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Bowden tells us that before deciding to admit the Shah, Jimmy Carter polled his top advisers. Most recommended that he do it. But when he also asked what they would do if the Iranians seized the embassy in retaliation, none answered. And when the thing actually happened, no one on any side was sure of exactly what to do. The triumphant but clueless students would hang on to the 52 frightened, angry Americans for 444 days, all the while making hapless attempts to prove that the embassy had been a cockpit of intrigue and espionage. Although for the most part the hostages were not subjected to torture, their detention and humiliation were in themselves an outrage and came complete with occasional beatings and sham executions. Spectacularly uncooperative types like Michael Metrinko, a political officer who could insult his guards (and their mothers) in fluent Farsi, were routinely roughed up and thrown into solitary. That may have been preferable to being subjected to political harangues by true believers like Massoumeh (Screaming Mary) Ebtekar, then a volcano of fundamentalist cant, later the first female Vice President of Iran.
Despite the students' conspiracy theories, Bowden says, the embassy actually housed just a few CIA officers, most of them new to the country and struggling to contact Iranians who could help them comprehend the shape-shifting revolution. Since none of them spoke Farsi, the American spies couldn't even read the Tehran newspapers.
As the siege wore on, a desperate Carter reached for an improbable armed mission. The plan called for slipping members of the U.S.'s still untested new Delta Force, an élite Army rescue unit, through Iranian airspace to a makeshift desert landing strip in Iran. Then they would be trucked into Tehran, where they would somehow fight their way into the embassy compound and out of it again with the hostages in tow. Instead, a Delta Force chopper collided on the runway with a C-130 transport plane that had 44 Delta troops inside, and eight soldiers died in the fireball. When word of the failed mission reached the White House, notes Bowden, Hamilton Jordan, Carter's chief of staff, "ducked into the president's bathroom and vomited."
It would take nine more long months and Carter's loss of the White House to Ronald Reagan before the no less exhausted Iranians would conclude the negotiations that sent the hostages home. And 26 years after that, the passions of the moment still reverberate. In Bowden's book, you can feel them on every page.