Among the Hostage-Takers

Twenty-five years ago in Tehran a group of Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy and took hostage the entire American diplomatic mission—igniting a fifteen-month international crisis whose impact is reverberating still. Now, for the first time, many of the leading hostage-takers speak candidly about their actions—which a surprising number deeply regret

By Mark Bowden
The Atlantic, December 2004

Nowadays the grand old U.S. embassy in Tehran looks forlorn, like a hostage left behind and long forgotten. A solid battleship of an office building in orange brick, two stories high and more than a block long, it was once the symbol of America's formidable presence in Iran. Today it still stands in the heart of the capital, facing a wide, busy thoroughfare called Taleghani Avenue, at the front of a leafy twenty-seven-acre oasis, a rare haven from the noisy hustle of this city of more than 12 million. Long ago dubbed the "Den of Spies" by Islamic radicals, the old embassy building is now garishly covered with anti-American graffiti, banners, and propaganda displays to remind people of the nation's undying disdain for its once favorite ally. The embassy compound is home to the Revolutionary Guards, an elite military unit that reports to the black-turbaned clerics of Iran's authoritarian mullahocracy, and to the basij, Islamic brownshirts, the civilian goon squads that turn out en masse and at a moment's notice to demonstrate on behalf of the regime and to help put down those who engage in public displays of dissent and "immorality," such as women whose scarves do not fully cover their hair, or young people who hold hands. The former embassy itself serves as an anti-American museum, with a grim, ugly permanent display called "The Great Aban 13th Exhibition," commemorating one of the most important dates on the modern Iranian calendar. Aban 13 corresponds to November 4, the date on which, twenty-five years ago, scores of Iranian students scaled the compound walls and took hostage the entire U.S. diplomatic mission, setting off a tense fifteen-month standoff between the United States and Iran. It was one of the founding events of the Islamic Republic, and its geopolitical repercussions are still being felt throughout the world.

The old embassy is supposed to be an official shrine to that bold act of national defiance, which defined for the world the glorious 1979 revolution, a kind of Iranian counterpart to America's Boston Tea Party—but more central and significant. Yet in the four times I went to the embassy during trips to Iran in the past year, it was empty of visitors. A bookstore just outside the entrance, which was once known for selling anti-American literature and reprints of the thousands of secret embassy documents seized in the takeover (the infamous "spy den documents"), was vacant when I first saw it in December, its racks empty, but nine months later appeared ready to reopen as a bookstore for children. The slogans and spiteful artwork that had been spray-painted on the embassy's brick outer walls by angry crowds during the tumultuous hostage crisis had faded—including an image of the Statue of Liberty with its face portrayed as a death mask and a sign in English that said "DEATH TO THE USA."

Even the guardhouse on the southeast corner, where visitors enter, was in shambles. Two friendly, unshaven Revolutionary Guards stood behind the counter in a small, marble-veneered reception area that looked like a frat house on Sunday morning, with battered furniture, an old swivel chair leaning precariously on its stem with cushion stuffing hanging out, dirt caked on the floors and walls, and muddy boot prints everywhere. I pointed quizzically at a boot print on the ceiling, and asked my guide and interpreter, Ramin, to tell the guards that as an American citizen, I protested these abuses of what could arguably be called U.S. property.

"Tell them that if they are going to steal it, the least they could do is take care of it," I said.

When Ramin relayed my comments, the guards laughed, looked around sheepishly at the mess, and shrugged happily. They were conscripts serving out the last few months of their duty at a gravy post. "It's great here," one said. "Nothing ever happens."

The exhibit itself is amateurish, as if put together by a group of high school students with a bad attitude. On the front steps are two cartoonish statues that appear to have been fashioned from papier-mâché and thickly painted over in bronze. The first—seemingly based on a photograph of one of the hostages, Corporal Steven Kirtley—is of a Marine surrendering with his hands clasped behind his head; the second is a replica of the Statue of Liberty with a white bird (a symbol of Islam) caged in her abdomen. Inside the museum is more of the same: displays illustrating America's "role of evil" in the world over the past several decades; lots of gory photographs of children presented as victims of American bombings; and a framed copy of an important-looking "spy document," impressively stamped Classified and Top Secret, which on closer inspection turns out to be a memo requesting additional drivers for the embassy's motor pool. There are also pieces of helicopters recovered in the Iranian desert from a failed U.S. secret mission on April 24, 1980, to rescue the hostages; photographs of the hostages themselves; and somewhat dated propaganda showcasing America and Saddam Hussein as partners in crime. But in its preoccupation with American symbols the exhibit is more a defacement than an indictment, like drawing a big nose and a moustache on a poster of someone famous. That such a gloating, adolescent display has endured in the heart of Tehran for a quarter century says more about Iran than it does about the United States.

For a visiting American, Iran is like Bizarro World, the mirror universe in Superman comics in which everything is inverted. Bad is good and good is bad. In Tehran patriotic symbols of the United States are everywhere, but always wrenched into images of violence, evil, and defeat. The American flag is shown in the shape of a gun; the bald eagle is shown going down in flames. In the West we are bombarded with advertising images of youth, beauty, sex, and life; in Tehran the preponderance of advertising images celebrate death. There are murals everywhere honoring martyrs—primarily those who died in the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, in the 1980s, but also more recent Islamic martyrs, including Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas, who was assassinated by Israeli forces in Gaza earlier this year. Billboards in the West often feature scantily dressed, provocatively posed teens, but in Tehran the gigantic wall murals tend to depict robed grandpas and grumpy-looking white-bearded clerics—especially common are the bespectacled face of the current Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the more imposing, threatening visage of the late Imam, Ruhollah Khomeini, the major force behind the overthrow of the Shah in 1979, and the father of Iran's theocratic state.

This Bizarro World feeling is pervasive. In August, when I left on one of my visits to Iran, a media blitz at home was trumpeting a more or less nonstop parade of American triumphs in the Olympic Games in Greece. Days later in Tehran the popular press was heralding a humiliating cascade of U.S. defeats. The Tehran Times reported an "anguished reaction" in Washington, D.C., over the three losses of the men's basketball team and its failure to win a gold medal (it won bronze), and when the American boxer Andre Ward advanced toward a gold medal, it ran the headline "SAVES U.S. TEAM FROM HISTORIC FAILURE." Coverage of the fighting in Iraq cheers savage insurgent violence there, and portrays the Iraqi Shia Ayatollah Ali Sistani—not the U.S. and British armies that actually toppled the tyrant Saddam Hussein—as the real force for democracy and independence.

And just when one seems to have the place in full inverse focus, there comes some wildly discordant note—such as the blocks-long open-air drug market right in Tehran's center, where dealers hawk Viagra, Ecstasy, and opium, at rock-bottom infidel prices. In this pious city where women are forced to cover their bodies and heads, even in stifling summer heat, it is common to see prostitutes—duly scarved and draped—freely patrolling the streets, sending with a slightly heavier application of makeup, flamboyant jewelry, and a few straying strands of hair the same message sent by spike heels and a G-string in Atlantic City. As I posed before a Khomeini mural for a snapshot one afternoon, a well-dressed young Iranian passerby asked me in perfect English, "Why do you want a picture of that asshole?"

Nowhere is Bizarro World more evident than in the country's national memory of the gerogan-giri, the "hostage-taking." On November 4, 1979, a well-organized core group of about sixty Iranian university students scaled the walls of the U.S. embassy compound, seized the embassy building, and bound and blindfolded about sixty Americans, including the embassy's top foreign-service and CIA officers, military liaisons, administrators, clerks, secretaries, and a detachment of Marine guards. The invaders, calling themselves Students Following the Imam's Line, demanded that their despised Shah, who had been forced to flee the country nine months earlier and had just been admitted to the United States for cancer treatment, be returned immediately to face revolutionary justice. Hundreds of his former associates had already been executed or thrown in jail. President Jimmy Carter refused the demand, and the subsequent fifteen-month standoff became one of the signature international crises of modern times. It left a lot of Americans feeling helpless and enraged, while imbuing Iranians, many of whom blamed the United States for the Shah's inarguable despotism, with a new sense of strength and national purpose. The episode turned tragic when the secret rescue mission, approved after much agonizing by President Carter, ended in catastrophe at a staging area in the Iranian desert: owing to freak dust storms, several helicopters had to set down or turn back and the entire operation had to be aborted. During the withdrawal one helicopter collided with a C-130 transport plane, exploded into flames, and left eight American Marines and airmen dead. In a final insult to Carter, the hostages were all released on January 20, 1981—Inauguration Day for the man who had defeated him, Ronald Reagan. The hostage-taking was an outrageous violation of international law and of the age-old rules governing diplomatic relations between civilized nations; but as shocking as it was at the time, in today's world of vicious Islamist terrorism the gerogan-giri seems almost quaint.

The different ways this event is remembered in America and in Iran illustrate how nations invent their own pasts, and how the simplification of history can create impossible gulfs between peoples. To Americans, the hostage crisis was an unprovoked, inexcusable crime, carried out by a scruffy band of half-crazy Islamist zealots driven by a senseless hatred of all things American. It was a terrifying ordeal for the hostages and their families, fatal for eight of the would-be rescuers, and a political disaster for Jimmy Carter—perhaps the single most important factor in making him a one-term President. In the United States it was a protracted, very public humiliation, made worse by breathless lead-story coverage in newspapers and on television, which began newscasts with a daily reminder of the predicament ("DAY 54: AMERICA HELD HOSTAGE"). It was America's first modern encounter with hostile Islamists, and the first time Americans heard their country called "the Great Satan."

For many Iranians, however, the hostage crisis was a glorious triumph. Embossed with florid Shia mysticism, the episode has taken on the force of national myth—an epic story of a small group of devout young gerogan-girha (hostage-takers) who, armed with only prayer and purity of heart, stormed the gates of the most evil, potent empire on the planet, booted out the American devils, and secured the success of the mullahs' revolution. It is a poignant and poetic tale of how these innocent servants of the Imam treated their often crude and abusive captives with kindness and respect even as they pieced together shredded embassy documents to expose and thwart America's plots to destroy the revolution and reinstate the Shah. And when the Great Satan dispatched its deadly commandos to slay these young heroes (this is the part that fires the blood of the faithful), Allah stirred dust storms to down the infidel helicopters and turn back the invaders. This is the story taught to schoolchildren who are bused in to see the Great Aban 13th Exhibition and to touch the remains of the helicopters that Allah scorched while the innocent gerogan-girha slept.

For the past three years I have been working on a book about the hostage crisis, trying to see it through both American and Iranian eyes and to understand how it shaped the world of today. On two recent trips to Tehran, I went looking for the people who planned and directed the embassy takeover and the ones who found themselves caught up in it. I wanted to know who they were, what had happened to them in the quarter century since they climbed the embassy walls, what they had hoped to accomplish, and how they felt, in retrospect, about what they had done. Given Iran's current status as one of the two remaining countries on President Bush's "axis of evil," a designation most Iranians seem both to resent and to perversely enjoy, I thought I might learn something about the world's proudest and noisiest self-styled Islamic republic by finding those who so enthusiastically poisoned its relationship with the United States.

What I discovered was a group of graying politicians and intellectuals with a broad range of views about the event. How they felt about the gerogan-giri tended to define where they stood on Iran's wide political spectrum. Some remain true believers and have prospered in the mullahocracy they helped create, and even as they acknowledge that the embassy seizure permanently stained their nation in the eyes of the world, they defend it as necessary and just. They see the problems of modern Iran as growing pains, and are heartened by the upsurge in Islamist fundamentalism around the world. Some of these true believers refused to speak to an American reporter, who they suspected would misunderstand or distort their words. Other gerogan-girha are clearly ambivalent about what they did, weighing the pride and satisfaction of their youthful defiance against a more mature understanding of world politics. These people tend to stay in the shadows, afraid of getting in trouble or of drawing attention to themselves. But a surprising number of gerogan-girha, constituting a third group, are outspokenly embarrassed by their role and regard their actions as a monumental mistake—a criminal act that disrupted not just the lives of the American hostages but ultimately the life of their own country, which has found itself ever since in a downward spiral of economic, political, and social isolation.

Ibrahim Asgharzadeh, a ringleader of the takeover who has become a reform politician and newspaperman, is emphatic in his assessment: "Hostage-taking is not an acceptable action under international norms and standards. The hostages underwent severe emotional difficulties. Prolonging it affected both countries in a negative way. The chaos caused such tension between Iran and the United States that even now, after two decades, no one knows how to resolve it."

One thing I learned from talking to the gerogan-girha was that the episode Americans remember as the "hostage crisis" was not supposed to involve the prolonged detention of hostages. The students who seized the embassy believed that they were participating in a conventional protest—not unlike those at U.S. colleges a decade before, when rebellious American students occupied campus buildings. The young Iranians envisioned having to subdue and confine members of the American mission for perhaps a day or two, but they had no intention of holding them for any length of time. They made no preparations for doing so.

The demand for the Shah's return was primarily rhetorical. The hostage-takers' immediate goal was to put pressure on the provisional government of Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan. This interim authority had been appointed by Khomeini after the fall of the Shah to preside until a new constitution could be written. The revolution had unleashed tumultuous political passions, and Khomeini, monitoring events from the holy city of Qom, was of two minds about the future. Should Iran be ruled directly by clerics, or should it have a secular democracy? Bazargan favored a Western-style state, but in the eyes of extremists—both Islamists and Marxists—he was watering down the revolution. They saw the provisional government's efforts to stabilize Iran and to re-establish ties with the rest of the world as a sellout.

The opportunity for radical change appeared to be slipping away. So extremists fanned fears of an American-led countercoup, and portrayed as treason all contacts between the provisional government and the United States—which were mostly over such practical matters as recovering the $6 billion the Shah had deposited in U.S. banks and obtaining needed parts for the Iranian air force's American-built F-16s. The plan to seize the embassy grew out of these fears. Many of the students involved believed the stories of an American plot, but the cooler heads behind them had more-local concerns. Khomeini was not—as many Americans always assumed—informed about the takeover in advance, and by the time it was presented to him it was already a fait accompli, and hugely popular. Hundreds of thousands of gleeful Iranians celebrated in the streets around the embassy night and day, burning Carter in effigy and chanting "Death to America!" Khomeini had little choice but to embrace the brash gerogan-girha, and to officially anoint them national heroes. In a development never foreseen or even hoped for by the student leaders, Bazargan's government resigned two days after the takeover, and the revolution tilted permanently into the arms of the mullahs.

The gerogan-girha saw themselves as part of an experiment that ought to be familiar to Americans. They were trying to build a utopia, their own version of "a city upon a hill." They were striving toward umma, a perfect, classless, crimeless Muslim community infused with the "spirit of God."

But instead of a shining city upon a hill, Tehran today is a bland, teeming sprawl, a study in faded brown and gray, swimming in a miasma of smog and dust that leaves everything coated with a patina of grit. Umma remains a distant, unfulfilled promise, as Iranians grapple with unemployment, rural migration to the cities, rampant corruption, and self-destructive domestic and foreign policies. Straining under tight economic sanctions imposed by the United States and some of its Western allies, Iran remains an international pariah; it courts even tougher sanctions by reportedly working to manufacture nuclear weapons—an effort the regime officially denies but nearly everyone believes is well under way. Women live under archaic restrictions on employment, social relations, and mode of dress. Teachers and other intellectuals labor under oppressive government oversight. Political dissenters often end up in jail, or worse. The country's vast Intelligence and Security Ministry is as omnipresent and feared as was SAVAK, the Shah's old secret police.

The gerogan-girha live in the ruins of their dream. As they've grown gray-haired and plump, the fame and admiration they once enjoyed have faded like the graffiti at the Den of Spies. Those who despise the current regime now regret their role in bringing a small circle of wealthy, authoritarian clerics to power. And more than anything they blame the hostage crisis for a litany of problems and setbacks that have befallen their country in the past quarter of a century. Iran's loss of ties to the United States after the embassy seizure prompted Saddam Hussein to invade in 1980 (when the hostages were still being held). In the ensuing war Iran lost more than half a million young men. Iran's status as an outlaw nation has had a stifling effect on its chances for an economic turnaround.

Some of the gerogan-girha have gone into exile and taken up arms against the religious rulers; others have been harassed, denounced, beaten, or imprisoned for advocating democratic changes. In some cases they have been persecuted by their former colleagues. "None of us in the revolution believed Iran would ever have an autocratic regime again," Mohsen Mirdamadi, a leader of the gerogan-girha who is today a controversial reform politician, told a Knight Ridder correspondent earlier this year. "Yet here we are."

Ibrahim Asgharzadeh was a wiry, intense, bearded engineering student when he came up with the idea, in September of 1979, to seize the American embassy. "The initial idea was mine," he told me in an interview in December at the office of his newspaper, Hambastegi, off an alley in Tehran. "Ever since high school I had been outraged by American policies."

According to Asgharzadeh, there were five students at that first planning meeting. Two of them wanted to target the Soviet embassy, because, he said, the USSR was "a Marxist and anti-God regime." But the two others—Mirdamadi and Habibullah Bitaraf (now Iran's Minister of Energy)—supported Asgharzadeh's choice. "Our aim was to object to the American government by going to their embassy and occupying it for several hours," he said. "Announcing our objections from within the occupied compound would carry our message to the world in a much more firm and effective way."

Asgharzadeh has served as a member of the Majlis (Iran's legislature) and as president of the Tehran City Council, and ran unsuccessfully for President in 2001. In his politics and journalism he has strongly urged the mullahs to adopt democratic reforms, such as freedom of the press and the elimination of veto powers they wield over political candidates and legislation. When I interviewed Asgharzadeh in Tehran, he looked entirely different from the images of him I had seen in the hostage-crisis days; he is now clean-shaven and very much at ease in a well-tailored suit. Indeed, he looked much too prosperous for his outlaw status; he has been banned from seeking public office, and in 1992 served a term in solitary confinement.

Asgharzadeh is the most prominent of the gerogan-girha who have turned against the mullahocracy. With the advantage of hindsight, he now sees the embassy takeover as a mistake—one that has had a disastrous long-term impact on his country. He chose his words carefully (to denounce the takeover is, in a sense, to debunk one of the founding myths of the regime), but his feelings about the episode were clear. "We failed in enforcing it the way it was meant to be," he said. "We lost control of events very quickly—within twenty-four hours! Unfortunately, things got out of hand and took their own course. The initial hours were quite pleasant for us, because [the protest] had a clear purpose and justification. But once the event got out of its student mold and turned into a hostage-taking, it became a long, drawn-out, and corrosive phenomenon."

Asgharzadeh and his fellow planners knew at the time that seizing the embassy would be dramatic and popular with large portions of the Iranian people; they had even thought it might lead eventually to the fall of Bazargan's provisional government. But he and the others had not anticipated how explosive the public response would be. Hundreds of thousands of jubilant Iranians jammed the streets around the embassy to celebrate and rant against the evil U.S. plotters. Students Following the Imam's Line, wearing laminated images of Khomeini around their necks in order to distinguish themselves from other, mostly left-wing political groups that rushed to join the protest, spent much of their first day on the embassy grounds fending off these rivals, who they feared would muddy the purity of their protest with ideological cant, or even harm the Americans. In the confusion, Asgharzadeh recalled, they failed to fully control even their own members.

"American hostages were not supposed to be paraded blindfolded in front of the press," he told me. "The blindfolding was done only for security reasons; in order to control the hostages we used strips of cloth to blindfold them. Unfortunately, our humane objectives were really distorted. We objected strongly to this behavior, and the people who did this were reprimanded, but the damage had been done. These things did happen, even though we tried very hard to prevent the operation from being manipulated and abused by political groups and factions." Asgharzadeh and his fellow students eventually chased the other political groups out of the compound and locked the gates.

How would President Jimmy Carter respond? Would there be military action? Sanctions? A blockade? This was an unprecedented event, amplified by around-the-clock global television coverage, and it seemed to herald something completely new and unpredictable in international affairs. The thing began to take on a life of its own. With the provisional government in tatters, the United States had no one with whom to negotiate a solution, and the students, locked inside the embassy compound with their hostages, unprepared for a drawn-out ordeal and with no plan for ending it, watched the great storm swirling outside the embassy walls, and began to see themselves as captives too.

In the coming weeks, as it became clear that the stalemate would not be resolved quickly, the hostage-takers recruited hundreds of volunteers to serve as guards, put them through hasty military training, and organized themselves into committees to handle the various practical challenges of holding, feeding, and housing a large number of prisoners. Many of the volunteers went to work piecing together documents that had been shredded by embassy officials on the day of the takeover, while others tried to decipher and translate them. Fluent English-speakers were brought in, including Massoumeh Ebtekar, who became the voice of the gerogan-girha at daily press conferences with the world media and is now one of Iran's Vice Presidents and the Minister of the Environment, and Hussein Sheikh al-Islam, who zealously interrogated the higher-level embassy staffers and CIA officers, and who is today a conservative member of the Majlis. For the young Iranians in charge of the compound, those days were heady and even romantic: Asgharzadeh met and proposed to his wife, Tahereh Rezazadeh, and Ebtekar met and ultimately married Muhammad Hashemi, one of the core group of leaders. But the days grew tedious, frustrating, and—when the failed U.S. rescue mission awakened the gerogan-girha to the dangers—frightening.

For the first two days the seized Americans inside the compound were tied to chairs in the ambassador's residence and blindfolded. In the coming weeks and months thirteen of them were released—all women and blacks, in the hope of winning the public support of America's "oppressed" minorities. Most of the remainder—lower-level embassy staffers, guards, and a few unfortunates who had come to Iran on business or as part of cultural exchanges—were herded into the basement of a warehouse on the embassy grounds, where they lived for months in a large windowless space divided into cells by bookshelves. They slept on mats on the floor and were forbidden to speak. The higher-level Americans—diplomats, CIA officers, and military-liaison personnel—were sequestered, and taken away one by one for interrogation. Some were beaten; the CIA officers were worked over with heavy rubber hoses under the supervision of al-Islam.

After the failed rescue mission, in April, the gerogan-girha realized the tactical error of keeping the hostages all in the same place, and they were hastily scattered around the country, some to prisons and some to private homes. For the next nine months the captors played shell games with the hostages, moving them frequently.

Asgharzadeh realizes that he cannot change the past. But knowing what he knows now, he would not do it again. "If today I were to devise a plan or political action, for myself personally or for the team of comrades that we were, it would certainly not be an action along the lines of the takeover of the American embassy," he said.

Among the old hostage-takers, Asgharzadeh is not the only one who has found himself at odds with the current regime. In December, the day before I was supposed to interview Mohsen Mirdamadi, one of the original planners of the takeover and now a reform member of the Majlis, he was beaten by stick-wielding basij. Mirdamadi, a slightly built man, was delivering a speech at a university when his assailants stormed the lecture hall and attacked him. A photograph on the front pages of the next morning's newspapers in Tehran showed his head and chest bloodied and bandaged.

Abbas Abdi, another gerogan-girha leader who became a journalist, has been jailed repeatedly for criticizing the regime, and for advocating renewed talks with the United States. He spent eight months in solitary confinement in 1993, and is today serving a four-and-a-half-year term in the notorious Evin Prison—where some of his former hostages were kept—for publishing poll results showing that 74 percent of Iranians favored renewing ties with the United States. The newspaper for which he served as editor in chief, Salam, was banned in the late 1990s, and several years ago Abdi got in trouble with the government when he attended a much publicized meeting in Paris with one of his hostages, Barry Rosen, the embassy's public-affairs officer, in an attempt to begin what Abdi described as a "healing process." But the meeting of the two men fell well short of a warm and fuzzy reunion. Rosen condemned the seizure of the hostages, and Abdi refused to apologize for the action. Indeed, Abdi's old captives feel little sympathy for his plight. One of them, Dave Roeder, a retired Air Force colonel, told me, "It couldn't happen to a nicer guy."

Perhaps the treatment of reformers like Mirdamadi and Abdi explains why some of the gerogan-girha tend to speak in stilted euphemisms, even when they are discussing events now a quarter of a century old. Muhammad Naimipour, a friend and political ally of Abdi's who was also one of the gerogan-girha, would say only, "What happened overall between Iran and the U.S. could have been handled much better. Even the taking of hostages, in my opinion, could have been handled much better."

When I interviewed Naimipour, in December, he was an elected member of the Majlis, but he has since been crossed off the list of eligible candidates (those who are too critical of the regime are branded "un-Islamic") by the Guardian Council, a twelve-member body of clerics and judges accountable only to the current Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. Thick-set and graying, Naimipour at forty-eight regards himself as "an old man."

"Because of all the stress and pressures we have had to live with, we have all aged well beyond our actual years," he told me. Several months after our interview Naimipour suffered a stroke.

If anyone at the time had a clearer vision of what the embassy takeover's full consequences might be, it was Muhammad Mousavi Khoeiniha, the black-bearded young cleric to whom the students took their plan in October of 1979. Khoeiniha was a well-known spiritual leader whose sermons in the Jobbestan Mosque, in northern Tehran, drew hundreds of radicals. When the students decided to invade the U.S. embassy, they sought out Khoeiniha in hopes of winning advance approval from Khomeini, with whom the young cleric had close ties. To their surprise Khoeiniha—without consulting Khomeini—immediately gave them his blessing, and thus established himself as the key clerical figure behind the gerogan-girha. Khoeiniha told me in an interview in Tehran in August that he had chosen not to ask the Imam's permission because "I did not think it was appropriate to involve him in some action being contemplated by a group of students."

Khoeiniha scoffed at the suggestion that his motive might also have been to force the issue; clearly, asking permission would have set off a furious round of backstage negotiations, which might have aborted the whole idea. But seizing the embassy would stir up popular support and put Khomeini on the spot, compelling him to either make the highly unpopular choice of backing the provisional government—which would have been duty-bound to evict the trespassing students—or go for the practical, post facto option of throwing his powerful support behind them. It was a clever and fateful piece of political engineering by Khoeiniha.

Today he remains a controversial, even somewhat mysterious figure. He is a leader of the reform movement, and was the managing director of the banned newspaper Salam. In 1999 he was charged with publishing lies and classified information, and was found guilty by a special court for the clergy. He was given a three-and-a-half-year prison term and was sentenced to be flogged, but because of his sterling revolutionary credentials, the penalty was reduced to a fine. Despite his feelings about the current regime, Khoeiniha remains a staunch defender of the embassy takeover, and he still thinks the United States owes Iran an apology for meddling in its affairs. As I was leaving his spacious office in central Tehran, located over the former offices of his newspaper, I noticed a gray four-drawer metal filing cabinet in the corner with a combination lock on the front. It bore a plate with the inscription "Property of the General Services Administration."

Khoeiniha smiled when I asked where it had come from. It was a souvenir from the U.S. embassy.

In the nine months between the fall of the Shah's regime and the takeover of the embassy, Iranian fundamentalists increasingly saw even routine contact between Bazargan's provisional government and U.S. officials, both in Tehran and abroad, as part of a CIA plot to undermine Khomeini, derail the Islamic revolution, and restore the Shah to power. Their fears were not irrational. The CIA had done something very similar in 1953, when its station chief, Kermit Roosevelt, orchestrated the collapse of an elected government under Prime Minister Muhammad Mosaddeq, and put the Shah on the throne. These actions had shaped the next quarter century of Iranian life. When the United States decided to admit the ailing exiled Shah for medical treatment, in late October of 1979, the students saw history repeating itself.

But they were wrong. The Shah was terminally ill with cancer, and Carter's decision to allow him treatment in the United States appears to have been purely humanitarian. In November of 1979 the United States had no intention—nor was it capable—of returning the Shah to the throne. As the famous documents seized in the embassy would eventually show, the American spy presence in Iran was at a pitifully low ebb. Only three CIA officers were in the country: Tom Ahern, the station chief; and two undercover operatives, Bill Daugherty and Malcolm Kalp. None of these men even spoke Farsi, and none had been in the country for longer than four months; Kalp had been in Tehran less than a week when the embassy was taken.

U.S. intelligence activities inside Iran during the previous twenty years had been directed primarily at the Soviet Union—and entailed mostly the monitoring of missile tests from bases along Iran's northern border. The warehouse basement where the gerogan-girha initially stashed most of the hostages—who called it the Mushroom Inn—had been built to house data-processing and communications equipment for those listening posts. Iran, as a staunch American ally, was not even a minor target for intelligence gathering. There is no better proof of this than the way the CIA was blindsided by the revolution. No one in Washington saw it coming.

After the revolution the CIA seemed to be largely groping for some understanding of the new regime taking shape in Tehran. Not that the Agency lacked bad intentions. Down the road it was hoping to at least nudge the revolution in a pro-American direction. A top-secret cable to the CIA director, Stansfield Turner, taken from Ahern's desk on the day of the takeover (he had neglected to shred it), summarized the station chief's goals and accomplishments.

You asked me to comment at some point about our prospects for influencing the course of events. Only marginally, I would say, until the military recovers, and that is a process we can do almost nothing to affect. What we can do, and I am now working on, is to identify and prepare to support the potential leaders of a coalition of westernized political liberals, moderate religious figures, and (when they begin to emerge) western-oriented military leaders.

Hardly the stuff of a countercoup. Still, the gerogan-girha did their best to paint the documents they seized as proof of their darkest suspicions, and to this day most of them insist that the embassy seizure did thwart active plots against the revolution.

Iran is still very much in the grip of CIA-phobia, which has spawned a national industry of conspiracy theories. One of the more breathtaking of these holds—and the irony here is apparently lost on most Iranians—that the embassy seizure was actually orchestrated by the CIA. In other words, the gerogan-girha were nothing but CIA stooges. How else to explain the world of trouble that followed the hostage crisis—the economic stagnation; the crackdowns on free speech; the constant patrols of the religious police; the jailing, torture, and even execution of political dissidents; the eight-year war with Iraq; the isolation from the international community?

Reza Ghapour, a fundamentalist scholar who was born the year before the embassy takeover, recently published a book that attempted to prove this theory of its origins. When I interviewed him in December, he told me with a straight face and a strong voice that the CIA had been responsible not only for installing and preserving the Shah but also for engineering his overthrow and secretly planning his return, for propping up the provisional government that followed the coup and fomenting the national unrest that ultimately undermined and toppled it, and for secretly orchestrating the seizure of the Den of Spies and keeping fifty-two Americans (three of them initially trapped at the Iranian Foreign Ministry) hostage for more than a year.

"Aren't some of these things mutually contradictory?" I asked. "For instance, why would the CIA wish to foment trouble for a provisional government it was secretly supporting?"

The slender, bearded Ghapour smiled at me with sweet condescension. "You must view the world through the lens of Islam to see the logic of these things," he said.

I heard the same general theory in slightly different form any number of times. Once was from Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the former President of Iran, who was elected during the hostage crisis and eventually fled to Paris, accused of being a CIA agent himself. Bani-Sadr, who still lives in Paris, under around-the-clock protection by the French police, is of the school that believes earth-shattering events do not happen spontaneously; he finds it hard to accept that a group of college students by themselves cooked up a protest that had such profound consequences for Iran—not to mention his own life.

I also heard the theory from a liberal magazine editor, a critic of the current regime, who did not want to be named. A worn-looking middle-aged man with a concave face and tobacco stains on his fingertips, he argued fiercely, "If you consider the event backwards, from where we are today to the point twenty-five years ago when the takeover took place, and you consider who was hurt most by it and who most benefited from it, then you would have to conclude that the answer is Iran in the first place and America in the second place." The United States has gained, he said, by impeding the progress of the world's first self-styled Islamic republic.

He went on for a while longer, filling in some of the wilder possibilities of his hypothesis, and then waited with a pleased look on his face as the whole torrent of Farsi was conveyed by my interpreter. I said nothing in response, so he told the interpreter to ask me, "What do you think?"

"I think you're crackers," I said.

My interpreter looked at me quizzically.

"Just use the word 'crackers,'" I told him.

The surviving gerogan-girha who have prospered most in the mullahocracy are regarded by many Iranians as opportunists, and the most tempting targets for this label are Muhammad Hashemi, who just retired as first deputy of the Ministry of Intelligence and Security, and his wife, Massoumeh Ebtekar, the Minister of the Environment. (If the smoggy skies of Tehran are any indication, Ebtekar has done her job with a notable lack of success.) They are Iran's premier power couple. As one might expect, both regard the embassy takeover as an unadulterated success. They promptly agreed to see me separately when I visited Iran in December.

I found Hashemi in an office several flights up from a noisy, bustling street in downtown Tehran. It was a chilly, wet, dreary day, and he served the customary small glasses of tea and chatted animatedly in front of a big color map of the world. Over the years Hashemi has grown thick and wide, with great round cheeks, a goatee framing large, pouting lips, and a wild spray of bushy gray hair. Self-assured, even imperious, Hashemi defends not only what he and the other hostage-takers did but also how they did it.

"We knew that there is an end to everything, like there is peace after every war," Hashemi told me. "We wanted it to be a hostage-taking without any kind of harshness and scuffle, unique in history, a hostage-taking that represented a nation and its concerns, and that is what we are proud of."

Hashemi's key role in the takeover turned out to have been a good career move. Early in 1979 he was a college student majoring in film at Tehran Polytechnic University, but after the Shah's ouster he had abandoned his studies to devote himself full-time to the revolution—joining not only Asgharzadeh's student group but also a far more violent band of militants inside the Revolutionary Guards, who had become the enforcers of the mullahocracy. After the hostage crisis ended, with the release of the Americans, Hashemi and several of the other Revolutionary Guard participants went on to found the new regime's Ministry of Intelligence and Security. Today it is the country's much feared and omnipresent central spy agency, which answers not to the President or the Majlis but to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In the years after the embassy takeover Hashemi's ministry conducted the vicious purges that broke the back of domestic opposition to mullah rule, and hunted down and assassinated enemies of the revolution overseas.

As one of the ringleaders of the embassy takeover, Hashemi recruited Ebtekar to join the gerogan-girha in the early hours of the crisis. He knew that, having lived in a suburb of Philadelphia as a child, she spoke fluent English. Ebtekar became the best known of the gerogan-girha, because, with her American-accented English, she was the natural choice to be the group's mouthpiece. Known as "Mother Mary" and "Screaming Mary," she was especially disliked by many of the hostages, in part because her accent made her seem like a turncoat, a "Tokyo Rose," in part because of her endless propagandizing. She would saunter through the captured embassy with a camera crew in tow, urging the hostages to describe their ordeal in upbeat terms. "You have been treated well, haven't you?" was her constant refrain. During one such filming session, in the final days of captivity, Army Sergeant Regis Regan got so fed up with Ebtekar that he let loose with a stream of invective and was dragged into a hallway for a beating. Another former hostage, Michael Metrinko, one of the embassy's political officers, summed up his feelings about Ebtekar this way: "If she were on fire on the street, I wouldn't piss on her to put it out."

Ebtekar has written a book called Takeover in Tehran, which is the best explanation I've read of what motivated her and the other gerogan-girha, and which colorfully evokes the naive, heady romanticism of the era. The book, which has been published in Iran and in other countries around the world, is available in English in the United States, thanks to a Canadian publisher.

"Did you know that no American publisher would publish my book?" Ebtekar asked me, when we met in a conference room in the Ministry of the Environment's headquarters. A chronic didact, she was wrapped from head to toe in the same manner as the Sisters of Mercy who taught me in grammar school. She blamed her failure to find an American publisher squarely on U.S. government censorship.

"We approached fifty major American publishers through a well-respected literary agent in New York," she said. All of them rejected it.

"There are publishers in the United States who specialize in publishing tracts against the United States government," I said.

"Not big publishers," she said.

"No, they're not," I replied. "Big publishing houses tend to buy books that they think will sell well enough to make a profit. I suspect they didn't think yours would."

Ebtekar wasn't buying it. As a member in good standing of the Iranian government for many years, she found perfect sense in the notion of government censorship. Revisiting the embassy takeover, she reverted to the old lecturing, holier-than-thou manner about which I had heard so much from the hostages, and which anyone would find annoying.

"If the real truth had been reported, things would have gone differently," Ebtekar said, adding that if the U.S. government had not kept "the real story" from the American public, the gerogan-girha's decision to imprison the American diplomats, office workers, and Marines and threaten them with trial and execution would have been supported in the United States. She was just getting warmed up. "Because if you go back to the basics, if you go back to the principles, if you go back to the Declaration of Independence of America, the Constitution, what the students were speaking about were common values, values that are appreciated by people in America, in Iran, in Europe." I began to feel a sudden kinship with Michael Metrinko.

Just days after this conversation, during a stopover in London on my way home, I turned on the TV in my hotel room and was startled to see Ebtekar's tightly wrapped face. She was being interviewed by a CNN announcer on a split screen with Iran's newly anointed Nobel Peace Prize winner, Shirin Ebadi, a lawyer, a feminist, and a human-rights activist. Ebtekar was talking about how proud everyone in Iran was of Ebadi, even though Ebadi is widely known as a determined critic of the regime—indeed, her award was a symbolic blow against the government's repressive policies.

Under Iran's theologically inspired laws, women are not allowed to travel without permission from their husbands. The CNN announcer asked the Iranian Vice President how she could defend such a system.

If Ebtekar squirmed, it was only for a split second. She smiled and smoothly segued into a windy recitation of the gains women had made under Iran's Islamic regime.

Several days before, it had occurred to me as I finished my interview with her husband that his willingness to talk to me might reflect an ulterior motive. It seems that he and his wife were heavily invested in an ambitious new vacation resort on the Caspian Sea called Cham Paradise. Hashemi showed me slick brochures and advertisements for the venture, printed in both Farsi and English; they were evidently designed to attract foreign visitors as well as Iranians. He boldly predicted that soon there would be a significant thaw in relations between Iran and the Western world, including the United States. The resort project seemed to rest in large part on that dubious proposition. Hashemi was clearly excited as he showed me a detailed model of the project—a cluster of modern apartment buildings, hotels, villas, restaurants, lakes, and other features arrayed on the tip of a peninsula. Then he had an idea.

"Perhaps, in a few years," he said, "we might invite back the Americans we held hostage, and they can all stay at the resort as our guests!"

"This time, can they go home when they want?" I asked, and waited for my interpreter to relay the question to him.

Listening to the Farsi, Hashemi first scowled, and then reeled with laughter. He said to me in English, "You make a joke!"

By the time I returned to Iran in August, Cham Paradise had gone bust. Hashemi and Ebtekar had been forced to sell their home to pay off their debts, and the two were living with her mother—somehow, one suspects, blaming the United States for their troubles. They were not the only gerogan-girha true believers who had fallen on hard times. When I tried to reach Hussein Sheikh al-Islam, the chief interrogator and the man that the former CIA station chief Tom Ahern (among others) remembers beating him with a rubber hose, I was informed by al-Islam's brother that he refused to speak to an American writer—for two reasons. The first, his brother said, was that he believes an American could never understand the "mysticisms" of the gerogan-giri. The second was that al-Islam blames the United States for thwarting his ambition to become a prominent Iranian diplomat. It seems that the only country that would accept him was Syria, historically a partner in terrorism with Iran.

On my last day in Tehran I visited the Den of Spies one more time. I was accompanied by David Keane, a filmmaker who is shooting a documentary in tandem with my reporting about the hostage crisis. David (who is also my cousin) wanted to shoot some film inside the compound and inside the old embassy building itself. We stopped at the by now familiar guardhouse on the southeast corner, and to our surprise, it had been spruced up. The walls and ceiling looked as if they'd been given a new coat of paint, the boot prints had vanished, and the broken-down furniture had been replaced. Another bored-looking team of young Revolutionary Guards—this time a threesome—sat sullenly behind the marble-veneered reception counter. Yes, we had an appointment. Yes, we had papers—Ramin held up an imposing document with multiple important-looking signatures. One of the guards rang up a superior to announce our arrival, and we sat down to wait for an escort inside.

We sat for hours before a mid-level official in the management of the compound arrived at the guardhouse. A worried-looking man in an open-collared pale-blue shirt, he said we would be permitted to walk through the exhibit, but no filming would be allowed. Our appointment, our document with the important signatures, did not seem to matter.

"It's an exhibit," I argued. "The whole idea is for people to see it. If we film it, millions of people will."

On our visit in December we had overcome initial resistance to allowing us into the exhibit with a small reshveh, or tip (literally translated, "success fee"), at which point we were given a bang-up tour. But David had had no video camera that day. We suggested that Ramin offer another reshveh. No, Ramin said, management of the compound had turned over since our last visit, and the officials now in charge were new to the job and too nervous to bend the rules. Blue Shirt disappeared, and we waited another hour before he came back with exciting news: we would be allowed to film inside the exhibit hall, but David would have to use the officials' own video camera. This prompted further discussion. What kind of camera did they have? Would it be compatible with the digital cassettes David used in his camera? Blue Shirt left to investigate, and returned to report sadly that they could not find their camera. "You will have to hire a camera," he said.

"But I have a camera!" David shouted, holding up his Sony model. "You can inspect it if you like."

Even the Revolutionary Guards behind the counter felt our frustration, and they joined in the argument. "What's the big deal?" one said. "Let them take pictures with their camera."

Blue Shirt was insistent: no, the camera would have to be rented.

Later, just as a search party was about to head off to find a camera-rental shop, another administrator came running out with the announcement that the official camera had at last been located. So after a long day of waiting, David and I were finally escorted into the compound. We passed through a small pine grove, walked past the old white two-story ambassador's residence, where most of the hostages had spent their first days in captivity, and then were led into a small new administrative building in the back of the compound, where tennis courts had once been. After all the back-and-forth the official camera turned out to be a Sony—exactly the same model that David was carrying. We exchanged a round of handshakes and thank-yous with our hosts and set off for the embassy building exhibit to begin taping.

We had gone about ten steps when Blue Shirt came running back out. "No," he cried. "It has been decided that you can only take still pictures—no moving pictures."

That was when we gave up. We had already taken still pictures, on our earlier visit. As we made our way out of the compound, crossing the sidewalk onto Taleghani Avenue to hail a cab, the three young Revolutionary Guards came running after us. We wondered for a minute if the procedures were going to change yet again.

The guards all spoke to Ramin in Farsi, smiling and gesturing toward us, and then he relayed their comments: "They want me to tell you that they are embarrassed, that they think this is silly. They want to apologize on behalf of their country."

Ramin grinned as the soldiers huddled around him, grabbing at him in a friendly way. "They want me to tell you that they love America."

The soldiers flashed big smiles at us and nodded approvingly. And right there in front of the Death to the USA sign, in front of the faded banners denouncing "The Great Satan," one of the Revolutionary Guards raised his thumb high into the air and said in halting English, "Okay, George W. Bush!"

So things have not worked out quite as the gerogan-girha planned. They have arrived in a new century with the varying perspectives of middle age. The righteous and successful see every step on their path as a correct one, and the righteous but disappointed still have an old enemy to blame. Those with misgivings concede the missteps of their youth, which they regret but cannot fully disown. They failed to create the world they dreamed of, but that is an old story. Some now accept the blame, or at least a big responsibility, for things they would like to change.

Still, even among those who now despair over the long-term consequences of the hostage crisis, I noticed a lift in mood when they talked about those stirring, intense, and dangerous days. No matter how it turned out for them, whether it made them proud or bitter, whether they feel they deserve international praise or scorn, for one long year they had the world's most powerful nation by the throat. At the center of the world's stage, for better or for worse, they danced a joyful and defiant dance.

* Mark Bowden, an Atlantic national correspondent, is the author of Black Hawk Down and Road Work, a recently published collection. He is writing a book about the hostage crisis and its aftermath, to be published next fall by Grove/Atlantic.

Into the Den of Spies

Mark Bowden, the author of "Among the Hostage-Takers," speaks about the Iran hostage crisis of 1979 and its architects' present-day struggles with the Islamic regime

By Terrence Henry

This November 4 marked twenty-five years since a small group of Iranian university students, accompanied by a much larger mob of supporters, stormed the vast American embassy compound in Tehran and held its staff hostage for 444 days. Those behind the takeover were concerned about the future of the Islamic revolution in Iran, a movement that had come to power just ten months earlier under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini. The students and their clerical leader, Ayatollah Khoeiniha, worried that the revolution was in danger of subversion by the former regime and moderates supported by the United States. When the U.S. admitted Iran's ousted monarch, the Shah, in October 1979 for cancer treatments in New York, the students decided to take over the American embassy and demand the return of the Shah to Iran for prosecution. They labeled the embassy a "Den of Spies" and accused its personnel of being CIA agents trying to overthrow the revolutionary government; the regime threatened several times to put the hostages on trial for espionage and to execute the guilty. Khomeini threw his support behind the hostage-takers, and the event rapidly became a defining political moment in Iran, one that consolidated power under the hard-line Islamic clerics and sidelined the moderates, thereby setting the stage for the theocratic authoritarianism that continues to this day.

By seizing the embassy, the students emerged from a crowded sea of millions of revolutionaries marching in the streets of Tehran to become national heroes seen every night on televisions across the world. Today, those hostage-takers who work with the regime still hold positions of power and influence in Iran, but those who vocally advocate reform frequently find themselves on the sidelines. Hoseyn Shariatmadari, one of the students behind the plan to take the embassy, runs one of the largest state-controlled papers in Iran, Kayhan, and acts as the unofficial spokesman for Iran's ruling cleric, Ayatollah Khameini, while his fellow hostage-taker, Abbas Abdi, sits in Evin Prison (the same site where some of the American hostages were held) serving a seven-year sentence for selling government secrets to the CIA. Abdi had published in his reformist newspaper the results of a poll showing that seventy-four percent of Iranians in Tehran want renewed relations with the U.S. Another of the students, Mohsen Mirdamadi, experienced a return to prominence earlier this year when he led 124 parliamentary members in a mass resignation to protest the disqualification of thousands of candidates (including himself) from parliamentary elections. "None of us in the revolution believed Iran would ever have an autocratic regime again," he said at the time. "Yet here we are."

For his third cover story for The Atlantic, national correspondent Mark Bowden traveled to Iran twice to visit the embassy and meet the hostage-takers. Tehran, Bowden discovered, is now a city of deadly traffic, open-air drug markets, and veiled prostitutes. He found the embassy, once a symbol of American prestige in Iran, now "garishly covered with anti-American graffiti, banners, and propaganda displays to remind people of the nation's undying disdain for its once favorite ally." The hostage-takers Bowden spoke with expressed little regret at their seizure of the embassy, but most, like Mirdamadi, lamented the role they played in cementing the repressive rule of the clerics. "The hostage-takers of 1979 were striving toward umma, a perfect Muslim community," Bowden writes. "Now they live in the ruins of their dream. The admiration they once enjoyed has faded like the graffiti at the Den of Spies."

Mark Bowden is a national correspondent for The Atlantic. His most recent book is Road Work: Among Tyrants, Beasts, Heroes, and Rogues, a collection of his best reporting over the past twenty-five years, including all of his work for The Atlantic. His book on the Iran hostage crisis, Guests of the Ayatollah, will be released next year in tandem with a four-part documentary based on his book that will air on the Discovery Times channel.

We spoke by telephone on November 3.

—Terrence Henry

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How were you able to find and speak with the hostage-takers twenty-five years after they took over the U.S. embassy in Tehran?

It was fairly easy once I got over the difficulty of getting a visa and getting to Tehran. In Iran, the gerogan-girha, as they're known—the hostage-takers—are well-known figures. Most of them are high-ranking members of the government, and others are members of the reform movement. Some have actually left Iran to join resistance groups that are fighting against the regime. So they fall all across the spectrum. but they became famous in Iran because of this incident.

Why was it difficult getting a visa to Iran?

Well, as a tourist, I could probably apply for a visa and get to Iran fairly easily. But if I arrived in Iran on a tourist visa and began doing journalism work, I would very quickly come to the attention of the authorities and probably be thrown out of the country, if not put in jail. It's a very authoritarian regime, and they keep close tabs on their own press, not to mention any foreign journalists in town. So I was more or less obliged to apply for a visa as a foreign journalist. I did so through the UN consulate in New York—Iran doesn't have diplomatic relations with the United States—and while they assured me that eventually I would get a visa, they kept delaying it month after month after month.

For me to travel to Iran and do the reporting I needed to do, it takes a fairly big chunk of time, and it's hard to keep waiting and waiting and hoping that eventually somebody will decide to give you a visa. So with my cousin David Keane, who is a documentary filmmaker working in tandem with me on this project, we opted to bribe somebody, which apparently is the way most journalists obtain visas to Iran. We found a fellow who works with the Iranian Intelligence Ministry, a former Iranian intelligence agent who has his own business basically providing visas to journalists. It cost a good bit of money to obtain the visa, but once I did I was able to travel there and work.

Once you arrived in Iran, did you have to keep paying bribes as you went along?

A little bit. For instance, when the individual who secures visas—Khamal Taheri—saw that I have a nifty palm pilot, he decided he wanted to have one for himself, which he had to be supplied with. We tried to oblige Khamal, because we knew we would want to go back again, so we needed to preserve that avenue. To a certain extent we had to keep paying him, and we also had to pay for a "fixer"—a guide and translator—who works for Khamal. The "fixer" in this case performed the dual service of helping us while at the same time reporting back on who exactly we're talking to and what they're saying.

So was the "fixer" an agent of the Iranian government?

No. The "fixer" is an employee of Khamal's, and Khamal is, I believe, an agent of the Iranian government. What they've done in Iran is to privatize many public responsibilities—much like here in the United States. In an authoritarian state, keeping track of foreign journalists who come into the country is one of the things the government wants to do. So they've allowed Khamal to set up his own little business of "helping" foreign reporters for a fee—Khamal gets to keep the money and the Iranian government gets to keep tabs.

While you were in Iran, did the government place any constraints on your talking to the hostage-takers?

Indirectly. Some of the people I wanted to talk to were in jail, so the government could prevent me from talking to them. Others who wanted to talk to me felt threatened, whether they had specifically been threatened or not I don't know, but at any rate a number of them backed out or "declined regretfully" my invitation to interview them. One of the individuals whom we intended to interview, a fairly well-known figure in the parliament there—Mohsen Mirdamadi —was attacked and beaten by a group of thugs the day before he was supposed to meet with us. I don't know if he was attacked because he was going to give us an interview, or because of his overall activities advocating reform in Iran, but it had the effect of making him unavailable to us.

When you spoke to the hostage-takers, were you surprised that some of them are critical of the very regime they originally helped bring to power in Iran?

No, I wasn't really surprised. But then again, I think real courage always surprises you when you see it. These are people who are—at great personal risk— speaking out against the regime. I'm fifty-three years old, so I'm really a contemporary of the young people who seized the embassy in 1979, and I can look back on things I did in my twenties that I don't think I'd do today. Certainly you can see now that the system that they hoped to create in Iran, the government that they all envisioned in their naiveté, was this sort of perfect Muslim society. But in fact what they have grown up to live in now is a horrible, totalitarian, religious, fascist society. Frankly, it doesn't surprise me that they hate it, but it does surprise me a little bit that they are courageous enough to oppose it.

Do you think they're walking a fine line by defending taking the American embassy then but criticizing the mullahs in power today?

Yes, I think that they are. The mullahs who were involved in the plan to take over the embassy were manufacturing this myth of American evil, omnipresence, and omnipotence in Iran. That has become one of the founding principles of the state, and it's really remarkable the extent to which Iran defines itself still—twenty-five years later—in opposition to the "Great Satan" of the United States. Clearly, anyone who would look back and speak critically of this "magnificent, founding event" in the history of Iran is running the risk of angering the regime and speaking heresy. Nevertheless, what you discover in Iran is that most people chafe under the dictates of the regime these days. My impression of the Iranians is that they're basically a freedom-loving people. I think they're just as unhappy being repressed by the mullahs as they were being repressed by the Shah.

The hostage-takers and their clerical leader, Khoeiniha, claim that Ayatollah Khomeini had no involvement in planning or approving the hostage-taking. What was Khomeini's role in the hostage crisis once it began?

Going into this, my impression of Khomeini, from pictures I'd seen of him and what we knew here in the States, is that he was a very decisive leader. But it turns out he wasn't, which was surprising to me. In particular where secular matters were concerned, he tended to be a vacillating figure. I think lower-level clerics authorized taking over the embassy knowing it would whip up a great deal of popular support, because anti-American sentiment was already rampant in Iran. So by presenting Khomeini with this fait accompli, with millions of people dancing in the streets, they made it impossible for him to support the provisional government, which had responsibility for protecting the American diplomats and ordering the Iranian students off the U.S. embassy grounds. So Khomeini ended up doing exactly what I think Khoeiniha and whoever else was involved expected him to do—capitulating to the students and basically supporting the takeover of the embassy. I think that in doing so Khomeini was kind of pushed into supporting the factions in Iran that wanted to create this religious theocracy, and I'm not convinced that that's what he envisioned at all.

Later on in the crisis, the students offered to turn the American hostages over to the Iranian government, and then changed their minds. Did Khomeini's indecisiveness come into play here? What effect did his vacillation have on the negotiations to free the hostages?

There was always a struggle in Iran over the hostages because there was an ongoing struggle over what kind of government the country was going to have. The hostages had become a very hot potato in Iran, and after a few months I think the students, who had never planned to hold the hostages for more than a day or two, were quite weary of the responsibility of maintaining this prison, and were eager to get on with their own lives. So there was an eagerness on their part to turn the hostages over to the government, which would then be in a position to at least negotiate with the United States. That would have happened fairly smoothly if not for the fact that there were factions in the government and around Khomeini who were still pushing for a hard-line, Islamic, anti-American stance, and they were opposed to striking any kind of a deal with the United States. They felt that by keeping the hostages in the hands of the students they avoided the possibility that some sort of compromise with the United States might be reached.

When the students seized the embassy, they seized thousands of classified documents, spanning decades, that they later published as the Den of Spies collection. They claimed these documents proved that the CIA was meddling extensively in Iran at the time and was planning to overthrow the Islamic Revolution. Having examined these files yourself, how much CIA spying was actually going on in Iran at the time? How did the students get their hands on the documents?

The students got the documents because the State Department had very sloppy procedures for getting rid of them, and in fact had hoarded them over the decades. So when the embassy was taken they essentially turned over to these invading students a treasure trove of secret documents relating the entire history, over a period of almost thirty years, of U.S. relations with Iran. A lot of the documents they seized were intact, and the ones that had been shredded were painstakingly pieced back together. The students used these documents to support their arguments that the CIA was this omnipotent and omnipresent force in Iran that was responsible for just about every obstacle to creating a new society and furthering the revolution. They blamed everything on the CIA, from rebellion in Kurdistan to hurricanes to train derailments; it was ridiculous. What you found in reality in the American embassy at that time was a CIA station that consisted of three officers—Tom Ahern, who had been in the country for about eight months; Bill Daugherty, who had only been in the country for a month or two, and who in fact had just been recruited as a CIA officer in January 1979 and was completely raw and inexperienced; and Malcolm Kalp, a CIA officer with more experience but who had only arrived in Tehran four days before the embassy was taken. This small contingent of CIA officers in the embassy was just beginning to figure out its way around Tehran. None of them spoke Farsi, none had large strings of agents they were running in the country. In fact, they knew next to nothing about what was happening in Iran and were totally incapable of influencing events. It's almost laughable to think that they were in a position to influence anything. The fact is that the CIA—counter to the myths perpetrated by the regime—had been a fairly unimportant force in Iran for many years, precisely because Iran had been a major American ally in the region, so there was really no energy being expended by the United States to spy on Iran. We basically—to our shame and ultimately our embarrassment—relied primarily on the Shah for any intelligence in Iran, and that intelligence was so poor that it led to one of the great failures of intelligence gathering in modern times, which was the failure to appreciate that the Shah was about to be overthrown. Washington was taken completely by surprise when the Shah left and the revolution took place. So there's no stronger example of how ineffective the CIA was in Iran than the fact that they didn't know they were about to lose the country to an Islamic revolution.

Do Iranians still accuse the CIA of meddling in their country today?

Absolutely. The country remains ridiculously fixated on the U.S., and actually defines itself in opposition to the United States, assuming still that the CIA is active under every bush and rock. Again, they blame everything on the CIA, including the takeover of the American embassy. The current popular theory is that the whole thing was actually engineered by the CIA to make Iran a pariah nation, which led to all of their troubles ever since.

You note that for the hostage-takers, the moment of taking the embassy put them at the center of the world's stage. Does the embassy takeover still instill pride in them, or do they see it as the beginning of a twenty-five-year curse that has cut them off from the world?

I think they see it as both, and where they fall on the political spectrum determines how strongly they feel about it one way or the other. The truth of it is that Iranians, like Americans, are patriots, and they resent the fact that, as they see it, the United States engineered, or helped engineer, the overthrow of a democratically elected government in 1953 and essentially imposed a king upon them by enthroning the Shah. I think the United States actually had a role in that but wasn't the prime mover. Nevertheless it was an insult to Iran, so there was a great deal of legitimate anger in these young revolutionary Iranians who took over the embassy in 1979. I think that any of the hostage-takers would have to look back on that time with some degree of fondness, and it would be hard for them to completely disown it. It was the most exciting period of their lives, even if the long-term impact was to damage their country.

How do the American hostages look back on their experience in Iran today?

I've spoken to most of them who are still alive, and there's a variety of ways that they feel, but they all feel bitter about the way they were treated and what happened to them in Iran. I have yet to find one who thinks there was any legitimate reason for them to be taken and held by these Iranians. They think they were dealt a tremendous injustice. Many of them are angry about the fact that the United States, in reaching the deal that ultimately led to their release, barred them from seeking any damages from Iran. At present those former hostages are pursuing a legal remedy to that in the U.S. courts, where they hope to get some sort of compensation from Iranian funds that were seized and held here in the United States after the embassy takeover. Some of the former hostages think that President Jimmy Carter should have reacted much more aggressively, even violently, to the takeover of the embassy. But most are grateful that he didn't, because they feel that if, for instance, the rescue attempt that Carter did try had gone through and made it to the embassy, some or maybe all of them wouldn't have made it out alive. So there are mixed feelings about the whole thing, but I think most of them feel a kind of gratitude toward Carter, even if they disagree with him politically, because he placed such a high importance on their safety and ultimately was able to get them back alive.

In what was once the U.S. embassy in Tehran, today there is what you describe as an "official shrine"—essentially a museum—for the hostage-taking. Do Iranians still visit the embassy much these days? Do they still demonstrate against America outside its walls?

They do, but my impression is that it's all orchestrated. There are still visitors to the Den of Spies, but they're basically bused in like school groups as part of a program to learn about the revolution. I didn't see any everyday Iranians standing in line who wanted to check out the exhibit; it was empty each time I went to see it. My understanding is that every year on the anniversary of the takeover, November 4, there is usually some kind of demonstration outside of the embassy walls, but that it's fairly perfunctory. A number of former hostage-takers I've talked to have told me that they're invited to come back annually and address the crowd outside the embassy in honor of the event, but they generally refuse to do so because they have mixed feelings, in some cases hard feelings, about what happened.

You say in your article that the hostage-taking was America's first real exposure to Islamic fundamentalism, an event that seems tame in contrast to the violent terrorism carried out today. Do you think the hostage crisis holds any lessons for fighting terrorism today?

I think it just points up the difficulty of dealing with terrorism and hostage-taking, because they create such a dilemma. One of the things that I am coming to realize more and more is the importance of the role that the press plays in giving them a weight they don't have in the real world. I think that the hostage crisis in 1979 was, in a way, prolonged by the hyperbolic press coverage here in the United States, which made such a huge issue out of it. It might not have lasted as long as it did or become such a charged and symbolic event if it hadn't been placed at the center stage of everyone's perception of the world at that point. So I think it was blown way out of proportion then, and I think we as journalists ought to think hard about how we report on these acts of terror today and at least weigh the public interest in deciding how much emphasis to give to something like a hostage-taking.

What kind of effect does the hostage crisis have on American-Iranian relations today?

I think it remains the single greatest obstacle to any kind of normal relationship between our two countries. Iran continues to define itself as the home of anti-Americanism in the world and its rhetoric is perfectly hateful and very provocative. I think the takeover of the American embassy in Tehran was a defining event in the relationship—or lack of one—between our two countries. So any effort to improve relations between our countries now would have to involve arriving at a better understanding of what was happening between our two countries in 1979.

In your last cover story for The Atlantic, you wrote about torture and interrogation, concluding the piece with your own realizations about the relative morality of such tactics in various situations. In this article, you don't shy away from including yourself, either—vocally protesting the poor care of the embassy by its Iranian guards today, telling one Iranian that he's "crackers" for thinking the CIA engineered the hostage-taking, and openly sharing some of the anger the American hostages felt toward their captors. How have you become so comfortable having your own thoughts and actions as part of the story?

One of the things that I enjoy about my work for The Atlantic and the books that I write is that they give me much more latitude to think through the issues that I'm writing about, and I feel that I owe it to readers to let them know what I think at a certain point. I was raised in the very strict tradition of newspaper journalism, where for many years I wrote stories that I totally removed myself from, generally avoiding reaching any kind of conclusion about things. I think that one of the things I find more challenging about the work I'm doing now is that I don't let myself off the hook like that anymore. I don't enter into a story with a preconceived notion and I don't have any kind of overarching ideology or political affiliation, but what I do try to do is approach whatever the subject matter is as a well-educated layman who has the time to really investigate what it is I'm writing about. And that gives me the opportunity to really think things through. I try not to be oppressive about that or even let it completely shape the story that I'm telling, but by the same token I don't avoid trying to convey what I think and what I feel at the various stages of writing.

What has been the response from readers to including yourself in your work?

Well, mostly I find that people respond to it very favorably. Whether they agree or disagree with me, they find it refreshing, I think, that I don't write as though I don't belong in the same world as everyone else. I react to things that I learn and experience in the same way anyone else does, and so far no one's threatened to lynch me for having an opinion.

Did you get any sense from those you talked to in Iran that the United States' difficulties in occupying Iraq have emboldened the Iranian government? Are they fearful of the U.S. as a superpower?

I think that they're not that fearful, because the fact that the United States has really gotten bogged down in Iraq reassures Iran that the Bush Administration is not about to invade. That would have been a fear if things had gone as smoothly as President Bush and some of his advisers had hoped initially. All Iranians are delighted to see Saddam Hussein removed from power, but I felt while I was in Iran that there were a number of different reactions to the American invasion of Iraq. On the one hand, the official policy of the Iranian government would favor the creation of a Shia-dominated religious state in the mode of Iran. So in that sense, they're looking to people like Ayatollah Sistani and Moqtada al-Sadr to pressure the United States into holding early elections that would lead to a Shia-dominated government. On the other hand, the average Iranian whom I spoke to was rooting for American success in Iraq, hoping that the Bush Administration can help Iraq set up a stable, Western-style democracy and by doing so create a great deal of pressure for reform in Iran. So ironically, some of conservative America's biggest supporters would be the Iranian men on the street who are rooting for American success in Iraq and Afghanistan.

How do you think Iranians feel about Bush being reelected?

I think the man on the street in Iran is delighted. Because, as I've said, I think they're rooting for an ultimate American success in Afghanistan and Iraq. And Bush is perceived as a very tough-minded, consistent leader in Iran, and that plays well in that part of the world. The official reaction, I'm sure, is one of dismay. The regime in Iran would probably much prefer to have dealt with John Kerry than George Bush, so I suspect that they're disappointed.

Much of the news about Iran today deals with its nascent nuclear-weapons program. Did the hostage-takers have anything to say about Iran's nuclear program? How do you feel about it?

I haven't discussed the nuclear situation with any of the hostage-takers. What I personally think is that Iran, like every country, is going to act in its own best interest. And frankly, even though I think it's terrible that Iran could have a nuclear weapon, if I put myself in the shoes of an Iranian, I can understand completely why they would want that and why it is something that would be to their benefit. For one thing, they're basically surrounded right now by countries they regard as enemies, most of whom are nuclear powers: the United States is occupying Afghanistan and Iraq; they have Pakistan on their border; and Israel is within striking distance. So I think they feel entitled to the same measure of deterrence that, say, the United States felt it needed during the Cold War. It's also a matter of national pride—I think they feel that if they have the technology and engineering capability to make nuclear weapons, then why shouldn't they be able to, if other countries all over the world have done so? I understand it for all those reasons, as well as an additional one: if they do develop a nuclear-weapons program it would be a tremendous bargaining chip for them in dealing with the United States and the Western world. If America and Europe are serious about wanting Iran to remain free of nuclear weapons, then they would presumably have to give up something important in order to make Iran abandon those efforts. And I do think it would be a bad thing for the United States and the Western world if Iran were to possess nuclear weapons. Not because I think that in the short run we're at any risk of the Iranian government using such a weapon in a first strike, but because I think that based on the way I see Iran there is political instability in the future of that country, and there are very clearly fanatical Islamic factions within Iran who are quite supportive of al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups who wouldn't hesitate to use these kinds of weapons. So I can foresee—without a great deal of stretching my imagination—Iran providing a nuclear device to a terrorist group who would use it against one of the "infidel" countries. I think it's a terrible problem, and one that the United States needs all the help it can get in addressing.

You said earlier that whatever kind of engagement comes up in the future between the U.S. and Iran, one of the first things that they would have to address up front is the hostage crisis. What would be the best way to deal with the hostage crisis in opening a relationship with Iran?

I think that the United States could take some steps to acknowledge how improper its involvement was in Iran in the early 1950s, when we effectively undermined a democratically elected government to install a monarchy. We basically did that to protect our interests in the country, which involved both geopolitics and oil. Acknowledging our historical wrongdoing in that region might go some way toward ameliorating the difficulties we still labor under with Iran. By the same token, Iran needs to acknowledge that the United States was not actively trying to overthrow the revolution in 1979; that the diplomats that they held hostage for more than a year were performing routine, everyday diplomacy; that seizing the embassy and holding the diplomatic mission hostage was a violation of every standard of international law; and that it was simply wrong. So I think that there's room for both sides in this discussion to acknowledge error and try to build something more respectful and more meaningful. If that can lead to ties between our two countries, that'd be a good thing. But I personally think the regime in Iran is a nightmare, and we can't be true to our democratic values and be in the least bit supportive of the theo-fascism that rules that country right now.

* Terrence Henry is a reporter-researcher for The Atlantic.

If America Left Iraq

The case for cutting and running

By Nir Rosen
The Atlantic, December 2005

At some point—whether sooner or later—U.S. troops will leave Iraq. I have spent much of the occupation reporting from Baghdad, Kirkuk, Mosul, Fallujah, and elsewhere in the country, and I can tell you that a growing majority of Iraqis would like it to be sooner. As the occupation wears on, more and more Iraqis chafe at its failure to provide stability or even electricity, and they have grown to hate the explosions, gunfire, and constant war, and also the daily annoyances: having to wait hours in traffic because the Americans have closed off half the city; having to sit in that traffic behind a U.S. military vehicle pointing its weapons at them; having to endure constant searches and arrests. Before the January 30 elections this year the Association of Muslim Scholars—Iraq's most important Sunni Arab body, and one closely tied to the indigenous majority of the insurgency—called for a commitment to a timely U.S. withdrawal as a condition for its participation in the vote. (In exchange the association promised to rein in the resistance.) It's not just Sunnis who have demanded a withdrawal: the Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who is immensely popular among the young and the poor, has made a similar demand. So has the mainstream leader of the Shiites' Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, who made his first call for U.S. withdrawal as early as April 23, 2003.

If the people the U.S. military is ostensibly protecting want it to go, why do the soldiers stay? The most common answer is that it would be irresponsible for the United States to depart before some measure of peace has been assured. The American presence, this argument goes, is the only thing keeping Iraq from an all-out civil war that could take millions of lives and would profoundly destabilize the region. But is that really the case? Let's consider the key questions surrounding the prospect of an imminent American withdrawal.

Would the withdrawal of U.S. troops ignite a civil war between Sunnis and Shiites?

No. That civil war is already under way—in large part because of the American presence. The longer the United States stays, the more it fuels Sunni hostility toward Shiite "collaborators." Were America not in Iraq, Sunni leaders could negotiate and participate without fear that they themselves would be branded traitors and collaborators by their constituents. Sunni leaders have said this in official public statements; leaders of the resistance have told me the same thing in private. The Iraqi government, which is currently dominated by Shiites, would lose its quisling stigma. Iraq's security forces, also primarily Shiite, would no longer be working on behalf of foreign infidels against fellow Iraqis, but would be able to function independently and recruit Sunnis to a truly national force. The mere announcement of an intended U.S. withdrawal would allow Sunnis to come to the table and participate in defining the new Iraq.

But if American troops aren't in Baghdad, what's to stop the Sunnis from launching an assault and seizing control of the city?

Sunni forces could not mount such an assault. The preponderance of power now lies with the majority Shiites and the Kurds, and the Sunnis know this. Sunni fighters wield only small arms and explosives, not Saddam's tanks and helicopters, and are very weak compared with the cohesive, better armed, and numerically superior Shiite and Kurdish militias. Most important, Iraqi nationalism—not intramural rivalry—is the chief motivator for both Shiites and Sunnis. Most insurgency groups view themselves as waging a muqawama—a resistance—rather than a jihad. This is evident in their names and in their propaganda. For instance, the units commanded by the Association of Muslim Scholars are named after the 1920 revolt against the British. Others have names such as Iraqi Islamic Army and Flame of Iraq. They display the Iraqi flag rather than a flag of jihad. Insurgent attacks are meant primarily to punish those who have collaborated with the Americans and to deter future collaboration.

Wouldn't a U.S. withdrawal embolden the insurgency?

No. If the occupation were to end, so, too, would the insurgency. After all, what the resistance movement has been resisting is the occupation. Who would the insurgents fight if the enemy left? When I asked Sunni Arab fighters and the clerics who support them why they were fighting, they all gave me the same one-word answer: intiqaam—revenge. Revenge for the destruction of their homes, for the shame they felt when Americans forced them to the ground and stepped on them, for the killing of their friends and relatives by U.S. soldiers either in combat or during raids.

But what about the foreign jihadi element of the resistance? Wouldn't it be empowered by a U.S. withdrawal?

The foreign jihadi element—commanded by the likes of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—is numerically insignificant; the bulk of the resistance has no connection to al-Qaeda or its offshoots. (Zarqawi and his followers have benefited greatly from U.S. propaganda blaming him for all attacks in Iraq, because he is now seen by Arabs around the world as more powerful than he is; we have been his best recruiting tool.) It is true that the Sunni resistance welcomed the foreign fighters (and to some extent still do), because they were far more willing to die than indigenous Iraqis were. But what Zarqawi wants fundamentally conflicts with what Iraqi Sunnis want: Zarqawi seeks re-establishment of the Muslim caliphate and a Manichean confrontation with infidels around the world, to last until Judgment Day; the mainstream Iraqi resistance just wants the Americans out. If U.S. forces were to leave, the foreigners in Zarqawi's movement would find little support—and perhaps significant animosity—among Iraqi Sunnis, who want wealth and power, not jihad until death. They have already lost much of their support: many Iraqis have begun turning on them. In the heavily Shia Sadr City foreign jihadis had burning tires placed around their necks. The foreigners have not managed to establish themselves decisively in any large cities. Even at the height of their power in Fallujah they could control only one neighborhood, the Julan, and they were hated by the city's resistance council. Today foreign fighters hide in small villages and are used opportunistically by the nationalist resistance.

When the Americans depart and Sunnis join the Iraqi government, some of the foreign jihadis in Iraq may try to continue the struggle—but they will have committed enemies in both Baghdad and the Shiite south, and the entire Sunni triangle will be against them. They will have nowhere to hide. Nor can they merely take their battle to the West. The jihadis need a failed state like Iraq in which to operate. When they leave Iraq, they will be hounded by Arab and Western security agencies.

What about the Kurds? Won't they secede if the United States leaves?

Yes, but that's going to happen anyway. All Iraqi Kurds want an independent Kurdistan. They do not feel Iraqi. They've effectively had more than a decade of autonomy, thanks to the UN-imposed no-fly zone; they want nothing to do with the chaos that is Iraq. Kurdish independence is inevitable—and positive. (Few peoples on earth deserve a state more than the Kurds.) For the moment the Kurdish government in the north is officially participating in the federalist plan—but the Kurds are preparing for secession. They have their own troops, the peshmerga, thought to contain 50,000 to 100,000 fighters. They essentially control the oil city of Kirkuk. They also happen to be the most America-loving people I have ever met; their leaders openly seek to become, like Israel, a proxy for American interests. If what the United States wants is long-term bases in the region, the Kurds are its partners.

Would Turkey invade in response to a Kurdish secession?

For the moment Turkey is more concerned with EU membership than with Iraq's Kurds—who in any event have expressed no ambitions to expand into Turkey. Iraq's Kurds speak a dialect different from Turkey's, and, in fact, have a history of animosity toward Turkish Kurds. Besides, Turkey, as a member of NATO, would be reluctant to attack in defiance of the United States. Turkey would be satisfied with guarantees that it would have continued access to Kurdish oil and trade and that Iraqi Kurds would not incite rebellion in Turkey.

Would Iran effectively take over Iraq?

No. Iraqis are fiercely nationalist—even the country's Shiites resent Iranian meddling. (It is true that some Iraqi Shiites view Iran as an ally, because many of their leaders found safe haven there when exiled by Saddam—but thousands of other Iraqi Shiites experienced years of misery as prisoners of war in Iran.) Even in southeastern towns near the border I encountered only hostility toward Iran.

What about the goal of creating a secular democracy in Iraq that respects the rights of women and non-Muslims?

Give it up. It's not going to happen. Apart from the Kurds, who revel in their secularism, Iraqis overwhelmingly seek a Muslim state. Although Iraq may have been officially secular during the 1970s and 1980s, Saddam encouraged Islamism during the 1990s, and the difficulties of the past decades have strengthened the resurgence of Islam. In the absence of any other social institutions, the mosques and the clergy assumed the dominant role in Iraq following the invasion. Even Baathist resistance leaders told me they have returned to Islam to atone for their sins under Saddam. Most Shiites, too, follow one cleric or another. Ayatollah al-Sistani—supposedly a moderate—wants Islam to be the source of law. The invasion of Iraq has led to a theocracy, which can only grow more hostile to America as long as U.S. soldiers are present. Does Iraqi history offer any lessons?

The British occupation of Iraq, in the first half of the twentieth century, may be instructive. The British faced several uprisings and coups. The Iraqi government, then as now, was unable to suppress the rebels on its own and relied on the occupying military. In 1958, when the government the British helped install finally fell, those who had collaborated with them could find no popular support; some, including the former prime minister Nuri Said, were murdered and mutilated. Said had once been a respected figure, but he became tainted by his collaboration with the British. That year, when revolutionary officers overthrew the government, Said disguised himself as a woman and tried to escape. He was discovered, shot in the head, and buried. The next day a mob dug up his corpse and dragged it through the street—an act that would be repeated so often in Iraq that it earned its own word: sahil. With the British-sponsored government gone, both Sunni and Shiite Arabs embraced the Iraqi identity. The Kurds still resent the British perfidy that made them part of Iraq.

What can the United States do to repair Iraq?

There is no panacea. Iraq is a destroyed and fissiparous country. Iranians and Saudis I've spoken to worry that it might be impossible to keep Iraq from disintegrating. But they agree that the best hope of avoiding this scenario is if the United States leaves; perhaps then Iraqi nationalism will keep at least the Arabs united. The sooner America withdraws and allows Iraqis to assume control of their own country, the better the chances that Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari won't face sahil. It may be decades before Iraq recovers from the current maelstrom. By then its borders may be different, its vaunted secularism a distant relic. But a continued U.S. occupation can only get in the way.

* Nir Rosen, a fellow at the New America Foundation, spent sixteen months reporting from Iraq after the American invasion. His book In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq will be published in February.