After the ayatollah’s tumultuous reception in Tehran, he quickly left for the holy city of Qum, the “Vatican” of Shiite Islam. Nevertheless huge fights broke out over the direction of the revolution, with Khomeini’s clerical followers demanding the formation of the “government of God” he had written about. They trekked to Qum for his word on events, and Ayatollah Khomeini gradually became a political arbiter.10
The Carter administration’s efforts were designed to build relationships with Bazargan’s nonclerical, relatively moderate government, named by Khomeini himself. Washington also tried to strengthen ties with the American-trained and equipped military, using as leverage the backlog of $12 billion in military equipment ordered under the Shah and the continuing need for spare parts. There was also an agreement to resume a small package of $50 million of nonlethal arms like jeeps. But even though Pentagon officials tried to implement it, the diplomatic relationship deteriorated, and the equipment was never delivered. At the start, Carter remembered, the United States had fairly good relations with the new government,11 but Sick shared Brzezinski’s skepticism that the relative moderates would survive. Brzezinski, with his academic knowledge of the Soviet revolution, believed that the radicals would end up in control, and that the Bazargan government was simply an interim arrangement. He was right.
* * *
The real battle was an ideological power struggle, played out over the year in drafting the new constitution. The moderates in power argued for a democratic civilian government dedicated to protecting minorities and free speech, as Yazdi had asserted in the final months before the revolution. The Islamists wanted a theocratic government operating under the Islamic law of Sharia. But the moderates were outmaneuvered by the clerics in the constitutional convention. Bazargan famously and courageously remarked that he was like a knife without a handle, unable to get things done.12 He appealed his case to Khomeini in Qum and lost.
It is barely remembered that on February 14, only two weeks after Khomeini’s return, young, left-wing students staged an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, took hostages, and led Ambassador Sullivan blindfolded out of the embassy as the news photographers clicked. At that time the invaders were efficiently dispatched by the Bazargan government. Foreign Minister Yazdi, recognizing this as a breach of international law and diplomatic protocol, quickly went to the embassy and ordered the release of the American officials. They were all freed within hours, the Iranian government apologized, and it was over.
This seemed to indicate it was safe for America’s diplomats to remain in Tehran and that a realistic chance remained of a correct, if not close, relationship with the new Khomeini-appointed government. Thereafter the government placed guards at the embassy compound, ostensibly to keep order and protect the diplomats. There were actually security squads from separate groups, some aligned with friendly elements from the provisional government to protect them from the organized Revolutionary Guards who were also present, and to whom Bruce Laingen, the ranking American diplomat, referred as “real thugs.”13
It is only in this political and security context that the seizure of the U.S. Embassy and the hostage crisis that exploded months later on November 4 can be fully understood. It became, in Khomeini’s own words, “the second” Islamic revolution.14 The first had ousted the Shah, and the second used the hostages as pawns in a power play to overturn the civilian Bazargan government Khomeini had appointed as a stopgap measure to consolidate his own power. This led the nation to rally around Khomeini and his clerics. This historic turn away from an intimate partnership of more than three decades helped prompt Khomeini’s label of “the Great Satan” for the United States and affixed the slogan “Death to America” in Iran’s clerical liturgy. These cries still split the air at rallies to this day, an essential political tool of Iran’s clerical leadership and its followers.
Washington wanted to avoid any action that might strengthen the clerics against Bazargan, and the first unnerving hostage episode, brief though it was, had led to a policy review that concluded American security interests in Iran were too important to abandon and that we needed to salvage our relationship with the new revolutionary crowd.
The administration made a continuous effort through contacts with Bazargan’s provisional government, but attempts to reach Khomeini himself were rebuffed. Laingen told Washington that the administration needed to send a “quick signal that we were willing to live with the revolution” and make a clean break from the Shah, a message he repeatedly gave to the provisional government, but which was “not enough.”15 One way to accomplish this, he argued, was to name a new ambassador. Finally, in April, the president nominated Walter Cutler, a respected career diplomat, and the Bazargan government gave its formal consent.
But, responding to the new regime’s horrific pressure against the Iranian Jewish community, Senator Jacob Javits put through a Senate resolution criticizing the Iranian government’s treatment of minorities in general and Jews in particular. This led to angry demonstrations attacking, although not overrunning, the U.S. Embassy; the flag was torn down and graffiti scrawled on the walls. The Iranian government also withdrew its acceptance of Cutler. When the Iranians refused to budge despite our protests, the administration appointed Bruce Laingen as chargé d’affaires with the rank of ambassador in June 1979. He was amazed to see revolutionaries everywhere, many waving their Uzi submachine guns. Banks, theaters, and Western business offices had been burned.16
The embassy, with its staff of about 1,100, had been reduced to only 70 people. Bazargan and Yazdi promised to protect it, and on Laingen’s orders major security upgrades were made. Heavy steel doors with automatic alarm systems, electronic surveillance cameras, remote control tear-gas devices, bulletproof glass, and steel window grilles were installed, backed up by sand-filled steel boxes to stop projectiles from outside. Food was stored for a long siege, and contingency plans developed for a staged withdrawal if there was an attack. These measures were designed to provide defense for several hours.17
Even though the U.S. Marine contingent was enlarged, as I later learned when I was the Brussels-based American ambassador to the European Union in the Clinton administration, embassies are not impregnable fortresses and depend upon the protection of the host country under long-standing international law and practice, and bilateral agreements. Khomeini’s forces totally ignored these established norms. Carter depended on precedent to avoid serious abuse or kidnapping of our people, and reflected that “I didn’t think it was going to happen. I thought they might have abused or gone into the embassy or something, but I never dreamed that the government would not eventually, maybe over a period of hours, come on in there.”18
When Laingen first arrived at the 27-acre embassy compound, he saw furniture, cars, and household supplies still piled up following the evacuation of the many members of the American community who had descended on the embassy after the February revolution. At the height of the Shah’s reign, there had been some 60,000 Americans living in Tehran, many to manage the large military relationship. As part of his initial focus on strengthening security, he especially wanted the Revolutionary Guards out of the compound, because their mere presence annoyed the marine guards protecting the embassy.
Laingen’s immediate mission was restoring the supply chain of military equipment as an earnest indication of his broader goal, which was to implement his instructions of reassuring the provisional government that the United States fully accepted the change of regime and had no intention of bringing back the Shah. His reception by the provisional government was courteous and friendly. It was staffed largely by secular leaders of the National Front, who had made common cause with Khomeini and his clerical followers to overthrow the Shah. He experienced no difficulty meeting with the most senior members of the new government, and was pleasantly surprised at the annual July 4 celebration by the large number of senior ministers who turned out, including Yazdi, although the foreign minister prudently refused to allow himself t
o be photographed with Laingen in a toast.
Lying in wait, however, was the parallel political structure: Khomeini and his revolutionary council, which never made formal contact with the embassy and was barely visible to it—although not for want of trying. Laingen occasionally met some senior mullahs and one member of the council, Ayatollah Beheshti, and he made it a point to emphasize repeatedly that the United States accepted the revolution and had no intent of reversing it, and that the Shah would not be a factor in making American policy.
In August there seemed to be some improvement. The head of the Iranian security group in the compound, whom Laingen called a “particularly unattractive thug named Mashalla,” was forcibly removed by other revolutionary elements. But the chaotic and threatening situation in which Laingen and his colleagues were forced to operate was still unlike that of any U.S. Embassy in the world. One Sunday morning Laingen returned from a swim, clad only in his swim trunks and a bathrobe. When he opened the door to the second floor of his official residence, he was shocked to find several Revolutionary Guards pointing Uzis at him, unaware that they were confronting the senior American diplomat in the country. They entered the residence through kitchen windows at the rear, exploring every corner in search of a competing group of Revolutionary Guards they were trying to evict.19
Several of the more friendly Revolutionary Guards and two chagrined marines met with Laingen to sort things out, and this led to a breakthrough. The marines regained control of the compound, and an Iranian police guard was posted outside the walls of the more heavily fortified embassy as a new ring of external security. This was taken as a tangible sign the provisional government wanted to regularize relationships with the Carter administration. But when Vance and Yazdi held the first high-level meeting between the two nations in New York, Yazdi was so full of aggressive revolutionary rhetoric that Vance was unable to pursue his agenda of installing a new ambassador to reopen formal diplomatic relations.20
Laingen resolved a number of commercial and consular disputes and facilitated dozens of visits by American business representatives, though he still felt Washington did not fully appreciate the upward trend in relations he saw in Tehran, which was shared by other Western embassies. Three weeks before the hostages were taken, visas started being issued to the thousands of Iranians waiting to come to the United States. There was even a willingness to share military intelligence with the provisional regime of the looming threat from Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. American officials felt comfortable traveling outside Tehran.
Only a week before the embassy was seized, American officials worked with the provisional government and the revolutionary committee that controlled the military compound to gain access to the military equipment warehouse, which Laingen regarded as the most important sign that the provisional government really wanted to rebuild the military supply relationship, a goal Laingen considered of overriding importance. The two sides were close to an agreement on a limited resupply of spare parts that was critical for the Iranian air force.21 What was lost on everyone was a subterranean effort to undermine the Bazargan government by the radicals, who were waiting for the right time to strike.
One of the most fundamental flaws of the U.S. intelligence was its failure to understand the powerful political pull of Islamic fundamentalism embodied in Khomeini, even though a number of Farsi speakers were stationed at the embassy and maintained contacts with lower-level clerics. A type of dual government was developing in Iran that exists even today.
Bazargan spoke frequently on television pleading for cooperation and venting his frustration over his inability to implement his decrees. He complained that the revolutionary committees were undermining his government, operating outside normal administrative channels, and setting up their own roadblocks on streets. He implied that Khomeini was behind this. The ayatollah sat like a potentate in Qum and refused to meet with Laingen. As the latter realized only in retrospect, Bazargan was a reasonable man, but headed a “government without power.”22 The real power lay in the ayatollah, who Laingen later concluded was “so rigidly opposed to any kind of presence of the United States, of ‘western toxification,’ as to make it impossible ever to have had a relationship with us.”23
THE SHAH’S POWERFUL FRIENDS LIGHT THE FUSE
The other major factor in the hostage crisis was the return of the Shah to the United States, and here he and his highly placed American supporters cannot escape their share of the responsibility. As the Shah’s regime tottered, Carter offered him an American sanctuary in December 1978 and January 1979, more than a month before Khomeini’s return, but the “King of Kings” dithered. The offer was not made out of the goodness of the administration’s collective heart, but as an inducement for the Shah to make way for moderate politicians to try to form a less radical government than was likely to be fostered by Khomeini.24
The administration made plans for him to stay at Sunnyland, the estate of the media magnate Walter Annenberg in Palm Springs, California; he was to fly there directly and agree to stay out of politics. But to everyone’s surprise, he decided first to stop in Egypt, probably because he nursed the illusion that a Khomeini regime would quickly fall and he would be ushered back to his kingdom, just as in 1953. More realistically, he also thought that rushing to America would play into the hands of his Iranian opponents, who considered him a lackey of the United States. In Egypt the deposed Shah stayed with his close friend Anwar el-Sadat, and then went to Morocco at the invitation of King Hassan. There a senior American intelligence officer made contact with him, and reported that while he was a broken man, he believed that he had prevented a bloody military confrontation that might have foreclosed his return.
While counterfactual history is speculative by its very nature, had the Shah accepted the president’s first invitation to come to America, I believe it is doubtful there would ever have been a hostage crisis. Khomeini was so pleased to see the Shah leave Iran and clear the way for his return that he initially raised no objections to the Shah going to the United States.25
But on February 22, when the Shah informed the American ambassador to Morocco that he would like to enter the United States, it was too late. The next day an NSC committee chaired by Brzezinski assessed the tense political stand-off in Iran and the large number of Iranian students in America who despised the Shah and could be expected to demonstrate against his presence. The CIA officer in Morocco was told to advise the Shah as politely as possible to delay his visit.26
Then Brzezinski, prompted by a call from Ambassador Zahedi, had second thoughts about denying immediate entry to a longtime ally and brought them to Carter. But the president was warned by Brzezinski’s own deputy, David Aaron, that if the Shah was admitted, American hostages might again be taken, and this time their release might be dependent on extraditing the Shah to Iran to face trial. The president abruptly turned Brzezinski down, pointing out that with Americans already having been held hostage, however briefly, on February 14, he did not want to see pictures of the Shah playing tennis on American soil.27
But the Shah was already wearing out his welcome in Morocco and would not take no for an answer. He hired a public relations firm and a lawyer and put tremendous and persistent pressure on Carter, through his good friends Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller. Both members of the foreign-policy establishment were indignant that such a longtime ally could be kept out of the United States. They arranged for him to take refuge in the Bahamas for an unhappy two months, with little privacy and exorbitant costs, and then he moved to Cuernavaca, a resort outside Mexico City favored by wealthy artists, eccentrics, and, ironically, the retirement home of his nemesis, Ambassador Sullivan.28 He was allowed to remain there only a few months and then moved on to Panama. Finally Sadat sent a plane to Panama to take him back to Egypt. The Shah’s anger at the president grew intense, and he blamed Carter for losing Iran, which was given credence by Henry Kissinger.
Kissinger told me that while he had no particular feeling for th
e Shah as a person, he felt the United States owed him much because, at some sacrifice to himself, he “was almost alone in helping us in a crisis” in Israel, in offering refueling to U.S. Navy ships in the Indian Ocean, and even in Vietnam. When Kissinger reached an agreement to end the Vietnam War that froze military force levels, the Shah sent all his F-15 fighters—later replenished by the Nixon administration—to beef up the South Vietnamese inventory.
The former secretary of state led an active campaign on behalf of the Shah against the appeals of his own successor, Cyrus Vance, telling me: “I started the ball rolling, as I felt he had been a champion and leader for the U.S. for over two decades, and couldn’t see a problem with having him come [here] for a supervised exile, so that he would not engage in Iranian politics.”29 Kissinger started the campaign by going to David Rockefeller, whose Chase Bank was known as “the oil bank” for its deep connections to the industry that was founded by his grandfather, John D. Rockefeller. He also recruited John J. McCloy, lawyer, banker, and de facto chairman of the American foreign-policy establishment. Now Kissinger felt it was time to go public. So in January 1979 he added a paragraph to a speech praising the Shah as a decades-long friend of America who was being treated “like the Flying Dutchman with no place to go.” On April 9 the impressive trio of Kissinger, Rockefeller, and McCloy met with Carter, Brzezinski, and Vance.
Kissinger remembers that Vance and Carter rejected their appeal, but Brzezinski let them know he supported it but was constrained by the president’s opposition.30 Carter was upset by the campaign, although he allowed the Shah’s children to continue their education in America and was willing to admit the empress for medical care if she wished, so notifying the Iranian government. For the first time the Iranians warned the administration of serious problems if either the Shah or his wife were admitted.
President Carter Page 91