They were hostages in Iran for 444 days. Decades later, they're waiting for compensation

LOS ANGELES - Dorothea Morefield was sipping coffee at her kitchen counter when a call came in: Iranian students protesting outside the U.S. Embassy in Tehran had stormed the building, a State Department official told her. Her husband, Richard, the U.S. consul general in Tehran, was caught in the frenzy.

The world, Morefield said, stopped on that day: Nov. 4, 1979.

"That first day, we didn't know what was going on," Morefield, now 85, said. "Had he been taken? Had he not? And then I saw a clip of him walking across the embassy lawn, surrounded. And I thought, 'Ok, that's one question answered.'"

Iran was in chaos then, roiled by the departure of the shah earlier that year and the return of the revolution's leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a longtime religious leader in exile. The U.S. had supported the shah's regime -