Iranians Commemorate 1979 US Embassy Takeover

Thousands of Iranian demonstrators have taken to Taleghani Avenue, the street facing the former U.S. embassy in Tehran, to mark their National Day of Fight Against Global Arrogance. The rally, which commemorates the students who led the takeover of the building on Sept. 3, 1979, also served as a unified denouncement of U.S.-imposed sanctions on the Islamic Republic.

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Demonstrators, mostly students, waved flags and signs, some which read “Stop Terrorism” and “Shut up Trump,” to show their discontent toward the hardline stance taken by the U.S. government.

After Iranian students seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979, they spent years painstakingly reassembling the intelligence reports shredded by the CIA officers who were some of the last workers captured, according to the BBC.

A few months after the toppling of the U.S.-backed government of the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Iranian students, believing the U.S. embassy was being used as cover for espionage activity aimed at overthrowing the Islamic Republic, stormed the building.

Though U.S. diplomats and CIA officers shredded thousands of documents before the students entered the building, the Iranian researchers spent years piecing each paper slice back together. 

This included gathering hundreds of thousands of shredded paper from bins, laying them on the floor and incorporating numbering and indexing systems to reassemble the secret documents.

Seven years of laborious un-shredding resulted in “Documents From the Espionage Den,” 60 volumes of published proof that the U.S. embassy was, in fact, used as a CIA hotbed to recruit ayatollahs, exiles, high-level Iranian officials, foreign journalists and diplomats as paid or “unwitting” agents in a quest to overthrow the Islamic Republic, according to the New York Times.

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''There was too much of a collection of documents that had to be destroyed in too short a time,'' said former CIA director William Colby, adding that ''One of the basic rules is burn the damn stuff before you get into trouble.''

Speaking about the students who stormed the U.S. embassy, Iran's former chief delegate to the United Nations, Rajaie-Khorassani said, ''I don't know if the intention of these boys is to prevent any movement toward the United States, but it is one of the inevitable consequences ... They keep the kettle boiling.”

A recent survey conducted by the Afkar Iranian Center, a public opinion polling institute, indicates that 94.5 percent of Iranians do not trust the United States. The poll, which was conducted between Oct. 7 and 13 in Iran's provincial capitals, included 863 adult respondents, according to the Tasnim news agency.

A further breakdown of the survey concluded that 60.60 percent of Iranians do not trust the United States “at all” and 21.3 percent have very low trust in it.