The Iran hostage crisis was a diplomatic crisis between Iran and the United States where 53 Americans were held hostage for 444 days from November 4, 1979 to January 20, 1981, after a group of Islamist students and militants took over the American Embassy in support of the Iranian Revolution.
The episode reached a climax when, after failed attempts to negotiate a release, the United States military attempted a rescue operation, Operation Eagle Claw, on April 24, 1980, which resulted in a failed mission, the destruction of two aircraft and the deaths of eight American servicemen and one Iranian civilian. It ended with the signing of the Algiers Accords in Algeria on January 19, 1981. The hostages were formally released into United States custody the following day, just minutes after the new American president Ronald Reagan was sworn in.
The crisis has been described as an entanglement of "vengeance and mutual incomprehension". In Iran, despite freezing of all Iranian assets held in the United States (Executive Order 12170), the hostage taking was widely seen as a blow against the U.S, and its influence in Iran, its perceived attempts to undermine the Iranian Revolution, and its long-standing support of the recently overthrown government of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The Shah had been restored to power in a 1953 coup against a democratically-elected nationalist Iranian government organized by the CIA at the American Embassy and had recently been allowed into the United States for medical treatment. In the United States, the hostage-taking was seen as an outrage violating a centuries-old principle of international law granting diplomats immunity from arrest and diplomatic compounds sovereignty in their embassies.
The crisis has also been described as the "pivotal episode" in the history of Iran – United States relations. In the U.S., some political analysts believe the crisis was a major reason for U.S. President Jimmy Carter's defeat in the November 1980 presidential election. In Iran, the crisis strengthened the prestige of the Ayatollah Khomeini and the political power of those who supported theocracy and opposed any normalization of relations with the West. The crisis also marked the beginning of U.S. legal action, or economic sanctions against Iran, that further weakened economic ties between Iran and the United States.
Background
1953 coup
Further information: Operation Ajax and Iranian RevolutionIn February 1979, less than a year before the hostage crisis, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, had been overthrown in a revolution. For several decades before that, the United States had been an ally and backer of the Shah. During World War II, Allied powers Britain and the Soviet Union occupied Iran and required Reza Shah the existing Shan of Iran to abdicate in favor of his son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The invasion was allegedly in fear that Reza Shah was about to align his petroleum-rich country with Nazi Germany during the war: However, Reza Shah's earlier Declaration of Neutrality and refusal to allow Iranian territory to be used to train, supply, and act as a transport corridor to ship arms to Russia for its war effort against Germany, was the strongest motive for the allied invasion of Iran. Because of its importance in the allied victory, Iran was subsequently called "The Bridge of Victory" by Winston Churchill.
By the 1950's, the Shah was engaged in a power struggle with Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq, an immediate descendant of the previous monarchy, the Qajar dynasty. In 1953, the British and U.S. spy agencies deposed the democratically-elected government of Mossadegh in a military coup d'état codenamed Operation Ajax, and restored the Shah as an absolute monarch. The anti-democratic coup d’état was a "a critical event in post-war world history" that replaced Iran’s post-monarchic, native, and secular parliamentary democracy with a dictatorship. US support and funding continued after the coup, with the CIA training the government's secret police, SAVAK. In subsequent decades this foreign intervention, along with other economic, cultural and political issues, united opposition against the Shah and led to his overthrow.
Carter administration
Shortly before the revolution on New Year's Day 1979, American president Jimmy Carter further angered anti-Shah Iranians with a televised toast to the Shah, declaring how beloved the Shah was by his people. After the revolution in February, the embassy had been occupied and staff held hostage briefly. Rocks and bullets had broken enough of the embassy front-facing windows for them to be replaced with bullet-proof glass. Its staff was reduced to just over 60 from a high of nearly 1000 earlier in the decade.
The Carter administration attempted to mitigate the anti-American feeling by finding a new relationship with the de facto Iranian government and by continuing military cooperation in hopes that the situation would stabilize. However, on October 22, 1979 the U.S. permitted the Shah - who was ill with cancer - to attend the Mayo Clinic for medical treatment. The American embassy in Tehran had discouraged the request, understanding the political delicacy, but after pressure from influential figures including former United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Council on Foreign Relations chairman David Rockefeller, the Carter administration decided to grant the Shah’s request.
The Shah's admission to the US intensified Iranian revolutionaries anti-Americanism and spawned rumors of another U.S.-backed coup and re-installation of the Shah.
Revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini - who had been exiled by the Shah for 15 years - heightened rhetoric against the “Great Satan”, the United States, talking of what he called “evidence of American plotting.”
"You have no right to complain, because you took our whole country hostage in 1953.”
In addition to putting an end to what they believed was American plotting and sabotage against the revolution, the hostage takers hoped to depose the provisional revolutionary government of Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan which they believed was plotting to normalize relations with the United States and extinguish Islamic revolutionary ardor in Iran.
A later study found that there had been no plots for the overthrow of the revolutionaries by the United States, and that a CIA intelligence gathering mission at the embassy was “notably ineffectual, gathering little information and hampered by the fact that none of the three officers spoke the local language, Persian.” Its work was “routine, prudent espionage conducted at diplomatic missions everywhere.”
Planning
The seizure of the American embassy was initially planned in September 1979 by Ebrahim Asgharzadeh, a student at that time. He consulted with the heads of the Islamic associations of Tehran’s main universities, including the University of Tehran, Sharif University of Technology, Amirkabir University of Technology (Polytechnic of Tehran) and Iran University of Science and Technology. Their group was named Muslim Student Followers of the Imam's Line.
Asgharzadeh later said there were five students at the first meeting, two of whom (including current Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, although this claim has been denied by the Iranian government, the Iranian opposition as well as a CIA investigation on the matter) wanted to target the Soviet embassy because the USSR was “a Marxist and anti-God regime.” But two others, Mirdamadi and Habibolah Bitaraf, supported Asgharzadeh’s chosen target — the United States. "Our aim was to object against the American government by going to their embassy and occupying it for several hours," Asgharzadeh said. "Announcing our objections from within the occupied compound would carry our message to the world in a much more firm and effective way." Mirdamadi told an interviewer, "we intended to detain the diplomats for a few days, maybe one week, but no more." Masoumeh Ebtekar, spokeswoman for the Iranian students during the crisis, said that those who rejected Asgharzadeh's plan did not participate in the subsequent events.
The Islamist students observed the security procedures of the Marine Security Guards from nearby rooftops overlooking the embassy. They also used experiences from the recent revolution, during which the U.S. embassy grounds were briefly occupied. They enlisted the support of police in charge of guarding the embassy and of Islamic Revolutionary Guards.
According to the group and other sources Khomeini did not know of the plan beforehand. The Islamist students had wanted to inform him but according to author Mark Bowden, Ayatollah Musavi Khoeyniha persuaded them not to. Khoeyniha feared the government would use police to expel the Islamist students as they had the last occupiers in February. The provisional government had been appointed by Khomeini and so Khomeini was likely to go along with their request to restore order. On the other hand, Khoeyniha knew that if Khomeini first saw that the occupiers were his faithful supporters (unlike the leftists in the first occupation) and that large numbers of pious Muslims had gathered outside the embassy to show their support for the takeover, it would be "very hard, perhaps even impossible", for the Imam Khomeini to oppose the takeover, and this would paralyze the Bazargan administration Khoeyniha and the students wanted to eliminate.
Takeover
Around 6:30 a.m. on November 4, the ringleaders gathered between
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