444 Days: The Iranian Hostage Crisis Remembered

Thirty years ago today, hundreds of Iranian students stormed the U.S. Embassy in Iran, took 66 Americans hostage, and set off an international incident whose consequences still affect us today.

In its November edition, GQ magazine presents an exhaustive oral history of the hostage crisis, gathered by 10 reporters from interviews of more than 50 people involved, including hostages, hostage-takers and policymakers. What emerges is a compelling story of the rise of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism and the West's continuing failure to quell it.

It goes like this.

In the early morning of Nov. 4, 1979, William Gallegos, a Marine guard, was doing security checks on the second floor of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Something wasn't quite right. He looked out the window and saw a mob outside the embassy gates.

"They weren't screaming, they were just moving around and talking, but you could hear a strange buzz in the air, even inside the embassy," Gallegos recalls.

Soon after, students stormed the embassy's walls. Bombproof doors were slammed shut and the staff began destroying confidential documents. According to diplomatic protocol, the host country was expected to protect the Americans.

Instead, the mob broke into the embassy's basement. Fearing a futile gun battle, the ambassador ordered the Marines to stand down.

The students had taken the embassy.

"It was supposed to be a small, short-term affair. We were just a bunch of students who wanted to show our dismay at the United States. After that, it got out of control," says Ebrahim Asgharzadeh, the mastermind behind the takeover, now in jail for dissension in Iran.

The students were part of a months-long revolt against Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whom they saw as a puppet of the U.S. government. He had been installed in a 1953 CIA-led coup that deposed Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq. In early 1979, the shah had left Iran to seek treatment for his cancer, religious leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had returned from exile and on April 1, an Islamic Republic had been declared. Now the hostage-takers claimed the embassy was filled with CIA agents plotting a second coup.

By October, the shah was dying of cancer. Two weeks before the hostage crisis, President Carter had grudgingly agreed to bring him to the United States for treatment, enraging the students and confirming their suspicions about U.S. collusion.

"The U.S. made a mistake taking in the shah. People in Iran were very sensitive to this issue. If they had not admitted him, nothing would have happened," says Saeed Hajjarian, a hostage-taker now jailed for dissent.

At the embassy, the hostages were blindfolded, tied up and accused of working for the CIA. Al Golacinski, chief security officer, says they were told they would be tried and executed for spying to force confessions.

The practice is still in use. Last June, presidential elections were followed by massive protests after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was accorded a dubious victory. Supporters of Ahmadinejad's opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, claimed election fraud and took to the streets. Thousands of protesters involved in the Green Movement, named for Mousavi's campaign color, were thrown in prison. Televised "confessions" of reformists are now a common occurrence.

"It would be great if Mrs. Clinton would do us a favor and not show us that she is for the Green Movement," says Abolhassan Banisadr, Iran's first post-revolutionary president. "Even today, in the show trials, they use the United States as an excuse to indict people for trying to start another revolution. Mr. Obama shouldn't use sanctions or threats or military attacks against Iran. The mullahs will say, 'If it wasn't for the sanctions, your lives would be better.'"

The students planned to hold the hostages for a few days to make a statement, then release them. What they didn't know was that their actions had handed Khomeini an unexpected weapon against the Americans.

"It came to a point where no one could say any longer when the hostages could be freed, even after the shah was gone. It became an international affair, with repercussions we hadn't foreseen. We were taken out of the decision-making process. We were basically just hostages of the hostages," explains Asgharzadeh.

Anyone who tried to negotiate was accused of being pro-American, allowing Khomeini to use the hostage crisis to root out remaining liberals from the government, says David Aaron, deputy national security adviser.

Days dragged into weeks and weeks into months. The hostages watched Thanksgiving and Christmas pass. They weren't allowed to talk to one another until January.

In April 1980, Carter ordered a rescue mission that ended in disaster before it even started. The Iranians panicked and moved the hostages around the country.

Hostage Moorhead Kennedy remembers seeing one of his guards cry because he was being relocated. He was going to lose his job.

"This was obviously the most exciting moment of his life," Kennedy says. "Terrorism gives a lot of unemployed people something exciting to do."

The United States imposed economic sanctions on Iran and the international community turned its back on the country. Mansour Farhang, Iran's first post-revolutionary ambassador to the United Nations, estimates that the hostage crisis cost Iran $10 billion. Isolated and weakened financially, it was easily invaded by Saddam Hussein in September 1980.

One year after the students had taken the embassy hostage, Americans voted Carter out of office. Two months later, after 444 days of imprisonment, the hostages were on a plane to Algeria, where Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher signed the Algiers Accords for their release.

But instead of hailing the agreement as their salvation, some of the hostages say it laid the groundwork for the radical Islamic terrorism we know today.

The agreement precludes the hostages from taking legal action against the Iranian government. It seemed to tell the world that the United States would, in fact, negotiate with terrorists.

"A clear violation of international law took place, and there was nothing done about it," said Charles Scott, one of the hostages. "That was the beginning, the emboldening, of radical Islamic terrorism."

Robert Armao, an aide to the shah, also blames the expansion of terrorism after 1979 on the revolution. He says Khomeini used Iran's oil money to fund terrorists worldwide.

"The consequences of the embassy takeover were disastrous," says Reza Pahlavi, the shah's son. "We were hoping to get ahead, to gain freedom, and instead we lost everything and went back to the Dark Ages."