Do you really think Iranian terrorists would have taken Americans hostage...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Zepezauer_Mark/Iran_Boomerang.html
Two things happened to help the conservative mullahs strengthen their grip on power: the hostage crisis and the war with Iraq. In February 1979 the U.S. embassy was seized by militant Muslim students, angered when the Shah was admitted to an American hospital for medical treatment. Against President Carter's better judgement (and the vehement warnings from the U.S. embassy in Tehran), the Shah's friends, Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller, successfully lobbied to bring him to the U.S. Iranians feared a repeat of the 1953 CIA plot that re-installed the monarchy (though in reality Reza Pahlavi was rapidly dying of cancer). Shredded documents from the "nest of spies" were painstakingly reassembled, making public the details of CIA collaboration with the Shah's secret police. Nationalist sentiments were further inflamed when the U.S. Iaunched a failed military rescue of its 53 hostages; the regime played it up as the first battle of a planned counter-coup, foiled by Islamist troops (though in reality the U.S. helicopters had crashed in an unexpected sandstorm).
In frustration, the U.S. cozied up to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. He was thirsty for revenge over a 1975 territorial dispute with the Shah. The U.S. hoped that a war with Iraq would force the Khomeini regime to bargain for the hostages to gain spare parts for the Shah's U.S.-built arsenal. Both sides figured the war would be short and relatively painless; in reality it would last eight years and cost over a million lives.
Khomeini was indeed willing to bargain for military equipment. But unfortunately for the Carter administration, according to investigative journalist Robert Parry, the bargain was made with a group of ex-CIA officers who supported the Reagan-Bush presidential campaign. Abolhassan Bani-Sadr was the civilian president of Iran in the first year of the revolution. In his memoirs, he explained that Khomeini's anti-American rhetoric was just show business for the masses, and that behind the scenes the Ayatollah had no problems dealing with the "Great Satan." For instance, in 1983 the U.S. secretly provided lists of leftist infiltrators in the Iranian government, which Khomeini used for mass roundups and executions.
According to numerous witnesses, representatives of the mullahs met in Paris with William Casey (later named CIA director) and other Reagan campaign officials in October 1980.37 This was done behind Carter's back and also behind Bani-Sadr's back, and though both caught wind of what was happening, they were unable to stop it. Iran agreed to keep the hostages until Carter was defeated for reelection, in return for $40 million in military equipment. Shipments of U.S. arms through Israel commenced shortly after Reagan was inaugurated. About the same time Bani Sadr was forced from office and fled Iran under threat of assassination. The nationalist fervor surrounding the embassy seizure allowed Khomeini and the mullahs to purge centrists from the government; soon clerics controlled both the judiciary and the military.