 There is a long history to the Iran Hostage Crisis that really begins in the middle part of the 20th century. Iran emerged from World War II under the control of a monarch who was known as the Shah. The Shah means king in Persian. So the king of Iran or the Shah of Iran was a man named Mohammad Reza Patlavi. He emerged from World War II as the leader of Iran in a position of partnership and friendliness toward the United States and other Western powers. Now, about five years after World War II in 1950-51, the Iranian people rallied behind a nationalist politician named Mohammad Motsudak, who became prime minister of Iran in 1951 and who challenged the Shah for power and control in the country. There was a brief period of political turmoil which ended in 1953 when the U.S. government and the British government sent their intelligence agencies into Iran to overthrow Mohammad Motsudak and restore the Shah to full power. That was seen at the time by the Eisenhower administration as a great foreign policy success because it restored Iran to a friendly power and stabilized Iran for the foreseeable future. For 26 years, in fact, the Shah remained in power as a friend and partner and ally of the United States government, and he provided certain goods to the U.S. such as access to affordable oil and a sense of military security in the vital region known as the Persian Gulf. Now, the action of 1953 also planted some deep seeds of resentment against the United States in the hearts and minds of the people of Iran. They lived for a generation under the military boot of the Shah's regime, if you will. They were oppressed by the Shah, kept out of political power. But gradually, especially as the 1970s passed, the Iranian people began to rally behind revolutionary leaders like the Ayatollah Khomeini. The Ayatollah Khomeini was a religious figure who did not live in Iran but actually lived in exile, first in Iraq and eventually in France. And from exile, he began to organize a revolutionary movement within the country through the network of religious leaders who resided throughout the state. Push came to shove at a revolution erupted in the late 1970s that led to the overthrow of the Shah in early 1979 in the heroic return of the Ayatollah Khomeini to Tehran a couple of days later. The Ayatollah Khomeini then spent the remainder of 1979 building a religion-based, a theocratic state, a new government in Iran that would be based on the precipice of a certain brand of the Islamic religion and one that would be completely purged of any influence of the old, royalist government of the Shah. That regime had an anti-American flavor to it because the Americans had been the best friends of the hated enemy, the Shah. Naturally, there was going to be tension between the new Iranian government and the U.S. government. Now, for several months after the revolution from January 1979 to November 1979, although tense, the relationship was stable, the embassy in Tehran remained open, the U.S. diplomats continued to engage in day-to-day business with the Iranian government and in Washington, D.C., the Iranian embassy continued likewise to engage in routine business with the U.S. government. The militant students were essentially a group of young, non-official, everyday students, young people, young adults, workers who had been so fired up by the Iranian revolution that they spontaneously took to the streets to demonstrate and protest and shout angry slogans against the U.S. government. It appears, and here we have to engage in some guesswork because this is a mob activity, there's not a real good document trail. We don't know exactly what they were thinking, but it appears that they thought that they could demonstrate against the embassy and maybe somehow embarrass the U.S. government by crashing through the walls of the embassy and taking over the place and maybe rifling through the files, maybe trying to capture some secret documents, maybe embarrassing Uncle Sam. They would do that simply as a way of expressing their anger, eventing their frustrations, of bloodying the nose, if you will, of the U.S. government. It does appear that they fully expected that the Khomeini government would honor the principle of diplomatic immunity and would immediately use police and military forces to end any such demonstration. But what they found was that the Khomeini reacted to the events of November 4th by giving them his blessing, by saying that he was glad that these proud sons of Iran had invaded the den of spies that was represented by the U.S. embassy and had embarrassed the U.S. government. That surprised them, pleased them and surprised them, but then put them in a position where they felt they had some political power and some political influence and they certainly had the ability then to keep the hostages in captivity for a prolonged period of time.