[15] The hostages were formally released into United States custody the day after the signing of the Algiers Accords, just minutes after American President Ronald Reagan was sworn into office.

[20][better source needed] In 1953, the CIA and MI6 helped Iranian royalists depose Mosaddegh in a military coup d'état codenamed Operation Ajax, allowing the Shah to extend his power.

[28] The Carter administration tried to mitigate anti-American feeling by promoting a new relationship with the de facto Iranian government and continuing military cooperation in hopes that the situation would stabilize.

[28] But in response to pressure from influential figures including former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Council on Foreign Relations Chairman David Rockefeller, the Carter administration decided to grant it.

A later study claimed that there had been no American plots to overthrow the revolutionaries, and that a CIA intelligence-gathering mission at the embassy had been "notably ineffectual, gathering little information and hampered by the fact that none of the three officers spoke the local language, Persian."

[65] According to scholar Daniel Pipes, writing in 1980, the Marxist-leaning leftists and the Islamists shared a common antipathy toward market-based reforms under the late Shah, and both subsumed individualism, including the unique identity of women, under conservative, though contrasting, visions of collectivism.

The Palestine Liberation Organization under Yasser Arafat provided personnel, intelligence liaisons, funding, and training for Khomeini's forces before and after the revolution and was suspected of playing a role in the embassy crisis.

By embracing the hostage-taking under the slogan "America can't do a thing," Khomeini rallied support and deflected criticism of his controversial theocratic constitution,[70] which was scheduled for a referendum vote in less than one month.

[71] The referendum was successful, and after the vote, both leftists and theocrats continued to use allegations of pro-Americanism to suppress their opponents: relatively moderate political forces that included the Iranian Freedom Movement, the National Front, Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Kazem Shariatmadari,[72][73] and later President Abolhassan Banisadr.

Revolutionary teams displayed secret documents purportedly taken from the embassy, sometimes painstakingly reconstructed after shredding,[69] in order to buttress their statement that the United States was trying to destabilize the new regime with the assistance of Iranian moderates who were in league with the U.S.

[78] According to the then United States Ambassador to Lebanon, John Gunther Dean, the 13 hostages were released with the assistance of the Palestine Liberation Organization, after Yassir Arafat and Abu Jihad personally traveled to Tehran to secure a concession.

"Naturally withdrawn" and looking "ill, old, tired, and vulnerable," Miele had become the butt of his guards' jokes, and they had rigged up a mock electric chair to emphasize the fate that awaited him.

[102] Other hostages described threats to boil their feet in oil (Alan B. Golacinski),[103] cut their eyes out (Rick Kupke),[104] or kidnap and kill a disabled son in America and "start sending pieces of him to your wife" (David Roeder).

[125] On Friday Brzezinski held a newly scheduled meeting of the National Security Council where the president authorized Operation Eagle Claw, a military expedition into Tehran to rescue the hostages.

"[125] Late in the afternoon of April 24, 1980, eight RH‑53D helicopters flew from the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz to a remote road serving as an airstrip in the Great Salt Desert of Eastern Iran, near Tabas.

Early the next morning, the remaining six helicopters met up with several waiting Lockheed C-130 Hercules transport aircraft at a landing site and refueling area designated "Desert One".

The report by Holloway's group pointed out that a cracked helicopter blade could have been used to continue the mission and that its likelihood of catastrophic failure would have been low for many hours, especially at lower flying speeds.

The report also concluded that "there were ways to pass the information" between the refueling station and the helicopter force "that would have small likelihood of compromising the mission" – in other words, that the ban on communication had not been necessary at this stage.

[129] In May 1980, the Joint Chiefs of Staff commissioned a Special Operations review group of six senior military officers, led by Adm. James L. Holloway III, to thoroughly examine all aspects of the rescue attempt.

In America, President Carter's political popularity and prospects for being re-elected in 1980 were further damaged after a television address on April 25 in which he explained the rescue operation and accepted responsibility for its failure.

[131] Three aircraft, outfitted with rocket thrusters to allow an extremely short landing and takeoff in the Shahid Shiroudi football stadium near the embassy, were modified under a rushed, top-secret program known as Operation Credible Sport.

The Iranian ministry of foreign affairs stressed that the United States government was requested to "announce its response as soon as possible" and "to inform the world" of the American answer to the hostage release conditions".

In another outwardly downbeat note yesterday, the department revealed that Deputy Secretary of State Warren M. Christopher, in a telephone message from Algiers, said that "serious problems continue to exist between the two sides."

Of principal concern to the Carter administration, the sources said, is that the linchpin of an agreement -- arrangements for transferring part of the estimated $8 to $14 billion in frozen Iranian assets held by the United States -- will take several weeks, or possibly months, to bring to the point that Iran feels sufficiently confident about U.S. faith to let the hostages go.

From Newburgh, they traveled by bus to the United States Military Academy at West Point and stayed at the Thayer Hotel for three days, receiving a heroes' welcome all along the route.

They originally won the case when Iran failed to provide a defense, but the State Department then tried to end the lawsuit,[159] fearing that it would make international relations difficult.

[161] The Guardian reported in 2006 that a group called the Committee for the Commemoration of Martyrs of the Global Islamic Campaign had used the embassy to recruit "martyrdom seekers": volunteers to carry out operations against Western and Israeli targets.

[174] The Humanitarian Service Medal was awarded to the servicemen of Joint Task Force 1–79, the planning authority for Operation Rice Bowl/Eagle Claw, who participated in the rescue attempt.

[178][179] In 1992, Gary Sick, the former national security adviser to Ford and Carter, presented the strongest accusations in an editorial that appeared in The New York Times, and others, including former Iranian president Abolhassan Banisadr, repeated and added to them.

[180] After twelve years of varying media attention, both houses of the United States Congress held separate inquiries and concluded that credible evidence supporting the allegation was absent or insufficient.