When something shocking and bad happens, we want to know how it happened. The most likely answer (for example, that Kennedy was shot by a nut acting alone) is often unsatisfying. Fortunately, our demand for a better answer generally produces the best answer of all: this bad thing happened because a group of evil people who pretend to be good people deliberately caused it so that they could profit from it. I'm not even a little bit surprised that someone has found a way to claim that the Iranian hostage crisis was deliberately created by ... who was it again? arms dealers? the CIA? Jews? freemasons? rich bankers? yes, rich bankers this time.

Was it likely that admitting the Shah to the United States for medical treatment would lead to a situation where the U.S. would end up freezing Iranian assets? [I believe it was, yes.] Since World War II, I believe the U.S. had frozen the assets of six countries, three of whom it was clearly at war with (North Korea and China in 1950, North Vietnam in 1964), two where it was pretty darned close to war (Cuba in 1963, Kampuchea in 1975), and one special case that virtually everyone had sanctions against (Rhodesia in 1965). It would take something special to get Iran onto this list.

A mob attacking the U.S. embassy and the police failing to protect the embassy and the mob seizing the embassy and the mob deciding to keep the people in the embassy as hostages and the government of Iran clearly taking the side of the mob -- that was enough. How likely was this to occur? An attack on the embassy was inevitable, and had happened several times already. In the past, the police had protected the embassy and the government apparently promised such protection even if the Shah was admitted to the U.S. for medical treatment. Even without police protection, the embassy was a pretty secure building. Even if a mob seized the embassy they might well have decided the propaganda benefit of releasing the hostages would outweigh the benefit of keeping them. (They did, after all, release the women, blacks, and non-Americans for exactly this reason.) Even if the mob didn't want to release the hostages, the Iranian government had ample reason to get the hostages released or at least oppose their continued captivity.

Looking at the situation as a whole, I don't think a reasonable person would have concluded that the Iranian government (not just a group of students) would hold a group of American diplomats hostage for an extended period or that the Iranian government would do some other thing so outrageous as to get the Iranian assets in the U.S. frozen. Jimmy Carter had access to more information about Iran than David Rockefeller. When he decided to admit the Shah, did he say "66 Americans will be held hostage for 444 days, but at least I'm saving Chase Manhattan's bacon"?

Carter had plenty of reasons for admitting a seriously ill former leader who had been a strong U.S. ally. There were people who disagreed with the decision at the time and it's even easier to disagree in retrospect, but I don't believe that Carter was a puppet whose strings were being pulled by Rockefeller and his friends. He had access to advice from a variety of sources, some of whom may have stood to benefit if U.S.-Iran relations got really bad. (For example, Henry Kissinger said ... the sort of things that Henry Kissinger always says. His connection to Chase Manhattan bank is not the only conceivable explanation for this.) In the end, Carter (a good person and a pretty smart guy, whether or not history will regard him as a good president) made his decision.