The U.S. & Iran: How We Got Here

For the American diplomats in Iran’s capital of Tehran, the morning started off like any other workday.

It was November 4, 1979, and there were students outside the U.S. embassy’s walls chanting “Death to America!” But the diplomats had gotten used to such displays. This corner of the world was unstable. Earlier that year, the people of Iran had overthrown that nation’s increasingly unpopular shah (or king), Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Students were angry at the U.S. for supporting the monarch.

Suddenly and swiftly, events spiraled out of the Americans’ control. Dozens of the students climbed the embassy compound’s heavy metal gate and over its brick walls. Others split the chains around the gate with metal cutters. Then they simply strolled past the Marine guards, who had been instructed to hold their fire.

The students followed a plan they had mapped out weeks earlier. They rounded up the embassy workers, bound them, and put blindfolds over their eyes. Then they paraded them before television news cameras. The Americans would be held hostage, they declared, until the U.S. turned over the shah. He had fled Iran and was receiving medical treatment in New York, but the students wanted him to stand trial.

Thus began one of the most humiliating and consequential events in recent American history. The crisis lasted for 444 days. For more than a year and two months, 52 Americans were held hostage. They suffered through terrifying, dispiriting, and sometimes physically abusive conditions. On January 20, 1981, the hostages were finally freed. That was 40 years ago.

The Iranian hostage crisis, as it came to be known, has poisoned relations between the U.S. and Iran ever since. There have been periodic efforts at engagement. Even so, the relationship has been marked by confrontation after confrontation. Most recently, the tension worsened over concerns about Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Still, it may be surprising to learn that for a long time, Iran and the U.S. enjoyed a friendly relationship.

“There’s a much longer and richer history of mutual admiration,” says John Ghazvinian, the executive director of the Middle East Center at the University of Pennsylvania. “And it’s important to remind ourselves how things went right.”

As far back as the 18th century, Americans were interested in events in Iran. Back then, it was known as Persia. Americans considered the region a defense against the Ottoman Empire. For centuries, the Ottoman’s Muslim rulers had expanded into southeastern Europe, northern Africa, and much of the Arab world. The empire collapsed shortly after World War I (1914-18).

Iranians were ruled entirely by a king until forming a parliament in the early 1900s. The nation looked to America as a model of constitutional democracy. Relations were so good that in 1911, an American lawyer was sent to reorganize Iran’s finances. At the end of World War I, the U.S. opposed British efforts to turn Iran into one of its colonies. Iranians then demonstrated in support of the U.S.’s position. And three years into World War II (1939-45), Iran began helping the U.S., Britain, and the Soviet Union against Germany.

Such mutual admiration broke down by the early 1950s, though. Iran’s popular democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, took control of the largely British-owned oil industry. The move was part of his efforts to stop colonial powers from taking advantage of his country’s resources. This enraged Western powers. They feared their economies might collapse without Middle Eastern oil. In 1953, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) and its British counterpart helped plot a coup d’état by the Iranian military that overthrew Mosaddegh.

Iran’s shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, declared himself an absolute ruler. Before that, he had shared power with an elected parliament. The shah made plans with the C.I.A. to train his feared secret police, Savak. He also bought jets and other weaponry from the U.S. This allowed Iran to emerge as a major regional power. In return, he guaranteed Western oil companies a large share of his country’s oil production. He also invited the U.S. to build Iran’s first nuclear reactor. The decision would haunt later U.S. presidents. That’s because it proved to be the foundation of a suspected program to develop an atomic bomb.

The shah oversaw years of modernization. But he lost support because of corruption within the royal family, brutal measures to suppress dissent, and rising resentment at his relationship with the U.S. Hundreds were killed in a 1978 protest.

By 1979, hundreds of thousands of Iranians had taken to the streets. This time, the shah lost the loyalty of his military and police, compelling him to flee. The Iranian Revolution brought a zealous Islamist cleric, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, back from a 14-year exile. He became the country’s Supreme Leader.

A secular government continued to manage the country’s domestic programs and defense. Despite that, Iran had become a theocracy. The country began enforcing extreme Islamic laws. These included amputations for crimes like theft, execution or torture for participants in political protests, and imprisonment for women who refused to wear veils concealing their faces.

President Jimmy Carter sought to adapt to the revolutionary government. But he angered many Iranians when he allowed the shah to enter the U.S. for cancer treatment in October 1979. Rumors spread that Carter was plotting another coup to reinstate the shah.

In the middle of the chaos, a small group of radicalized students at Tehran colleges planned to take control of the American embassy.

“Our aim was to object against the American government by going to their embassy and occupying it for a few hours,” student leader Ibrahim Asgharzadeh said later.

Two factors led the students to prolong the takeover. They were encouraged by Ayatollah Khomeini. He saw it as a drama that would cause more Iranians to support his theocratic government. The students also pieced together shredded embassy documents. In them, they found evidence that the Americans had been trying to thwart the new government.

In interviews after they were freed, the hostages told of terrifying games of Russian roulette and mock countdowns to execution. They also detailed days of solitary confinement in pitch-dark cells scattered around Tehran.

“I was beaten, I was hung by my wrists, marched into trees with a blindfold on, sleep deprivation,” recalled one of the hostages, Colonel Charles Scott. “They tied me up like a pretzel, come in every 15 minutes, give me a couple of good swift kicks, pulled me to my feet and asked me a bunch of stupid questions. I figured I was finished, it was all over, just a question of how I was going to go out.”

The incident seemed to spark a wave of patriotism in America. In time, it dawned on the Iranians that they had become hostage to the hostage-taking. In other words, there was no more value in holding the Americans. In fact, cruelly keeping them was earning Iranians worldwide contempt. They agreed to negotiate a release in exchange for an end to an oil embargo and the unfreezing of their assets.

Ronald Reagan defeated Carter in the 1980 election. The hostages were set free minutes after he was sworn in as president in January 1981. They came home to tearful reunions with spouses, children, and parents they hadn’t seen for a hard 14 months. Days later they were celebrated with a ticker-tape parade in New York City.

In the aftermath, many Americans viewed Iran as a nation of fanatics. Two decades after the hostage crisis, President George W. Bush labeled it an “axis of evil” that sponsored terrorism. Iraq and North Korea were also included his list.

At the same time, the U.S. was growing increasingly alarmed at signs that Iran was enriching uranium with the goal of building nuclear bombs. In 2015, President Barack Obama and representatives of a half-dozen other countries signed an agreement with Iran. It greatly restricted Iran’s ability to enrich uranium for 15 years. In exchange, the economic sanctions that were crippling Iran’s economy would be eased.

But three years later, President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the agreement. He claimed that it wasn’t tough enough. Instead, he imposed new economic punishments. Tensions escalated further in early 2020. At that time, Iran’s top general, Qassim Suleimani, was killed in a targeted American drone strike. Iran responded by launching airstrikes on two Iraqi bases housing U.S. troops. The attacks wound 34 Americans.

Another source of lingering hostility is Iran’s longstanding threat against the two main allies of the U.S. in the Middle East: Israel and Saudi Arabia. The decades-long conflict with Israel is again at a tipping point after the assassination of one of Iran’s top nuclear scientists in November. The attack is believed to have been carried out by Israel.

With all this going on, U.S. restrictions on purchases of Iranian oil, sales of spare airplane parts, and other economic trade have made many Iranians resentful. Even some younger Iranians who are also fed up with their own hardline government are angry at the U.S.

“We are at a historic low point,” says Ghazvinian of the Middle East Center. “Relations have never been this poor.”

Joe Biden takes the oath of office as president this month. When he does, dealing with Iran and its current Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, will be one of his most pressing matters. Biden has promised to rejoin the nuclear pact if Iran agrees to dispose of the large quantities of uranium it enriched after the U.S. withdrew. But Iran has shown that negotiating a deal might not be so simple.

Whatever comes next, Ghazvinian says, any chance of peace between the U.S. and Iran must begin with the two nations dropping their resentment at the “original sins”: the hostage taking and the coup against Mosaddegh.

“Policy-making seems permanently trapped,” he says. “But history reminds us that there is a larger and richer history of admiration, even affection.”

_{*Today, Iran’s Ayatollah, or Supreme Leader, is the unelected religious leader. He and his clerics have the most authority. Iranians also elect a president and a parliament, whose powers are limited.}

_{*Today, Iran’s Ayatollah, or Supreme Leader, is the unelected religious leader. He and his clerics have the most authority. Iranians also elect a president and a parliament, whose powers are limited.}