The militants announced that the Americans at the embassy would be held hostage until the United States returned the shah to Iran for trial as a traitor. They also demanded that the shah’s vast wealth be confiscated and surrendered to the Iranian government. President Carter rejected these demands. Instead Carter froze Iranian assets in the United States and banned trade with Iran until the hostages were freed.
A stalemate developed. Months passed. Even after the shah, who was terminally ill, left the United States for Panama, the Iranians remained adamant. The Iranian hostage crisis produced a remarkable emotional response in the United States. For the first
In 1979 Islamic militants hold an American embassy worker in Tehran.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, lectures in 2010. When Ahmadinejad spoke at the UN in 2009, many were struck by his resemblance to the young militant (left photo) who held Americans hostage in Iran in 1979. Then, Ahmadinejad was 23. He denied that he was the person in the earlier photo.
Time since the Vietnam War the entire country agreed on something.
Nevertheless the hostages languished in Iran. In April 1980 Carter finally ordered a team of marine commandos flown into Iran in Sea Stallion helicopters in a desperate attempt to free the hostages. The raid was a fiasco. Several helicopters broke down when their rotors sucked sand into the engines. Another helicopter crashed and eight commandos were killed. The Iranians made political capital of the incident, gleefully displaying on television the wrecked aircraft and captured American equipment. The stalemate continued. When the shah died in exile in Egypt in July 1980, the Iranians made no move to release the hostages.
World History
