It was a typical hot and humid July day just outside Washington, D.C. By 11 a.m., it was already 87 degrees but felt nearly 100. Ali Akbar Tabatabaei was at home in Bethesda, Maryland. The doorbell rang. Tabatabaei answered, and a man dressed as a postman shot Tabatabaei several times in the abdomen. Within an hour, the charismatic former press attache at the Iranian Embassy under the shah was dead.

The assassin, a Muslim convert named David Belfield, fled to Iran, where he continues to live today. (Decades later, he would play a role in the kidnapping and murder of another American, former FBI agent Robert Levinson.) Belfield’s controllers worked just a couple of miles away in the Iranian Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue. Even though Iranian revolutionaries had already been holding 52 U.S. diplomats hostage for eight months, President Jimmy Carter refused to sever relations. Tabatabaei’s murder changed that. While revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini encouraged the fiction that Iranian terrorism and its rejection of diplomatic norms were just the actions of mobs motivated by righteous anger against America, the evidence of the Iranian Embassy and Khomeini’s asylum for the murderer was too much even for Carter to ignore.