Americans Held Hostage.

• Author: SCHAUMBURG, RON

On Inauguration Day 1981, a nightmare ended for 52 U.S. citizens in Iran

For more than a year, they lived with a knife at the throat. Half a world away from home, they wondered if they would ever return.

This week marks the 20th anniversary of the end of their ordeal. On January 20, 1981, 52 U.S. citizens were released after being held hostage for 444 days by revolutionaries in Iran. Employees in the U.S. embassy there, they had been captured in an attack that shattered the rules of diplomacy. At home, their fate had become a national obsession, affecting a presidential election and raising urgent questions: What could be done about their plight? And was it partly America's own fault?

For five hundred years, oil-rich Iran had been ruled by powerful kings called Shahs. After World War II, the U.S. had supported the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, as an ally against Communism. When he was overthrown in 1953, a coup secretly backed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) helped him regain his throne.

For the next 25 years, the Shah spent billions of dollars trying to modernize Iran and buying weapons, while most Iranians lived in poverty. Hundreds of political opponents were tortured or killed by the Shah's secret police. Most Iranians practice Islam, a religion whose teachings clash with Western ways, and many resented the Shah's modernization.

In January 1979, a revolution forced the Shah to flee the country. The revolt was led by followers of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (ko-MAY-nee), an exiled Islamic religious leader. (Ayatollah, a title of respect, means "sign of God.") Khomeini returned to lead a revolutionary government based on Islamic fundamentalism. He despised the U.S., which he called "the Great Satan."

Later that year, Democratic President Jimmy Carter let the exiled Shah enter the U.S. for cancer treatment. The action enraged Iranians, who wanted the Shah to stand trial in Iran.

On November 4, young Islamic militants stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran, Iran's capital. They captured 66 people, including military personnel, government officials, and staffers. They blind-folded them and held them prisoner. Iran's government declared:

Today's move by a group of our compatriots is a natural reaction to the U.S. government's indifference to the hurt feelings of the Iranian people about the presence of the deposed Shah, who is in the United States under the pretext of illness.

In the next weeks, some hostages were beaten...