The 1979 U.S. Embassy takeover in Tehran may have ended after 444 days, but both America and Iran still remain captive to a crisis that began 40 years ago.
While those held hostage at the embassy ultimately would be released, Iran to this day holds dual nationals and those with Western ties as bargaining chips for negotiating deals. Cries of “Death of America” still echo through hard-line rallies as Iran’s supreme leader criticizes the untrustworthiness of the “Great Satan” over President Donald Trump unilaterally pulling the U.S. out of the 2015 nuclear deal.
That mutual suspicion has reached a level unseen since the hostage crisis — and perhaps in some ways has gone beyond it.
How did the U.S. and Iran get here? A direct line can be drawn back to the American miscalculations before, during and after the Islamic Revolution.
By January 1979, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi would flee Iran while suffering from a fatal illness the U.S. knew nothing about. The Islamic Revolution would take hold in the next month, which also would see Marxist students overrun the embassy in Tehran and briefly hold it.
The U.S. in part realized the danger its diplomats, employees, military advisers and spies faced. The U.S. presence in Iran dropped from over 1,400 civilian and military personnel to about 70 by the time of the Nov. 4, 1979, embassy takeover.
However, the President Jimmy Carter administration sought to establish a relationship with Iran’s revolutionary government. There had been billions of dollars in arms sales to the shah, including advanced F-14 Tomcat jet fighters that required American support. The U.S. also wanted to maintain access to its secret listening posts in Iran to monitor signals and missile tests in the Soviet Union. America long had seen the shah as a bulwark in the Persian Gulf against Soviet expansion. Soviet forces would invade Afghanistan amid the hostage crisis, leading to the Carter Doctrine — that the U.S. would use military force to defend its interests across the energy-rich region.
All this blinded Washington to warnings from Tehran. When Carter allowed the shah into New York for medical treatment Oct. 23, he lit the fuse for the Islamist student takeover. A protest Nov. 1 saw the embassy protected.
That wasn’t the case Nov. 4, both the 15th anniversary of the shah expelling Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini from Iran and of a bloody attack by security forces on students the year before. Police faded into the background as hundreds of students jumped the fence and took over the embassy in 3 1/2 hours.
But the students themselves would date their anger back further to the 1953 coup that overthrew Iran’s elected prime minister and cemented the shah’s power, a putsch organized by the CIA and British spies.
