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<text> <title> (1970s) Iran Hostages </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1970s Highlights </history> <link 07703> <link 07636> <link 07735> <link 05898> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> Iran Hostages </hdr> <body> [Still another dictatorship fell at the end of the 1970s. This one was also that of a good friend and client state of the U.S. Instead of democracy or Marxism, the successor regime to the Shah of Shahs in this case was an Islamic theocracy.] (September 18, 1978) Day after day they marched, tens of thousands strong, defiant chanting demonstrators surging through the streets of Tehran, a capital unaccustomed to the shouts and echoes of dissent. The subject of their protest was the policies of Iran's supreme ruler, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Some carried signs demanding his ouster. Others called for a return of long denied civil and political liberties and the enforcement of Islamic laws. The crowd, at times numbering more than 100,000, was a colorful, sometimes incongruous cross section of Iranian society: dissident students in jeans; women shrouded in the black chador, the traditional head-to-foot veil; peasants and merchants; and most important the bearded, black-robed Muslim mullahs, the religious leaders of the Shi'ite branch of Islam, which commands the allegiance of 93% of Iran's 34.4 million people. The challenge to his leadership stunned the Shah and outraged his generals, who argued that the demonstrations were surely eroding his authority--and in turn the army's--and must be stopped. A lengthy late-night Cabinet meeting followed, and on the morning after, Premier Jaafar Sharif-Emami proclaimed a curfew and martial law for six months. Not in a quarter-century had Tehran been under the rule of troops. Next day the demonstrations began again and this time ended in fatal, fiery riots. Many marchers apparently had not heard the martial-law proclamation over Radio Iran or else they chose to defy it. Jaleh Square in downtown Tehran was packed with thousands of protesters. A local religious leader appealed to them to disperse. They refused. A cavalcade of motorcycles, followed by groups of women and young children, began to proceed toward squads of armed soldiers. After repeated warnings, the soldiers lobbed canisters of tear gas into the crowd, then shot into the air. As the throngs advanced, the troops lowered their guns and fired. At nightfall, after the bodies of the victims had been loaded into army trucks and carried away, the government announced that 86 people, mostly women and children, had died, and 205 others were wounded. (January 29, 1979) In Tehran, the throngs were filling the streets to begin once more their daily demonstrations. If the protesters had looked upward, they would have seen a blue and white Boeing 727 swing over the city, circle once and turn away. The pilot of that plane was Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, taking a long, perhaps last look at the capital of his realm. For years he had lived under the illusion that he was a monarch beloved by his 34 million subjects; for years he had harbored the conviction that his leadership was bringing all the benefits of national wealth and well-being to a backward nation. In the end, it had come to this: he departed hated, vilified, denounced. After 37 years on the Peacock Throne, he had been ignominiously driven out of Iran. The public face he put upon it was that he was simply taken a leave. But in all likelihood, his departure means the end of monarchy in a land ruled by kings for more than 2,500 years. (February 12, 1979) The chartered Air France 747 circled over the city and past the nearby Elburz Mountains three times before settling down gently on the tarmac of Tehran's Mehrabad Airport. As aides and reporters milled about, the frail old man, wearing a black turban and ankle-length robes, stepped out of the aircraft's door into the chill February morning. His back hunched, he clutched the arm of an Air France purser as he walked down the portable ramp to touch Iranian soil. After 15 years in exile, Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, 78, spiritual leader of a revolution that has been building to a frightening climax, had come home at last. The moment was, conceivably, the start of a new era for a country that has seemed dangerously out of control. After all the demonstrations of anger and mourning that have punctuated the year-long crisis, Iran went wild with joy. From all across the country, millions of people thronged into the capital; they lined the 20-mile route out to Behesht-Zahra Cemetery, where many of the martyrs of the revolution are buried, to catch a glimpse of the Ayatullah. "The holy one has come!" they shouted triumphantly. "He is the light of our lives!" So heavy was the crush of people that Khomeini had to be lifted from his motorcade and flown the last mile to the cemetery by helicopter. There, in Lot 17, he prayed and delivered a funeral oration for the dead. "Is it human rights," he asked in a bitter if oblique reference to President Carter, "when we say we want to name a government and we get a cemetery full of people?" [After a brief stay in Egypt, the deposed Shah obtained permission to enter the U.S. for medical treatment (he was actually dying of cancer). His arrival touched off a violent, visceral reaction against the U.S. and all things American.] (November 19, 1979) On Sunday, Nov. 4, hundreds of protesters gathered in downtown Tehran outside the U.S. embassy, a 27-acre compound surrounded by ten- and twelve-foot brick walls and secured with metal gates. The students, most of whom were unarmed, chanted anti-American slogans and carried banners: DEATH TO AMERICA IS A BEAUTIFUL THOUGHT and GIVE US THE SHAH. At the very hour at which the demonstration was taking place in Tehran, the Ayatullah Khomeini was telling a student in the holy city of Qum, some 80 miles to the south, that foreign "enemies" were plotting against the Iranian revolution. Repeatedly, he charged that the American embassy in his country's capital was "a nest of spies" and "a center of intrigue." That was all the inspiration the students needed. Just before 11 a.m., someone with a pair of powerful shears managed to break the chain that held together the gates on Taleghani Street, and the crowd surged through. Once inside the compound, some headed for the ambassador's residence, where the servants offered no resistance (there has been no U.S. ambassador in Tehran since William Sullivan left in April). Others tried to take over the chancellery but found it protected with armor plating and grillwork. Using bullhorns, they shouted at the occupants: "Give up and you won't be harmed! If you don't give up, you will be killed!" As the attackers struggled to get inside, other protesters and a crowd of curiosity seekers clambered over the embassy walls and swarmed through the compound. Inside the two-story brick chancellery building, known to Americans as "Fort Apache" for its special security reinforcements, Marine guards donned flak jackets and gas masks and ordered everyone to the top floor. Finally, after stalling as long as possible, a Marine opened the door, and students rushed in, their eyes moist from tear gas. The students grabbed the masks of the Americans. Said one attacker: "We had the gas for three hours. You can taste it for a while." Then they blindfolded the embassy staff, bound their hands and made them sit on a corridor floor. Soon the students put one of their prisoners on parade, draping his body with a Khomeini poster. By 4 p.m., the compound was completely in the hands of the students, who now numbered about 600. Soon afterward the group, which called itself the "Muslim Students of the Imam Khomeini Line," issued "Communique No. 1." It announced that the occupation of "this next of intrigue" was a protest against "the U.S. officer of asylum to this criminal Shah who was responsible for the deaths of thousands of Iranians." (December 3, 1979) The rancorous quarrel between the U.S. and Iran darkened and expanded last week into an ever more perilous confrontation. From the U.S. came a warning of military force, from Iran an appeal to mob violence. Such violence broke out from Turkey to India, most seriously in Pakistan, where the first American blood was shed. And by this time Iran's fire-eating Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini had become so extreme, so demagogic, so streaked with irrationality that serious diplomats wondered how the breach could be repaired. "This is not a struggle between the United States and Iran," Khomeini declared. "It is a struggle between Islam and the infidels." He repeatedly threatened that the 49 American hostages held in the captured U.S. embassy in Tehran would be tried as spies, and possibly executed, if the U.S. does not send back the deposed Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi from the hospital in New York City. Khomeini's inflammatory rhetoric played a major part in the wave of Muslim fanaticism and anti-American violence that swept far beyond Iran. In Saudi Arabia, possessor of the world's greatest reserves of oil and American dollars, a band of extreme religious zealots seized the Sacred Mosque in Mecca, the holiest shrine in all Islam. In Pakistan, a mob enraged by radio reports claiming that the U.S. had inspired the attack on the Mecca mosque stormed and set fire to the U.S. embassy. They left the modernistic, 30-acre compound a gutted ruin. Two Americans were killed; 90 others were rescued after seven hours of horror. For the U.S. the immediate issue remained the 49 hostages in Tehran. Concern about their fate far overshadowed any relief about the return of the 13 hostages--five white women and eight black men--who were freed by their captors and who made it home for Thanksgiving dinner. As the 13 stepped off the C-135 military jet that brought them into Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, dozens of relatives who had been flown there from all over the country rushed to embrace them. But the official welcoming could not be jubilant. Said Secretary of State Cyrus Vance: "Our relief that you are safe is muted by our concern for your colleagues who remain." [Despite intensive negotiations and an abortive rescue mission mounted in April 1980, the 52 American hostages, including the three trapped at the Iranian Foreign Ministry, were not released until noon on January 21, 1981, the moment when Carter's Administration ended.] </body> </article> </text>