After radical students overthrew Iran’s shah in 1979 and took hostages in the U.S. embassy, the Middle Eastern nation became a strident and blood-soaked adversary of what its new Islamic fundamentalist dictatorship has long called the ‘Great Satan.’

Since then, Tehran has sponsored terrorism around the globe, including targeting the U.S. in multiple, high-profile instances. Former Reagan Justice Department Chief of Staff Mark Levin said Sunday there are at least 44 examples of Iran targeting Americans either directly or indirectly.

‘The Iranian-Nazi regime … [has] murdered more than 1,000 Americans [and] relentlessly pursued nuclear weapons to use against us — they are genocidal warmongers,’ said Levin, an author, attorney and Fox News Channel host.

The stage for Iran’s transformation from ally to enemy of the U.S. was set in the 1960s, when Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi began clashing with influential Islamic cleric Ruhollah Khomeini. The monarch infuriated the theocrat by liberalizing the national constitution to allow faiths other than Islam to be sworn into office on holy books of their choice.

Khomeini’s rhetoric from France, where he was exiled, intensified during the period known as the White Revolution, including misogynistic and xenophobic sermons and demands that Pahlavi be ousted.

Early aggression toward the US

With Pahlavi as a U.S.-aligned leader, this marked an early instance of antagonism by proxy. As protests engineered by Khomeini broke out in fall 1978, the shah declared martial law, and military police fired on a massive crowd of protesters.

Pahlavi and Empress Farah Pahlavi soon fled on a ‘vacation’ to Egypt but never returned. By February 1979, Khomeini returned to Tehran with significant sectarian support.

Failed Carter strategy develops into hostage crisis

Carter National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski — the father of ‘Morning Joe’ host Mika Brzezinski — coined the term ‘arc of crisis’ and advanced an ultimately failed ‘Green Belt’ strategy that supported an arc of largely unstable but fundamentalist regimes across the Middle East that were also viewed as oppositional to the Soviet Union.

Brzezinski’s envisioned buffer strategy soon collapsed when Khomeini proved to be just as anti-American as anti-Soviet.

In October 1979, after months of debate over whether to admit him to the U.S. amid the new turmoil in Iran, President Jimmy Carter relented and permitted the cancer-stricken shah to seek medical care in New York.

That November, the group ‘Muslim Student Followers of the Imam’s Line’ stormed the U.S. embassy, beginning 444 days of captivity for 52 American hostages.

The U.S. severed diplomatic ties the following April, and one rescue mission failed and left several U.S. servicemembers dead. The shah died that summer in Egypt, leaving Khomeini in full control of the government.

In what was seen as the final offense to Carter, Iran suddenly released the hostages minutes into President Ronald Reagan’s administration on Jan. 20, 1981.

Lebanon hostage crisis

On July 5, 1982, the years-long saga known as the Lebanon Hostage Crisis began with the systematic abductions of foreigners, including Americans, by Hezbollah and Iranian proxies in the Mideast country, according to United Against a Nuclear Iran.

That group, founded by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and former Ambassador Mark Wallace, maintains a comprehensive history of Iranian aggression on its website and is a nonpartisan policy organization formed to combat the threats posed by the Islamic Republic.

During the Lebanon Hostage Crisis, several victims spent years imprisoned by Hezbollah, where they were forced to undergo psychological and medical torture, including CIA Beirut Station Chief William Buckley, who was not related to the National Review founder of the same name. 

Buckley was tortured for months by Dr. Aziz al-Abub, a Lebanese Hezbollah psychiatrist and medical expert who reportedly forced him to take phenothiazines and experimented on him to induce interrogation and make an example of him to the West.

Buckley reportedly died in custody amid these experiments on June 3, 1985.

The CIA later memorialized him on its wall in Langley, Va., and Obama-era Director John Brennan said in a 2014 statement that ‘we remember Bill not for the manner in which he died but for the legacy he left behind. From his time as an Army lieutenant colonel to his tenure with the Agency, Bill inspired those around him to do great things despite often dangerous conditions.’

The agency later caught up with the figurehead of the Hezbollah-linked Islamic Jihad terrorist group — carrying out what the Washington Institute described as a rare contemporary CIA assassination nearly 25 years later.

Imad Mughniyeh’s group had announced Buckley’s execution in October 1985, but the actual date was determined later, with allegations that he died not from execution but from the side effects of the medical torture he endured. Former hostage David Jacobsen told the institute that Buckley was often sick and delirious in his cell and ultimately died ‘drowning in his own lung fluids’ after a bout of torture.

David Dodge, then-president of the American University in Beirut, was also kidnapped for about a year, and U.S. journalist Terry Anderson was held in captivity for more than six years.

Reagan-era bombings and murders of American servicemembers

On April 18, 1983, an Iran-backed group seen as the predecessor to today’s Lebanese Hezbollah bombed the U.S. embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people, including 17 Americans.

That October, a suicide truck bomb linked to Iran hit a U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon, killing 241 servicemembers, in what remains the deadliest single day for the Corps since Iwo Jima.

According to the MEMRI translation of Khomeini’s representative to Lebanon, Sayyed Issa Tabatabai’s interview with the IRNA: ‘I quickly went to Lebanon and provided what was needed in order to [carry out] martyrdom operations in the place where the Americans and Israelis were.’ 

He added, ‘The efforts to establish [Hezbollah] started in [Lebanon’s] Baalbek area, where members of [Iran’s] Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) arrived. I had no part in establishing the [political] party [Hezbollah], but God made it possible for me to continue the military activity with the group that had cooperated with us prior to the [Islamic] Revolution’s victory.’

The MEMRI report continued, ‘It is noteworthy that the part of the interview in which Tabatabai acknowledged receiving Khomeini’s fatwa ordering attacks on American and Israeli targets in Lebanon was removed by IRNA from its website shortly after publication. This is apparently because no official representative of Khomeini, the father of the Islamic Republic, or of Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, had ever said that Iran had any involvement in ordering, planning and carrying out the massive bombings in Lebanon against U.S.’

In 1985, Iran-backed Hezbollah hijacked Trans World Airlines (TWA) Flight 847 as it departed Athens. The hijackers collected IDs from the passengers and singled out U.S. Navy Seabee Robert Stethem of Waldorf, Md., mistaking him for a Marine and blaming him for involvement in the Lebanese Civil War.

The hijackers tortured Stethem as they flew to Beirut before shooting him dead, dumping him on the tarmac, and shooting him again.

Operation Praying Mantis

In 1988, the USS Samuel B. Roberts struck an Iranian mine in the Persian Gulf and nearly sank. The Roberts had been escorting Kuwaiti oil tankers as a protective measure.

After the mines were matched to the Iranian ship Ajr, which had been captured by the Americans earlier that year, President Reagan sprang into retaliatory action.

Reagan’s operation destroyed two oil platforms reportedly used as Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) surveillance structures, leading Iran to begin attacking nonmilitary targets.

The mission also claimed two other Iranian ships and was considered the largest naval surface engagement since World War II.

Two Americans died in a helicopter crash during the operation, while dozens of Iranian officers were killed.

Clinton-Bush-Obama era; 9/11

The FBI linked a 1996 attack on an American military housing complex in Saudi Arabia to another Iranian-backed terrorist group.

Hezbollah al-Hejaz was blamed for the Khobar Towers bombing in June of that year, which killed 19 U.S. servicemembers.

In the aftermath of Al Qaeda’s 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole destroyer in Aden, Yemen, American courts found Iran indirectly liable in that it provided support for the terrorists – in part by letting them be trained in Tehran-linked Hezbollah bases in Lebanon.

In 2015, FISA Judge Rudolph Contreras found Iran and Sudan liable, and during the Biden administration. Sudan agreed to settle claims of murdered sailors’ families.

After 9/11, when the U.S. went to war in Iraq, Iran and its proxies were suspected of causing a large portion of American casualties by supplying land mines to the Iraqi Shia insurgents. In 2019, the Department of Defense officially raised its estimate to more than 600 troop casualties directly tied to Iran or its proxies, meaning one in six Iraq War losses were caused by Tehran.

Navy Cmdr. Sean Robertson told the Army Times at the time that ‘these [American] casualties were the result of explosively formed penetrators (EFPs), other improvised explosive devices (IEDs), improvised rocket-assisted munitions (IRAMs), rockets, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), small arms, sniper fire, and other attacks in Iraq.’

During his first term in the White House, President Donald Trump ordered a strike on the IRGC, killing its legendary commander, Qassem Soleimani.

While Iran was not directly implicated as having specific knowledge of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia, it was found to be complicit in facilitating the planned terrorism.

The report, led by former New Jersey Republican Gov. Tom Kean Sr., found a ‘persistence of contacts’ between Iranian officials and Al Qaeda.

Chapter 7 of the report found that Iran at least knew that the terrorists being trained by Hezbollah were going to act against the U.S. and/or Israel. The findings thereby blew apart critics’ claims that the Sunni terror group could get along with its religious archenemy, the Shia who ran Iran.

Tehran border patrol officials also did not stamp passports of Al Qaeda operatives traveling around the region, as the marking would have been flagged upon application for any U.S. visa.

In 2016, hackers linked to the IRGC were indicted by the Justice Department – including one 34-year-old Iranian national who allegedly gained access to the controls of a major dam in Rye Brook, N.Y., near the confluence of Interstate 287 and the New England Thruway.

In 2011, the U.S. also foiled an IRGC plot targeting the homeland, in which a District of Columbia restaurant was to be bombed to kill Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. Adel al-Jubeir.

Iranian-born U.S. citizen Manssoor Arbabsiar and Quds Force member Gholam Shakuri were charged in the incident. Arbabsiar was arrested at New york’s JFK Airport and Shakuri remains at large.

A confidential federal source met with Arbabsiar in Mexico that July, where the suspect agreed to pay $100,000 toward a $1.5 million bounty placed on al-Jubeir, according to the Justice Department.

Then-FBI Director Robert Mueller said at the time that the arrests depict the U.S. ‘increased ability … to bring together the intelligence and law enforcement resources necessary to better identify and disrupt those threats, regardless of their origin.’

Biden era

By 2020, Iran was blamed for several recent attacks on commercial oil tankers, and after Trump ordered the killing of Soleimani, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei dispatched ballistic missiles at Al-Asad Air Base in Iraq.

Several dozen U.S. troops were wounded.

After Hamas militants massacred Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, Iran-backed Hamas and Hezbollah launched about 180 attacks on Western forces in the region, including a drone strike on a base in Jordan that killed three Americans.

Trump era: Assassination plot on the president

After an Afghan-born Iranian proxy and two American men were charged with allegedly trying to hunt down and assassinate an Iranian-born American critic of the ayatollah’s regime, the Justice Department disclosed that Trump was also the subject of a similar assassination plot.

Farhad Shakeri, who had spent 14 years in a New York state prison for robbery and made U.S. contacts to create a ‘network of criminal associates’ to ‘supply the IRGC with operatives’ domestically, was allegedly seeking to kill Masih Alinejad — a journalist who often appears on Fox News Channel.

Shakeri remained at large, likely in Iran, as of 2024, but his American counterparts were put on trial in Brooklyn.

Jonathon Loadholt of Staten Island and Carlisle Rivera of Brooklyn allegedly ‘were recruited as part of that network to silence and kill, on U.S. soil, an American journalist who has been a prominent critic of the regime,’ according to then-Attorney General Merrick Garland.

‘We will not stand for the Iranian regime’s attempts to endanger the American people and America’s national security,’ Garland said, as the criminal complaint suggested Shakeri and Rivera first met while serving time.

The two men stalked Alinejad and were also accused of rotating plates on Loadholt’s car to avoid suspicion, while then-FBI Director Christopher Wray mentioned Trump as another target of an Iranian plot in a related statement on the Alinejad case.

Shakeri reportedly spoke to the FBI voluntarily from Iran, where he disclosed efforts to assassinate Trump, according to The New York Times.

Shakeri said he was told to create a plan to kill Trump after an IRGC meeting that October and that, if he could not, the assumption from the militia was that Trump would lose to Kamala Harris and be ‘easier to assassinate’ while out of office.

‘Thanks to the hard work of the FBI, their deadly schemes were disrupted.  We’re committed to using the full resources of the FBI to protect our citizens from Iran or any other adversary who targets Americans,’ Wray said in a statement at the time.

Trump has since warned Iran repeatedly to back down, with Secretary of War Pete Hegseth overseeing 2025 airstrikes on nuclear facilities, and the administration ultimately taking what it described as long-term military action to force regime change.

‘Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime,’ Trump said Saturday.

Fox News Digital’s Benjamin Weinthal contributed to this report.

Iran’s Assembly of Experts has elected Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as the country’s new supreme leader, according to reports.

Iran International cited sources who claimed the decision was made ‘under pressure’ from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Mojtaba Khamenei, 56, is the second-eldest son of Ali Khamenei and was born in Mashhad in 1969.

His early childhood coincided with his father’s rise as a revolutionary figurehead opposing the monarchy of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

After the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Ali Khamenei moved from a dissident cleric to a senior government official, holding key posts in the regime including deputy defense minister.

The family moved from Mashhad to Tehran, where Mojtaba attended Alavi High School, which is a school that is known for educating members of Iran’s political and religious elite.

There, he received a general and religious education and graduated in 1987. In 1989, after the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Ali Khamenei was appointed supreme leader.

That same year, Mojtaba began his formal clerical studies in Tehran. He studied under his father as well as Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, who later served as Iran’s chief justice.

Over the years, Mojtaba was seen constantly with his father and was also regarded as an influential figure behind the scenes.

In 2019, the U.S. sanctioned Mojtaba Khamenei under Executive Order 13867. The U.S. Treasury Department stated that he had been ‘representing the supreme leader in an official capacity despite never being elected or appointed to a government position aside from work in the office of his father.’

The Treasury also said that the supreme leader had delegated part of his leadership responsibilities to Mojtaba. 

It said he worked closely with commanders of the IRGC’s Quds Force and the Basij Resistance Force, positioning him as a key player in both domestic and international security affairs.

Mojtaba is married to the daughter of former Iranian Parliament Speaker Gholam Ali Haddad-Adel.

Among Ali Khamenei’s sons, he is considered the most powerful and politically influential, according to reports.

Initial reports had indicated Mojtaba was among around 40 officials killed in Feb. 28’s strike targeting Iran’s highest-ranking cleric.

As previously reported by Fox News Digital, President Trump said strikes on Iran eliminated much of the regime’s anticipated leadership succession bench.  ‘Most of the people we had in mind are dead,’ Trump told reporters Tuesday.

As yet, Iranian state media has not confirmed the succession reports.

As coordinated U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran continue, current and former defense officials say that while a limited strike lasting several days is feasible, sustaining a broader confrontation — one involving potentially hundreds of incoming missiles — is far more complicated.

The U.S. and Israel undertook a mission known as Operation Epic Fury, targeting Iranian leadership and military sites Saturday. Its duration is still unclear, but the campaign may go on for days, according to U.S. officials. 

Sustaining operations beyond the initial window presents a more complex challenge — one shaped by a ‘zero-sum’ competition for missile defense inventories between the Middle East and Europe.

Officials and analysts warn that certain U.S. missile and air-defense interceptor inventories have been severely drawn down by the relentless pace of recent operations. The strategic dilemma for the Pentagon is that the systems required to shield U.S. bases from Iranian retaliation are the same ones being depleted by the defense of Ukraine and the ongoing protection of Israel.

Iran already has fired counterattacks near U.S. positions in Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Jordan, with several host governments saying their air defense systems intercepted incoming projectiles. No U.S. service member fatalities or injuries have been reported as of Saturday, a U.S. official told Fox News Digital. 

U.S. authorities have not publicly released casualty figures or formal damage assessments.

During the intense June 2025 Iran–Israel conflict, U.S. forces fired more than 150 Terminal High Altitude Area Defense Interceptors — roughly a quarter of the total global inventory — and a large number of ship-based standard missiles to protect allies, according to published defense assessments.

This shortfall largely is attributed to the dual pressure of supplying Ukraine against Russian cruise missiles and the surge of batteries to the Middle East. Replenishing these high-end systems can take more than a year, analysts say, because production lines are optimized for peacetime and cannot be surged overnight.

Independent groups have noted the U.S. currently produces roughly 600–650 Patriot PAC-3 MSE missiles annually, reflecting recent contracts to boost production capacity. Analysts say that in a high-intensity war with a near-peer adversary like Iran — where multiple interceptors are often used to defeat a single incoming missile — even a year’s worth of production could be consumed in a matter of weeks, especially after recent drawdowns in Ukraine and the Middle East.

‘The Department of War has everything it needs to execute any mission at the time and place of the President’s choosing and on any timeline,’ Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in response to readiness questions.

Retired Air Force Gen. Charles Wald, former deputy commander of U.S. European Command, said the United States retains the ability to surge conventional strike munitions into the region and draw from prepositioned stocks if a campaign is ordered. 

‘From a conventional munition standpoint, we can always fly in more weapons from around the world,’ Wald told Fox News Digital. ‘There are a lot of weapons stored there with this type of mission in mind.’

The greater concern, he acknowledged, lies on the defensive side. 

‘The issue will be defensive weapons — Patriot, SM-3, and the Arrow system in Israel,’ Wald said. ‘You can never have enough defense.’

Regional analysts caution that in a sustained missile exchange, interceptor inventories — not offensive strike weapons — could become the binding constraint. 

‘There is a limit to how many THAAD missiles can be used,’ Israeli defense analyst Ehud Eilam said. ‘These are not systems you can reproduce overnight.’

Iran is believed to possess between 1,500 ballistic missiles and 2,000 ballistic missiles, as well as drones and shorter-range rockets capable of striking U.S. bases and Gulf energy infrastructure.

Several experts also pointed to the psychological impact of recent U.S. operations. 

The swift Operation Absolute Resolve in Venezuela in January 2026 and summer 2025’s 12-day exchange with Iran have reinforced confidence in American military capability. However, one former defense official cautioned that success in these tightly scoped missions can create a false sense of momentum toward action in far more complex scenarios.

‘Iran is a very different problem,’ the official said — a large, heavily armed state with extensive missile forces and regional proxy networks that would not resemble a short, surgical operation.

Wald acknowledged that risk. 

‘You don’t want to get people so confident that you don’t consider the risks. It’s not going to be as clean or pure as, say, Venezuela was, or the 12-day war.’

Even as the strikes continue, officials warn that retaliation from Iran and its network of allied militias could broaden the conflict. Iran’s ballistic missiles and drones — coupled with allied groups in Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen — already have prompted missile salvos against U.S. bases and Gulf partners, according to defense reporting.

Experts say the 2025 conflict underscored how quickly escalation can test both defensive systems and political will. 

‘Once these things break, you own what follows,’ one former official said, underscoring the risk that missiles and proxy actions could quickly widen a limited U.S. strike.

Wald warned that even a successful military phase would not eliminate the political uncertainty. 

‘Bombing Iran is not going to do regime change,’ he said, emphasizing that air power can degrade capability but cannot guarantee a stable political outcome.

Beyond the immediate exchange, officials say the economic consequences could prove just as consequential. Roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil supply transits the Strait of Hormuz, and even limited disruption could send global energy markets sharply higher.

For Washington, the strategic calculus extends beyond the Middle East. China remains the primary long-term competitor, with the war in Ukraine already consuming significant resources. 

A sustained regional conflict would draw on naval assets and air-defense systems that planners must also consider for potential future contingencies in Taiwan or North Korea.

Officials familiar with internal deliberations say President Donald Trump has sought a high degree of confidence in how an Iran contingency would unfold — a standard that becomes harder to meet in scenarios involving escalation and political fallout.

Fox News Digital has reached out to the White House for comment.

At least two more allies of President Donald Trump have said the Biden-era FBI secretly sought their records, in addition to the records of FBI Director Kash Patel and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.

Republican operative Corey Lewandowski, who currently serves as a Department of Homeland Security aide, said Thursday he received the same type of notice that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino disclosed last year regarding records seizures. Both men said they were notified in 2024 that Google had complied with FBI legal demands for information tied to their accounts, underscoring how broadly the bureau’s investigation into Trump extended and fueling Republicans’ claims that President Joe Biden ‘weaponized’ law enforcement to target his political opponents.

‘Funny – I received the same notice,’ Lewandowski wrote on X. ‘Where is the media outcry. Right, they don’t care when it happens to Trump people.’

Lewandowski and Scavino both said the notices they received indicated that Google had been under a court-authorized gag order and could not notify them sooner about the demands for their records. Prosecutors commonly obtain such gag orders as part of their investigations.

Patel, meanwhile, confirmed the existence of the subpoenas for his and Wiles’ phone records in a statement to Fox News this week and said the subpoenas were difficult to access because the files for them had added layers of protection.

‘It is outrageous and deeply alarming that the previous FBI leadership secretly subpoenaed my own phone records — along with those of now White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles — using flimsy pretexts and burying the entire process in prohibited case files designed to evade all oversight,’ Patel said.

Fox News was told that the subpoenas sought Patel’s and Wiles’ toll records, which include dates and times and phone numbers related to messages and calls but do not include the contents of them. The subpoenas themselves have not been made public, so the details about what they sought remain unconfirmed.

Two FBI officials told Fox News that in 2023, agents also recorded a phone call between Wiles and her lawyer. The officials said the lawyer was aware the call was being recorded and consented, but Wiles was not.

The claim about the lawyer has however been disputed. An unnamed lawyer representing Wiles at the time of the phone call in question denied to Axios that he knew of the FBI recording a phone call between him and his client.

‘If I ever pulled a stunt like that I wouldn’t — and shouldn’t — have a license to practice law. I’m as shocked as Susie,’ the lawyer told the outlet.

While it is unclear exactly what the FBI was investigating, the timing and targets signal the subpoenas could be related to the bureau’s probe into President Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents. Patel and Wiles, both private citizens during the Biden administration, were known witnesses in the classified documents case, in which special counsel Jack Smith alleged Trump violated the Espionage Act by hoarding national security-related documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence.

It has previously been widely reported that Patel was summoned to give grand jury testimony in exchange for immunity in 2022 as part of the same probe.

The FBI investigated Trump over both his alleged retention of classified documents and his alleged attempts to subvert the 2020 election. Documents released by Congress show that the FBI — and later Smith, after he became special counsel — issued hundreds of subpoenas targeting Republican entities and figures, including the phone records of several GOP lawmakers. Republican targets have characterized Smith’s actions as an egregious abuse of power and hyper-politicized, while Smith has repeatedly defended his work as by-the-book and apolitical.

In line with his claims of a weaponized FBI, Patel fired at least 10 bureau employees around the same time he revealed the subpoenas. The move drew condemnation from the FBI Agents Association, which represents thousands of employees and has maintained that agents’ actions are typically the result of following orders within the chain of command.

‘The FBIAA condemns today’s unlawful termination of FBI Special Agents, which—like other firings by Director Patel—violates the due process rights of those who risk their lives to protect our country,’ the FBIAA said. ‘These actions weaken the Bureau by stripping away critical expertise and destabilizing the workforce, undermining trust in leadership and jeopardizing the Bureau’s ability to meet its recruitment goals—ultimately putting the nation at greater risk.’

Former U.S. Attorney John Fishwick of Virginia told Fox News the firings could keep Patel ‘in good stead with President Trump,’ saying Patel did not ‘look like a prototypical G-man’ during his viral and widely reported on celebration at the Olympics in the Team USA men’s ice hockey team’s locker room.

The White House referred Fox News to the FBI when asked for comment. The FBI gave no additional comment. A representative for Smith had no comment.

Fox News’ David Spunt contributed to this report.