Takeover
Around 6:30 a.m. on November 4, the ringleaders gathered between 300 and 500 selected students, thereafter known as Muslim Student Followers of the Imam's Line, and briefed them on the battle plan. A female student was given a pair of metal cutters to break the chains locking the embassy's gates, and she hid them beneath her chador.[34]
At first the students' plan to only make a symbolic occupation, release statements to the press and leave when government security forces came to restore order, was reflected in placards saying "Don't be afraid. We just want to set-in." When the embassy guards brandished firearms, the protesters retreated, one telling the Americans, "We don't mean any harm."[35] But as it became clear the guards would not use deadly force and that a large angry crowd had gathered outside the compound to cheer the occupiers and jeer the hostages, the occupation changed.[36] According to one embassy staff member, buses full of demonstrators began to appear outside the embassy shortly after the Muslim Student Followers of the Imam's Line broke through the gates.[37]
As Ayatollah Musavi Khoeyniha had hoped, Khomeini supported the takeover. According to Foreign Minister Ebrahim Yazdi, when he, Yazdi came to Qom to tell the Imam about the incident, Khomeini told the minister to "go and kick them out". But later that evening, back in Tehran, the minister heard on the radio that Imam Khomeini had issued a statement supporting the seizure and calling it "the second revolution", and the embassy an "American spy den in Tehran".[38]
The occupiers bound and blindfolded the embassy Marines and staff and paraded them in front of photographers. In the first couple of days many of the embassy staff who had snuck out of the compound or not been there at the time of the takeover were rounded up by Islamists and returned as hostages.[39] Six American diplomats did however avoid capture and found refuge at the nearby Canadian and Swiss embassies in Tehran for three months (Canadian caper). They fled Iran using Canadian passports on January 28, 1980.[40]