A Look Back: Protest Turns To Drama

In 1979, a few Iranian students were planning a short protest at the American embassy in Tehran. But somehow things got out of hand. Fifty-two Americans ended up as hostages for 444 days.

It was one of the deepest humiliations the United States has ever suffered. Twenty years later, with U.S.-Iranian relations still poisoned by the affair, some of the hostage takers admit that it might not have been such a good idea after all - not only for the Americans, but for their own country. 60 Minutes II Correspondent Bob Simon reports.

"We had an embassy staff meeting at 9 o'clock that broke up about 10 o'clock," says Colonel Chuck Scott, the embassy's former military attaché. "And it wasn't much longer after that, that we heard the hordes chanting outside the embassy."

"I looked out my window, and all of a sudden I see a rampaging group of Iranian students, climbing over the gates of the Tehran embassy," says Barry Rosen, who was the press attaché at the time.

"And before I knew it, they were banging on my door," he says.

"We were diplomats, for God's sake, protected by masses of traditions and laws of immunity against this kind of abuse," says Bruce Laingen, the ranking U.S. diplomat at the embassy at that time.

Suddenly these men, and 441 others, were hostages. "I had no glimpse of the nightmare that was ahead," says Scott. "I thought, 'If this thing lasts another 24 hours, we're going to be way behind in our work.'" For the next 444 days, their only work was staying alive.

The rallying cry for Ayatollah Khomeini and the Islamic revolution became "Marg Bar Amrika," which means death to America.

America had not only supported the shah and his oppressive regime for 25 years, but had just let him into the United States for medical treatment.

Since America was far away, the Ayatollah and the students directed the sea of rage toward the hostages. They were blindfolded much of the time, brutalized, interrogated, humiliated, kept in solitary confinement and regularly threatened with death.

Scott was among a group lined up in front of a firing squad on Feb. 4, 1980: "[We] stood there for about what seemed to be an eternity while they went through these fire commands," he says.

"And then heard them snickering and laughing," he says, noting that one of the hostages was, Don Sharer, a Navy commander. "They had us facing a wall and spread-eagled against the wall."

"[Sharer] turned around and said, 'If you're going to shoot me, you're going to have to shoot me frontward, you know.' And when that thing was over that night, we knew we had just won one hell of a fight," he says.

"Because there wasn't a single hostage that begged or pleaded for his life," he notes. "And to this day, I'm very prod of that group."

"I've worked with a lot of brave men in 31 and half years in the Army. But I never really witnessed any more of a demonstration of raw courage than I saw that night," he adds.

They were already heroes in the eyes of America and in much of the world. But they had no way of knowing that. For more than a year, their lives involved darkness, loneliness and desperation.

After 444 days, the hostage crisis ended, at least for the hostages. For Iran, it did not. Tehran was in the throes of a bloody eight-year war with Iraq, as a direct result of the hostage crisis. Saddam Hussein saw that Iran was isolated and distracted, so he attacked.

In that war, half a million Iranians died, including many of the students who had attacked the embassy. The survivors have had to live with the consequences of what they did, and it's not been easy for some.

"Iran lost something because of what we did," says Ebrahim Asgharzadeh, a student leader at the time. "The takeover led to the Iran-Iraq war, and America supported the aggressor, Iraq. The government then became more radical and suppressed our civil rights."

It has taken Asgharzadeh the better part of 20 years to reach that conclusion. In 1979, if Americans were shocked to see the Iranian hatred on their television screens night after night, the students were equally shocked by the way Americans reacted.

They expected support from American students, in demonstrations like those during the Vietnam War.

As Asgharzadeh and the students became convinced the Americans were preparing to reinstate the shah, they became more and more radical.

"Wherever we see any fingerprint of America, any evidence of America, we will attack it and struggle against it," said Mary Ebtekar, a 19-year-old spokeswoman for the students at that time.

She called for the hostages to be put on trial as spies. Today that teen-age firebrand is a vice president, Iran's first woman to hold the post. She handles tough questions as politicians do anywhere else: by avoiding them.

Asked if she really thought the hostages should be put on trial, she now says: "I think that now going back to those very detailed questions [is] not very logical, reasonable."

"Twenty years has passed and going back to the feelings and the ideas of that time - I think that that's not a pertinent right-now question," she says.

But her former colleague, Asgharzadeh, now a Teheran city council member, is willing to review the actions of that time and comes pretty close to apologizing for some of them.

"Things like the handcuffing of the hostages and blindfolding them were in retrospect indefensible acts," he now says.

Last November, Asgharzadeh stood in front of the same embassy he had seized and told today's students that Iran can not be seen as a terrorist state any longer.

"It's sweet revenge to a certain degree," Rosen says now. "Peopl who were so hard-line and hated the United States so much have finally realized that the institutions of Western democracy are what they want."

The majority of Iranians want more freedom, more democracy. They want change - change from the strict Islamic law that the hostage crisis helped put in place.

Their hopes rest with President Khatami, who swept into power two years ago with 70 percent of the vote. Khatami is known as the "smiling mullah." He no longer wants to hear chants about death; he wants to hear about life, he says.

Many Iranians, while proud that they overthrew the shah, are embarrassed by the excesses of their very own revolution.

Says Scott: "A very close Iranian friend of mine said to me, 'Chuck, if we came back to Iran and went into a restaurant today and told them, you were one of the hostages, Chuck, you couldn't buy a meal.'"

"It would be free because they are still basically ashamed and humiliated that that's what happened," Scott continues.

It is not hard to spot some of the people who have had enough of the ayatollahs. The veils seem to get pulled back a little every year. But it is not always so obvious.

Today some university students say they're all in favor of an Islamic state. But they sing a different song from that sung by the class of 1979. Many say, for example, that they want to visit America.

But real power in Iran still rests with the hard-line mullahs who control the courts, the military, the police and the parliament.

At the Friday prayers, those old slogans are still heard. With a hand on an AK-47, ayatollahs line up to rage against American arrogance.

You can still see the official view of America downtown and on the old embassy walls. The site of America's great humiliation is now an academy for the revolutionary guards. The hard-liners just won't let go of the old scapegoat.

"They can't get past the past," says Rosen. "How do you say we will develop new relations with the U.S. and somehow say that the hostage crisis might be a mistake, when…it is the trademark of the revolution?"

Recently Rosen tried to get past the past. He went to Paris where he became the first American hostage to meet one of his former captors.

He spent a week with Abbas Abdi, one of the leaders of the takeover who was put on trial recently for his pro-democracy views. Abdi offered his hand, but would not offer a public apology.

Rosen says that Abdi apologized in private, but because he was under pressure from the Iranian right wing, he didn't do so in public. But some of Abdi's other opinions, spoken publicly, will almost certainly anger the right wing.

"If we assume that the takeover of the American embassy was a humiliation, then we can say we are even because the Americans humiliated Iran for 25 years. Now we can sit down as equal parties and reestablish relations," he says.

Asgharzadeh says that this repair will not be esy. The Ayatollah Khomeini died 10 years ago, but his stern eyes still watch everyone, everywhere.

At Khomeini's shrine outside Tehran, pilgrims come to pay their respects to the leader of the Islamic revolution, the man who established a new relationship between Iran and the United States - a relationship of fear and loathing that is still very dangerous to question.

Asked if America is still the Great Satan, Ebtekar declines to answer.

Almost three-quarters of Iranians today are younger than 30. They know very little about what happened at that American embassy and care even less. They are ready to move on, as are many of the hostages and their captors. Once again, it's the veterans of the frontlines who are the most fervent advocates of peace.

If the hostages returned, he would not only welcome them but would defend them, Asgharzadeh says.

"When they're saying they'd love to have us come back, that's as close as you'll get to a real apology for what they did," says Scott. "Would I go back as a diplomat? Probably. I love the country."

So would Rosen? "It'd be ironic, but wonderful," he says.

The broadcast was produced by Draggan Mihailovich; the Web coverage was produced by David Kohn;