The hostage crisis in Iran developed over a period of 444 days, during which a group of Iranian students took 66 diplomats and citizens of the United States of America (USA) hostage. November 1979 and lasted until January 20, 1981.
On October 22, 1979, the Iranian sah, Mohammad Reza Pahlevi, traveled to New York to undergo cancer treatment. On November 1, Iran's new leader, the Shiite Islamist cleric, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, led an Islamist revolution that sought a new government, arguing that the Sah was a "puppet" of US interests and that it should be deposed to impose a new government, a theocratic republic.
On November 4, the US embassy in Iran was surrounded by a group of about 500 Iranian students following the Islamist revolution (although the numbers vary between 300 and 2000). Fifty-two Americans were taken hostage for 444 days (from November 4, 1979 to January 20, 1981), while six diplomats managed to escape from the embassy during the takeover, which were refugee by the Canadian ambassador and his wife in his residence until his rescue (with a plan apart from the one designed for those left at the embassy). Three senior officials, business manager Bruce Laingen, deputy head of mission Victor L. Tomseth and Mike Howland, remained hostage in the Iranian Foreign Ministry. President Carter called the victims of the kidnapping "victims of terrorism and anarchy "and added that the United States was not going to yield to blackmail.
Often, the Islamist movement showed the hostages blindfolded to the local population and television cameras. Islamist rebels said captive citizens would be released only in exchange for Sha's extradition to Iran to be tried for "crimes against the Iranian people" in line with the words of the Islamist leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, a hard-line Shiite Islamist cleric , with a strongly anti-American rhetoric, repeatedly calling the US government "the Great Satan" and "the enemy of Islam."
