U. S. Embassy, the combination of worsening relations between this country and iran and the wake of the iranian revolution in february 1979. Even though the crisis ended with the release of the hostages on january 20th, 1981, after an incredible ordeal that lasted some 440 that lasted some 444 days, it has had a lasting influence on the relationship between the two countries. Images of iranian students breaching the embassy shouting slogans, tauntingly burning the american flag, traumatized a nation and a presidency. They live on in popular consciousness here with such movies as the 2012 movie, argo and continue to weigh on the public discourse. So here today, we want to explore this 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. Very pleased that our expert, that the distinguished guest have accepted our invitation. Todays event is being organized by the Centers History and Public Policy program. The Program Seeks to provide meaningful Historical Context to Public Policy issues and debate. As a Global Leader in uncovering and publicizing policy relevant archival documentation through its awardwinning digital archive easily accessible to all of you at digitalarchive. Org, youll see the front 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 archival access and transparency. We have recently launched a new initiative on exploring and documenting the contemporary history of the middle east through genuine, local, and regional sources through perspectives. Some day, we hope to be able to analyze and discuss episodes such as the one well be focusing on today based on iranian and other 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 limbert, an eyewitness to the hostage ordeal, who had agreed enthusiast kri ically to be her really 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. Im grateful for my team for the organization of this event. Two of our talented Program Interns and especially my colleague on the history program, ken burn, who took the lead in putting this event together and who spearheads our middle east initiative. She will introduce our speakers, so lets me briefly introduce her. Not that she needs an introduction to this group. The founding director of the middle east program and now a Public Policy fellow at the Wilson Center. In iran, she worked as a journalist, an academic and on womens issues. She directed a complex of several museums and cultural centers. Before joining the Wilson Center she taught persian language at princeton. Shes the author of reconstructed lives women and iranians Islamic Revolution and my prison, my home. Based on her own ordeal in iran. On months of imprisonment in evan prison in 2007. Let me also add that shes an amazing colleague and dear friend who we at the center have been fortunate to have around. She is a jewel of this institution. Shes a sought after expert on iran and ive learned a lot from her as a scholar, public intellectual, a Program Manager and Institution Builder and as a moderator who combines grace with draconian disciplines. Discipline. Im looking at my panelists. So thank you for sharing this event. The floor is yours. Thank you very much, christian. Its an honor to be here with such a distinguished panel. I think all of us, some offo usn this room, remember november 4th, 1979. I must confess when i saw the pictures of these students climbing up the gate of the American Embassy in tehran, so shortly after the revolution, i thought they have gone completely crazy. What a thing to do. You know . And i thought, okay, theyll go in and theyll go out and that would be it. And i believe john limbert in an interview he gave recently, he said that 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 knows, he was blindfolded and taken by the student. His counterpart, you know, not his counterpart but the student who designed the whole plan, gave an interview just couple of days ago and he said that he thought this would be a 48hour affair and it will 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 hostages were put in minibuses, sent to the airport, and left the country and freed. To make sense of all these happenings, we have a very distinguished panel. Michael will go first. He will give us a historical background of what happened that day. And during that year. He, as christian mentioned, the Deputy Director and Research Director at the National Security archive. Hes currently he directs the u. S. iran relation project which studies controversial historical events through multilandmark, the archival corporation. He was a Public Policy scholar at the Wilson Center and hes the author of iran contra reagan scandal and the unchecked abuse of president ial power. Bruce ryder is a senior federal and director of the brookings intelligence project and the senior fellow at the center of middle east policy. He has served under the last four president s to shape u. S. Policies toward south asia and the middle east. And additionally, he has advised nato and Foreign Government on similar issues. He has a number of books, so, bruce, i picked and chose what to mention, one, and hes the author of kings and president S Saudi Arabia and the u. S. Since fdr. I was so intrigued by the title, i read the book. Its very its fantastic. I recommend it. Finally, susan maloney, the susan maloney, i always refer to her as because shes the top expert on iran. I think not only in this town but in the country, really. And i have watched her career from day one so, therefore, i think i can say whatever i want to say. And shes the director Deputy Director of the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution and senior fellow in the Brookings Center of middle east policy and Energy Security and climate initiative. She has served on the secretary of state policy planning staff and directed the task force on u. S. Policy toward iran at the council on foreign relation. She is the author of Iran Political economy since the revolution and iran reconsidered the nuclear deal and the quest for a new moderation. When i saw the word, moderation, i thought, wishful thinking. Okay. Lets start with you. Well, i have some thanks and an apology. The thanks are to the organizers for including me. Christian and kian and chuck and others and my apology is to all of you for not being john limbert. I had a reminder of the effect this might have in the elevator when a person whos here in the room heard in the elevator me saying john was out because of surgery. She said, john limbert isnt going to be here . So i hope you dont all feel that way. Obviously, i cant fill his shoes, but i can provide as haleh requested some historical background on this really fascinating and important episode. Ill do this in three small lightning fast chunks. The historical background, the approximate causes. And also just run through some of the dates that events that happened during this crisis. I also brought some artifacts, some declassified documents as christian requested. Im always happy to oblige. These may help illustrate some of what im going to talk about. And i will just say before i start that im sure 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 certainly our project at the National Security archive on iran. So with that, let me start with the historical background. Really three main things that i want to mention. The first is that 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 that the cia and the british were largely responsible for the coup, but there had been some challenges to that thesis of late that basically posit that the cia had virtually nothing to do with the actual overthrow, that it was really iranians by themselves. I have some problems with that, but b i think you dont need to get into the specifics to recognize that what is important for our purposes is the awareness that iranians believed that the United States was involved and, in fact, there is very clear evidence that i dont think anybody disputes that at least the u. S. Had the intention to overthrow him. Theres absolutely no question of that. And i have one item that has always been compelling to me. It is a cable from the u. S. Ambassador in baghdad. On the 17th of august, the day after the shah fled iran, after the first attempt at the coup failed and the part that i highlighted here says shah led to baghdad and asked to meet with the ambassador. The ambassador writes, i found shah worn from three sleepless nights, puzzled by push of events with no, repeat, no bitterness toward americans who had urged and planned action. I suggested for his prestige in iran he never indicate that any foreigner had had a part in recent events. He agreed. That, to me, is fairly compelling. Anyway, the point is, the iranians have believed for, you know, many, many years now that the u. S. Was centrally involved and that was a big part of the motivation. The second event is the 25year reign of the shah that falled his reinstatement by u. S. And iranian forces. This was period where all the damage was done. Where the shah alienated the population. Accrued greater and greater power to himself. Became essentially a dictator. Witnessed widespread corruption and so on. All of which the 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 after the departure of the shah in january 79 and the arrival of Ayatollah Khomeini who would eventually be the, essentially, well, the Leading Light of the Islamic Republic of iran. The point here is that that event was not was not something that could be readily predicted at the beginning of the revolution. It was uncertain how events would unfold. Iran was in a chaotic state. There was all kinds of strife. Ethnic, political and otherwise. The tribes. The kurds. Lefti leftists. Others. Were all pushing and shoving and it was a very violent and unsettled time. This, i think, played in as well very much to the thinking of the people behind the hostage seizure who wanted to do something to advance their cause. So what were the proximate causes . I would, again, point basically to three. The first is one that is not readily remembered and that was a resolution passed by congress in may of 1979. Sponsored by jacob javits of new york which called iran to account for all the executions that were being perpetrated and generally the terrible treatment that they were giving to certain of their citizens including jews. Why was this important . Because khomeini thought it was important. Khomeini, himself, took great exception to this and railed against it publicly not failing to mention that this was a jewish senator who was leading the, you know, the charge, again, as the United States was interfering in irans internal affairs. And he made a cause celeb out of this. Charlie nas 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 langan. Much better known as a cause of the takeover was the admission of the shah to the United States for medical treatment in october of 79. And before that time, bruce langan was precient in a cable he sent to washington, in response to a query, in july, a couple months ahead of time, in response to a query, what he thought it would mean if the u. S. Admitted the shah. He wrote, gives some background he says summit to this reservati reservation, i conclude that for the shah to take up residence in the u. S. , in the immediate future, by which i mean the next two or three months, would continue as before to be seriously prejudicial to our interest and security of americans in iran. This is, of course, exactly how things worked out and he was not alone in saying that. Virtually every iran expert in the state department warned of this, but a long by about october 20th, the word came down from the white house that the president had approved. This was a note on october 20th to the president. Then theres handwriting on the bottom that says, 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 then the final event that seemed to break the camels back was the infamous meeting between brzezinski and the head of the provisional government in algie algiers. This was an event that langan ruefully acknowledges that he purged. He went and suggested strongly that he meet with brzezinski because of, ironically, the lack of highlevel contacts before that time between americans and iranians and langan and others thought this would be a really good idea. I dont know that he really believed that brzezinski would be the one to meet with him. I think he thought david newsom might be the person more appropriate, highlevel state department official. Be that as it may, that event occurred. It was in, made headlines around the world and that appeared to be what set off the students following the line of the imam. Okay. Those are the three proximate causes i would draw attention to. I think ive got a couple more minutes then ill go through as haleh requested earlier and give just a couple key dates that are good to keep in mind. So november 4th is the day the students stormed the gates. They had been planning this for a couple of weeks. After apparently rejecting the idea of storming the soviet embassy, which none other than ahmadinejad apparently was behind. So he lost out on that. One of the results, of course, as we know, was that 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, amazingly, to reconstruct in many cases and then sold them at a little book stall at the gate of the embassy. Irony upon ironies. These materials are actually incredibly fascinating and important for understanding all kinds of aspects of u. S. Policy. Okay. November, just a day or two after this happens, carter authorizes two emissaries to go to iran to try to negotiate the hostages release. Thats ramsey clark, an old friend of cy vances and 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, never came about. November 6th, the government collapses while the clark mi mir mission is still heading to turkey. They end up staying in turkey because they cant get access to tehran. Its 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 Security council, starts to meet, and we got a lot of records that are declassified at the carter library. Virtually every meeting of the fcc is recorded there and its a fascinating account of the evolution of thinking. A couple of items i have that relate to that that give insight into what the top levels of the administration were thinking includes this december 79 report from brzezinski to the president where he offers his opinion about socalled difficult choices in iran. He says at one point, we need to consider military actions which contribute to his downfall meaning khomeinis downfall downfall. Consider military actions relating to his downfall and release the hostages as a consequence of his downfall. I have set a small tightly held group to see whether we can make this happen, et cetera. At the end of it, carter writes in his handwriting, he says we need to list everything he would in the want to see occur and which would not incite condemnation of u. S. By other nations. Now this is a little extreme what brzezinski was proposing and in fact, it was a even more remarkable document available in the carter library. 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, this small tightly held group he mentions is what this black room is, but he starts off saying weve 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 sit