A couple of side stories... I was living Bonn, Germany in 1979 when the shit hit the fan in Iran. My father was working at the US Embassy and I was a senior at the American high school nearby. At that time, there were A LOT of Iranians living and working in Germany as guest workers there. They fucking lost their minds and several times tried to storm the embassy gates as German police had pitched battles with them. Water canons and tear gas. But the Germans didn't fuck around like we did in Tehran and let the zealots overrun the embassy. I personally knew (worked with) a couple of senior CIA officers that made it through and their stories would make your skin crawl.

Anyway, fast forward to 1990. I am a hotshot computer programmer at the CIA working in the office of Finance and we had this newfangled thing called a PC being shipped to stations around the world and the financial station in Bern, Switzerland needed some software installed to count their money on hand. I go out there for two weeks and soon after I get there the senior officer shows me this big walk in vault that is just loaded with cash. Bales of it the size of straw bales.. He tells me that this is both Dong from Vietnam and Rials from Iran that are worthless but because they are prohibited from destroying money, it was still sitting in this vault. This one guy had been through both crazy shit in Vietnam and then Iran like six years later because the CIA sometimes doesn't leave until after shit falls apart. Oh the stories he had...