The Carter Years | 444 Days | 4

On November 4th, 1979, Iranian students overran the U. S. embassy in Tehran intending to stage a short sit-in protest. But after they detained embassy staff, what started out as a sit-in grew into a hostage crisis that lasted for more than a year. Iran’s new political and religious leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, took advantage of the situation to consolidate his grip on power. Today, Lindsay is joined by journalist Mark Bowden to talk about the hostage crisis and what it cost the Carter administration. Bowden is the author of Guests of the Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis: The First Battle in America’s War with Militant Islam. Be the first to know about Wondery’s newest podcasts, curated recommendations, and more! Sign up now at https://wondery.fm/wonderynewsletter Listen to American History Tellers on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Experience all episodes ad-free and be the first to binge the newest season. Unlock exclusive early access by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial today by visiting wondery.com/links/american-history-tellers/ http://wondery.com/links/american-history-tellers/ now. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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• 0:00Lindsay Graham?

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• 0:23Lindsay Graham?

  Imagine it's December 26, 1980. You're sitting in your living room in Bethesda, Maryland. You switch off the television and sigh. For months now, you've tuned in every night to see what's going on with the Americans being held hostage in Iran. You've watched in horror as the news broadcast footage of protesters chanting "Death to America" and the American hostages were paraded in front of the cameras. You can only imagine what they're going through. As the glow of the television fades, your teenage son comes into the room with a notebook and plops on the sofa beside you. "Hey Dad, can you help me with my homework?" "Uh, yeah. What's the assignment? Supposed to write a paper about the hostage crisis." "Oh, well, what about it? It's a damn disgrace, is all I can say." "Why can't we just go in and get them?"

• 1:08Lindsay Graham?

  "Well, President Carter's tried that, and it was a failure. All we achieved was killing some of our own." You shake your head, thinking of the disastrous military rescue operation earlier in the year. You wonder what, if anything, Jimmy Carter is planning to do now. It seems like he's sitting on his hands while American citizens rot in captivity. "Well, if we can't go in and free them, what... what do the Iranians want? Can we pay a ransom?" "Well, that's the idea. From what I've seen on the news, they want the money we've been keeping in US banks returned to them. See, we froze their assets when they first took the hostages, and now they want it back for their war with Iraq. But I say to hell with them. We shouldn't pay them a cent." "So what's left, then?" "Uh, diplomacy, I suppose."

• 1:53Lindsay Graham?

  Carter and those good old boys he's got in the White House need to figure something else out, and soon. This has gone on too long. The American people are sick of it. "I know I am. That's why we voted him out last month. Maybe it's gonna take someone like Reagan to finally get it done."

• 2:11Lindsay Graham?

  Your son gives you a perplexed look and then gets up to leave. You know you weren't very helpful just now. He's probably more confused than ever before, but you don't know what else to tell him. More than 50 of your fellow Americans have been held hostage for over a year, and there seems to be no end in sight. You're deeply frustrated by Jimmy Carter's inability to bring them home. But for the hostages' sake, you hope there's some sort of deal being made before a whole new administration has to start over with negotiations.

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• 3:52Lindsay Graham?

  From Wondery, I'm Lindsay Graham, and this is American History Tellers. Our history, your story.

• 4:14Lindsay Graham?

  In December 1980, a national audience watched as several of the American hostages being held in Iran appeared before television cameras at a gathering their captors arranged for the Christmas holiday. One by one, the hostages were allowed to speak to the cameras, sending messages to their loved ones. After 14 months of waiting for the government to somehow secure the release of the hostages, the American public had grown weary. Carter's inability to end the crisis would contribute to his crushing defeat to Ronald Reagan in November of 1980. But Carter remained determined to see the hostages released before he left office and continued to aggressively pursue a deal with Iranian authorities. Less than a month after this Christmas broadcast, on inauguration day in January 1981, Jimmy

• 4:59Lindsay Graham?

  Carter received word that the hostages were finally on their way home. Here with me now to discuss this crisis and what it cost the Carter administration is journalist Mark Bowden, author of Guests of the Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis, The First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam. Mark Bowden, welcome to American History Tellers.

• 5:22Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 5:23Lindsay Graham?

  So I don't think the hostage crisis can be properly understood without really having a sense of what was going on in Iran in the fall of 1979. Iran was in the throes of revolution, but it was not really the Islamist state we know today. What was happening?

• 5:39Speaker 03

  Well, the Shah had been overthrown early in the year of 1979, and among that group who accomplished it were a coalition of dissidents: religious fanatics, Islamic clergy, communists, socialists. There were people who wanted Western-style liberal democracy in Iran. The one thing that they all had in common was their hatred of the Shah and his regime. So they had all banded together to depose the Shah, who had fled the country. So in the months afterwards, a provisional government was created just to run things in the country until a constitutional convention could be held in the summer of 1980.

• 6:22Speaker 03

  So things were very much in flux. All the various factions opposed to the Shah were all basically vying for a position to create the new Iranian state.

• 6:33Lindsay Graham?

  And what was the United States' interest in Iran at this time?

• 6:37Speaker 03

  Well, the United States, of course, had a long relationship with Iran dating back to the end of World War II. Iran was an important trading partner for oil, and it was considered to be kind of a bastion of the Western world at a time of Soviet expansionism. So in that part of the world, in the Near East, Iran had enormous strategic value for the United States. When the Shah was deposed, the United States, under President Jimmy Carter, had made the decision to try to work with whatever government emerged from the cauldron of the revolution. So the embassy in Tehran was up and running, the hopes being that whoever assumed power would retain some relationship with the United States.

• 7:22Lindsay Graham?

  And it was here at the embassy on November 4th, 1979, that a protest approaches and then enters the compound grounds. This wasn't, though, the first time protesters had made it through the gates here. How did US officials initially handle these incoming students?

• 7:38Speaker 03

  Well, initially, they basically retreated to secure positions on the embassy grounds and decided to await the intervention of the Iranian authorities. What had happened months earlier was people had overrun the embassy grounds, and within hours, the Iranian police or army had escorted them off the premises. So there was initially an expectation that that's what would happen here.

• 8:05Lindsay Graham?

  What do we know about the plan hatched by these students initially? What did they want at first?

• 8:09Speaker 03

  Well, the students themselves just wanted to make a statement. They wanted to do a sit-in that would last a couple of days. In fact, they called it a "set-in." And what had happened was there were mullahs. We're talking now about a faction in Iran who made a decision very early on to seize this moment. It created an outcry in the city, and it gave them both what the students wanted initially, which is a lot of attention, but also a growing realization that they could leverage this moment into something bigger and more important.

• 8:46Lindsay Graham?

  Your mention of the mullahs gives me an opportunity to ask for some definitions here. Could you tell us what a mullah is versus the ayatollah versus the shah, what the structures are?

• 8:56Speaker 03

  Sure. You know, mullahs are religious leaders. These are the clerics. And they range from people who would have their own religious community, all the way up to the people surrounding the ayatollah, who was the leader of the clerics. So the ayatollah Khomeini was the top mullah. The shah was essentially the king that the United States had helped prop up in the early 1950s and who had ruled Iran as a secular leader, up until the point where he was ousted in early 1979.

• 9:32Lindsay Graham?

  So these mullahs, who are looking to take advantage of a public protest moment, made more of the attack on the embassy than a sit-in. How did the general public in Iran react to the takeover of the embassy?

• 9:45Speaker 03

  Well, it's hard to gauge what everybody felt, but many, many people came out in the streets to support the takeover of the embassy. There was a widespread fear in Tehran that the United States, which had propped up the shah for decades, was plotting to return him to Iran and basically overthrow the revolution. So when the students targeted the American embassy, a lot of people felt that this was an opportunity to prevent the United States from pulling off this counter-revolution.

• 10:18Lindsay Graham?

  Now, there's a fair bit of history here that we probably should talk about. Why would many Iranians have this fear that the US was going to intervene?

• 10:26Speaker 03

  Because the shah was essentially an American creation. His rule over decades had been deeply supported by the United States, and he was seen as a puppet. So when the shah was overthrown, there was almost this expectation that the United States would somehow step in, or Great Britain, or another of the Western powers, to restore him to power, because he had played an important role, as far as the Western world was concerned, in, you know, shoring up their interests in that part of the world.

• 11:00Lindsay Graham?

  How did the US government react to the Iranian revolution at first?

• 11:04Speaker 03

  Well, I think it's fair to say, Lindsay, that the United States was taken by surprise. No one anticipated the overthrow of the Shah. In fact, the CIA had its own work to do in Iran, which had actually nothing to do with what was happening in their domestic politics. So the United States basically had relied upon the Shah to maintain himself in power. And so his overthrow came as a shock. And I think, you know, these things happen in the world. The United States reacted by trying to maintain a presence in Tehran, trying to understand the forces that were at work, trying to position themselves to maybe influence the kind of government that would emerge from the Constitutional Convention.

• 11:49Speaker 03

  But the bottom line was they didn't want to leave Iran. They wanted to create a relationship with whoever assumed power.

• 11:57Lindsay Graham?

  But that didn't work too well, or at least a wrench was thrown in the works when the embassy was overrun. What was the Carter administration's reaction to this moment?

• 12:06Speaker 03

  Initially, the Carter administration assumed that the provisional government in Iran would do what they had done before, which is chase the students or the protesters off the grounds and restore the embassy to put it back on its feet. I think hope began to diminish in the first few hours of the event because the Ayatollah, who had not been informed of the takeover of the embassy and who initially ordered that the students be expelled from the embassy grounds, changed his mind. And I think it's because he was advised, because of the great showing in the streets, that this was a moment that the clerics, the mullahs, could use to their political advantage.

• 12:52Lindsay Graham?

  And then I guess let's roll the tape forward a bit. What was the next step that the Carter administration took when it became clear this was a hostage situation?

• 13:00Speaker 03

  Well, when it became clear that it was a hostage situation, the president basically faced a dilemma. And I think he had choices to make. You know, one option would have been to issue an ultimatum to Iran, perhaps prepare for punitive action that would try to force the provisional government or the mullahs to release the hostages. But any one of these options, whether we're talking about pressure or punitive raids, ran the risk of the hostages being imprisoned and executed, which is one of the things that the students said. So emotions were very high in Iran, and I think the Carter administration made the

• 13:39Speaker 03

  decision that rather than try to react immediately to this assault on international diplomacy, that they were going to try to let things cool off and figure out a way to peacefully resolve the problem.

• 13:54Lindsay Graham?

  Did they have some ideas of how to peacefully resolve the problem? What were their first moves?

• 13:58Speaker 03

  Well, they were very much at sea because the things were in such flux in Iran. They were used to dealing, at least for the previous few months, with the officials from the provisional government. But the provisional government collapsed shortly after this hostage crisis began. So at that point, it wasn't clear who they could talk to. It was clear that whoever was controlling the embassy takeover was part of the religious faction in Iran, and this would not have been a faction that the United States had any close ties with. Initially, the Carter administration tried to open an avenue for negotiations.

• 14:39Speaker 03

  A former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and another official made a furtive attempt to establish some kind of dialogue but failed. At least for the first few weeks or months, the Carter administration really was having a hard time figuring out who to talk to, who would be in a position to actually make anything happen.

• 14:59Lindsay Graham?

  You mentioned that the CIA had their interests in Iran, and this is important because the 1953 Iranian coup d'etat, which installed the Shah, the CIA was instrumental in this. So what was the CIA's abiding interest in Iran in 1979?

• 15:15Speaker 03

  I think we have to distinguish between the myth of the CIA's presence in Iran, which was that they were actively supporting the Shah, shoring up his regime, and that after he was deposed, that they were actively plotting to bring him back. In fact, the CIA had very little involvement in propping up the Shah. Their primary mission in Iran was to spy on Soviet Union missile sites. There were a range of spying centers up along the northern border of Iran. And I think the bulk of the work that the CIA did there by the good graces of the Shah

• 15:57Speaker 03

  was to run listening outposts to keep track of the Soviets' nuclear weapons and whatever deployments they were making in that part of the world. So that was the main focus, in fact, of the CIA.

• 16:11Lindsay Graham?

  But to many in Iran, that was not the only thing the CIA was doing there.

• 16:15Speaker 03

  No, clearly, the CIA, largely because of Hollywood, has a much higher profile around the world than it in fact deserves. And so there was this fear that Savak, which was the Shah's secret police, were actually just agents of the CIA and that everything terrible that happened under the Shah's reign, the strings were being pulled by the United States through the CIA. So there was this expectation that the CIA had its fingers in everything in Iran. And in fact, that was not the case. In fact, the strongest argument against that point of view is that the CIA did not see the Shah's downfall coming.

• 16:56Speaker 03

  If you look at their assessments of risk in Iran in that period, there's no mention of the possibility that the Shah might be deposed.

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• 18:19Lindsay Graham?

  In researching your book, you visited Iran a few times, two decades after all of this unfolded. I guess I'd like to know first, what was it like to be in Iran at this time as a journalist?

• 18:31Speaker 03

  It was fascinating and stimulating for me as a journalist. I was learning a lot. I was nervous because I didn't go pretending to be a tourist. I went in as a journalist and I knew I was vulnerable to any action that the state decided to take. As it was, they assigned me a minder. All of the interviews that I conducted were recorded. I presume they were being listened to. So on the one hand, as a journalist, I knew I was being spied upon. But on the other hand, the fellow who they assigned to work with me, who was actually an employee of the Information Ministry, was himself not particularly keen on the regime and was actually helpful to me.

• 19:13Speaker 03

  Helping to find the former hostage takers, helping me to talk to ordinary Iranians. He was more interested in my getting a accurate feel for what was going on in Iran then. I was more interested in what had happened 20 some years earlier. So I was focused on the past and he was focused on the present. I will say too, that the Iranian people, the Average Iranian person, people I would meet on the street or in restaurants or in the hotels were delighted to help me. They were very friendly, very warm. It would tell me how much they missed seeing Americans in Iran. You remember, America had a large presence in Iran for many years previous. So people couldn't have been nicer to me

• 19:55Speaker 03

  and made it very clear to me, at least many of the ones that I met, that they were not particularly keen on the Islamic rule.

• 20:03Lindsay Graham?

  Did you ever feel like you were in danger?

• 20:07Speaker 03

  I did not. You know, I felt more like that was a possibility, but at the time, I didn't know of an instance where a foreign journalist had been thrown into a veen prison. In the years since, that's happened a number of times, but either I was naive and ignorant or tensions had eased somewhat, but I didn't really feel any danger.

• 20:29Lindsay Graham?

  Now, during your visits, I understand you went to the former US Embassy in Tehran. What was that like?

• 20:35Speaker 03

  Well, it's easy to find. It's a big complex right in the middle of Tehran. Part of it, the old Chancery Building, has been turned into an anti-American museum. I toured it, and that gave me an opportunity to walk around the grounds and picture the places that I was going to be writing about in the book. One of the big exhibits in the anti-American museum is about the takeover of the embassy, and they have pieces of the wreckage of the planes and helicopters that were destroyed in the desert in the failed rescue mission. They have framed top-secret documents that were seized from the vault at the embassy, most of which were very mundane things, nothing terribly interesting, but which looked really

• 21:20Speaker 03

  important because they have "top secret" stamped on them. The museum itself was dedicated to exposing American atrocities all over the world, so there was plenty of other stuff there to take in.

• 21:32Lindsay Graham?

  As part of your research, you tracked down several of the hostage takers themselves, now middle-aged people. But I wanted to ask you about a few of them, starting with one called Ibrahim. How did he reflect on his role in the hostage-taking when you interviewed him in 2003?

• 21:48Speaker 03

  Well, Ibrahim Azgarzadeh has become a fairly prominent figure in Iran and a dissident figure. He was more secular, even though he had been a part of the Islamic student movement when he was a young man. He had come, over the years, to view the takeover of the embassy as a big mistake. In fact, had run for office. He had briefly been either imprisoned or sentenced to confinement at home. So he had a dicey relationship with the regime and a very courageous man. And he spoke to me very candidly about his early involvement in the takeover of the embassy and how he very quickly felt that it was

• 22:28Speaker 03

  being turned into something much larger and different than what he had originally imagined.

• 22:34Lindsay Graham?

  I'd be interested to hear what he tried to do in order to, I guess, reorient Iran into the vision he had after the hostage-taking.

• 22:43Speaker 03

  So he was a prominent dissident voice in Iran. He was not, at least overtly religious. He was not a cleric. He was a secular gentleman, very smart, very much believing that Iran should have a Western-style democracy. He was one of those who emphasized to me how the original intent of the takeover was much more akin to what had happened at Columbia University in the United States, to hold a protest. So he was alarmed as what he thought would be a two- or three-day sit-in turned into this high-powered, long-term hostage-taking. I should add, too, that, you know, I've mentioned several times that

• 23:26Speaker 03

  the mullahs who backed the takeover of the embassy used this to leverage themselves into power. And the way that they did it was by perpetrating the myth that the United States Embassy was actively plotting to return the And so during the period, at least in the first few months of the embassy takeover, the students would hold press conferences where they would flash papers that they had seized from desks or from safes in the embassy. And if there were names of prominent politicians, Iranian politicians, who had met with American officials, and they were not part of the Mullah's party, these were the more secular politicians who were willing to talk to the United States

• 24:11Speaker 03

  or willing to talk to the West, they were accused of being traitors to the revolution. And many of them went to prison and many were executed. So this turned into a very ugly moment where the religious leaders were able to manufacture propaganda used to destroy their political enemies.

• 24:30Lindsay Graham?

  You interviewed another participant, the spokesperson for the hostage takers nicknamed Mother Mary. We didn't really cover her in our series. Can you tell us who she was and how she got involved in this event?

• 24:41Speaker 03

  Her name was Niloufar Ebtikar. She is an Iranian woman who was raised in Philadelphia in the United States for the first five years of her life because her father was taking part in an international studies program at the University of Pennsylvania. So she happened to speak flawless American accented English. So when the students took over the embassy, Niloufar, who had become a religious zealot, joined the students and became their spokesman because they were holding these press conferences, both to achieve their purposes inside of Iran, but also to speak to the world. She would appear on news broadcasts about the embassy

• 25:24Speaker 03

  takeover, lecturing Americans in her very American English about how terrible the Great Satan was. She became a memorable figure, certainly in the United States.

• 25:36Lindsay Graham?

  In your conversations with her, how did she reflect on her involvement all these years later?

• 25:40Speaker 03

  She was very proud of it. She had, like many of the hostage takers, risen to prominence in Iran. In fact, she was one of the vice presidents. There are a number of vice presidents in the Iranian government. She was the vice president in charge of environmental protection. So she was a powerful figure. She was dressed like a nun, and she was very, very proud of her role in taking over the American embassy and basically continued to spout the same myth about the takeover of the embassy, how it had thwarted the CIA plot, how the United States was trying to bring the Shah back, all of which I knew to be untrue and which frankly, I think she

• 26:22Speaker 03

  probably knows is untrue, but is nevertheless the official line. Leela Far was the only one of the hostage takers who had had any real experience living in the United States, and so she was considered to be kind of the expert on the United States and apparently came to believe that about herself because she lectured me at some length about the United States as if it was a place that I hadn't been born in and grown up in. And in fact, at one point asked me what branch of the military I served in. And I told her, well, I'm a journalist and I've never served in the military. And she told me to my face, I know you're lying because all American men have to serve in the military for a number of years.

• 27:07Speaker 03

  And I said, okay, not true, but what do you say to somebody who seems to know more about your own country than you do?

• 27:16Lindsay Graham?

  Now, in the midst of this frightening tragedy, there were perhaps some lighter moments. One of the unusual things that happened among some of the hostage takers was that they met their spouses. The spokeswoman met and married another hostage taker who you interviewed, Mohammed Hashemi. What can you tell us about them?

• 27:34Speaker 03

  They were young people. These were college-age students who were thrown together in a very passionate moment for the country, who believed that they were doing something really historic and wonderful, and who ended up basically having to live together at the embassy for many, many months. I'm sure that they got to go home, unlike the American hostages, and take breaks. But they were thrown together and became a very close-knit unit. And I think whenever you get a group of young people who are thrown together in a situation like that, that romance blooms. In this case, Mohammad Hashemi had been one of the instigators of the takeover, and he and Yulfa Abdiqar became a couple, and in fact, married and

• 28:19Speaker 03

  were still married when I visited in Iran. In fact, they had invested in some resort on the Black Sea, and Mohammad Hashemi proposed to me the idea that maybe they could invite back some of the former American hostages to take advantage of this new resort that they were building. So they saw an entrepreneurial opportunity.

• 28:41Lindsay Graham?

  Well, while romance bloomed between some, Americans were held hostage in extraordinary circumstances. It was never really part of the hostage-takers' plan to torture any of the American embassy workers, but some hostages were tortured. Did you speak to any of the hostage-takers about their treatment of the hostages?

• 29:02Speaker 03

  I did, yes. I remember Ibrahim Azgarzadeh was embarrassed about what had happened. He felt that the protests that he had imagined lasting a couple of days had gotten out of control from the very beginning. And so people became involved in guarding the hostages and caring for the hostages, feeding them, questioning them, who had other motives. So, you know, Mohammad Hashemi, for instance, who later on became an important figure in the information ministry in Iran, was involved in questioning the hostages. And he would have supported the strong interrogation methods that were used particularly against those who they They suspected of being in the CIA.

• 29:47Speaker 03

  And in some cases, those men were tortured in the conventional sense that they were whipped. They were held in abominable conditions. They were lined up against the wall and told they were going to be executed. They were constantly threatened with execution. So it was something that evolved as the hostage taking grew increasingly serious over time.

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• 32:24Lindsay Graham?

  We've talked a little bit about the crisis as it unfolded in Iran, but let's turn to how the American people viewed the events. In your book, you talk about this 15-month hostage crisis as being a perfect story for TV. What did you mean by that?

• 32:39Speaker 03

  You had huge crowds of people demonstrating outside the American Embassy in Tehran, chanting "Death to America." You had the students who held a number of events where they would exhibit the hostages and who held press conferences where they made their outrageous claims about what these embassy workers had been up to. What was going on in Tehran was very dramatic. It was, I think, a humiliation for the American government and for the American people. We were considered to be one of the superpowers in the world, and yet here, a group of students in Iran had taken an entire embassy and held it hostage, and there appeared to be nothing that the United States could do about it.

• 33:23Speaker 03

  The thing about the television in the United States is that, you know, television in the United States back in the 1970s, or 1979, 1980, you had the big broadcast networks. And then each of these broadcast networks had affiliates in just about every major city in the United States. And when you have 53 or more hostages, you had hostages from just about every part of America. So, local television stations all had their own hostage, and they could go out and interview the families of that hostage. They could follow along the story from day to day and week to week. So, it created this kind of perfect storm of television coverage, and people were glued to it because it was a dramatic moment.

• 34:08Speaker 03

  The United States was being humiliated. There was this expectation that something really big was going to happen, possibly. And you had the Carter administration basically at loose ends with no real way of resolving it.

• 34:23Lindsay Graham?

  That's a beautiful segue to my next question because President Carter reluctantly did try to resolve it with a rescue attempt, which we know failed. What went wrong?

• 34:32Speaker 03

  Well, the idea was to fly eight helicopters to a rendezvous point in the desert well outside of Tehran, at which point the helicopters, which had no capability of being refueled in flight at that point, would be out of gas. So they had to rendezvous in the desert with big aircraft carrying oil and actually carrying the Delta Force operators who would do the rescue mission. So the goal was to land eight helicopters in the desert, refuel, load the rescue force on the helicopters, and then fly the helicopters to hiding places just outside of the city before dawn. And at nightfall, the rescue force would load on

• 35:15Speaker 03

  trucks, drive into the city, attack the embassy, rescue the hostages, which for them, frankly, would not have been a terribly difficult task because these hostages were being held by amateurs and Delta Force, I think, would have overpowered them rapidly. So the idea was to get the hostages, who the hostage chakres had made the mistake of keeping all in the same place at the embassy, blow a hole in the wall, march them across the street to a soccer stadium, strongpoint the soccer stadium, and then fly these helicopters, which had been kept in hiding all day, fly them into the soccer stadium, load the hostages and the rescue force on the helicopters, then fly them out to a nearby airstrip,

• 35:59Speaker 03

  which a battalion of Army Rangers was going to raid and seize. So, once they were at the airport, they would fly them out of the country. That was the way the thing was supposed to go on paper.

• 36:12Lindsay Graham?

  And then how did it go?

• 36:13Speaker 03

  It was a disaster. The eight helicopters encountered problems flying across the desert. Iran's desert is this very fine sand, more like dust. And these columns of dust called haboobs, dust storms, were not uncommon. And so a number of these helicopters ran into these huge dust storms. As a result, they began to experience mechanical failure. One of the helicopters actually had to sit down. They gave up on the machine, loaded themselves on another helicopter and continued. Another helicopter turned back. He got to the point where he could either press on, knowing that his engines were about to give out because of the dust clogging the rotors. And so he made the decision to head back to the aircraft carriers.

• 36:59Speaker 03

  So now they were down to just six helicopters. And then one of the helicopters that made it to the rendezvous point was so damaged by exposure to this dust storm that the pilot said that it could not be flown safely. So now they're down to five helicopters. So the decision was made, and it was an automatic decision, we're going to pull out. But what happened was, as the helicopters took off to return to the aircraft carrier, one of them clipped one of the fixed wing tankers that had landed in the desert, and it exploded, killing eight of the service members there, crashing the helicopter, at which point any hope of maintaining secrecy was gone.

• 37:42Speaker 03

  The wreckage of these planes and the bodies had to be left in the desert. And the remaining men in helicopters basically flew out of Iran, knowing that the mission that they had envisioned was never going to happen.

• 37:54Lindsay Graham?

  And this mission's failure made what was already a political debacle even worse. How did Ronald Reagan use the hostage crisis in his campaigning against Jimmy Carter?

• 38:06Speaker 03

  When you do something like this, you run a huge risk. If it fails, you are going to look like an incompetent. You are going to look like somebody who doesn't know how to use American power properly. Ronald Reagan was able to portray Jimmy Carter as a weak president, as someone who was overmatched by this little country of Iran. Carter, I think, to his credit, had made trying to keep the hostages alive his major priority. I don't think every president would have done that, but he seemed to realize that actions that might make the American people feel good or that might make him look good, like bombing

• 38:45Speaker 03

  missions in Iran or threats, invasion, whatever, would almost certainly get the hostages killed. And so he was willing, basically, to take a beating. And he tried many different avenues to open negotiations with the Iranians, trying to figure out who would be sufficiently in charge to actually reach a deal and make something happen. And every time they got close, the mullahs would pull the rug out from under. And I think those around Carter, including President Carter himself, understood when the rescue mission failed, that their chances of reelection were very small. So I don't fault them for what they did. I think they tried everything that they could.

• 39:26Speaker 03

  The efforts that they made ultimately bore fruit because they did, in December of 1979, more than a year after the takeover, negotiated a deal to release the hostages, all of whom were in good shape, in return only for giving Iran back money that had been seized when the embassy was taken. And that was negotiated by the Carter administration. The Iranian students, to spite Carter, refused to release the hostages and sign off on the deal, literally until the day that Ronald Reagan was inaugurated.

• 40:03Lindsay Graham?

  Mark Bowden, thank you so much for talking with me today on American History Tellers.

• 40:07Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me.

• 40:09Lindsay Graham?

  That was my conversation with Mark Bowden, author of Guests of the Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis, The First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam.

• 40:19Lindsay Graham?

  From Wondery, this is the fourth and final episode of our series on the Carter Years for American History Tellers. In our next season, at the turn of the 20th century, President Teddy Roosevelt and other politicians, activists, and journalists turn their attention to the problems caused by rapid industrialization, urbanization, and sweeping corruption. Their efforts bring about new consumer protections, labor reforms, and business regulations, expanding the power and scope of the federal government in a period called the Progressive Era.

• 40:52Lindsay Graham?

  American History Tellers is only possible because of listeners like you, so thank you. And don't miss an episode. Be sure to follow American History Tellers on Audible or wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts. And to find out more about me, including my other podcasts, my live show, the history tours I'm arranging, and all sorts of other things, go to historyishuman.com. That's historyishuman.com.

• 41:29Lindsay Graham?

  American History Tellers is hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham, for Airship. Sound design by Molly Bach. Supervising sound designer, Matthew Filler. Music by Thrum. This episode was produced by Polly Stryker and Alida Rosansky. Our senior interview producer is Peter Arkuny. Managing producer, Desi Blalock. Senior managing producer is Callum Pluse. Senior producer, Andy Herman. Executive producers are Jenny Lauer Beckman, Marshall Louie, and Aaron O'Flaherty for Wondery.

• 42:03Lindsay Graham?

  By 1779, Benedict Arnold had sacrificed more for the Revolution than almost any other man in America. One of George Washington's most effective commanders, he had nearly lost a leg in the Second Battle of Saratoga. But in return, Arnold believed he had been humiliated by Congress and cheated of his glory by lesser men, so he decided to make them pay. Hi, I'm Lindsay Graham, the host of the podcast American Scandal. We bring to life some of the biggest controversies in U.S. history. Presidential lies, environmental disasters, corporate fraud. In our latest series, Benedict Arnold turns his back on his comrades in the Continental Army and secretly defects to the British. With the help of his wife, he plots to hand over the most important colonial fortress

• 42:47Lindsay Graham?

  to the enemy and doom the revolution he once served. Follow American Scandal wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge all episodes of American Scandal early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.