Episode Details

Four hundred and forty-four days. Sixty-six hostages. A rescue mission that ended in fire and death in the Iranian desert. A secret arms deal that nearly brought down a presidency. And intelligence sharing that helped Iraq deploy chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers while Washington looked the other way.

The 1980s were the most operationally intense decade in the CIA's history with Iran — and the most morally incoherent. The United States was publicly tilting toward Iraq while secretly selling missiles to Tehran. It was condemning terrorism while funding covert operations through channels no congressional committee had approved. It was expressing regret over two hundred and ninety civilians shot out of the sky while refusing to apologise.

This episode covers it all — the hostage crisis and Carter's impossible position, the catastrophic failure of Operation Eagle Claw in the Iranian desert, the October Surprise allegations that have never been fully resolved, the Iran-Contra affair and the CIA's central role in it, the chemical weapons intelligence shared with Saddam Hussein, the Beirut barracks bombing, and the shootdown of Iran Air Flight 655.

It also asks what was lost in the process — and why, by the end of the decade, the space for any kind of pragmatic diplomacy between Washington and Tehran had been compressed almost to nothing.

Epic Fury is a daily narrative podcast covering the US-Iran conflict of 2026. This five-part bonus series traces the CIA's history with Iran from the 1953 coup to the bombs falling today.