On Nov. 4, 1979, radical Iranian students seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, ultimately holding 52 American diplomats hostage for 444 days. I covered the incident in detail in Dancing with the Devil, a history of U.S. diplomacy with rogue regimes, utilizing not only American sources but Iranian ones as well. Bottom line, the reason why the hostage crisis occurred, and why it lasted so long was a tragedy of errors.

Too often, the Islamic Revolution and the embassy seizure are conflated in the American mind, but the reality is they occurred more than nine months apart. It is essential to understand why Iranian radicals attacked the embassy in November 1979 rather than the previous February when revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned and ended the shah’s rule.