aligned himself too closely with Iran’s communist party. The coup restored power to
the shah, who had fled Iran after an earlier attempt to dismiss Mosaddeq.
Since 1953, Iranian nationalists had nursed grievances against the United States
because of its role in the coup and support for the shah. Some of the students at the
embassy reportedly brandished copies of an autobiography by Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., a
CIA official (and grandson of former president Theodore Roosevelt) who had said that
he had engineered the 1953 coup. Khomeini’s government also cited the coup as its
central claim against the United States in a December 10 letter to the International
Court of Justice (the World Court), which was considering a U.S. petition against the
hostage taking. (The court later sided with the United States.)
The Iranians’ sense of grievance and the Americans’ feeling of impotence to resolve
the crisis grew after April 1980, when a U.S. commando team flew into Iran on a secret
mission to rescue the hostages. Equipment failures forced the military to abort the mis-
sion, and eight U.S. servicemembers died when a helicopter and a transport plane crashed
as the commandos were leaving the desert base of the rescue mission. The attempted
U.S. resort to military force stiffened the determination of Khomeini and his allies to
hold on to the hostages. In the United States, the failure of the operation ultimately
hardened a public perception of Carter as too weak to bring the hostages home.
Subsequent attempts to negotiate a diplomatic solution stalled, particularly after
the outbreak of war between Iran and Iraq in September 1980 distracted Tehran’s
attention. It also became evident that the Iranians were using the crisis to weaken
Carter, who faced a tough reelection battle against a formidable Republican opponent,
Ronald Reagan. The Iranians released one of the fifty-three remaining hostages for
medical reasons in July 1980, but the others remained imprisoned as Americans went
to the polls in November and voted Carter out of office. Some observers argue that
Khomeini wanted to demonstrate that he could push a U.S. president from power,
just as the United States had dumped an Iranian leader twenty-seven years earlier (Iran-
Iraq War and Diplomacy, p. 430).
Khomeini and his government had one last humiliation for Carter. An agreement
for the release of the hostages, mediated by Algerian diplomats, was signed on Janu-
ary 19, 1981—one day before Carter’s departure from office. Iran held up the actual
release until minutes after Reagan took the oath of office on January 20. The fifty-
two Americans had been held hostage for 444 days.
The agreement for the hostages’ freedom satisfied only a small part of the numer-
ous demands Khomeini had made the previous September as the price for releasing
them. Of note, the agreement provided for the United States to release most of the
$12 billion in Iranian government assets that Carter had ordered frozen after the
embassy seizure; most of these funds were deposited in an escrow fund, however, and
Iran received only about $2.3 billion. In partial satisfaction of Iran’s historical griev-
ances, the United States also pledged “that it is and from now on will be the policy
of the United States not to intervene, directly or indirectly, politically or militarily, in
Iran’s internal affairs.” The Reagan administration later announced that it would
observe the terms of the hostage-release agreement.
Despite the peaceful settlement of the hostage crisis, the wounds it caused remained
raw for decades in the United States, just as earlier U.S. interventions in Iran festered in
that country. Until Iran elected Mohammad Khatami, a moderate, as president in 1997,
it was virtually impossible for an American politician to suggest improving the relations
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