The First Battle in an Ongoing War

There are many good reasons to read Mark Bowden's authoritative account of the seizure of the American Embassy in Tehran and the subsequent hostage crisis that electrified and, ultimately, inflamed the nation. The most compelling and relevant ones concern the profound failure of American intelligence that preceded the takeover and the hard-nosed but fair analysis of the Carter administration's handling of the crisis.

The talented author of "Black Hawk Down," Mr. Bowden knows his way around the nonfiction narrative form, and his latest, "Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America's War With Militant Islam" (Atlantic Monthly Press, 680 pages, $26), is an engrossing, even entertaining, read.But Mr.Bowden has more on his mind than a simple story, and it is clear that he sees the Iran hostage crisis as Round 1 in a long war that continues to play out today in the streets of Baghdad and Kabul.

In an early passage that illustrates both the massive intelligence failure and what might be termed President Carter's core competencies, Mr. Bowden describes a glittering state dinner in the shah's Tehran: "On New Year's Eve in 1977,Carter had toasted the shah of Iran at a state dinner in Tehran, calling him 'an island of stability' in the region. He also saluted the ruler's 'wisdom,' 'judgment,' 'sensitivity,' and 'insight.'"

Months later, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was forced to flee his country in a bloody uprising that gave the contemporary world its first look at what the Islamic world was like in the Middle Ages: the forbidding mullahs, the chador, the grim denunciations of modernity,the resentments and obvious defensiveness associated with feelings of inferiority.

How did we not see this coming? One answer is found on page 193:

Sen. Frank Church ... whose committee hearings had famously exposed CIA excesses just a few years before and prompted severe restrictions on intelligence-gathering methods, now complained about the dearth of intelligence. 'It's extremely frustrating and difficult to find the [new Iranian] government, or determine who speaks with authority.'

If Senator Church was feeling frustrated then, he would feel even worse when he was swept from office in the conservative revolution already beginning to bubble.

Indeed, six months before the shah was given the heave-ho, a CIA analysis confidently concluded that Iran was "not in a revolutionary or even a pre-revolutionary situation." If the CIA had had a few more agents on the ground who could speak Farsi, it might have seen an alliance forming between middle-class secular intellectuals who opposed the shah for his tyranny and the clerics who wanted to replace his tyranny with their own. Predictably, the secularists didn't realize they had struck the wrong bargain until it was too late,and by that time it was either get that turban out of mothballs or head for the hills.

To hear the shah hold forth in his prime, you would have thought the Pahlavi dynasty had a better pedigree than that of the Windsors. In truth, his father first seized power in a coup in 1925 and ruled until Britain and the Soviet Union ousted him for siding with Hitler during World War II. His son got the job when Teddy Roosevelt's grandson, Kermit, then a Tehran-based spook, staged another coup after an elected government nationalized the Anglo-Iran Oil Company. Mr. Bowden gives a brisk accounting of all this; one of his strengths as a writer is his ability to make such arcane episodes accessible to the average reader.

Another strength is his fair-mindedness. No Carter-hater, he seems to view the president as a man whose preoccupations and skills were ill-suited to the extraordinarily difficult situation in which he found himself. But facts are facts, and even Mr. Bowden is occasionally forced to acknowledge this emperor's clothing deficit.

"Already Jimmy Carter had demonstrated a gift for making Americans feel bad," he notes on the eve of one of Mr. Carter's most calamitous initiatives. "In the most ill-considered idea in the history of public relations, Carter devised the 'misery index' to gauge the national mood, as inflation and rising oil prices battered household income."

Mr. Bowden's account excels at describing the unfolding drama of the individual hostages, many of whom he interviewed.Their torment, boredom, coping strategies, and emotional and spiritual journeys are handled with aplomb. The famously abortive rescue mission that resulted in the death of eight men and the loss of seven helicopters and one transport plane in the desert is a pounding mini-narrative that manages to be both gripping and suspenseful. And the visiting-firemen lefties from the West - Ramsey Clark, William Sloane Coffin, Bishop Thomas Gumbleton et al. - who periodically drop in to comfort the afflicted and pose for the cameras are framed appropriately.

Last, but certainly not least, are the bad guys - the student revolutionaries, the mullahs, and the Iranian politicians they managed like so many puppets on a string. Mr. Bowden was able to visit quite a few of those students, as well as ordinary Iranian citizens, in writing this book. He concludes that many of the participants and witnesses have had second thoughts about the wisdom of their hostage-taking. His evidence of this is that the current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, denies that he was among the student ringleaders even though he doesn't hesitate to threaten Israel with extinction and is eager to acquire a nuclear bomb. As for Mr. Ahmadinejad's denial of participation, Mr. Bowden writes, "Without any doubt, Ahmadinejad was one of the central players in the group that seized the embassy and held hostages."

This is a powerful and probably definitive history that deserves a large audience.