WASHINGTON — The Bush administration demanded Thursday that the Iranian government clarify the role of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the 1979 siege of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran after several former hostages declared that they recognized the president-elect as one of their captors.
U.S. officials also pledged to conduct their own investigation into Ahmadinejad's past after several of the 52 Americans who were held hostage said he was a key figure in their 444-day ordeal.
"The Iranian government ... has an obligation to speak definitively concerning these questions that have been raised in public," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters.
McCormack, White House spokesman Scott McClellan, and national security advisor Stephen J. Hadley said in separate briefings that the U.S. would launch its own efforts to determine whether Ahmadinejad had a role in the crisis.
"We need to get the facts," Hadley told reporters.
The president-elect's staff on Thursday denied that he had any active involvement in the embassy standoff. An aide, Meisan Rowhani, told Associated Press that Ahmadinejad recently said he had been against targeting the U.S. Embassy because he "believed that if we do that the world will swallow us."
Dozens of students, mainly from Tehran's Polytechnic University, stormed the embassy 10 months after the ouster of the shah of Iran, protesting his admission to the U.S. for medical treatment. Some accounts said the students were apparently spurred by concern that the Islamic Revolution was already unraveling.
Rowhani said Ahmadinejad dropped his opposition to the embassy takeover after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the revolution, approved it. But Ahmadinejad did not participate in the hostage taking or the events that followed, Rowhani said.
The crisis ended with the release of all of the hostages.
In Iran, the allegation that Ahmadinejad might have been a hostage taker is unlikely to spark public outrage. Some participants in the embassy takeover went on to hold key positions in the government and parliament.
Some have become reformists, speaking out against the Islamic regime led by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who inherited Khomeini's position of supreme leader.
But for Americans, the hostage crisis was one of the most painful public dramas in recent times and still influences Iranian-American relations. The countries have had no formal diplomatic ties since the takeover.
