The Desert Angel
Before dawn Mohammad Hashemi prepared himself to
die. He washed according to ritual, then knelt in his
dormitory room facing southwest toward Mecca, bent his head
to the floor, and prayed the prayer for martyrdom. After
that the stout, bushy-haired young man with the thick beard
tucked a handgun in his belt, pulled on a heavy sweater, and
set out through the half darkness for the secret meeting.
It was, in Iran, the thirteenth day of Aban in the
year 1358. The old Zoroastrian calendar had been resurrected
a half century earlier by the first self-appointed shah in
the Pahlavi line, Reza Khan, in an effort to graft his royal
pretensions to the nation’s ancient traditions. That
flirtation with Persia’s gods and bearded prophets had
backfired, sprung up like an uncorked genie in the previous
ten months to unseat his son and the whole presumptuous
dynasty. Aban is Persia’s old water spirit, a bringer of
rebirth and renewal to desert lands, and the mist wetting
the windows of high-rises and squeaking on the windshields
of early traffic in this city of more than five million was
a kept promise, an ancient visitation, the punctual return
of a familiar and welcome angel. As it crept downhill
through the sprawling capital and across the gray campus of
Amir Kabir University, where Hashemi hurried to his meeting,
Iran was in tumult, in mid-revolution, caught in a struggle
between present and past. Towering cranes posed like
skeletal birds at irregular intervals over the city’s low
roofline, stiff sentinels at construction sites stranded in
the violent shift of political climate. The fine rain gently
blackened concrete and spotted dust in the canals called
jubes on both sides of every street, fanning out
like veins. Moisture haloed the glow from streetlamps.
Hashemi was supposed to be a third-year physics
major, but for him, as for so many of Tehran’s students, the
politics of the street had supplanted study. He hadn’t been
to a class since the uprising had begun more than a year
ago. It was a heady time to be young in Iran, on the front
lines of change. They felt as though they were shaping not
only their own futures but the future of their country and
the world. They had overthrown a tyrant. Destiny or, as
Hashemi saw it, the will of Allah was guiding them. The word
on campus was, “We dealt with the shah and the United States
is next!”
Few of the hundred or so converging from campuses
all over the city on Amir Kabir’s School of Mechanics that
morning knew why they were gathering. Something big was
planned, but just what was known only to activist leaders
like Hashemi. Shortly after six, standing before an eager
crowded room, he spread out on a long table sketches of the
U.S. embassy, crude renderings of the mission’s compound
just a few blocks west. He and others had been scouting the
target for more than a week, watching from the rooftops of
tall buildings across the side streets, riding past on the
upper floor of two-decker buses that rolled along
Takht-e-Jamshid Avenue in front, and waiting in the long
lines outside the embassy’s newly opened consulate. The
drawings showed the various gates, guard posts, and
buildings, the largest being the chancery, the embassy’s
primary office building; the bunkerlike consulate; and the
airy two-story white mansion that served as home for the
American ambassador. There was a murmur of satisfaction and
excitement in the crowd as Hashemi announced they were going
to lay siege to the place.
In retrospect, it was all too predictable. An
operating American embassy in the heart of revolutionary
Iran’s capital was too much for Tehran’s aroused citizenry
to bear. It had to go. It was a symbol of everything the
nascent upheaval hated and feared. Washington’s
underestimation of the danger was just part of a larger
failure; it had not foreseen the gathering threat to its
longtime Cold War ally Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the now
reviled, self-exiled shah. A CIA analysis in August 1978,
just six months before Pahlavi fled Iran for good, had
concluded that the country “is not in a revolutionary or
even a prerevolutionary situation.” A year and a revolution
later America was still underestimating the power and vision
of the mullahs behind it. Like most of the great turning
points in history, it was obvious and yet no one saw it
coming.
The capture of the U.S. embassy in Tehran was a
glimpse of something new and bewildering. It was the first
battle in America’s war against militant Islam, a conflict
that would eventually engage much of the world. Iran’s
revolution wasn’t just a localized power struggle; it had
tapped a subterranean ocean of Islamist outrage. For half a
century the traditionbound peoples of the Middle and Near
East, owning most of the world’s oil resources, had been
regarded as little more than valuable pawns in a worldwide
competition between capitalist democracy and communist
dictatorship. In the Arab states, the United States had
thrown its weight behind conservative Sunni regimes, and in
Iran behind Pahlavi, who stood as a bulwark against Soviet
expansionism in the region. As the two great powers saw it,
the Cold War would determine the shape of the world; all
other perspectives, those from the so-called Third World,
were irrelevant, or important only insofar as they
influenced the primary struggle. An ignored but growing
vision in the Middle East, nurtured in mosque and madrasah
but considered quaint or backward by the Western world and
even by many wealthy, well-educated Arabs and Persians, saw
little difference between the great powers. Both were
infidels, godless exploiters, uprooting centuries of
tradition and trampling sacred ground in heedless pursuit of
wealth and power. They were twin devils of modernity. The
Islamist alternative they foresaw was an old twist on a
familiar twentieth-century theme: totalitarianism rooted in
divine revelation. It would take many years for the movement
to be clearly seen, but the takeover of the embassy in
Tehran offered an early glimpse. It was the first time
America would hear itself called the “Great Satan.”
How and why did it happen? Who were the Iranian
protesters who swarmed over the embassy walls that day, and
what were they trying to accomplish? Who were the powers
behind them, so heedless of age-old privileges of
international diplomacy? What were their motives? Why was
the United States so surprised by the event and so
embarrassingly powerless to counter it? How justified were
the Iranian fears that motivated it? How did one of the
triumphs of Western freedom and technology, a truly global
news media, become a tool to further an Islamo-fascist
agenda, narrowly focusing the attention of the world on
fifty-two helpless, captive diplomats, hijacking the policy
agenda of America for more than a year, helping to bring
down the presidency of Jimmy Carter, and leveraging a
radical fundamentalist regime in Iran into lasting power?
Excerpted from Guests of the Ayatollah
by Mark Bowden. Copyright © 2006, Mark Bowden. All rights
reserved.