The history of US-Iranian relations
Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran, shakes hands with a US Air Force general officer prior to his departure from the United States.
On November 4, 1979, during the Carter administration, Iranian revolutionaries stormed the American embassy in Tehran and took dozens of US diplomats and marines captive. They held them for more than a year. Relations between the two countries were destroyed.
To many Americans it seemed as if the confrontation came out of nowhere. That's not the way Iranians saw it. They remembered 1953, the year the CIA organized a coup in their country. It resulted in the overthrow of Iran's prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh. Iran has never forgotten that injustice, just as the United States has never forgiven Iran for taking Americans hostage. In our four-part series The World's Jeb Sharp takes an in depth look at the history of US policy towards Iran.
Check out the four-part series "US-Iranian Relations." (It first aired on The World in November 2004)