The White House assumed the hostage crisis was a negotiation over specific demands, such as returning the Shah. In reality, Khomeini used the prolonged crisis to eliminate moderate rivals and consolidate the Islamic Republic, making the stated demands largely irrelevant.
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The students who seized the US Embassy did not plan a 444-day ordeal. Their original plan was a brief, symbolic occupation to protest US policy, inspired by Western student sit-ins. They brought only enough food for three days, showing their lack of foresight for the crisis's escalation.
The Carter administration was explicitly warned by its own diplomats that allowing the deposed Shah into the US would provoke an attack on the Tehran embassy. Carter, aware of the risk, ultimately relented due to humanitarian pressure and political concerns about appearing disloyal.
Instead of viewing the crisis as an immediate disaster, some in Carter's re-election team saw it as an opportunity. They believed it would allow Carter to "wrap himself in the flag" and appear presidential, a strategy that catastrophically backfired as the crisis dragged on.
The U.S. ambassador in 1977 was shocked that few staff spoke Farsi or had ever left Tehran. This linguistic and cultural isolation meant they lacked links to opposition groups, and their intelligence was based almost solely on the Shah's insulated royal court.
Days before Iran's 1978 revolution, President Jimmy Carter lauded the Shah's leadership and Iran's "stability." This highlights a catastrophic failure of intelligence and a reliance on superficial state-level relationships over understanding ground-level dissent.
The U.S. Embassy and CIA were unaware that the Shah was dying of leukemia, dismissing rumors as Russian propaganda. This critical intelligence gap meant they couldn't understand his indecisiveness and erratic behavior as the crisis escalated, misreading the entire situation.
Iran's leader was surprised by the student takeover and first ordered them out. He quickly changed his mind upon realizing the event's immense popularity and its utility in consolidating hardline control, demonstrating his political opportunism over ideological consistency.
The concept of an "Islamic government" was deliberately left undefined. This vagueness allowed various anti-Shah groups—from secular liberals to Marxists—to project their own hopes onto the revolution, creating a broad but fragile coalition. The lack of detail was a feature, not a bug.
The iconic term used by Iranian leaders to describe the United States was coined by Ayatollah Khomeini the day after the embassy seizure. It is not a traditional Quranic term but a modern political slogan crafted to cast the conflict in Manichaean terms of good versus evil.
The Shah believed the US was masterminding events in Iran, a comforting illusion that someone was in control. The reality—that the US government was paralyzed by indecision and had no plan—was far more terrifying. This realization shattered his confidence and sealed his fate.