Abstract
On the day of the seizure of the US Embassy and its staff, requests for help were repeatedly made by the US Chargé d’Affaires, who was then at the Iranian Foreign Ministry, and also by the US government to the Iranian Chargé d’Affaires in Washington. However, no Iranian police or soldiers were sent in time to release the Embassy staff or afford protection to them and the Embassy. On 7 November, a former Attorney-General of the United States, Ramsey Clark, was instructed to go to Iran to deliver to Ayatollah Khomeini a message of protest from President Carter. In response, Tehran radio broadcast on the same day a message from Ayatollah Khomeini forbidding members of the Revolutionary Council and government officials to meet the American representatives. In this message Khomeini asserted that ‘the US Embassy in Tehran is our enemies’ centre of espionage against our sacred Islamic movement’. He then made the first official demand to the United States: ‘Should the United States hand over to Iran the deposed Shah … and give up espionage against our movement, the way to talks would be opened on the issue of certain relations which are in the interest of the nation.’1
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Notes
Quoted in Steven Rattner, ‘The Economic Warfare Was Also Psychological’, New York Times, 18 November 1979.
Ian Mather, ‘Iran May Face Sanctions Campaign’, Observer Foreign News Service, No. 39, 222 (13 November 1979), p. 1.
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© 1992 Makio Miyagawa
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Miyagawa, M. (1992). Action Taken by the United States. In: Do Economic Sanctions Work?. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22400-5_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22400-5_8
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