 1979 had been a very tumultuous year. The Khomeini regime had taken over in the early months of 1979, and the US embassy had remained in business throughout the duration of the year. Although because of historic tensions between the Iranian people and the US government, there were frequently demonstrations in the neighborhood, in the street, in front of the US embassy with mobs of students and others walking by and chanting nasty slogans about the US. By the end of 1979, the embassy staff had almost gotten accustomed to it. It was like the background noise. And of course, they were concerned about it, but they had sort of settled into a relatively comfortable routine. The events of November 4th, when they first started, there was initially an assumption that it was just kind of business as usual and a heightened state of tensions. But then obviously, as these dramatic events unfolded, the officials realized that, no, this is actually something new and different. The first excerpt worth seeing is right on page one and page two, and that is Mr. Odie's firsthand testimonial about being taken captive. He reports that he was engaged in routine business at the embassy on what seemed like a routine day. On this day in particular, though, suddenly the embassy was aglow with activity. There were some indicators that some students had breached behind the security wall and were causing some worry and consternation. A Marine Corps guard came in and advised that he and his colleagues moved from one part of the embassy to another. Still nothing apparent that a major ordeal was about to ensue. Mr. Odie was asked to escort an elderly gentleman from the Chance Rebuilding. And so he walked outside with this elderly man who got in a car and drove away. And then he and some of his colleagues decided that maybe what was happening in the embassy was unsettling enough that they should walk up the street to another US government facility. And they began to walk away quickly surrounded by a group of students who were armed and who demanded they go back to the embassy. They tried to protest that as diplomats they had immunity and should be free to go. Someone fired a shot over their heads, got their attention back to the embassy they went. And before long, they were bound and blindfolded with the other hostages, paraded before the cameras and maltreated as many realize was the case. It's interesting how Mr. Odie records in his diary an explanation or a narration of what's happening to him and his colleagues around him. And he does so in a very professional and detached way. He's not panicking. Now some of that might be because he was recording these events at some time after they happened. Some of it might be that as a career foreign service officer he had been trained and professionalized to remain professional and rational and non-emotional even in times of great duress. The man was a combat veteran of World War II. He had been involved in a couple of amphibious assaults on Pacific islands with enemy soldiers firing at him. So he'd been through difficult places before in life. He probably also anticipated that the trouble was not going to last for long. That maybe a day or two or a week at the most and then the government at home the US government would do something to liberate or rescue him or the Iranian government would intervene and force the captors to relinquish their prey and so forth. So he probably figured it was a temporary inconvenience and that he would be going home right on schedule at the end of his 45 days. No one knew at the time. In fact from what we can tell even from Iranian records not even the Iranians realized at this point in time that the hostage crisis is going to last so long. Those who took the Americans captive figured it would be a couple of days or a week at the longest. Some of them thought that the Iranian government would intervene within hours and force them to relinquish the captors. To their surprise the Ayatollah Khomeini gave his blessing to the deed and that actually then created a political perfect storm in which the hostage crisis endured simply because of the political context in Tehran and no one forcing it to end and the US government's hands seemingly tied by the very difficult circumstances against it. So the bottom line is that OD might not have realized at the time it was going to become a major sort of life changing and very demoralizing ordeal as it eventually became. Some of the striking features, some of the other striking features of the diary include the way that OD interpreted events that we knew at the time and we certainly know in retrospect were happening on the international stage but were unknown to him, at least unknown to him in great detail. Two examples. There was an attempt by the Carter administration to rescue the hostages by military means in late April 1980. It's a famous and very tragic story in American history in which the Defense Department sent a fleet of soldiers on helicopters into Iran with a mission of flying into Tehran under the cover of darkness landing at the grounds where the hostages were being held captive, chasing away or killing the captors, liberating the hostages, loading them onto helicopters, and flying them to freedom. Unfortunately, the operation experienced technical difficulties at the outset. Some of the helicopters were disabled by a sandstorm. Decision was made early in the procedure to abort the operation. And then in the haste to abort, a couple of aircraft collided and there was an explosion and several USGIs were killed. At that point in time, the Iranians did not yet know that there were American rescuers on their soil and route to Tehran to liberate. They would only learn of the operation after it had failed and after the hasty departure of the American forces. We can see the impact of that event in Odie's diary even though he is not cognizant of the details of the operation. He does not understand that there was a rescue operation. But if you cross-check the dates, you can discern the impact of the failed rescue mission on the status of the hostages, even though the hostages themselves had no idea what had happened. They wouldn't learn for a couple of months that a rescue operation had even been attempted. The diary entry that reveals the impact of the failed rescue mission appears on page 23. And it's the entry for April 25, 1980. Mr. Odie writes, big demonstration outside the embassy again today with much shouting of slogans, everything amplified to the highest degree as usual, and also much horn tooting. About 4.45 PM, we were told to pack up everything as we were being moved to, quote, a much, much better room, unquote, and that we should be ready in 10 minutes. Bruce and I got our things together, which meant gathering up the accumulation of the past two months that I have been in this particular room, and we then proceeded to wait. No one came for us in 10 minutes, and after a couple of hours, Hamid came in and told us to take only one blanket and just the essentials for that night. Also, to take just two books and that everything else would be brought to us within a day or two. This meant going through everything again as we had taken all the loose items, such as toothbrush, razor, shaving cream, our letters, photographs, et cetera, as well as our clothing. Hamid told us to leave most of our clothing behind and that it too would be brought to us later. However, since I don't trust anything, he told me, I packed it anyway, and also the electronic mosquito destroyer and other miscellaneous items, as of course we were not giving any idea where we were going, except that it would be to, quote, a much, much better room, unquote, and from the activity going on in our building, we felt that it would definitely be off the compound, although at first we were under the impression we were just moving upstairs. Then our supper was brought in and we still weren't being moved. Finally, seven hours later, approximately 1 a.m., this would be April 26th, I was told that I was to sleep in our room and that only Bruce was to be moved. I was so angry, I told everyone off and was reminded that, quote, I was not polite. Also that older men should be more polite, unquote. So it appears that I will again be punished, for, quote, being impolite, unquote. This passage reveals a feeling of energy and a feeling of panic among the Iranian captors. It also shows the confusion that followed the discovery by the Iranians of the rescue mission. How, in a sense of panic, they wanted to move. The hostages obviously they realized that had the rescue mission reached Tehran. They could have been in a very difficult position because all the hostages were in the same place. In fact, we now know that in the aftermath of the hostage crisis, the Iranian captors scattered the hostages among several different facilities with some distance between them, precisely for the purpose of making any future rescue mission virtually impossible to pull off. I think the sense of confusion among the captors was the reality. The captors tended to be young people. They were not officials of the Iranian government. They were students. They were militants. They had an edge. They had launched and they pursued the operation against the US Embassy because they wanted to embarrass Uncle Sam. They wanted to embarrass the US government. They bore no particular ill will against the hostages themselves, but they thought that some kind of a political demonstration would help embarrass the United States and otherwise serve the political interests of the Iranian Revolution. They were very much ad-libbing. They had no master plan of how to conduct a hostage operation. They simply took some hostages and then went day by day. No doubt by this point in time, they were beginning to feel a certain sense of fatigue and uncertainty. And then when they realized that the US military had made a foray against them, that probably made them very nervous. And they had to ad-lib some more and adjust their own plans accordingly.