Word: iranian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Some 6,350 miles away in Tehran, the Americans were enduring a final episode of psychological abuse. Most, if not all, had been assembled by Iranian revolutionary guards at an undisclosed site in northern Tehran, probably the opulent mansion once owned by Hojabr Yazdani, a wealthy cattle breeder and industrialist who is now a fugitive from Khomeini's regime. They had been examined by the Algerian doctors, but the hostages had not been told that they were to be released. Ahmad Azizi, the Iranian government's second-ranking spokesman on the hostages, claimed later: "It would have been too painful...
...through a gauntlet of chanting militants. While some hostages thought the dozens of militants forming a corridor to shout "Death to America!" at them were just performing for propaganda effect, others were genuinely frightened and reported that they had been kicked and shoved during their last steps on Iranian soil...
...Washington, where it was 1:50 p.m. when the jet cleared Iranian airspace, the State Department began informing the families that the hostages were free at last. Carter quickly got the word too, and his airborne party, including Zbigniew Brzezinski, Hamilton Jordan, Jody Powell, Jack Watson and Stuart Eizenstat, struggled with laughter and tears at the same time. Phil Wise rushed into the plane's press section to paraphrase a Martin Luther King Jr. line that applied aptly to both the Carter Administration officials and the hostages: "We're free, we're free; thank God almighty, we're free...
...Brooklyn echoed a refrain heard often among the other families. "The servicemen who went over in that rescue attempt were the true heroes of this entire Iran crisis," she said, "because they went over knowing full well that they might not come back." Eight of them died in the Iranian desert in April...
Mock executions carried out by white-masked "firing squads" that clicked rifle bolts behind the backs of hostages spread-eagled against a wall. Iranian guards playing Russian roulette with revolvers held to the heads of two bound American women. Prisoners confined in basement cells where they were prevented from seeing sunlight for months, forced to sleep for weeks in the clothes they were wearing when captured, denied baths for as long as three months, afraid even to look at each other because their captors thought they might be exchanging eye signals...