American History Tellers - The Carter Years | 444 Days | 4

Episode Date: April 30, 2025

On November 4th, 1979, Iranian students overran the U.S. embassy in Tehran intending to stage a short sit-in protest. But after they detained embassy staff, what started out as a sit-in grew into a hostage crisis that lasted for more than a year. Iran’s new political and religious leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, took advantage of the situation to consolidate his grip on power. Today, Lindsay is joined by journalist Mark Bowden to talk about the hostage crisis and what it cost the Carter administration. Bowden is the author of Guests of the Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis: The First Battle in America’s War with Militant Islam.Be the first to know about Wondery’s newest podcasts, curated recommendations, and more! Sign up now at https://wondery.fm/wonderynewsletterListen to American History Tellers on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Experience all episodes ad-free and be the first to binge the newest season. Unlock exclusive early access by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial today by visiting wondery.com/links/american-history-tellers/ now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

As we explore the triumphs and tragedies that shaped America, we're always striving to paint a vivid, nuanced picture of the past, and with Wondery+, you can experience that vision in its purest form. Enjoy ad-free episodes, early access to new seasons, and exclusive bonus content that illuminates the human stories behind the history. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts and see American history through a whole new lens. Imagine it's December 26, 1980, and you're sitting in your living room in Bethesda, Maryland. You switch off the television and sigh. For months now you've tuned in every night to see what's going on with the Americans being held hostage in Iran. You've watched in horror as the news broadcast footage of protesters chanting death to America

and the American hostages were paraded in front of the cameras. You can only imagine what they're going through. As the glow of the television fades, your teenage son comes into the room with a notebook and plops on the sofa beside you. Hey, dad, can you help me with my homework? Yeah, what's the assignment? We're supposed to write a paper about the hostage crisis. Oh, well, what about it?

It's a damn disgrace is all I can say. Why can't we just go in and get them? Well, President Carter has tried that and it was a failure. All we achieved was killing some of our own. You shake your head, thinking of the disastrous military rescue operation earlier in the year. You wonder what, if anything, Jimmy Carter is planning to do now. It seems like he's sitting on his hands while American citizens rot in captivity. Well, if we can't go in and free them, what do the Iranians

want? Can we pay a ransom? Well, that's the idea. From what I've seen on the news, they want the money we've been keeping in U.S. banks returned to them. See, we froze their assets when they first took the hostages, and now they want it back for their war with Iraq. But I say to hell with them, we shouldn't pay them a cent. So what's left then? Diplomacy, I suppose. Carter and those good old boys he's got in the White House need to figure something else out, and soon. This has gone on too long. The American people are sick of it. I know I am. That's why we voted him out last month.

Maybe it's going to take someone like Reagan to finally get it done. Your son gives you a perplexed look and then gets up to leave. You know you weren't very helpful just now. He's probably more confused than ever before, but you don't know what else to tell him. More than 50 of your fellow Americans have been held hostage for over a year and there seems to be no end in sight. You're deeply frustrated by Jimmy Carter's inability to bring them home. But for the hostages' sake, you hope there's some sort of deal being made before a whole new administration has to start over with negotiations.

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Be protected. Be Zen. From Wandery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers. Our history, your story. In December 1980, a national audience watched as several of the American hostages being held in Iran appeared before television cameras at a gathering their captors arranged for the Christmas holiday. One by one, the hostages were allowed to speak to the cameras, sending messages to their loved ones. After 14 months of waiting for the government to somehow secure the release of the hostages, the American public had grown weary. Carter's inability to end the crisis would contribute to his crushing defeat to Ronald Reagan in November of 1980. But Carter remained determined to

see the hostages release before he left office and continued to aggressively pursue a deal with Iranian authorities. Less than a month after this Christmas broadcast, on Inauguration Day in January 1981, Jimmy Carter received word that the hostages were finally on their way home. Here with me now to discuss this crisis and what it cost the Carter administration is journalist Mark Bowden, author of Guests of the Ayatollah, the Iran Hostage Crisis, the First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam. Mark Bowden, welcome to American History Tellers. Thank you.

So I don't think the hostage crisis can be properly understood without really having a sense of what was going on in Iran in the fall of 1979. Iran was in the throes of revolution, but it was not really the Islamist state we know today. What was happening? Well, the Shah had been overthrown early in the year of 1979, and among that group who accomplished it were a coalition of dissidents, religious fanatics, Islamic clergy, communists, socialists. There were people who wanted Western-style

liberal democracy in Iran. The one thing that they all had in common was their hatred of the Shah and his regime. So they had all banded together to depose the Shah who had fled the country. So in the months afterwards, a provisional government was created just to run things in the country until a constitutional convention

could be held in the summer of 1980. So things were very much in flux. All the various factions opposed to the Shah were all basically vying for position to create the new Iranian state. And what was the United States interest in Iran at this time? Well, the United States of course had a long relationship with Iran dating back to the end of World War II.

Iran was an important trading partner for oil, and it was considered to be kind of a bastion of the Western world at a time of Soviet expansionism. So in that part of the world in the Near East, Iran had enormous strategic value for the United States. When the Shah was deposed, the United States under President Jimmy Carter had made the decision to try to work with whatever government emerged from the cauldron of the revolution. So the embassy in Tehran was up and running, the hopes being that whoever assumed power would retain some

relationship with the United States. And it was here at the embassy on November 4th, 1979, that a protest approaches and then enters the compound grounds. This wasn't though the first time protesters had made it through the gates here. How did US officials initially handle these incoming students? Well, initially, they basically retreated to secure positions on the embassy grounds and decided to await the intervention of the Iranian authorities. What had happened months earlier was people had overrun the embassy grounds and within hours the Iranian police or army had escorted them

off the premises. So there was initially an expectation that that's what would happen here. What do we know about the plan hatched by these students initially? What did they want at first? Well, the students themselves just wanted to make a statement. They wanted to do a sit-in that would last a couple days. In fact, they called it a set-in. And what had happened was there were mullahs, we're talking now about a faction in Iran, who made a decision very early on to seize this moment.

It created an outcry in the city and it gave them both what the students wanted initially, which is a lot of attention, but also a growing realization that they could leverage this moment into something bigger and more important. Your mention of the mullahs gives me an opportunity to ask for some definitions here. Could you tell us what a mullah is versus the Ayatollah versus the Shah, what the structures are? Sure. Mullahs are religious leaders.

These are the clerics, and they range from people who would have their own religious community all the way up to the people surrounding the Ayatollah who was the leader of the clerics. So the Ayatollah Khomeini was the top Mullah. The Shah was essentially the king that the United States had helped prop up in the early 1950s and who had ruled Iran as a secular leader up until the point where he was ousted in early 1979. Steve McLaughlin So these mullahs who are looking to take advantage of a public protest moment made more of the attack on the embassy than a sit-in. How did the general public in Iran react to the takeover of the embassy?

Well, it's hard to gauge what everybody thought, but many, many people came out in the streets to support the takeover of the embassy. There was a widespread fear in Tehran that the United States, which had propped up the Shah for decades, was plotting to return him to Iran and basically overthrow the revolution. So when the students targeted the American embassy, a lot of people felt that this was an opportunity to prevent the United States from pulling off this counterrevolution. Now, there's a fair bit of history here that we probably should talk about.

Why would many Iranians have this fear that the US was going to intervene? Because the Shah was essentially an American creation. His rule over decades had been deeply supported by the United States, and he was seen as a puppet. So when the Shah was overthrown, there was almost this expectation that the United States would somehow step in or Great Britain or another of the Western powers to restore him to power because he had played an important role as far as the Western world was concerned in, you know, shoring up their interests in that part of

the world. How did the US government react to the Iranian revolution at first? Well, I think it's fair to say, Lindsay, that the United States was taken by surprise. No one anticipated the overthrow of the Shah. In fact, the CIA had its own work to do in Iran, which had actually nothing to do

with what was happening in their domestic politics. So the United States basically had relied upon the Shah to maintain himself in power. And so his overthrow came as a shock. And I think, you know, these things happen in the world. The United States reacted by trying to maintain a presence in Tehran, trying to understand the forces that were at work, trying to position themselves to maybe influence the kind of government that would emerge from the constitutional convention. But the bottom line was they didn't want to leave Iran. They wanted to create a relationship with whoever assumed power. But that didn't work too well, or at least a wrench was thrown in the works,

when the embassy was overrun. What was the Carter administration's reaction to this moment? Initially, the Carter administration assumed that the provisional government in Iran would do what they had done before, which is chase the students or the protesters off the grounds and restore the embassy to put it back on its feet. I think hope began to diminish in the first few hours of the event because the Ayatollah who had not been informed

of the takeover of the embassy and who initially ordered that the students be expelled from the embassy grounds changed his mind. And I think it's because he was advised because of the great showing in the streets that this was a moment that the clerics, the mullahs could use to their political advantage. And then I guess let's roll the tape forward a bit. What was the next step that the Carter administration took when it became clear this was a hostage situation?

Well, when it became clear that it was a hostage situation, the president basically faced a dilemma. And I think he had choices to make. You know, one option would have been to issue an ultimatum to Iran, perhaps prepare for punitive action that would try to force the provisional government or the mullahs to release the hostages. But any one of these options,

whether we're talking about pressure or punitive raids, ran the risk of the hostages being imprisoned and executed, which is one of the things that the students said. So emotions were very high in Iran. And I think the Carter administration made the decision that rather than try to react immediately to this assault on international diplomacy, that they were going to try to let things cool off and figure out a way to peacefully resolve the problem.

Did they have some ideas of how to peacefully resolve the problem? What were their first moves? Well, they were very much at sea because the things were in such flux in Iran. They were used to dealing, at least for the previous few months, with the officials from the provisional government. But the provisional government collapsed shortly after this hostage crisis began. So at that point, it wasn't clear who they could talk to. It was clear that whoever was controlling the embassy takeover was part of the religious faction in Iran. And this would not have been a faction that the United States had any close ties with. Initially, the Carter administration tried to open an avenue for negotiations. A former attorney general, Ramsey Clark, and another official made a furtive attempt

to establish some kind of dialogue, but failed. At least for the first few weeks or months, the Carter administration really was having a hard time figuring out who to talk to, who would be in a position to actually make anything happen. You mentioned that the CIA had their interests in Iran, and this is important because the 1953 Iranian coup d'etat which installed the Shah, the CIA was instrumental in this.

So what was the CIA's abiding interest in Iran in 1979? I think we have to distinguish between the myth of the CIA's presence in Iran, which was that they were actively supporting the Shah, shoring up his regime, and that after he was deposed, that they were actively plotting to bring him back. In fact, the CIA had very little involvement in popping up the Shah. Their primary mission in Iran was to spy on Soviet Union missile sites. There were a range of spying centers up along the northern border of Iran.

And I think the bulk of the work that the CIA did there by the good graces of the Shah was to run listening outposts to keep track of the Soviet's nuclear weapons and whatever deployments they were making in that part of the world. So that was the main focus, in fact, of the CIA. But to many in Iran, that was not the only thing the CIA was doing there. No, clearly the CIA, largely because of Hollywood, has a much higher profile around the world than it in fact deserves. And so there was this fear that SAVAK, which was the Shah's secret police, were actually just agents of the CIA and that everything terrible that happened under the Shah's reign,

the strings were being pulled by the United States through the CIA. So there was this expectation that the CIA had its fingers in everything in Iran and in fact that was not the case. In fact the strongest argument against that point of view is that the CIA did not see the Shah's downfall coming. If you look at their assessments of risk in Iran in that period, there's no mention of the possibility that the Shah might be deposed. I'm F. W. Hirsch. I'm Peter Francopone. And in our podcast, Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history.

This season, we're talking about Joseph Stalin, a murderous dictator who saved the world from another murderous dictator. The man who defeated Hitler but also the man who oversaw the deaths of millions of his own people. How did he get away with it and why is he so popular in Russia today? He is such a singular character for the scale of his brutality, for the psychopathic desire for power. What do you think Peter? I'm not completely convinced about the glories of the socialist revolution, but we're going

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Follow the Spy Who on the Wondry app or wherever you listen to podcasts. Or you can binge the full season of The Spy Who Dressed the Queen early and ad-free with Wondry Plus. In researching your book, you visited Iran a few times, two decades after all of this unfolded. I guess I'd like to know first, what was it like to be in Iran at this time as a journalist? It was fascinating and stimulating for me as a journalist. I was learning a lot. I was nervous because I didn't go pretending to be a tourist. I went in as a journalist and I knew I was vulnerable to any action that the state decided

to take. As it was, they assigned me a minder. All of the interviews that I conducted were recorded. I presume they were being listened to. So on the one hand, as a journalist, I knew I was being spied upon. But on the other hand, the fellow who they assigned to work with me, who was actually an employee of the information ministry,

was himself not particularly keen on the regime and was actually helpful to me, helping to find the former hostage takers, helping me to talk to ordinary Iranians. He was more interested in my getting a accurate feel for what was going on in Iran then. I was more interested in what had happened 20-some years earlier, so I was focused on the past and he was focused on the present. I will say too that the Iranian people, the average Iranian person, people I would meet on the street or in restaurants or in the hotels were delighted to help me. They were very friendly,

very warm and would tell me how much they missed seeing Americans in Iran. You remember America had a large presence in Iran for many years previous, So people couldn't have been nicer to me and made it very clear to me, at least many of the ones that I met, that they were not particularly keen on the Islamic rule. Did you ever feel like you were in danger? I did not. You know, I felt more like that was a possibility, but at the time I didn't know of an instance where a foreign journalist had been thrown into a Vien prison

in the years since that's happened a number of times, but either I was naive and ignorant or tensions had eased somewhat, but I didn't really feel any danger. Now, during your visits, I understand you went to the former US embassy in Tehran. What was that like? Well, it's easy to find. It's a big complex.S. Embassy in Tehran. What was that like? Well, it's easy to find.

It's a big complex right in the middle of Tehran. Part of it, the old Chancery building, has been turned into an anti-American museum. I toured it, and that gave me an opportunity to walk around the grounds and picture the places that I was going to be writing about in the book. One of the big exhibits in the anti-American Museum is about the takeover of the embassy. They have pieces of the wreckage of the planes and helicopters that were destroyed in the

desert in the failed rescue mission. They have framed top secret documents that were seized from the vault at the embassy, most of which were very mundane things, nothing terribly interesting, but which looked really important because they have top secret stamped on them. The museum itself was dedicated to exposing American atrocities all over the world,

so there was plenty of other stuff there to take in. As part of your research, you tracked down several of the hostage takers themselves, now middle-aged people. But I wanted to ask you about a few of them, starting with one called Ibrahim. How did he reflect on his role in the hostage-taking when you interviewed him in 2003? Well, Ibrahim Esgarzadeh has become a fairly prominent figure in Iran and a dissident figure. He was more secular, even though he had been a part of the Islamic student movement when he was a young man.

He had come over the years to view the takeover of the embassy as a big mistake. In fact, he had run for office. He had briefly been either imprisoned or sentenced to confinement at home. He had briefly been either imprisoned or sentenced to confinement at home. So he had a dicey relationship with the regime and a very courageous man. And he spoke to me very candidly about his early involvement in the takeover of the embassy and how he very quickly felt that it was being turned into something much larger and different than what he had originally imagined. I'd be interested to hear what he tried to do in order to, I guess, reorient Iran into the vision he had after the hostage taking. So he was a prominent, dissonant voice in Iran. He was not at least overtly religious.

He was not a cleric. He was a secular gentleman, very smart, very much believing that Iran should have a Western style democracy. He was one of those who emphasized to me how the original intent of the takeover was much more akin to what had happened at Columbia university in the United States to hold a protest. So he was alarmed as what he thought would be a two or three day sit-in turned into this high-powered long-term hostage taking. I should add too that, you know, I've

mentioned several times that the mullahs who backed the takeover of the embassy used this to leverage themselves into power. And the way that they did it was by perpetrating the myth that the United States Embassy was actively plotting to return the Shah. And so during the period, at least in the first few months of the embassy takeover, the students would hold press conferences where they would flash papers that they had seized

from desks or from safes in the embassy. And if there were names of prominent politicians, Iranian politicians, who had met with American officials and they were not part of the Mueller's party, these were the more secular politicians who were willing to talk to the United States or willing to talk to the West, they were accused of being traitors to the revolution. And many of them went to prison and many were executed. So this turned into a very ugly moment where the religious leaders were able to manufacture propaganda used to destroy their political enemies. You interviewed another participant, the spokesperson for the hostage takers, nicknamed Mother Mary. We didn't really cover her in our series. Can you tell us who she was and how she got involved in

this event? Her name was Nelufar Ebtekar. She is an Iranian woman who was raised in Philadelphia, in the United States for the first five years of her life because her father was taking part in an international studies program at the University of Pennsylvania. So she happened to speak flawless American accented English. So when the students took over the embassy, Aniloufar, who had become a religious zealot, joined the students and became their spokesman because they were holding these press conferences both to achieve their purposes inside of Iran, but also to speak to the world. She would appear on news broadcasts about the embassy takeover lecturing Americans in her very American English about

how terrible the great Satan was. She became a memorable figure, certainly in the United States. In your conversations with her, how did she reflect on her involvement all these years later? She was very proud of it. She had, like many of the hostage-shakers, risen to prominence in Iran. In fact, she was one of the vice presidents. There are a number of vice presidents in the Iranian government.

She was the vice president in charge of environmental protection. So she was a powerful figure. She was dressed like a nun and she was very, very proud of her role in taking over the American embassy and basically continued to spout the same myth about the takeover of the embassy, how it had thwarted the CIA plot, how the United States was trying to bring the Shaw back, all of which I knew to be untrue and which frankly I think she probably knows is untrue, but is nevertheless the official line. Leela Farr was the only one of the hostage-shakers who had had any real experience living in

the United States. And so she was considered to be kind of the expert on the United States and apparently came to believe that about herself because she lectured me at some length about the United States as if it was a place that I hadn't been born in and grown up in. And in fact, at one point asked me what branch of the military I served in. And I told her, well, I'm a journalist and I've never served in the military. And she told me to my face, I know you're lying because all American men have to serve in the military for a number of years. And I said, okay, not true. But what do you say

to somebody who seems to know more about your own country than you do? Now, in the midst of this frightening tragedy, there were perhaps some lighter moments. One of the unusual things that happened among some of the hostage takers was that they met their spouses. The spokeswoman met and married another hostage taker who you interviewed, Mohammed Hashemi. What can you tell us about them? They were young people. These were college-age students who were thrown together in a very passionate moment for the country, who believed that they were doing something really historic and wonderful, and who ended up basically having to live together at the embassy for

many, many months. I'm sure that they got to go home, unlike the American hostages and take breaks, but they were thrown together and became a very close knit unit. And I think whenever you get a group of young people who are thrown together in a situation like that, that romance blooms, in this case, Muhammad Hashemi had been one of the instigators of the takeover and he and Ilfah Abdukar became a couple

and in fact married and were still married. When I visited Iran, in fact, they had invested in some resort on the Black Sea. And Mohammed Hashemi proposed to me the idea that maybe they could invite back some of the former American hostages to take advantage of this new resort that they were building. So they saw an entrepreneurial opportunity. Well, while romance bloomed between some,

Americans were held hostage in extraordinary circumstances. It was never really part of the hostage takers plan to torture any of the American embassy workers, but some hostages were tortured. Did you speak to any of the hostage takers plan to torture any of the American embassy workers, but some hostages were tortured. Did you speak to any of the hostage takers about their treatment of the hostages? I did, yes. I remember Ibrahim Asghazadeh was embarrassed

about what had happened. He felt that the protest that he had imagined lasting a couple of days had gotten out of control from the very beginning. And so people became involved in guarding the hostages and caring for the hostages, feeding them, questioning them, who had other motives. So you know, Mohammed Hashemi, for instance, who later on became an important figure in the information ministry in Iran, was involved in questioning the hostages,

and he would have supported the strong interrogation methods that were used, particularly against those who they suspected of being in the CIA. And in some cases, those men were tortured in the conventional sense. They were whipped, they were held in abominable conditions, they were lined up against the wall and told they were going to be executed, they were constantly threatened with execution. So it was something that evolved as the hostage taking grew increasingly serious over time. In the early hours of December 4th, 2024, CEO Brian Thompson stepped out onto the streets of Midtown Manhattan. This assailant pulls out a weapon and starts firing at him.

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You can join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Spotify, or Apple podcasts. We've talked a little bit about the crisis as it unfolded in Iran, but let's turn to how the American people viewed the events. In your book, you talk about this 15-month hostage crisis as being a perfect story for TV. What did you mean by that? You had huge crowds of people demonstrating outside the American Embassy in Tehran chanting Death to America. You had the students who held a number of events where they would exhibit

the hostages and who held press conferences where they made their outrageous claims about what these embassy workers had been up to. What was going on in Tehran was very dramatic. It was, I think, a humiliation for the American government and for the American people, we were considered to be one of the superpowers in the world. And yet here, a group of students in Iran had taken an entire embassy and held it hostage and there appeared to be nothing that the United States could do about it. The thing about the television in the United States is that, you know, television in the United States back in the 1970s or 1979, 1980, you had the big broadcast

networks and then each of these broadcast networks had affiliates in just about every major city in the United States. And when you have 53 or more hostages, you had hostages from just about every part of America. So local television stations all had their own hostage and they could go out and interview the families of that hostage. They could follow along the story from day to day and week to week.

So it created this kind of perfect storm of television coverage and people were glued to it because it was a dramatic moment. The United States was being humiliated. There was this expectation that something really big was gonna happen possibly. And you had the Carter administration basically at loose ends with no real way of resolving it.

That's a beautiful segue to my next question because President Carter reluctantly did try to resolve it with a rescue attempt, which we know failed. What went wrong? Well, the idea was to fly eight helicopters to a rendezvous point in the desert, well outside of Tehran, at which point the helicopters, which had no capability of being refueled in flight at that point, would be out of gas.

So they had to rendezvous in the desert with big aircraft carrying oil and actually carrying the Delta Force operators who would do the rescue mission. So the goal was to land eight helicopters in the desert, refuel, load the rescue force on the helicopters, and then fly the helicopters to hiding places just outside of the city before dawn. And at nightfall, the rescue force would load on trucks, drive into the city, attack the embassy, rescue the hostages, which for them, frankly, would not have been a terribly difficult task because these hostages were being held by amateurs and Delta Force them, frankly, would not have been a terribly difficult task because these hostages were being held by amateurs and Delta Force, I think, would have overpowered them rapidly.

So the idea was to get the hostages who the hostage shakers had made the mistake of keeping all in the same place at the embassy, blow a hole in the wall, march them across the street to a soccer stadium, strongpoint the soccer stadium, and then fly these helicopters, which had been kept in hiding all day, fly them into the soccer stadium, load the hostages and the rescue force on the helicopters, then fly them out to a nearby airstrip, which a battalion of army rangers was going to raid and seize. So once they were at the airport, they would fly them out of the country. That was the way the thing was supposed to go on paper.

And then how did it go? It was a disaster. The aid helicopters encountered problems flying across the desert. Iran's desert is this very fine sand, more like dust. And these columns of dust called Haboob's dust storms were not uncommon. And so a number of these helicopters ran into these huge dust storms. As a result, they began to experience mechanical failure. One of the helicopters actually had to set down. They gave up on the machine, loaded themselves on another helicopter and continued. Another helicopter turned back.

He had gotten to the point where he could either press on knowing that his engines were about to give out because of the dust clogging the rotors. So he made the decision to head back to the aircraft carriers. So now they were down to just six helicopters. And then one of the helicopters that made it to the rendezvous point was so damaged

by exposure to this dust storm that the pilot said that it could not be flown safely. So now they're down to five helicopters. So the decision was made and it was an automatic decision, we're going to pull out. But what happened was, as the helicopters took off to return to the aircraft carrier, one of them clipped one of the fixed-wing tankers that had landed in the desert, and it exploded, killing eight of the service members there, crashing the helicopter, at which point any hope of maintaining secrecy was gone. The wreckage of these planes and the bodies had to be left in the desert and the

remaining men and helicopters basically flew out of Iran knowing that the mission that they had envisioned was never going to happen. And this mission's failure made what was already a political debacle even worse. How did Ronald Reagan use the hostage crisis in his campaigning against Jimmy Carter? When you do something like this, you run a huge risk. If it fails, you are going to look like an incompetent. You are going to look like somebody who doesn't know how to use American power properly. Ronald Reagan was able to portray Jimmy Carter as a weak president, as someone who was overmatched by this little country of Iran.

Carter, I think to his credit, had made trying to keep the hostages alive his major priority. I don't think every president would have done that, but he seemed to realize that actions that might make the American people feel good, or that might make him look good, like bombing missions in Iran or threats, invasion, whatever, would almost certainly get the hostages killed. And so he was willing basically to take a beating and he tried many different avenues to open negotiations with the Iranians, trying to figure out who would be sufficiently in charge to actually reach a deal and make something happen. And every time they got close, the Mullins would pull the rug out from under him.

And I think those around Carter, including President Carter himself, understood when the rescue mission failed, that their chances of reelection were very small. So I don't fault them for what they did. I think they tried everything that they could, the efforts that they made, ultimately bore fruit because they did in December of 1979, more than a year after the takeover, negotiated a deal to release the hostages, all of whom were in good shape, in return only for giving Iran back money that had been seized when the embassy was taken. When that was negotiated by the Carter administration, the Iranian students, despite Carter, refused to release the hostages and sign off on the deal, literally until the day that

Ronald Reagan was inaugurated. Mark Bowden, thank you so much for talking with me today on American History Tellers. Thanks for having me. That was my conversation with Mark Bowden, author of Guests of the Ayatollah, the Iran Hostage Crisis, the first battle in America's war with militant Islam. From Wondery, this is the fourth and final episode

of our series on the Carter years for American history tellers. In our next season, at the turn of the 20th century, President Teddy Roosevelt and other politicians, activists, and journalists turn their attention to the problems caused by rapid industrialization, urbanization, and sweeping corruption. Their efforts bring about new consumer protections, labor reforms, and business regulations expanding the power and scope of the federal government in a period called the Progressive Era.

If you like American history tellers, you can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. American History Tellers has hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham, for Airshow. Sound design by Molly Bach. Supervising sound designer Matthew Filler. Music by Thrum. This episode was produced by Polly Stryker and Alita Rozanski. Our senior interview producer is Peter Arcuni. Managing producer Desi Blaylock.

Senior managing producer is Callum Plues. Senior producer Andy Herman. Executive producers are Jenny Lauer Beckman, Marsha Lewy, and Erin O'Flaherty for Wondering. In the early hours of December 4th, 2024, CEO Brian Thompson stepped out onto the streets of Midtown Manhattan. This assailant pulls out a weapon and starts firing at him. We're talking about the CEO of the biggest private health insurance corporation in the world. And the suspect has been identified as Luigi Nicholas man, Johnny became one of the most divisive figures in modern

criminal history was targeted premeditated and meant to sow terror. I'm Jesse Weber host of Luigi produced by law and crime and twist this is more than a true crime investigation we explore a uniquely American moment that could change the country forever. He's awoken the people to a true issue. Happy birthday, James! Happy birthday!

Finally, maybe this would lead rich and powerful people to acknowledge the barbaric nature of our healthcare system. Listen to Law and Crime's Luigi exclusively on Wondery+. You can join Wondery+, the Wondery app, Spotify or Apple podcasts.