Speak up, Colonel Tavakoli

If you go to YouTube and type in “Colonel Tavakoli Tehran,” you’ll see the man himself in front of the American Embassy on November 4, 1979. He’s shouting into a megaphone, imploring the revolutionary students to back off.

 “My name is Colonel Tavakoli,” he says. “Listen up everyone. I am the chief of the Revolutionary Command Headquarters. Invading the American Embassy will give the American army an excuse to intervene. Stop doing this. I beg you. Hold your fire. Stop it for the sake of your country — and for Islam.”

On the anniversary of the embassy takeover this month, we had the usual orgy of commemoration and justification. I watched the video then, and it troubled me. Partly because the colonel’s warning was so prescient, and also because — to this day — no one in power will admit that the takeover was wrong and calamitous for Iran. If they did, they’d have to admit it's time to apologize in order to re-build relations with the United States. 

Instead, Iranian politicians tie themselves into all kinds of knots. They will condemn more recent student embassy takeovers, just not the one in Tehran in 1979.

Iranian journalists are complicit in this charade. Year after year, they repeat the lie parroted by self-serving officials —  that the Iranian revolutionary students overran the US embassy and took 52 Americans hostage for 444 days in (belated) response to the 1953 coup orchestrated by the CIA.

This is simply not true. 

The students seized the embassy and hostages as payback for America’s refusal to return the dying Shah to Iran. Very few of them knew much about the1953 coup. 

Over the years, though, politicians of all stripes realized that outrage over CIA meddling made for better moral high ground than resentment over a missing monarch – and it became the party line. Clustered on that moral high ground, puffed up with indignation, our leaders are left defending the indefensible.

Of course, conservative politicians, including the Supreme Leader, avoid raising the issue of an apology to the US by arguing that America is the Great Satan. Until it changes its behavior toward Iran, they say, there will be no relations at all. Full stop.

In 2011, during the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iranian “revolutionary” students attacked the British Embassy in Tehran. In fact, there is evidence the Iranian government “helped” the students. I remember seeing a truckload of stones trundle past the embassy at a suspiciously convenient time for them to be used as projectiles. 

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was one of the hostage-takers in 1979. (As a historical footnote, it’s interesting that his main beef at the time was not with America. He thought the students should attack the Soviet Embassy instead.)

But in 2011, as president, he could not endorse the attack on the British embassy. It was clearly a bad move which would endanger diplomatic ties with a major Western power. But rather than criticize it and implicitly criticize the 1979 takeover, he took the Iranian way out – he found a foreigner to blame.

The British embassy takeover,” he claimed in a Telegram video, “was plotted by the British themselves to set the scene for UK sanctions against Iran”.

Later, in a partial climb-down, Ahmadinejad’s Foreign Minister, Ali Ackbar Salehi, was instructed to express “his regret” over the incident.

You might expect a more progressive view from the reformers who have been growing in strength since about 1996. But even they can’t quite bring themselves to suggest Iran should apologize for 1979.

Listen to what Ebrahim Asgarzadeh, now a reformer who was once a hostage-taker, told students at Tehran University after the Saudi Embassy in Tehran was attacked by students in 2016.

“Our takeover of the US Embassy was different,” he said.  “The people who stormed the Saudi Embassy did it while nuclear negotiations were underway. Their actions hurled acid in the face of Iranian diplomacy.” 

His implication – however muddled – is that the 1979 US embassy takeover was justified because it did not threaten any Iranian diplomatic negotiations.

Even the late Ebrahim Yazdi and Abbas Amir Entezam, two politicians who were persecuted for their moderate views, could not bring themselves to suggest the 1979 takeover deserved an apology. They too laid blame on the two old bogeymen – writing that it was “an American and Israeli plot.”

Nowadays, young reform-minded Iranians are asking questions about what happened on and around November 4, 1979. They want to know who led the takeover, and why. They are curious about the involvement of Marxist groups, the People’s Mojahedin Organization (MEK), and liberals, and they want to know whether those who were there regret their actions; whether they believe embassy takeovers are always — in the long run — counterproductive.

Sadly, very few public figures are brave enough to come clean – either about the facts, or about a constructive way forward. Especially if it begins with saying sorry. Back then in 1979, goes the story,  the takeover was justified because it was a revolutionary time – even if it now it would be wrong.

Meanwhile, we are all paying the price. Iran is known worldwide as a rogue state. It was left with few allies to help in the war against Saddam Hussein. It remains under international sanctions and its crippled economy stifles opportunity for millions.

Oh, Colonel Tavakoli – if only we’d listened.