According to the report, in turn, Carter and his administration helped Khomeini and made sure that the Imperial Iranian army would not launch a military coup.
The Shah received significant American support during his reign. He frequently made state visits to the White House, and received praise from numerous American presidents. The Shah's close ties to Washington and his modernization policies soon angered some Iranians, especially the hardcore Islamic conservatives.
On November 4, 1979, Iranian militants stormed the United States Embassy in Tehran and took approximately seventy Americans captive. This terrorist act triggered the most profound crisis of the Carter presidency and began a personal ordeal for Jimmy Carter and the American people that lasted 444 days.
On 16 January 1979, Pahlavi left the country and went into exile as the last Iranian monarch, leaving behind his duties to Iran's Regency Council and Shapour Bakhtiar, the opposition-based Iranian prime minister.
Iran was caught in the larger battle between the US and USSR during the Cold War, and became an important ally for the US. Iran shared a border with the Soviet Union, and so was logistically important. It also had oil. So the US supported the Shah of Iran, even though he was a dictator because he was anti-communist.
[T]he United States actively supported the Iraqi war effort by supplying the Iraqis with billions of dollars of credits, by providing U.S. military intelligence and advice to the Iraqis, and by closely monitoring third country arms sales to Iraq to make sure that Iraq had the military weaponry required.
Judging Mosaddegh to be unamenable and fearing the growing influence of the communist Tudeh, UK prime minister Winston Churchill and the Eisenhower administration decided in early 1953 to overthrow Iran's government.
The Muslim Student Followers of the Imam's Line demanded that Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi return to Iran for trial and execution. The U.S. maintained that the Shah – who was to die less than a year later, in July 1980 – had come to America for medical attention.
Its causes continue to be the subject of historical debate and are believed to have stemmed partly from a conservative backlash opposing the westernization and secularization efforts of the Western-backed Shah, as well as from a more popular reaction to social injustice and other shortcomings of the ancien régime.
On November 4, 1979, Iranian students seized the embassy and detained more than 50 Americans, ranging from the Chargé d'Affaires to the most junior members of the staff, as hostages. The Iranians held the American diplomats hostage for 444 days.
The United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran have had no formal diplomatic relationship since that date. Switzerland is the U.S. protecting power and provides limited consular services to U.S. citizens in Iran. Iran has no embassy in Washington, D.C.
The Iran hostage crisis was an international crisis that began in November 1979 when militants seized 66 U.S. citizens in Tehrān and held 52 of them hostage for more than a year. The crisis took place in the wake of Iranian Revolution (1978–79).
Since the Iranian revolution of 1979, Iran has had some difficult relations with Western countries, especially the United States. Iran has been under constant US unilateral sanctions, which were tightened under the presidency of Bill Clinton. Iran has had a civilian nuclear program since before the 1979 revolution.
There are many claims that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has repeatedly intervened in the internal affairs of Iran, from the Mossadegh coup of 1953 to the present time. The CIA is said to have collaborated with the last Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
U.S. passports are valid for travel to Iran. However, the Iranian government does not recognize dual nationality and will treat U.S.-Iranian dual nationals solely as Iranian citizens.
In other words, the Iranian Revolution turned out to be successfully nonviolent because, unlike previous revolutions, it was a global affair in which the revolutionaries intentionally and strategically sought to bring the world into their struggle against the state.
The Pahlavi family today
No one in the Pahlavi family has returned to Iran since they left. A cancer-stricken Mohammad Reza Pahlavi died in 1980 and is buried in Egypt. He had five children — one daughter with his first wife and four children with his third wife, Farah, who lives in France.
Islam was brought to Iran via Arab-Islamic conquest in 650 AD and has played a shifting, anomalous role in this nation-state ever since.
In 2016, the BBC published a report which stated that the administration of United States President Jimmy Carter (1977–1981) had extensive contact with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his entourage in the prelude to the Iranian Revolution of 1979.
The official justification for the arms shipments was that they were part of an operation to free seven American hostages being held in Lebanon by Hezbollah, an Islamist paramilitary group with Iranian ties connected to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
August 19, 1953: Massive protests broke out across Iran, leaving almost 300 dead in firefights in the streets of Tehran. Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh was soon overthrown in a coup orchestrated by the CIA and British intelligence. The Shah was reinstalled as Iran's leader.
Early Iranians had their own regional elected councils. By the time of the Medians, the city-states were administered in a democratic fashion. During the Achaemenids, in a debate over the constitution of Iran, Otanes argued in favor of democracy, however he did not succeed.
The CIA undertook Operation PBSuccess to overthrow the democratically elected Jacobo Árbenz in the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état. Carlos Castillo Armas replaced him as a military dictator. Guatemala was subsequently ruled by a series of military dictatorships for decades.