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Iranian revolution revisited 30 years after it changed the world - -

By Tim Reid

February 7, 2009

Iranian Revolution revisited 30 years after it changed the world

On the morning of Sunday, November 4, 1979, John Limbert, a Farsi-speaking political officer at the US Embassy in Tehran, was planning to slip out for for a quick haircut. He looked out of a window towards the front gate of the embassy to see a large crowd of young protesters, chanting antiAmerican slogans, but thought little of it. It had been a daily occurrence, especially since President Carter’s fateful decision a month earlier to allow the deposed Shah of Iran entry into the United States.

What Mr Limbert could not know then was that he was about to find himself a central character in a 444-day ordeal that has become a watershed moment in modern American history.

Nine months after the Iranian Revolution that 30 years ago this week saw the return to Tehran of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, those young radical Iranian students were about to give America its first confrontation with modern Islamic fundamentalism. The storming of the US Embassy that day, which led to 52 American diplomats being held hostage until January 20, 1981, ushered in a new era of conflict in the region, and hostile relations between Washington and Tehran that still strikes at the heart of US foreign policy today.

“Instead of shouting and moving on, as they did each day, they started to jump over the walls and into the compound,” Mr Limbert, now a professor of international affairs at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, told The Times. “We thought the Iranian authorities would tell them to get out. But nothing happened.”