When Iranian students chanting anti-American slogans gathered in front of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran at about 10:30 on the morning of November 4, 1979, it seemed that they would be following other groups heading to a planned demonstration at the nearby university.
Instead the crowd surged toward the embassy’s front gates. Young women pulled bolt cutters out of their hijabs.
Local security officers “melted away,” newly arrived U.S. diplomat John Limbert would later recall. “The gates were nothing like today’s security arrangements, the barriers were nothing like you see today in embassies, with all the high-tech stuff and the razor wire and the bollards and all that sort of thing. It was essentially an ornamental fence.”
The protesters broke a window in the main building, removing metal bars, while outnumbered U.S. marines fired tear gas in a vain effort to stop them. Limbert and other embassy workers rushed to the second floor and sheltered behind a steel door, with some destroying sensi…
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