Setting
On November 4, 1979, 66 hostages were taken at the U.S. embassy in Tehran, Iran, and held there for 444 days. The capture stemmed from a variety of long and short-term causes. Long-term causes can be found in tension between the United States and Iran over oil. For years, the U.S. and Britain controlled Iran's oil reserves, which proved beneficial to these western nations but not Iran. In 1951, Prime Minister Muhammed Mossadegh nationalized the oil industry to put the reserves in the hands of Iran. This move infuriated the U.S. and Britain, and these countries worked together to devise a plan to overthrow Mossadegh, called Operation TP-Ajax. The plan was a success and in 1953 power was put into the hands of Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi. The Shah was chosen because he was pro-western, anticommunist, and agreed to return 80% of the oil reserves to the U.S. and Britain for foreign aid. While the U.S. and Britain were pleased with the turn of events, the Iranian citizens were enraged by the intervention. Iranian discontent grew in the following years, as the Shah proved to be a brutal, harsh dictator who killed thousands of his citizens using his secret police. By the 1970s, the Iranians were ready to rise up and fight for a new dictator. The people turned to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who offered the Iranians what they wanted: a radical movement and change from ways of the past, to give Iranians more autonomy. The Shah was overthrown in July of 1979 by revolutionaries and replaced by Khomeini, and a militant Islamist government was put into place. At first, the U.S. refused to aid the Shah, due to his bad reputation in Iran. However, three months later Carter - not for political but rather humanitarian reasons - allowed the Shah to come to the U.S. for cancer treatment, a decision likened to tossing "a burning branch into a bucket of kerosene.” Indeed, the Iranians were furious, anti-U.S. sentiment grew, and the day the Shah's plane touched down in New York Iranian students attacked the U.S. embassy in Iran ("Iran Hostage Crisis").
Above: On November 13, 1979, an effigy of Uncle Sam is burned by Iranian revolutionary students by the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. "CIA" can be seen in the arm of the effigy; a sign in the backgrounds says "Down with the Carter and Imperialism" ( “The Iran Hostage Crisis, 31 Years Later -- PICTURES").