Initially 66 Americans were taken hostage when the U.S. embassy was stormed, but shortly after 13 were released and then another for health reasons so that a total of 52 we held captive for the 444 day ordeal.
There were actually many Americans in Iran at the time of this crisis. Many were missionaries, including a friend with whom I painted apartments in Minneapolis a couple years after. Dennis and his family sold their house in exchange for two Persian rugs and a gold belt, hurriedly leaving the country by escaping into Turkey.
Not once did I ever hear the story of how the Shah came into power 26 years earlier. Why were Americans so ignorant about this backstory?
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It was David Halberstam's The Fifties that opened my eyes regarding the extent of U.S. meddling in foreign affairs. Though I, like many, were aware of our country's bad behavior in places like Chile, Central America and Vietnam, Halberstam gets beneath the surface to where the seeds were first planted. Iran was among the first in a series of clandestine interventions in which leaders were overthrown so that we could install our own puppets.
Here's a short list of countries we messed with in the 1950s and 60s: Egypt, Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Lebanon, Iraq, Cuba, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Laos, Dominican Republic, South Vietnam, Brazil, and Indonesia, among others. According to one source, the U.S. made 66 regime change attempts during the Cold War, succeeding in 26 of these. 75% of our successes were by means of election interference.
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I mention all of the above in order to point out that the media failed us by not informing us of the backstory regarding how the Shah of Iran gained power in the first place. The CIA, in collaboration with British intelligence (Operation Ajax), orchestrated the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh after he nationalized Iran’s oil industry.
This preface from Stephen Kinzer's All the Shah's Men shows how our CIA-funded & generated 1953 coup affected the people themselves. Were they happier afterwards?
One day I attended a book party for an older Iranian woman who had written her memoirs. She spoke for an hour about her eventful life. Although she never touched on politics, she mentioned in passing that her family was related to the family of Mohammad Mossadegh, who served as prime minister of Iran for twenty-six months in the early 1950s and was overthrown in a coup d'etat staged by the Central Intelligence Agency.
After she finished speaking, I couldn't resist the temptation to ask a question. "You mentioned Mossadegh," I said. "What do you remember, or what can you tell us, about the coup against him?" She immediately became agitated and animated.
"Why did you Americans do that terrible thing?" she cried out. "We always loved America. To us, America was the great country, the perfect country, the country that helped us while other coun- tries were exploiting us. But after that moment, no one in Iran ever trusted the United States again. I can tell you for sure that if you had not done that thing, you would never have had that problem of hostages being taken in your embassy in Tehran. All your trouble started in 1953. Why, why did you do it?"
This outburst reflected a great gap in knowledge and understanding.
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This week, American journalist Seymour Hersh wrote about the Biden administration's blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea. The media repeated bogus claims from Washington like, "We have no idea who would do such a thing" and "Maybe the Russians did it." Reading the Hersh piece brought to mind the above memories regarding the Shah's downfall.
As my mother frequently said, "Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive."
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