Since the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlevi, 11 months earlier, embassy staff had grown used to coping with the revolution. They had survived the Valentine's Day 1979 seizure of the embassy by more than 100 Iranian leftists, with many miraculously escaping certain execution by hiding in the embassy safes. (Afterward, the State Department gave Rosen its Award for Valor for negotiating in Farsi with the captors until the embassy was rescued by the army of Ayatollah Khomeini.)

So when, on November 4, demonstrators began to gather outside the embassy compound, shouting "God is great! Long live Khomeini!" Rosen continued working until "their noise grew more clamorous than usual." From his office window, Rosen watched a small crowd of young men and women-photos of Khomeini pinned to their chests-increase in minutes to about 500. Armed with clubs, pistols, pipes, and a bolt cutter, a few young men clambered over the fence, cut a chain, and flung the gates open. Rosen watched as the demonstrators "poured in like a flood of frenzy." Within minutes, embassy security was fully breached.

"There goes Iran," Rosen recalls thinking, somewhat ruefully. "I bet we close the embassy by tomorrow."

The embassy not only ceased operations, but then hosted a crisis that lasted for 444 days, with 130-plus militant Iranian students holding 52 American diplomats and servicemen captive. Images from the crisis are embedded in America's psyche: Angry mobs holding portraits of Khomeini high, chanting, "Death to America!" The young hostage-takers, with guns and bayonets. Helpless hostages standing silent before the video camera, blindfolded and bound, or staring blankly and stammering assurances to their families.

Eventually, the hostages were released, on January 20, 1981, just minutes after President Ronald Reagan's inauguration. Twenty-five years later, the ordeal has entered American history as the first in an ongoing series of radical Islamic-sponsored terrorist acts committed against the United States. It's probably safe to say that U.S.-Iran relations never fully recovered from the crisis. Certainly, Barry Rosen himself has not.

"It was the most dehumanizing experience I ever could have lived through," he says.

Now a Columbia University administrator, Rosen remains deeply concerned about Iran's impact on international security, and has become a leading activist on behalf of the 42 former hostages still alive. He has worked for the passage of two bills before Congress: HR 3358, which seeks financial compensation from Iran for the hostage-taking; and HR 282, the Iran Freedom Support Act, which advocates the use of strong economic sanctions against Iran and multinational corporations that do business with Iran, with the goal of forcing the country to curtail development of its nuclear program.

Rosen has met with a former hostage-taker, seeking reconciliation. He has protested a visit to the United Nations by current Iranian leadership.

And, significantly, Rosen's career in education has taken him not back to Iran, but to another, nearby Islamic state, Afghanistan, where he heads an effort to redevelop elementary-school curriculum in the wake of that nation's liberation from the Taliban. Through all this, he has emerged as a student of Middle Eastern politics whose perspective is, if nothing else, very personal.

"I just can't sit on the sidelines right now," he says. "I feel that I ought to speak out about Iran and to join the protest against the regime."

arry Rosen first entered Iran in May 1967-just three months after graduating from Maxwell-as a Peace Corps volunteer, viewing Iran as the perfect setting for his "first time out of the United States as a young man." (He was 23.) For two years, Rosen taught English at the National Police Academy during winters and worked in northern Iran kindergartens in summer. By studying Iranian literature and cultivating friendships with Iranians, including Sufi mystics, Rosen quickly became fluent in Farsi. "The idea of learning a new language-of living in a culture that you're totally immersed in-gave me the opportunity to stretch myself a lot and get out of what was in many ways a parochial existence," he says. "It was seminal."

Rosen loved Iran enough to find a way back there after his Peace Corps tour. In 1969, he entered Columbia University's Iranian and Central Asian Studies program, earning a master's and pursuing a doctorate. He worked in Uzbekistan for Voice of America. Then, in 1978, he joined the State Department in Tehran, welcoming the chance to indulge his "intoxicating nostalgia" for Iran. Once back in Iran, however, he noticed "warning signs" of the crisis to come. Iran seemed like "a new country" with "total chaos everywhere and martial law," rather than the place in which he had spent "the best years of [his] youth." Although Rosen's home was ransacked, he still felt somehow safe. "I stupidly thought, 'I know these people and these people know me. I can't get hurt because I can talk my way out of things,'" he recalls. He remained focused on his assignment: to "figure out how we could secure any relationship with the new Islamic Republic of Iran, with Khomeini."

But when the Shah was admitted to a New York hospital for cancer treatment in October 1979, "That was the death knell for us," says Rosen. "I don't think the White House understood how precarious a situation it was. . . . They should have evacuated us." The hostage crisis began less than a month later. Americans in the embassy were accused of being spies, working to undermine the Islamist regime.

As the embassy's liaison with the Iranian press, Rosen was suspected of spying and was subjected to a mock trial. "I was interrogated with AK-47s pointed at my head. They were counting to 10 and telling me if I didn't sign this [confession] of spying I would be shot dead," he recalls. "That is one of the most horrendous scenes one could possibly go through in life." During their 15-month captivity, the hostages were beaten, interrogated, blindfolded, and tied hand and foot, day and night. Several times they were roused from their cells and told they were about to be executed. Rosen spent periods in solitary confinement beneath an always-burning light bulb; other times, he shared cells with one to three other hostages, to whom he was forbidden to speak.

To keep sane, Rosen and his cellmates communicated with other hostage cells by tapping on walls and scratching messages into soap bars left in the shower. Rosen distracted himself from his plight by redirecting lines of red ants, drawing cartoons for his son back home, rereading the boating section of a newspaper sent to a fellow hostage and imagining sailing Chesapeake Bay, singeing orange peels on the heater to make marmalade, and playing whispered games of Monopoly with his cellmates.

His wife Barbara, a Brooklyn schoolteacher-turned-housewife, suddenly found herself a media celebrity. Rosen's son Alexander, age three when the crisis began, ran from the room whenever his father's face appeared on TV. His daughter Ariana, who was one in 1979, included "Khomeini" among her first words, and feared her father as a stranger for months after his return home. To "make [them]selves whole again," Rosen and his wife undertook co-authorship of their memoir, The Destined Hour: The Hostage Crisis and One Family's Ordeal (Doubleday, 1982).

ven after his ordeal, Rosen hoped to return to the foreign service or Voice of America. His family, though, wanted him home, and he decided to respect their wishes. "I'd already done too many things for myself," he commented in a Peace Corps online newsletter. He accepted a position as assistant to the president at Brooklyn College, teaching core courses on Iran and the Iranian Revolution. Since 1995 he has worked for Columbia University Teachers College as executive director of external affairs. He was drawn by the school's history of international education.

Until 1998, Rosen believed U.S. relations with Iran could be restored. He was even willing to travel to Iran with other former hostages to hold talks with Iranian leaders. Now, however, he believes "there is no way to work with Iran or to have relations or to discuss anything with them. I don't think any administration we have can break through that wall."

When asked by several human rights groups in 1998 to reconcile with the hostage-takers' leader, Abbas Abdi, at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, Rosen agreed. The two spent several days together, eating, taking walks, and speaking in Farsi.

"We got on very well, which was very, very weird," Rosen recalls. "Abbas had gone through a lot in Iran, and was turning out to be a reformer. He was going against the regime. He still believed there could be a democratic Islamist state."

Both Abdi and Rosen spoke publicly after their meeting. Rosen's speech was "an attempt at conciliation," advocating an apology from the Iranian government that would lead to "a resolution of the differences between both countries." Abdi, though, continued to defend the hostage-taking as a necessary reaction to American support of the Shah.

Although Abdi had apologized privately for taking Rosen and the others hostage-Rosen describes Abdi as "contrite"-the public comments rankled. "I did say this to him: 'Many, many innocent Iranians were put in jail because of you and tortured and killed, and you have to live with that the rest of your life,'" Rosen recalls. Abdi returned to Iran in 1998, incidentally, and when, in 2002, he conducted a poll revealing that most Iranians favor closer ties with the U.S., he was imprisoned. He was released last year.

Rosen does not believe the U.S. bears direct or sole responsibility for offenses of the Shah. "Iranian history is replete with torture and maiming and murder," he says, "and they don't have to learn that from the United States. If indeed the C.I.A. did train SAVAK [Iran's internal security agency], shame on us. But believe me, there were many Americans who went over there and worked in many different ways to help Iran."

More recently, Rosen has been vocal about the identity of Iran's current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whom several former hostages have identified as the lead interrogator during their captivity. In September, Rosen led a vigil, with several other hostages and activists, in front of Tehran's New York City mission to the United Nations, denouncing Ahmadinejad's visit there. (The other Maxwell graduate who had been a hostage, Bert C. Moore '72 M.P.A., was represented at the vigil by his son Bob. The elder Moore was a foreign service officer and, at the time of the hostage-taking, the embassy's administrative counselor. It was he who officially recorded the embassy's surrender. Having lived most of his life in Ohio, Moore died in Florida in 2000 at age 65.)

Ahmadinejad, who has denied taking part in the hostage-taking, addressed the General Assembly that day, despite a State Department finding that he is a "terrorist" and therefore ineligible for a visa. Then, in October, Ahmadinejad made his infamous remark-at a Tehran conference called "The World without Zionism"-that Israel should be "wiped off the map." This only validated Rosen's opinion of Ahmadinejad as a trouble-maker.

"His remarks are part of a half-baked political ideology that has hardly matured from his days as a young militant raging against the United States and Israel for all of Iran's problems," says Rosen. "He is acting as the "face" of Iran, and most of the world community has denounced him. Even the Arab world has said nothing. They are too embarrassed."

Although Ahmadinejad's "populism" may ultimately cost him power in Iran and make it difficult internationally for Iran to advocate for nuclear capability, says Rosen, "anything could happen under extreme conditions in Iran." In the meantime, he sees signs that the U.S. is no longer taking its "dose of naïveté where Iran is concerned. As Iran moves closer to resuming nuclear activities, support builds in Congress for the use of sanctions, says Rosen, and the 1979-81 hostage crisis has been recognized publicly by President Bush as the first incident in a series of terrorist acts against the United States.

n 2003, Barry Rosen took on a new challenge for Columbia University-one that helps satisfy his longing for the Middle East. He now works in Afghanistan as the director of Teachers College's Afghanistan Education Project, supervising teacher training and textbook production. For 25 years, Teachers College had run a similar program in Afghanistan, but it ended in 1978, when the country ceased relations with the United States. After the Taliban was overthrown in 2001, however, Teachers College returned, with Rosen at the helm. "I was determined that I would initiate the project because of my feelings toward Dari- and Farsi-speaking people and our desire to make a dent in the destroyed Afghan educational infrastructure," he recalls.

Rosen estimates that, of the 140,000 teachers in Afghanistan, only 30,000 actually have teaching credentials. "It's a struggle for many of them to teach because many of them are not very literate either." He is proud of the work Columbia is doing, such as helping to implement a modern teaching methodology "that tries to elicit critical thinking from Afghan children," he says, without anti-Western bias. The new textbooks are the first in Afghanistan to feature color illustrations integrated with text, which facilitate child-centered classroom discussion.

Although Rosen's now-grown children and in-laws objected to his working in Afghanistan, he says his wife supports him because she understands that Afghanistan is the closest he can get to his beloved Iran. He admits a "desire to come back to the region and have contact with people whom I can speak to and a culture that I know." Says Rosen, "For me, it became a very personal matter. We decided that [the project] would be great for the college and great for Afghanistan, and I said I would like to give it a shot, whatever happens."

His acceptance of these risks echoes his insistence that "there was nothing heroic" about his Peace Corps and hostage experiences in Iran. "It was a choice I made," he says. ". . . I absolutely feel it was the right choice for me."