Word: oned
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...masks of the Americans. Said one attacker: "We had the gas for three hours. You can taste it for a while." Then they blindfolded the embassy staff, bound their hands and made them sit on a corridor floor. Soon the students put one of their prisoners on parade, draping his body with a Khomeini poster. One attacker brandished a picture of the Ayatullah that, he claimed, embassy personnel had used as a dart board...
...shots were fired inside the chancellery, which may have disappointed the students. Said one: "If the Marines don't shoot, we take over. If they do, we have our martyr. Either way, we win." Any hopes that embassy officials had once had of preventing attackers from scaling the walls of the compound were abandoned after last February's assault, when Muslim guerrillas easily overpowered a handful of Iranian police guards and the embassy's Marines. The basic defense plan of the embassy was simply to have the Marines hold off any assault long enough for sensitive material to be destroyed...
While their comrades were seizing the chancellery, another group of students was breaking into the heavily secured consulate section, which had just been rebuilt (at a cost of $500,000) to speed up the issuance of visas for thousands of Iranians seeking to go to the U.S. One irony of the situation was that in recent weeks the crowds of Iranians around the embassy had been there to try and get visas to the U.S. Noted the English-language Tehran Times: "Despite the public denunciations, the U.S. embassy has often presented the spectacle of being mobbed one day by visa...
Some critics of Khomeini charge that one of his motives in inciting the students was to distract his country's attention from problems that his revolution has been unable
...Entebbe-style attack as impractical under the circumstances. Nor did the Administration have the option of undertaking any kind of covert action inside Iran that might have tempered the situation. When the Shah fell last January, most of the U.S. intelligence apparatus in Iran fell along with him. Confessed one Washington official: "We have reviewed our assets and our options, and they are precious...