As the brutal nature of the Khomeini regime emerged through torture and summary executions of its opponents, a politically dangerous “Who lost Iran?” campaign began gathering force as a presidential election year approached. Sentiments within the administration began to change, and even Mondale appealed to Carter in a July 23 memo arguing that “a great nation could not allow these twerps to tell us who could come into our country.”31
No one in the administration could say they had not been fully warned by the most authoritative American official on the ground. On July 29, Laingen, replying to a request from Vance to assess the possible repercussions of admitting the Shah, sent a secret cable advising against it in half a dozen different ways.32 He warned that if the Shah took up residence in the next two to three months, it would endanger Americans in Iran unless the political power struggle in Iran was resolved by autumn, which it was not.
Laingen correctly forecast that daily frustrations would increase in the coming months, including a potential “search for scapegoats” for the regime’s failure, such as an absurd charge by Khomeini during the previous week blaming the United States for burning agricultural fields throughout Iran. He also reported the frequent intrusions on Bazargan’s government by revolutionary groups who were subject to the “whims of the ultimate control of the Ayatollah.” Moreover, he chillingly reported that the government still had not replaced the irregular guerrilla force of supposed guards posted by Khomeini around the embassy. Finally he warned correctly that “refuge of the Shah [in the United States] would almost certainly trigger demonstrations against our Embassy … [and] Iran’s regular police forces remain largely demoralized and cannot yet be relied upon to apply the force that might be needed to prevent violence against us.” He concluded: “It is of utmost importance, in my view, that we not inject ourselves in that process by a premature gesture toward the Shah, with all the suspicions about our attitudes and about USG [U.S. Government] interference that this could arouse, and the opportunity it would provide for those revolutionary hotheads who would probably like nothing better than a chance to frustrate the political timetable and take a crack at us at the same time.”
Through the late summer and early autumn, Laingen continued sending cables like this with reports that the clerics were heading toward establishing a theocracy, and that the pledges by Bazargan and Yazdi to protect the embassy from attack by the radicals were of diminishing value. Bazargan was publicly critical of the revolutionary committees operating outside the control of his government, and told the celebrated Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci: “For an official point of view the government runs the country, but in an ideological and revolutionary sense Khomeini and his councils control.”33
If Kissinger, McCloy, and Rockefeller could have read Laingen’s stark cables, would they have persisted in lobbying for the Shah’s admission? The question underscores the dangers of relying upon even informed Americans offering sensitive advice without full access to all the classified information necessary for a sound decision.
Laingen posed alternatives for the administration and the Shah’s advocates. He argued that while the United States had an obligation to admit him at some point, it would be dangerous now, with so much political turmoil, and not until we had demonstrated our acceptance of the Islamic revolution by formally naming someone as ambassador following the aborted nomination of Cutler; until the Iranians largely completed their process of shaping a new constitution; and finally, until the Shah had publicly renounced his and his heirs’ claim to the throne—which he never did to his dying day.34
* * *
Then we learned that the Shah had cancer. Like so many other destabilizing factors in Iran, this secret illness was not uncovered by U.S. intelligence but disclosed on October 18 by David Rockefeller, who must have thought he held a humanitarian trump card by appealing for him to be treated in the United States. Until that moment the Shah had kept his illness a personal and state secret of the highest order. For years since its discovery during a Swiss ski trip in 1974, the Shah had told neither his own family—his wife, Empress Farah, and his twin sister, Ashraf, learned about it only after he went into exile—nor the Iranian government and people, that two French specialists, Dr. Jean Bernard and Dr. Georges Flandrin, had diagnosed him with cancer of the lymph system.
His treatment with the drug chlorambucil kept the cancer in check, but for the CIA to have been unaware for five years of a potentially fatal disease affecting the leader of one of America’s major allies and the beneficiary of billions’ worth of weapons was another staggering lapse. By the time the Shah had reached the Bahamas, the cancer had flared up. Dr. Flandrin flew to the Bahamas and diagnosed Richter syndrome, a rare and sudden transformation of the Shah’s slow-growing cancer into a more aggressive form of lymphoma. Along with the cancer, a case of gallstones and his own reaction to medication made the Shah terribly ill.
As late as September 27, Vance spoke to the Council on Foreign Relations reiterating why security for U.S. diplomats in Tehran precluded the Shah’s admission. Dr. Benjamin Kean of New York Hospital made several trips to examine the Shah in Mexico and concluded that the combination of so many maladies, from jaundice to a cancerous spleen and a neck tumor, required immediate attention that he could only receive at a large, sophisticated hospital.
Rockefeller’s disclosure had its intended effect. After Vance informed the regular weekly foreign-policy breakfast on October 19, resistance began crumbling. The secretary changed his mind and recommended that the Shah be admitted on humanitarian grounds to deal with this medical emergency. Brzezinski had always advocated his admission as a matter of national honor. As he told me: “How can we have friends in the world if we behave this way?”35 Journalists began accusing the administration of treating a valued ally like a homeless person.
The president was the last holdout, fearing another attack on the embassy.36 Carter was the only person who was “skeptical and did not want to let him in,” Ham said, and the president was the only person in his inner circle who actually predicted the outcome: “What are you guys going to advise me to do when they overrun our embassy now and take our people hostage?”37
Carter told Vance to get a medical opinion on whether the Shah could receive the required medical care abroad. On October 20 the State Department’s medical adviser, after reviewing the Shah’s records, agreed the Shah could not receive the treatment he needed anywhere in Mexico. Finally Warren Christopher, the deputy secretary of state, told Carter they would obtain an assurance from Bazargan and Yazdi that our diplomats would be protected. So the president said: “Well, if we can get that commitment, okay.”
Carter and Brzezinski felt they got that commitment from Bazargan.38 Ham also recalled they got renewed assurances from the Iranian government that they would protect the embassy as they had the previous February.39 But it is clear that the Iranians objected to the Shah’s entry into the United States, fearing it was part of a conspiracy to return him to power. There were eight thousand Americans in Iran at the time, plus those seventy-two diplomats.
In fact, however, the commitment was not as binding as it seemed, in part because by that time no one but Khomeini could have made such assurances stick. Carter was at Camp David that weekend, and Brzezinski forwarded Vance’s memorandum on admitting the Shah, softening it slightly but crucially. He changed the conditions so that the Iranians would merely be notified and not asked to agree because, as he said “We didn’t in effect let Bazargan and Yazdi have a veto power, but we did agree to notify Bazargan and Yazdi through Laingen.”40
Carter now faced one of the most fateful decisions of his presidency. Vance recommended that before allowing the Shah entry Bazargan should be notified so we could assess the severity of his reaction in advance. But from Camp David, Carter disagreed, and on October 21 decided that the Iranian government should be told he would be admitted for purely medical reasons and no more.41
Laingen learned that his advice against admit
ting the Shah had been ignored when a Marine guard handed him a note two days later as he was having breakfast at the residence. When he read the message, he said, it was a “bit of a shock to all of us in the embassy,” and he immediately ordered additional security measures, fearing the worst. Laingen and the Iran desk officer Henry Precht, who was visiting Iran at the time, met with Bazargan and Yazdi, and while the two politicians were unhappy, their response was subdued. They doubted that the real reason was medical, since no one in Iran had ever heard the Shah was ill.42
Laingen himself did not have full knowledge of the Shah’s condition, and while Bazargan, a dignified man in the Persian tradition, was civil in his response, Yazdi bluntly warned that the Shah’s admission to the United States was a very serious step that could have some severe repercussions. They were not ready to believe the Shah had incurable cancer and pressed for a medical evaluation by Iranian doctors, who would fly to the United States to examine the Shah. The State Department and NSC balked and agreed only to inform them of the diagnosis made by the Shah’s American oncology team. Laingen asked for assurances that the embassy would be protected, but Bazargan, fearing the worst from the growing power of the radicals, could only say: “We will do our best.”43
The president faced a classic dilemma. As Ham aptly described it, Carter was being asked: “Mr. President are you going to let him in and get that treatment, or are you going to make him stay in Mexico and possibly have him die and us be blamed for that death?”44 Public opinion would not have permitted him to deny entry under those dire medical circumstances, and he would have been accused of weakness and betrayal of a valued ally.
But one of the historic ironies of the Carter administration, perhaps the difference between the president serving two terms or only one, was that the president was given an inaccurate medical assessment of the treatment options. He grudgingly agreed to admit the Shah based on the assurance he could only be treated in the United States. But New York was not the only place where the Shah could have been well cared for.
In researching his own book years later, Ham was the only person in the Carter administration who talked to the Shah’s French doctors, the two specialists who had originally diagnosed his lymphoma and later examined him when his illness worsened. Bernard and Flandrin were world renowned for their treatment of lymphoma. Jordan also asked several doctors to review the Shah’s medical records and concluded that he could have been treated in Mexico City, where many American top medical specialists in all fields do their advanced training. But the crucial medical judgment about whether he needed to be flown to New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center was turned over to Dr. Kean, who was not an oncologist but a pathologist specializing in malaria who had managed the Shah’s care in Panama, as well as Dr. Michael DeBakey, the famed cardiovascular surgeon, also not an oncologist. Ham believed that the Shah got “poorer treatment and poorer medical care and attention than you or I would have gotten if we had walked in off the street with the same condition,” because with the eyes of the political and medical worlds looking over their shoulders, the Sloan Kettering doctors dared not risk being experimental and bold, but gave their distinguished patient very conservative treatment, which Jordan found to be “uneven and at times contradictory.”45
From Sazegara’s perspective at Khomeini’s right hand, the admission of the Shah to the United States was a “powerful trigger” for the second hostage taking. Yazdi felt the same. As Yazdi’s son-in-law Professor Noorbaksh told me: “The admission of the Shah to the U.S. was the last blow. Yazdi had warned the U.S. against this act, and said the United States was playing with fire with the Shah’s admission to the U.S.”46
Again the CIA-sponsored 1953 coup loomed large in the minds of Iranians, who were convinced that in admitting the Shah, the United States was on a path to reinstall him. The fateful decision would lead not only to Carter’s downfall but to that of Bazargan and Yazdi as well. That is why Yazdi pressed so hard to have one of their doctors examine the Shah. Yet the immediate response on the streets of Tehran and the official media was surprisingly restrained. Even Khomeini simply said: “Let us all hope he dies.”47
A FATEFUL HANDSHAKE
One final diplomatic event made it almost certain that as the radicals gained control, the revolutionary Iranian regime would turn its back on the United States. In the last few days before the U.S. Embassy was breached on November 4, Brzezinski flew to Algiers at the head of a U.S. delegation to join the celebration of 25 years of Algerian independence from France, with a handful of famous radical figures including General Võ Nguyên Giáp of Vietnam, Raúl Castro of Cuba, Libya’s Mu’ammar Gadhafi, and Yāsir Arafat of the PLO, with whom he shook hands at a reception in violation of U.S. policy. For this he was criticized by the White House, but he blithely shrugged it off by saying he had “acted in conformance with the laws of civilized people.”48
Of more fateful consequence for both sides, Bazargan and Yazdi were also there and asked for a meeting with Brzezinski, which he felt he could not refuse at a time when Washington was trying to open a channel with Iran. He repeated that the United States was willing to open diplomatic relations and resume military sales. But they conveyed another message: Do not provide asylum to the Shah. Brzezinski replied that if he asked for it, “We won’t betray him,” and that the situation differed from that of the Mossadegh coup of 1953. They repeated their warning, and as they parted, Brzezinski was photographed shaking hands with Bazargan.49
This handshake was far more serious. The photograph and the story of the meeting were given massive play on the front pages of the Iranian newspapers even before Bazargan returned from Algiers. While Brzezinski returned home optimistic about doing business with Tehran, to paranoid Iranian radicals—“hotheads,” as Laingen called them—it appeared that the civilian government was cozying up to the United States, and this was one more nail in its coffin.
Laingen said flatly that Brzezinski’s public embrace of Bazargan in the Algiers meeting “backfired” and “put an end to the provisional government.”50 As the student radicals took to the streets, Brzezinski continued to think their demonstration would turn out to be just one more left-wing revolt against Bazargan and Yazdi.51 But this time really was different.
A few days before, a group of fervently religious students from Amir Kabir University of Technology had gone mountain climbing, a favorite activity among Iranian students. They decided to show they were more radical and anti-American than the Communist students who had stormed the embassy on February 14, and they contacted Mohammad Mousavi Khoeiniha, a young cleric and close friend of Khomeini’s son, imploring him to ask permission from Khomeini. They told Khoeiniha that they did not want to storm the embassy if Ayatollah Khomeini forbade it, and that, in any event, they only intended to stay a few hours or at most a day. Khoeiniha told them the ayatollah would not approve if he was asked in advance. So Khoeiniha advised them to take over the embassy anyway, whereupon he would seek Khomeini’s agreement, in effect presenting Khomeini with a fait accompli.52
On November 1 more than 1,000 students spent the day marching around the embassy compound walls and posting pictures of Khomeini, drawing graffiti, and slapping on posters denouncing the Shah and the United States. Laingen learned about it the night before, added security, called in the Tehran police chief, and things were under control. There were some tense moments as an embassy security officer ripped down posters with the ayatollah’s picture. In view of the warning and the occasional struggles around the gates, it is difficult to understand why the State Department and the White House did not order an immediate evacuation of all embassy personnel.
Laingen had already advised the bulk of the Americans who lived in the vast compound or in apartments behind it to spend the day at the British Embassy compound in the hills of Tehran. On the evening of November 3, at the invitation of the Iranian Foreign Ministry to its private club, Laingen and most of the diplomatic corps viewed a documentary on the revolu
tion. It included shots of the February breach of the U.S. Embassy, with tanks in the streets. The day had passed in relative quiet, so he decided to reopen the embassy’s consular section, after the graffiti were removed.
The difficult events of the previous days seemed to provide evidence that the government meant what it said about providing security. One precaution taken by the staff was a patriotic decision to keep the American flag flying by securing it to the flagpole and greasing the pole itself to make it difficult to climb. The Marines were ordered to keep a state of alert, but business would defiantly go forward.
THE HOSTAGE CRISIS BEGINS
On that fateful November 4, Laingen left the embassy for the Foreign Ministry and a long-scheduled meeting at 10:30 a.m. to arrange for the future reopening of a reduced American military liaison office. He was accompanied by Mike Howland, his security officer, and Victor Tomseth, the senior political officer. As they made their way across town, Laingen noticed several groups of demonstrators heading for the university to commemorate an assault there by the Shah’s regime. The meeting, accompanied by traditional cups of tea, was civil and apparently productive. As they were boarding their limousine, Howland, who had a walkie-talkie, relayed the news that the demonstrators had turned toward the embassy compound and that Alan Golacinski, a security officer inside the walls, was advising the three diplomats not to return. So they raced up the stairs of the Foreign Ministry seeking Iranian help to block the advancing demonstrators.
They were physically separate but in radio contact. Laingen did not order the marines to fire on the demonstrators, and they did not, but instructed them to use tear gas, which was done. When the alarm bells rang, the Marines raced from Marine House back to the compound, and one or two were captured. The chancery building, the diplomatic heart of the large embassy where the real business takes place and the papers are stored, was surrounded by hundreds of demonstrators. Some had guns, others carried banners; still others were equipped with tools with which they forced open a rear window of the chancery basement. From there they stormed the chancery, even though the Marines used tear gas to try to repel them. The Marines retreated up one floor and then another, to the level where most of the embassy officials were behind locked steel doors.
President Carter Page 92