There are rooms of creative if didactic art works, graffiti, and murals denouncing US policy, including our news media which they see as a weapons system that has been deployed against them. (One slogan on the wall: "Information R.I.P.") Perhaps this is why my film WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception was shown here and is popular.)
The angry art is not the building's most popular attraction. On the second floor, is the ex-Embassy's own West Wing, behind a metal safe like door is where the spying was done.
The offices are pretty much as they found it--a soundproof glass encased safe room within a room, cryptographic equipment, communications gear that allowed them to tap Tehran's telephones and a forgery bench where they invented passports and spread disinformation. (I once saw a similar room in a former Stasi secret police station in East Germany that kept tabs on everyone.)
The students found a secret document with a floor plan of the Ayatollah's residence and other artifacts of CIA espionage including guns and coding machines.
Today, all of this is done digitally and with much more sophistication. Just last week, the US launched a massive new spy satellite to upgrade our global surveillance capabilities.
You don't need Embassies anymore to do this dirty work. We have since set up a well-funded Office of Global Reconnaissance but it doesn't seem be to making us any more secure.
These days, a small group like Wikileaks has found ways to release hundreds of thousands of documents that officialdom wants to hide..
(After the Embassy seizure,
The US government downplayed spying by its diplomats calling it "routine." The
latest Wikileaks expose reveals that
diplomats are spying more than ever.)
As the students muscled their way into the Embassy back then, US officials were busy destroying documents, burning them in the basement, throwing them into chemical vats that turned paper into powder, and feeding them into huge industrial-strength shredders. I saw the machines.
They managed to keep the activists at bay for three hours while destroying sensitive and potentially embarrassing data before surrendering.
What they didn't count on was that scores of students would spend weeks patiently and systematically piecing the shreds together, literally ironing and weaving the fragments into readable prose. They reconstructed the destroyed documents and published them in scores of books that topped the best-seller list in Iran, if there was one.
The late Bill Worthy, a legendary African American journalist, brought some of the books back to Boston in 1980 only to have them confiscated at the airport where he was threatened with prosecution.
Most Americans know little of Iran's 2500 year history, its proud culture or the role played by the CIA in toppling the democratically elected the Mosaddegh government in l953 that wanted to nationalize the country's oil instead of being forced to allow the West to exploit it. (The Ayatollah Khomeini referenced this event when he told the US: "You have no right to complain, because you took our whole country hostage in 1953.")
There is no evidence that the Ayatollah organized the Embassy takeover.
They don't know that the US orchestrated Iraq's invasion of Iran causing a half million deaths, many from chemical weapons. I met some of the still sick victims of those chemicals including a disfigured Member of Parliament who was a war correspondent. Saddam's chemical attacks on Iran's military got almost no press attention compared to his gassing of Kurds.
Our ignorance still feeds dangerous calls for war like those made recently by the pin-headed Lindsey Graham, a Republican Senator from the former Confederate State of South Carolina. He's called for the sinking of Iranian Navy. He seems to have forgotten his own States role in launching the American civil war after a Naval battle between the Monitor and the Merrimack in Charleston harbor.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
