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Viewed through history's rear-view mirror, the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-80 is not such a big deal.
Iranian students and others, some of whom we would now call "Islamo-fascists," took 66 American Embassy personnel hostage and held most of them for a terrifying 444 days. All were released, no occupying armies were deployed and no IEDs were detonated.
But for contemporary historian Mark Bowden, the standoff is indeed an object that is larger than it at first appears. It's a tale, argues the author of Black Hawk Down and Killing Pablo, of fear, cruelty, heroism and something more:
"The first battle in America's war against militant Islam, a conflict that would eventually engage the entire world."
Guests of the Ayatollah is at heart a thriller. Students, some of them fundamentalist Muslim and others left-wing and secular, occupy the American Embassy on Nov. 4, 1979. What was planned as a sit-in to call attention to Iran's supposed grievances -- the deposed shah had recently been admitted to the USA for medical treatment, for example -- spirals out of control.
Americans are beaten, in some cases tortured, and led to believe they would be executed. The most appealing characters are Americans who keep their cool and get in a few licks of their own.
The chapters on an aborted attempt to rescue the hostages by helicopters, and the behind-the-scenes machinations by the Carter administration to make it happen, are among the most compelling. The mission was scuttled because of sandstorms and equipment failure, and eight soldiers died in a fiery collision as the rescue team fled its Iranian staging area.
The details speak volumes. When he learns of the failure, White House chief of staff Hamilton Jordan rushes into the president's private bathroom and becomes ill.
But Bowden's big-picture analysis comes up short. The "glorious Islamist revolution in Iran," he assures readers, will wind up as "little more than a footnote," a "despised, corrupt and ineffectual religious dictatorship." Religious "terrorism," he is certain, is "in its death throes" in Iran.
Really? More than a generation after the embassy takeover, the mullahs remain in the saddle and Iran is led by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a Holocaust-denying Muslim fundamentalist whom several former hostages have identified as one of their most rabid interrogators. (He denies it.)
When Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian women's and children's advocate, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, the government required her to get her husband's permission to travel to Stockholm for the ceremony.
Defending that position on worldwide television was the Islamic Republic's vice president, Massoumeh Ebtekar.
Even with her face wrapped in the custom of some Muslim women, Ebtekar was recognizable as "Screaming Mary," one of the loudest and vilest of the English-speaking interrogators who harangued the hostages for hours, weeks and months.
Guests of the Ayatollah
By Mark Bowden
Atlantic Monthly Press, 680 pp., $26
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