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The Ayatollah in the Cathedral: Reflections of a Hostage
One of the hostages taken in Iran recounts the 444-day ordeal, the factors behind the crisis, and the rigid self-righteousness, reminiscent of the Ayatollah, he encountered as director of a peace program in New York City after his release
- GenresIran
241 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 1986
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June 2, 2020
"As the British moved out of the Middle East, the Americans had taken their place. Now, as a hostage, I realized that I was part of another changing of the guard, only this time the Americans were being ousted."
I read this book right before my latest visit to the former US Embassy in Tehran, now known as the Den of Spies. It is quite disappointing that no one there seems to have ever once reviewed these conclusions of such a key hostage of the 1979-1981 crisis who, knowingly or unknowingly, converted to the revolutionary perspectives and became a critic of US foreign policy and Western arrogance in general.
"There was much the students told us that was essentially correct. I knew the results of promoting America's idea of what is 'good' without asking the additional question about whether, in foreign circumstances, that 'good' will work (p. 126)."
"A retired teacher berated us for condoning the conduct of our captors. Barry Rosen replied, 'We are not making excuses for them, but the Iranians have had a social revolution of great profundity. It was clearly one of the most broad-range revolutions of the twentieth century.' Our experience was [indeed] a side product of a social revolution of 'great profundity.' It induced in a number of us an equally profound psychological revolution. Even in captivity, I had begun to wonder by what means a similar and overdue revolution might be induced in the thinking of our fellow Americans (p. 204)."
With some urgently needed insights and a call to humbling down, The Ayatollah in the Cathedral helps a great deal to explain why US foreign policy is so pathologically and exceptionally obsessed with Iran, a country that hasn't started a war of aggression in centuries. And no, it's not about the oil, as highly oversimplifying US Democratic party narratives (e.g. Argo, Stephen Kinzer) would want everyone to believe.
"Yemen taught me an important lesson which Westerners too readily ignore: the difference between Westernization and modernization (p. 23)."
"We have imposed our idea of "the good" on the Middle East. But if it is so "good" why are they so forceful in rejecting it? Perhaps it is because they have tried it and found it wanting, indeed harmful, in important respects (p. 26)."
"Our analyses of overseas problems are too often based on abstraction - what the problem should be, rather than what it really is. We indulge ourselves in the luxury of seeing what we want to see and denying what we do not want to see (p. 196)."
"The fundamental threat to us all [rather] lies in ourselves, our propensity to conflict, to violence, self-righteousness and self-delusion, to ego-tripping, to the avoidance of responsibility; in short, to all the flaws in our human nature that are conducive to war. Too exclusive a preoccupation with weaponry leaves less time for self-examination, for increasing our awareness of the world problems that give rise to its use, for pondering means for their resolution, and for developing a faith which might enable us to formulate fresh goals for our troubled planet (p. 156)."
"Peace activism was doomed to ineffectiveness so long as it focused on single issues external to ourselves, rather than where the real battle had to be fought, within ourselves (p. 172)."
I wonder if he realized how much in agreement he was with Khomeini: "It is necessary that you purify yourself so that when you become a head of an institution or a community you purify them and in this way take a step to rectify and build a society (from The Greatest Jihad by Khomeini)."
In 1979 Jimmy Carter made the catastrophic decision of allowing the brutal dictator Pahlavi family to settle in the US and deposit the stolen billions of Iranian people's wealth in American and Western banks. The sectors of Iranian revolutionaries still sympathetic to the US were humiliated and saw no other option to recover lost reputation and to continue challenging Khomeini's lead in Iranian emancipation but to take extremist action against the very US they felt so fondly and hopeful of. The inevitable result, according to US diplomats in Tehran, was the momentous Iran hostage crisis, which, thanks to significant Western media distortion, continues to play a pivotal role behind US and Western anxieties about the Islamic Revolution. When Khomeini surprised all by endorsing the embassy takeover, the so-called moderates lost their platform and the crisis gained a revolutionary flavor, to the point that several hostages reported experiencing personal and eye-opening revolutions of their own.
The voice of Moorehead Kennedy, the official speaker of the 53 hostages of the US Embassy in Tehran between 1979 and 1981, is a must-read for anyone interested in Iran-US relations, Middle Eastern politics and US and Western foreign policy and colonialism in general.
The reason why I take a couple of stars off from a perfect rating is because Kennedy, while himself calling to drop arrogance and to understand others, mixes some of his fascinating insights with leftovers from his own arrogant ways and misunderstandings. It is clear from his writing that he never studied Khomeini in spite of what he went through and imposes his misconceptions on the Iranian reality he experienced first-hand. Even to the level that throughout the book he insists that Saturday is the peak of the Iranian and Islamic world weekly holiday (as opposed to Friday), quite possibly because this is how it works in some Arab countries where he lived before serving in Iran.
There are also interesting confirmations of Iranian perspectives, such as his giving away of the many CIA staff who worked undercover in the Embassy and the fact that he reveals that the "mocked execution" made famous by Argo and other distorted Western media broadcasts, actually consisted on their captors taking them out of their rooms and gathering them elsewhere blindfolded, so they could remove dangerous objects from their rooms, after one of the hostages attempted suicide.
I leave here a collection of insightful quotes from the book for reference:
"The difference between the terrorist targeting of Americans over Soviets is hard for Americans to understand. We are brought up to believe that the Soviets are "bad" whereas we are "good". That to many we are the enemy demands more self-recognition than Americans are prepared for (p. 13)."
"British influence in Iran was still strong in 1950 giving rise to a quasi-colonial relationship. The British regarded Iran as a source of oil, for which they paid ridiculously small royalties, and as a captive market for their exports. "I'm sorry", a senior British official told the senior American adviser to the Iranian government, with whom I was staying, "but these people will buy British locomotives". The American adviser had just been pointing out that American locomotives, being diesel, were far better suited to the Iranian railways, with their many tunnels, than the British steam-driven engines. The Iranians ended up buying British (p. 15)."
"The legitimacy of America's role as policeman in the Middle East would have to be accepted for military action to be justified in the eyes of those in the area whom we wished to influence. So long as military action is considered justifiable, then the inevitable civilian casualties, however regrettable, might also be accepted (p 20)."
"Those Americans who applauded the Westernizing efforts of the Shah had little notion of how his programs had disrupted lives at all levels of society. Many Iranians, disoriented, forced to think in new and strange ways, to perform unfamiliar tasks in accordance with unfamiliar norms, humiliated by their inadequacies as they tried to behave as Westerners, and disinclined to become proximate Westerners, second-class at best, sought above all for a renewed sense of their own identity (p. 25)."
"After we were released, it became clear that the Department of State, in its effort to cover up the misjudgement that led to the takeover of the Embassy, was determined not to draw the conclusions it should have from the Iranian experience (p. 28)."
"In theory, the host government is sovereign and has the last word. In practice, it is not always easy to enforce national sovereignty, particularly for a weak Third World government, which may be susceptible to corruption and may not have access to sophisticated legal and accounting methods. More important, foreign investment is usually accompanied by foreign ideas, foreign tastes and standards. Expatriate American business communities generally live and act as if "the locals" hardly exist (pp. 41-42)."
"We lack the maturity to understand another point of view, to cooperate and develop consensus. Our difficulty in growing up impairs both our view and our management of foreign affairs (p. 49)."
"We Americans tend to project our values as if they should have universal acceptance. For some high ranked ones, a desire for investment, which would make Iran more like the United States, was a sign of returning sanity; not to want 'progress' was 'going back to the thirteenth century' (p. 67)."
"For all my own experience in the Middle East, my learning process really began with captivity (p.85)."
"Another addition to the staff was a CIA officer assigned, for cover purposes, to the economic section, with a cover-job title of economic/commercial officer… I pointed out the Embassy had no labor officer. That, the CIA station chief replied, was an ideal cover, giving the new man the excuse he would need to get out of the Embassy compound and become involved in his covert activities… So the cover held until the takeover, when the charge's safe, containing the names of all the Embassy's CIA officers and their cover jobs, fell into the hands of the students (pp. 86-87)."
"I realized that our captors had a gentler side, which had only to be taken advantage of, and with that in mind, I learned to treat them as stewards in a private club, with the kind of courtesy that produces that extra degree of service (p. 95)."
"Before long, the Shah's minions realized that, whatever Carter might say, human rights were not to play a role in Iranian-American relations. And they cracked down even harder (p. 127)."
"We had lost our moral authority in Iran, and for that, more than fifty hostages had to suffer (p. 140)."
"I observed that, in fulfilling its own ethical norms, the Islamic system of inheritance was far more successful than Anglo-American law. Essentially, Anglo-American law protects the right of testators to do what they want with their wealth, subject only to the law's insistence that there be some protection for spouses. In the Islamic system, what the testator may dispose of freely is strictly limited; provision must be made not only for children but also for parents. The one system is essentially a statement of one's rights; the other, of one's duties. Which is superior or more civilized (p. 175)?"
"Justice without love ceases to be justice, becoming no more than balance of power; and love without justice ceases to be love, degenerating into mere sentimentality (p. 185)."
"A month before our release, as we began to realize that the end of our captivity was in sight and to think back on what it all meant, a Marine roommate suddenly asked: "Say, supposed we were guards and they were the hostages - would we have treated them as well as they treated us?" What we recognized was that we were probably not inherently any better than they, and as capable as anyone else, of the greatest wrongs (p. 189)."
"[With the Shah] we projected a world in our own image, where we could be in control or at least feel at home (p. 196)."
"Not until November 9, 1978, did Ambassador William Sullivan in Tehran, in his telegram "Thinking the Unthinkable", come to grips with the possibility of the fall of the Shah. Those reporting officers in the field who, much earlier, had begun to suspect the unthinkable were faced with the reality that if they reported their suspicions, no one in Washington would have taken them seriously. Hence, no Foreign Service or CIA reporting officer, or academic, looked for or was willing to see evidence that would in fact reduce his credibility. American expectations determined not only what the conclusions of any report would be but what evidence would be selected to back them (p. 196-197)."
Until Vietnam we had always managed to win our wars; we and virtue triumphed together, and it was tempting to believe that we triumphed because we were virtuous. So long as our capacity to enforce our view of the good was not challenged, we did not question the rectitude of our aims or the propriety of the means used to attain them. Vietnam raised serious doubts, not only about the propriety of our means, but also about our capacity to refashion the world in our own image. And continuing encounters with Middle East terrorism have given us further pause (p. 198)."
"Our major disappointment was the widespread failure to deal with its [the hostage crisis] lessons. 'Many people in and out of government', Bruce Laingen observed, 'would like to put it all aside and just say, Thank God it's over (p. 202)!"
"International understanding does not result automatically from a stay abroad (p. 213)."
I read this book right before my latest visit to the former US Embassy in Tehran, now known as the Den of Spies. It is quite disappointing that no one there seems to have ever once reviewed these conclusions of such a key hostage of the 1979-1981 crisis who, knowingly or unknowingly, converted to the revolutionary perspectives and became a critic of US foreign policy and Western arrogance in general.
"There was much the students told us that was essentially correct. I knew the results of promoting America's idea of what is 'good' without asking the additional question about whether, in foreign circumstances, that 'good' will work (p. 126)."
"A retired teacher berated us for condoning the conduct of our captors. Barry Rosen replied, 'We are not making excuses for them, but the Iranians have had a social revolution of great profundity. It was clearly one of the most broad-range revolutions of the twentieth century.' Our experience was [indeed] a side product of a social revolution of 'great profundity.' It induced in a number of us an equally profound psychological revolution. Even in captivity, I had begun to wonder by what means a similar and overdue revolution might be induced in the thinking of our fellow Americans (p. 204)."
With some urgently needed insights and a call to humbling down, The Ayatollah in the Cathedral helps a great deal to explain why US foreign policy is so pathologically and exceptionally obsessed with Iran, a country that hasn't started a war of aggression in centuries. And no, it's not about the oil, as highly oversimplifying US Democratic party narratives (e.g. Argo, Stephen Kinzer) would want everyone to believe.
"Yemen taught me an important lesson which Westerners too readily ignore: the difference between Westernization and modernization (p. 23)."
"We have imposed our idea of "the good" on the Middle East. But if it is so "good" why are they so forceful in rejecting it? Perhaps it is because they have tried it and found it wanting, indeed harmful, in important respects (p. 26)."
"Our analyses of overseas problems are too often based on abstraction - what the problem should be, rather than what it really is. We indulge ourselves in the luxury of seeing what we want to see and denying what we do not want to see (p. 196)."
"The fundamental threat to us all [rather] lies in ourselves, our propensity to conflict, to violence, self-righteousness and self-delusion, to ego-tripping, to the avoidance of responsibility; in short, to all the flaws in our human nature that are conducive to war. Too exclusive a preoccupation with weaponry leaves less time for self-examination, for increasing our awareness of the world problems that give rise to its use, for pondering means for their resolution, and for developing a faith which might enable us to formulate fresh goals for our troubled planet (p. 156)."
"Peace activism was doomed to ineffectiveness so long as it focused on single issues external to ourselves, rather than where the real battle had to be fought, within ourselves (p. 172)."
I wonder if he realized how much in agreement he was with Khomeini: "It is necessary that you purify yourself so that when you become a head of an institution or a community you purify them and in this way take a step to rectify and build a society (from The Greatest Jihad by Khomeini)."
In 1979 Jimmy Carter made the catastrophic decision of allowing the brutal dictator Pahlavi family to settle in the US and deposit the stolen billions of Iranian people's wealth in American and Western banks. The sectors of Iranian revolutionaries still sympathetic to the US were humiliated and saw no other option to recover lost reputation and to continue challenging Khomeini's lead in Iranian emancipation but to take extremist action against the very US they felt so fondly and hopeful of. The inevitable result, according to US diplomats in Tehran, was the momentous Iran hostage crisis, which, thanks to significant Western media distortion, continues to play a pivotal role behind US and Western anxieties about the Islamic Revolution. When Khomeini surprised all by endorsing the embassy takeover, the so-called moderates lost their platform and the crisis gained a revolutionary flavor, to the point that several hostages reported experiencing personal and eye-opening revolutions of their own.
The voice of Moorehead Kennedy, the official speaker of the 53 hostages of the US Embassy in Tehran between 1979 and 1981, is a must-read for anyone interested in Iran-US relations, Middle Eastern politics and US and Western foreign policy and colonialism in general.
The reason why I take a couple of stars off from a perfect rating is because Kennedy, while himself calling to drop arrogance and to understand others, mixes some of his fascinating insights with leftovers from his own arrogant ways and misunderstandings. It is clear from his writing that he never studied Khomeini in spite of what he went through and imposes his misconceptions on the Iranian reality he experienced first-hand. Even to the level that throughout the book he insists that Saturday is the peak of the Iranian and Islamic world weekly holiday (as opposed to Friday), quite possibly because this is how it works in some Arab countries where he lived before serving in Iran.
There are also interesting confirmations of Iranian perspectives, such as his giving away of the many CIA staff who worked undercover in the Embassy and the fact that he reveals that the "mocked execution" made famous by Argo and other distorted Western media broadcasts, actually consisted on their captors taking them out of their rooms and gathering them elsewhere blindfolded, so they could remove dangerous objects from their rooms, after one of the hostages attempted suicide.
I leave here a collection of insightful quotes from the book for reference:
"The difference between the terrorist targeting of Americans over Soviets is hard for Americans to understand. We are brought up to believe that the Soviets are "bad" whereas we are "good". That to many we are the enemy demands more self-recognition than Americans are prepared for (p. 13)."
"British influence in Iran was still strong in 1950 giving rise to a quasi-colonial relationship. The British regarded Iran as a source of oil, for which they paid ridiculously small royalties, and as a captive market for their exports. "I'm sorry", a senior British official told the senior American adviser to the Iranian government, with whom I was staying, "but these people will buy British locomotives". The American adviser had just been pointing out that American locomotives, being diesel, were far better suited to the Iranian railways, with their many tunnels, than the British steam-driven engines. The Iranians ended up buying British (p. 15)."
"The legitimacy of America's role as policeman in the Middle East would have to be accepted for military action to be justified in the eyes of those in the area whom we wished to influence. So long as military action is considered justifiable, then the inevitable civilian casualties, however regrettable, might also be accepted (p 20)."
"Those Americans who applauded the Westernizing efforts of the Shah had little notion of how his programs had disrupted lives at all levels of society. Many Iranians, disoriented, forced to think in new and strange ways, to perform unfamiliar tasks in accordance with unfamiliar norms, humiliated by their inadequacies as they tried to behave as Westerners, and disinclined to become proximate Westerners, second-class at best, sought above all for a renewed sense of their own identity (p. 25)."
"After we were released, it became clear that the Department of State, in its effort to cover up the misjudgement that led to the takeover of the Embassy, was determined not to draw the conclusions it should have from the Iranian experience (p. 28)."
"In theory, the host government is sovereign and has the last word. In practice, it is not always easy to enforce national sovereignty, particularly for a weak Third World government, which may be susceptible to corruption and may not have access to sophisticated legal and accounting methods. More important, foreign investment is usually accompanied by foreign ideas, foreign tastes and standards. Expatriate American business communities generally live and act as if "the locals" hardly exist (pp. 41-42)."
"We lack the maturity to understand another point of view, to cooperate and develop consensus. Our difficulty in growing up impairs both our view and our management of foreign affairs (p. 49)."
"We Americans tend to project our values as if they should have universal acceptance. For some high ranked ones, a desire for investment, which would make Iran more like the United States, was a sign of returning sanity; not to want 'progress' was 'going back to the thirteenth century' (p. 67)."
"For all my own experience in the Middle East, my learning process really began with captivity (p.85)."
"Another addition to the staff was a CIA officer assigned, for cover purposes, to the economic section, with a cover-job title of economic/commercial officer… I pointed out the Embassy had no labor officer. That, the CIA station chief replied, was an ideal cover, giving the new man the excuse he would need to get out of the Embassy compound and become involved in his covert activities… So the cover held until the takeover, when the charge's safe, containing the names of all the Embassy's CIA officers and their cover jobs, fell into the hands of the students (pp. 86-87)."
"I realized that our captors had a gentler side, which had only to be taken advantage of, and with that in mind, I learned to treat them as stewards in a private club, with the kind of courtesy that produces that extra degree of service (p. 95)."
"Before long, the Shah's minions realized that, whatever Carter might say, human rights were not to play a role in Iranian-American relations. And they cracked down even harder (p. 127)."
"We had lost our moral authority in Iran, and for that, more than fifty hostages had to suffer (p. 140)."
"I observed that, in fulfilling its own ethical norms, the Islamic system of inheritance was far more successful than Anglo-American law. Essentially, Anglo-American law protects the right of testators to do what they want with their wealth, subject only to the law's insistence that there be some protection for spouses. In the Islamic system, what the testator may dispose of freely is strictly limited; provision must be made not only for children but also for parents. The one system is essentially a statement of one's rights; the other, of one's duties. Which is superior or more civilized (p. 175)?"
"Justice without love ceases to be justice, becoming no more than balance of power; and love without justice ceases to be love, degenerating into mere sentimentality (p. 185)."
"A month before our release, as we began to realize that the end of our captivity was in sight and to think back on what it all meant, a Marine roommate suddenly asked: "Say, supposed we were guards and they were the hostages - would we have treated them as well as they treated us?" What we recognized was that we were probably not inherently any better than they, and as capable as anyone else, of the greatest wrongs (p. 189)."
"[With the Shah] we projected a world in our own image, where we could be in control or at least feel at home (p. 196)."
"Not until November 9, 1978, did Ambassador William Sullivan in Tehran, in his telegram "Thinking the Unthinkable", come to grips with the possibility of the fall of the Shah. Those reporting officers in the field who, much earlier, had begun to suspect the unthinkable were faced with the reality that if they reported their suspicions, no one in Washington would have taken them seriously. Hence, no Foreign Service or CIA reporting officer, or academic, looked for or was willing to see evidence that would in fact reduce his credibility. American expectations determined not only what the conclusions of any report would be but what evidence would be selected to back them (p. 196-197)."
Until Vietnam we had always managed to win our wars; we and virtue triumphed together, and it was tempting to believe that we triumphed because we were virtuous. So long as our capacity to enforce our view of the good was not challenged, we did not question the rectitude of our aims or the propriety of the means used to attain them. Vietnam raised serious doubts, not only about the propriety of our means, but also about our capacity to refashion the world in our own image. And continuing encounters with Middle East terrorism have given us further pause (p. 198)."
"Our major disappointment was the widespread failure to deal with its [the hostage crisis] lessons. 'Many people in and out of government', Bruce Laingen observed, 'would like to put it all aside and just say, Thank God it's over (p. 202)!"
"International understanding does not result automatically from a stay abroad (p. 213)."
October 25, 2008
This book was written by one of the hostages in the 1979 takeover of the American embassy in Iran. The book includes the history of his life, the story of the hostage situation, and several chapters on the author's life after returning from captivity. I felt in some places that he was a bit too hard on American policy. However, I thought the book is one of the best examples of an author explaining how he integrated his Christian faith with his professional life.
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