He first went to Iran in 1962 to visit his parents, who were there working for USAID, two of the thousands of Americans in the country helping the Shah achieve his modernization plans. He came back in 1964 as a Peace Corps volunteer and later in the decade as an English instructor at Shiraz’s much-lauded Pahlavi University, which was being built up in partnership with the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania.
Ironically, one of the students who would get his degree from the university was Ebtekar’s father, leading her to partially grow up in suburban Pennsylvania, evident in her smooth English — which gave her a role in and made her the face of hostage-takers to the world. In 1979, Limbert had been in the country for only a couple of months when Ebtekar and her comrades launched their hostage-taking operation.
