America Held Hostage : The Secret Negotiations Hardcover Pierre S

THE MOST stirring moment in the day of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration as the fortieth
President of the USA came with his announcement that at last the hostages were on their way home.
Fourteen months had passed since a group of Iranian students had stormed the American Embassy in Tehran and taken hostage 66 members of its staff.
Rarely during those months was the story absent from our newspapers – which does not mean that we were, in fact, being told what was going on. The nature of the event forbade it. It was not only the freedom (perhaps the lives) of the hostages which was at stake. A kind of violence between nations had been unleashed that might well have led to something even worse, and the saving of faces was an essential element in the attempts to defuse it