Download Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam AudioBook Free
From the best-selling writer of Black Hawk Down comes a riveting, definitive chronicle of the Iran hostage crisis, America’s first battle with militant Islam. On November 4, 1979, a group of radical Islamist students, inspired by the brand new Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini, stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran. They took fifty-two Americans hostage, and kept practically most of them hostage for 444 days. In Guests of the Ayatollah, Mark Bowden tells this sweeping story through the eyes of the hostages, the soldiers in a new special forces unit delivered to free them, their radical, naïve captors, and the diplomats working to end the crisis. Bowden takes us inside the hostages’ cells and inside the Oval Office for meetings with President Carter and his exhausted team. We happen to be international capitals where shadowy figures held clandestine negotiations, and the deserts of Iran, where a courageous, desperate try to rescue the hostages exploded into tragic failure. Bowden dedicated five years to this research, including numerous trips to Iran and many interviews with those involved on both sides. Guests of the Ayatollah is an in depth, brilliantly re-created, and suspenseful account of an emergency that gripped and in the end changed the earth.
