Guests of the Ayatollah- Mark Bowden

Today it’s almost impossible to imagine a group of radical students overtaking an American Embassy and seizing sixty-six hostages. Our embassies and consulates overseas are impenetrable fortresses that are so well fortified that even our own diplomats sometimes can’t gain access. When I was in the Foreign Service, if I forgot my badge, I couldn’t even get in to work, even though all of the guards knew me, until I could call someone in my section to come outside and sign me in. But in 1979, we were not yet completely reviled around the Middle East, and Guests of the Ayatollah tells the riveting, page-turning account of how a group of zealous Iranian students managed to seize control of the American Embassy in Tehran and hold sixty-six American diplomats hostage for 444 days, while winning the blessing of Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian people, who were repelled by the excesses of the American-backed Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.

Bowden, the author of Killing Pablo, Blackhawk Down, and many others, is a zen-master of narrative non-fiction, and this is certainly his most compelling work to date. Bowden succeeds in brining us inside the minds of the hostages, their Iranian captors, and the policymakers in Washington who had to decide how to resolve the standoff. The hostage crisis was probably the beginning of the end of Jimmy Carter- as the standoff served to make him appear weak and indecisive to an already recession beleaguered populace that was being seduced by the tough talking Ronald Reagan- but Bowden’s account helps the reader understand that Carter’s top priority was the safety of the hostages, rather than appearing tough to voters. Bowden also artfully illustrates the treacherousness of several self-serving left wing grandstanders who made high profile trips to visit the hostages, only to bolster the cause of the captors, whom they praised for taking on American imperialism, while offering little or no comfort to the hostages.

Guests of the Ayatollah is well worth reading, not only because it’s a thrilling narrative, but also because it helps us understand a country that neo-conservative and pro-Israel hawks desperately want us to wage war against. Nearly thirty years after the fact, the hostage incident still casts a shadow over U.S.-Iranian relations- we still fail to understand the ramifications of our 1953 CIA directed plot which toppled a popular left-leaning democratically elected Iranian leader, Mohammed Mosaddeq, and subsequent installation of the corrupt Shah as leader, and Iranians still fail to understand how repugnant and unacceptable it is to take diplomats hostage as a means of expressing a political grievance.

Highly Recommended