The New Yorker:

By Robin Wright

Forty years ago Monday, thousands of Iranian students stormed the sprawling U.S. Embassy compound in Tehran. They had waited for three pieces of intelligence, Ibrahim Asgharzadeh, the group’s ringleader, later told me. The plotters, assembled from campuses across Tehran, needed an inside plan of the embassy. They scouted it out from two student apartments across the street. Then they needed a log of the personnel, so they posted watch around the clock to identify the diplomats coming and going. “We wanted all the Americans inside when we took it,” he said. The final piece was intelligence on the marines guarding the mission. “We had to do this all ourselves, and we were just students.”

The young revolutionaries intended to hold the embassy for three to five days to protest the Carter Administration’s decision to take in the ailing former shah, Asgharzadeh said. Instead, egged on by the government, the drama involving fifty-two imprisoned Americans dragged on for four hundred and forty-four days. It haunts the relationship to this day.

For the United States, the embassy takeover was the last in a trifecta of humiliations in the nineteen-seventies. It followed the American retreat from Vietnam that eroded the U.S. image as an invincible military power. Watergate led to the only resignation of a U.S. President and created a crisis of confidence in American democracy. The embassy takeover introduced the yellow ribbon as a national symbol of American vulnerability. To this day, American policymakers, both Republican and Democratic, view Iran through this hostage prism.

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