The face-off

Mark Bowden's new book offers a gripping, suspenseful account of the Iran hostage crisis -- but almost no analysis of its larger meaning. Considering the mounting tension between the U.S. and Iran, that isn't good enough.

By Laura Secor

Read more: Books, Iran, Politics, Jimmy Carter, Islam, Reviews, Mark Bowden, Book reviews

AP Photo

One of 60 U.S. hostages, blindfolded and with his hands bound, is being displayed to the crowd outside the U.S. Embassy in Tehran by Iranian hostage takers, Nov. 9, 1979.

May 15, 2006 | A couple of weeks before the 2004 American presidential election, I checked out of a hotel in central Tehran in order to check into a friendlier one around the corner. The first was a towering block of featureless rooms, its lobby forever crowded with bored, shabby men who may or may not have worked there. Two men staffed the reception desk, and they seemed to track my every movement, whether out of professional obligation or to amuse themselves wasn't clear. An Iranian friend who called for me complained that they gruffly questioned her: Who are you? What is your father's name? Who is the American? How do you know her?

So it was that I stood impatiently before the window to check out while the receptionist took his sweet time to retrieve my American passport from the cubby behind him. He held it for a long, strange moment before he slid it my way.

Wistfully, he said: "How I wish I had a passport like that."

Off we were, talking about the election. The receptionist hoped President George W. Bush would defeat Sen. John Kerry. He hated the Democrats, he professed. It wasn't my first encounter with this Iranian enthusiasm for the Republican Party, as unfathomable as it was widespread. Under the Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, after all, the United States toppled Iran's popular nationalist prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, in 1953, consolidating power in the hands of the brutal and despised shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Under the Democratic President Bill Clinton, the United States finally apologized for engineering those events. I asked the receptionist to explain.

"Jimmy Carter," he replied with disgust. "He could have stopped this Islamic Revolution, and he didn't."

When it comes to Iran, where revolutionaries identified Carter with every bad turn the United States had ever visited on their or any other third-world country, and where Americans would come to associate him with haplessness and defeat, somehow everything the president from Plains, Ga., did would always be wrong. His presidency, already a fragile vessel, shattered on the shoals of the Iranian hostage crisis -- those 444 days at the end of his single term when the staff of the American embassy in Tehran was held captive by militant students. From then on, he would forever be linked in the American mind with the humiliation of seeing one's countrymen blindfolded, helpless, surrounded by angry mobs of Shiites -- believers in a religion most Americans only dimly apprehended, revolutionaries who hated the United States for having supported a regime most Americans were barely conscious existed. And now, 26 years later, this Iranian hotel worker in a single gesture renounced his country's revolution and laid it at the feet of the very president whose likeness Iranian revolutionaries burned in effigy as they massed outside the seized embassy compound. It's been a long quarter-century in Iran.

In "Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America's War With Militant Islam," Mark Bowden, the celebrated author of "Black Hawk Down," takes us back to the Iran of 1979 and the America of the Carter White House, painstakingly recounting the 444 days of the Iranian hostage crisis. It is an uneven but riveting book -- history written as thriller, a suspenseful narration of one of the more bizarre and dramatic episodes in the annals of American diplomacy. It is doggedly reported, reconstructed with a detective's eye for detail, and strangely, given the times, only tenuously tied to any larger frame of meaning.

The story opens on Nov. 4, 1979, when Bowden's sweeping cast of characters reported for an ordinary day of work at the American embassy in Iran's unstable capital. "Ordinary" was a relative term in the nine months after the fall of the shah; the embassy's staff, nearly all of which had turned over since the revolution, was wholly aware that the buildings might be laid siege. Students had already attempted to take the compound in February and been expelled. But when President Carter admitted the ailing, exiled shah to the United States for medical treatment, despite ample warning that doing so would leave the American embassy staff vulnerable to reprisals, many of the diplomats regarded the demonstrators outside their compound with mounting apprehension.

Students poured over the walls that isolated the embassy compound from the city, encircling the buildings and heading straight for the least secure openings, which they'd evidently scoped out earlier. The Americans executed a plan the embassy's Marine security force had devised after the February attack: They were to barricade themselves on the second floor of the chancery, and if that redoubt were breached, they'd retreat to the vault on the same floor, where they had reserves of food and water. Although the Marines were well armed, under no circumstances were they to shoot at Iranian interlopers. Anti-American fear and suspicion were so powerful in the Iranian capital that to open fire might ignite a spiral of violence. As a last resort, the embassy guards could lob tear gas grenades.

Bowden seems to have debriefed nearly every living hostage for untold hours, and he recounts the embassy siege with a battle historian's zeal for minutiae. We know exactly who was where, doing what in what order. The Iranian students put a gun to the security chief's head and threatened to shoot if the diplomats didn't admit them to the second floor of the chancery. A small coterie of embassy staff members retreated to the vault, hastily destroying as many sensitive documents as they could find. Communications specialist Rick Kupke noticed that all the embassy's firearms had also been loaded into the vault and worried that if he and his colleagues were found there with a cache of weapons, they would come under fire. So he crept up through a hatch onto the roof with armfuls of firearms, looking for places to hide them. When the Iranians breached the vault, Kupke hesitated on the roof: Should he surrender himself or risk being found, surrounded by weapons?

In the end all of the Americans surrendered. Those suspected of being CIA were threatened or beaten; so were those suspected of knowing the combinations to various office safes. The day finished with many of the American diplomats and Marines tied to chairs in the ambassador's residence. From there, we follow the hostages' movements from one part of the compound to another, through an array of holiday pageants and propaganda interviews staged for the Iranian and foreign press, and eventually into the Tehran prison system, where they were held following a brief dispersal to various Iranian cities after a botched American rescue attempt. We hear their thoughts, their most banal memories of captivity, their captors and each other; we follow the overgrowth of their hair and beards, their weight loss, the deterioration of their clothes, which some learn to wash by stepping into the shower fully dressed; we witness the humiliation of being issued too-small underwear.

At the book's lesser moments, this thicket of detail can try a reader's patience. We learn that on the day of the embassy's seizure, the security chief, Al Golacinski, pulled on his cammies in a hurry and thought they looked ridiculous with his loafers; we learn that a political officer, John Limbert, was preoccupied with his need for a haircut. Near the end of the first 24 hours' ordeal (recounted in some 180 of the book's 680 pages), we learn that one hostage's "butt hurt from sitting in the same position for so long." Are we to conclude that if any one of these facts had been otherwise, things might have worked out differently? Or is it simply the odd trivia that has been emblazoned on the memories of the captives, such that 26 years later, they still think to tell a reporter how they felt that day about their shoes? One waits in vain for the significance to reveal itself; the details are recounted with a historian's detachment but a novelist's unfulfilled promise of resonance.

A little character development helps, and though it's often hard to keep the 66 hostages straight, we manage to follow an impressive array of experiences over the sweep of Bowden's tale. From the consulate, we get to know Richard Queen, who begins to suffer from a mysterious, frightening, degenerative illness in captivity. (Irritatingly, after building the reader's concern and sympathy for Queen over hundreds of pages, Bowden never reveals what it was that ailed the vice consul; for those who wonder, it's multiple sclerosis.) Bruce Laingen, the embassy's chargé d'affaires, was the top American diplomat in Tehran following the revolution (no new American ambassador had yet been installed). On the day of the hostage-taking, Laingen had an appointment with the foreign minister, which he attended with one political officer, Vic Tomseth, and a Marine security guard, Michael Howland.

The three of them would become unofficial prisoners at the foreign ministry for the duration of the crisis, confined to an incongruously grand dining room that crawled with cockroaches after dark. If they left the ministry, they would fall into the hands of a waiting mob; if they sought refuge in allied embassies, they would expose those embassies to violence. At the foreign ministry, they tried fruitlessly to negotiate their own and their colleagues' release. They read their way through the ministry's library, occasionally making their bedraggled presence known to visiting dignitaries; Howland made mischief by disabling the guards' weapons on the pretense of teaching them how to disassemble and maintain them and by prowling the ministry naked at night. Laingen kept a diary in which he could remain a statesman, recording political observations and reflections even as he felt himself fading to irrelevance as anything but a hostage.

Next page: The Iranian captors remain cartoonish figures in Bowden's telling: Ill-educated, conspiracy-minded, cultish and cruel