Mark Bowden never aspired to writing military history. That may be why he's so good at it. The author of two bestselling books about U.S. special ops missions—1999's National Book Award finalist Black Hawk Down and 2001's Killing Pablo—Bowden spent decades as a reporter before publishing his first book, Doctor Dealer, in 1987.
As a journalist his defining trait was curiosity. "I was never interested in specializing in anything," he tells me over dinner in a Baltimore restaurant. What he liked to do was pick an incident he didn't understand and study it until he had something to say. In his new book, Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam, that incident is the 1979 invasion of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, which led to a 444-day hostage crisis, the first Delta Force mission and the undoing of the Carter administration. Writing the book, Bowden mixed his newspaperman's skills—interviewing dozens of people, including Delta Force members, State Department staffers, hostages and hostage-takers—with his gift for novel-like narrative. The resulting story is not only suspenseful but revelatory as well. It explains, for example, why Carter's seeming passivity was actually grounded in good policy (it concealed top-secret military and diplomatic operations).
The book also offers some discomfiting parallels to today's ongoing uranium face-off with Iran. First, although Bowden withholds judgment on the issue, many ex-hostages believe that Iran's current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was among the students who raided the embassy. Second, Iran's flouting of diplomatic manners looked like political suicide back then, but Bowden argues that it was actually a canny internal move.
"The embassy takeover helped the mullahs overcome secular nationalists," he explains. When the shah of Iran, the country's last hereditary ruler, was deposed in 1979, Iran turned into a political free-for-all. Fundamentalists vied with moderates and nationalists for control of the country's future. Once crowds thronged the embassy in support of the Islamist students, however, the moderates didn't stand a chance—they were easily dismissed as puppets of "the Great Satan." Shortly after the takeover, Iran's democratic provisional government collapsed. Mullahs in the mold of Ayatollah Khomeini have held the real power ever since.
It's no coincidence, says Bowden, that Iran's current nuclear research scandal comes a few years after its students agitated for democratic reform. "The pendulum has swung back to the hard-line us-against-the-world vision that served them so well in 1979," he says. "And it seems to be serving them well again today. From what I can tell, the [nuclear] program has tremendous internal support.
"Iran thrives on the disapproval of the rest of the world," Bowden explains. "When they come into conflict, it's almost reassuring. It restokes the fires of the revolution."
No Dumb Kid
Work hard, move up—that was the moral of Bowden's adolescence. One of eight children, he was born in Missouri in 1951. The family moved from St. Louis to Chicago to Long Island to Baltimore, and Bowden switched schools every year from sixth through the 10th grades. At each new location, he'd be placed in the "dumb kids" class, he recalls. Then, halfway through the year, he'd be shifted to one full of the college-bound.
Comic books were Bowden's favorite reading in those days, but after he entered Loyola College of Maryland in 1969, he transferred his affection to New Journalism, studying Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese with the same fervor he had once applied to Superman and the Green Lantern. After college, he took a job as a reporter with the Baltimore News-American, a place he later called "a backwater in the unimpressive Hearst newspaper chain." It took him six years to jump from there to the Philadelphia Inquirer.
"That was the most significant career move of my life," Bowden says. "It was the destination for anyone in newspaper journalism who wanted to write creatively." Legendary executive editor Gene Roberts was at the helm then, and during his 18-year tenure the Inquirer won 17 Pulitzer Prizes. Among the first assignments he gave Bowden: go to Africa and research the near-extinction of the black rhinoceros.
Three of Bowden's books—Black Hawk Down, Killing Pablo and Finders Keepers (2002)—began as articles at the Inquirer. The paper also gave him time off to write two other books: one about Ivy League drug dealer Larry Lavin (Doctor Dealer) and another about the Philadelphia Eagles (Bringing the Heat, 1994).
"For me, the goal was always to become a better writer," Bowden wrote in Road Work, his collection of miscellaneous articles. "My instincts drove me to work on ever-bigger, longer, more complex stories. I was evolving from a newspaper reporter into a magazine writer and author, and the Inquirerlet me do it." He left the paper only when the Atlantic offered to make him one of its five national correspondents.
Family Comes First
About halfway through dinner, Bowden pulls back the sleeves of his black sweater and shows me the fine, scabbed-over scratches on his arms. They are a part of a deal he struck with his wife, Gail, when they bought their 14-acre horse farm in lower Pennsylvania.
"Gail said, if we buy this place you have to promise to help," he recalls. So all last summer and fall, while he was writing Guests of the Ayatollah, he cleared brush, mowed pastures and repaired fences. And now, in the spring, a few weeks before his book tour, he's been yanking out underbrush to make riding trails through the woods.
Once you've talked to him for a couple of hours, it's easy to picture Bowden doing such chores. Though he's built like a prizefighter, and though his most famous books are littered with machine guns, he is, at heart, a family man. Even his books have a deep connection to his childhood.
"Someone pointed out to me that all I ever wrote about was men," Bowden says. "I realized it was true, but it actually went deeper than that. All the books I'd written were about fraternities, and I grew up in a fraternity. I literally slept in a room with one brother on top of me and one brother below me. We had triple bunk beds."
Bowden, whose father, a career concrete salesman, died in 1992, remains close to his mother and his seven siblings. In fact, the reason his mother joins our interview is because they eat dinner together every Monday night. And his latest project has become somewhat of a family affair: his cousins David and Arcadia Keane filmed Guests of the Ayatollah's four-hour companion documentary, which will air on the Discovery Times Channel on June 26, and Bowden's son Aaron wrote the script.
Even Oprah Winfrey can't interfere with Bowden's commitment to family. Sometime around 1999, Bowden turned down an offer to appear on Oprah because, after months of touring for Black Hawk Down, he'd promised his wife that he was coming home. His decision, at 55, to make his next book a novel about the Paxton Boys, a group of 18th-century Pennsylvania vigilantes, is also related to Gail.
"Over the next 20 years my passion for travel is going to wane," Bowden explains. "My children are growing and going, and Gail will be alone if I go away, and I don't want to leave her home alone." He wants to be able to write books that don't take years of research and don't require travel to dangerous nations. Ten years from now, he says, he'd like to be able to decide, "Okay, I'm just going to stay home and write novels." That might seem an unlikely scenario for a man whose childhood took him to four different states and whose writing career has taken him all over the world. But then again, for most authors, turning down Oprah to go home to your wife doesn't sound that likely either.
