Читать книгу Global Issues 2021 Edition - Группа авторов - Страница 34

The first phase of the Iranian revolution, which lasted until Khomeini’s death in 1989, was marked by a violent purge of the shah’s associates and by the November 1979 takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran by militant students. Enraged that the U.S. government had allowed the shah to come to the United States for cancer treatment, the students captured 52 American diplomats and held them hostage for 444 days, despite an aborted rescue attempt by the U.S. military in 1980. The U.S. Treasury froze $12 billion in Iranian assets here and abroad.⁴¹

After lengthy negotiations brokered by Algeria, the hostages were released on Jan. 20, 1981, the day Republican Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as president. Since then, the two countries have had no official diplomatic relations, and the hostage affair cemented the Islamic Republic as an implacable foe in the minds of most Americans.

Blindfolded American diplomats are paraded outside the U.S. Embassy in Tehran on Nov. 4, 1979. Militant students held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days before releasing them on the day Ronald Reagan became president.

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During the next decade, Iran exported anti-American Islamic extremism across the Muslim world. In 1983, Iranian-backed Hezbollah militants bombed the U.S. embassy and Marine barracks in Lebanon. They later murdered the CIA’s Beirut station chief and held hostage 25 U.S. civilians working in Lebanon. U.S. efforts to gain their release would spawn the Iran-Contra scandal, in which the Reagan administration secretly sold weapons to Iran—in violation of U.S. law—in exchange for the hostages’ freedom. Proceeds from the sale were used to fund anti-communist Contra guerrillas in Nicaragua, violating a congressional ban on such payments.⁴²