Word: compounding
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...President had joined last week with about 2,000 others in an ecumenical prayer service for 62 American hostages held under threat of death at the captured U.S. embassy compound in Tehran. At his right sat Penny Laingen, wife of L. Bruce Laingen, the imprisoned chargé d'affaires in Tehran. On his left sat Vice President Walter Mondale and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, whose tireless efforts through a fortnight of nerve-racking negotiations had achieved as little as those of the President himself...
...promise to release some of the hostages, the Iranians dawdled through the weekend and by early Monday Iran time, nearly 40 hours after the first announcement, not a single American had been freed. Instead, the students staged a circus act in the embassy compound, trotting out three of the captives who were
...compound was completely in the hands of the students, who now numbered about 600. Soon afterward the group, which called itself the "Muslim Students of the Imam Khomeini Line," issued "Communique No. 1." It announced that the occupation of "this nest of intrigue" was a protest against "the U.S. offer of asylum to this criminal Shah who was responsible for the deaths of thousands of Iranians." By Monday the streets outside the embassy were jammed with thousands of people. Perhaps the lightest moment in a generally grim day was the arrival of Khomeini's only surviving son, Seyyed Ahmed Khomeini...
...fact, through most of last week, U.S. officials were not even sure exactly where all the hostages were, although it was assumed that they were inside the sprawling, 27-acre embassy compound. Because Washington had no direct communication with the embassy, U.S. knowledge of the situation in Iran depended mostly on secondhand information, relayed by other diplomatic missions in Tehran or monitored from Iranian radio broadcasts. There thus was the chilling possibility that a daring rescue operation, after enormous risk, might reach the embassy only to find it empty...
This was a key argument against dropping paratroopers into the compound...