For 444 days, from November 4, 1979 to January 20, 1981, 53 Americans were held hostage by militant Iranian students in the U.S. Embassy in Teheran that would soon be part of the American vernacular as the Iran Hostage Crisis.
It wasn’t America’s first major policy blunder in the Middle East that allowed the Embassy to be taken over, but it did call attention to how foreign policy in the Middle East was not always understood or addressed regional issues effectively. Most of the crisis centered on two individuals the U.S.-backed Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and Ayatollah Khomeini. Although The Shah had been overthrown earlier in the year, when he journeyed to the United States for medical treatment at the Mayo Clinic (a journey discouraged by the U.S. Embassy in Teheran) The Shah’s visit intensified Anti-Americanism among Iranian revolutionaries and spawned rumors of a U.S.-backed coup.
The seizure of the embassy was planned as early as September. Interestingly, Khomeini did not know of the plan beforehand. Initially, the students only wanted to occupy the embassy for a few hours or even a few days to have their message heard around the world.
Around 6:30am on November 4, the ringleaders assembled approximately 500 students. At first, they only wanted to make a symbolic gesture, but when it became clear that the guards inside the embassy were not about to use deadly force, the plans changed and the students broke through the gates.
One of the more disturbing photos to quickly emerge from this takeover was the photo of the bounded and blindfolded embassy workers and military personnel who were parade in front of photographers.
In November of 1979, I was a sergeant serving in the United States Air Force at George Air Force Base in the High Desert region of the Mojave Desert, just outside of Victorville, California. I had been in the Air Force since June 1976, and it had been a rather peaceful military service—in those three years, there had only been one major international crisis that affected the U.S. military, the August 18, 1976 Panmunjom Ax Murder Incident.
There were a lot of rumors circulating on base that we might be the first Air Force units deployed, if the crisis escalated given that the 35th Tactical Fighter Wing, known as the Wild Weasels was an important fighter wing that had proven itself in the Vietnam War.
Every night, after the crisis erupted many of us watched Ted Koppel and ABC’s Nightline for the latest updates of the crisis.
It also created a surge of patriotism in the States, but at the same time it would also come to symbolize America’s mishandling of Middle East diplomacy that still resonates today. Although the U.S. sought a diplomatic solution to have the hostages released an ill-fated rescue mission—Operation Claw Eagle on April 24 (just two weeks before I was discharged)—that ended in disaster when a helicopter crashed into a C-130 tanker aircraft only intensified the vehement Anti-Americanism.
The hostages would finally be released, on January 20, 1981—twenty minutes after Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president. It is thought the hostage takers waited until Reagan was president to punish President Jimmy Carter’s support for The Shah.
When the hostages were finally released and arrived back in America, they were given a hero’s welcome and a ticker tape parade down the Canyon of Heroes in New York City. That didn’t sit too well—this hero’s welcome—with some Vietnam veterans I knew. In January 1981, I was a student at Southern Illinois University (SIU) in Carbondale, Illinois. When it was announced that there was going to be this hero’s welcome for the hostages, the owner of the American Tap, a popular bar in Carbondale decided to have a Veteran’s Party to honor Vietnam War veterans, many who were attending SIU.
The aftermath of the Iran Hostage Crisis reads like a Tom Clancy novel with a number of conspiracy theories (like how it was a secret CIA plot), not to mention a actual historical events like the Iran-Iraq war (with the U.S.-backed Saddam Hussein), the Iran-Contra Affair (Iranians, Contras, and Ollie North) and in many ways, that takeover 30 years ago, still resonates loudly today with the current and sometimes shaky U.S.-Iran relations.
