Nightmare in Tehran

“It was a thrilling life.”

            You are an American in Tehran. The year is 1979 and the tension is mounting. One day you are alone in a little apartment on the fourth floor. You look out the window and see hundreds of Iranian people, coming towards your building. Your heart is pounding. You know they are coming for you. The door is bashed in. You are taken away…

            Can you imagine it? No, of course not. “That’s something that happens in movies; that would never happen to me.” And yet, you very well could have passed by a woman in town who lived through such an ordeal. In fact, you probably have.

            In 1979 Vera was stationed in Damascus, Syria; in fact, she probably would have missed the entire ordeal in Iran had Washington not asked her to go to the embassy in Tehran to help out the people working there. On February 14, Valentine’s Day, Vera was alone in the apartment building on the fourth floor. The embassy rented out the apartment for its workers; at times there were fourteen people in the three-bedroom dwelling. Vera received word that in the morning that the Iranians had taken over the embassy. She thought to herself, “they’re going to come because they know there are Americans in this building.”

            One of her co-workers, who had been working all night, returned to the apartment to hide his wife’s jewelry and to rest. Vera and her co-worker started hearing noises and looked out the window. “We could see them just going over the walls. We stayed back from the windows… they were just like ants going in there,” she recalled. “Eventually they came for us. Couldn’t bring a thing with us, except they did allow us to bring a coat.” Despite the terror of the situation, Vera grinned as she recounted a rather funny detail. Before the Iranians stormed the building “I said to my coworker, ‘I don’t know about you but I’m going to the bathroom first!’ They came and they knocked in the door and I ran out of the bathroom and I’m zipping up the zipper on my jeans and I’m saying ‘I surrender! I surrender!’”

            The embassy workers were all taken to a compound. Three days later Vera and the other embassy workers were evacuated to either Rome or Frankfurt. “I didn’t realize that it had effected me. I…stopped in Rome to visit friends before returning to Damascus… and they told me later that I was a different person and I thought that I was acting normally.” The entire occurrence was surreal for Vera, “it was almost like I was watching a TV movie,” she said.

            If you have seen the movie Argo, this event should sound familiar. The workers in the movie happened to work three or four blocks away from the embassy in the Consular Section. They knew what was happening in the embassy and, because of that, they were able to hide and await rescue.

            Looking back on the situation now, Vera believes that “[The Iranians] didn’t know what they wanted to do with us really. I think they didn’t intend to take the embassy over; they wanted to see if it could be done, if it could be penetrated.” Vera told me she would not recommend anyone going into the type of work she was in nowadays. “Before anybody thought with tampering with the U.S. embassy they really gave it a lot of thought, whereas today they’d do it on a whim,” she reflected, commenting on the dangers of today’s world.

When I interviewed Vera I was not expecting to hear something as incredible as this. I remember leaving her home that afternoon and saying to myself, “I can’t believe what this woman just told me.” It was unreal to think of what she had been through and of what she had experienced in her lifetime. Of course, the story does not end here. Be sure to keep an eye out for the next installment of Vera’s astounding adventures.

            My name is Jillian DiPersio and I am a sophomore at Windham High School. After learning the stories of my own grandparents, I have been interviewing the elderly. Through my research and interviews I have been able to dig up some incredible bits of history from the lives of local residents, as well as learn about people who are the products of a different generation. If you or someone you know would like to share your stories, please contact me at jillian@dipersio.com.