The Iran hostage crisis (Persian: بحران گروگانگیری سفارت آمریکا) was a diplomatic standoff between Iran and the United States. Fifty-three American diplomats and citizens were held hostage in Iran after a group of armed Iranian college students belonging to the Muslim Student Followers of the Imam's Line, who supported the Iranian Revolution, including Hossein Dehghan (future Iranian Minister of Defense), Mohammad Ali Jafari (future Revolutionary Guards Commander-In-Chief) and Mohammad Bagheri (future Chief of the General Staff of the Iranian Army),[3][4] took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran[5][6] and took them as hostages. The hostages were held for 444 days, from November 4, 1979 to their release on January 20, 1981. The crisis is considered a pivotal episode in the history of Iran–United States relations.[7]
Western media described the crisis as an "entanglement" of "vengeance and mutual incomprehension".[8] U.S. President Jimmy Carter called the hostage-taking an act of "blackmail" and the hostages "victims of terrorism and anarchy".[9] In Iran, it was widely seen as an act against the U.S. and its influence in Iran, including its perceived attempts to undermine the Iranian Revolution and its long-standing support of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was overthrown in 1979.[10] After Shah Pahlavi was overthrown, he was granted asylum and admitted to the U.S. for cancer treatment. The new Iranian regime demanded his return in order to stand trial for the crimes he was accused of committing against Iranians during his rule through his secret police. These demands were rejected, which Iran saw as U.S. complicity in those abuses. The U.S. saw the hostage-taking as an egregious violation of the principles of international law, such as the Vienna Convention, which granted diplomats immunity from arrest and made diplomatic compounds inviolable.[11][12][13][14] The Shah left the U.S. in December 1979 and was ultimately granted asylum in Egypt, where he died from complications of cancer at age 60 on July 27, 1980.
Six American diplomats who had evaded capture were rescued by a joint CIA–Canadian effort on January 27, 1980. The crisis reached a climax in early 1980 after diplomatic negotiations failed to win the release of the hostages. Carter ordered the U.S. military to attempt a rescue mission – Operation Eagle Claw – using warships that included USS Nimitz and USS Coral Sea, which were patrolling the waters near Iran. The failed attempt on April 24, 1980, resulted in the death of one Iranian civilian and the accidental deaths of eight American servicemen after one of the helicopters crashed into a transport aircraft. U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance resigned his position following the failure. In September 1980, Iraq invaded Iran, beginning the Iran–Iraq War. These events led the Iranian government to enter negotiations with the U.S., with Algeria acting as a mediator.
Political analysts cited the standoff as a major factor in the continuing downfall of Carter's presidency and his landslide loss in the 1980 presidential election.[15] The hostages were formally released into United States custody the day after the signing of the Algiers Accords, just minutes after American President Ronald Reagan was sworn into office. In Iran, the crisis strengthened the prestige of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and the political power of theocrats who opposed any normalization of relations with the West.[16] The crisis also led to American economic sanctions against Iran, which further weakened ties between the two countries.[17]
During the Second World War, the British and the Soviet governments invaded and occupied Iran, forcing the first Pahlavi monarch, Reza Shah Pahlavi to abdicate in favor of his eldest son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.[18] The two nations claimed that they acted preemptively in order to stop Reza Shah from aligning his petroleum-rich country with Nazi Germany. However, the Shah's declaration of neutrality, and his refusal to allow Iranian territory to be used to train or supply Soviet troops, were probably the real reasons for the invasion of Iran.[19]
The United States did not participate in the invasion but it secured Iran's independence after the war ended by applying intense diplomatic pressure on the Soviet Union which forced it to withdraw from Iran in 1946.
By the 1950s, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was engaged in a power struggle with Iran's prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, an immediate descendant of the preceding Qajar dynasty. Mosaddegh led a general strike, demanding an increased share of the nation's petroleum revenue from the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company which was operating in Iran. The UK retaliated by reducing the amount of revenue which the Iranian government received.[20][better source needed] In 1953, the CIA and MI6 helped Iranian royalists depose Mosaddegh in a military coup d'état codenamed Operation Ajax, allowing the Shah to extend his power. For the next two decades the Shah reigned as an absolute monarch. "Disloyal" elements within the state were purged.[21][22][23] The U.S. continued to support the Shah after the coup, with the CIA training the Iranian secret police. In the subsequent decades of the Cold War, various economic, cultural, and political issues united Iranian opposition against the Shah and led to his eventual overthrow.[24][25][26]
Months before the Iranian Revolution, on New Year's Eve 1977, U.S. President Jimmy Carter further angered anti-Shah Iranians with a televised toast to Pahlavi, claiming that the Shah was "beloved" by his people. After the revolution commenced in February 1979 with the return of the Ayatollah Khomeini, the American Embassy was occupied, and its staff held hostage briefly. Rocks and bullets had broken so many of the embassy's front-facing windows that they were replaced with bulletproof glass. The embassy's staff was reduced to just over 60 from a high of nearly one thousand earlier in the decade.[27]
The Carter administration tried to mitigate anti-American feeling by promoting a new relationship with the de facto Iranian government and continuing military cooperation in hopes that the situation would stabilize. However, on October 22, 1979, the United States permitted the Shah, who had lymphoma, to enter New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center for medical treatment.[28] The State Department had discouraged this decision, understanding the political delicacy.[27] But in response to pressure from influential figures including former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Council on Foreign Relations Chairman David Rockefeller, the Carter administration decided to grant it.[29][30][31][32]
The Shah's admission to the United States intensified Iranian revolutionaries' anti-Americanism and spawned rumors of another U.S.–backed coup that would re-install him.[33] Khomeini, who had been exiled by the shah for 15 years, heightened the rhetoric against the "Great Satan", as he called the U.S, talking of "evidence of American plotting."[34] In addition to ending what they believed was American sabotage of 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 U.S. and extinguish Islamic revolutionary order in Iran.[35] The occupation of the embassy on November 4, 1979, was also intended as leverage to demand the return of the Shah to stand trial in Iran in exchange for the hostages.
A later study claimed that there had been no American plots to overthrow the revolutionaries, and that a CIA intelligence-gathering mission at the embassy had been "notably ineffectual, gathering little information and hampered by the fact that none of the three officers spoke the local language, Persian." Its work, the study said, was "routine, prudent espionage conducted at diplomatic missions everywhere."[36]
On the morning of February 14, 1979, the Organization of Iranian People's Fedai Guerrillas stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took a Marine named Kenneth Kraus hostage. Ambassador William H. Sullivan surrendered the embassy to save lives, and with the assistance of Iranian Foreign Minister Ebrahim Yazdi, returned the embassy to U.S. hands within three hours.[37] Kraus was injured in the attack, kidnapped by the militants, tortured, tried, and convicted of murder. He was to be executed, but President Carter and Sullivan secured his release within six days.[38] This incident became known as the Valentine's Day Open House.[39]
The next attempt to seize the American Embassy was planned for September 1979 by Ebrahim Asgharzadeh, a student at the 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. They named their group Muslim Student Followers of the Imam's Line.
Asgharzadeh later said there were five students at the first meeting, two of whom wanted to target the Soviet Embassy because the USSR was "a Marxist and anti-God regime". Two others, Mohsen 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."[43] Mirdamadi told an interviewer, "We intended to detain the diplomats for a few days, maybe one week, but no more."[44] Masoumeh Ebtekar, the spokeswoman for the Iranian students during the crisis, said that those who rejected Asgharzadeh's plan did not participate in the subsequent events.[45]
The students observed the procedures of the Marine Security Guards from nearby rooftops overlooking the embassy. They also drew on their experiences from the recent revolution, during which the U.S. Embassy grounds were briefly occupied. They enlisted the support of police officers in charge of guarding the embassy and of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards.[46]
According to the group and other sources, Ayatollah Khomeini did not know of the plan beforehand.[47] The students had wanted to inform him, but according to the author Mark Bowden, Ayatollah Mohammad Mousavi Khoeiniha persuaded them not to do so. Khoeiniha feared that the government would use the police to expel the students as they had the occupiers in February. The provisional government had been appointed by Khomeini, so Khomeini was likely to go along with the government's request to restore order. On the other hand, Khoeiniha knew that if Khomeini first saw that the occupiers were faithful supporters of him (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 him to oppose the takeover, and this would paralyze the Bazargan administration, which Khoeiniha and the students wanted to eliminate.[48]
Supporters of the takeover stated that their motivation was fear of another American-backed coup against their popular revolution.
On November 4, 1979, one of the demonstrations organized by Iranian student unions loyal to Khomeini erupted into an all-out conflict right outside the walled compound housing the U.S. Embassy.
At about 6:30 a.m., the ringleaders gathered between three hundred and five hundred selected students and briefed them on the battle plan. A female student was given a pair of metal cutters to break the chains locking the embassy's gates and hid them beneath her chador.[49]
At first, the students planned a symbolic occupation, in which they would release statements to the press and leave when government security forces came to restore order. This was reflected in placards saying: "Don't be afraid. We just want to sit in." When the embassy guards brandished firearms, the protesters retreated, with one telling the Americans, "We don't mean any harm."[50] But as it became clear that the guards would not use deadly force and that a large, angry crowd had gathered outside the compound to cheer the occupiers and jeer the hostages, the plan changed.[51] According to one embassy staff member, buses full of demonstrators began to appear outside the embassy shortly after the Muslim Student Followers of the Imam's Line broke through the gates.[52]
As Khomeini's followers had hoped, Khomeini supported the takeover. According to Foreign Minister Yazdi, when he went to Qom to tell Khomeini about it, Khomeini told him to "go and kick them out." But later that evening, back in Tehran, Yazdi heard on the radio that Khomeini had issued a statement supporting the seizure, calling it "the second revolution" and the embassy an "American spy den in Tehran."[53]