Radicals Reborn

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It was, Ibrahim Asgharzadeh now insists, all his idea. On Nov. 4, 1979, Asgharzadeh, then a radical 24-year-old engineering student, led a furious mob down Taleghani Street in Tehran, crashed through the U.S. embassy's gates and began a 444-day siege that not only humiliated America but also cemented a new Iranian political order. But these days, Asgharzadeh is a changed man. At 44, he is a yuppie-ish politician with a seat on Tehran's municipal council, and he is frequently denounced by hard-liners. He has shaved his beard and clearly prefers cracking jokes to raising a clenched fist. Puffing as he escorts an American visitor up a few flights at city hall, down the street from the desolate embassy compound, he says, laughing, "I guess I'm better at climbing over walls than walking up staircases."

Asgharzadeh, who read out the first incendiary communique on the siege that sickened the world, has come a long way in 20 years, and he is not the only one. Many of his fellow militants have also mellowed and are slipping out of the shadows of revolutionary Iran to acknowledge their roles, admit to a few regrets and argue that their cause is finally maturing. All three of the original planners of the siege, it turns out, are now key figures in moderate President Mohammed Khatami's government. Asgharzadeh smiles at the thought of a hostage taker becoming a democrat, but he insists that is exactly what he is. "There is no need to change the world anymore."

In separate interviews, conducted in Tehran over cups of tea, plates of sugary cookies and in one case a late-night pizza to go, Asgharzadeh and top planners Mohsen Mirdammadi, today a political-science professor, and Abbas Abdi, an outspoken newspaper editor, revealed fresh insights into their moment of history. They denied, to start with, that Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini had put them up to it. "The idea came to me while I was studying," Asgharzadeh recalled, joking. "I didn't mind getting away from the books."

For several days before the takeover, Asgharzadeh dispatched confederates to rooftops overlooking the embassy to monitor the security procedures of the U.S. Marine guards. Around 6:30 a.m. on the cataclysmic day, the ringleaders gathered 300 selected students, thereafter known as Student Followers of the Imam's Line, and briefed them on the battle plan. To break the chains locking the embassy's gates, a female student was given a pair of metal cutters that she could hide beneath her chador.

Asgharzadeh said the plan was to hold the embassy for three days. "I didn't think that it would lead to the deep-rooted conflict with America that still exists," he says. But the students were carried away by public opinion when thousands thronged to what was denounced as the "Nest of Spies." "Things got complicated," he says. "We couldn't make decisions on our own anymore." One problem, he says, was keeping discipline in the ranks. The planners insist that the students were under orders not to harm the hostages, and were dressed down when they did. Asgharzadeh says the planners were angry when a student staged a shocking media parade of blindfolded hostages.

As Asgharzadeh made clear at the time in his frequent harangues to Western reporters, the students were outraged by the entry of the deposed Shah of Iran into the U.S. for cancer treatment. Mindful of the CIA-engineered coup that restored the Shah to his throne in 1953, the students saw conspiracies everywhere, hence their painstaking effort to reconstruct embassy documents retrieved from the shredder. The students had another aim: they hoped anti-Americanism would end the factional feuds undermining the revolution.

The student militants did well by their exploits, later winning election or appointments to high posts. But their luck ran out after Khomeini died in 1989. In 1991, Asgharzadeh found himself not only removed from his seat in Parliament but also heading for prison for criticizing the despotic tendencies of the ruling clergy. The student militants were again excluded from politics. "The embassy takeover was in defense of Iran's independence," explains Mirdammadi, 44. "But after Iman Khomeini died, the danger was to democracy. Iran moved away from the freedom of choice and expression that had been promised to the people."

Abdi, 43, has had the most difficult time. In 1993, he spent eight months in solitary confinement for criticizing the clerics' failure to abide by democratic practices set down by the nation's 1979 constitution. Yet he has remained a leading strategist in Khatami's new Participation Party and is one of the architects of Iranian detente with the West. In 1998, ignoring the howls of the hard-liners, Abdi traveled to Paris and met with former hostage Barry Rosen, achieving a reconciliation of sorts. A sign of Abdi's influence: last summer's student riots began with a protest against the closing of his newspaper, Salam, by conservative-controlled courts.

Abdi and the others can still scarcely help themselves when it comes to blaming America for Iran's ills. Asgharzadeh says he is willing to say he's sorry if the repentance is mutual, but Mirdammadi disagrees: "I am sure that we will never apologize to America." Abdi is not looking for a lovefest but wants mutual respect and diplomatic relations for the sake of Iran's national interest. As he puts it, "The Americans were a nuisance to us, and we were a nuisance to them. Perhaps now we can talk to each other on an equal footing and establish a healthy relationship."