American Experience: "Taken Hostage," part 1 (WGBH, PBS, aired. November 14, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I decided to watch a very interesting first half of a two-part American Experience program on PBS called “Taken Hostage” on the 1989-1981 Iranian hostage crisis that did so much to change the world – including making then-President Jimmy Carter look even more like a hopeless dolt than he had before and paving the way for Ronald Reagan to defeat him in the 1980 election. The first part of the show was actually a history of U.S.-Iran relations from the end of World War II to November 4, 1979, when the Iranian student group that actually took the U.S. embassy and held the hostages acted. During the hostage crisis, many Americans were asking the question, “Why do the Iranians hate us?” This show goes a long way to answering that question. The key turning point in U.S.-Iran relations happened in 1953, when Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh was overthrown in a coup d’état sponsored by the CIA nad its British equivalent, MI-6. Mossadegh had taken power in a free election in 1951 and was a liberal reformer who was determined to regain control of Iran’s natural resources, particularly its oil. At the time Iranian oil was controlled by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (originally the “Anglo-Persian Oil Company,” after Iran’s historical name, Persia), which built the world’s largest refinery to that time at Abadan, Iran. In 1946 the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company launched the British Princess, the world’s then-largest oil supertanker, and the real British Princess, Elizabeth, came to Iran to launch it six years before she became Queen Just the name “Anglo-Iranian,” in which the British gave themselves top billing, says all you need to know about the enterprise and the way it ran itself. It acted as a colonial enclave in the middle of what was still a Third World country, and Anglo-Iranian Oil Company personnel, especially the executives, enjoyed all the perks Iranian oil revenues could pay for. They lived in a gated community with five-star restaurants and swimming pools, while just outside the gates ordinary Iranians scrounged for food. Mossadegh’s election had been greeted warmly by then-U.S. President Harry Truman, especially since, like Ho Chi Minh, Mossadegh had sought to co-opt the rhetoric of the American Revolution (against the same country, Great Britain, that was then colonizing Iran by proxy through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company).

Unfortunately, Truman’s term ran out just as Mossadegh got the Iranian Parliament to pass – unanimously – a bill to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The company appealed to the British government, who in turn appealed to the CIA, and the CIA and MI-6 sponsored a coup that included bribing prominent mullahs to preach sermons denouncing Mossadegh and claiming he was a British agent, a drug addict and a homosexual. (It’s fascinating how often hatred and prejudice against Gay people comes up in these stories.) One of the most interesting parts of the documentary was the footage of Mossadegh trying to rally support from Western nations by speaking to them in French, which might have been the only Western language he knew. During Mossadegh’s term in office the Shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi – who had taken the throne in 1941 after the abdication of his father, Reza Pahlavi – had remained on the throne but was basically just a figurehead, like the British monarch, giving formal assent to the measures passed by the Iranian parliament but not with any real power. Instead the CIA- and MI-6-backed coup transformed the Shah into an absolute dictator. The CIA helped train the Shah’s secret police force, SAVAK, who in its intrusiveness into the lives of ordinary Iranians rivaled the East German STASI and other secret police forces in Eastern Europe. The Shah became a linchpin of American foreign policy in the Middle East, and Iran and Saudi Arabia became known as the “Two Pillars” (actually there were three, including Israel) bolstering American interests in the region, including maintaining a steady flow of relatively cheap oil to the American market.

In 1967 the Shah held his own coronation and bestowed on himself the title “Shahnashah” – literally “king of kings” – and four years later, in 1971, he decided to host an absolutely insane party for the world’s leaders to celebrate the 2,500th anniversary of his nation’s founding under Cyrus the Great, first Emperor of Persia. He held it in the ancient city of Persepolis, capital of the Persian Empire, and literally no expense was spared. (The cost estimates range from $11 million to $120 million.) Among the Shah’s crazier ideas for this party was importing 50 songbirds from Europe to serenade the guests with real-life birdsong. Not surprisingly, the songbirds did not survive very long in the desert climate of Iran. While Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip didn’t go this time, citing security concerns, Britain was represented by Princess Anne and her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh. Among the royals who did go were Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, Frederick IX of Denmark, Baudouin of Belgium, Hussein of Jordan, Mahendra of Nepal, Olaf of Norway, Konstantinos II of Greece, Musahiban Abdul Wali Khan of Afghanistan, Moshoeshoe II of Lesotho, Turku Abdul Hakim of Malaysia, Franz Josef II of Lichtenstein, Prince Rainier III (and his U.S.-born wife, former movie star Grace Kelly) of Monaco, Grand Duke Jean of Luxembourg, Prince Bernhard of The Netherlands, Crown Prince Carl Gustaf of Sweden, Prince Juan Carlos of Spain, Prince Victor Emmanuel of Italy, Prince Takahito of Japan, Prince Bahnubandhu Yugala of Thailand, Prince Moulay Abdallah of Morocco, the sultan of Oman, the sheikh of Abu Dhabi and the emirs of Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait. Then-Vice-President Spiro Agnew represented the United States, and among the other non-royal countries were Canada, Australia, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Bulgaria, Brazil, Finland, Turkey, Hungary, Indonesia, Pakistan, Lebanon, South Africa, Senegal, India, Mauritania, Dahomey, Romania, Zaire, Switzerland, France, South Korea, Italy, Poland, Swaziland, China, Germany, Portugal, the Philippines, the Vatican and the Blackfeet Nation of Native Americans. The event was filmed for a documentary called Flames of Persia, narrated by Orson Welles – who as the director of Citizen Kane doubtless knew something about megalomaniacs with insane ambitions – who was in bed, figuratively, with the Shah of Iran because among the Shah’s various ventures was a film production company, Astrophore, which financed Welles’ last film, the uncompleted The Other Side of the Wind.

Meanwhile, Iran’s oil industry had remained under the nominal control of the state-owned oil company Mossadegh had set up, but what was left of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company still ran it under contact and extracted most of the profits. In the late 1960’s the British decided to get out of Iran, thinking the Americans would take over the task of providing military security for their investments in Iran. Instead the Americans decided to subcontract that task to the Shah of Iran’s own military and essentially gave the Shah a blank check to order whatever he wanted in terms of weapons. The Iranians were not allowed to have nuclear weapons or the delivery systems for them, but the Shah was allowed access to everything else in the American arsenal, The only problem was he was expected to pay for them, and in 1973 the Shah joined forces with the similarly authoritarian regime in Saudi Arabia to restrict the world’s supply of Middle Eastern oil and thereby drive up the price. The result was an immediate worldwide spike in the price of gasoline and huge resentments among many Americans who had taken cheap gas for granted and now were confronted with huge price increases and often gas lines and rationing. This being America, a lot of the public reaction took the form of anti-Arab racism (the minor detail that Iranians are not Arabs was lost on most Americans). The Shah had also decided to “modernize” Iran by force, if necessary, and one of the things he had SAVAK agents do is go up to women on the streets and rip off their head coverings – an ironic anticipation of the current Iranian regime’s “morality police” who recently beat a woman to death because her head covering did not completely conceal her hair.

Though the Pahlavi family were doing much worse things to the country than this – including demanding a personal share of every business contract made in Iran involving a Western corporation – it was this, more than anything else, that ticked off a young Iranian cleric named Ruhollah Khomeini and set him off on a path to overthrow the Shah and his pro-Western, pro-secular regime. It seems to have had the same effect on him that the summary execution of Alexander Ulyanov in Russia after the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881 had on his younger brother Vladimir, who took the last name “Lenin” (after the Lena River), led the Bolshevik Party after Nicholas II’s abdication in 191`7 and ultimately formed the Soviet Union. The Shah’s police caught up with Khomeini and exiled him to Iraq (Iran’s next-door neighbor and a key player in Iranian politics because it’s a majority Shi’a Islam country and yet, until Saddam Hussein’s fall in 2002, it was governed by Sunni Muslims; when the Geroge W. Bush administration deposed Saddam Hussein as part of the second U.S.-Iraq war in 2002, most of the Iraqis who became the new government had survived Saddam’s repression by fleeing to and hiding in Iran). In 1975 the Shah abolished Iran’s multi-party system and decreed that from then on only one political party, the Rastakhiz Party, would be allowed to exist. The end of the last vestiges of multi-party democracy in Iran didn’t help the Shah’s cause. In hopes of maintaining power against the increasingly aggressive challenges of Khomeini and his followers – who, as one of the talking heads in this documentary pointed out, had become the center of opposition to the regime since the Shah had done such a good job disposing of all his liberal and moderate opponents – he had Khomeini sent from Iraq to France and put out an article accusing Khomeini of being a Soviet agent, a drug addict and a homosexual – the same litany of charges the cIA and MI-6 had aimed at Mossadegh a quarter-century earlier.

In a last-ditch attempt to salvage his regime, the Shah reached out to the surviving members of Mossadegh’s short-lived government (Mossadegh himself had died in 1967) and offered them Cabinet jposts, but it was too late. The Shah’s officer corps remained loyal to him, but the soldiers were conscripts from Iranian villages and often refused orders to fire upon demonstrators. Under Shi’a Ialam, there is supposed to be a major mourning ceremony 40 days after a death, and this led to staggered protests, each one many times more numerous than the last, at regular 40-day intervals. The Shah fled Iran on February 11, 1979 and at first sought asylum in Egypt, but he had been diagnosed with cancer as early as 1974 and he wanted to be treated in the United States. President Jimmy Carter was reluctant to let the Shah come to the U.S. but he was talked into it by his vice-president, Walter Mondale, and his hard-lien national security advisor, Zbigniew Brezinszki. Carter agreed to allow the Shah to seek medical treatment in New York City but uttered the prescient words to Mondale, “Just what are we going to do when they take our people hostage?” Years ago I read a book on the Iranian hostage crisis which claimed that Khomeini at first thought the students who had taken over the American Embassy were nuts, and he was ready to order them to release the hostages, but he soon realized that the hostages were an important weapon he could wield to maintain control over Iran and keep the handful of Iranian moderates and liberals under control – which led to the oddball political system that rules Iran to this day, where Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (who took over Khomeini’s old job after Knomeini died) holds the title of “Supreme Leader of the Iranian Revolution” and can deny candidates for office in Iran the right to run for election on the ground that they are “un-Islamic.” (It’s like what Italy would be if the Vatican had the power to deny people the right to run in elections on the grounds they were “un-Catholic.”)

A number of interesting characters emerged from the Taken Hostage documentary, including Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., President Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson and person in charge of the coup to overthrow Mossadegh (seen here in archive footage since he died in 2000) and Barry Rosen, who as the press attaché at the American Embassy in Tehran, Iran became the public face of the hostage crisis. Rosen had first come to Iran as a member of the U.S. Peace Corps in 1967, charged with teaching English as a second language to Iranian servicemembers, and he fell in love with the country, its people and its rich cultural heritage. As a member of the U.S. Foreign Service he managed to get a chance for a return assignment to Iran in the late 1970’s, and he originally intended to bring his wife and children with him, but – fortunately for them, as it turned out – he couldn’t clear the bureaucratic hurdles to take them, so he went alone. Overall,the first part of “Taken Hostage” is an excellent overview of how many resentments the U.S. has built up all over the world and the extent to which policies that seemed to make sense at the time have had radically unintended consequences. Throughout the Iranian hostage crisis, many Americans were asking, “Why do they hate us?” This show gives an example of how one country came to view America as their enemies because of the dictatorial regime we supported and helped keep in power. After watching this film, you’re liable to wonder, “Why don’t more countries hate us the way Iran does?”