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Iranian process servers demanded that Panama deport the gaunt and wasted Shah, who flew to Egypt at the invitation of President Anwar Sadat. In the U.S. at the beginning of April, President Carter called a dawn press conference to say that he saw progress in the hostage crisis—undetected by anyone else—and won the Kansas and Wisconsin primaries that day with a boost from his TV announcement. A week later, Carter ordered the remaining Iranian diplomats out of Washington and five other U.S. cities, imposed an economic embargo on Iran, and said that claims of U.S. firms against Iran would be paid from that country's frozen assets. Khomeini said that Carter's moves constituted victory for Iran. In early-round elections for the Majlis (national assembly), Banisadr's followers did poorly, and hard-line right-wingers of the Islamic Republican Party predominated. Common Market Foreign Ministers, meeting in Lisbon, condemned the hostage taking but delayed until May the imposition of reluctantly agreed-to economic sanctions against Iran. Carter's mood remained grim; he imposed a ban against U.S. travel to Iran and hinted that little remained for the U.S. except military action. Mrs. Barbara Timm, mother of Hostage Kevin Hermening, defied the travel ban, flew to Tehran and managed to see her son, but was not granted the audience she wanted with Khomeini.
The hostage mess had turned brackish, and worse was to come: at 7 a.m. on Friday, April 25, Carter told the nation that a U.S. military raid to rescue the hostages had been aborted, leaving the burned bodies of eight servicemen behind in the Iranian desert. In the next days, Americans gloomily sifted the rubble of their hopes and the nation's self-respect. Why had three of eight Sea Stallion helicopters failed? What was wrong with our equipment, or our nerve? Had there been a reasonable chance of success or was Carter's raid an ill-advised act of desperation? Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who had opposed any military rescue attempt from the beginning, resigned. Carter replaced him with Senator Edmund Muskie. In Iran, Ayatullah Khalkhali crowed over Carter's defeat, as authorities with knives picked at the bodies of the dead American raiders before television cameras. Iran and the U.S. haggled over the return of the bodies, parodying in a grisly way the endless dreary bickering, now six months stale, over the release of the hostages themselves.
The failed raid left the U.S. with few useful cards to play. It may also have been the moment at which the electorate, almost subliminally, began to harden in the view that Carter was hopeless. Yet he continued to roll over Kennedy in the primaries and went on to win renomination by his party. Republican Ronald Reagan continued to hammer away at the Administration's foreign policy failings without dwelling on the desert debacle. But it was becoming clear that Carter's handling of the entire hostage crisis was perceived by many voters as a disaster.