Iran hostage crisis

• 1. Introduction

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  The Iran hostage crisis began with a pair of metal cutters hidden beneath a student's chador outside the American embassy in Tehran. The cutters were meant for the chains on the embassy gates, and the date was the 4th of November 1979. The takeover left 66 Americans, diplomats and other civilian personnel among them, in captivity. Fifty-two of them were still prisoners on the 20th of January 1981, up to 444 days after the takeover. The students who planned the operation spoke of an occupation lasting a few hours, or at most about a week. Why did a gesture meant to be brief become a standoff of more than a year? What did the captives endure while their countries argued over them? And how did a third country, Algeria, end up bringing the whole affair to a close?

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• 2. Roots of Resentment

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  During the Second World War, British and Soviet forces occupied Iran and forced Reza Shah Pahlavi to abdicate in favor of his eldest son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The occupiers said they feared an alliance with Nazi Germany. The Shah's declared neutrality, and his refusal to let Iranian territory be used to train or supply Soviet troops, were probably the real reasons. The United States stayed out of the invasion, but heavy diplomatic pressure from Washington helped push the Soviet Union out of Iran in 1946.

  In 1953, the CIA and MI6 helped Iranian royalists depose Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in a coup codenamed Operation Ajax. Mosaddegh, a descendant of the Qajar dynasty, had led a general strike demanding a larger share of oil revenue from the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Britain had answered by cutting the revenue that reached Iran. After the coup, the Shah reigned for two decades as an absolute monarch and purged "disloyal" elements from the state. The CIA trained his secret police, and opponents accused that Bureau for Intelligence and Security of the State of numerous human rights abuses against dissidents.

  On New Year's Eve 1977, President Jimmy Carter gave a televised toast to the Shah at a state dinner in Tehran, saluting the monarch's character. The toast angered Iranians who wanted him gone. The revolution began in February 1979 with the return of Ayatollah Khomeini from exile. Rocks and bullets had broken so many of the embassy's front-facing windows that they were replaced with bulletproof glass, and the staff shrank from nearly one thousand earlier in the decade to just over 60.

  On the 22nd of October 1979, the United States admitted the Shah, who had lymphoma, to New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center for treatment. The State Department had discouraged the decision because it understood the political delicacy. Pressure from influential figures, including former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller, chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, carried the day. Revolutionaries read the admission as proof of American scheming and spread rumors of another U.S.-backed coup to restore him. Khomeini, whom the Shah had kept in exile for 15 years, spoke of "evidence of American plotting" and sharpened his attacks on the "Great Satan." Within two weeks, a crowd was at the embassy gates.

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• 3. Seizing the Embassy

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  On the morning of the 14th of February 1979, the Organization of Iranian People's Fedai Guerrillas stormed the American embassy and took a Marine named Kenneth Kraus hostage. Ambassador William H. Sullivan surrendered the building to save lives. With help from Foreign Minister Ebrahim Yazdi, he had it back in American hands within three hours. Kraus was injured, tortured, tried and convicted of murder, and he was to be executed. Carter and Sullivan secured his release within six days. The episode became known as the Valentine's Day Open House.

  In September 1979, a student named Ebrahim Asgharzadeh began planning a second attempt. He consulted the heads of the Islamic associations at Tehran's main universities, including the University of Tehran and Sharif University of Technology. Together they named themselves the Muslim Student Followers of the Imam's Line. Five students attended the first meeting, and two of them wanted to target the Soviet Embassy, which they called "a Marxist and anti-God regime." Mohsen Mirdamadi and Habibolah Bitaraf sided with Asgharzadeh and chose the United States.

  Asgharzadeh described the goal this way: "Our aim was to object against the American government by going to their embassy and occupying it for several hours." Mirdamadi recalled it more broadly: "We intended to detain the diplomats for a few days, maybe one week, but no more." The students watched the Marine guards' routines from nearby rooftops. They enlisted police officers who guarded the embassy and members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards.

  According to the author Mark Bowden, the organizers wanted to tell Khomeini but were talked out of it by Ayatollah Mohammad Mousavi Khoeiniha. Khoeiniha feared the provisional government, which Khomeini had appointed, would ask him to restore order and have police expel the students. If Khomeini first saw pious supporters thronging the embassy, Khoeiniha reasoned, it would be very hard for him to oppose the takeover. The senior organizers later rejected any claim that Khomeini had ordered the attack.

  At about 6:30 on the morning of the 4th of November, the ringleaders briefed between three hundred and five hundred selected students. Placards read "Don't be afraid. We just want to sit in." When the embassy guards brandished firearms, the protesters retreated, and one told the Americans, "We don't mean any harm." Then it became clear that the guards would not use deadly force, and a large, angry crowd had gathered outside to cheer the occupiers. The plan changed. The Marines and embassy staff were blindfolded and paraded in front of photographers.

  Foreign Minister Yazdi went to Qom to tell Khomeini the news, and Khomeini told him to "go and kick them out." That evening, Yazdi heard on the radio that Khomeini had instead issued a statement backing the seizure. It called the takeover "the second revolution" and the embassy an "American spy den in Tehran."

  Six American diplomats had avoided capture. One of them, Robert Anders, called his Canadian counterpart John Sheardown for help. Two of the six stayed with Canadian Ambassador Kenneth Taylor, and the other four stayed with the Sheardown family for 79 days. The government of Prime Minister Joe Clark secretly issued an Order in Council allowing Canadian passports to be issued to some Americans. With the CIA, it built a cover story about a film project. The six, along with two CIA agents, boarded a Swissair flight to Zürich on the 28th of January 1980. The operation, called the Canadian Caper, later inspired the 2012 film Argo, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

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• 4. A Standoff Takes Hold

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  "This has united our people," Khomeini told Iran's president. "Our opponents do not dare act against us. We can put the constitution to the people's vote without difficulty, and carry out presidential and parliamentary elections." His words explain why a short occupation became a long one. Iran's moderate prime minister, Mehdi Bazargan, and his cabinet resigned under pressure just days after the takeover. A referendum on the new theocratic constitution was less than a month away, and Khomeini rallied support under the slogan "America can't do a thing." The referendum succeeded.

  After the vote, both leftists and theocrats used accusations of pro-Americanism against their rivals. The targets included the Iranian Freedom Movement, the National Front, Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Kazem Shariatmadari, and later President Abolhassan Banisadr. Documents found at the embassy fed the campaign. Revolutionary teams displayed telegrams and reports from the State Department and the CIA, some painstakingly pieced together after shredding, as proof that Washington was plotting with Iranian moderates. They were published in a series titled Documents from the U.S. Espionage Den, which had reached 77 volumes by 1995.

  On the 21st of November 1979, a crowd of more than 1,000 Pakistani rioters attacked and burned the American embassy in Islamabad. Most were students from Quaid-i-Azam University, and they had been inspired by events in Tehran. Four embassy personnel, two Americans and two Pakistanis, died, along with two rioters. Khomeini helped incite the riots by claiming on the radio, falsely, that the United States and Israel had orchestrated the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Saudi Arabia. Pakistan's president, Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, condemned the burning and eventually sent in the army.

  Carter's first replies were gentle. He appealed for the release of the hostages on humanitarian grounds and shared hopes for a strategic anti-communist alliance with the Ayatollah. Pressure followed. Oil imports from Iran ended on the 12th of November 1979. Two days later, under Executive Order 12170, the Office of Foreign Assets Control froze around US$8 billion in Iranian assets.

  Back home, the editorial board of The New York Times called the hostage-taking a "declaration of war on diplomacy itself." Television news gave daily updates, and in January 1980 CBS anchor Walter Cronkite began ending each broadcast by counting the days of captivity. Before Christmas 1979, high school students and community groups made so many cards for the hostages that they filled bales. The National Christmas Tree was left dark except for the top star. Two newspapers in Trenton, New Jersey, printed full-page color flags for readers to cut out and place in their windows. Some Iranian Americans met a backlash. Activist Maziar Bahari quoted a friend who said he had to hide his Iranian identity "not to get beaten up, even at university."

  Bowden described a pattern in Carter's diplomacy: the president would seize a deal offered by a senior Iranian official and grant small but humiliating concessions. Then Khomeini would scuttle it at the last minute. As that pattern repeated, the pull of a military option grew stronger.

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• 5. Inside Captivity

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  On the 19th of November 1979, the captors released one woman and two African American hostages. They cited solidarity with "oppressed minorities" and respect for "the special place of women in Islam." Kathy Gross and William Quarles first had to hold a press conference praising the revolution's aims. Four more women and six more African Americans went free the next day. John Gunther Dean, then the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, said the Palestine Liberation Organization helped, with Yassir Arafat and Abu Jihad traveling to Tehran in person. Charles A. Jones, Jr., was the only African American hostage not released that month.

  Richard Queen, a vice consul, was sent home in July 1980 because of serious illness. Six months earlier he had developed dizziness and numbness in his left arm, which his captors first blamed on drafts of cold air. Later he was told it was "nothing." The numbness spread to his right side, and he ended up "literally flat on his back, unable to move without growing dizzy and throwing up." His condition was later diagnosed as multiple sclerosis.

  Three senior officials, Bruce Laingen, Victor L. Tomseth and Mike Howland, were at the Foreign Ministry when the embassy fell. They stayed for months, sleeping in the ministry's formal dining room and washing their socks and underwear in the bathroom. At first they were treated as diplomats, but once the provisional government fell, conditions worsened. By March the doors to their living space were chained and padlocked. The rest of the hostages began at the embassy, then were scattered around Iran so that no single rescue attempt could reach them. By midsummer 1980 they were in Tehran prisons. From November 1980 they were held in the Teymur Bakhtiar mansion, where they finally had tubs, showers and running hot and cold water.

  Iranian officials insisted the Americans were "guests." Ali Agha, an Iranian chargé d'affaires in America, stormed out of a meeting with an American official, exclaiming, "We are not mistreating the hostages. They are being very well taken care of in Tehran." Asgharzadeh spoke of "gentle and respectful treatment." The hostages described something else: beatings, theft and constant fear. William Belk and Kathryn Koob remembered being paraded blindfolded before a chanting crowd outside the embassy. Others had their hands bound "day and night" for days or weeks. They endured solitary confinement and months of being forbidden to speak, stand or walk. All were "threatened repeatedly with execution, and took it seriously," and the guards played Russian roulette with them.

  Michael Metrinko spent months in solitary confinement. When he voiced his opinion of Khomeini, he was handcuffed for two weeks, and a second time he was beaten and left in a freezing cell for two weeks. Army medic Donald Hohman went on a hunger strike lasting several weeks. Two hostages attempted suicide. Steve Lauterbach slashed his wrists with a broken water glass after being locked in a dark basement with his hands tightly bound. Jerry Miele, a CIA communications technician, knocked himself unconscious against a door, and guards had earlier rigged a mock electric chair to torment him. The guards also made threats aimed at families, including a threat to kidnap a disabled son in America and "start sending pieces of him to your wife." Four hostages tried to escape, and every attempt ended in stretches of solitary confinement.

  Mail became another weapon. Guards told Charles W. Scott, "I don't see anything for you, Mr. Scott. Are you sure your wife has not found another man?" The cruelty, in the hostages' account, became "a form of slow torture."

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• 6. Desert One

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  On Thursday, the 10th of April 1980, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, suffering from gout, left for a long weekend in Florida. Vance had argued against the push of National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski for a military solution. On Friday, Brzezinski held a newly scheduled National Security Council meeting where Carter authorized Operation Eagle Claw, a military expedition into Tehran to rescue the hostages. Deputy Secretary Warren Christopher attended in Vance's place and did not tell him. Furious, Vance resigned on principle and called Brzezinski "evil."

  Late in the afternoon of the 24th of April, eight helicopters flew from the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz to a remote desert road near Tabas, in the Great Salt Desert of eastern Iran. Severe dust storms disabled two of them, and all flew in complete radio silence. Early the next morning, the remaining six met several Lockheed C-130 Hercules transport aircraft at a refueling area called Desert One. A third helicopter proved unserviceable, which put the force below the six that planners considered the minimum. Colonel Charles Alvin Beckwith, the operation's commander, recommended aborting, and Carter agreed. While the helicopters repositioned for refueling, one ran into a C-130 tanker aircraft and crashed, killing eight U.S. servicemen and injuring several more. One Iranian civilian also died.

  In May 1980, the Joint Chiefs of Staff commissioned six senior officers, led by Admiral James L. Holloway III, to examine the attempt. They identified 23 significant issues, 11 of them major. The overriding one was operational security, the effort to keep the rescue a complete surprise. That secrecy cut pilots off from weather forecasters, so no one told them about the local dust storms. It also required all the helicopter pilots to come from one unit, a Navy mine-laying squadron.

  The review picked apart each failure. One crew saw a warning light for a possibly cracked rotor, landed, confirmed a crack had begun and stopped flying. The report said such a blade could have kept flying with little risk of catastrophic failure for many hours. A second pilot turned back in the dust because his helicopter lacked terrain-following radar. He might have gone on had radio silence not stopped him from asking about conditions ahead. A third helicopter lost part of its hydraulic system and flew four hours to Desert One, where a hydraulic fluid leak was found to have damaged a pump.

  After news of the failure spread, Khomeini credited divine intervention on behalf of Islam, and his prestige in Iran skyrocketed. Officials who favored releasing the hostages, such as President Bani Sadr, were weakened. On the 25th of April, Carter appeared on television to explain the operation and accept responsibility for its failure, which further damaged his re-election prospects.

  A second attempt was planned but never carried out. Under a rushed, top-secret program called Operation Credible Sport, three YMC-130H Hercules aircraft were fitted with rocket thrusters for an extremely short landing and takeoff in the Shahid Shiroudi football stadium near the embassy. On the 29th of October 1980, one crashed during a demonstration at Eglin Air Force Base when its braking rockets fired too soon. It tore off the starboard wing and caught fire, though everyone aboard survived. After Carter lost the November election, the project was abandoned. The failed mission did produce one lasting result: the creation of the 160th SOAR, a helicopter aviation special operations group.

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• 7. Algeria's Bargain

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  On the 2nd of November 1980, two days before the American presidential election, the Iranian parliament voted to release the American captives if the United States met four conditions. Iran wanted its assets unfrozen in American and international banks, the late Shah's wealth returned, all lawsuits against Iran in the United States dropped, and a pledge of non-intervention in Iranian affairs. Algerian Foreign Minister Sedikk Benyahia carried the message to the State Department. Algeria was Iran's protecting power in Washington, while Switzerland looked after American interests in Tehran. Earlier, at Carter's request, Algeria had agreed to attempt a last-chance negotiation before he left office.

  In the first phase, two Algerian ambassadors, one in each capital, only passed messages and did not touch the substance. The press called them "the mailmen." Talks stalled. State Department negotiators could not reconcile their position with the demands set by the Majlis vote, and the two ambassadors lacked specific expertise. As of the 9th of January 1981, The Washington Post reported, Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher had telephoned from Algiers to say that "serious problems continue to exist between the two sides." The Carter administration worried that arranging the transfer of part of an estimated $8 billion to $14 billion in frozen Iranian assets could take weeks or months.

  Seghir Mostefai was the man Algeria turned to. He had founded the Central Bank of Algeria in 1962 and led it ever since. He was also a long-time member of the boards of governors of the IMF and World Bank. His career had given him working relationships with both the Federal Reserve Bank, which had frozen the Iranian assets, and Iran's Markazi Bank. Both sides approved him. When Algeria took this active role, a team led by Christopher, with members of the State and Treasury Departments, arrived in Algiers.

  Mostefai's plan, which the Iranians called the "Algerian proposal," aimed to settle all disputes between the two countries. He built it by discussing with each side which claims and conditions they could accept. It gave the Central Bank of Algeria a trust role, allowing the hostages and the assets to be released at the same moment. It also created an arbitration tribunal, later known as the Iran-US Claims Tribunal and based in The Hague, to resolve outstanding disputes gradually. That meant the captives could go free without waiting for massive pending litigation to end.

  The assets, in the form of gold bullion, cash and securities, mostly U.S. Treasury bonds, would move into an escrow account in the name of the Central Bank of Algeria, held at the Bank of England. When the Bank of England confirmed the agreed amount had arrived, Iran would be notified and the hostages could be released. Part of the money stayed at the Algerian bank to cover American claims presented to the tribunal. In the end the United States transferred, directly and indirectly, a total of USD 7.956 billion to Iran, the equivalent of more than USD 25 billion in 2020. The three countries signed the Algiers Accords on the 19th of January 1981.

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• 8. Release and Reckoning

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  Algeria sent two identical Boeing 727 airliners from its national airline, Air Algérie, along with a medical team. Algerian doctors examined the hostages at Tehran airport and found them in good condition. Boarding began only after the Central Bank of Algeria confirmed it had received the deposits, with Algerian army special forces overseeing the process. For security reasons, given rising military tension with Iraq, the second plane served as a decoy. The captives walked through a gauntlet of students shouting "Marg bar Amrika," or "death to America." When the pilot announced they had left Iranian airspace, the freed hostages "went wild with happiness." The release came minutes after Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president, while he was delivering his inaugural address. Theories differ on why Iran waited until that moment.

  In Algiers, Warren Christopher, who had signed the Accords, received the hostages in a symbolic gesture of thanks to the Algerian government. The flight went on to Rhein-Main Air Base in West Germany and an Air Force hospital in Wiesbaden, where former President Carter greeted them as an emissary. A stop at Shannon, Ireland, drew a large crowd. At Stewart Air National Guard Base in Newburgh, New York, they boarded buses to the United States Military Academy at West Point. They spent three days at the Thayer Hotel, cheered the whole way. Ten days after their release, they rode in a ticker tape parade through New York's Canyon of Heroes. Gifts poured in, including lifetime passes to any minor league or Major League Baseball game.

  The timing of the release also fed an allegation that Reagan's campaign had conspired with Iran to delay it until after the election, denying Carter an "October surprise." In 1992, Gary Sick, a former national security adviser to Ford and Carter, laid out the strongest accusations in an editorial in The New York Times. Former Iranian president Abolhassan Banisadr repeated and added to them. After twelve years of intermittent media attention, both houses of Congress held separate inquiries and found credible evidence absent or insufficient. In May 2023, Sick and three others published an article in The New Republic that called the theory's credibility "all but settled."

  For Iran, the settlement achieved none of its original demands, and the country lost international support for its war against Iraq. Yet anti-Americanism intensified, and politicians such as Khoeiniha and Behzad Nabavi emerged stronger. Khomeini's biographer Baqer Moin called the crisis "a watershed in Khomeini's life," turning a "cautious, pragmatic politician" into "a modern revolutionary single-mindedly pursuing a dogma." Several people tied to the occupation went on to prominent careers. Hossein Dehghan became Iran's Minister of Defense, Mohammad Ali Jafari commanded the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and Mohammad Bagheri became Chief of the General Staff. Masoumeh Ebtekar, the students' spokeswoman and interpreter, became Iran's first female Vice President. According to journalist Stephen Kinzer, the swift collapse of American-Iranian friendship emboldened Saddam Hussein to invade Iran less than a year after the takeover. The two governments broke off formal relations, and Switzerland and, from 1992, Pakistan now carry their interests.

  Since 2001, the former embassy has served as a museum to the revolution, with a bronze model based on the Statue of Liberty outside its door. On the 4th of November 2009, anniversary protesters were encouraged to chant "death to America." They chanted "death to the dictator" instead, aiming at Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

  The hostages themselves found no quick compensation. In 2000 they sued Iran under the Antiterrorism Act of 1996 and won when Iran offered no defense. Then the State Department tried to end the suit for fear of complicating international relations, and a federal judge ruled that no damages could be awarded because of the Algiers Accords. After years of lobbying, Congress passed the 2015 United States Victims of State Sponsored Terrorism Act, which offered US$10,000 per day of captivity, up to US$4.4 million for each hostage. The fund drew on penalties paid by companies that broke sanctions against Iran, including part of a $9 billion penalty from BNP Paribas. September 11 victims' families and victims of the 1983 Beirut barracks bombings then made claims on the same fund, and by February 2019 the former hostages and their direct families had received only 17.8% of the legislated amount.

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