444 days and a Gulf full of mines
Published 4 October 2026
The shah ruled Iran from the 1953 restoration until January 1979, when he fled. Britannica's timeline credits his exiled opponent, Ruhollah Khomeini, with orchestrating the revolution from a Paris suburb through recorded messages delivered to the Iranian masses. On 1 February Khomeini flew home and was proclaimed the leader of the Iranian Revolution. He would rule until his death in 1989, and he would call the United States the "Great Satan."
The revolution had its own American subplot. In October 1979 Washington allowed the ailing shah to enter the country for medical treatment. On Sunday, 4 November 1979, some 3,000 Iranian college students stormed the American embassy in Tehran and took 66 Americans hostage. Some were released. The remaining 52 were held for 444 days, which made Iran front-of-mind for the American public in a way it had never been before. Ted Koppel ended each nightly broadcast with a count of the days. The hostages were freed on 20 January 1981, moments after Ronald Reagan was sworn in, and an April 1980 rescue mission had already ended in disaster when a helicopter and a plane collided, killing eight American service members.
A war with a very long shadow
In 1980 Iraq invaded Iran. The war pitted Saddam Hussein against Khomeini and raised the profile of Iran's then-president, Ali Khamenei, who would become supreme leader after Khomeini's death. The United States supported Iraq, which used chemical weapons on the Iranians. Britannica notes that Iran, which by some estimates lost a million citizens, accepted a United Nations-brokered deal in July 1988. A million is an estimate, not a count, and the file treats it that way. What matters here is that a generation of Iranian officials who now run the state, and a population that remembers the shortages and the funerals, took one lesson from the eight years: wars with outside powers are survived, not won.
The war did not stay on land. By 1982 the ground fighting had settled into a stalemate, and the conflict leaked into the Persian Gulf. Britannica's account of the Tanker War dates the shipping fight to May 1984 through the end of the war, and traces it to an Iraqi strike on a Turkish tanker loading at Kharg Island, Iran's main export terminal, in May 1982. Iraq stepped up attacks around Kharg in 1984, mostly by air but also with naval mines, and Iran began answering in kind. By 1985 an Iraqi missile had sunk a Liberian tanker, the Neptunia, carrying 60,000 tons of kerosene.
Iran then went after the ships of Gulf states that had backed Iraq. Kuwait started talks with the Soviet Union about protecting its tankers, which concentrated minds in Washington, and the diplomacy ended with an American deal instead. In July 1987 the United States Navy began escorting reflagged Kuwaiti tankers in Operation Earnest Will, the largest naval convoy operation since World War II. The mission's real problem was mines. Iranian mine-laying outpaced American minesweeping, and in one notable early incident a reflagged tanker, the Bridgeton, survived hitting a mine while its American escorts, apparently unprepared for a minefield, followed behind it for the rest of the voyage.
Direct clashes followed. On 3 July 1988 the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air flight 655, having mistaken it for a fighter jet. All 290 people aboard died. Britannica says the tragedy hastened a war-weary Iran to accept the UN-brokered ceasefire. The Tanker War formally ended on 20 August 1988.
Read that paragraph again with the 2026 file in mind. Mines laid faster than they can be cleared. Escorts that discover the minefield at the same moment as the tanker. A passenger jet hit by mistake. The vocabulary of the summer of 2026 was not invented in 2026. It was a revival.
The terrorism list and the arms-for-hostages detour
In October 1983 truck bombs destroyed the American marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 marines and sailors, and a second attack killed 58 French soldiers. Islamic Jihad, believed to be affiliated with Hezbollah, a Lebanese militant group backed by Iran, took credit. The State Department put Iran on its state sponsors of terrorism list the following year, and the Arms Control Association dates it to 19 January 1984, noting it effectively imposed sweeping sanctions.
The most absurd chapter of the decade came next. Despite an American arms embargo, Reagan administration officials arranged to sell weapons to Iran to try to secure the release of American hostages held by Hezbollah, then used the proceeds to fund Nicaraguan contra rebels after Congress cut that funding off. Britannica says the scandal consumed much of Reagan's second term. Hezbollah killed two of the hostages and released the rest over several years. In other words, within a few years the same government had armed Iran, sanctioned Iran, convoyed tankers against Iran, and shot down an Iranian airliner. Iranian officials can be forgiven for finding American consistency a bit hard to read.
The thaw that wasn't
The 1990s added sanctions rather than relief. Congress passed the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act on 5 August 1996, penalizing foreign and American investment above $20 million a year in Iran's energy sector. Britannica's verdict is that the sanctions had little effect on Iranian government behavior. A short thaw followed at the end of the Clinton administration: in 1998 Albright met Iran's deputy foreign minister, the highest-level meeting between the two governments in almost two decades, and after the 11 September attacks the two countries cooperated on an agreement to let displaced Afghans return home.
The thaw ended with a speech. In the 2002 State of the Union, George W. Bush put Iran in an "axis of evil" with Iraq and North Korea. By August of that year the nuclear file had opened, and it is the subject of the next chapter.
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