Original subtitles

[audio logo]

[chanting]

DON COOKE: Emotions were running extremely high,

but I felt pretty secure in the embassy.

BARRY ROSEN: I thought we were being protected.

MARK LIJEK: But then, we could hear them on the roof.

CORA AMBURN-LIJEK: Someone was trying

to come in through the window. MARK LIJEK: And we had to hide.

ROCKY SICKMANN: We were trying to buy time,

with the expectation that we would get to leave,

and unfortunately, it didn't turn out that way.

They take us from the room, and they blindfold us.

STEVE KIRTLEY: They could do whatever they

wanted to with us at any time.

[chanting]

[theme music playing]

Hello, and welcome to How It Really Happened.

I'm Jesse L. Martin.

Sometimes, it seems like the world is on fire.

That terror is the new norm, and hostage

taking, bargaining for human life, is all too common.

But what happens to these hostages

while they're in captivity?

Are they treated humanely?

Are they tortured?

Or do they try to escape?

When Iranian students stormed the US Embassy in Tehran

in November of 1979, they took the embassy staff hostage

and held them for 444 days.

Only a handful managed to escape,

but they were trapped in Iran until the CIA

came up with a daring plan to bring them home.

The top secret mission was the subject of the Academy

Award-winning film Argo.

Here's how it really happened.

It was about mid-morning.

Two of our three local employees had decided

to go buy some cookies as a snack for everybody,

and all of a sudden, the two came back.

They were out of breath.

They were visibly upset.

Something was wrong.

There was a march in front of our embassy,

the American Embassy.

Thousands of people, and the demonstration

got greater and greater as time went by.

I could hear the demonstrating,

getting closer and closer and louder and louder.

And here are these people are chanting, death to America.

And all of a sudden, they've gotten in.

They're coming over the walls.

They're coming over the walls.

The place was just overrun with people.

We were over in the Marine house,

and they came in and started kicking doors down.

And we could see him taking other State Department

and defense attache people out and lead

them across the compound.

You don't know what's going on.

You don't know if you're ever going to get out of there.

My adrenaline was gone.

People were pounding on the door,

and I'm putting rounds into my pistol.

And then, all of a sudden, they start

bringing people to the door and saying, hey,

they got a gun to my head.

If you don't open the door, they're going to kill me.

We called the State Department.

What do you want us to do?

They actually told us, make them kick the door down.

And then you just--

I want you to surrender.

So that's what we did.

That morning, we had the chance to pull the trigger,

but we were told to stand down.

All it would have taken is one word from those in charge.

And all they would have had to do was say, fight.

And every Marine there, we'd all have fought to the death.

We're taken hostage.

Marines were the first ones out, arms behind your back,

and blindfold you and tie your hands up.

And I was being led across the embassy compound.

People running up to me, shouting,

death to America, shaking their fist at me, spitting at me.

I was taken from there into one of these little houses.

There were probably 20 other hostages in there,

and my feet were tied.

My hands were tied behind my back.

That's how it started for me.

I was 21 when I was taken hostage.

That day, the day it took the American embassy and took us

hostage is the day that the war on terrorism started.

The wall where they entered, that was motor pool gate.

That's the southwest corner of the compound.

And so we locked down in the Consular Building, which

was separate from the embassy and from the warehouse

and from the residences.

And they could not get into our building at first.

We couldn't see into the compound, so everything we knew

was based on what the Marines were putting out on the radio.

And we knew that the Iranians were increasingly taking over.

And then we heard footsteps on the roof of the building.

The power went out.

They shut that down.

Shortly after that, it was decided

we should leave the building.

We had access to the back of the embassy compound,

and so the thought was that we could get out the back

and head down some of the other streets

there and make our escape that way.

The Consul General told us we should

go to the British embassy.

There was Bob Andrews, Cora, and Mark Lijek, Joe

Stafford and his wife, Kathy.

They were caught up in a crazy scenario.

We went out the door, turned left,

headed west in the direction of the British compound.

I was in line to either go with that group

or to stay behind, and I decided that I would stay.

And then we were taken prisoner.

They got caught right away, and we didn't.

There were 66 Americans that were being held hostage.

You're thinking, OK, this is going to end pretty quick.

The government is going to come in.

They're going to take control, and it'll all be over.

And it didn't work out like that.

That night was played out on the couch.

Feet are tied.

Hands are tied.

All these Iranians, and they're gathered

around this, literally-- this little transistor radio.

And you could hear somebody on the radio speak in Farsi.

And I didn't know at the time that it was Ayatollah Khomeini.

Ayatollah Khomeini led the Islamic revolution.

They thought he was the savior of the poor people.

They thought he was going to bring democracy and fairness

and equality to the country.

Initially, it looked like he was going to question

the action of the students.

And then--

Ayatollah Khomeini announced that he

is in full support of the takeover

of the United States Embassy.

He blessed them, and then that was it.

They became Iran's heroes.

This, now, became a test of wills

between the Iranian government, the revolutionary government

and the American government.

And that's when I knew we were going to be there for a while.

WILLIAM BELK (ON RECORDING): I am all right.

I do expect to come home.

When?

I don't know.

ALAN GOLANCINSKI: Everybody that was there suffered.

Make no mistake, there was bad treatment.

[suspenseful music playing]

JOHN GRAVES (ON RECORDING): I was

the highest-ranking officer in their hands,

so I was isolated completely.

I was questioned and questioned and not allowed to sleep.

Every day was a psychological warfare.

You're always tested to see, either you'll make it,

or you'll-- you'll be broken.

They would play with weapons and put them to you, your head,

and say, tell me the information or else.

I really wanted to cry.

I really wanted to cry.

And there were many times that I did.

When these students climbed over the wall of the American

Embassy and took these diplomats and others hostage,

I was taken aback, like just about everybody was taken aback.

I grew up in Iran, and we had a very normal, fabulous childhood.

And then everything changed.

It was unprecedented.

And the reason it happened was because President Carter,

at the time, had taken in the exiled Shah

for urgent medical treatment.

The Shah became unpopular at home

for his ostentatious lifestyle and the torture of dissidents.

That all changed in 1979.

The Islamic Revolution ushered in change, forcing

the Shah to flee the country.

When he was admitted into the United States

for cancer treatment, they just thought that was a step too far.

Many Iranians were very, very angry.

They thought that the Shah was evil.

And they were very afraid that America was planning

to help bring the Shah back.

It was not an action of revenge

against the American nation, but was protest against the policies

of the American government.

I think it was Sunday morning, real early,

a neighbor across the street, he looked at me and says,

they got your dad, don't they?

My father knew it was dangerous.

And I remember, when we came back

from dropping them off at the airport,

his will was on the dining room table.

I spent the rest of the day on the phone

to Washington, trying to find out what had happened.

Our government would not release any information,

who was being held, what are their names,

what are their positions.

So I was never sure for over a month,

whether or not Barry was even one of the people who was taken.

They wouldn't confirm anything.

That first 30 days--

I mean, the first 30 days was hard because you were solitary,

as you sat tied to a chair.

And at night, they tie you to your wrist, to your ankles,

and that's how you slept.

I had two interrogators-- a female and a male.

They said to me, you're a member of the nest of spies.

They were paranoid.

They thought that we were always spying on Iran.

We were doing something evil.

We have found no evidence that proves that these people

are diplomats.

All evidence proves that these people are spies.

My father became one of the, quote, unquote, "spies."

He was, much of the time, not allowed

to talk to the people with him.

JOHN GRAVES (ON RECORDING): Most of the time we were blindfolded.

All I had were--

what I could hear, the chanting crowd, which kept chanting,

death to America and America.

You could hear individuals shooting,

and you don't know what they were shooting at.

Six of our colleagues in Tehran

escaped out the back gate of the embassy,

the day the embassy was being overrun.

And there they were in the middle of Tehran,

not quite sure where they were going, looking for refuge,

wherever they could find it.

It was like a bonfire--

Iran was-- and these six Americans got caught up in it

and were stranded.

Bob Anders and the Lijeks and the Staffords and Lee

Schatz, there was really nowhere to turn,

except for other embassies.

That was the only hope that they had.

But in order to get to another embassy,

you're out on the street.

We, Americans, were not popular in Tehran.

We went out in the direction of the British embassy.

When we got within about a couple of blocks,

we could see there was a demonstration

going on in front of it.

If we had been found, we would have been hostages as well.

Bob said his apartment wasn't far away.

I went to my apartment.

We didn't know what was going to happen.

It was time limited, how long we could

survive in that apartment.

Basically, we knew that, eventually, they

would search all of the houses.

They would get into the office where the records were kept

or the embassy leases, and they would send teams out.

They would find everyone.

So we were going to move.

We moved around to several different places,

and I have an ace in the hole, I hope.

Bob Anders reached out to his counterpart at the Canadian

Embassy, John Sheardown.

They called Sheardown and asked if he would take them in.

John said, why didn't you call sooner?

They all started on a Sunday, and on Saturday,

we were finally in safety.

We thought we were.

Welcome back to How It Really Happened.

After the siege at the US embassy began,

some of the hostages were being subjected to public humiliation

by their Iranian captors.

Others were reportedly being tortured behind the walls

of the compound.

Anger and frustration in the United States

was at its boiling point, but the worst was yet to come.

My name is Seargeat Rodney Sickmann,

United States Marine Corps.

I like to give my love to my family.

Each day you were there, it wasn't getting better.

It was getting worse.

It was bad.

They could do whatever they wanted to with us at any time.

We were in a fairly large group in the basement

of the warehouse.

And I look up, and bam, door comes blasting open.

Two guys in military uniforms come in, rifles in your face--

up against the wall.

Put your hands against the wall.

And we could hear them doing this

all the way up and down the hallway,

where they had everybody.

And so they took us all into a room,

and they lined us up against the wall.

And then, all of a sudden, somebody yelled out a command,

and they started making noise, like they were

jacking rounds in the chamber.

And then it got real quiet, like they were waiting for a command

to fire.

I really thought I was really about to die.

But then they took us one at a time.

They strip-searched us, and they took

us and put us back in our room.

We were stripped our freedom, our dignity, and our pride.

The Iranian hostage crisis, it's a very definitive moment

in American history.

Now, the one bright spot in that moment

is that six State Department officers were able to get away,

and they took refuge in the Canadian embassy.

We knew, broadly speaking, what

was happening at the embassy.

We assumed the hostages were not being very well treated.

That was heart rending.

I mean, there are friends.

For us, it was mostly a matter of just

getting through the days.

At first, it was quite comfortable.

Most of us read books, or we played games, or slept a lot,

just going day by day.

But then as time went on, we became concerned.

The Iranians could start saying, there are some

people missing--

where are they-- and then, actually,

really go looking for them.

It could have been really dangerous.

In early January, we had been there almost two months,

and we began to realize that as more time went on,

there were bigger chances of us being found by accident

or somebody got sick or needed to go to the hospital,

and it just was inevitable that something would happen.

There was no movement on the hostages.

We can't stay here until they negotiate their release.

If the hostages hadn't been released,

we felt we could be a problem.

We started to realize that we couldn't just join up

with the other hostages when they

would be released because they would say, where have you been?

The Iranian students thought that everybody at

the American embassy was a spy.

They really did.

The fact that these six people were hiding

would only have confirmed their suspicions.

It just seemed like we were pushing our luck.

We had no choice.

We couldn't stay there.

We're leaving.

The only question is how?

There was no good way out.

Someone was going to have to come and get them.

And that's when CIA came into the picture.

Because one thing CIA is very good at is getting people out

of really sticky situations.

It came in a memo.

The State Department people, they sent a memo to the CIA,

saying we've got to try and figure out how to get them out.

And so Tony Mendez, who was put in charge of this operation,

he had to come up with an out-of-the-box solution.

Tony Mendez and his team in the Office of Technical

Services, that's what they do.

We're getting ready to do what we call an exfiltration.

We were running out of time.

And he came up with the idea, just kind of randomly,

and it was a ridiculously good idea.

[suspenseful music playing]

[chanting]

It was a wildly violent and dangerous time in Iran,

so the six American officials that

escaped, if any Iranians knew that they were there,

then we've got problems.

Every day was compounding the risk

of something stupid happening.

My husband, Tony Mendez, he had to try and figure

out how to get them out.

That was Tony's business.

I was working as a identity transformation specialist, which

is a bureaucratic way of saying, we made

disguises and false identities.

Tony was an artist, and he saw an ad in the paper

in Denver that said, wanted to work for the US government--

an artist.

Work at the CIA.

They were looking for a counterfeiter forger,

and he was in.

They hired him, then became chief of disguise.

It's all about magic and illusion, and it works.

The president of the United States,

he made the final decision.

I got a message from Washington that said the president

has approved your mission.

Good luck.

We were ready to roll.

[chanting]

There's a knock on the door.

I opened the door, and there's two guys

standing there in trench coats.

Tony Mendez and Ed Johnson, people whose expertise is to get

in and out of dangerous places.

And they said, OK, we've got some plans,

so we get you out of here.

And they told us three possible cover stories,

one that we were engineers.

Petroleum engineers, that's a field where

you need to know something.

And it would be easy for somebody

to realize that we didn't.

Two, we were teachers.

The International school was closed,

so being teachers looking for jobs didn't make sense.

These were unlikely to hold up to scrutiny.

And they came upon a really wild idea

that that wound up being the perfect idea.

The third was a Hollywood story.

We're going to go make a fake movie,

and they immediately discarded the teachers.

They discarded the other, and they said,

we like the Hollywood thing.

In their business, typically, you want to fly below the radar,

and they went completely the opposite way--

the story of Argo.

In the Academy Award-winning film Argo,

Ben Affleck plays the real-life CIA disguise expert Tony Mendez.

You can't afford to wait around until spring.

The only way out of that city is the airport.

Tony Mendez had been the chief of disguise for CIA,

so he had reached out to people in Hollywood.

He had a friend named John Chambers,

who actually won an Academy Award for Planet of the Apes.

And John was the one who told Tony, just

say you're part of a scouting location

crew for a Hollywood movie.

You'll be able to go anywhere.

You know those science fiction movies, Star Trek, Star Wars.

They need an exotic location to shoot--

moonscape, Mars, desert.

I fly into Tehran.

We all fly out together as a film crew.

And so that was the genesis of this exfiltration idea.

They were a film crew based in Canada,

and they were looking for a place to film.

This Scenario, I thought, was brilliant.

Who better than Hollywood people to show

up in the middle of a revolution and try to shoot a movie?

It was a compelling thought.

Everybody knows that people from Hollywood

are a little eccentric.

So the idea was set up a movie company

and come up with a movie that would make

sense to send a location crew to Tehran during this time period.

It's going to be a Middle Eastern sci-fi thriller.

Fade in on a starship landing, an exotic Middle Eastern vibe.

Women gather offering ecstatic libations to the sky gods--

.

They found a script.

They named it after a foul language, knock, knock joke

that we used to tell.

What does argo mean?

Argo was a short way of saying, oh, go [audio out] yourself.

It means oh, go [bleep] yourself.

We started putting together Studio 6 Productions.

The reason we called it Studio 6, by the way,

is because there were six people we were rescuing.

And so that was part of the fun is

to have that right up in front.

The Hollywood scenario came with all the trimmings.

He had a script.

We even had some drawings.

And there was somebody back in Hollywood

that would answer the phone if someone called to check on us.

For three days, we were given character

information-- where we were from,

background information to learn.

One of them is the cinematographer, one of them

is the director, one of them is the scriptwriter.

I was Terry Harris.

I was the writer in the group, so I had the script.

I was a location manager.

I have a business card.

Here it is, Studio 6.

My name there was Robert Baker, the location manager.

They're going to have to learn it and live it in order

to get through the airport.

And then off they went.

REPORTER: In Tehran, the Iranian parliament

met to discuss the hostage crisis

and demanded that the United States repent what they called

its crimes under the Shah.

The actions of Iran have shocked the civilized world.

Everybody now had a television in their living room,

and they tuned in to the hostage crisis every single night

and watched what was not going on because there was no change.

REPORTER: This was a week of frustration

for the families of the American hostages in Iran.

There were many signs that pointed

to a release of their loved ones, but by week's end,

they were still being held captive.

But then Khomeini decided that the really smart thing to do

would be to release the women and people of color,

and so they did--

13 people.

They actually told us we released these people so that--

in solidarity, with the poor, oppressed

peoples of the United States.

They, apparently, really thought that Americans would

say, oh, they're really good guys

and basically divide the American people

and get a lot of the American people on their side.

Of course, it didn't work that way at all.

They always told us in our interrogations, it's not you,

the American people, we hate, it's your government.

But we will use you to humiliate your government.

BARRY ROSEN: I was getting letters from Barbara.

I would like to send my love to my wife,

Barbara, and my two children, Alexander and Arianna.

The press literally parked outside of my parents' home

in Brooklyn.

They walked out, what's happening?

What's happening?

My son, as a three-year-old, how do

you deal with the uncertainty of not

knowing what's happening to--

to daddy?

Will he come home?

We didn't know what he was going through,

and that's something that we had to live with.

And that is hard.

We were brought to Evin Prison.

Automatic weapons were going off all the time.

It brought great, profound fear in our hearts.

I got to go outside once a month, on average.

But there were months--

there were two or three months when I didn't go outside at all.

Most of the time, we were just locked up inside.

They didn't give us any news.

They didn't want us knowing anything.

To my wife and my many children, I'm well and happy.

Communication was fairly limited.

You'd always be stuck in front of the television.

And sometimes, you get a glance where they had a picture of him.

It was very, very tough on my mom.

Here she is, her husband is being held.

What's going to happen with her life,

and what is she going to do?

I need my husband.

My children need their father.

[suspenseful music playing]

Their trip to the airport was still dark.

I think Tony wanted to do it early because people are

sluggish at 5:00 AM, and so it was a good time for us

to go through the formalities.

And then when we got to the airport,

the lights just seemed so bright.

We had not been in public for months at that point.

And we're supposed to look for Tony,

and he's over there at Swiss Air,

and he's smiling, which is the sign that we're good to go.

We had to deal with immigration, and that was the scary part.

You know, that was where, if this was going to fail,

that was what was going to be the cause.

The eight of us arrived at immigration,

put down our authentic-looking, phony document packages.

We had been told to destroy anything with our real names

on it.

The Canadian Parliament, they gave us

real passports for those folks with cover names.

The problem with brand new passports

is when you come into a country, your passport

gets stamped to show that you've entered the country.

But with these brand new passports, they don't have that.

So Tony and Ed put in the documentation

so that it will look like that they've

already been there all along.

It was more crowded in the waiting area

so that was a little bit scary, because a lot of people

had seen my face and Kathy and Joe's face

because we were all doing the visa interviews,

and we probably saw more Iranians than anybody else.

So I was worried about one of us being identified.

And they called our flight.

When they call your flight, you

go through the security check and into a smaller waiting room.

They announced that there was a mechanical problem,

and it would be three hours.

Of course, that was a panic because three hours

could turn into six hours.

There's always the realization that this thing

could fail, that some--

something could happen.

When they started making the ,

they're going to change some things.

In real-life, real CIA operations,

our hope is that it will be as boring as possible,

that there won't be any hiccups, that there won't be any

last-minute surprises, unlike the movie

in which there's gunmen chasing after them down the runway.

In fact, it was very anticlimactic at the airport.

They get on the plane, and they fly off to freedom.

It was a relief to get in the plane

and on a seat, the first step of the journey of actually leaving.

We were lucky.

That's all you can say.

Four American diplomats and wives of two of them

were spirited out of Iran over the weekend

by Canadian embassy officials.

They'd given the Americans secret refuge

since militants took over the US embassy last November.

I asked them to not-- never let on that CIA was involved

if it was a secret and to make sure

that everybody in the world knows that

this is a Canadian operation.

And therefore, the attention won't be turned on the Americans

in the embassy who were being held.

This dramatic escape is bound to refocus attention

on the hostage crisis.

And in this volatile climate, there is concern

about what happens next.

It was a scary time.

Everybody was frustrated that the negotiations,

what little there were, weren't going anywhere.

President Carter tried to negotiate.

He was so embedded to make sure that we all came home.

We have tried every possible and feasible

effort to resolve this crisis by humanitarian and peaceful means.

We are still continuing those efforts.

The first few days of April that I

had had a visit with a couple of people

from the State Department--

this was not an official State Department position,

but they came to me privately and said,

if we're ever going to take any action to do anything

about this, now is the time.

That was when everything went into motion.

US military personnel, together with the air crews,

embarked on an operation to prepare for a rescue of the US

citizens held hostage in Iran.

They went for eight helicopters.

And helicopters, as we know, are tricky creatures,

and three had developed a unfixable problem.

And they got to the landing site.

They called it off.

And then in the process of getting out of there

and flying home, they had a collision on the ground.

Eight people lost their lives, eight individuals,

who had the guts to try to come over to regain our freedom.

The Iranians didn't have a clue that any of this was going on,

and they didn't until Jimmy Carter went on the air

and told them about it.

I share the disappointment of the American people

that this rescue mission was not successful.

I also shared the grief.

He took this very, very personally.

The Iranians, they went into panic mode.

All the hostages were supposedly all in the compound

of the American embassy.

after the failed rescue attempt, we

were spread out around the country,

because they don't want the United States to find us.

Mr. President, seven months ago, this Sunday, the hostages

were seized in Iran.

Yes.

Is there any reason to hope that they

are any closer to being freed?

This may last a long time.

And you make artificial deadlines for yourself.

Maybe we'll be home by Christmas,

or maybe we'll be home by my birthday.

Maybe we'll be home in the summer.

And each one passed.

We would go, often, to the candlelight

vigils in front of the Iranian embassy on Mass Avenue.

Just holding a candle and singing songs.

And every Sunday night, we would say,

I hope I don't see you next week.

But week after week after week, we were there,

and they were still held.

The Iranians were restricting the amount of information

that we had.

But we found out, on November 5, that Ronald Reagan was elected.

Americans across the country voted in record numbers in some

states to make Ronald Reagan the 40th

president of the United States.

And that made the difference.

Carter was the personification of the Satan America in

the Iranian view of the Shah.

It was good that our presidential cycle occurred when

it did, because they could then not reward him with the release

of the hostages.

The Iranians came to us after the election

through the offices of the Algerians.

We started to set a negotiation.

And so Jimmy Carter, as a lame duck president,

actually negotiated one of the more complicated arrangements

that we've ever made.

My reaction was my bags are packed.

It was time to go.

REPORTER: Hostage.

If ever a word has burned itself into the American consciousness,

it is this.

For 14 months, the nation was obsessed

with the fate of the Americans held hostage in Iran.

Then, on Tuesday, day 444, they were hostages no longer.

It took 444 days, and it was only

a change of American president that enabled

the release of these hostages.

On the day that he was going to actually be turning the job

over to somebody else, Carter spent in the Oval Office,

dealing with the final stages of getting this thing done.

REPORTER: The Iranian news agency

is reporting that the departure of our 52 American hostages

is imminent.

I talked to Carter twice, when he was in the car with Reagan,

on the way up to the inauguration.

And I did get him the news that they were being released,

but they weren't out yet.

About 9 o'clock, we're sitting there.

Door opens-- come with me.

Everybody was blindfolded.

We were marched outside and put on buses.

You drive for, I don't know, 30 or so minutes,

and all of a sudden, it turns right,

and you hear a sound of a jet engine,

and my heart is pounding.

Took us off one at a time, down through the corridor,

with screaming people.

They're chanting death to America,

and they're spitting on us.

And I could see on the other end of this pathway, stairs

going up on the Algiers plane.

And by the time we got me halfway there,

I was dragging them along rather than pushing me.

We're boarding the back of this airplane.

Here you are, looking at people that you hadn't seen

since November 4th of 1979.

Everybody's saying hello and shaking hands and hugging.

The pilot comes on and says, please be seated.

We must take off very quickly, starts accelerating,

plane shaking, and all of a sudden,

it comes back down to an idle.

They turn the runway lights off.

I mean, the Iranians really wanted to stick it

to Jimmy Carter, and so they waited until the inauguration

before we were actually flown out.

They kept the lights off until he was out of office,

and President Reagan was in.

I, Ronald Reagan, do solemnly swear.

I, Ronald Reagan, do solemnly swear.

President Carter was officially out of office.

Reagan was sworn in, and they let us go.

We then knew that we were free.

And Joy was enormous-- just absolutely enormous.

We walked out of the house in Brooklyn,

and we just announced that it was over.

Well, the phone call just came, and now it is official.

REPORTER: Alex Rosen, in his mommy's arms,

and with sister Ari with him, made the announcement.

Daddy's coming home.

I said, tell everybody.

And he goes, daddy's coming home.

We arrived in s United States.

There were people holding up signs and thumbs up and high

five and the whole bit.

It was a surprise.

It was truly a very, very heartwarming.

I really meant a lot to us.

They were united in welcoming them home.

It was just unreal.

It's the best way I can put it, you know?

And when you're sitting there thinking about coming home

and dreaming about coming home, and it didn't match

what it was like to come home.

It's hard to express this sense of joy,

seeing Barbra, seeing those kids.

It was a mixture of tears and joy at the same time.

I was a stranger in many ways.

But to see those faces and the smiles, that was wonderful.

Coming home, it's a second chance in life.

I have Jo and three wonderful children.

I've gone fishing with my boys, my daughters,

walked them down the aisle.

I've held my grandkids.

My father was very happy.

That was a good time.

JOHN GRAVES (ON RECORDING): I had no idea that I would

spend 14 months as a hostage.

I never thought I would survive.

My father never talked a lot about what happened,

but you could see a big change in him.

He became a lot more closed in.

He did not handle crowds at all.

It was very different-- very different.

I'm just very appreciative that we were

able to get out of there alive.

There's a picture of me with my hands on my head

being led across the compound.

In front of the embassy building,

now, there's a bronze statue of me like that.

And it's not the embassy, it's the Museum of the Den of Spies.

After more than 14 months in captivity,

the 52 hostages returned to the United States

as homecoming heroes.

They were honored in a ticker tape parade in New York

and greeted by newly-sworn in President

Reagan at the White House.

But despite the hero's welcome, many

were left with both physical and psychological scars

from their unprecedented ordeal.

More than four decades later, in 2022, Congress

passed the Iran hostages Congressional Gold Medal

Act, recognizing their resilience

and sacrifice for our country.

I'm Jesse L. Martin.

Thanks for watching.

Good night.

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