was smoke and tear gas inside the embassy. The other was still being alive.
Gallegos: The crowd around me were hissing, "CIA." It sounded like they were going, "Ssss."
Kathryn Koob Director of the Iran-American Society, U.S. embassy
They took my jewelry. It didn't have much value, but I saw them twisting it—they were sure it was some kind of secret spy paraphernalia. They thought we were all James Bond.
Golacinski: They would start out with, "You are a spy; we are going to try you and ecute you." Then they would try to get you to confess.
Joseph Hall Military attaché, U.S. embassy
They accused the United States of causing some crop failures in Iran. I told them, tongue in cheek, that yes indeed, I was the agent for wheat mold. They worked on that one for about a day and a half.
Sickmann: Eleven of my comrades were interrogated by Ahmadinejad. He's denied it, but he wasn't at home rearranging his sock drawer that morning. He was a radical Islamic leader; he was in the midst of the whole thing.
Limbert: The students claimed that their plan, if they had one, was to hold the embassy for maybe a day at most, make a statement, and then march out.
Laingen: The standing opinion is that Khomeini at the outset would have been prepared to release us. But overnight his son was hoisted over the walls of my embassy, and he communicated back to his father that this is a very interesting, dangerous situation, that the students represented a political force that the Ayatollah could not ignore.
Metrinko: By grabbing all of the embassy files, they were [later] able to start a real purge of the government and go after a lot of people that they expected were antirevolution.
Barry Rosen Press attaché, U.S. embassy
Eventually, they put us into rooms with twenty-four-hour guards. We weren't permitted to speak to each other. We were tied up, hand and foot. You felt like a piece of meat.
Golacinski: The worst part was the humiliation. You don't go to the bathroom unless you're given permission to go to the bathroom. You don't eat unless someone decides to feed you.
Hall: I kept thinking, The cavalry's coming to the rescue; this is all going to end; I'll be home for Thanksgiving.
Rosen: They'd beat the freakin' hell out of you, and then they'd ask, "When this is all over, can I get a visa?" In Iranian culture, they can compartmentalize anything.
Golacinski: Christmas was coming. You're thinking, Our government is not gonna just leave us here for Christmas.
Reverend M. William Howard Former president, National Council of Churches USA
On the Saturday before Christmas, I received a telegram saying that the Revolutionary Council was requesting my presence in Iran to conduct Christmas services. We would be the first Americans to be able to report on the hostages' well-being. We arrived there on Christmas Eve, we were blindfolded, and at midnight we were in the compound.
Golacinski: You had mid feelings, because the priest who was sitting there was going to be able to walk out, and you were going to stay. I whispered to him that it was not what it appeared to be, that we were being treated like animals. He just said, "I know."
Kevin Hermening Marine guard, U.S. embassy
You've probably seen the picture of us enjoying a Coca-Cola and some cookies: The Iranians were using us, absolutely. But all I thought was, This is a chance to have my family see me. I've heard other families say how terrible it was that they never saw their loved one while he or she was in captivity.
Thomas Gumbleton Former auxiliary bishop, Archdiocese of Detroit
In the States, the hostages were on the news every day, but they had no sense of that. They felt like they'd been abandoned.
Moorhead Kennedy Economics and commercial officer, U.S. embassy
We were not allowed to talk until well into January. We whispered, but there was no normal conversation. One day they came in and said sort of proudly, "You can talk now." Everybody got along less well after that.
Metrinko: I read everything I could get. The most important was [Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. He was writing about the same experience and what he had done to cope—about how, for instance, prisoners, no matter how intelligent they are, can only think about what will be for lunch or dinner. You lose your mental sharpness. I thought I was surrendering in some way because I was thinking about food all the time, but I found out that was quite natural.
Limbert: It helped to have a routine. You had a certain amount of ercise, sleep, reading. If you could get through the next fifteen minutes, you could get through the next hour.
Metrinko: It just kept dragging on. It wasn't something they announced at nine in the morning, "Oh, we've decided to hold you for fourteen months." It just sort of drifted into it.
Robert Armao Aide to the Shah, 1979-80
In January 1979, I went over to see the Shah. The situation was untenable. He was weak from cancer, tired, confused, and he was preparing to leave.
David Aaron Deputy national-security adviser
The Shah had been extremely important to us. He was viewed as a regional leviathan, and Iran was the local hegemonic power we relied on to keep order and civility in the Gulf. Then he's challenged by Khomeini. As the revolution took on greater momentum, we couldn't seem to get the Shah to do anything. He wouldn't even say no.
Reza Pahlavi The Shah's son
The question was where we might end up, and it was not very clear as to which country would be willing to host my father.
Armao: The Shah was advised that it would be in everyone's best interest if he did not come to the States. He ended up in Mexico, where his health deteriorated. He was dying, and suitable medical care was not available there.
Aaron: Henry Kissinger, Nelson Rockefeller, and [national-security adviser] Zbigniew Brzezinski played the violin in meetings with the president: "The Shah stood up for us for thirty years. You can't just toss him on the ash heap of history. He's a dying man. He's got to come in."
Hendrik Hertzberg President Carter's chief speechwriter
It was, "This guy was a shit, but he was our shit for all these years."
Henry Precht Director of Iranian affairs, State Department
Carter was in an impossible situation: Do we go for a new relationship with Iran, or do we recognize the human obligation we have to the Shah? I said, "If we want to deal with Iran, we have to keep the Shah out of the country." I wrote a memo saying, "If the Shah is admitted, the following things might happen...." The first was that the embassy personnel might be taken hostage. It had been clear for months that we did not have adequate protection at the embassy.
Jody Powell White House press secretary
The president was quite reluctant to admit the Shah. It was a delicate time. Their government was not yet overwhelmingly hostile to the United States, and there was hope that a reasonable relationship could evolve.
Zbigniew Brzezinski National-security adviser
I personally told the Iranian government that we wouldn't encourage the Shah to undertake any political activities and that therefore they could rest assured that granting him asylum in the United States would not be exploited in any political sense whatsoever. Either they were convinced that this was not true, or they thought it was a good issue around which to stir up public emotions.
Gary Sick Adviser, National Security Council
The president was the last one to give in. He said, "I just wonder what advice you're going to give me when they take our people hostage."
Mansour Farhang Iran's first postrevolutionary ambassador to the U.N.
When I first heard that the United States was going to let the Shah in, it absolutely blew my mind.
Armao: We came to New York on October 22, and the Shah went into the hospital. So many old friends came to see him. Kissinger, Rockefeller. I took Frank Sinatra up one day.
Farhang: On November 1, 1979, there was an event in Algiers to celebrate the anniversary of Algerian independence. Brzezinski was there, as was [Iranian] prime minister Mehdi Bazargan, who wanted to normalize relations with the United States, and Foreign Minister Ebrahim Yazdi. They exchanged niceties, but they didn't discuss specific issues. This meeting led to all kinds of innuendo and false charges.
Sick: Shortly after they were out of a job.
Marvin Zonis Author, 'Majestic Failure: The Fall of the Shah'
The meeting was proof for Khomeini that these guys were traitors to the Islamic revolution.
**Sick: **On November 4, I was awakened in the middle of the night. Someone called and told me the embassy had been broken into and that people were assembling at the State Department. I drove in and joined the group. They were in a room with speakerphones linked to telephones at the embassy; the people there were reporting on a minute-by-minute basis. As the process went on, one after another went silent as the students found them, broke in, and took them hostage.
Powell: The president called me early in the morning and woke me up. He was seriously concerned but somewhat hopeful, because the previous situation, in February, had turned out all right in the end. And the Iranian government was quick to give us assurances. But there was no way to know exactly who the people were that had gone into the embassy.
Bill Beeman _Author, 'The "Great Satan" vs. the "Mad Mullahs" ' _
It was a small and unauthorized group that took over the embassy; they intended to be there for only a few days. They called themselves Students Following the Line of the Imam, which put Ayatollah Khomeini in a curious position: Was he going to denounce them?
Farhang: Khomeini hadn't expected the seizure—nobody had. It turned out to be a gold mine for him.
Aaron: Somebody would step forward and say, "I have the power," and they'd start negotiations. Then the Khomeinists would immediately say, "You're pro-American, you're selling out the revolution," and that person would lose their job and sometimes their life. Khomeini began to see how he could use this to clean out the café liberals who were running the government.
Leslie Gelb
Assistant secretary of state for politico-military affairs
What was our awareness of the Ayatollah and the clergy? None. And not a single person, not a single CIA document, had raised the possibility of a revolution.
**Hodding Carter ** State Department spokesman
Our information out of Iran was crappy to nonexistent. We had nobody who spoke Farsi, and what passed for our intelligence was what was given to us by SAVAK [the Shah's secret police], since the Shah, paranoid as he was, had gotten an agreement from us that we would not infiltrate Iran with our own intelligence people. The Shah himself had been our chief source of information about internal dissent!
Farhang: Iranians were so taken with Khomeini. We had a highly romantic view; he was the personification of moral opposition to the Shah. I thought of him as the Mahatma Gandhi of Iran. I didn't know he was going to be the Reverend Jones.
Precht: Carter sent Ramsey Clark to Tehran to give a letter to Khomeini, which would be the instrument that would get the hostages freed.
Ramsey Clark Special emissary; attorney general under President Johnson
I said that there has got to be absolute secrecy, otherwise it won't work. We get out of the car at Andrews Air Force Base and there are fifty people with cameras.
**Precht: **We hadn't yet been given authority from the Iranians to come, and within a few hours the story of the mission was on the nightly news. When we got to Istanbul on November 7, Khomeini decreed that no Iranian officials were to talk to American officials. It would have been better not to have sent the mission at all. It looked as though we were set up to bully them, and that set Khomeini off.
Clark: This must be one of the saddest affairs of my life. I think it changed history. I think Carter would have been reelected. I knew Khomeini, Bazargan, and Yazdi well, and I knew I could talk heart-to-heart with them.
Hodding Carter: The fundamental error was keeping this story on the front burner day in and day out. We talked about it every goddamn day.
Sick: Every night it was the top story—whole news programs, like Nightline, were invented just to cover it.
**Ted Koppel ** Anchor, 'Nightline'
Years later I ran into Jimmy Carter, and he said, "There were only two people who really benefited from all of that—you and Ayatollah Khomeini." Certainly, it boosted my career way beyond anything I'd ever dreamed of. I'm forever sorry that it came at the pain of so many people, but that's what we news people do, cover stories like that. There was a gigantic appetite for it; it was not unusual for us to have 10 million people watching the program.
David Farber _Author, 'Taken Hostage' _
The hostage-taking occurred at a time when many Americans felt that their nation was under siege in so many ways, in particular economically. Here were fellow Americans who were completely adrift. The hostages became a kind of symbol.
Koppel: President Carter famously said the hostages were the first thing he thought about in the morning and the last thing he thought about at night. It was a downright foolish thing to say, because it made the people holding the hostages realize that they had an awful lot of influence over the United States.
Hertzberg: I thought Carter was essentially making himself a hostage. Every single night it was, "America is being humiliated because Carter is a wimp." The Rose Garden strategy was a mistake. [Because of the crisis, Carter initially decided to remain in the White House instead of campaigning; this became known as the Rose Garden strategy.] It was crazy to sit in the White House while there was a presidential campaign going on.
Abolhassan Banisadr_ First postrevolutionary president of Iran _
Early on I put together a proposal with three conditions for freeing the hostages. That proposal was approved by Mr. Khomeini himself and by the U.S. I would go to the U.N. and make Iran's case, the General Council would approve, and the hostages would be freed. When I was about to leave for New York, Mr. Khomeini issued an order over the radio that nobody will go to the U.N. on behalf of Iran. I went to Khomeini, and in a heated manner I asked him why he had changed his mind. He had a very ridiculous reason: He said, "What if the U.N. passes a resolution against Iran because of the problems with the islands in the Persian Gulf?" [At the time, Iran was claiming ownership of three islands.] I told him, "Sir, you are dealing with a lot of ifs. If this, if that. They have already agreed to the conditions of the meeting." I realized later that he didn't really want to resolve the situation. He also didn't want me to solve the crisis, because my popularity in Iran would have risen, which would have been a direct threat to him.
David Gergen Adviser, Reagan campaign
In Washington there was tension right from the start between the camps of Cy Vance, the secretary of state, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national-security adviser. Zbig Brzezinski was more of a Cold Warrior. He'd come out of Eastern Europe; he understood the dark side of the Soviet empire and wanted to be very tough with the Iranians. Cy came from the school that said, "We can negotiate with them, we can work this out."
Brzezinski: The basic difference was, I had absolutely no confidence that a post-Shah regime would be stable and pro-U.S., while Vance thought it highly probable that some sort of democratic coalition could emerge that would be friendly, even if not quite as friendly as the Shah's regime.
Gergen: The tension boiled over at times. Famously, Jimmy Carter had asked each team to draft an Annapolis-commencement address. He got two different drafts: One hard-line from Brzezinski, one soft-line from Vance. And he said, "Marry the drafts." He went and gave this speech that essentially was two different speeches. It made Carter appear ambivalent about the use of force; that's what gave Reagan the advantage in the campaign. But it also sent this message to the hostage-takers that there was a waffling quality inside the White House.
Sick: By the end of March, it was clear that we had exhausted all avenues—diplomatic pressure, economic pressure, world negotiations. There was really no good option left.
Warren Christopher Deputy secretary of state
Brzezinski was very enthusiastic about a rescue mission. Vance doubted it would work; he was firmly against it, and he felt it would sour our relationships in the Middle East.
Aaron: We had a review of the plan for the rescue mission. When it was over, the president looked at the members of the cabinet and said, "This is my decision. If something goes wrong, I'm taking responsibility." Of course, they were all very eager to place it on him.
**Gergen: **When they ordered the rescue mission, Vance gave the president a letter saying, "You have my resignation as soon as this operation is over, however it turns out."
Brzezinski: I was very much aware that we could fail. But we also knew that there were other rescue attempts that had succeeded, and they had all involved chances and risks. There was a consensus in the National Security Council in favor of the mission.
Farber: It's one of the great unknowns: What if that military mission had succeeded? Does Carter beat Reagan?
Mark Colvin ABC Radio correspondent, Tehran
We got a call one day to come down to a side gate of the embassy. We entered the compound, and in the middle of this big courtyard about forty chairs faced a pile of tarpaulins. We were told to sit. Eventually, a short, fat ayatollah, Ayatollah Khalkhali, arrived. He was known as "the cat strangler" because once, during a TV interview, a reporter asked, "What would you do if the Shah came back tomorrow?" And Khalkhali had a cat on his lap, which he picked up and strangled in front of the camera. That's the way he rolled. He proceeded to harangue us in Farsi for half an hour, screaming a lot of the time. About halfway through, the Revolutionary Guards started taking off the tarpaulins. Beneath were some wooden crates, and they started opening them, and Khalkhali started pulling out all these blackened pieces. We were all trying to work out what these things were. Then he picked up one of these objects and started scraping at it with a pocketknife, and gradually you made out a wristwatch and you suddenly realized he was holding the blackened arm of an American. These were the remains of the men who had come to rescue the hostages.
Bucky Burruss _Operations officer, Delta Force _
We used to watch Nightline religiously. One hostage was a Marine security guard, and there was footage of his kid sister crying on Christmas Eve. I thought, You sons of bitches, we're coming after you.
Eric Haney Sergeant, Delta Force
The plan was for the air force to fly us on C-130 aircraft into Desert One, a site about 250 miles from Tehran, where we would meet helicopters coming from the USS Nimitz in the Indian Ocean. The 130s carried big rubber bladders holding thousands of gallons of fuel. We would refuel the helicopters, then move forward that same night to Desert Two, a hide site about forty miles outside the city. The planes would then return to Masirah, off the coast of Oman.
Burruss: Two of our people on the ground had arranged for a warehouse and trucks, and we had some expat Iranians who were going to serve as drivers and interpreters. They would take us to this warehouse before daybreak.
Haney: That night we would scale the embassy walls—we'd assault the buildings, kill the hostage-holders, and recover the hostages.
Burruss: We would then blow a hole in the embassy wall and take the hostages to a soccer stadium across the street. Choppers were then going to land in the stadium.
Haney: The hostages would be loaded and immediately carried out, and we would follow.
**Burruss: **We would land at the Masirah airfield, then we'd all go back home and be heroes, and Carter would be reelected.
Logan Fitch Squadron commander, Delta Force
I felt confident we were going to succeed. I knew that we would lose some people and probably some hostages, but isn't it worth it to show people around the world that you can't do that to us?
**Burruss: **We'd laid out the whole embassy compound. Guys knew that they had to go eight steps this way and turn left and go four steps and then turn right and go up a set of stairs. That's how well rehearsed they were. One guy said it was like a ballet, which I thought was a wimpy way to put it, but it was.
John Carney Air force combat controller, Delta Force
The problem was the helicopter part, the Marine pilots. They hadn't been trained in this type of mission. We needed guys with experience landing in the dirt, like in Vietnam. When you try to land one of those big helicopters in the dirt, it just browns out. You can't see anything.
B. J. McGuire _Marine helicopter pilot _
Our feeling was that the training had been so long and so arduous that the mission itself would be easy.
Haney: We launched from Masirah on April 24. When we crossed into Iranian airspace, we were probably about 200 feet above the ground.
Jim Kyle Colonel, U.S. Air Force
You fly nape of the earth. That's to get through the radar net at the coast.
Fitch: My squadron was on the first aircraft [to land at Desert One]. I came off the plane, I had my arm up trying to shield my eyes from all the blowing dust, and then—what in hell is this?
**Haney: **There's a tanker truck, a passenger bus, and a pickup truck.
**Fitch: **We'd landed at midnight in the middle of nowhere. Murphy's Law dictated that a bus and two trucks should be there.
Haney: We run out to stop the vehicles. The tanker truck doesn't stop, so one of the Rangers takes out his anti-tank rocket. He tried to shoot the engine, but the rocket hit the dirt right under the bumper, bounced up into the belly of that 10,000-gallon tanker of gasoline, and—BOOM! It was biblical. It was like the pillars of fire that the children of Israel followed across Sinai. The guy in the tanker dove out of the cab, ran to the pickup, and got away.
Carney: We moved the bus out of the way and told the passengers that they'd be all right just as long as they stayed there.
Haney: Eventually, the other planes start coming in. We're all waiting for the helicopters. The clock is ticking. We have to get this done during darkness. Another hour goes by. Finally, we see one of the helicopters. He staggers in—the crew is rattled, overwhelmed. Then the other helicopters start staggering in.
Fitch: We'd conducted seven rehearsals in environments similar to this—Arizona, Nevada. What the pilots had never encountered, however, was a haboob.
McGuire: These storms kick sand into the air, and afterward, because there's no wind whatsoever, very fine particulates remain suspended. The pilots couldn't see squat. It's like trying to look through a glass of Tang.
Kyle: The first helicopter aborted due to a blade problem about an hour into the mission. Another pilot was separated from the group in the dust storm. He lost his confidence and went back to the carrier. He claimed he was afraid he was going to crash and all sorts of blubbering things.
Carney: They'd launched eight helicopters from the Nimitz. The one major contingency of the mission was that we had to have six. That was the absolute minimum. Six helicopters made it to Desert One.
Kyle: We refueled them. All were ready to go with Delta northbound.
**Carney: **Now you're high-fiving: "We did it—let's go!" And then it just turned to manure. One of the helicopters shut down; his backup hydraulic system was out. That left us with five helicopters—an automatic abort.
Kyle: The mission could not go with five helicopters, because the extra twenty-some people on the chopper that had aborted were too much weight. I was just trying to keep the mission going. I said, "Is there any way you can reduce by twenty shooters?" [Colonel Charlie] Beckwith said, "Fuck you, I ain't gonna do that. I don't know what I'm up against."
McGuire: They got on the phone to Washington, and President Carter decided to abort.
**Haney: **I heard an outburst from Beckwith: "Fuck it. Just load everybody up. We'll come back tomorrow night."
Carney: We'd kept the engines running the whole time, and one of the airplanes was running low on fuel. Its pilot needed to get out of there so he'd have enough fuel to get back to Masirah. The decision was made to move the helicopters out from behind the aircraft [to clear the runway]. One helicopter picked up to reposition and browned out. This is a ninety-mile-per-hour wash coming down into the sand and then blowing it up; he can't see anything.
J. J. Beyers Air force radio operator
All of a sudden, the whole windscreen of the airplane lit up.
Fitch: I thought, Oh shit, we're under attack. The whole left side and back of the plane was in flames.
Beyers: I made it from the cockpit to the door; the whole airplane was on fire. Two shadows on the ground grabbed me and threw me on the ground. That was the last thing I remember. Evidently, I was on fire.
Fitch: I ran maybe fifty yards. When I looked back, I could see the helicopter was on top of the cockpit of the 130. That's when I knew what had happened.
Haney: The blades cut through the fuselage and the flight deck, and that pulled the helicopter up on top of the plane—that's when the helicopter exploded.
Carney: It killed three Marines in the back of the helicopter and five airmen who were trapped in the cockpit of the plane.
**Kyle: **The airplane blew its guts out and shrapnel spewed all over the place.
Burruss: We left eight guys on this pyre in the middle of the desert. That's something you live with forever.
Haney: There's an old army maxim: "No plan survives contact with the enemy." We didn't even have to contact the enemy on that one. No plan survives contact with yourself sometimes. When we got home, we started preparations for a second go-round, but it was obvious that no one from the White House had their heart in it.
Kyle: What it all boils down to is, one guy with a good helicopter—a helicopter we needed to complete the mission—turned around and flew all the way back to the Nimitz. The Marines nicknamed that pilot Turn Back.
**Haney: **The hostage-takers were worried about the possibility of another attempt, so they scattered the Americans around Iran. It was our one opportunity, and it was gone.
Joseph Hall _Military attaché, U.S. embassy _
They panicked and spread us all over the country in forty-eight hours. I think I was moved seventeen times during the next two months.
Abolhassan Banisadr _First post-revolutionary president of Iran _
The consequences of the rescue mission were severe. The mullahs' suspicions were raised against the military, because they wondered how the U.S. could enter Iranian airspace undetected. So they started a purge that resulted in the extreme weakening of Iran's military power.
Rocky Sickmann _Marine guard, U.S. embassy _
One day the guards brought over a copy of The Sporting News, and I'm sitting there reading that a tennis tournament was postponed "due to the death of the Shah of Iran." I said, "Holy shit!" We bang on the door: "Hey, Ali"—everybody's name was Ali; they wouldn't give us their real names—"What is this, the frickin' Shah is dead?"
**Banisadr: **His passing wasn't something the students were happy about. As long as the Shah was alive, they could use the excuse that he was planning to come back, that he was a direct threat to the government.
John Limbert _Political officer, U.S. embassy _
His death didn't affect the way we were treated. It was clear this whole incident was not about the United States—it was an internal political game. One of the students even said that to me. They had been turned into prison guards. I think many of them felt used by the politicians.
Sickmann: At times you'd think, Boy, they're probably as much hostages as we are.
**Moorhead Kennedy ** Economics and commercial officer, U.S. embassy
But once, when they were moving us, one of the guards stood there with tears pouring down his cheeks. He was a local hire, and when we were moved he was laid off. This was obviously the most exciting moment of his life; terrorism gives a lot of unemployed people something exciting to do.
Mansour Farhang _Iran's first postrevolutionary ambassador to the U.N. _
The hostage-taking probably cost Iran over $10 billion. Khomeini didn't care; he enjoyed his immense popularity and the idea of being involved in a moral struggle. The sanctions, the freezing of Iran's assets, were devastating. Without the economic weakness and international isolation, Saddam Hussein would not have invaded Iran in September 1980. There was hardly any resistance.
Michael Metrinko Political officer, U.S. embassy
Our guards started to leave, to go to the war front. They asked if we'd be willing to defend the prison if it were attacked. I said, "Give me a gun."
Bruce Laingen Chargé d'affaires and acting ambassador, U.S. embassy
Iran was in trouble. They needed funds, they needed help, they weren't getting it anywhere. They were dramatically isolated at the U.N. and in international opinion.
Gergen: In the U.S., election day 1980 fell on the one-year anniversary of the hostage-taking. It was clearly a factor in Reagan's ten-point defeat of Carter. I am among those who believe the coming to office of Reagan was a significant factor in the Iranians' decision to free the hostages. I remember one common quip going around was: What's flat, red, and glows in the dark? Answer: Tehran, after Reagan becomes president.
**Sick: **There's no smoking gun, but there are many who believe that the Reagan people deliberately slowed down progress in the hostage issue. Nobody who was involved in it has come out publicly. Maybe we'll have a deathbed confession someday.
Banisadr: In the spring of 1980, the Reagan-and-Bush team contacted my team and also the Islamic Republican Party, the friends of Mr. Khomeini. Reagan's team tried to make a deal with us to free the hostages. I rejected the deal because they weren't official representatives of the U.S. at the time, but the Islamic Republican Party decided to work with them. [As a result] Khomeini delayed implementation of the release until Reagan was elected.
Farhang: Congress spent more than $1 million to investigate. I testified, and I remain convinced to this day that there was no contact or conspiracy.
Hall: We didn't know if it meant anything or not, but we were counting down to inauguration day. On January 19, they led me into a room and asked me questions about my treatment. I remember they presented it as though I was a "candidate for release." I wasn't going to sing their praises, but I wasn't going to say a whole lot.
Metrinko: It was a sort of Tokyo Rose-type interview.
**Limbert: **They asked, "How were you treated?" I just said, "You could have done a good thing with your revolution, but you really screwed it up." They didn't have a response.
Sickmann: On January 20, they told us we were going home. They came back five minutes later and we were still sitting there. Seriously. You have to understand that they have screwed with our minds for 444 days. I remember walking out that night. They had taken our shoes away, and we had plastic sandals. I was blindfolded, and it was snowing; the snow was running through my toes as I was walking through it. I can hear to this day the crunching of the snow under my feet as we walked to this bus that supposedly was taking us to the airport.
Hall: They stood us up individually inside the bus, took the handcuffs and the blindfolds off, and we literally ran a gauntlet to the steps of that airplane, one final insult of slapping and shoving and punching.
Limbert: I thought to myself, This group has no class at all. This is a chickenshit outfit.
Sickmann: We walk to the back of the airplane. Nobody high-fives, nobody says a word. You're free, but you're still whispering to each other because you're in shock. The plane starts revving and shaking, and all of a sudden it comes to an idle. It's like, "God, they're messing with us." Iran had turned off the runway lights.
Koppel: The hostages were on the plane, but the Iranians did the cruelest thing they could think of, which was to wait until one second after noon on inauguration day. And that was just crushing. Carter and Brzezinski and their advisers were in the Oval Office all night, praying that they would get these guys released while they were still on duty. Because Carter really did, it must be said, try with all his heart to get those men and women out of there.
**Bill Daugherty ** _CIA officer, U.S. embassy _
You cannot underestimate the hatred that the hostage-takers felt for Jimmy Carter. They felt betrayed by him. He had come in on a platform of human rights, and he had said these standards will apply to friends as well as enemies. He mentioned Iran in the campaign! The Iranians really believed he was going to come in and stop the Shah's human-rights violations.
Barry Rosen Press attaché, U.S. embassy
We were very worried that some sort of Iranian jet fighter, if they had any left, would shoot us down.
Warren Christopher _Deputy secretary of state _
The Iranians sent two commercial planes, one as a decoy. But until I saw the landing lights of those planes off in the distance, near the Algiers airport, I had no real confidence that they were coming home. It was a very tricky moment.
**Sickmann: **We got off the airplane in Algiers and kissed the ground. The left cheek of my pants was completely ripped out from sitting on my can so much. I felt sorry for the ambassador and all the other people having to look at us and smell us.
Metrinko: When we got to the military hospital at Wiesbaden [in Germany], there were stacks of newspapers in the reception area. I was glancing at one, and I looked at one of the photographs and thought, My God, it looks just like my grandfather's portrait. Then I realized it was the portrait that hung in our dining room at home, and that the people standing under it were my mother and father. Why it would be in The New York Times I had no idea. I did not know that anyone was interested or cared. It was like Rip Van Winkle waking up.
Henry Precht Director of Iranian affairs, State Department
I was invited to go on the plane to Wiesbaden with Carter and Vice President Walter Mondale. I said, "Mr. President, many of the hostages are likely to hold you responsible for admitting the Shah and leaving them vulnerable in Tehran." He said, "I realize that, and I'm prepared to deal with it."
Kevin Hermening _Marine guard, U.S. embassy _
Six or eight Americans refused to meet with President Carter and Mondale.
**Al Golacinski ** _Chief security officer, U.S. embassy _
A gentleman stood up—I will not reveal who he was—and said to the president, "Why did you do the one thing that would fire up the Iranians like that?" His answer was, "We had been given assurances that our embassy and our personnel would be protected." I stood up and said, "Mr. President, with all due respect, I and others wrote that those assurances were not worth the paper they were written on." Later we had our pictures taken individually with the president, and he apologized to me. He said he had seen what had been written. I really believe the president was a very decent man.
Daugherty: Had we had any inkling that they would actually let the Shah into the United States, I don't think many of us would have gone to Tehran in the first place. I certainly wouldn't have. Before I went over, a senior officer told me, "The only real danger is if they let the Shah in, but nobody is that stupid." Golacinski: I sometimes wish I could go back and relive those first few days or that first month, because I don't remember much of it. I do remember, though, that in all of the stopovers on the way home, I had to be the last one on the airplane. I just wanted to make sure everybody was there. I don't know how to explain it to you. I think maybe I was just trying to make myself feel better about something.
**Charles Scott ** Head of military-liaison section, U.S. embassy
While we were hostages, my cellmate and I prayed that Uncle Sam wouldn't sell us out to get us released. Of course he did sell us out.
Laingen: The Algiers Accords, the document Warren Christopher signed, indemnifies the Iranian government against lawsuits launched by the hostages.
Christopher: We felt that under the circumstances, the highest value was to get the hostages out alive, so this did not seem to us to be a breaking point in the negotiations.
Rosen: I would rather have stayed longer. Don't do me a favor by getting me out and telling me that I don't have a right to sue.
Brzezinski: It certainly was not a very good bargain. All I can say is that I don't blame [them] for being mad.
Golacinski: One of the most important provisions of the accords is that the U.S. and Iran agreed not to meddle in each other's internal affairs.
Daugherty: That provision has been violated many times, overtly and covertly. The Algiers Accords are meaningless at this point. Hillary, as a senator, was on board with holding the Iranians accountable, but we've seen absolutely no indication that she cares now. I don't know if Obama gives a crap about us.
**Scott: **A clear violation of international law took place, and there was nothing done about it against the country that committed the crime. That was the beginning, the emboldening, of radical Islamic terrorism.
Robert Armao _Aide to the Shah, 1979-80 _
Terrorism after '79 exploded for one reason: The regime had $27 billion in oil revenues, and they spent it on terrorism. Everywhere you went—Hezbollah here, the Taliban there, Arafat. The Iranians funded everybody.
Reza Pahlavi _The Shah's son _
The regime's raison d'être is to establish a nuclear hegemony and impose its ideology on the world. Which will happen first: Will we bring democracy to our homeland, or will the regime become nuclear-capable? The consequences of the embassy takeover were disastrous. We were hoping to get ahead, to gain freedom, and instead we lost everything and went back to the Dark Ages.
Laingen: The people who held us have to live with their pain. I know they feel it, because now several of them have accepted that what they did was contrary to Iran's own objectives. Indeed, several of them are now in the show trials Ahmadinejad is putting on.
David Aaron _Deputy national-security adviser _
There's a battle in Iran now between... It's not even clear who. There are different coalitions every day; everyone's baffled. But the government is doing the same thing. They're using the crisis to get rid of anybody with a liberal orientation.
Hodding Carter State Department spokesman
Underneath the clamping down, the pot is boiling at a level we haven't seen since the revolution.
Leslie Gelb _Assistant secretary of state for politico-military affairs _
I haven't seen any improvement under Obama except in one respect, which is that there is a real desire to engage with them. But you need a strategy to go with that desire, and we don't have that strategy.
Banisadr: It would be great if Mrs. Clinton would do us a favor and not show us that she is for the green movement [Iran's reform movement]. She must stay neutral, not take sides. Even today, in the show trials, they use the United States as an excuse to indict people for trying to start another revolution. Mr. Obama shouldn't use sanctions or threats or military attacks against Iran. The mullahs will say, "If it wasn't for the sanctions, your lives would be better."
Bill Beeman Author, 'The "Great Satan" vs. the "Mad Mullahs" '
Frankly, I think Iran is going to give up on Europe and the United States. They've got all these economic sanctions; they're being demonized for their perfectly legitimate right to establish nuclear power. They're sick of it. And they have very good friends in China and India and Russia.
Gelb: We're going to give the North Koreans two light-water reactors? We make a deal with India to empt their military nuclear plants from international inspection? We give billions of dollars to Pakistan, which committed all the sins we're accusing Iran of—and they're a more volatile and dangerous country? Iran is entitled by treaty to have a uranium-enrichment program. We can't just be total schmucks about this.
Pahlavi: How come most Iranians who left, including critics of my father, ended up in the U.S.? They didn't go to Havana. They didn't go to Pyongyang. They went to New York or L.A.
**Gelb: **There are a huge percentage of Iranians who are pro-American. We saw that after September 11, when they spontaneously came into the streets. It's the biggest love-hate relationship we have with any country in the world.
Hodding Carter: We make tentative starts toward some kind of conversation, but we're easily deterred by our own insistence on preconditions and of course the obduracy on the Iranian side. Iran is the bone in our throat that we don't know how to get out.
_On September 11, 2009, the Obama administration announced that the U.S. would accept Iran's proposal to hold face-to-face talks. These would be the first substantive conversations between the two countries since 1979. In that same week, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reaffirmed his country's commitment to its nuclear program, whose purpose, he said, is generating electricity. _
_Reported by Hilary Elkins, David Gargill, Sarah Goldstein, Cole Louison, Trent MacNamara, Raha Naddaf, Alexander Provan, Daniel Riley, and Christopher Swetala. Compiled by Nate Penn. _
Interviews with hostage-takers conducted by Bill Berkeley and will appear in his forthcoming book, The Imam's Line: The Story of the Iranian Hostage-Takers (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).
