The Rest Is History - 639. Revolution in Iran: Death in the Desert (Part 4)

Episode Date: January 29, 2026

How did America respond after the American Embassy in Tehran was seized, and American citizens taken hostage? Would the hostages survive? And, what became of the Iranian Revolution, and Ayatollah Khomeini? Join Dominic and Tom, as they unfold the climactic conclusion to the Iranian Revolution, and America’s attempts to bring its hostages home. _______ Become a member today and join us at The Rest Is History Festival at Hampton Court Palace on the 4th and 5th of July 2026. This is a members-only event. Join the Athelstans for guaranteed entry or become a Friend of the Show to enter the ballot. You'll also get ad-free listening, bonus episodes, exclusive mini-series and more. Sign up now at therestishistory.com _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editors: Jack Meek + Harry Swan Social Producer: Harry Balden Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude  Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello everyone and we have some unbelievably exciting news for you all. Tom, if anything, you are underselling it because this is truly spectacular. On the 4th and 5th of July this year, we are going to be hosting the inaugural. Rest is History Festival. Out of all places, Hampton Court Palace. And crucially, this is just for the people who mean most to us. That is the members of the Rest is History Club. Tom, am I right?

You are so right, Dominic. So if you want to access tickets for the festival, then you will need to become a member of the Restless History Club, which is so easy to do. All you have to do is go to therestishistory.com and it's a matter of seconds. Okay, so remember, by becoming a member of the Restis History Club, you will be able to enter that much prized ballot for tickets to this thrilling festival. But of course, on top of that, you'll get all our episodes ad free. You will get early access to our epic series. will get weekly bonus episodes. You will get access to our exciting new exclusive mini-series. Most of all, you'll get an entree to our much-love chat community and many more such exciting

benefits. So if you want guaranteed access to two tickets, you can join the very top tier of the club and become an Athelstan. You will also get the exclusive opportunity to upgrade to a VIP ticket, which includes a range of special perks including, and this is so exciting, unlimited food and unlimited drink. So go to the restishistory.com and sign up immediately. It is going to be the most extraordinary weekend. There'll be talks, there will be thrilling special guests, there will be historically themed music, there'll be all kinds of treats, there'll be all kinds of action, there might even be some battles, but above all all all It'll be a time for friendship to get to know your fellow members and to get to know Tom and me in a very, very special place, Hampton Court Palace.

And I know that I speak for Dominic as well as for myself when I say, we cannot wait to see you there. President Carlo looked at me. I'd like to see you Colonel Beckwith before you leave. It was quiet in the room. He walked over and stood in front of me. I want to ask you to do two things for me. Sir, all you got to do is name them. I want you, before you leave for Iran, to assemble all of your force,

and when you think it's appropriate, give them a message from me. Tell them that in the event this operation failed. for whatever reason, the fault will not be theirs. It will be mine. Sir, I give you my word I will do that. The second thing is, if any American is killed, hostage or Delta Force, and if it is possible, as long as it doesn't jeopardize the life of someone else, you bring that body back. Sir, if you've gone over my record, you know I'm that kind of man.

So that was Colonel Charlie Beckwith, Mighty Warrior, founder of the US Special Forces Unit Delta Force. And he was recalling a meeting that he had with President Jimmy Carter on the 16th of April 1980. They met in the White House Situation Room to finalize the plans for one of the most daring military operations in American history. And this was a plan to rescue the 52 Americans who were being kept hostage in the center of Tehran and to get them out of Iran or Iran to safety. And Dominic, I think both men come out of that meeting very well. They do. So Skeletor and Boss Hogg from the Dukes of Hacet in that reading. It's some, I mean, you get the sense, you know, the incredible courage required to undertake what is going to be a mad operation.

Yes. But also Carter's concern. Yeah. You know, I mean, it's obviously causing him immense kind of moral anguish, isn't it, the whole prospect of it? It is, but he's doing the right thing. And he really impressed Colonel Beckwith. And he said, you know, if it goes wrong, it's on me. And then he makes this last request, you bring that body back. and I've got a terrible spoiler. They don't. That's the one thing they don't do is bring the bodies back. But I just wanted to say that because this is an episode that famously kind of dooms Carter's presidency. I mean, a spoiler alert.

Yeah. But actually, I think he comes out of this pretty impressively. This last episode of our series about the Iranian Revolution and the American reaction to it, I mean, it's sort of the tragedy of Jimmy Carter, really, because we've had some fun with him and his failure to pursue the peanut diplomacy that the situation called for in previous episodes. Aggressive approach to rabbits, all kinds of things

go wrong. But in this episode, yeah, he's so unlucky. I mean, he's just unbelievably unlucky. So anyway, this is the climax of our series on this tangled relationship between the United States and Iran at the end of the 70s. So as we said, we'll be talking about Delta Forces' attempt to rescue the hostages and what it meant for the presidential

election between Jimmy Carter and old associate of the rest is history, Ronald Wilson Reagan. And we'll be talking about the fate of the American hostages in Tehran, and we'll also be talking about what happened to the Iranian Revolutionary regime. Well, as we record this, Dominic,

we're not absolutely certain what's going to happen to the Iranian Revolutionary regime. Right, who right now are embroidered in all these street protests and repression and whatnot and President Trump making his threats. So let's remind ourselves a little bit of the context. Revolution had broken out Iran at the turn of 1978. The Shah fled a year later, January, 1979.

The Ayatala Khomeini returned in triumph from exile. There's chaos in the streets, but he has started to lay the foundations for his new state based on this idea of kind of clerical guardianship. Yeah, it's kind of ruled by jurists, isn't it? Yes. It's actually a bit like Britain. Tom is only moments away from a rant about unelected judges, clearly.

Nadine Dorris joins the rest is history. It's a little bit of political satire there, which I hope people enjoy. There's a space for you on Liz Truss's podcast, Tom, if you want to join that particular show. So anyway, Carter agreed to admit the Shard in New York for cancer treatment. A student militants stormed the U.S. Embassy on the 4th of November 1979. They took the staff hostage. They eventually released the black and female hostages, and that left 52 Americans in captivity. And although Khomeini probably didn't know about the embassy takeover,

and this was never part of the plan, the issue becomes so useful to him politically that he decides to hang on to the captives and this becomes this great personal duel between him and Jimmy Carter. So let's get to the beginning of 1980. The hostages have been in captivity for weeks. They're having a terrible time.

They're exhausted, they're hungry, they're frightened, all of this. Important point, they have not yet been split up and put in prisons around Tehran. They're still at the United States. Embassy, the den of spies, as the Iranians. now call it. And are they starting to do all those kind of frescoes on the walls showing Uncle Sam as a

skeleton and all of that kind of thing? Exactly. And there were huge crowds and we were talking last time about the exciting hats, the souvenir hats that the Iranians are selling. Yes. So globally the impact of the revolution and the catastrophic impact on the oil industry is rippling through the world economy. So the United States has tipped into recession in January 1980, and the presidential campaign has got underway. So on the one hand, you have the former governor of California, the champion of the conservatives, Ronald Reagan. And he builds an early lead in the Republican primaries. He's pretty obviously going to be the Republican candidates. And he's promising to roll back the federal state and to take a much harder line in the Cold War. And indeed,

and this is a direct quote, to make America great again. So not the last time we'll hear that particular message. Now, for the Democrats, Jimmy Carter was in terrible trouble, really, domestically, because the economy had tanked and he was unnecessarily wearing cardigans and giving speeches about national spiritual crises and so on. Can I just ask, has he introduced oil sanctions against Iran? No, not yet. So the sanctions will come later. As we'll see, he's taking a deliberately soft lying because he thinks that will get the hostages back. So Carter's handlers had said to him, well, actually, this, um, hostage crisis could work in your favour because people might rally around the flag.

They might rally to you, the sitting president, rather than to the challenger from the liberal side who is Ted Kennedy. Chapo-Quiddick's Ted Kennedy. And actually, they're right. In the early primaries, Carter wipes the floor with Ted Kennedy, partly because people keep saying to Ted Kennedy, are you not the bloke who drowned that woman? Like, you can't run for president if you've done that. But also, Ted Kennedy turns out to be a terrible candidate.

So when they ask him, he's asked in an interview, why would you like to be president? and he gives this incredibly rambling answer for about 20 minutes. He doesn't have a reason. He's not like David Cameron. Remember how his answer? I think I'd be quite good at it. Because I'd be good at it. But why didn't he just say, I'm a Kennedy?

Yes. I think because people are a bit sick of Canada-ness by this point, to be honest with you. Now, abroad, Carter is reinventing himself as a bit of a hawk as well. So previously, he'd all been, you know, about sort of peace and love in 1976. But now the Soviet Union has invaded Afghanistan. He's reinvented himself as Harry Truman, one of the founders of NATO. So he's basically gone to Congress. He said, I want lots more money for defence.

I'm going to punish the Russians with a boycott of the Moscow Olympics. I'll teach him. Well, that didn't teach them. And actually, the result was that Alan Wells, a Britain, won the 100-metre sprint for the first time in decades. Yeah, Sebastian Coe and Steve Avet and Daly Thompson. So great scenes. And it's the Americans who missed out. The Americans, I think the Germans, the West Germans, the Canadian.

and the Japanese didn't go, and a load of other countries, but we went. Although Mrs. Satcher didn't want us to go. She didn't want us to go and the athletes defied her. Yeah. Yeah. So there you go. And he's also, Carter, here's a bit of irony, he's asked Congress for Massive Military Aid to Pakistan and he's stepped up CIA support for the Majahadeen in Afghanistan.

Yeah. These noble fighters for freedom. Right. Yeah. So this is the era. Have you seen the Bond film, The Living Daylights, with Timothy Dalton? Yeah. They're the heroes of that film.

One of them is played by Art Malick, and he turns out he went to Cambridge or something like that, or Oxford, I can't remember which. Anyway, none of this produces instant results in Iran. And the problem for Carter is he has made the hostage crisis now the absolute kind of fulcrum, the test of his presidency. But he couldn't really do anything else, could he? I mean, if you've got, you've had your diplomats kidnapped and they're on national news. I mean, you can't just ignore it and pretend it's not happening. Yeah, I guess so. I mean, that's what Kennedy would do, of course.

nothing to see. Yeah. Kennedy would swim back to his hotel, put on a change of clothes. Put on a spiffy outfit. Yeah. But Carter has personalised it. He's cancelled all his trips. He's cancelled meetings.

He's made a huge hullabaloo of going to prayer meetings and so on. Now, at first, he thinks when the Soviets invade Afghanistan, he thinks, well, this will actually work out very well for me. Because if there's one thing the Iranians hate, you know, as much as... Americans, they hate godless Russian communists. So maybe if I take a restrained line towards Tehran, if I don't impose sanctions, which he doesn't, this will do the trick. Basically, the Soviet Union will scare the Ayatollahs into my embrace. But the problem is, you know, he's still hoping that they will negotiate, but it's not clear to him still whom he's meant to be

negotiating with. Homini, who is the figurehead of the regime, has said explicitly, you know, he won't give up the hostages. We fight against America until death. We shall not stop fighting until we defeat it. I don't know why I've given him that voice, but I have. Well, he's cast America as the great Satan. And if you're up against the great Satan, you have to keep fighting it, don't you?

Yeah, you can't negotiate with the great Satan. The Americans are hoping that maybe he's just a very loud figurehead. So, for example, he's got a new foreign minister at beginning of 1980 called Sadek Gottbzada. What is it? Gotbzada, Tom. Do you want to keep saying it? No, you got it. Yeah, I got it.

It didn't take a thousand takes, honestly. So this bloke got bizada was a former student activist. He'd been kicked out in the 50s. He'd gone to Georgetown University, so he's American educated. Oh, so a hotbed of radicalism. He had become very close to Khomeini in Paris. He'd been on the flight with him from France. And the Americans say, look at this bloke, this bloke, he's a man we can do business with.

He's American-educated, he looks very sort of smart and Western. And actually, they're right. Gottpzada wants to end the hostage crisis because he thinks, quite rightly, this is a gift to the hardliners. It's allowing them to kind of set in the regime further and further down the kind of Islamist road. So how has this American-educated, clean-shaven technocrat come to be foreign minister who's appointed him? At this point, there is an interim government.

under a guy called Bani Sadr, who is, again, slightly more technocratic, more moderate. You know, at this point, remember, the regime is not fully established. There's still an awful lot of jostling for position, not least among the different paramilitary groups on the streets. And, well, we can get massively bogged down at this point, but it's true the Iranian regime from 1979 to the present, that there are always factions, different elements, different elements, within it, reformists, conservatives. And that great tension between the structures of democracy and the structures of Khomeini's religious-focused rule.

Exactly. So on the one hand, you have Holmeney saying, if you oppose the government, because it's a government deriving its authority from the Quran and the Sharia. So if you oppose it, it's a blasphemy against God. And yet at the same time, you have democratic elections. Yeah. You know, competitive elections. Anyways, for Westerners, it's a very confusing picture.

This boat got Bessada. He works on a deal in early 1980 through Argentine, French, Panamanian intermediaries. At one point, amazingly, in February, Carter's chief of staff, a guy from Georgia called Hamilton Jordan, he goes off to Paris to meet this foreign minister, and he flies to Paris with a wig and false mustache that have been given him by the CIA. It's so brilliant. The CIA have a supply of false wigs and moustaches. Yeah, exactly. It's very kind of the Pink Panther strikes again or something. And it's in Paris. And it's in Paris, exactly. He gets there. He has this meeting. I presume he takes

the moustache off, or the wig off, at least at the meeting. But actually, this doesn't go anywhere. And the reason it doesn't go anywhere, of course, is that Khomeini has no intention of giving up the hostages. He's not going to give away this brilliant card that allows him to cement his control over the streets. So the weeks go by, the breakthrough never comes. And you can see the result in Jimmy Carter's approval rating. It had shot up to about 50% at the turn of the year as people rallied around the flag. But with every about two weeks or so when they do a new poll, it's down another 4 or 5%. And it's dropping all the time. So by March it's into the 30s, which is very bad for an incumbent president, hoping to win re-election.

Presumably this is also because of the recession. So the recession is a massive part of this. But also a perception, I think, of weakness. A perception that Jimmy Carter at this point has what you might call, he's got basically the opposite of the Midas touch. Everything he touches crumbles into dust and it's not really his fault. No, because what credibly can he do? Again, we could

spend ages talking about this but I think political leadership is about seizing control of a narrative and appearing to be the master of events and also making the most of crises. I mean, you say what can he do? Franklin D. Roosevelt was president in the Great Depression

much worse economically than this and yet he projected an image of vitality and vigor and activism and good cheer that resonated with enough Americans for him to win election after election, even though a lot of what he was doing didn't work out. But he didn't have loads of diplomats who were being paraded every day on the TV stations of a very hostile power. No, he didn't, but if you look at Reagan's time in office, for example, I mean, there was some absolute disaster in Reagan's time in office, not just things like Iran-Contra or economic, you know, borrowing loads of money and stuff. No, I suppose there were hostages in Lebanon, weren't there? There were hostages in Lebanon. There was a massive attack. The Americans were basically kicked out of Lebanon.

Reagan was a brilliant performer who was able to turn circumstances to his advantage. Carter, you know, famously, looks. Haggard and Gray. Haggard and Gray. And he doesn't have that Hollywood Sheen. And it may sound like a very trite thing. But as we've said since the very first episodes we ever recorded of this podcast, performance matters enormously. as for Roman emperors as it did for US presidents.

And actually this perception of weakness, by about March, April, even Carter's allies are really running out of patience. So there's an absolutely damning editorial in the Washington Post at the beginning of April. The Washington Post is much more likely to be pro-democrats. Iran, enough. The United States, far from earning respect

for its restraint and forbearance, is increasingly seen as a country that shrinks from asserting what even its enemies recognized. as a legitimate interest in protecting its diplomats from a mob. So it's interesting. In our lifetime, most of the discourse about the United States has been that it's much too trigger happy, much too swift to intervene militarily, to basically launch airstrikes against people and all of this.

And here is an instance where the president is taking deliberately a path of restraint because he thinks it will work better. And he's just getting an absolute kicking from his own media and his own people for doing so. And yet, actually, what people don't know is that inside the White House, Carter and his AIDS have been actually talking about, you know, taking more serious action all this time. So in the very first week of the crisis, his national security advisor, I know you're a big fan of this guy's name, aren't you, Tom? Do you want to say his name for everybody?

Shabignu Brizinski. Yeah, Zabignev Brzezinski. He's the hardliner, Polish. He has said to Carter, in the first days of the crisis, he was. said, you know, the hostages' lives are really important, but your greater responsibility is to protect the honour and dignity of our country and its foreign policy interests. And Brzezinski says to him, one day, we may have to choose between the hostages and our nation's honour in the world. I mean, that is ultimately the policy that the United States will adopt, isn't it, towards hostage

taking in the Middle East. Yeah. So, I mean, that's why the hostages held by Islamic State were allowed to be killed because there were no negotiations with them. So I guess, I guess it was a lesson learned, maybe. I guess. But, I mean, that's pretty tough for the hostages, right? And also, 52 of them. A lot of hostages taken in one fell swoop. This is slightly different from isolated groups of hostages

that have been taken over a longer period of time, I would say. Now, there have always been military options. So a task force within days had begun planning a possible rescue mission. We shall, of course, come back to this. But Carter's team had also discussed mining Iran's harbors, air strikes against oil refineries and bombing this gigantic oil complex at Aberdan which is one of the biggest oil complexes in the world

and Carter had actually been very tempted by this so he's not as weak as he's often painted but his patrician secretary of state Cyrus Vance said this would be very reckless to rush into this because we would lose the moral high ground in the eyes of the world and the Iranians would surely kill the hostages I mean, they would surely start executions.

And even Brzezinski said, yeah, maybe we should give the diplomatic process a bit more time. We shouldn't rush into this. But over time, of course, you know, we now get to March 1980. And they're thinking, well, we're never going to get these hostages out. So on the 22nd of March, Carter summoned his whole national security team to Camp David, ironically by helicopter. And they sit down and they say, well, what should we do? and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Jones, says, okay, well, this is the plan that we've been working on all this time. And the bloke behind this plan is the man who opened this episode, Colonel Charlie Beckwith.

He has exactly the kind of resume you would want him to have. He was a former Georgia All-State footballer. It turned down the Green Bay Packers in order to join the US Army in Korea. Dominique, I think that is the most American sentence we've ever had on the rest of the I think it undoubtedly is. He had commanded a special forces unit in Vietnam and he'd be hit in the chest and almost killed. He'd also, this is very pleasing.

He'd served as an exchange officer with the SAS in Malaya in the 1950s. And again, he almost died, I think this time of disease. And he absolutely loved the SAS. He liked Britain, Tom, I'm pleased to say. Great man. And he said, let's have an American,

the Brits are brilliant at this. Why don't we have an American SAS? Mad. And he was pestered, and pestered, and in 1977, his bosses gave him the green light to set up Delta Force. I mean, that is such a great name for them. It's so good. So, Delta Force specialized in counterterrorism and special ops.

So they're the sort of people, I know this will mean nothing to you, Tom, but if you play Call of Duty, you're kind of in a Delta Force kind of mindset. So it's Delta Force that sprung Magero out of Venezuela, right? Right. So Delta Force got Maduroa out of Venezuela. Delta Force were involved in the capture of Manuel Noriega from Panama. And Delta Force were the people who killed the Islamic state leader. Abu Bakar al-Badadi, he died like a dog. That's my Donald Trump, by the way, in case you're baffled. Yeah, they killed him as well. So they've got an impressive track record, if you like that kind of thing. Donald Trump said that their operation in Caracas was like a movie. Yeah, that's what they specialise. him. Their kind of operations, they specialize in things that will then become the subject to movies, right? Exactly. And Beckwith himself is a very Hollywood character. He's always got a crew cut. He's always got a cigarette at the corner of his mouth. He loves a hard liquor, an evening on the hard liquor. He doesn't do his paperwork. He's a man's man. He's chosen them all himself. So they're all

kind of hard-bitten, grim-faced, taciturn men who can be relied on. Quite like me. Yeah, just like you, exactly. But in 1979, they've never been tested, they've never done anything. They'd just finished their first major exercise in the Forest of Georgia when the Iranian seized the U.S. Embassy. And Beckwith was very excited when he heard this, and he rushed straight back to Fort Bragg to start planning. And his first attempt to plan was, I mean, even by Hollywood standards,

it was bonkers. Delta Force would be parachuted into an area east of Tehran near this big sort of highway, this motorway. We'll land there by parachute. We'll hijack some trucks. Then we'll drive into Tehran in these trucks, will storm the embassy, rescue the hostages. At this point, he said,

US bombers should hit all Iran's military bases and oil refinerers. There'll be complete chaos in Tehran. And Delta Force can then fight their way out of Tehran and get some more trucks and drive 400 miles to the Turkish border. Hell yeah. USA! Yeah, but unfortunately, his bosses don't respond like that. They say, are you mad?

driving here and there, hijacking trucks. You know, that'll never work. Pen-pushing blotter-dottes. So he goes back to the drawing board. And there's a place called the Farm, of course, in Northern Virginia, which is like a CIA base. And there, on the sort of tarmac, they laid out the outline of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran with masking tape or engineering tape. And they basically did endless drills, kind of working their way around the different rooms. So they know the embassy better than their own homes.

and they reckon if they can get to the embassy, they can kill the guards and get the hostages out. The question is how do they get into the centre of Tehran? And this is the solution. It's quite complicated, Tom. There won't be a test. And they actually only did a bit of it, so it doesn't really need to be a test.

So this is stage one. Eight marine helicopters will take off from the aircraft carrier Nymitz in the Gulf of Oman. And they'll fly to this salt desert in South Khorasan near the city of Tabah They'll fly to this desert to a place that they've designated as Desert One.

So they land at Desert One and at Desert One they will rendezvous with some Hercules transport planes, six of them, that have arrived from Egypt. There's the helicopters in the aircraft carrier, there's the planes from Egypt, they'll land at this desert and these transport planes will be carrying

Delta Force and some US Rangers so 130 men or so and fuel supplies for the helicopters. And at Desert One they will refuel the helicopters. Then the Delta Force team will get onto the helicopters and they'll fly to Desert 2, which is another desert checkpoint just outside Tehran.

And here, a secret CIA team, which will have been infiltrated into Iran earlier, will be waiting for them with a load of trucks. They will get in the trucks. They'll go into Tehran. They'll storm the embassy and the Iranian forces. foreign ministry, because remember three blokes are still in the foreign ministry, they're trapped in the dining room of the foreign ministry. So they rescue all of them. Do they contemplate taking,

I don't know, the Iranian foreign minister as hostage or something? No, I don't think so. That's what I would have done. Yeah. I'm more ruthless than Delta Force. More ruthless, clearly. So then they'll go across the street to a football stadium, the Amjadir football stadium, and the US helicopters will pick them up from this football stadium and they'll fly them to an air base south of Tehran an abandoned airbase which in the meantime will have been secured by a team of US army rangers and at this air base south of Tehran they'll be picked up by some more transport planes and flown to safety in Egypt. What could possibly go wrong? I think listeners will have drawn their own conclusions from my outline of the plan which by the way is a very simplified version of the

And it's extremely simplified. It's much more complicated in reality. I mean, it would work in a Tom Cruise film, wouldn't it? It would. But only just. But they could be spotted at Desert 1, Desert 2. Their trucks could be stopped in the way into Tehran. They might get delayed, capturing the embassy.

They might not even be able to cross the streets, the football stadium if there's a huge crowd there or if there's, you know, police. Well, the traffic. I mean, it's terrible. All of this. And Bekwith says, has said to his bosses, look, I mean, you can winge as much as you like. But there is no other plan. There is no other plan. The hostages aren't getting out by negotiation.

That's pretty clear. And he says, do you know what? It could work. And he has a model in mind, which is the Israeli raid on Entepe in 1976. To remind people about that, 102 largely Israeli hostages were taken in an airline hijacking by Palestinian and I think West German terrorists.

And they were flown to Uganda, to Entebbe in Uganda. And people thought it was impossible to get them out. And a load of Israeli commandos flew 2,500 miles, stormed the airfield, stormed the planes, and got almost all of the hostages out alive. They were led by Benjamin Netanyahu's brother, I think. Is that right? I think so. Well.

And this is the kind of operation, you know, that gave the Israelis in the 70s, this sort of reputation for extraordinary kind of daring and military. sort of prowess, a stunning feat, and Carter and his men think, well, if we could do the same, what a brilliant thing this would be for Carter and for the United States. So even though they can all see the risks, they're all very tempted by it. The one person who's not tempted as Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. He says, this is an insane plan. Things are bound to go wrong, and some of the hostages are bound to be killed. But Carter likes it, and he says start work on reconnaissance. So that was on the 22nd of March.

Let's move forward a couple of weeks. On the 7th of April, Carter broke off for the, I mean, it's amazing that he hadn't done this before. He broke off diplomatic links with Iran. On the 9th of April, Brazinski, his national security adviser, sent him a note and says, In my view, a carefully planned and boldly executed rescue operation represents the only realistic prospect that the hostages, any of them, will be freed in the foreseeable future. And Brzezinski says, we've pursued a policy of restraint, very un-American, for the last few months, and it's got us a lot of understanding and sympathy, but nothing else, and it's time for us to act.

So two days after that, Carter convenes his National Security Council. Now, crucially, Cyrus Vance, the one doubter, is away on holiday. He's had this long postponed holiday in Florida, which is finally gone on. And Carter has the meeting then when Vance is away, and they all agree, let's go with this plan. Vance gets back a couple of days later and he is horrified and he's outraged they've decided behind his back and he says to Carter

if you do this there will be huge reprisals against American teachers and businessmen still in Iran and indeed across the Muslim world I think by the way he was probably right that if they had carried this out this would have happened

but nobody backs Vance up there's a very embarrassing and excruciating meeting and he's left kind of smouldering so the next evening is the six which is the moment we open the episode with. This is Beckwith meeting Jimmy Carter. And Beckwith, you would think he would absolutely despise Carter as a wimp and a weed and stuff.

But he clearly doesn't from that account. He thinks Carter is great. He says in his memoirs Carter was really calm, direct, forceful. He said, you know, no nonsense. Carter said, finally, okay, we'll do this. And Beckwith, in his memoirs, it says, I was full of wonderment. I was proud to be an American and to have a president. do what he'd just done. And Carter gives him that last message. If this fails, it's on me,

not on you. And, you know, we don't leave any of our dead behind. And Beckwith absolutely loves this. This is music to his ears. And that's just the meeting breaks up. He says, unimprovably, he says, God bless you, Mr. President. So everybody's whipping away a manly tear. It's great. The only person who isn't, actually, I say everybody, Cyrus Vance isn't the Secretary of State. He's absolutely furious. And a couple of days afterwards, Carter, this is perhaps the other side of Carter. Carter says, I've got a load of Methodists coming to the White House. I want someone to go and tell them that we're not going to do any military action. Could you do that, please? And Vance says, no, I'm not going to lie to you to a

lot of Methodists. And Carter's furious. This is the first time the commander in chief has been disobeyed by one of his subordinates. And then Vance gives him an envelope and it's a handwritten note from his secretary of state, like a really important person, a handwritten note saying, I'm resigning. I'm out. As soon as that mission finishes, I'm going to wait till after the mission, but then I'm gone. You know, a bad blow for the Carter administration. Anyway, we come to the big day, Thursday the 24th of April. Carter and his aides are in the White House.

They're pretending that it's just an ordinary day, but this is the day that's been chosen. And at 10.30 that morning, he gets a call from General Jones. It's night in Iran. The weather is clear. It's all go, the choppers have taken off from the Nymets. Meanwhile, in Egypt, Charlie Beckwith's men, Delta Force, lining up for their final inspection

in their airbase hangar. And they're all dressed kind of in plain clothes. They're all wearing jeans and kind of flannel shirts and black jackets. They haven't shaved because they want to blend in on the streets of Tehran. They've written farewell letters to their wives and girlfriends, if the worst happens. And now a scene that is so made for Hollywood.

In the hangar, their ops officer who's called Major Jerry Boykin has put a big sort of photo, a montage of all the hostages faces. These are the Americans that we are going to get out of Tehran. And Major Boykin gets out the Bible, and he reads from the first book of Samuel. And David put his hand in a bag and took thence a stone and slung it and smoked the Philistine in the forehead so that the stone sunk into his forehead and he fell on his face to the earth. So David prevailed over the Philistine with a stone and a stone and a stone. And a sling. He finishes and they all bow their heads in prayer. And then one of them starts singing, God bless America, and they all join in. And the sound kind of echoes around the hangar.

And it's actually, I mean, the reason I did this, I think, is that this is the last scene of the film, The Deer Hunter, which had been released just over a year earlier and had been a massive hit at the Oscars. So, I mean, literally Hollywood. Literally Hollywood. And then they finish, the song dies away. And it's time to go. Operation Eagle Claw is underway. Goodness me. I mean, Dominic, what a pitch for a Hollywood thriller.

We will find out what happens after the break. Welcome back to The Rest is History. Massive, massive tension, massive, massive drama brewing because it's the morning of 24th of April 1980 and in the White House Jimmy Carter is waiting by his phone for news from Iran. So he knows that about midday

the first helicopters should reach Desert One and he and his aides are looking at their watches and all these meetings but they look in their watches the whole time. And at lunchtime he's having a sandwich in the Oval Office and the Secretary of Defence, who's called Harold Brown, brings the news from Iran. And it's bad news, Tom. So the helicopters have been flying across the desert

and they've run into an unexpected sandstorm, like a sort of dust storm, a really bad dust storm. I mean, you say unexpected, but I imagine dust storms are pretty common. I think it was bad luck. I think it was genuinely really bad luck, though. You know, you could fly across 10 times and there'd be no dust storm, but on the 11th is a dust storm,

and this is the 11th time. one of the helicopters has gone down in the dust storm because the dust is so terrible it's kind of got into their rotors or whatever and they've had to abandon this helicopter the men have got out and gone into the other helicopters but they've had to abandon it a second helicopter got totally lost in the dust storm

and almost crashed into a mountain and has turned back to the Gulf of Oman but so instead of having eight helicopters they now have six is that enough to get that hostages? That is enough. That is just enough. Now meanwhile, Charlie Beckwith and Delta Force have landed safely and on time at Desert 1. But here too, there are some unexpected hiccups. So first of all, as they're landing, they see two, basically two vehicles, which are oil tankers driven by Iranian smugglers, oil smugglers, streaking across the desert. And the US Rangers chased after these

oil tankers, because they said, God, we can't allow anyone to have seen us. They, took one of them out with an anti-tank rocket. So the tanker kind of exploded. Whoa. And, I mean, that wasn't very discreet because they're blown up an oil tanker with a kind of missile. And the next thing that happens, suddenly this bus appears out of the night.

And the bus is packed with pilgrims, most of whom are women. Oh, no. And it's overloaded with the pilgrim's luggage. And the Rangers, this time, they fire at the tires of the bus. disable the bus and they take all these women pilgrims off as prisoners. So, I mean, we're talking about dozens and dozens of people.

And they're like, what are we going to do with all these women? And they put them on one of their transport planes and they say, well, we'll hold them on this transport plane at Desert 1 until the mission is over. So at midnight local time, they hear sound overhead and it's the helicopters, six of them. And they're more than an hour late. So the helicopters land. And now this sort of patch of desert is very crowded. You've got transport planes, you've got helicopters,

you've got all the blocs from Delta Force, you've got a burning wreckage of an oil tanker, you've got a captured bus, and a load of captured pilgrims, all packed into this bit of the desert. And Beckwith is horrified when he sees they've only got six helicopters. That's the bare minimum to complete the mission. And they're running out of time.

They have to do all this under cover of darkness. So he says to his men, okay, hurry up. Get your gear, take it from the transports, load on to the choppers. And then, as they're doing that, one of the marine pilots comes up to him and he says, Sir, we have a problem. A pump on one of the helicopters has failed. And they did bring repair equipment with them, but it was in the helicopter they abandoned in the dust storm. Oh no. Suddenly Beckwith has this massive decision to make. He could go on with a smaller team in just five helicopters, but his written instructions are very clear.

next to the words less than six hellos is the single word in capital letters abort now he can't make that decision himself the commander-in-chief has to make it

so back at the White House Carter's chief of staff Hamilton Jordan gets a call from his boss Hamilton Jordan has the bloke previously was wearing a false moustache and a wig He's taken that off

not anymore he's taken it off and he gets this call come to the Oval Office he goes to the Oval Office Carter is sitting in there with his head and his hands devastated. Carter says,

I've just had a call and I've given the order abort the mission. Carter has absolutely crushed all that tension, all that excitement, but he's aborted the mission. And then he says,

well, at least there were no American casualties and no innocent Iranians hurt. And then the phone rings. And Carter picks up the phone and what color there is, which isn't much, drains from his already haggard features. And he just says,

Uh-huh, uh-huh. Are there any dead? And then there's a pause and then very quietly he says, I understand. And then he puts down the phone. And what's happened? What's happened? Carter's abort order had reached Desert One.

They refueled the helicopters. They prepared to abandon ship and move out. And then one of the pilots, the pilot of the helicopter Bluebeard 3, in the darkness and in dust, as he was moving his helicopter, he clipped the wing of one of the transport planes. There was this great crack

and then basically the helicopter fell out of the sky onto the plane. There was a massive explosion and then the flames from that explosion spread to the plane's fuel supply and there was a second explosion like a fireball, colossal fireball as the plane blew up. Amazingly, only eight Americans were killed.

Five airmen in the transport plane and three in the helicopter. And it's a scene of total devastation. There's burning wreckage everywhere, you know, smouldering bits of planes, whatever. I mean, you know, it's a shocking scene. And understandably, all the Americans say, oh my God, we've got to get the hell out of here.

And they all pile into the remaining transport planes and they take off as quickly as they can. Can I just ask, do they obey Carter's orders and bring the bodies back with them? Because they're burning bodies in the middle wreckage of a transport plane. Right, because I have an incredibly vivid memory of there was a magazine called Now. Right. It was published by James Goldsmith.

On the cover, they had a charred body of an American in the desert. And it was really vivid in my memory because it's the first time I'd seen a photograph of a body. Yeah. Really shocking image. And I was kind of wondering when I read that passage at the beginning. Was my memory playing tricks? But no. No, no, not at all.

because actually, you know, they leave behind in the desert. You know, they've left the smoldering records of the transport and the helicopter with the bodies in them. They've left four perfectly good helicopters behind. They've left the burning remains of an Iranian oil tanker and a bus full of Iranian pilgrims who are completely baffled and frightened. By what's going on? Yeah. Yeah, by what's encouraging.

I mean, it must have seemed absolutely bizarre to them. They're taken prisoners by the Americans who then blow themselves up and then run away. Yeah. I mean, that's how you'd perceive it if you're an Iranian, right? And what's worse, they've left in the helicopters, their mission instructions, or the classified instructions. Why do they do that? They're leaving in the chaos and panic, right? Yeah, they think the SAS would do that.

Maybe not. So, in the Oval Office, Carter tells his team the news, and no one speaks. In fact, the only person who breaks the silence is of all people, Cyrus Vance, who's about to resign, who just says, Mr. President, I'm very, very sorry. That's decent of him. Yeah, and there's this sort of funereal mood. Of course, the truth is it was always a massive long shot, and they did a report afterwards the Pentagon, and they said, you know, plans like this,

you have to prepare for the worst, and we didn't. We put our men and our machines under intolerable pressure. There was no margin for error. And actually, it turned out that the CIA had predicted, even if you get to Tehran, even if you get to the embassy, probably half the hostages will be killed in the fighting. You'll only get half of them out alive.

Do you think that there was a sense that this was a kind of Hollywood script penned by someone who saw himself as its star? I mean, I just asked because what's his name, the guy who founded the SAS. He was very much that kind of figure, wasn't he? What was he called? David Sterling. Colonel David Sterling, yeah, who later talked about carrying out a coup in 1975 from Britain against the Labour government. I just wonder whether the kind of men who have the get up and go in imagination to set up units like this, maybe their imagination can sometimes run away with them. Completely can, but that's how you have this such a unit in the first place, isn't it?

I mean, that's, I would say, an inherent part of the repertoire of such people. Yeah, an occupational hazard of it. Yeah, absolutely. That you have people who are coming up with these what seem insanely reckless ideas, but you obviously need people to rein them in and say, well, okay, well, let's look at this piece by piece, is this actually plausible? It's all going to work. Carter and Coe always knew that it was a long shot. I mean, they did it because they thought it's this or nothing. They were right, by the way, if this was the only way that they could plausibly get them out. But the press were completely unforgiving. The new republic, and a headline called it the Jimmy Carter Desert Classic. And basically

Carter got all the blame. And everyone said, look at Carter. You know, there was a time when we had the best military in the world. But now when a helicopters are in the air, they just crash. Even when they're on the they crash into each other and have to be abandoned and stuff. This is what the state that Jimmy Carter has brought us to, which is harsh, I agree, very unfair. In Iran, the reaction was unbridled delight. So there were huge crowds on the streets of Tehran. Khomeini said, this is all God's doing. You know, thanks be to God, obviously.

And you were talking about seeing the photo on James Goldsmith's magazine. So Khomeini's chief justice, who was called Sadeh Khaqqqq. Cali, who was nicknamed the hanging judge. He went on Iranian TV to exhibit these charred remains of the bodies. Oh my God. A blackened forearm with the US military watch still on it. So he took a ghoulish delight in showing off the bodies that the Iranians had found at Desert One. Carter, he was very decent about this.

He took all the blame on himself. As he said he would. He wanted to ring all the families personally. but was told not to by the Pentagon. It broke a Pentagon protocol. The Secretary of Defense does it, not the president. He did fly to Delta forces based, to meet Beckwith and the team.

A very Hollywood scene again, there's a lot of sort of manly tears and embracing and stuff. And if the American people had seen that, maybe they'd have a different view of Jimmy Carter, but as it is, they just see this bloke who yet again is coming on TV looking very pained, announcing more bad news. Loser.

Yeah, they say he's a loser. people just say this bloke is just a born loser and seven out of ten people are saying now that it's time for a change cars is not fit to be president all of this kind of stuff so what now for the hostages they were split up and moved to prisons

all over Tehran and actually they disappear a little bit from the US front pages for most of the rest of 1980 there's still the business with yellow ribbons and people ringing bells and whatnot but they're not as prominent as story as they were and obviously they're a reminder of failure and defeat I suppose if they vanish into prison cells, then they're not as visible, are they?

They can't be put on television, and it's a bit like the hostage situation in Lebanon in the 80s. You know, if you're not seeing them, you can forget them. Yes, out of sight out of mine, frankly. But then they returned to the headlines in October and November, not because of anything in Iran, but because of the looming presidential election. So Carter was confirmed as the Democratic candidate. Kennedy had a little bit of a revival after the desert debacle, but wasn't enough to stop Carter getting the nomination for the Democrats.

The Republican side, Reagan is nominated, and he's now trying his best to win over blue-collar Democrats in industrial states. So basically, the kind of people who are like truck drivers or whatever, they listen to Jimmy Carter's speech about the crisis of confidence and they thought he'd gone mad. They're cross about their gasoline prices. They're very annoyed that people are burning the American flag

in the streets of Tehran and humiliating the United States, and they want a change of leadership. So Reagan leads in the polls, but his lead was much smaller than is often remembered. It was only 3 or 4% or so, so Carter still had hope. And basically, the Reagan camp's fear is that if Carter can get the hostages back in October or early November, just before the election, that will swing it. The Reagan camp's computers have decided that it would give him a 10% boost, and that would be enough to win the election for Jimmy Carter. And so the notion of an October surprise by this point is part of American political discourse, is it? It is absolutely. So an October surprise, a coup that will transform the narrative. And the Republicans are planting loads of stories about an October surprise, actually, to try and preempt it, and saying, oh, Carter's going to pull out an October surprise. You know, he's playing politics with the lives of the hostages, how cynical, all this kind of thing.

Isn't the conspiracy theory, though, that actually is working the other way around and that it's the Republican, who are in contact with the government in Tehran to keep the hostages until after the election? Yeah. Is that true? Now, some of our American listeners will be waiting excitedly for this, for our analysis of this.

So to explain, the thesis is that Reagan's campaign manager, William Casey, who ended up running the CIA and being involved in Iran-Contra, so the Iran-Contra was, this is going to be a very simplified version, they were secretly selling arms to Iran

as a sort of quid pro quo to try and get hostages out. of Lebanon, and they were also channeling the profits from the arms sales to fund the Contra right-wing fighters in Nicaragua, which had been explicitly banned by Congress. So a very complicated and murky story. Anyway, we touched on it, didn't we, in our series on Reagan? So Casey was involved in this, and the October surprise conspiracy theory is that actually Casey was involved in dealings with the Iranians long before Iran-Contra.

He was secretly meeting them in 1980, in Washington and Madrid, and he basically said to them. Don't release the hostages. Hold on to them until after the election. If you hold on to them until after the election, the Reagan administration will release Iran's frozen bank assets and we will organize arms shipments to you via Israel. So conspiracy theorists, I mean proper conspiracy theorists, first floated this story in 1980. But then when the Iran contra revelations came in the late 80s, people said, well, hold on, maybe these stories are actually true. And both the Senate and the House of Representatives held inquiries into this in the 1990s,

and they said it's actually not true. It's rubbish. And what's more, three different American news outlets, so Newsweek, the New Republic, and the Village Voice, and the Village Voice, you know, anti-establishment, definitely left-leaning. They all investigated this, and they said, it's Tosh, actually.

There wasn't a deal between Reagan and the Iranians. But it's never gone away. There was a book published as recently. It's 2024. Very well reviewed in The Guardian, among other places, by a guy called Craig Unger, an American journalist. And he said, no, no, no. And he found a lot of people who said maybe there was a secret deal.

The issue is, I mean, there's one issue about Craig Unger. Craig Unger specialises in this kind of thing, because he wrote a lot about the bushes and the Saudi royal family. He's written loads about Trump being an FSB agent and stuff. Now, he might be right about all of those things. but I always tend to be a little bit skeptical when somebody sees conspiracies everywhere. That's a slight red flag for me. Not for some listeners, I guess.

They might sound being too skeptical. I think the bigger point is that I think it's irrelevant. I don't think there was any way the Iranians were going to release the hostages before the election, because they have come to see this as a duel between Khomeini and Carter. And there's actually a degree, I think, of the bully about the Iranian regime when it comes to Carter. I mean, the way that Khomeini would taunt him, you know, in interviews and say Carter is weak, he hasn't got the guts to fight us, he hasn't, all this kind of thing. There's a kind of sadistic glee to it.

And I just don't see a world in which he would have released those hostages before the election. He didn't want to give Carter the satisfaction. But why is he even contemplating releasing them to Reagan? Is he not worried that Reagan will be a much more formidable and hawkish opponent? Why does he want to give Reagan, any rocket fuel for his presidency, wouldn't an impaired, politically damaged Carter winning a second term

be better for Iran than Reagan? I don't think the Iranians are thinking that closely about the results of the US presidential election, first of all, but also they would like to get their $8 billion in banking assets back. So, you know, I mean, $8 billion is a lot of money. Plus, after 1980,

when they're fighting the Iran-Iraq war, the possibility of arms shipments becomes very important to them. So I think once the Iran-Iraq war has broken out, when Saddam Hussein has invaded, they're slightly, the Americans are no longer at the forefront of their mind. They probably just want to get this issue done and dust it, I think,

and crack on with fighting Saddam. So anyway, let's get to the first weekend in November. So there's four days to go till election day. Carter is still hoping for a last-minute offer from the Iranians. And actually, on the Sunday, the election's on Tuesday and on the Sunday he gets one from the Iranian parliament. They say Carter's got to cancel all-American financial claims against Iran. He's got a hand over their frozen assets.

He's got a hand over the shahs, millions. And he must promise never to intervene in Iranian affairs. The problem is that this proposed deal is so complicated financially. There is no way it will be done before election day. And Carter is gutted. And then the next day, the Monday, the last day, the last full day of the campaign, that is the day that marks the end

of 12 months in captivity for the hostages. And Carter's flying back after campaigning in Detroit to Washington, and he puts on the TV news on Air Force One on his plane, and he is absolutely horrified because all the three American networks ended their big news bulletins with montages of,

it's been 12 months for the hostages in captivity, yellow ribbons and all that. Yellow ribbons, the scenes of them are blindfolds, burning helicopters in the desert, it is the worst possible publicity. And at that point, I think some of his aides thought, we've lost this election. Because if that's what everybody is talking about, we're doomed. And they were right, because the next day, the Tuesday, Reagan won by almost 10%. He won 44 states to Carter's 6.

It was a landslide. And you know what? This was not the end of Jimmy Carter's personal torment. Well, no, because he's still got two months left as president, hasn't he, before Reagan's inaugurated? Right, and his one big dream, you know, Carter has always been obsessed with the hostages. His one thing is, I want to be the president who welcomes them home. I want to get them home. It was the one thing I always wanted.

So all through December and January, the State Department are negotiating this deal with the Iranians. Basically, through Algeria, which is the big intermediary, they will hand over $8 billion in frozen assets. And then, when the Iranians get the money, they'll release these hostages. The Iranians, I mean, I think there's no doubt they are toying with Carter. They are loving every minute of this because they don't sign the deal until the last full day of his presidency, Monday the 19th of January. The terms are so complicated the money has to go from the Bank of England to the central bank of Algeria

and then Tehran will release the hostages. Now Carter hasn't slept for days. He's been in the Oval Office sort of obsessing over all the details of these transactions. and he says to his aides, the hostages matter more to me than anything. He's not going to have a farewell party in the White House as people normally do. There's not going to be a drinks party

for all the people who've worked with him because he is waiting to fly to West Germany to an air base where the hostages will be brought to go to a US military hospital. And he reckons he can just about get to West Germany, greet the hostages, and then get back to Washington for Reagan's inauguration at midday on the Tuesday.

So on Monday he's just sitting there in the Oval Office, waiting for the go ahead. And then finally they get news from Tehran. The Iranians have rejected one of the financial documents. Of course they have. And they're going to have to start the transfer all over again. You can't believe it. He's waiting and waiting. At 2 o'clock in the morning, he gets a call from the US Treasury.

The Iranians have now sent documents to their own, but they've sent the wrong bank code and the wrong figures. I mean, of course the Iranians are doing this deliberately, I think. Carter's aides were all to sleep on the sofa. but he's still, you know, sitting there in his cardigan, making notes in his little pad, God, hasn't slept for about a week, all of this. And finally he gets the call at 6.30 in the morning. The Bank of England have transferred the money to the Bank of Algeria, and the Algerians have sent word to Tehran.

You can release the hostages now. And Carter, you know, it's come too late for him to go and greet them in West Germany, but at least, you know, it's kind of happened under his watch. and he, this is my favorite detail he says to his aides, ring Ronald Reagan. Reagan is staying basically across the streets ready to take over.

He says ring Reagan, you know, the incoming president will want to know. And Reagan's aides say, oh, he's given instructions not to be, he's asleep, he's not getting on now to take you a call. He's given instructions not to get up, not to be woken until after 8 o'clock.

Carter can't believe this because this is antithetical to his way of working. Yeah, finally. Those tennis courts aren't going to book themselves. Right, exactly. Finally, what did Reagan say? They say hard work, never killed anyone, but I say, why take the chance?

He gets through to Reagan at 8.30, and then my favorite line of this entire Iranian revolutionary story. Carter speaks to Reagan for ages, and then he puts down the phone, and his aides say, what did Reagan say? And he said, oh, how did it go? And Carter said, well, Reagan just listened. And then when I'd finished, he said, what hostages? Is that Carter making a joke? I don't know. I think it possibly is Carter making a joke.

And if so, hats off to Jimmy Carter. That is a good joke. It is a good joke. I mean, if it's Reagan's joke, it's even funny. Anyway, the inauguration gets underway. Carter is still waiting for news. Ron and Nancy arrive at the White House, and Carter's still waiting, and they say to his aid say,

the hostages are still not, they're literally sitting on airport buses. They're not being allowed onto the planes. So he won't get the one thing he wanted, which is the chance as president. to announce that they have left Iran. He won't even get that. At midday, Reagan is inaugurated.

Carter standing next to him looks kind of like a ghost. He's so tired. In Tehran, the guards on the airport buses get the call. Basically, Reagan is in and Carter is out. And they say, fine. And they open the doors. They rip their blindfolds off the hostages. And they push the hostages out.

And the hostages are herded onto these Air Algeria planes, but there's a crowd there spitting at them and chanting death to America as they board the planes. So the Iranians had claimed, of course, that they were guests, but I have to say this is not the great moments in the history of Iranian hospitality.

So all of that meant that it was Reagan, not Carter, who got to announce their release, and he did it in the most classic Reagan Hollywood style. He gives the speech at the inauguration lunch, and he ends, he's giving a toast, and he says, and you can do it, Tom,

because you do a very good Ronald Reagan. Oh, with thanks to all. mighty God, I have been given a tagline. The get-off line, everyone wants at the end of a speech. Some 30 minutes ago, the planes bearing our prisoners left Iranian airspace and are now free of Iran. Then he raises his champagne glass and everybody cheers at such a Hollywood moment. Carter was in his car going to Andrew's Air Force Base when he got the news. He flew eventually to Vies Barton and West Germany to greet the hostages, not as president, but as a very exhausted and gaunt ex-president.

And it was a very poignant scene. Some of the hostages, of course, they're all absolutely traumatized and exhausted. Some of them were in tears, some of them applauded him. But actually, he'd hoped for this great cathartic moment. But some of them actually say, why did you let the Shah in? Why didn't you rescue us? What was that business about the desert? What's all that about?

I mean, I guess if there's a moral to this whole thing, story, it's, don't be kind, right? I mean, don't let dying dictators into your country. Timmy Carter didn't want to let a dictator. Didn't want to let the shower in? No, I know he didn't. But he did, and everything followed from that, right? Well, I mean, we can discuss the lessons in just a sec. What did it all mean? The hostages were there for 444 days. And I think when you read interviews with them, I mean, it's the defining moment in their lives. And some of them never really recovered, I think, from the trauma of, I mean, the terror of being held in Tehran. And I imagine the physical treatment as well.

Being beaten up and starved and, yeah. People paying Russian re-elect with you or whatever, taunting you, being dragged in front of a crowd, blindfolded, all of those kinds of things. For Carter, it becomes defining, it becomes the moment that taints his presidency forever. I think in many ways a much more interesting and sort of forward-looking presidency than people remember. I mean, he's a pretty strange character by the standards of presidents, Jimmy Carter, but he's trying lots of different things and he's a definite break from the norm. But the perception of weakness. I mean, that's how subliminally I remember him as a child who was

first becoming aware of the news is I just sort of him as a loser. Yeah, exactly. For Reagan and the conservative movement, it's a gift actually, this whole story because it confirms this impression of the 1970s as a decade of humiliation and retreat, that it'll take a bit of Hollywood magic to restore America's vigor. And I think the Iranian hostage crisis and the Iranian Revolution generally really mattered in the American imagination

because I think it's always there in the background when other things happen in the 80s and 90s and 2000s. So Iran becomes, in the American imagination, the embodiment of sort of oriental fanaticism and cruelty And I think even though people aren't maybe consciously or directly thinking or talking about it, the scar of this is always there in 9-11, in the first Gulf War, in the invasion of Iraq, all of those kinds of things. Americans had never thought about the Middle East, I think, before this. This is the point at which sort of Islamic fanatics really start to loom as enemies of the United States.

Anyway, we'll end in Tehran. So we left the Iranian Revolution, really our narrative of it, in the end of 79 with Khomeini strengthening his grip. And the hostage crisis allowed him to complete that process. Because in the next couple of years, the religious conservatives really took control of Iran. Part of it was that they were able to use anti-Americanism as kind of ideological fuel.

They got an arguably an even bigger boost in September 1980 when Saddam Hussein invaded. and the Iran-Iraq war started. But that's a terrible war for Iran, isn't it? And indeed for Iraq. It's like the First World War. Human wave attacks, trenches, gas. And it ends in a stalemate.

Half a million people kill basically for nothing. I remember I mentioned this stay in Hamadan in Iran, where I met the old Shahs officer who'd loved the disco dancing in Chelsea. But I remember watching if there was a football match on. I think it was a British football match, English football match. and at half time instead of you know pundits coming on and analyzing v a r or whatever they showed maimed war veterans of that war kind of displaying their you know their injuries and their amputations and things and uh i mean you think i mean if that's if that's what you're

getting even in sports programs yeah what a constant trauma yeah the stuff about the sort of martyrs of the Iran-Iraq war, I mean, looms so large, and certainly for Iran, sort of Iranian sensibility, and left a massive scar, I think. But of course, what it did, just as in the French or the Russian revolutions, it worked in the hardliners' favour, because doubters or moderates are seen as unpatriotic, and people start to flee the centre ground for the extremes. And that allowed Khomeini and, well, his allies, certainly, and the more hardline elements, to purge the sort of more moderate members of his coalition, some of whom were actually executed. They shut down dissenting newspapers. They executed the more left-wing element of this sort of Islamist

spectrum. And they were able to push through this sort of social and cultural revolution, taking schools back into clerical control. They nationalized lots of industry. They launched all these campaigns against Western values. Most notably being the obligational women to wear hijab. But here's the interesting thing. That thing that we talked about earlier on and we've talked about before, the tension in Iran between the democratic and the Islamist elements was never resolved. So on the one hand, you know, Iran to this day, this sort of repressive, autocratic state, but it does have contested elections. You know, admittedly, you know, not everybody's allowed to run, but it's not a monolithic autocracy. And at the same time, women's rights very severely restricted, you know, what women can wear, how they look and so on.

And yet, confusingly, Iran has more female engineers, university-educated engineers, than any other country per capita in the world. So it's a land of contrasts and paradoxes. Land of contrast. Well, we mentioned, they also have more gender reassignment operations than anywhere else in the world. And I guess the question, I mean, maybe we can talk about this in a bonus episode in more detail, is whether it has. had to work out as it did. Are there parallel universes in which the Iranian revolution turns out differently? And I think as with the French and Russian revolutions, the answer is yes. The Shah could have handled things differently. The Americans certainly could. They could have ditched the Shah earlier.

They could have rushed into a military coup. They could have tried to reach out to Khomeini. Maybe he might have behaved differently. I think it's unlikely. The hostage crisis, if that hadn't happened, maybe things would have played out differently on the streets of Tehran. My last thought is, I think it's odd that of the two great 20th century revolutions, the Russian Revolution is far better known in the West. So Lenin and Stalin are far better known than the Aetala Khomeini. But I would say the Islamic Revolution in Iran is much more relevant in the 21st century than the Russian Revolution.

Completely. Because, I mean, there aren't many communists. You don't meet many communists. And it seems unlikely to me that a major industrialized country, country will be taken over by a communist coup. But there are a lot of Islamists. What hominy pioneered, so that blend of radical modernity and kind of backward-looking conservatism, the blend of religiosity and nationalism as well, actually. And his ability to tap people's anxieties remains enormously powerful, I would say. I mean, I think that appeal to

nationalism is a particularly Iranian thing. The sense Iranians have of themselves as belonging to an incredibly ancient civilization, because it's true, is much more pronounced than it is in most other Muslim Arab countries, because Iran is the country that doesn't Arabis. Yes. Unlike Egypt or Syria or whatever. Agreed. But I think the style of politics, his style that he pioneered and his ability, and don't forget, Khomey was in many ways a very modern figure with his, you know, cassettes of his sermons,

with his message being broadcast from Paris, all of this kind of thing. and I think that that's been much more influential in the 21st century than anything that the Russian communists ever did. Anyway, next time, something completely different. The fall of Carthage. Exciting. Hannibal, the Romans, Battle of Zama. Plunging right back in time. And it will end with the destruction of the city that was, in the opinion of the Romans, their greatest and most dangerous enemy.

So that will be the fall of Carthage. Good news for Restis History Club members, Tom, isn't it? There is. They will get all four episodes of that Carthage series on Monday. And if you want to join them, just sign up at the Restis History.com. It's what Jimmy Carter would have wanted. Yeah. I'm not sure that's necessarily a commendation.

Right. Join Jimmy Carter at the Restis History Club. Yeah. The whole website would probably crash. And that's hard. because I, you know, I'm left with a soft spot for Jimmy Carter. Oh. A decent man.

Yeah, he was in many ways. Apart from getting Cyrus fans to light of the Methodists. That was very poor. Yeah. Anyway, on that note, thank you very much for listening. Thank you, Dominic, for a wonderful and timely series. Bye-bye. Goodbye.