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After radical students overthrew Iran's shah in 1979 and took hostages in the U.S. embassy, the Middle Eastern nation became a strident and blood-soaked adversary of what its new Islamic fundamentalist dictatorship has long called the "Great Satan."
Since then, Tehran has sponsored terrorism around the globe, including targeting the U.S. in multiple, high-profile instances. Former Reagan Justice Department Chief of Staff Mark Levin said Sunday there are at least 44 examples of Iran targeting Americans either directly or indirectly.
"The Iranian-Nazi regime … [has] murdered more than 1,000 Americans [and] relentlessly pursued nuclear weapons to use against us — they are genocidal warmongers," said Levin, an author, attorney and Fox News Channel host.
The stage for Iran's transformation from ally to enemy of the U.S. was set in the 1960s, when Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi began clashing with influential Islamic cleric Ruhollah Khomeini. The monarch infuriated the theocrat by liberalizing the national constitution to allow faiths other than Islam to be sworn into office on holy books of their choice.
Khomeini’s rhetoric from France, where he was exiled, intensified during the period known as the White Revolution, including misogynistic and xenophobic sermons and demands that Pahlavi be ousted.
With Pahlavi as a U.S.-aligned leader, this marked an early instance of antagonism by proxy. As protests engineered by Khomeini broke out in fall 1978, the shah declared martial law, and military police fired on a massive crowd of protesters.
Pahlavi and Empress Farah Pahlavi soon fled on a "vacation" to Egypt but never returned. By February 1979, Khomeini returned to Tehran with significant sectarian support.
Failed Carter strategy develops into hostage crisis
Carter National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski — the father of "Morning Joe" host Mika Brzezinski — coined the term "arc of crisis" and advanced an ultimately failed "Green Belt" strategy that supported an arc of largely unstable but fundamentalist regimes across the Middle East that were also viewed as oppositional to the Soviet Union.
Brzezinski’s envisioned buffer strategy soon collapsed when Khomeini proved to be just as anti-American as anti-Soviet.
In October 1979, after months of debate over whether to admit him to the U.S. amid the new turmoil in Iran, President Jimmy Carter relented and permitted the cancer-stricken shah to seek medical care in New York.
A map of Western strikes against Iran (Fox News)
That November, the group "Muslim Student Followers of the Imam’s Line" stormed the U.S. embassy, beginning 444 days of captivity for 52 American hostages.
The U.S. severed diplomatic ties the following April, and one rescue mission failed and left several U.S. servicemembers dead. The shah died that summer in Egypt, leaving Khomeini in full control of the government.
In what was seen as the final offense to Carter, Iran suddenly released the hostages minutes into President Ronald Reagan’s administration on Jan. 20, 1981.
President Jimmy Carter, left, and Shah Mohammed Pahlavi dine in Iran. (Bettmann/Getty Images)
On July 5, 1982, the years-long saga known as the Lebanon Hostage Crisis began with the systematic abductions of foreigners, including Americans, by Hezbollah and Iranian proxies in the Mideast country, according to United Against a Nuclear Iran.
That group, founded by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and former Ambassador Mark Wallace, maintains a comprehensive history of Iranian aggression on its website and is a nonpartisan policy organization formed to combat the threats posed by the Islamic Republic.
During the Lebanon Hostage Crisis, several victims spent years imprisoned by Hezbollah, where they were forced to undergo psychological and medical torture, including CIA Beirut Station Chief William Buckley, who was not related to the National Review founder of the same name.
Buckley was tortured for months by Dr. Aziz al-Abub, a Lebanese Hezbollah psychiatrist and medical expert who reportedly forced him to take phenothiazines and experimented on him to induce interrogation and make an example of him to the West.
US Naval asset map. (Fox News)
Buckley reportedly died in custody amid these experiments on June 3, 1985.
The CIA later memorialized him on its wall in Langley, Va., and Obama-era Director John Brennan said in a 2014 statement that "we remember Bill not for the manner in which he died but for the legacy he left behind. From his time as an Army lieutenant colonel to his tenure with the Agency, Bill inspired those around him to do great things despite often dangerous conditions."
The agency later caught up with the figurehead of the Hezbollah-linked Islamic Jihad terrorist group — carrying out what the Washington Institute described as a rare contemporary CIA assassination nearly 25 years later.
Imad Mughniyeh’s group had announced Buckley’s execution in October 1985, but the actual date was determined later, with allegations that he died not from execution but from the side effects of the medical torture he endured. Former hostage David Jacobsen told the institute that Buckley was often sick and delirious in his cell and ultimately died "drowning in his own lung fluids" after a bout of torture.
David Dodge, then-president of the American University in Beirut, was also kidnapped for about a year, and U.S. journalist Terry Anderson was held in captivity for more than six years.
Reagan-era bombings and murders of American servicemembers
Iran bombed the Beirut US Embassy in 1983 (Stringer/Reuters)
On April 18, 1983, an Iran-backed group seen as the predecessor to today’s Lebanese Hezbollah bombed the U.S. embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people, including 17 Americans.
That October, a suicide truck bomb linked to Iran hit a U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon, killing 241 servicemembers, in what remains the deadliest single day for the Corps since Iwo Jima.
According to the MEMRI translation of Khomeini's representative to Lebanon, Sayyed Issa Tabatabai’s interview with the IRNA: "I quickly went to Lebanon and provided what was needed in order to [carry out] martyrdom operations in the place where the Americans and Israelis were."
He added, "The efforts to establish [Hezbollah] started in [Lebanon's] Baalbek area, where members of [Iran's] Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) arrived. I had no part in establishing the [political] party [Hezbollah], but God made it possible for me to continue the military activity with the group that had cooperated with us prior to the [Islamic] Revolution's victory."
The MEMRI report continued, "It is noteworthy that the part of the interview in which Tabatabai acknowledged receiving Khomeini's fatwa ordering attacks on American and Israeli targets in Lebanon was removed by IRNA from its website shortly after publication. This is apparently because no official representative of Khomeini, the father of the Islamic Republic, or of Khamenei, Iran's Supreme Leader, had ever said that Iran had any involvement in ordering, planning and carrying out the massive bombings in Lebanon against U.S."
In 1985, Iran-backed Hezbollah hijacked Trans World Airlines (TWA) Flight 847 as it departed Athens. The hijackers collected IDs from the passengers and singled out U.S. Navy Seabee Robert Stethem of Waldorf, Md., mistaking him for a Marine and blaming him for involvement in the Lebanese Civil War.
The hijackers tortured Stethem as they flew to Beirut before shooting him dead, dumping him on the tarmac, and shooting him again.
In 1988, the USS Samuel B. Roberts struck an Iranian mine in the Persian Gulf and nearly sank. The Roberts had been escorting Kuwaiti oil tankers as a protective measure.
After the mines were matched to the Iranian ship Ajr, which had been captured by the Americans earlier that year, President Reagan sprang into retaliatory action.
Reagan’s operation destroyed two oil platforms reportedly used as Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) surveillance structures, leading Iran to begin attacking nonmilitary targets.
The mission also claimed two other Iranian ships and was considered the largest naval surface engagement since World War II.
