Hostage to Khomeini Robert Dreyfuss
Publisher:

They grew up in Dearborn in the 1980s during a religious revival among Lebanese Shias that developed after the Iranian revolution in 1979. Just finished reading Robert Dreyfuss' Hostage to Khomeini. For “their audacious initiative,” this small band of Islamist students, the Intelligentsia obtained “unconditional support of Imam Khomeini”. Embassy in Iran, taking the 52 diplomats hostage. On November 4, 1979, the 15th anniversary of his exile, students stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took the staff hostage. Bowden has produced an in-depth study of the 444-day hostage taking, which included mock executions and interrogations, run by a wildly paranoid group of Khomeini followers. The Ayatollah Khomeini made no comment on the occupation for several days, waiting first to gauge American reaction to the hostage taking, which he feared might spur military action. Available intelligence suggested that most, if not all, of the Americans were held hostage by members of Hezbollah, a fundamentalist Shiite terrorist group with links to the regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini. According to Iranian researcher Fara Mansoor, the U.S.-Iran hostage crisis was not a spontaneous act by Iranian mobs or a senseless act devised solely by the Khomeini regime. That's apparent in the lives of the Amen sisters. From the 60 Minutes site, his interview with the Ayatollah Khomeini during the hostage crisis: Bookmark and Share. During their 444 days in captivity, the remaining 52 hostages were put on display in front of television cameras, often blindfolded. In November of 1979, Iranian students broke into the U.S. Khomeini was not informed before the takeover, it is believed that if he had been he would have supported his government and stopped the takeover. That “Ayatollah Khomeini and Ronald Reagan had organized a clandestine negotiation … which prevented the attempts by myself and then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter to free the hostages before the 1980 U.S. It's an interesting book, or at least the first half of it certainly is. Legendary CBS newsman Mike Wallace died this weekend at the age of 93.