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The Iran hostage crisis was a diplomatic incident between Iran and the United States in which 52 Americans were held hostage for 444 days from November 4, 1979, to January 20, 1981, after a group of Islamist students and militants took over the American Embassy in Tehran in support of the Iranian Revolution. President Carter called the hostages "victims of terrorism and anarchy", adding that the "United States will not yield to blackmail".
In February 1979, less than a year before the hostage crisis, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, was overthrown in a revolution. For several decades prior to his deposition, the United States had supported the Shah. In 1953 the British and the United States helped Iranian royalists depose of the government of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh in a military coup d'état codenamed Operation Ajax, and helped restore the Shah back to power. The Shah appointed himself an absolute monarch rather than as a constitutional monarch, with the aim of assuming complete control of the government. The coup replaced Iran's parliamentary democracy with an absolute monarchy. U.S. support and funding of the Shah continued after the coup, with the CIA training the government's secret police, SAVAK. This foreign intervention, along with other economic, cultural, and political issues, united opposition against the Shah and led to his overthrow.
On New Year's Eve, December 31, 1977, American president Jimmy Carter gave a toast to the Shah of Iran, declaring how beloved the Shah was by his people. The revolution of 1979 resulted in the return of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini from France in February 1979. The US embassy in Tehran was occupied and its staff was held hostage briefly. The Carter administration tried to mitigate the anti-American feeling by attempting to build a new relationship with the new Iranian government. But, on October 22, 1979, the United States permitted the Shah—who was ill with cancer—to attend the Mayo Clinic for medical treatment. The State Department had discouraged the request, understanding the political delicacy, but the Carter administration decided to grant the Shah's request.
The Shah's admission to the United States aggravated anti-American sentiments in Iran and spawned rumors of another U.S.-backed coup and re-installation of the Shah. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini—who had been exiled by the Shah for 15 years—heightened rhetoric against the "Great Satan", the United States. He called the US action of giving medical aid to the Shaw "evidence of American plotting".
On November 4, 1979 between 300 and 500 selected students, thereafter known as Muslim Student Followers of the Imam's Line, demonstrated at the US embassy in Tehran, initially giving the impression that they only wished to stage a sit in. But when it became apparent that the US Marines protecting the embassy would not use deadly force, the embassy was taken over and its staff was held hostage.
The occupiers bound and blindfolded the embassy Marines and staff and paraded them in front of photographers. In the first couple of days, many of the embassy staff who had snuck out of the compound or not been there at the time of the takeover were rounded up and returned as hostages. Six American diplomats found refuge at the nearby Canadian and Swedish embassies in Tehran for three months. A joint Canadian Government-CIA covert operation managed to smuggle them out of Iran using Canadian passports and a cover story disguising them as a part of a Canadian film crew on January 28, 1980.
The staff remained held hostage and efforts to negotiate their release were unsuccessful. The United States military attempted a rescue operation off the USS Nimitz, an aircraft carrier. On April 24, 1980, Operation Eagle Claw resulted in a failed mission, the deaths of eight American servicemen, one Iranian civilian, and the destruction of two aircraft.
The hostages continued to be held and as an insult to Carter, they were not released until minutes after Carter's successor, Ronald Reagan, was inaugurated. This took place the day after the signing of the Algiers Accords, a deal brokered by Algeria between the US.
The crisis was considered by many to be the major reason for President Carter's defeat in the November 1980 presidential election.