Operation Eagle Claw Essay

“It was raining moderately at the time. We were taken back to the compound, being pushed and hurried along the way and forced to put our hands above our heads and then marched to the Embassy residence. After arriving at the residence I had my hands tied behind my back so tightly with nylon cord that circulation was cut off.” This is an actual diary entry from an Iranian hostage, Robert Odee. The hostages were held captive for 444 days. They were held captive by Iranian students.

Iran’s newly elected prime minister, a European-educated nationalist named Muhammad Mossadegh, announced a plan to nationalize the country’s oil industry. In response to these policies, the American C.I.A. and the British intelligence service devised a secret plan

to overthrow Mossadegh. The new leader was a member of Iran’s royal family named Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi. The Shah’s government was secular, anti-communist and pro-Western. In exchange for tens of millions of dollars in foreign aid, he returned 80 percent of Iran’s oil reserves to the Americans and the British. many Iranians bitterly resented what they saw as American intervention in their affairs. The Shah turned out to be a brutal, arbitrary dictator whose secret police (known as the SAVAK) tortured and murdered thousands of people. Meanwhile, the Iranian government spent billions of dollars on American-made weapons while the Iranian economy suffered. A group of students demanded the extradition of the Shaw from the United States.
Iran has maintained a narrative that the hostages were treated well, but that is not true. Not all the hostages were treated the same. The two women, Ann Swift and Kathryn Koob, said they were treated "correctly" by their captors, but others, including Al Golacinski, John Limbert and Rick Kupke, were subject to a mock execution, where they were awakened in the middle of the night, forced to strip to their underwear and marched to a room in the basement where their guards made it seem they were about to be executed by firing squad. The guards fired their weapons, but they were not loaded. Then the guards laughed.
The immediate cause of this action was President Jimmy Carter’s decision to allow Iran’s deposed Shah, a pro-Western autocrat who had been expelled from his country some months before, to come to the United States for cancer treatment.

Carter decided to launch a risky military rescue mission known as Operation Eagle Claw. The operation was supposed to send an elite rescue team into the embassy compound. However, a severe desert sandstorm on the day of the mission caused several helicopters to malfunction, including one that veered into a large transport plane during takeoff. Eight American servicemen were killed in the accident, and Operation Eagle Claw was aborted.
Many Historians believed that the Hostage Crisis cost Jimmy Carter his second term of presidency. President Carter’s inability to resolve the problem made him look like a weak and ineffectual leader. At the same time, his intense focus on bringing the hostages home kept him away from the campaign trail.
The hostages were freed on Jan. 20, 1981, Iran released 52 Americans who had been held hostage for 444 days, minutes after the presidency had passed from Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan. The hostages were placed on a plane in Tehran as Reagan delivered his inaugural address. “The voice came over the Algerian plane’s speaker:”You are now leaving Iranian air space!” What a cheer went up from the American hostages on the plane! This was the moment for which we had waited 444 days. Now we knew we were really

free!”