Bregg photographs on exhibit at NPC transport viewers to Iranian hostage crisis

Canadian Photojournalist Peter Bregg was there when 52 Americans, held hostage in Iran for more than two years, stepped off a plane in Algeria, en route to freedom.

"Nothing had the juices flowing like those moments," Bregg said Friday at the opening of his National Press Club exhibit. "I had goose bumps."

Bregg's photographs transported NPC members and guests back 30 years when the nation was transfixed by the fate of the 52 hostages held captive in the U.S. Embassy from Nov. 4, 1979 to Jan. 20, 1981.

Soon after Iranians seized the U.S. embassy, the Iranian government expelled all American and British journalists from the country, Bregg said. Canadian journalists were allowed to stay. Bregg's photos for the Canadian Press news agency raced around the world.

For a while, he said, the U.S. owned Associated Press in London transmitted the photos with an AP logo to newspapers in Iran. Bregg, fearing expulsion or retaliation, asked the AP to stop. "We had a secret word in Canada for the AP ('the Calgary Herald'), in case they were tapping our phones," he said. "But I'm not sure they were."

When the government learned the Canadian embassy had harbored six Americans and helped them escape it was livid. At a press conference with Bregg and a colleague present, the Iranian foreign minister, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, said "Canada will pay." Bregg said it was a tense moment for the two of them: "We were the only Canadians in the room. We didn't know what might happen"

After President Jimmy Carter's failed helicopter rescue effort, "Operation Eagle Claw," on April 24, 1980, Four members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard took over the rented home where Bregg and others stayed.

"We were blindfolded and taken to another location," he said. "I tried to count the seconds it would take to get to different roads and turns."

They were freed unharmed but had to find new lodging.

Bregg was in Algeria when the hostages, freed just after President Ronald Reagan's Inauguration, stopped there en route to the U.S. Army Base in Weisbaden, Germany heading home.

An award-winning photographer, Bregg has taken his camera to 75 countries. He has covered eight Olympic games and other major sports events, Presidential trips and the 911/2001 terrorist attacks in New York City. He also teaches photojournalism to journalism students in Toronto.

-- Robert Webb, [email protected]