University alumnus Victor Tomseth delivered a lecture about the Middle East to a small crowd of students and community members at the Adelaide Church Memorial Reading Room at the Knight Library on Monday. Tomseth, a former diplomat to a half dozen countries, was one of 52 Americans held hostage when the U.S. embassy in Iran was overrun in 1979.
The peaceful talk, entitled “What Went Wrong? The Road to Baghdad” was in stark contrast to a lecture Tomseth delivered to a crowd of more than 1,500 students Feb. 9, 1981, at the EMU Ballroom, when the diplomat denied student allegations that he was a CIA spy.
“If you think the CIA ‘sucks,’ you’re not talking about me,” he was quoted as saying to one detractor in a Feb. 10, 1981, Emerald article.
At the 1981 talk, two students from the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade burned a yellow cloth during the reception and bolted from the ballroom before they were arrested by police.
Although the community at the time hailed the alumnus and 1959 Springfield High School graduate as a hometown hero, Monday’s event at the library drew only 30 to 50 people.

— Brook Reinhard