 The source is a diary that was kept by a Foreign Service officer named Robert Odie. Mr. Odie was a combat veteran of World War II and after the war joined the Foreign Service as a clerk, he worked his way up through the ranks to become a Foreign Service officer and he was forced to retire by a mandatory retirement law at age 60 in 1975. After he took occasional work as a contractor for the U.S. government and he happened to take a job for the State Department that involved traveling to the embassy in Tehran, supposed to be for only 45 days and he arrived in the fall of 1979 in a perfect case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was in the embassy in Tehran when it was overrun by the student militants on November 4th. Thus his 45-day assignment became a prolonged assignment because he remained in captivity as the other 51 hostages did for 444 days until they were released on January 20th, 1981. During his captivity he eventually got permission to begin recording his thoughts. He didn't start writing immediately, he was eventually given permission and he retrospectively wrote back to the onset of the hostage crisis on November 4th, 1979 and then he wrote on an occasional basis, not quite a daily basis for the duration of his captivity. The final product is a diary of 115 pages. It's available at the Jimmy Carter Library in Atlanta, Georgia and a substantial excerpt of it is posted on the website of the Carter Library so it's readily accessible by electronic means in any classroom in the country. 115 pages is perhaps a daunting length for a primary source for high school instruction but I think that teachers can effectively and rather easily find the meaty excerpts to which they can guide their students for a greater understanding of what the document reveals. What I like about this document is it's a first person narrative by a participant who was involved in one of the most sensational events in U.S. diplomatic history. It's not a study of the making of official American foreign policy by the Oval Office or by the seventh floor of the State Department by the Secretary of State but rather it's a record of the day to day experiences of the real life impact of an international event on an individual foreign service officer who experienced that event in a very personal first hand and day in and day out way. What I like about the document is it reveals the human side of international relations. It does not reveal why policy was made or how policy was made but it shows how policy was experienced by a key official who was caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nothing much will be learned from this diary about the origins of the hostage crisis about why it erupted, about how it was settled, about what kind of negotiations ensued between Carter and Khomeini but what is learned is how the hostage ordeal affected the 52 individual American government employees who experienced it on a day to day basis. In that sense it's kind of like studying the new deal not by looking at the policy made by Franklin Roosevelt but rather by reading the account of the oakes or it's about learning about World War II not by studying the decisions of the generals but by looking at the lived experiences of the soldiers who swarmed up onto the beaches in the face of enemy gunfire. So it does have to be supplemented with studies or explanations of what's happening at the top level, what's happening between the Carter government and the Khomeini government but this document does bring to life the actual real experience of what took place in the lives of the Iran embassy employees.