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The Iran Hostage Crisis — Part I

November 4, 1979 – Radical Iranian students take over the U.S. embassy in Tehran and hold 52 Americans hostage. The embassy had been seized in February of that year, shortly after the Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile in Paris, but that was resolved quickly; few suspected that this diplomatic crisis would end up lasting 444 days and cost the lives of eight soldiers who died during the ill-fated Operation Eagle Claw rescue attempt on April 24, 1980.

Bruce Laingen was Charge d’affaires of the embassy and was one of three people who spent most of that time held hostage at the Foreign Ministry. In this interview, conducted by Charles Stuart Kennedy starting in January 1993, he discusses the run-up to the takeover, his stay at the Ministry, the “Canadian caper,” which became the inspiration for the movie Argo, and the negotiations which led to their eventual release. Read more

Tie a Yellow Ribbon — The Iran Hostage Crisis as Seen from the Home Front

Penelope (Penne) Laingen is the wife of Bruce Laingen, who had served in Germany, Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan before being named ambassador to Malta in 1977.  He was sent back to Iran to serve as Charge d’Affaires, and had been there for only a few months when the U.S. Embassy was overrun by student protesters.  In this interview, Penne Laingen describes the agony of the hostage crisis from the spouse’s perspective, the now ubiquitous yellow ribbon campaign she started, and the chronic frustration of dealing with the U.S. government. She was interviewed by Jewell Fenzi starting in March 1986. Read Bruce Laingen’s account here. Read more

The Missiles of October

October 14, 1962, witnessed the start of one of the most potentially devastating moments in history, when the United States and the Soviet Union came to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Photographs taken by a high-altitude U-2 spy plane offered clear evidence that Soviet medium-range missiles — capable of carrying nuclear warheads — were now stationed 90 miles off the American coastline.

Tensions between the U.S. and the USSR over Cuba had been steadily increasing since the failed April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. Though the invasion did not succeed, Castro was convinced that the United States would try again, and set out to get more military assistance from the Soviet Union. During the next year, the number of Soviet advisers in Cuba rose to more than 20,000. Read more

Lessons Learned from a Former Hostage

In Captive in the Congo, Mike Hoyt describes his ordeal as one of 300 hostages taken by armed

rebels. They were eventually rescued in a joint U.S.-Belgian operation code-named Dragon Rouge. In this article, he discusses U.S. government policy on hostages and argues for a re-evaluation, contending that the longer people talk with hostage-takers, the greater the chances are that the hostages can be saved.  He was interviewed by Ray Sadler in 1995; these excerpts were taken from the Democratic Republic of the Congo Country Reader. Read more

Those Little Bastards at the State Department

Ah, the power of bureaucrats! It doesn’t seem to matter if you’re talking about the upper echelons of the State Department or the lowly ranks of the DMV, some people just never learned to share. Theodore Achilles, who later became ambassador to Peru, served in Washington as Chief of the British Commonwealth Division in the State Department from 1941 to 1945.  Here he relates Secretary of State Byrnes’ view of the very Department he oversaw.  He was interviewed by Richard D. McKinzie in 1972.

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