Mohammad Homaeefar, journalist in the field of Iranian politics and Western Asia affairs
Imam Khamenei has consistently argued that the United States’ hostility toward the Iranian people “has nothing to do” with the US embassy takeover in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
For many observers in the West, the constant US-Iran tensions are often traced back to a single, dramatic event that occurred on November 4, 1979, when Iranian students stormed the US embassy in Tehran, commonly known as the “Spy Den”.
However, Imam Khamenei has strived tirelessly over the years to make it clear that this narrative is a distortion of the complex and longstanding history of the conflict between the two nations and that the incident is merely a reopened wound that originated some 26 years earlier.
For many Iranians, dismantling the Spy Den was an act of resistance against US hegemony and underscored an ideological shift toward the independence that the Islamic Revolution envisioned.
The founder of the Islamic Republic, Imam Khomeini, hailed the move as “the second revolution” that foiled US plots against Iran. The trove of classified documents uncovered by the students revealed those attempts.
In numerous speeches throughout the years, Imam Khamenei has stressed that the seeds of US animosities toward the Iranian nation were sown not in 1979 but in 1953, when a CIA-orchestrated coup overthrew Dr. Mohammad Mosaddegh, Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister, to reinstate the fugitive Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
According to the Leader, the United States had been hatching conspiracies to subjugate Iran at least since 1953, fostering public resentment across the country that culminated in the revolutionary fervor of 1979.
To understand Imam Khamenei’s perspective, we must look back to the early 1950s. In 1951, Prime Minister Mosaddegh nationalized the Iranian oil industry, taking control from the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.
This in turn infuriated the United Kingdom and raised concerns in the United States, which feared that Iranian nationalization efforts could encourage other countries to wrest control of their resources from Western companies.
For that reason and others, in August 1953, the CIA orchestrated a coup that removed Mosaddegh from power and reinstated the Shah, an invaluable asset for Washington, who would secure US interests in Iran for over two more decades.
“Mosaddegh’s government was a national one,” Imam Khamenei has repeatedly said in his speeches on the occasion, which was designated as National Day of Fighting Global Arrogance. “His problem with the Westerners was only the issue of oil; He was neither Hujjat al-Islam nor did he claim to be after Islam.”
The Leader has also argued that Mosaddegh wasn’t even hostile to the Americans and hoped that they would help him against the British, who sought to topple him.
“It is interesting to know that Mosaddegh’s government, which was overthrown by the Americans, had no enmity toward the Americans. He stood against the British and trusted the Americans; he hoped that the Americans would help him,” he said in a speech on October 31, 2012, days before the anniversary of the US embassy takeover. “They did that to such government.”
In his speeches, the Leader of the Islamic Revolution has also underscored that the 1953 coup fundamentally altered Iran’s trajectory, turning the country into what he describes as a playground for American and British interests.
According to him, this marked the beginning of a broader US strategy to control Iran, an agenda that persisted even after the Shah was overthrown. In that sense, he argues that the students’ storming of the US embassy was “indeed a defensive, appropriate, timely, and completely rational move.”
One notable statement from Imam Khamenei on November 2, 2016, reads: “The students’ move to seize the embassy was a triumphant reaction to all this wickedness; that is, it stopped the activities of the US, an arrogant and greedy superpower, inside the country; this is what revolution means.”
He has also placed great emphasis on the fact that the Western narrative surrounding the embassy takeover is a deliberate falsification of the history of Iran-US tensions.
In his latest speech on the occasion on November 2, 2024, he said: “There are hands at work to first raise doubts about this courageous and conscious move of the Iranian nation in confronting the world-devouring America and its agents in the region and then dismiss [the move]; we must not allow this. The historical memory of the Iranian nation rejects this.”
The truth that they are deliberately hiding, he continued, is that the US embassy was not just a place for diplomatic activity nor even gathering intelligence, but rather, it was a headquarters for plotting against the nascent Islamic Revolution and even against the blessed life of Imam Khomeini.
“Our youths weren’t initially aware of this and entered the embassy for another reason, but when they went there and obtained the embassy documents, they realized these things,” he said.
The Islamic Revolution was, in Imam Khamenei’s words, a historic response to decades of foreign dominance and an assertion of national sovereignty. As he has often expressed, the revolution’s fundamental goal was to re-establish Iran’s independence, freeing it from the grip of superpowers.
This emphasis on independence is central to Imam Khamenei’s discourse. He states that the revolution restored Iran’s agency, enabling it to act in the interest of its people rather than as a pawn in the strategies of foreign powers.
The revolution, according to the Leader, was a rejection of decades of American intervention and exploitation; a rejection of continuing to live under a government that did not represent the Iranian people but rather the interests of the United States. The Islamic Revolution was an end to that injustice, he has asserted.
Another recurring theme that stands out throughout Imam Khamenei’s speeches is the idea of “resistance”—a commitment to defying the US’s imperial ambitions. He describes this resistance as essential to preserving Iran’s sovereignty and protecting it from external exploitation.
In a speech on November 2, 2011, he quoted Imam Khomeini as saying that the embassy takeover was “a revolution greater than the first revolution”, arguing that when a nation resists and fights for its independence, no foreign power can counter it.
And that is precisely how, as the Leader goes on, Iranians expelled the Shah in the first revolution and expelled America in the second one—on November 4, 1979.
(The views expressed in this article are author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Khamenei.ir.)
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