Stormed the u. S. Embassy and the culmination of worsening relationships between the wake of the iranian revolution in the wake of 1979. Even though the crisis ended with the release of the hostages on january 20, 1981 after an incredible ordeal that lasted some 444 days, it has had a lasting influence on the relationship between the two countries. Images of fanaticized and bushing the American Flag traumatized a nation and the presidency. They live on in popular consciousness here with such movies as the 2012 movie argo and continue to weigh on the public discourse. Here today we want to explore the Lasting Impact of the hostage crisis a bit further and we have convened a panel of distinguished experts which will be moderated by my colleague. I am very pleased that our expert that the distinguished guests have accepted our invitation. Todays event is by the Public Policy program and it seeks to provide meaningful, historical context, as a Global Leader uncovering and archival documentation through its Award Winning digital archive easily accessible to digital archive. Org. You can see the front of page there. The Program Works with the Worldwide Network to build nextgeneration research capacity, foster dialogue on new, historical sources and perspectives and to push for greater access and transparency. We have recently launched a new number ti through genuine local and regional sources and perspectives. Some day we hope to be able to analyze and discussen soetds su episodes such as the one well be focusing on today based on archives in the region. Let me also say that the centers middle east program has graciously agreed to cosponsor todays session. I want to thank our speakers and of course, my colleague for moderating. Unfortunately, John Lindberg, an eyewitness to the hostage ordeal, who had agreed enthusiastically to be here and wanted to be here had to cancel at the last moment for a health emergency. We are, of course, sending our best wishes to john for a speedy recovery. I am grateful for my team and the organization of this event, and two of our talent interns and especially my colleague on the History Program and who spearheads our middle east initiative. Let me briefly introduce her, not that she needs an introduction to the group. Shes the founding director of the mid will east program and now a Public Policy fellow at the Wilson Center. In iran, she worked as a journalist and academic and on womens issues. She directed a complex of several museums and cultural centers. Before joining the Wilson Center she taught at princeton and shes the auth are on of reconstructed lives and the Islamic Revolution and my prison, my home, one womans story of captivity in iran based on her own ordeal in iran on months of imprisonment in 2007. Let me also add that shes an amazing colleague and dear friend who we have been fortunate to have around. She is a jewel of this instulz. Shes a soughtafter expert on iran and ive learned a lot from her as a scholar and a Program Manager and institution builderser and as a mod rairt who combines grace and im looking at our panelists. Thank you very much. The floor is yours. Thank you very much, christian. It is an honor to be here with such a distinguished panel. I think all of some of us in this room remember 1979. I must confess bhi saw the pictures of these students climbing up the gate at the American Embassy in tehran shortly before the revolution, i thought they had gone completely crazy. What a thing to do, and i thought they will go in and go out and that would be it, and i believe, john in an interview he gave recently, he thought the students were there to just demonstrate and so he volunteered to go out and talk to them. And so he walked out, they locked the door behind him and the next thing he know, he was blindfolded and he was taken by the student. His counterpart, you know, not his counterpart, but the student who designed the whole plan as far as they did gave an interview just a couple of days ago, and he said that he thought this would be a 48hour affair and it would end and they would have sent a message to america and that was that, but it wasnt. As christian said it lasted 444 days and just one day, people of tehran, iran heard that the oftages were put in minibuses and sent to the airport and left the country and freed. We have a distinguished panel. Mike will go first and he will give us a historical background of what happened that day, and during that year. As christian mentioned he was Deputy Director at the National Security archive. He is currently he directs the u. S. Iran project which is a controversial and historicalers vents and the archival coop raising. He was a Public Policy scholar at the Wilson Center and the author of irancontra reagan scandal and the unchecked abuse of president ial power. Bruce is a director at the brookings intelligence project and the senior fellow at the center of mideast policy. He has served under the last four president s to shape u. S. Policies in asia and the middle east and additionally, he has advised nato and Foreign Government on similar issues. He has a number of books. So i picked and choose what to mention one, and hes the author of kings and president s, saudi arabia and the u. S. Since fdr. I i was so intrigued by the title. I read the book, its fantastic. I recommend it. Finally, susan maloney, the susan maloney, i always refer to her because shes the top expert on iran. I think not only in this but in the country, really, and i have watched her career from day one, so therefore i can say whatever i want to say and shes the director the Deputy Director of the Foreign Policy program of the Brookings Institution and the senior fellow of the Brookings Center of mid willdle east policy and security and climate initiative, and she has served under the secretary of state policy planning staff and directed the task force on u. S. Policy towards iran at the council of foreign relations. She is the author of Iran Political economy since the revolution and iran reconsidered the nuclear deal and the quest for a new moderation. Bhi saw the word mod ragd i thought, wishful thinking. Okay. Lets start with you. I have some thanks and an apology. The thanks are to the organizers for including me, kian and chuck and others and my apology is to all of you for not being John Lindberg. I had a reminder of the effect this might have in the elevator when a person who is here in the room and heard in the elevator me saying that john was out because of surgery. She said John Lindberg isnt going to be here . So i hope you dont all feel that way, but obviously, i cant fill his shoe, but i can provide some historical background on this really fascinating and important episode. Ill do this in three small, lightning fast chunks. The historical background and t t the approximate causes. This may help illustrate some of these some of what im going to talk about and i will just say before we start that we all feel the same way that aside from john, the person who we most miss here is bill miller who played a part in these events and was always a strong supporter of the art project at the National Security archive on iran. With that, let me start with the historical back ground. Theyre really the three main things that i want to mention and the first is you have to go back to 1953 to understand the motivation. That is not as straightforward a proposition as you might think. In the good old days it used to be widely accepted and the british were largely challenges to that thesis of late that basically that the cia had to do with the actual overthrow and i had problems with that and i dont think you need to get into the specifics to recognize that what is important for our purposes is the awareness that iranians believe that the United States is involved and theres very clear evidence that i dont think anybody disputes that at least the u. S. Had the intention to overthrow it, and there is no question of that and i do have one item that has always been compelling to me. It is a cable on the u. S. Ambassador in baghdad on the 17th of august on the day after the shah fled iran and after the first attempt at the coup failed and the part that ive highlighted here is the shah led to baghdad and asked to meet with the ambassador and the ambassador writes, i found shah warped by two sleep little nights and no bit prestige in iran and i said he should never indicate abamerican would have a part and he agreed. That was fairly compelling. The iranian his believed that for many, many years now that the u. S. Was was centrally involved and that was a big part of the motivation. The second event was the 25year reign of the shah by the u. S. And iranian forces. This was the period where all of the damage was done. This is where the shah increasingly alienated the population, accrued greater and greater power to himself and became essentially a dictator and witnessed widespread corruption and so on and all of which iranians came to resent more and more and many of them believed, as we know that the u. S. Was the hidden hand behind all of this, even though scholarship shows that the relationship between the shah and the u. S. Was much more complicated than that. The third event was the revolution itself and the period that followed, the ten months or so, and the ayatollah would be the light of the Islamic Republic of iran. The point here is that that event was not something that could be readily predicted at the be givening of the revolution. It was uncertain how events would unfold and iran was in a chaotic strait that was with ethnic, political and otherwise and the kurds and others were all pushing and shoving and it was an unsettled time and this played in behind the hostage seizure who wanted to do . I would again point to three and that was a res lugsz laszolutio which called to account for the executions that were being perpetrated and generally, the terrible treatment that they were giving to a certain of their citizens. Com annie thought it was important. Khomeini took great exception to this and lalrailed against it publicly and mentioned that this was a jewish senator who was leading the charge again, as the United States was interfering in irans internal affairs and he made a cause out of this. Charlie who was at the time the acting dcm at the embassy in tehran said that this basically spelled the end of any of his hopes for improvement of the situation, and he shortly thereafter left and was replaced by bruce langam. Much better known as a cause of the takeover was the admission of t of the shah to the United States for medical treatment. Before that time bruce langan was prescient in a cable that he wrote to washington in response to a query. This was in july. So a couple of months ahead of time and in response to a kwiry of what did he think it would mean if the u. S. Admitted the shah. He wrote he said subject to this resolution, for the shah to take up residence, by which i mean the next two or three months to be seriously prejudicial to our interests and to the securist americans to iran and he was in the state department and everyone warned about this and the word came down from the white house that the president had approved and this is a note from brzezinski to the president and theres handwriting on the bottom. President called z. B. Late saturday evening with approval. So the shah was going to be admitted and two days later he did appear. That didnt immediately cause the takeover. It took a little while longer and the final event that took the camels back was the meeting between the bazaargan, and the head of the provisional government in algiers. This was something that he acknowledged that he urged. He went and suggested strongly that he meet with brzezinski because of, ironically, the lack of highlevel contacts between that time between americans and iranians and i dont know that he really believed that bresen s bresenenski would be the highstate Department Official and be that as it may. That event occurred and made head was what was set off the line following the imam. Those are the three positive causes that i would attract attention to, and i think i have a through, as was requested earlier, and give just a couple of the key dates that are good to keep in mind, so november 4 is the day that the students stormed the gates. Theyd been planning this for a couple of weeks. After apparently rejecting the idea of storming the soviet embassy, which none other than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was behind, so he lost out that. We know a great deal of highly classified material was captured, the Agency Officials and others tried to burn and shred materials. The materials they shredded, the iranians managed to reconstruct in many cases, and then sold them at a little book stall at the gate of the embassy. These materials are actually incredibly fascinating and important for understanding they offer emissaries to go to iran to negotiate the hostages release. Its someone who is known to have associations with iranian dissidents and bill miller, who had been tapped to be eventually the ambassador, replacing bill sullivan, but that never came about. November 6, the government collapses while the clark Miller Mission is still heading to turkey. They end up staying in turkey because they cant get access to tehran, and its a great story of how they tried to push their agenda no matter what. The Carter Administration immediately moves into action. The special coordination committee, a subset of the National SecurityCouncil Starts to meet, and weve got a lot of records declassified at the carter library, virtually every meeting is recorded there, and its a fascinating account of the evolution of thinking. A couple of items that i have that relate to that that just gives insight into what the top levels of the administration were thinking include this december 1979 report from brzezinski to the president where he offers his opinion about socalled difficult choices in iran, and he says at one point we need to consider military actions, which contribute to his downfall, meaning khomeinis downfall, and thats the release of hostages of obtaining the other objective, his downfall, i have set up a very small, tightly held group to see whether we can make this happen, etc. At the end of it, carter writes in his handwriting, he says we need to list everything that khomeini would not want to see occur and which would not incite condemnation of u. S. By other nations. Now this is a little extreme what he was proposing. And in fact, theres even more remarkable document that was available in the carter library, i have not seen anything like this. Its from brzezinski to carter, and its entitled black room report. And my theory is that this small group, the small tightlyheld group that he mentions is what this black room is. And he starts off saying, we have been examining the situation in iran from the standpoint of influencing the course of political developments. Goes on to list some thoughts, and he says, are we prepared to accept a commitment to destabilize the situation in iran and try to replace the present leadership . Carter writes in the margin, not yet. It goes on to suggest some other things that are very similar, and carter again, as hes wont to do, made some handwritten notes at the end. He says be extremely cautious about u. S. Action for now. But assess options within c. I. A. , let them give me analysis of all potential antikhomeini elements. So again, this is extreme. The s. E. C. Was considering all kinds of things from dealing with student visas, freezing assets, mounting a blockade, all kinds of things are being considered obviously just because its written doesnt mean that was going to happen, but it certainly is interesting that it was on the table. A couple of other quick dates. Carter ends oil imports from iran and freezes the assets, november 12th to 14th. A couple of days later, the africanamerican and women hostages are released as a symbol of iranian concern for these minority groups. In january, january 27, a famous canadian caper happened, which was the subject of the argo film, and there are even documents about that that have been released by c. I. A. April 7, takes a few months, the u. S. Finally breaks off relations with iran, and just a little over two weeks later, mounts the doomed operation eagle claw, which ends in disaster, and the iranian desert, we have, among other things, declassified a topsecret report which examines the operation, and when we get into the question of ramifications of this, which my colleagues will do, this is one of them. This is one of the conclusions that we need to ramp up our special ops capabilities so that we can defend our interest better in the middle east, and obvious implications. July 27, the shah dies in egypt, which is important here because it effectively removes one of the key conditions that the iranians had for resolving this crisis, and then finally in january, january 19, the algiers accords are signed, which free the hostages who come home january torque the day that Ronald Reagan is inaugurated, very much deliberate timing, and that ends the crisis, but we will hear, and as you all well know, this was only the start of an incredibly bitter and prolonged period of relations between the u. S. And iran. Thank you. Thank you. Great, thank you so much, and thank you, especially for this incredibly generous, both opportunity, the incredibly generous introduction, which i will interpret as taruf rather than actual description of my role here, my role in th