Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis by Mark Bowden Read Free Book Online

men stepped into an elevator to go upstairs and their car abruptly halted in mid-ascent. It went completely black inside. Trapped for more than an hour, they held their meeting right there in the dark. Ahern learned only later that he had walked past a large sign in Farsi on the apartment house front door warning of a power shutdown at that hour. In the four months since he’d arrived, he had mostly managed to reestablish links with people who had spied for the agency in the past. His file was thin, but it was important that none of it fall into the wrong hands. The information was ruinous to his own meager efforts, embarrassing to the United States, and potentially catastrophic (even fatal) to the Iranians involved. Ahern walked down the hall to the other end of the building, to the communications vault, and began feeding his files into the disintegrator, a drum-shaped device with a metal feeding chute like a mail slot. It had blades, grinders, and chemicals inside that tore, pulverized, and deconstructed documents and electronic parts, rendering all into a fine, dry, gray-blue ash. The machine made such a terrible racket that users were supposed to wear earplugs to protect their hearing. For now, Ahern began feeding short stacks of paper into it. The machine worked methodically but slowly, and kept jamming, so Ahern started feeding some of his files into a shredder that cut the paper into long, thin, vertical strips.
    In his office over by the motor pool, Barry Rosen, the embassy’s press attaché, was closest to the demonstration and among the first to see Iranians coming over the walls. He was working on a ridiculous directive from his superiors in the International Communications Agency (ICA) in Washington, who wanted him to draw up a chart of the current power structure in Iran. Were they kidding? Nobody he knew had a clear idea of what was going on. Rosen had a better fix than most Americans; he spoke Farsi and had worked in Iran as a Peace Corps volunteer a decade ago. He had networks of friends all over the country. He had been in Tehran on this ICA tour for nearly a year, through the fall of the shah, the return of Khomeini, the February siege of the U.S. embassy, when he had briefly been held hostage, to the current provisional government phase and ongoing struggle to form a more permanent state. This year on the ground had made him, like Metrinko and Limbert, one of the old heads at the embassy at age thirty-five. But the little he knew only underscored how much he didn’t. Iran was like the intricate designs on its famous Persian rugs: the closer you looked the harder it was to discern a pattern.
    Nevertheless, after attending the morning meeting, he dutifully inserted paper in his typewriter and started banging out a response. When the demonstration outside grew louder he got up from his desk and went into his outer office to stand with his secretary and watch out the window. The demonstrators were all very young, and he noticed many of them had plastic-covered placards around their necks with photos of Khomeini. As he watched, the mob swelled rapidly.
    Then a few of the young men began scaling the front gates. Rosen locked the door to his outer office and slid a locking metal bar into place. He told his secretary, Mary, not to open the door for anyone.
    Then he ran back to his inner office and began flipping through his files looking for classified documents to destroy. Things were happening fast. He heard some of his colleagues being taken from their offices down the hall. Rosen was not unduly concerned. When it had happened nine months earlier he had been convinced as he was led out into the tear-gas-filled compound that he was going to be shot. When he had not been, along with the enormous sense of relief came a reduced fear of the demonstrators. Their bark was worse than their bite. He assumed this would be another rude interruption; his biggest concern was that it might convince Washington to close the