by David Crist
After a bit of small talk, the shah raised the prospect of leaving Iran on an “extended vacation.” He hoped it would help calm the streets, apparently still dreaming that he might yet return to his throne after things calmed down. “When should I go?” he asked.
Sullivan immediately responded, “As soon as possible would probably be the best for all concerned.” The shah agreed.
As the meeting concluded, General Huyser reminded the shah of a conversation the two men had had just five months earlier, at the outset of the shah’s troubles. The shah had emphatically told the air force general that he would not lose control of power. “What happened, Your Majesty?” Huyser asked.
Mohammad Reza thought quietly for some time, glaring at Sullivan through his thick glasses. “Your commander-in-chief is different from me. I am a commander-in-chief who is actually in uniform and, as such, for me to give the orders that would have been necessary….” He paused. “Could you as commander-in-chief give the order to kill your own people?”54
On January 16, 1979, the shah left Iran for Egypt on his “extended vacation.” He never returned. Hundreds of thousands of jubilant Iranians celebrated until nightfall. As Huyser walked across the darkened embassy to the secure room for his evening talk with Washington, it was extraordinarily quiet, but, Huyser sensed, “there was a different feeling in the air.”
Over the next month, General Huyser met repeatedly with Iranian military leaders. Huyser helped develop a series of military options to maintain order and ensure a smooth transition. The most extreme was Option C—a military coup designed to break any strikes and resistance, and to regain control over the country. When Huyser back-briefed this military option in a secure conference call with Brzezinski and Brown, the national security adviser latched onto it in congruence with his long-standing support of a military takeover to preserve a pro-American government. “The coup option needed to remain on the table,” Brzezinski stressed. “Could the army execute it?”
“Yes,” General Huyser responded, “as long as the army continued to hold together.”
Whether they would open fire on the opposition remained an open question, however, as the conscripted soldiers had shown no stomach for killing fellow Iranians. Furthermore, the shah had maintained tight control over the military leadership and did not reward generals who showed much initiative.
On February 1, Ayatollah Khomeini returned by jet to Tehran. Some five million people poured into the streets to welcome him. At Huyser’s urging, the Iranian military provided Khomeini with protection, escorts, and even a helicopter to travel about the city. It was a strange spectacle, as the shah’s military leadership ordered honor guards and protection for the man they all despised.
On the night of February 9, Iranian television broadcast a rerun of Khomeini’s return, inciting a group of low-ranking technical officers called Homafaran (the equivalent of warrant officers in the U.S. military) to protest openly against the shah at an air base in eastern Tehran that housed the Iranian air force’s headquarters. The Homafaran clashed with a detachment of the shah’s elite “Immortals” unit. The next morning, the Homafaran forced their way into an armory and began distributing weapons to other military defectors and leftist sympathizers. Pitched clashes between the rebels and the Iranian army soon broke out all over the city. Events culminated in a series of dramatic attacks on February 11, a day still celebrated in Iran as a national holiday called Islamic Revolution’s Victory Day. A mob stormed the Supreme Staff headquarters—the Iranian version of the Pentagon—and soldiers mutinied and shot dead the army chief of staff outside his own headquarters building. By the end of the day, the remnants of the old regime had been swept away and nearly all Iran’s senior military leadership were in jail.55
A week later, back in Stuttgart, Huyser casually spoke to Haig about the latter’s retirement plans. An aide interrupted with an important phone call from Washington. Both Haig and Huyser picked up phones; on the other end of the line were the deputy secretary of defense, Charles Duncan, Brzezinski, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Jones. The men had just left a meeting at the White House in which the decision had been finally made to have European Command plan for military intervention in Iran. While the president had made no decision about executing such an operation, the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg had been placed on alert. Would General Huyser, Jones asked, be willing to return to Tehran and conduct a military takeover?
Incredulous, Huyser privately wondered, “Why didn’t they ask that question while I was in Tehran and the Iranian military was still intact?”
“Sir, I’ll consider doing it,” Huyser said, suppressing his growing anger, “but there would need to be unlimited funds. I would need to handpick ten to twelve U.S. generals and I’ll need ten thousand of the best U.S. troops, because at this point, I have no idea how many Iranian troops I could count on. And finally, I must have undivided national support.” There was silence on the other end of the phone.
After a long pause, Huyser resumed. “I don’t think the people I am talking to are ready for that type of action, nor do I believe the American people would give their support. The answer is obvious—it’s not feasible.”
Brzezinski asked a few perfunctory questions, and Jones asked Haig if he had any comment. “Nope,” Haig replied tersely. The conversation ended and so did any further talk of a coup or American military intervention.
While the new Islamic Republic wanted to retain the skilled officers to run the military, the government moved quickly to purge the Iranian armed forces of unreconstructed royalists. One of these was Commander Said Zanganeh. Of average height and balding but with a distinguished persona and strong bearing, Zanganeh had joined the Imperial Iranian Navy in 1964.56 In 1977, less than two years before the revolution, Zanganeh became the first commanding officer of Iran’s new flotilla of French-built missile boats, each armed with advanced American-made Harpoon antiship missiles, capable of striking a target ship sixty nautical miles away.57
After the revolution, Zanganeh was ordered to attend a mandatory assembly with a senior cleric. “You all have a little king in your heart, and we have to eliminate it,” the cleric told the audience of officers. While this was not said in a menacing tone, his intent was clear.
A secular Muslim, Zanganeh had strongly supported the shah. He simply could not bring himself to work for a government he viewed as dominated by backward, uneducated clerics. After the shah’s departure, he walked into the now empty office of the chief of naval operations and penned his resignation letter.
A few days later a cleric, recently appointed as a senior admiral, called Zanganeh into his office. “Why are you resigning? I’ve looked over your file and you have no political association with the shah or his crimes.”
Zanganeh replied with a religious analogy he knew the cleric would understand. “I don’t know Islam as well as you do, but I know that Ali was a great man. Nevertheless, if I were a married woman and Ali wanted to take me to bed, I still wouldn’t let him.”
The cleric signed his approval without ever taking his eyes off Zanganeh. The commander hastened out of the office, fully expecting a bullet in his head for his insolence. Fortunately, he left the building alive and left for the United States the following year.
The Carter administration wanted to continue normal diplomatic relations with the new Iranian government. The provisional Iranian government’s first prime minister was handpicked by Ayatollah Khomeini: seventy-two-year-old Mehdi Bazargan. A devoted Muslim but also a secular democrat, he favored continued ties with the United States. While scaling back consular services, the American embassy in Tehran remained open, even after a six-hour takeover of the embassy grounds in February by leftist students overcome with revolutionary fervor. Ayatollah Khomeini immediately ordered the students out of the embassy, not wishing to hand such a propaganda victory to the Marxists, his growing rivals for power. But that takeover was a precursor of things to come.
When Sullivan stepped down as ambassador in March 1979, Carter nominated another experienced diplomat, Walter Cutler, as his replacement. But after the execution of a prominent Iranian-Jewish businessman who had close ties to the shah, and with a growing perception of an anti-Semitic attitude on the part of the new regime, New York senator Jacob Javits pushed through a resolution critical of the new Iranian government. This action sparked violent protests outside the twenty-seven-acre U.S. embassy compound, with the U.S. flag torn down and anti-American graffiti painted on the embassy walls. The State Department withdrew Cutler’s name and, in June 1979, dispatched fifty-eight-year-old Bruce Laingen as the new chargé d’affaires and senior American diplomat in Iran. A naval officer in the Pacific during the Second World War, Laingen had been posted to Tehran once before, in 1953, arriving just after the United States engineered the coup that reinstalled the shah to power.
Laingen continued meeting with Iranian officials to try to normalize relations. One of his major headaches involved sorting the status of billions of dollars, worth of military hardware and spare parts in transit or sitting in American warehouses—weapons destined for Iran. Not surprisingly, Iran wanted the matériel, while Washington showed trepidation, weighing the merits of sending military supplies to a potential adversary against the prospects that this new Iran might still serve as an ally against the Soviets.
In a meeting with Laingen on August 11, Prime Minister Bazargan expressed the desirability of close cooperation between the two nations, but he stated that the U.S. government’s support for the shah remained a strong impediment to friendship. Laingen replied that his government had no intention of trying to reinstall the shah on the throne. Bazargan greeted this assertion with skepticism.58
In June 1979 the Iranian deputy prime minister had traveled to Sweden and met with American officials. The U.S. delegation included one of the CIA’s best Iranian specialists, fifty-year-old George Cave. Tall, thin, and with a quiet, reflective demeanor, Cave was fluent in Farsi and had served two tours in Iran, his first in 1958. The group met to discuss normalizing relations between the two countries. Over the next two months, these talks set a framework for more substantive talks in Tehran. The CIA dispatched Robert Ames, the national intelligence officer for the Near East, to Tehran, where he joined Laingen and other senior State Department officials in discussions about improving relations. Here they met repeatedly with a tough but cordial cleric, Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti. Second only to Khomeini as the most powerful cleric in Iran and one of the main authors of the new constitution for the Islamic Republic in Iran, Beheshti was an important leader in the newly formed, shadowy Revolutionary Council. Established by Khomeini, the council was composed of mullahs and dedicated Islamists and served as the power behind the Bazargan mask. Beheshti had little love for the United States, but he supported the talks on normalization.
Throughout the autumn of 1979, U.S. negotiators continued their secret meetings, making slow headway toward patching up their differences. The last meeting occurred in Algiers on November 1, 1979, between U.S. national security adviser Brzezinski and Iranian prime minister Bazargan. Brzezinski told the Iranian delegation that the United States recognized the revolution and had no intention of trying to reinstall the shah. The talks ended abruptly, however. News of the meeting leaked, infuriating student radicals as no one in the Iranian leadership wanted to be seen negotiating with the Great Satan.
On October 23, 1979, Bruce Laingen was sitting at the breakfast table in the embassy residence when a marine guard brought him an urgent message. The cable stated that the U.S. government had decided to allow the shah into the country for cancer treatment and instructed Laingen to inform the Iranian government that the shah would be allowed in strictly for humanitarian purposes. The shah was deathly ill and his supporters in Congress lobbied President Carter to admit him. The president had reluctantly agreed.
Laingen knew that no one in the new Iranian government would believe this statement, and he raised strong objections back to headquarters. The situation in Iran remained precarious, and that country’s population would greet with open hostility anything that smacked of renewed cooperation between the United States and the shah. This was a major blunder and neither Laingen nor the others at the State Department knowledgeable about Iran had any illusions about the likely Iranian response: they would overrun the embassy.
George Cave was in Paris when he received a cable asking him to return to Tehran to help Laingen explain to the Iranian government why the shah would be allowed to enter the United States. He phoned Laingen. “Bruce, I don’t think there is much I can do to help you.”
“Yeah,” Laingen replied. “You’d just be one more body taken in the embassy.”
“No one in Iran believed that the shah had gone to the United States for humanistic reasons,” observed Mohsen Sazegara, a Western-educated engineer and early supporter of the revolution. “The United States backed the shah and would bring him back to power and overthrow the revolution. Everyone believed this in Iran.” Rumor of the shah’s cancer had circulated through the streets of Tehran for years. To the men in the new revolutionary government, Washington and its omnipresent intelligence apparatus had to know of the shah’s illness. The sudden admittance of the shah to the United States appeared all the more nefarious, and Laingen’s explanation sounded ludicrous.
Laingen and Cave’s predictions became reality. The first massive demonstration against the United States took place on November 1. Some rocks were thrown, but little more transpired. On the night of November 3, Laingen attended a movie premier at Iran’s foreign office for a new documentary on the revolution. Although its theme was anti-American, Laingen found the film interesting, chiefly due to its footage of mobs storming the U.S. embassy back in February. The next day Laingen was attending a meeting at the foreign office when reports came in about students trying to scale the walls of the U.S. embassy. He tried to drive back to the compound, but the embassy staff warned him to stay away; the situation was becoming too dangerous. Back at the Iranian foreign office, Laingen located a civilian phone and notified Washington of the deteriorating situation at the embassy.59
When news of a disturbance at the U.S. embassy in Tehran arrived at Alexander Haig’s European Command headquarters in Patch Barracks, Germany, newly promoted Marine Corps Brigadier General George Crist hastened down to the operations center. As the deputy J-3, or operations officer, it was Crist’s responsibility to track current events. He picked up an unsecured phone and called the embassy to find out what was going on. The phone rang a few times before it was answered by a man on the other end speaking Farsi. Crist asked him a question, only to discover that the man did not understand English.
“I need a Farsi speaker!” Crist hollered, sending officers at European Command headquarters scrambling to find someone in the building who could converse with the Iranian on the other end of the phone line. Of the hundreds of people in the headquarters, including the intelligence section, not one person could speak Farsi. After a few more minutes of incoherent discussion, the bemused Iranian student lost interest and hung up the telephone.60
A group of students representing Iran’s universities had conspired to launch a coordinated takeover of the American embassy. Calling themselves Muslim Student Followers of the Imam’s Line, they were inspired by recent statements by Khomeini railing against the United States. They decided to strike a blow against the Great Satan. While the shah’s admittance into the United States served as the catalyst, planning for the move had been under way since September. Marine security guards failed to halt the mob with a prodigious use of tear gas. Laingen pleaded with Iranian security forces to send personnel to expel the students, but none materialized. In short order, embassy staff had been rounded up and paraded, bound and blindfolded, before a stunned world media.
Initially, the students had intended to hold the embassy for just a few hours. In some ways, it was the Iranian version of American student pro
tests of the 1960s, in which protesters would occupy the president’s office, smoke his cigars, make a few statements, and leave with self-congratulatory remarks about having stood up to the establishment.
But the embassy takeover acquired a life of its own. Foreign Minister Ebrahim Yazdi called Khomeini and received permission to go to the embassy and order the students out. But the ayatollah quickly reversed himself. He had no advance knowledge of the students’ action, but the embassy takeover afforded him the chance to consolidate power and rally the public behind the Islamists at the expense of liberals and nationalists within the revolutionary movement, who Khomeini regarded as the chief rivals to his vision of an Islamic state. When Ayatollah Khomeini publicly endorsed the action, Bazargan, Yazdi, and other moderates resigned in protest the next day. This left the Revolutionary Council and the Islamists in sole power, and over the next year Khomeini supporters moved to expunge the remaining moderates and secularists from positions of authority.
For the next 444 days, fifty-two Americans, including Laingen, languished as hostages, held by Iranian student radicals. President Jimmy Carter froze Iranian financial assets, severed diplomatic relations, and tried through a variety of means to end the crisis peacefully. Carter took military action off the table as divisions emerged within the administration on how to handle the crisis. The national security adviser advocated the use of force, while Cyrus Vance worried about the consequences of such an action on the hostages. For six months, Carter sided with Vance.
The strain of these challenges took a toll on President Carter. He reveled in policy details. He impressed the White House staff with his sheer capacity to read and retain the information in towering piles of paperwork. He returned lengthy memos with his handwritten comments on the last page, often replete with grammatical corrections. But this attention to minutia, especially the demands of attending to the hostage crisis, consumed Carter. He averaged five hours of sleep a night, arriving at the Oval Office at five thirty a.m. and regularly not leaving until midnight. He scaled back his daily jogging from five miles to three, frequently running around the White House grounds late at night. He grew increasingly and uncharacteristically testy and often snapped at his staff for no reason.