How vengeance and mutual incomprehension entangled two nations
The mob of surly shouters that formed outside the high walls of the U.S. embassy in Tehran that morning of Sunday, Nov. 4, 1979, did not seem at first to be unusually menacing. The Iranians chanted "Death to America," but demonstrations had periodically rumbled around the embassy before in the ten months since Shah Reza Pahlavi had been forced out of Iran by the Muslim revolution. In February, Marxist guerrillas had seized the embassy and held it for nearly two hours. That time, forces loyal to the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, in what now seems the sourest of ironies, came to the rescue of Ambassador William Sullivan and some 100 embassy employees. Since then the ambassador had left, dependents had been sent home, and the garrison staff that remained had grown accustomed to angry commotion in the streets.
The difference on Nov. 4 was that Khomeini was not a potential rescuer but the spiritual force behind the attack. Two weeks earlier, disregarding State Department warnings of certain reprisal by the Iranians, President Carter had permitted the ailing Shah to enter the U.S. from his temporary hideaway in Mexico to be treated for lymphatic cancer in a New York City hospital. The Ayatullah, then 79, a Muslim mystic and fundamentalist who despised the West and held the U.S. in special hatred for its long support of the Shah, had flown into a pious rage. At his headquarters in the holy city of Qum, 80 miles to the south of Tehran, he told student followers that the U.S. embassy was "a nest of spies" and "a center of intrigue."
The Sunday morning demonstration quickly turned into an occupation. Someone with a boltcutter opened a padlocked gate, and the mob flooded into the 27-acre compound. The Americans inside barricaded themselves in the fortified brick chancellery building, and Marine guards there held the doors shut long enough for officials to destroy some secret embassy documents. Then they surrendered and, with the rest of the Americans, were blindfolded and bound. Their captors identified themselves as students whose allegiance was to Khomeini. Their demand was that the Shah be returned to Iran.
So began the slow and cruel exaction of vengeance. As outrage flared in the U.S., President Carter denounced the occupation as terrorism and flatly rejected extradition of the Shah. Military intervention was also ruled out because of the delicacy of Persian Gulf oil politics, Iran's geography, the awkward truth that the U.S. did not have a commanding military presence in the area and—above all—the danger to the hostages. Their captors threatened executions at once if the U.S. made any military move to liberate them. Carter had no choice but to negotiate. He tried dealing with moderate Iranian Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan, who seemed to be sympathetic on the day after the seizure of the hostages. Bazargan resigned his office in frustration the day after that, confessing that it was not his government but Khomeini and his followers who held power. Carter dispatched former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and former Foreign Service Officer William Miller to meet Khomeini, but before they could reach Iran, the Ayatullah announced that he would not see them.