Guests of the Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis: The First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Bowden, whose Black Hawk Down won him a National Book Award nomination, turns his sights to the 1979 Iran hostage crisis. The audio abridgment is generally smooth, though it's often difficult to keep the cast of characters straight: 66 original hostages, dozens of Iranian captors and untold numbers of diplomats, bureaucrats and family members. On audio, such a dizzying array of stories and backstories can become confusing. Bowden is a capable and competent narrator; while there are no tour de force performances here, the reading is solid and consistent, with no annoying vocal tics or other distractions. The real bonus of the audio over the print version is the final disc, which contains several visual enhancements: a PDF map of the embassy compound; a map of Iran, with markings not only for cities but also the landing site of the ill-fated 1980 rescue mission; and, most impressively, almost nine minutes of footage from the Discovery Channel's four-part documentary Guests of the Ayatollah, featuring compelling interviews with surviving members of the rescue team.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

From The Washington Post

In the winter of 2005, Massoumeh Ebtekar stood before the world's political and business elite in Davos, Switzerland, and gave them a tongue-lashing. Before a startled crowd at the annual powwow of global movers and shakers, the senior Iranian official blasted the West for cultural decadence, proclaiming the values of the Islamic Republic of Iran to be superior -- and far more benevolent to women. She dismissed concerns about human rights abuses with a flick of her heavily veiled arm.

In 2005, her listeners could simply walk out on the harangue. In 1979, John W. Limbert Jr. was not so lucky; he was, literally, Ebtekar's captive audience. Limbert, an erudite diplomat and scholar of Persian poetry, was one of the 52 American hostages who suffered through 444 days of captivity in revolutionary Iran, and he remembers Ebtekar with contempt. Back then, she was known as "Screaming Mary," the young spokesperson for the student hostage-takers -- a smug radical who regularly berated the Americans with finger-waving, ill-informed lectures about the evils of their country.

At one point in Mark Bowden's riveting new book, Guests of the Ayatollah, Ebtekar browbeats a CIA agent named William J. Daugherty over "the inhuman, racist decision" to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After Daugherty shoots back that the Japanese started the war at Pearl Harbor, Ebtekar looks confused. "Pearl Harbor? Where's Pearl Harbor?" she asks. Hawaii, she is told. Her reply, after a moment of confused silence: "The Japanese bombed Hawaii?"

In many ways, Ebtekar is a fine symbol for Iran's amateurish young radicals. Brimming with righteous fire and a sophomoric, conspiratorial view of the world, they performed a dramatic act -- storming the U.S. embassy in Tehran on Nov. 4, 1979 -- that had grown-up ramifications for Iran, the United States and the world. The crisis (arguably) felled a U.S. president and (indisputably) strengthened the clerics' power in Iran's post-revolution power struggle, locking Iran and the United States into a spiral of conflict that whirls on today with the tensions over Iran's nuclear program.

The student radicals were convinced that the embassy was a "den of spies" aimed at restoring the shah -- the country's exiled former autocrat, whom President Carter had decided to let into the United States for cancer treatment -- to power. What they found instead, in Bowden's masterfully told tale, was a CIA mission in tatters, with not a single agent fluent in Farsi -- a bewildered team of operatives who barely understood the events engulfing them. "For years, little intelligence was collected from Iran that did not originate with the shah's own regime," Bowden writes. "Now, with Iran suddenly under new masters and the situation in constant, confusing flux, the agency was . . . pathetically far from being able to influence events, despite the overblown fears of most Iranians, who saw the CIA as omnipotent and omnipresent." In contrast, several of the diplomats on duty were first-rate Farsi speakers and Iran scholars, deeply empathetic to the country's culture and people.

But the student radicals knew little of the world and its ways, let alone the difference between a diplomat and a spy. They saw an operative with James Bond-like powers in every corner. One interrogator questioned State Department security officer Alan Golacinski about his digital watch, convinced that it was a secret radio.

Often, the encounters were not so comic. Some hostages were badly beaten. Others faced terrifying mock executions. A few were thrown in solitary confinement. Bowden skillfully gets inside the minds of the hostages, vividly describing their churning emotions and harrowing experiences.

Fans of the author of Black Hawk Down and Killing Pablo will see plenty of classic Bowden here: meticulous reporting backed by a compelling narrative. But unlike those two books, in which he spent considerable time trying to understand Somali fighters and Colombian drug lords, Guests of the Ayatollah provides only glimpses of the thoughts of the foreign antagonists.

Still, Bowden skillfully evokes the era and the ordeal, putting a human face on the yellow ribbons. And he describes in detail President Carter's vacillations, the failed rescue attempts, and the charlatans and apologists who acted as private intermediaries to seek the hostages' release (and their own photo ops).

Mostly, however, the book is about the hostages themselves. These men and women deserve their day, and Bowden has given it to them. Their jailers hardly knew what to make of people such as Limbert or Michael Metrinko or Barry Rosen -- diplomats who embraced the Iranians' culture and spoke their language well. John Limbert, in particular, intrigued them. He knew more about Iran's history than most of his captors did and spent much of his time translating books from English to Farsi. Metrinko's carefully crafted Farsi insults shocked the hostage-takers, inviting several beatings -- though they must have invited some admiration, too.

The young, unformed minds of the student radicals were still locked in an earlier era when the CIA and British intelligence had real power in Iran and used it malevolently, above all in the 1953 CIA-supported coup that toppled the country's popular, nationalist prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh. As a result, they scarcely understood the power of their own revolution -- of a new era of mass politics that was fed by the power of the media, a growing middle class's discontent with the shah's dictatorship, a disoriented urban proletariat in search of a savior and the determination of the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, to win at all costs. The revolution simply couldn't be undone by the CIA this time.

"Screaming Mary" and her comrades also scarcely understood the U.S. position on the revolution. L. Bruce Laingen, the seasoned diplomat and chargé d'affaires at the embassy, wrote at the start of his personal diary of the hostage-taking: "Why? To what end? What purpose is served? We have tried by every available means over the past months to demonstrate, by word and deed, that we accept the Iranian revolution . . . . we wish it well and hope it can strengthen Iran's integrity and independence."

Long-time Iran-watchers often have such "Bruce Laingen moments" -- scratching their heads and wondering why the Islamic Republic behaves so rashly and seemingly without strategic direction. In foreign affairs, the country is isolated; poor diplomacy has left it with few allies that it can count on in a crunch -- including a showdown with Washington over Iran's nuclear ambitions. (Those countries seeking to avert war are motivated more by worries about oil and stability than by loyalty to Tehran.) Economically, the country is wretchedly managed; despite its abundant natural resources, oil reserves and talented workforce, Iran is punching far below its potential economic weight. And in politics, the country's populist new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has publicly embraced Holocaust denial -- a disgrace that, beyond its moral depravity, also raises the question: "Why? For what purpose?"

Perhaps the reason for such excesses is that the spirit of the hostage-takers still haunts Iran today. They acted without the prior knowledge of Ayatollah Khomeini, Bowden notes. The embassy seizure was not a well thought-out ploy vetted by senior officials; it was a rashly planned tactical move designed to win a short-term public relations victory, burnish the students' anti-imperialist credentials and drive a wedge between Tehran's moderates and radicals. The hostage-takers presented the new Khomeini regime with a fait accompli -- with fateful consequences.

Decades later, Iranian politics still contains something similar -- an element of surprise, along with confusion. Long after the Babel of the hostage crisis, many voices still speak in Tehran; the president says that Israel should be wiped off the map, and other political leaders scramble -- some belatedly endorsing his rant, some distancing themselves, all while the analysts scratch their heads, looking for explanations.

Indeed, that president is himself a former student radical. Some former hostages allege that Ahmadinejad was one of their interrogators. Some hostage-takers -- several of whom are reformist politicians today -- deny this, saying that he wanted to take over the Soviet embassy instead. "Without any doubt," Bowden writes, "Ahmadinejad was one of the central players in the group that seized the embassy and held hostages." Whatever the case may be, the president clearly still has much of the hard-line student radical left in him.

Meanwhile, last month, Massoumeh Ebtekar, "Screaming Mary," was awarded a prestigious prize by the United Nations for her work on environmental issues. The shadow of the student radicals has not yet receded, and this chapter in Iranian history has not yet played itself out.

Reviewed by Afshin Molavi
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 704 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press (March 13, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802143032
• ISBN-13: 978-0802143037
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.9 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (89 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #222,804 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An in depth, 360 degree view of the event, August 2, 2006

By	Kevin Lynds (San Diego, Ca USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam (Hardcover)

I have read other books by Mark Bowden and he did not dissappoint me with "Guests..". True to his style that made his other books so good were his ability to get a 360 degree view of the situation by getting accounts from all sides of an event. He has the ability to create stories with in the story of all the people involved on all sides and it left me wondering how he was able to make such contacts, get precise information and draw the lines he did especially in regards to a radically Islamic Iran.

The only part of the book that dragged was the day to day routine the prisoners dealt with (only a few were tortured i.e. beaten, most were just holed up, some alone for months on end and repeatedly interrogated and harrassed by uneducated fundamental "students"). The prisoners were held hostage for ever 440 days and like their monotonous time spent sitting in their rooms, the book got a little monotonous talking about it. One reason I bought the book was to hopefully learn something about the history of our two cultures and where it went wrong. Mr. Bowden's storytelling capabilities are so strong that to a point, the history lesson I was looking for was somewhat clouded by the situation he was writing about. This isn't a complaint, but I may have to re-read part of the book to find some of facts I was initially looking for.

His character development was excellent, and added strength to the stories when talking about clashing personalities, prisoners harrassing the guards or doing un-Islamic things in front of the guards to embarrass them. His research on the failed Delta mission was first class (and very sad in regards to the time and energy spent along with the loss of such capable men) as was his research on Carter and his administration during the whole crisis. It may sound like a cliche, but when reading about the pressure Carter was dealing with, you did feel like you were a fly on the wall watching it go down.

Finally, Mr. Bowden did an excellent job closing the book out. The last few chapters dealing not only with a "where are they now" of the prisoners but with the student-hostage-takers as well helps bring the story to a close. His chapters comparing Iran today with America and his experience going there for research was an entertaining and educational read about the stark differences between our two cultures. Again, he has an uncanny ability of writing to make the reader think they are there. The chapter on Tehran and what its like to drive around there, about how Allah must only like the color of dust, as well as the American merchandise sold and the types of "advertisements" they have on their billboards or posters is worth the time spent reading through the somewhat long parts in the book dealing with captivity.

This was a subject he made a lot more interesting to me, and had it not been him writing the book, I probably would not have bought it. I gave it 4 stars unlike the 5 stars I gave to "Killing Pablo" or "Black Hawk Down" because I was much more interested initially in those stories. This is a great book, even if some parts are a little too long.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Captivating Piece of Journalism, June 2, 2006

By	Octoworm - See all my reviews

This review is from: Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam (Hardcover)

The newest book from Mark Bowden again delves into the murky realm where political scheming and military manuevering meet. Detailing the 1979 Iranian Hostage Crisis, Bowden tells a compelling story that weaves the personal experiences of those involved together with the clash of cultures and global politics.

As usual, Mark Bowden does a superb job of cutting through the mitigating complexities to deliver a strong narrative that imbues the reader with a clear picture of the unfolding events. He delivers nuanced portraits of many of the hostages, candidly exploring both their strengths and weaknesses. Simultaneously, he tells the saga of the birth of Delta Force, and the botched rescue attempt that was their infamous first mission.

While I found "Guests of the Ayatollah to be enjoyable and compelling, it fell short of Bowden's "Killing Pablo", and "Black Hawk Down". I believe the primary reason is that Bowden is at his best when depicting scenes of action and mayhem, whether Special Operations firefights or Columbian drug wars. While "Guests" does contain many action driven passages, the bulk of it is devoted to the ways in which the hostages dealt with the tedium of captivity. Obviously that is an essential part of the story, but I found it led to some passages that seemed repetitive, especially the ones that detail criticisms of the hostage's guards, and of the philosophy of the Iranian cultural revolution. The secondary weakness of the book is the ending, in which Bowden switches to a first person perspective to discuss his own ideas about Iran in the present day. For me it lessened the impact carried by the rest of the book.

My two complaints are very minor, but enough to prevent a full five star rating. This fascinating and imformative book is a great aid for understanding the current crisis developing between America and Iran. Ultimately, any reader should find this to yield many rewards.

17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The First Crisis With Persia (Iran), May 13, 2006

By	C. Hutton "book maven" (East Coast, USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam (Hardcover)

"Guests of the Ayatollah" is a riveting account of the seizure of the American Embassy in Tehran by militant Islamic radicals and students in 1979. Fifty-two Americans (an additional 14 had been released earlier) were held hostage for 444 days until Ronald Reagon's Inauguration in 1981. With such a large cast of characters, it is helpful that each of the six chapters is opened with a page of photographs of the principals for that chapter (with two pages of maps).

The author of "Black Hawk Down" chillingly describes the doomed Delta One Task Force rescue attempt in the midst of a presidential election year. His research will make this book the definitive account of this crisis. Mr. Bowden seems to have interviewed everyone involved : the hostages, the Iranians, Delta Force soldiers, and American politicians. He injects himself into the epilogue as he traveled four times to Iran in 2003-2004 to track down the key Iranian participants. "Guests of the Ayatollah" is a page-turner that sheds background and light onto the current nuclear crisis with Iran.