#laingen

[thefreedomcards]

Bruce Laingen 

Freedom to me is evident in my right to speak my mind and be respected for doing so. 

[ben1783-blog]

The Iran Hostage Crisis-- An Insider's Account

November 4, 1979 – Radical Iranian students take over the U.S. embassy in Tehran and hold 52 Americans hostage The embassy had been seized in February of that year, shortly after the Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile in Paris, but that was resolved quickly; few suspected that this diplomatic crisis would end up lasting 444 days and cost the lives of eight soldiers who died during the ill-fated Operation Eagle Claw rescue attempt on April 24, 1980. Bruce Laingen was charge d’affaires of the embassy and was one of three people who spent most of that time held hostage at the Foreign Ministry.

'A key issue as things developed was destruction of documents and equipment…. We had earlier been under instructions to reduce our classified material. We had supposedly responded to that instruction. I say supposedly because it is clear in retrospect that not enough destruction had taken place, not enough return of documents had taken place to Washington. Indeed, there is some evidence that some documents had been returned from some offices in Washington to the embassy in Tehran. We clearly had much more classified paper than we should have had and I knew we had. We also had generally inadequate destruction equipment, older varieties. Not enough of the total mashing version, or whatever the terms are. More often it was stripping equipment.

'We also that morning began the destruction too late. It did not seem, in the conversations that I was having, that it was that threatening. The first impression that all of us got, both on the compound and certainly with us in the foreign ministry, was a kind of repeat of the February intrusion and that the intention of the students coming into the embassy was this time to again hold it for a while as a kind of demonstration of their contempt for the United States, and more importantly their concern about the direction in which the provisional government had been taking the revolution and their hope that they could destabilize the provisional government under Bazargan.

"This was in any event their real intent. Their real intent was not to get the Shah back, despite the slogans that were so useful to them in that sense to get passions in the streets aroused. Their intent was to use that device to destabilize and undermine the provisional government of the revolution and to facilitate a greater role for the more radical elements.

"Of course, a lot of the paper that did not seem to have that urgency of destruction, including unclassified biographical material, would also in time prove to be a very damaging element of the situation, because lots of that stuff has Central Intelligence Agency logo stamped on it even if it is unclassified. That was enough to fire the fury of the more radical elements of the revolution, even though it was material of an unclassified, descriptive nature. That was sufficient to cause a great deal of pain and hurt to a lot of Iranians.

"As we have all learned since, if you are going to be overrun by a revolutionary group at an embassy, make sure you are overrun by groups a little less passionate in their zeal and determination than those in Tehran, because their passion, their determination, their zeal as revolutionaries was apparent in many ways in the months that followed, and not least in the way they laboriously over hours and hours, days and days, and still today probably, pieced back together a lot of the damaging paper, strip by strip."

[mn70s]

Minnesota's Hostage in Iran

Minnesota native Bruce Laingen was the senior American diplomat in Iran when student revolutionaries took over the U.S. embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979.  Laingen and 52 other embassy staffers were held hostage for 444 days in a diplomatic crisis that dominated the final year of Jimmy Carter's presidency and helped doom Carter's reelection campaign. In this video, Laingen reflects on his experience as a hostage and on his feelings after learning of a failed rescue attempt.

Outgoing President Jimmy Carter with Bruce Laingen at a U.S. military hospital in Germany, 1981.

Little known fact: Laingen's wife, Penne (Penelope), is widely credited with starting the "yellow ribbon movement" that is now so prevalent in the United States. A few days after the embassy takeover, Penne Laingen tied a yellow ribbon around a tree in the yard of her Bethesda, Maryland, home as a show of support for her husband and the other hostages. (She was inspired in part by the 1972 Tony Orlando and Dawn song, Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree.) It wasn't long before yellow ribbons were appearing on trees throughout the country. In the years since then, yellow ribbons have become militarized, transformed into ubiquitous symbols of armed forces solidarity.