The Foreign Service Journal, February 2004

economic well-being and social wel- fare for the Iranian people, so that the country can someday be the bul- wark of freedom in this area which it is U.S. policy to help achieve.” A Second Detour to Tehran That was 1955. Almost a quarter- century later, fate again intervened. Over the intervening years I had watched Iran’s development from a distance, and like almost everyone else, from governments on down, found the shah’s forced moderniza- tion of his country impressive enough to think he might succeed. Everyone was proved wrong, above all the shah himself, and in January 1979, he once more fled his country, never to return. The Ayatollah Khomeini arrived a few weeks later to preside over his Islamic Revolution. Back on that farm in Minnesota, in May 1979, again on leave prior to leading an inspection team of our embassies in Uruguay, Paraguay and Argentina, the telephone rang, with advice that the Secretary of State wanted me to go to Tehran, “for four to six weeks,” as acting chief of mis- sion, while Washington sorted out its future policy direction in our prickly relations with the new regime in Tehran. Those four to six weeks would extend to five months and later become the 444 days of the hostage crisis.  66 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 4 New to embassy life, I marveled that even with a curfew, the diplomatic social circuit was intense.