The Iranian students who stormed the US embassy in 1979 and released thousands of secret CIA documents were the WikiLeaks of their time, their former lead spokesperson told reporters.
Every year on Nov. 3 and Nov. 4, Iran celebrates the 444-day siege of the embassy, when more than 50 diplomats, staff and CIA employees were taken hostage by students demanding the extradition of the shah, who had fled to the US after being deposed a few months earlier in a revolution.
Iranian Vice President Massoumeh Ebtekar is now one of the nation’s most recognizable politicians, feted globally for her work as head of the environment department.
Photo: AFP
However, back then, she was a 20-year-old medical student — nicknamed “Mary” by the international press — who became the face of the hostage crisis thanks to her fluent English.
She now regrets the diplomatic isolation that followed the siege, but she is still proud of their work in releasing documents found in the CIA’s files — some painstakingly reassembled after embassy staff frantically shredded as many as possible when the students stormed the building.
“Revealing these documents was very similar to what WikiLeaks is doing these days. It was the WikiLeaks of those ages,” Ebtekar told reporters.
The documents unveiled the CIA’s attempts to recruit leading Iranian politicians — including a liberal who became Iran’s first post-revolution president, Abol Hassan Bani-Sadr.
Although he denied being on the CIA payroll, the allegations contributed to his decision to flee the country.
“The hostage crisis ... is hugely important to Iran’s domestic politics. It was used as a weapon to destroy the opposition,” said Michael Axworthy, a British historian who has published several books on Iran.
Ebtekar said the documents, later compiled in 77 volumes of Documents from the US Espionage Den, also showed how Washington was working to subvert popular uprisings around the world.
Despite her past, Ebtekar is now a firm supporter of her government’s efforts to rebuild ties with the West through last year’s nuclear deal.
“Even the students who took part in [the siege], many of them believe that maybe in some aspects, relationships could have been maintained in a more rational manner,” she told reporters.
However, she remains unrepentant about the hostage crisis. At the time, the students were convinced the US was preparing another coup to reverse the revolution.
“They were not militants, radicals. They thought there was an imminent danger ... of another coup d’etat that would have led to the downfall of the very young and fragile Islamic revolution,” she said.
Such fears were not completely unfounded. Looming large in every Iranian’s mind was the 1953 CIA-organized coup in which the US and Britain conspired to overthrow the then-prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh, who had dared to nationalize Iran’s oil resources.
“They installed a government that was a puppet to American policies for 25 years, a tyrant who had imposed dictatorship, very dark ages for Iran,” Ebtekar said.
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