Top official in Iranian hostage crisis dies

Bruce Laingen, the highest-ranking American official held in Iran during the 444-daylong hostage ordeal that began in November 1979, has died. He was 96.

His son Chip told The Associated Press that his father died Monday due to complications of Parkinson’s disease.

Laingen had been in Iran less than five months when militant students stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking more than 60 hostages, mostly diplomats and staff members.

A few hostages were released. But most, including Laingen, were held for more than a year before being released Jan. 20, 1981, the day Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as president. It was a period of high tension that included a failed rescue attempt that left eight American servicemen dead.

Laingen heard the embassy was under siege just as he was leaving a meeting at the Foreign Ministry.

“It was clear at that point that I could not ever have gotten there physically,” he told The New York Times. But he exerted what authority he could by phone and radio, ordering that no guns be fired at Iranians and that the staff begin destroying classified documents.

Lowell Bruce Laingen was born Aug. 6, 1922, in Odin Township, Minnesota. His was a farm family, but he took a different career path.

“I am often asked why I joined the Foreign Service,” he said in 1992 for the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. “We couldn’t all be farmers. I had some brothers, and I began to look beyond that.

“I am part of that generation that when they made a decision to join the Foreign Service, that was it,” he said. “It was a lifetime commitment. It didn’t enter our minds that we would consider anything else.”