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Welcome to Spycast, the official podcast of the International Spy Museum.

I'm your host, Sasha Inver, and each week I take you into the shadows of espionage, intelligence,

and covert operations across the globe.

Today, we'll go back in time to November 1979, when radical Iranian students

seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took dozens of Americans hostage. Six U.S. officials

managed to find refuge with Canadian embassy staff, and 11 weeks later, the CIA

led a daring operation to sneak them out of Iran, disguised as a Hollywood film crew. Mark and

Coralijic were two of those officials, and in 2008 they shared their story with the late Peter Ernest, the founding director

of the International Spy Museum.

So welcome to the program.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Could you give us just a sense of the atmospherics in those days, that little period leading up to

the actual takeover of the embassy?

I was in Tehran for about three months prior to the takeover. It was chaotic. The government

had basically collapsed. It was dangerous to, especially for Westerners,

to travel around the city and the evenings. As I learned shortly after my arrival, there were

roadblocks at night and diplomatic status did not mean anything to the comatais,

the revolutionary committees that manned these roadblocks.

On the plus side, there was a spree decor within the diplomatic community.

...