WASHINGTON: The flap over whether Iran’s president-elect played a role in taking US diplomats hostage in Tehran 26 years ago highlights the emotional pull the episode still has on the US public and government.

The US administration has launched its own investigation into allegations by five former hostages that Mahmood Ahmadinejad was a key player in the 1979 seizure of the US embassy.

But even if the assertions prove dodgy or false, they have exposed the scars that remain from one of the darkest and most humiliating chapters in US diplomacy when 52 Americans were held captive for 444 days.

“Anybody who was alive at the time, during this period, can never forget that period. And we have not forgotten,” State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters.

Former hostages still have celebrity status. A Google search of “Iranian hostage crisis” brings up 519,000 entries, and an ABC newshow “Nightline” that was launched to follow the drama is still running.

Some analysts say the embassy takeover has sown seeds of bitterness which colour efforts to grapple with current problems, namely Iran’s alleged support for terrorism and its suspected nuclear weapons programme.

“In some ways the past is a bigger obsctale for US-Iranian relations than the present,” said Scott Lasensky, a Middle East expert with the United States Institute of Peace.

“Certainly the hostage crisis looms very large over two generations of American foreign policy leaders,” he said. “That’s why these reports about the new president of Iran are getting such attention.”

But other experts say previous administrations have made an effort to get past the hostage crisis and were even selling the Iranians weapons five years later under President Ronald Reagan.

Patrick Clawson, deputy director for research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said the impact of the embassy ordeal has been “significantly exaggerated by many, especially in Europe.”

“At the popular level, there is a very considerable legacy. But in the policymaking elite, in the foreign policy circles, it’s not been a problem,” Clawson told AFP.