6. The Hostages Were Charged as Spies
The spirit of the revolution had a religious fervor that no one in Washington was prepared for handling. Many of the students involved in the seizure of the embassy spent weeks piecing together documents that had gone through the shredders to decipher the information that the diplomats had tried to destroy. They became convinced that the people working at the embassy were spies who were plotting to overthrow the revolutionary government and reinstate the shah as the leader of Iran. In a press conference, one of the students announced that those who had been taken were not innocent hostages but rather spies who were being apprehended for their crimes.
Other than freezing all of Iran’s assets, President Carter and his colleagues in Washington had no idea how to deal with a religious revolution, especially not on this scale. He determined that the use of military force would place a risk on the lives of the hostages so settled for trying to negotiate with Ayatollah Khomeini. Meanwhile, the hostages were enduring beatings, starvation, sleep deprivation, and other forms of inhumane treatment as part of their imprisonment. They soon resigned themselves to the fact that they would soon die at the ends of their captors.