Bowden focuses on events surrounding the Iranian hostage crisis, the 444-day period, during which student proxies of the new Iranian regime held hostage 66 diplomats and citizens of the United States inside the U.S. embassy in Tehran. Historians consider the crisis to have been an important reason for United States President Jimmy Carter's loss in his re-election bid for the presidency in 1980.

The book is not as good as Biden's own Black Hawk Down, but it's also a revelation on several levels. The strength of the book is in the opening and closing chapters where Bowden deals extensively with the underlying strategies of the individuals involved in the takeover of the embassy and the political aftermath.
The author shows how a small group of individuals with understandable, if questionable, ideals, initiated an event which very quickly went over their heads, themselves as well as their captors becoming pawns in what mostly was an internal (to Iran) struggle of political supremacy, eventually resulting in bringing the hard-liner clerics to power and making Iran into what it is today, a mullahcracy.
Although Bowden takes too much time describing the individual ordeals of the hostages, interesting, but without an apparent underlying pattern, these lists of events turn into pure anecdotal offerings, he also tries and succeeds quite well in supplying a balanced view of the events over the 14 months the crisis lasted.

However, the book's most interesting part is near the end, where Bowden tries to investigate the effect those events, now some three decades old, had and still have on Iran and is politics. Most people now realise, including several of the former hostage takers originally involved as instigators, that a lot more harm was done and that not only were the effects averse to their objective of enlisting the American people in their fight against the American government, who had been meddling in Iranian affairs since world war two, the overall effects on Iran as a country were quite devastating, bringing a system into being, not nearly democratic, under which many people suffered, even decades later.
Bowden also shows how the somehow long lasting need for consistency (but also terror!) by the Iranian regime still accounts for the very sour relations between the US and Iran. Suggesting, to me, that perhaps the only way to resolve this whole issue is not by slow evolutionary changes to the political structure of Iran, if this has happened at all since the death of Khomeini, but really needs a jolt to force some much needed changes.

One of Bowden's closing paragraphs sum up his own experiences, as well as the Iranian people's, quite well:

"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 [at the former embassy, celebrating the hostage taking] is at some level an enduring embarrassment."

Bowden linked an important series of events together, each intertwined with the next:

+ Carter's failure to be reelected
+ The death of the Shah, which happened during the crisis.
+ The Soviet Union entering Afghanistan.
+ Saddam Hussein's declaring war on Iran.
+ The emergence of a hard-liner clerical government in Iran.

Bowden shows how the hostage crisis was used by the clerics to slowly take in more and more power (although he also suggests that, to a certain extent, even Khomeini himself might have been something of a pawn in this, not acting according to a greater plan but constantly submitting to what appeared to be spur of the moment decisions and changes), thus benefiting from a long and protracted crisis. Also, Bowden doesn't believe the supposed Reagan-administration intervention (before the man was inaugurated as president) had any effect on the hostage crisis as such.

One gripe: Bowden could have done with a better editor. He repeats himself quite often, and even though this is useful at times, considering the many characters who play a role in the book, on several occasions he obviously forgot mentioning the same tidbit of information earlier on.
And he calls 'Afghan' a language. That's sad.

Hostages in Iran

This an exce!lant book,well written and informative. The author explains the circumstances of both the condition of the hostages and of the rescue attempt.

This is the second book I have read by Mark Bowden. While not quite as good as Black Hawk Down, it does an outstanding job of bringing to life the Embassy takeover, the captivity of the hostages and the failed rescue attempt. I was ten when the embassy was overrun and have memories of the hostage crisis in the news and yellow ribbons around trees, but I was too young to truly understand what was actually happening. So, this book was much more than a trip down memory lane; it was an opportunity to better understand a transformative event in my country’s history. For example, I remember our conflicts with Iran, during the Reagan administration, when I was in high school, and I even remember the president singing Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran to the tune of the Beach Boys’ Barbara Ann. Perhaps I should have connected his hostility towards Iran with the hostage crisis, but I tended to think of it in terms of Islamic terrorism and such confrontations as the tanker wars and the near sinking of the USS Samuel B. Roberts, things that I read about in the newspaper while I was a teenager. Reading this book has definitely broadened my understanding of how the hostage crisis impacted history, both American and Iranian.

One thing the book brought into stark relief was the shear magnitude of the rescue mission. Here is a list of initial mission requirements quoted from the book:

1.tFly 15,000 miles around the world – 850 miles of it in Iran (based on concerns that consulting working with a near neighbor would invite leaks that would provide early warning to Iran).
2.tEnter into Tehran undetected.
3.tBreach the embassy and rescue the hostages.
4.tReturn the hostages without any harm.
5.tDon’t hurt any civilians, Iranian or otherwise.
6.tRescue the three Americans at the Foreign Ministry simultaneously (They had been at the Foreign Ministry for a meeting on the day of the embassy takeover.).
7.tDo not permit the Iranian forces to be aware of or react to our presence.

Furthermore, this was to be the first mission of the newly constituted Delta Force. While the first requirement was relaxed in that air transport would consist of eight CH-53s flying off a carrier in the Arabian Sea and six MC-130 transports flying from Wadi Kena, a remote airstrip in Egypt, the mission was going to be risky, at best, with a high likelihood of failure under any circumstances. To make it work, the CH-53s and MC-130s had to rendezvous at a remote location in Iran, referred to as Desert One, where the CH-53s could be refueled from fuel bladders transported in the MC-130 cargo bays. Because the mission required a minimum of six CH-53s for transporting commandoes and hostages out of Iran, it was believed that eight would provide adequate safety margin. As it turns out, one of the CH-53s had to land and be abandoned in route due to a cracked rotor, and another had to turn back because of mechanical failures. Of the six CH-53s that made it to Desert One, one of them arrived with a failed backup hydraulic pump, rendering it inoperable. The mission had to be scrubbed. While a CH-53 was being maneuvered out of the way to allow a MC-130 to take off, its pilot, blinded by the dust cloud kicked up by his rotor wash (When Desert One was selected, a scouting team had noted no dust on the ground. At the time of the mission, it was ankle deep.), collided with the MC-130, killing aircrew from both aircraft. Debris and cooked off ammunition damaged the other CH-53s, which had to be abandoned. The survivors flew out in the MC-130s. It was a daring, high risk plan, and President Carter deserves credit for having the guts to try it.

Until I read the book, I had no idea just how the hostage crisis affected Iranian politics. The embassy takeover had been planned and executed by university students. Late in the Shah’s reign, various opposition groups that normally didn’t get along managed to rise above their differences to unseat him. In the power vacuum after he went to the U.S. for medical treatment, these groups formed a provisional coalition government that was weakened by jockeying for power among the diverse groups. The students included members of the different groups, but the take-over was exploited by the Islamists. The quick takeover limited the ability of embassy staff to destroy records, and shredded records could be put back together. One conspiracy theory running rampant in Iran at the time was that spies in the embassy were working to undermine the Iranian government, and anyone who had any connection to it was considered suspect. When retrieved records implicated any Iranian, especially one with political power, rivals often exploited the situation by having him/her tried and executed. So, the non-Islamist students among the hostage takers unwittingly helped the Islamists gain power over themselves.

It is true that the Iranians had some legitimate grievances against the U.S. For example, a CIA-sponsored coup early in the Eisenhower administration toppled Mohammad Mosaddegh, a leftist prime minister, helping the Shah to consolidate power. While the U.S. did not make the Shah govern in a brutal, heavy-handed manner, it did turn a blind eye on account of its need for Iranian oil, its effort to limit Soviet influence in the Middle East and the use of sites in Iran to monitor Soviet nuclear weapons testing. In fact, because of Soviet efforts to exert power and influence over Iran, some of the students, including Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a future president of Iran, had proposed taking over the Soviet embassy, instead. That said, because diplomacy is one of the few viable alternatives to war, seizing the embassy was the absolute wrong way to seek redress.

This book describes the 444 days long ordeal faced by the people in the American embassy at Tehran. What I loved about this book was that the author has tried to be unbiased (except probably in some parts of the epilogue where he tries to portray that the strained US-Iran relations are responsible for the miserable state of Tehran, but he ends up describing any normal third world country). At times, I found myself rooting for the American victims and getting absolutely enraged by the blatant violation of basic diplomatic courtesy, while at other times I found myself sympathizing with the Iranians and understanding the reasons behind their drastic actions. I finally came to peace with the conclusion: 'why' they did it seems justified, but 'how' they did does not.

The author doesn't mince with words when it comes to describing the oppression of the shah and pointing out CIA's mistake in helping the shah overthrow an elected government. At the same time, the book describes the boredom faced by the hostages and how each one of them devises different ways of dealing with it. The writing is such that you can literally imagine being with the hostages! You can feel your frustration building up, especially in the end when the deal after deal just fell apart because nobody knew who was the puppeteer directing the happenings in Iran.

The book also talks about the general reaction of the American citizens and the press and also about the trauma that families of the hostages went through. It talks about how this crisis was handled in the White House and the remarkable patience and restraint demonstrated by Jimmy Carter. It also narrates the story of the special delta force, their formation, their meticulous preparations, the unexpected obstacles they encountered in their mission and the tragic accident that followed when the forces were returning after abortion of the mission.

I began with sympathizing with the Iranians' grievances, but then slowly losing patience with the Iranian students (especially after the death of the shah), and finally getting anxious for the safe return of the hostages. Overall, it was a long, detailed book, but narrated in a way that keeps you hooked on to every word.