The Den of Spies

 

The year was 1979, and something bad was coming to Tehran. You could feel it the way you feel a storm front moving in off the ocean—that drop in pressure behind your eyes, that sick-sweet smell in the air. Something bad, yeah. Something that would leave a mark the size of a fist-shaped bruise on the face of history.

It always starts further back than you think. It started in 1953, if you want the real beginning. A CIA operation with a name that sounded almost polished, almost civilized: Operation Ajax. They reached into Iran like a man reaching into a beehive and yanked out a democratically elected prime minister named Mohammad Mosaddegh, and what grew back in his place was the Shah.

People don’t forget things like that. They can’t forget. The memory lives in the blood, in the bone, passed from parent to child like a bad gene, like a curse.

So when the students came—and they were students, that’s the part that should keep you up at night, that’s the part that makes the darkness feel closer—they didn’t come out of nowhere. They came out of twenty-six years of remembering.

They had been planning since September. Quiet planning. Patient planning. The kind of planning done by people who believe absolutely in what they’re doing, and that particular variety of true believer is about the most terrifying thing this world manufactures. They were from the Muslim Student Followers of the Imam’s Line, and they had a simple enough idea at first: seize the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Hold it for a few hours. Make their point. Go home.

That was the plan.

Plans are what you make before the monster shows up.

November 4, 1979. Cold morning, the kind of cold that gets its fingers inside your coat no matter how tightly you button it. The female activists came first, hidden inside crowds, long chadors covering what they carried. Bolt cutters. Small, patient, practical tools for opening the gates of hell. When the locks were cut, the crowd surged, and sixty-six Americans found themselves hostages before some of them had finished their morning coffee.

The blindfolds went on. The wrists were bound. In the streets outside—in the streets—secret documents burned alongside looted desks and chairs and all the mundane furniture of American institutional life. Somehow the burning furniture is the detail that gets you, isn’t it? The bureaucratic clutter of the everyday world going up in orange flame on a Tehran street. The world you thought was permanent turning out to be nothing but kindling.

Then Khomeini spoke, and everything changed.

He had come back from France in February—fifteen years of exile, and then the plane touched down and the crowds were ten miles deep, screaming his name. He called the takeover the second revolution. He called the U.S. Embassy “the den of American spies in Tehran.”

When the monster names the place, the place becomes what it’s named. That’s how it works.

The occupation that was supposed to last a few hours stretched into days. Days stretched into weeks. Weeks into months. Four hundred and forty-four days, total. The longest hostage crisis in history—a record no one wanted, set by people who had stopped caring about the calendar.

The Iranians called the hostages guests. They said this with straight faces, and some of them probably even believed it. But the guests told different stories when they finally got home. They talked about handcuffs worn for days on end. About dark rooms and the sound of guards just outside the door. About being forbidden to speak, forbidden to move, forbidden to exist as full human beings. About guns pressed to their heads. About a game of Russian roulette that someone thought was funny.

One went on a hunger strike.

Two slashed their wrists with broken glass and were found by guards in the dark.

Four tried to escape and learned that solitary confinement is a kind of dying that you come back from, if you’re lucky.

In April 1980, the United States tried a rescue. Eight American servicemen died in the desert when the mission fell apart—helicopters and bad luck and the vast indifference of the universe conspiring together the way they sometimes do. President Carter aged about a decade in front of the television cameras, and the hostage-takers went right on not negotiating.

Four hundred and forty-four days.

On January 20, 1981, the hostages finally flew out—first to Algeria, then to West Germany, then home to crowds that cheered them like returning soldiers, because that’s exactly what they were. Soldiers in a war that nobody had declared but everybody knew was real.

The former embassy building still stands in Tehran. They’ve made it into a museum now. Every year, on the anniversary of the takeover, the crowds fill the surrounding streets and chant Death to America! with the kind of raw, hot, unselfconscious hatred that most emotions fade into eventually.

But not this one.

This one keeps.

Some wounds don’t scar over. Some hatreds don’t cool down. Some ghosts don’t move on, and some chains, once forged, just go on getting heavier.

1979 is still happening, in all the ways that matter.

It never really stopped.