Word: swifts
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Politically, too, the experience appears to have had a significant impact. Since she has chosen to remain in the foreign service. Swift refuses to discuss publicly her political perspectives, but CFIA colleagues say her experience as a hostage left her deeply disillusioned with some aspects of American foreign policy. Reportedly, Swift's guards showed her documents captured in the embassy which she never knew existed and which seemed to run counter to some of the policies she was working to uphold. "She was deceived, double-crossed," one colleague says. "She has lost a few of her illusions...
...saga for Ann Swift began in February 1979, when the Islamic revolution erupted in Iran and the U.S. embassy was taken over for the first time. Most of the officers who had been staffing the embassy left soon after the takeover and the State Department recruited volunteers to fill the posts. Although all of Swift's training and experience had been in East Asia, she sympathized somewhat with the goals of the revolution and considered the dangerous situation dramatic and exciting...
Within the State Department, officials say, there were some doubts about whether a woman should be sent into such a volatile situation, but Victor Tomseth, the newly appointed chief political officer, had worked with Swift in the East Asian bureau 10 years before. "Because I had worked with her before. I thought otherwise," Tomseth says...
Despite the nearly complete turnover of the Embassy staff--with four exceptions. Swift says, we "were all new in varying degrees of newness"--she believes the embassy was better trained and informed than most. "Our problem was we weren't tied in to the revolutionary members." On November 4, 1979--less than three months after Swift had arrived--this "problem" proved critical: the embassy was overrun by students, and Swift became a hostage for the next 14 months...
...first few days, the hostages were tied to chairs during the day and left bound on the floor at night. When, after two and a half weeks, most of the women in the embassy were released. Swift was put into isolation--which she calls "down right frightening." "I thought Kate had been released too and assumed that most of the others had been released and we were down to a core of six or seven." From 10 a.m. to 3 a.m. every day there were unceasing demonstrations outside the embassy I Loudspeakers blared continuously and occasionally sporadic gunfire broke...