Believers: Love and Death in Tehran An Excerpt
BY JOHN LIMBERT AND MARC GROSSMAN
Background
Believers: Love and Death in Tehran (Mazda Publishers, 2020), written by Ambassadors (ret.) Marc Grossman and John Limbert, both AFSA members, is a work of fiction set in Iran and Washington, D.C., during the 1980s and the present. The hero is the fictional FSO Nilufar Hartman, daughter of an Iranian mother and an American father. With the liberty of novelists, the authors have imagined her in scenes both historical and fictional with people real and invented. The following adapted excerpt, set in late 1980 and early 1981, ends with the release of 52 American hostages on Jan. 20, 1981, just a few minutes after Ronald Reagan took his presidential oath of office.
But the alliance did not last.
Here s What You Need to Remember: Saddam’s defeat in 1991, coupled with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, brought an end to the clandestine Israel-Iran alliance. Tehran increasingly leaned on its support for anti-Israeli groups to win influence and alliances in the Arab world, while Israel now understood Iran to be the most likely hostile state in the region to acquire nuclear weapons.
At dawn on September 30, 1980 four American-made F-4E Phantom jets screamed low over central Iraq, each laden with air-to-air missiles and three thousand pounds of bombs.
Prior to entering Iraqi airspace they had rendezvoused for aerial refueling with a Boeing 707 tanker escorted by two more advanced F-14 Tomcat fighters the type immortalized six years later in the film Top Gun. And to complete the eighties action-movie vibe, they were embarked on a mission codenamed ‘Operation Scorched Sword.’
Outside America, the F-5 Lives on as a Formidable Foreign Fighter
The F-5’s blend of impressive price-to-performance, low maintenance costs, and sufficiently adequate capabilities as a light ground-attack fighter has shown itself to be a winning export formula to the present day.
Here s What You Need to Remember: The F-5 still sees limited use throughout the US air force as a cheap adversary trainer. More impressively, F-5 continues to serve in several militaries across the world: notably, the Republic of Korea Air Force (ROKAF) roster still contains just under 200 hundred advanced F-5 variants that have yet to be phased out.
5 Weapons Russia and America Would Have Used in a Cold War Turned Hot
Weapons were made more lethal to give each side an edge in what might very well have been the last war humanity would ever fight.
Here s What You Need to Remember: Not one but many arms races pursued concurrently, from infantry small arms to nuclear weapons.
The Chieftain was an evolution of the Centurion tank, which had appeared at the end of World War II. Chieftain had considerably better armor than the Centurion and an improved engine. What really stood the tank apart from its contemporaries, however, was the 120mm main gun. The L11A5 rifled gun was much larger and more powerful than the 105mm gun equipping American M60 tanks and 115mm gun equipping Soviet T-62 tanks.