The cia hostage. Please give a warm hometown walking while going. [applause]. Thank you all for coming. What an amazing crowd. I do need to correct one thing. I just did ain degree at the university of california armstrong. Since i have a captive audience i will digress from my normal talk in address of the university of georgia board of regents. About ten or 12 years ago armstrong was a commuter college it with no residence halls. As i recall the board of regents said Georgia Southern is a little too large lets make armstrong a Residential College and turn it into another Regional School and we will take some of the pressure off of Georgia Southern. Armstrong has beautiful residential halls. The school is growing and now here is this phenomenally incredibly stupidph decision to somehow merge these two schools that are an hour apart. T. If i may tell the board of regents this is neck and be costeffective more effective than that we are the south. In history do not merge the schools. Armstrong was the best job i ever had. Not including the one i head at the 15. That is a good training for g the marine corps. For going to iran. I do want to talk about what i saw in iran at the age of 31 and what iran has become today. I am not at all president s against islam. I have no problem with muslims ive no problem with iranians. I do have problems with the extremists who take their beliefs to extreme measures. Everybody erected is pretty familiar with the split in islam but it doesnt stop there. There are 33 different sects of islam is shows it shows you how divided the religion is. Sd the 33 different sects run from very passive this young lady has gone on to do absolutely wonderful thingsel of the world of charity and nongovernmental organizations. She has paid a price for that. She was in a very terrible car wreck she was in kenya when the riots were there. Several years ago i was honored to have received an invitation to her wedding and i flew up to vancouver which took place at a beautiful mosque. I consider her one of my top notch students and a very close friend. I am no concern and all about the religion of islam and those who practice islam just with individuals. The iranians who took the embassy for the most part were wellmeaning but very naive i would divide the group into sort of three age brackets. Those who are college graduates. My chief interrogator and individual and that i spent a hundred or so very delightful hours with. In less than comfortable circumstances. Have actually gone to the university of california berkeley for a few years. I am a product of the university of california system only irvine. We were so close to the beach that nobody was radicalized except when surf was up. I do understand berkeley and i thought it was very appropriateer that this guy had gone to berkeley although he was radicalized in different direction. And they were responsible i think for what the leadership. There was a lot of struggles going on. Nobody seemed to be going in charge. , there were three operations officers i have only been in the agency for nine months. That feeling never pass. The whole point that we were there was a that the Carter Administration and indeed the western world had no idea what was going on. Because the iranians did things hourly. No one really knew who was in charge or influencing them who seem to be the last person that talk to them. There was a tremendous need and let washington to find out what the new policies were to be. Most of the station after fled. It was also attacked then by a group of militants. Mostly thugs. We caught the february 14 valentines day open house. They were in the embassy for about three hours. We were really trying to find anybody who have any access to power who could tell us what was going on and who might be willing to cooperate with the great satan. I was assigned under cover as the Clinical Affairs officer. Because of the billions of dollars of military equipment. In the middle of the that revolution. They embargoed all of that. They wanted that. In that money was a real sticking problem. They actually got the money after all of these years. And then at night when i shouldve been sleeping or doing other things productive i was out on the streets doing spy stuff. I was making friends with the guy who worked in the prime ministers office. Spine yourself can be hazardous to your health. I diplomatic immunity. The sky was going to go to jail not me. We dont know whats going on. You could really help us. I didnt know what to say because we had covered a lot of scenarios in my training but that wasnt one of them. I just ask if i could have another drink we changed the subject. Needless to say that was a pitch that didnt work out well. Like all of the others. Here was the group of older guys. And then there was ap middle group was sort of in charge of our daytoday once we were captured in turned in. We thought we were captives for a while. We did not know we were hostages until about the third week. In my case one of my guards, said that we were hostages. I didnt really know what it meant for me at the time. I knew what it meant to m be a hostage. You dont apply those things to yourself. And then there was a 19yearold who was the day today guards. Ou we have most of the interaction and some of them are hostile and some of them were amazed to find after being with us for weeks or months at a time that we were just americans like they were just iranians. You take them off. And get under the cone of silence and talk to somebody. And that really have an impact on their view of us. Everybody i think is pretty much aware that the iranians came to the embassy to break the relations with the United States. They were unrelated but they put them together for a great conspiracy theory. This means the United States was planning to have another coup. That is what the state department was doing. In the north of the country there were listening posts that were way up in the mountains. They were using the listening post. You could discern a lot of intelligence. We could down load. They would also violate them in other ways. They have violated the treaty this way and that way. It was first of all with the soviets being right there on the soviet border. There were a lot of soviet diplomats and intelligence oen officers in irene iran. That is Something Else that we were very interested in. They are focused on the United States. Since 1972 with the nixon administration. The shot was spending billions of dollars of iranian oil on weapons to be a leader of the world their poor health care. They blame the United States for a lot of their woes. In a certain sense rightly so but misguidedly in a lot of respects as well. They wanted to come to the embassy to finally break relations with the United States and force them completely out of iran. They could become their own country. Ll they were certain to get his marching instructions for the day. The have of the desk at the cia i just dont think that he would call a Lieutenant Colonel to find out what we should be doing for the day. They believed it. That is the wellknown reason. But they also thought that it was backtracking on the promise that he have made multiple times in paris to establish an islamic regime. They thought we could combinedug two objectives here. We can get them out of iran. And we can force them to decide whether they can have a secular governmentnt or whether they were to have an islamic regime like they promised. And those two factors led to the takeover of the embassy. Were pretty sure and here was their dream. Ll they will fully be independent it would not be under the health the heel of the United States. They have a lot to do with the deprivation in the late 1950s early 60s the United States sought saw back going and direction we didnt like in terms of the treatment of prisoners. Ha targeted against perceived threats to the shop. They became a vicious organization. They became the principal trainers not the United States. Although we took the blame for again because of 1953. It is incredible all the things they blamed us for. Going back not only when they didnt exist. It have not even been discovered. So number one they sought independence. Number two they were to prosper for this. Everybody was going to not necessarily can become wealthy but what we might describe as middleclass. Age education was gonna bloom. There was gonna be a democracy. They would sort of caveat it and say we would have freedom of speech but the government would be able to say we dont like that speech and then you want to be able to say those things. Freedom of the press anybody can write anything they want. You might be told they cant anymore. T they have a kind of a warped acea of what democracy and freedom actually entailed. They a lot of bright ideas and dreams and i got there there was about 20 million iranians. About five and half million lived in5. Abject poverty. The halfmillion that were wealthy were fabulously wealthy. They were pouring billions of dollars into that country. It was been siphoned off. All of the french couture ears were there. Nc the french jewelers, it was a wealthy persons rodeo avenue. If youve have the amazing experience to go down that street. There was always going to be sweetness and light once the americans got out. Today, i ran is 80 million and growing perhaps 85 million now. Tehran itself is about 20 million. There has been no trickledown not that there has been in the United States either but thats another point. They are still dirt poor over there. If they have the ability to go to collegege they can turn out a replica of the middle class. A lot of them were second andnd. First year college students. We found their knowledge of history that sort of thing. It was roughly about that with the welleducated eighth or ninth grader. What we would consider to be an educated college student. The population today probably 75 to 85 of that population was born after the revolution. They know that the promises that they made to justify the revolution had never come about again that is in United States fault. And here is a news flash you probably dont know this but the United States secretly collaborated with Saddam Hussein to order Saddam Hussein to attack iran in 1980. That will come as a great surprise to everybody. That is a sort of thing that we are still a convenient scapegoat for them. Theyre unable to look internally and to accept their own mistakes. Part of this is their history. They had 3,000 years been controlled predominantly by outsiders or controlled by authoritarian leaders of one sort or another. And this has given them that combined with their version of shia islam an interesting perspective on their lives. It has given them the belief that they have no control over anything that they do. O. Its always conspiracies by outsiders and nothing is ever their fault. I know many times when we were there the captives. We were blamed for their taking of the embassy. I will get down on my knees and apologize for my deeds. An i will apologize to you all the way to the airport. They were not that accepting however. In 2009 week you may recall there is the green revolution. He was reelected and it was really kind of the first time in a number of years since 1979d that the election for the presidency was not really a free election. Iran has an interesting system these days. A response to the leadership they might have a couple of hundred folks they applied to run for the presidency or for a seat in the parliament. They will go through and all of those that are as him they oppose the regime or in some way not necessarily purely loyal of those that remain the elections are pretty much free. With the reelection it was not because two of the other contenders n to possibly win. The election was rigged. They were violently repressed. The face of the repression. Was known as the siege. As they run across mine fields. The ultimate mind sleepers so that when they were cleared the iraniansso could run across the minefield. I guess their technology was not sufficiently advanced. That accounted for thousands and thousands of casualties. It was just awful. That revolution did not succeed but it scared the really group very deeply. This is not really understood for quite a while. It is an academic journal and that sort of thing. Its never received the coverage that it should have. That was one of the instrumental things that led up to the Nuclear Agreement that was signed last year. R. The ruling class stands to rule a lot. Theyre all filthy rich. The revolutionary guard. The revolutionary guard has its own army and navy. They get preference over the regular military. They are much more religiously reliable. They are so much so that their regular navy has been kicked out of the persian gulf. In all of thehe things that are being taken place. They are the revolutionary guards. The revolutionary guards control about 60 of the economy and iran. A miniature rolls royce. They handle all the smuggling thatth goes into iran which was required of, because of the sanctions that were in. They are, the leaders of the revolutionary guards are a very wealthy group. And should there be any kind of a revolution that would partly succeed or disrupt the society, these people would not only lose their wealth, but they might actually end up losing their lives as well as what happened in 1979 with the revolution afteren khomeini came back. So that was one impetus. And the that and the election itself sort of got them thinking we need to, you know, the sanctions were kind of, kind of a sideline. We need to pacify the people. Because, again, about 75 of the people were disillusioned. And they know what the rest of the world has. Even back in the early 1980s just in tehran alone, there were over half a million satellite dishes. Illegal. The sun would go down, satellite dishes would go up all over the city. They would see bbc, they would see german tv, they would see the french channels, they would see american channels. One of their favorite shows, honesthe to god sorry. [laughter] one of their favorite, one of their favorite shows was baywatch. Im serious. [laughter] you cannot make this stuff up. Huh . [laughter] and so, so they know what theyve been missing. What the western world has, what the opportunities are out there. And so the leadership, the islamic leadership came to realize that they need to do something to take the edge off the people, to give them some semblance of hope, to maybe actually make their lives a little better so that they can keep their places. Now, theres a lot more to it. The iranian leadership is a nebulous concept. Its very fragmented. There are, there are little points of power all over the country, in tehran, tabriz. You have struggles between the ministry of defense expect revolutionary guard, you have struggles between the councils, the religious councils that advise khamenei and the ministry of foreign affairs, the ministry of finance, the banks need to have policies that enable them to p interact with western bank. But yet the muslims need or want them to follow islamic interpretations of banking rules. And so its a very complex society at this point. Its very difficult to understand. I certainly dont pretend to understand it. Its, and its hard at times to get information, Accurate Information out of there. It is competing circles of power centers. And you never know whos in charge. And with the revolutionary guards and what theyre doing, for example, in the persian gulf, you dont know whether theyre being directed by khamenei or when theyre acting own, which they have been known to do. Theyll act on their own, theyll cause a problem like whenir they captured the british sailors, and then the political side has a problem that they didnt ask for that they have to solve without losing face. Thee. Real danger with the revolutionary guards is theyre going to get froggy one day and do something that is going to trigger a a response that they hadnt anticipated. And all of a sudden theres going to be a real problem. So its a very difficult society to figure. Let me take my last couple minutes, and then ill take questions. The nuclear thing. I know this is very unpopular probably in this area of the or a lot of the country. Im for it and i always was for it, and ill tell you why. And i is have read every and i have read every word of that agreement. Its online, you can read it for yourself. Its notot easy to understand, i dont pretend to understand the science part of it. If i, if i was good at math and science, id be a real doctor instead of the fake kind. [laughter] and, but theres a and its very complicated, the parts that are, you know, readily understandable or sort of understandable you can see that it wasnt easy to reach that agreement. It took a long time. It took a lot, a lot of man hours. Sevena countries have agreed to it. Six, the six powers and iran. The iranians so far have followed it. Why, again, because lifting the sanctions is very important to the leadership. If it wasnt, they wouldnt have entered into the agreement in the first place. They didin not enter into the agreement to disown it a year after they entered into it. The, in terms of the ballistic missiles, thats a different thing. A year ago there was an agreement, a u. N. Resolution that said e the iranians shall not, shall not test missiles that will be capable of carrying a Nuclear Warhead. That agreement was changed when this Nuclear Agreement came out, it said we hope the iranians will not test missiles. So theyre testing the missiles. Its not forbidden, its just hoped that they wont do it. And, of course, they are. And they may very well be looking, anticipating someday to put a Nuclear Warhead on, but, you know, so far the Nuclear Agreement itself is holding up. It guarantees that there will be no Nuclear Weapon for ten years. Without it theres no guarantee there wont be a Nuclear Weapon in two with years. Ten years is a long time. Tell me, who in 1981 would have foreseen thatd the soviet union would have completely disappeared in 991 . 1991 . Who in 1981 would have thought that in 1991 we would have completely beaten