She also outlines, in considerable detail, how one faction of the Shi'a clerical establishment came to see (with the eager complicity of the international media and its own pro-Western political agenda) these students as a vanguard of its own theocratic goals, rather than of the much broader cultural upheaval which had ousted the the regime of Shah Mohammad-Reza Pahlevi, installed through a US-sponsored coup in 1953.

In February, 2000, a month before US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's admission of active CIA involvement in the 1953 coup, Iranians flocked to the polls to elect the Islamic Republic's sixth parliament: 70% of the candidates elected are self-proclaimed "reformers". Among them are several of the former students who seized and occupied the American Embassy in November, 1979. These reformers, followers of President Mohammad Khatami -- himself a Shi'a clergyman -- are now attempting to pry open the vise-grip of the conservative religious faction on Iranian politics since 1979, and to establish a civil society within an Islamic framework.