Takeover in Tehran: The Inside Story of the 1979 U.S. Embassy Capture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
IRAN Takeover in Tehran: The Inside Story of the 1979 U.S. Embassy Capture. by Massoumeh Ebtekar (as told to Fred A. Reed). Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2000. 243 pages. Appends. to p. 246. Notes to p. 256. $14.95 paper. Reviewed by William J. Daugherty Massoumeh Ebtekar was spokeswoman for the who captured the American Embassy in Tehran in 1979. She claims to seek an alternative view of that event in hope of opening understanding and dialogue between the United States and Iran. She will probably be disappointed, for this work stands little chance of fulfilling her wish, offering little by way of justification that wasn't said 21 years ago by the students. Nor is Ebtekar assisted by her co-author, whose Foreword is so blatantly anti-American that even those inclined towards the Iranian perspective will find it hard to credit. Any value to the book resides in Ebtekar's account of the planning for the takeover and the day-to-day management of the hostages. She states that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and the clerics were not informed, much less involved, in the initial capture of the embassy, and identifies the student's goals: the breaking of Iranian-American relations, the return of the Shah for trial, and the condemnation of the United States in world opinion for its policies towards Iran. An additional motivation, left unsaid by Ms. Ebtekar, is that the takeover was an attempt to revive an Iranian revolution running out of steam and leaving Iranians frustrated and disappointed over unfulfilled promises of a better life. The embassy capture did rally the Iranian populace initially, but this faded as Iran began to suffer under sanctions levied by much of the world, particularly nations whose help Iran needed the most. This was the first, but not the only, aspect of the takeover that backfired to the detriment of all Iranians. To name two others, it is improbable that the Soviet Union would have invaded Afghanistan or that the Iraqis would have attacked Iran had there remained a formal relationship between the United States and Iran. These two events cost millions of casualties, including hundreds of thousands of Iranians. The students who captured the US Embassy in 1979 bear a direct responsibility for this. Ebtekar shows in numerous examples how, once the takeover was accomplished, this act was transformed into a government-supported violation of international law, and how the students themselves subsequently became de facto agents of the government. The internal chemistry of the student groups involved in the takeover is likewise interesting, if only as a study of group dynamics in abnormal situations. The students established a well-organized bureaucracy that functioned reasonably effectively. This is no small accomplishment in that they had intended to hold the embassy for only a few days, and so had to improvise as time passed without a resolution of the crisis. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".