Iranian student revolutionary regrets role in 1979 US embassy occupation
One of the Iranian students responsible for the 1979 attack on the US embassy in Tehran has warned other wannabe revolutionaries against following in his footsteps.
On November 4, 1979, a group of Iranian university students stormed the embassy, intending to stage a sit-in. Instead they ended up taking 52 Americans hostage and beginning a siege that lasted 444 days.
The incident, one of the defining moments of the Iranian revolution, sparked a deterioration in US-Iranian relations which echoes through global politics today.
The takeover has become enshrined in hard-line mythology. Ebrahim Asgharzadeh disputed a revisionist history being offered by supporters of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that they directed the attack, insisting all the blame rested with the extremist students who let the crisis spin out of control.
“Like Jesus Christ, I bear all the sins on my shoulders,” Mr Asgharzadeh said.
The shah, dying from cancer, fled Iran in February 1979, paving the way for its Islamic Revolution. But for months, Iran faced widespread unrest ranging from separatist attacks, worker revolts and internal power struggles. Police reported for work but not for duty, allowing chaotic scenes to develop, such as Marxist students briefly seizing the US embassy.
In this power vacuum, the US president at the time, Jimmy Carter, allowed the shah to seek medical treatment in New York.
The students hoped to put pressure on Mr Carter to send the shah back to Iran to stand trial on corruption charges.
Mr Asgharzadeh, then a 23-year-old engineering student, remembers friends going to Tehran’s Grand Bazaar to buy a bolt cutter, a popular tool used by criminals, and the salesman saying: “You do not look like thieves. You certainly want to open up the US Embassy door with it.”
“The society was ready for it to happen. Everything happened so fast,” Mr Asgharzadeh said. “We cut off the chains on the embassy gate. Some of us climbed the walls and we occupied the compound very fast.”
Like other former students, Mr Asgharzadeh said the plan had been to stage a sit-in.
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the long-exiled Shiite cleric whose return to Iran sparked the revolution, gave his support to the takeover. He would use that popular angle to expand the power of the extremists.
“We, the students, take responsibility for the first 48 hours of the takeover,” Mr Asgharzadeh said. “Later, it was out of our hands since the late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and the establishment supported it.
“Our plan was one of students, unprofessional and temporary.”
It dawned on the naive students that Americans wouldn’t join their revolution. While a rescue attempt by the US military would fail and Mr Carter would lose to Ronald Reagan, the US expressed worry about the hostages by displaying yellow ribbons and counting the days of their captivity.
Mr Asgharzadeh said he thought things would end once the shah left America or later with his death in Egypt in July 1980. It didn’t.
“A few months after the takeover, it appeared to be turning into a rotten fruit hanging from a tree, and no one had the courage to take it down and resolve the matter,” he said.
“There was a lot of public opinion support behind the move in the society. The society felt it had slapped America, a superpower, on the mouth and people believed that the takeover proved to America that their democratic revolution had been stabilised.”
It hadn’t, though. The eightyear Iran-Iraq war would break out during the crisis.
In the years since the incident, Mr Asgharzadeh has become a reformist politician and served prison time for his views. He has argued that Iran should work towards improving ties with the US, a difficult task amid President Donald Trump’s campaign of maximum pressure against Tehran.
“It is too difficult to say when the relations between Tehran and Washington can be restored,” Mr Asgharzadeh said. “I do not see any prospect.”
We cut off the chains on the embassy gate. Some of us climbed the walls and we occupied the compound very fast EBRAHIM ASGHARZADEH Former student activist