Iranian Hostage Crisis

Beginning in late 1979, Iranian radicals held 52 Americans hostage for a grueling 444 days. Americans hungry for news of the hostages [Page 294]watched television reports and taped statements from the captives, and their safety and return became a national focus. The inability of the administration of President Jimmy Carter to quickly master the crisis is often cited as a main cause for Carter's loss to Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential elections.

The crisis developed in the midst of Iran's Islamic revolution, after the U.S.-supported Shah Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlevi fled the country in January 1979. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, living in exile in Paris, returned to Tehran in February, and anti-American sentiment reached a fever pitch. The hostage crisis began soon after the United States permitted the shah to enter the country for cancer treatment in October 1979.

On November 4, a crowd of about 500 radical students occupied the U.S. embassy in Tehran, taking embassy employees hostage. The students soon had the backing of Khomeini and most of the government, and they demanded concessions from the United States and Iran's former monarch. After capturing approximately 90 people inside the embassy, the captors freed most of the women, non-Americans, and blacks. They held the remaining 52, many of them elderly diplomats, hostage until January 1981.

Television screens across the United States broadcast images of the hostages nearly every night and showed video messages released by the kidnappers. Soon after the hostages were taken, the ABC television network began a nightly report called America Held Hostage; the show's name was changed in the spring of 1980 to Nightline. The hostages were often shown handcuffed and blindfolded, growing thinner as the ordeal continued. Two Christmases in a row, Kathryn Koob, director of the Iran-America Society, looked into the cameras to send a message home and gathered enough wry humor to report that she had finally solved her weight problem.

According to the captives’ later testimony, many were tied to chairs, blindfolded, for weeks at a time. They worked to keep records of their days and even fashioned a coffee stove from a discarded tin can. At times they were separated into small groups and not allowed to communicate; at least one hostage attempted suicide.

In the winter of 1979, Penelope Laingen, the wife of hostage Bruce Laingen, tied a yellow ribbon around a tree in the front yard of her Maryland home. Millions across the nation followed suit, hanging yellow ribbons as symbols of solidarity with the hostages and hoping for the prisoners’ safe release. However, Carter's diplomatic attempts and economic sanctions (halting oil imports from Iran and freezing Iranian assets in the United States) failed to bring the captives home.