The Twilight War: The Secret History of America’s Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran by David Crist
Penguin Press medium.com
At two a.m. on January 4, 1979, the loud ringing of the secure tele­phone jolted U.S. Air Force General Robert “Dutch” Huyser awake and out of his warm bed in Stuttgart, Germany. The early-hour call…
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President Carter inherited a Persian Gulf policy forged entirely on the anvil

of the Cold War. One of the first crises between the United States and the

Soviet Union had occurred in that region in March 1946, when the Soviets

refused to leave northern Iran following the end of World War II and then

moved tanks menacingly toward the Iranian capital of Tehran. When the

United States forcefully objected, Moscow backed down, unwilling at that

point to go to war. For the next three decades, while the United States

focused its resources on confronting Moscow in Central Europe, the United

Kingdom served as the major military power in the Middle East protecting it from Soviet expansion. The British had a large military presence in the area,

and the Gulf sheikdoms were still colonial dependencies. But in January

1968 Prime Minister Harold Wilson announced his cash-strapped British

government’s decision to withdraw all its armed forces and end 140 years of

colonial occupation in the Persian Gulf. As the Union Jack lowered over the

newly independent sheikdoms, the United States, bogged down in Vietnam,

lacked the military resources to post to the Gulf.

So in the early 1970s, President Richard Nixon devised a new economy-of-force plan, unofficially known as the twin pillars strategy. Amer­ica’s Persian Gulf security would rest on the two staunchly anticommunist powers in the region: Iran and Saudi Arabia. With Saudi oil money and its regional prestige as keeper of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, coupled with Iran’s military muscle, these two nations would serve as America’s prox­ies to contain the Soviet Union. “The vacuum left by British withdrawal,” Henry Kissinger wrote in his memoirs, “would be filled by a local power friendly to us.” American security in the Persian Gulf now rested largely with the growing might of the shah’s military.

The shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, enthusiastically stepped into this role. Since his reinstatement on the throne, with the assistance of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), following a 1953 coup, the shah proved to be ambitious, expansionistic, and fervently anticommunist. He made it known throughout diplomatic circles that he sought Iran’s ascendancy as the new regional power. Deftly playing on American fears of communism and fueled by petrodollars, which increased twenty-four-fold in the seven years from 1968 to 1975, the shah expanded the Iranian military to become the largest force in the Middle East. The Ford and Nixon administrations sold some $12 billion in weapons to Iran, offering the Iranian despot the most advanced weapons, short of nuclear, in the American arsenal.

The shah was not shy about using his freshly acquired military might to encroach on his neighbors. In November 1971, following the final British pullout of forces from the Gulf and the scheduled independence of its former protectorates — the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Bahrain — the shah forcibly reasserted Iran’s control of the contested Tunb Islands and the island of Abu Musa in the Persian Gulf. While small (Abu Musa is only twelve square kilometers), the islands are strategically located. Abu Musa, for exam­ple, sits astride the deepwater route leading into the western approaches to the Strait of Hormuz. Any oil tanker exiting or entering the Gulf must pass close by the island. The shah also backed Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq, as a result of which in 1975 then Iraqi vice president Saddam Hussein reluc­tantly signed the Algiers Accords, which established as the southern border between the two nations the midpoint — and not the Iranian bank — of the Shatt al-Arab, a strategic waterway between the two nations and an impor­tant entry for Iraq into the Persian Gulf.

President Carter continued Nixon’s twin pillars policy, though with less enthusiasm. He initially hoped to demilitarize the Persian Gulf. Carter floated the idea to Moscow of reducing the quantity of weapons sold to the third world, a strategy that would include a drastic reduction of American weapons sold to both Saudi Arabia and Iran. The president then proposed a treaty to reduce naval forces in the Indian Ocean as the first step in what he hoped would lead to an accord on demilitarizing that body of water. Neither proposal went beyond perfunctory discussions. Moscow steadfastly refused to curtail arms shipments to buyers in the Middle East, all of whom happened to be among the Soviets’ largest weapons clients.

A fundamental split divided Carter’s foreign policy team. The two prin­cipal antagonists were Carter’s national security adviser and longtime Demo­cratic foreign policy expert, a forty- nine- year- old Polish- born Cold War hawk named Zbigniew Brzezinski, and his sixty-year- old secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, who had served as secretary of the army and deputy secretary of defense in the two previous Democratic administrations. While the two advis­ers generally agreed with Carter’s emphasis on human rights, they clashed on just about every other significant issue. The potential pitfalls associated with these two men and their rival philosophies in the same administration came as no surprise. Hamilton Jordan, Carter’s youthful campaign manager, quipped during the transition: “If, after the inauguration, you find Cy Vance as secre­tary of state and Zbigniew Brzezinski as head of national security, then I would say we failed. And I’d quit.” President Carter appointed both men, and Jor­dan remained as chief of staff.

The two men also differed in their views of the Persian Gulf. Brzezinski advocated a more robust American military presence. He viewed Gulf oil as an Achilles’ heel of the West in relation to the Soviet Union and stressed the need to retain unfettered access to Middle East oil. If oil resources became scarce, the next battle of the Cold War would be not for Berlin, but for Riyadh or Tehran. Secretary Vance wanted to downplay the role of the U.S. military in the Gulf. The secretary advanced the prevailing view within the State Department that the presence of U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf would be counterproductive. In an area with a long colonial legacy and deep suspi­cions of superpower motivations, better to keep U.S. forces beyond the hori­zon than to increase the military footprint in the region.

The new secretary of defense’s view lay somewhere in between. The forty-nine-year- old Harold Brown had earned his doctorate in physics at Columbia University at the remarkable age of twenty-two. A self- described impersonal and analytical man, he was a brilliant scientist and had arrived at the Penta­gon as a member of Kennedy defense secretary Robert McNamara’s “whiz kids.” Brown had spent most of the 1960s earning the deserved reputation as a moderate and a realist, but when it came to the Middle East, Secretary Brown generally agreed with Brzezinski’s more hawkish assessment of Soviet intentions. He shared Brzezinski’s concern about Soviet dominance of the Persian Gulf: “Soviet control of this area would make virtual vassals of much of both the industrialized and developing worlds.”

Despite this discord, the stakes remained low for Washington, as the shah appeared to be firmly in power and in America’s pocket. In January 1977, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research produced an optimistic report that echoed the intelligence community’s views of the shah’s prospects for political survival: “Iran is likely to remain stable under the shah’s leadership over the next several years. The prospects are good that Iran will have relatively clear sailing until at least the mid-1980s.” On a stopover in Tehran in December 1977, at the end of his first year in office, Carter reemphasized his support for the shah during a lavish New Year’s Eve gala, noting that under the leadership of the shah, Iran “is an ‘island of stabil­ity’ in one of the more troubled areas.”

But all was not as rosy as the U.S. intelligence community believed for the Pahlavi dynasty. In the early 1960s, the shah actively encouraged modernization and secularization. He forced land redistribution, especially of the vast holdings of Shia clerics, which struck at the heart of their wealth and power. The shah ordered state-owned businesses sold; the enfranchisement of women, including their ability to hold political office; and the removal of Islamic dogma from schools. The shah largely dismissed Islam as a backward force that impeded the formation of a new, modern Iran. The by-products of his brand of modernization were rapid social change and increased instability. While Iran’s newfound oil wealth remained in the hands of a small elite, rural unemployment grew, and the population of Tehran multiplied fivefold as peasants poured into the city in search of work.

In 1975, the shah canceled elections and abolished the two nominally independent political parties in favor of a single party dedicated to the Pahlavi regime. Any pretense of a constitutional monarchy vanished. The opposition movement grew, as did the murmur of discontent in the streets of Tehran, stoked by thousands of underemployed students freshly educated in Western universities.

From the beginning, one of the most vocal opponents of the shah’s designs was a religious scholar from Qom, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Alarmed by Khomeini’s unwavering vitriolic criticism of the secularization of society, the shah had ordered the sixty-year- old cleric imprisoned in 1963 and exiled the following year. Khomeini settled in the Shia holy city of Najaf, Iraq, where he continued his incessant monologues against the “corrupt” Pah­lavi dynasty and its chief supporter, the United States. Khomeini remained revered by multitudes of Iranian people. He developed a mystical persona among both secularists and Islamists opposing the shah. Khomeini preferred to stay above the political fray, providing broad policy guidance and leaving the details to his key advisers. Many Western observers mistakenly viewed this leadership style as a sign that Khomeini intended to serve in the tradi­tional role of a Shia imam: influential and powerful, but aloof from secular politics. Ayatollah Khomeini, however, had a clear view of where he wanted to take Iran, and it was not in the direction of either a Western democracy or a constitutional monarchy. He called for a purge of all corrupt influences and for the Islamization of Iranian society. Khomeini believed history had shown that the throne was not to be trusted; the monarchy needed to go. Ayatollah Khomeini intended to remake Iran into a new Islamic republic. The mosque would supplant the imperial throne.

The shah’s power began to unravel in late 1977. Khomeini’s eldest son died, likely of a heart attack, but Khomeini accused the shah and his secret police, Savak, of murdering him. A short time later, on January 7, 1978, an article published in a government newspaper ridiculed the ayatollah, ques­tioning his religious credentials and even his sexual preference. Riots erupted in the religious city of Qom. In the resulting mayhem police shot several protesters; reports of the exact number killed varied from six to three hun­dred. The streets remained quiet for the next forty days in accordance with the Iranian custom of remembering the dead, but when the mourning period ended, on February 18, protests over the killings erupted in every major Ira­nian city. In Tabriz events turned violent, and the government sent in the army to quell the unrest, killing more than one hundred people. In a recur­ring pattern over the coming months, each of the events was followed by a period of mourning and then another clash between protesters and govern­ment security forces.

Attacks grew in intensity and violence, especially against targets seen as Western and decadent, such as liquor stores and movie theaters. In one of the most horrifying incidents, Khomeini supporters set fire to the Cinema Rex, a movie theater in a two-story commercial building in the port city of Abadan. Thick black smoke overwhelmed many patrons as fire spread quickly through the theater. More than four hundred people died, most of them incinerated while still sitting in their seats. In the Middle East, suspicions of conspiracy often supplant fact: despite the evidence against Khomeini’s supporters, rumor spread in the Iranian streets that the government actually had started the fire to discredit the religious opposition. The rumor turned many of those sitting on the fence decidedly against the shah and marked the begin­ning of the end of his quarter-century reign.

The shah found himself in a difficult position. If he tried to crush the dissidents, he would face the wrath of the United States for his human rights abuses. If he allowed the protests to continue, it would encourage the opposi­tion. The shah did neither. On July 22, he met with the head of Savak to discuss policy regarding the demonstrators. The meeting adjourned with the shah clearly directing that the demonstrations should be quelled by force and authorizing the army to open fire. But his directive was never implemented as the conscript army recoiled at opening fire on the populace. On August 19, less than a month later, the shah shifted course and released 711 political prisoners, most of whom immediately joined in the street protests. A mem­orandum from the director of the CIA’s office for the Near East, which was responsible for Iran, summed up the monarch’s difficulties: “The shah’s efforts to modernize Iran have unleashed unexpected if accurate strong forces of reaction that are not being contained by martial law or piecemeal conces­sions to the opposition.”

At the Iranian government’s urging, and perhaps to forestall a similar uprising among its own majority Shia population, the Iraqi government or­dered Khomeini out of the country in a forlorn attempt to isolate Khomeini from the Iranian populace. Khomeini initially sought refuge in Kuwait, but the emir turned him away at the border. This rejection turned out to be for­tuitous. Khomeini’s close adviser Ebrahim Yazdi urged him to find refuge in a democratic country. Yazdi, who had lived in the United States, believed that a free press would facilitate the spread of Khomeini’s message. So Aya­tollah Khomeini moved into a house at Neauphle-le-Château in the Paris suburbs. There, unshackled by the Iraqi Baath Party’s authoritarian restraints, he found a more free-flowing outlet in the sympathetic Western press for his revolutionary rhetoric. In the first few months, Ayatollah Khomeini con­ducted more than 450 interviews with the press as part of a sophisticated media campaign against the shah.

The protests expanded. Supporters smuggled cassette tapes of Khomei­ni’s talks back inside Iran. Technocrats, democratic reformers, communists, and disgruntled merchants all joined in the growing protests. Oil workers went on strike, and the violence reached a crescendo in early December, when hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets. Meanwhile, Kho­meini approved sending small teams of supporters to Iraq, Syria, and Leba­non to begin training as guerrilla fighters for the long insurgency he expected to wage against his rival for control over Iran.

The troubles in Iran divided the Carter administration along familiar lines. Brzezinski wanted the shah to use force to crush the resistance. He believed the United States needed to express its unqualified support for the monarch, and he advocated dispatching an aircraft carrier to the Gulf of Oman as a show of support. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance cautioned, how­ever, that the Iranians might interpret a movement of U.S. forces to the region as a precursor to invasion; the United States needed to assist Iran in a transi­tion from autocracy to democracy.

The president himself remained torn, harboring private sympathy for the democratic reforms sought by the shah’s opponents, while recognizing the grave strategic blow to the United States should the shah be overthrown. The president remained bothered by the shah’s poor human rights record under which political dissidents were frequently imprisoned and tortured. But the Iranian leader had consistently supported both Israel and Carter’s Camp David Accords, signed in September 1978 between Israel and Egypt, and his offer to assure Israel’s fuel requirements had contributed to Israel’s agreement to withdraw from the Sinai and relinquish control of the Abu Rudeis oil fields in western Sinai.

Carter agreed to send an aircraft carrier off the Iranian coast to demon­strate American resolve, and he dispatched his dutiful but bland deputy sec­retary of defense, Warren Christopher, who would later serve as secretary of state (1993–1997) under Bill Clinton, to meet with the Iranian ambassador in Washington and inform him of President Carter’s unqualified support for the shah. A week later President Carter penned a handwritten note to the shah: “Again, let me extend my best wishes to you as you continue your successful effort for the beneficial social and political reforms in Iran.”

The American ambassador in Tehran was an experienced Foreign Service officer named William Sullivan. Polished and well dressed, with a shock of white hair, Sullivan had served in two previous ambassadorial postings, including as ambassador to Laos at the height of the Vietnam War. He was no stranger to the dirty side of foreign policy and, while he was in Laos, had supported the CIA-led secret war against the North Vietnamese.

Sullivan agitated to open a dialogue with Khomeini. When the shah once told him that Khomeini supporters were “crypto-communists,” Sullivan flatly rejected the notion. The influence of Shia Islam was stronger than any Western-imposed ideology, especially the secular communists, Sullivan countered. Khomeini supporters held the real power behind the opposition movement and would serve as a natural bulwark against the communist groups, Sullivan thought. Any post-shah government would require Khomeini’s support to facilitate an orderly transfer of power to a new democratic government, and the sooner Washington recognized this, Sullivan observed, the better for America’s standing in the future Iran.

Brzezinski rejected Sullivan’s views of the situation in Tehran. It was not a choice between the shah and democracy, he told Sullivan: should the shah fall, Khomeini would inexorably move the new government toward theoc­racy. The national security adviser began backdoor conversations around Sul­livan with hard-liners inside the Iranian government about a possible military takeover. In an October 28, 1978, meeting at the White House with CIA Director Stansfield Turner, Brzezinski asked the CIA to look into developing information that could be used to undermine the opposition and strengthen the shah. Turner agreed, but he cautioned Brzezinski that many members of Congress looked upon the shah as so undemocratic that they would not toler­ate a covert program designed to keep him in power.

Turner responded a few days later. He believed the CIA could help keep the shah in power for the short run and this might provide breathing space for the Iranian government. But for the strategy to succeed, the shah needed to use “maximum force.” And in the long run, CIA analysts cautioned, it would not solve the shah’s problems. He needed to move more swiftly to establish a democratically elected civilian government.

Undeterred, Brzezinski asked Sullivan about prospects for a successful military takeover if the shah was willing to use maximum force to crush the opposition. In a tense series of secure telephone conversations, Sullivan coun­tered that a military takeover might be feasible, but every day that passed reduced the chances of a successful outcome. More important, Sullivan said, the cost to long-term American interests would be exceedingly high. Loss of life would be great, and this would scuttle any possibility of moving the country in the direction of democracy. Sullivan again advanced the idea of opening contacts with the opposition, which the national security adviser flatly rejected. Over the coming days, exchanges between the two men grew heated on the issue. They frequently shouted at each other, their arguments clearly audible in adjacent rooms.

On September 8, 1978, a massive throng of demonstrators — largely unaware that the shah had declared martial law the day before — gathered in Jaleh Square in Tehran. When the army moved in, the demonstration turned violent and jittery soldiers opened fire. While the true number of Iranian civilians killed was less than one hundred, news quickly spread through the streets that thousands of peaceful demonstrators — including many women — had been cut down in the streets. Today this day is known in Iran as Black Friday. The carnage horrified both the shah and the demonstrators, giving pause to the latter to rethink their actions. But as senior CIA Iran analyst and Iranian military historian Steven Ward noted, “The government then mis­handled what possibly was one of its best opportunities to reassert control.” With the opposition reeling, the shah opted for reconciliation. He dismissed security officials, released imprisoned opponents and replaced them with some of his own Savak agents, and ordered the army to fire above the heads of the crowds. Rather than placating the revolutionaries, the shah’s actions only emboldened them as he now appeared weak and irresolute.

A few days after Black Friday, President Carter called the shah and stressed continued American support as well as the importance of liberalization. The shah had it posted verbatim in the newspapers as a sign of American support. It backfired. To the Iranian population, it read as though the United States stood behind a government that had just shot down tens of thousands of unarmed civilians in Jaleh Square, fueling hatred of the shah and his chief supporter in Washington.

To gain a better idea of what was going on in the streets of Tehran in early November 1978, Stanley Escudero arrived in Tehran. Fluent in Farsi, the thirty-five-year-old diplomat of Mexican ancestry from Daytona, Florida, had recently served for four years in the embassy. With dark hair and a dusky complexion, he could pass as a local — perhaps not from Tehran, he admitted, but from an outlying area such as Azerbaijan. His previous assignment to Iran in the early 1970s had not been a particularly career- enhancing tour of duty. Escudero had annoyed his State Department superiors in Foggy Bottom by questioning the long-term viability of the Pahlavi dynasty. While he had not predicted the shah’s current difficulties, he openly questioned the viabil­ity of rule by the shah’s son. This assessment was not what Henry Kissinger and the State Department had wanted to hear. Compounding his impropri­ety of straying off the policy reservation, Escudero had met repeatedly with the shah’s opponents, especially religious leaders. “Iran was too important to the United States,” he later said. “I believed we would be better advised to have relations with whoever ran Iran, be it the shah or the opposition. This was not popular in Washington.” Escudero, relegated to working in the then less prestigious Bureau of International Organization Affairs at State, seemed destined for a lackluster career. But the shah’s troubles revived Escu­dero’s standing. In fall 1978, Harold Saunders, the deputy assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs, and Henry Precht, the country desk officer for Iran, each asked Escudero if he would be willing to go back to Tehran to assess the opposition and the shah’s likelihood of survival.

Reluctant, Escudero answered, “You want me to go out and meet with the same people that got me into trouble in the first place, and tell you things that you know are not going to suit current policy?”

Saunders and Precht acknowledged that Escudero had been correct in his predictions regarding the shah. They added, “We don’t have anyone else to send who stands a reasonable chance of survival.” Escudero decided to accept their offer. “I was young and stupid,” he said with a chuckle years later.

Landing in Tehran, he set about going native and infiltrating the revolu­tion. He donned Iranian clothes and cropped his beard close in a style com­mon among Iranian men. To preserve his cover, he distanced himself from the embassy and traveled to its sprawling grounds only during darkness in order to provide updates to Ambassador Sullivan. He lived in apartments of trusted Iranian friends, moving frequently for his and their safety.

Escudero traveled to Qom and met with Ayatollah Sayed Shariat-Madari, an opponent of the shah, but less extreme than Khomeini and more favor­ably disposed to the United States. Posing as a journalist, Escudero met with religious leaders from Khomeini’s camp to glean their views of the revolt, which confirmed both Brzezinski’s views of Khomeini’s true intentions and Sullivan’s intuition about the importance of the ayatollah in the future of Iran. He discovered that the religious leadership played a prominent role in mounting antigovernment demonstrations. “The demonstrations were very organized,” he observed. Wardens with armbands kept the crowd orderly, orchestrating their chants and keeping the mob unified. While the crowds were composed of a mixture of all the shah’s detractors, the Islamic move­ment was the most organized and best funded. Khomeini supporters, such as a fluent English speaker named Mohammad Beheshti, the ayatollah’s repre­sentative in Hamburg, Germany, played a pivotal role in orchestrating the protests.

Masquerading now as a student, Escudero infiltrated the mobs protesting against the shah, where he blended in with the thousands of others, shouting “Death to the shah! Death to the shah!” and raising a fist in defiance as he joined the throngs confronting the Imperial Army. It was hazardous duty. Had the students or clergy discovered an American Foreign Service officer in their midst, vengeance would have been swift and deadly.

It soon became apparent to Escudero that the shah’s days were numbered. His reports reinforced Sullivan’s opinion of the inevitability of the monarch’s overthrow. In numerous cables to both Vance and Brzezinski, the ambassador wrote that the only solution available was to push for a democratic govern­ment before the revolution spiraled out of control and it became impossible to save anything from the disaster looming before them.

Supporting Escudero’s reports, on December 12, 1978, veteran American diplomat and Middle East hand George Ball delivered a report on Iran to the president. Ball had worked Middle East issues for both the Nixon and Carter administrations, and he was instrumental in helping Nixon develop the twin pillars strategy. Echoing Sullivan’s views, he stated bluntly that the shah needed to act immediately to effect the transition to a civil government and transfer all power, except that as commander of the armed forces. Otherwise, Ball predicted, “he will collapse.”

Carter reluctantly approved his first covert operation for Iran in a final stab at saving the shah. The president had a strong distaste for these actions, but had finally been convinced to try a small effort. The CIA began a very limited psychological operations campaign to highlight awareness of the Iranian com­munist Tudeh Party’s support for Khomeini’s return in a forlorn hope to rally anticommunists to support the shah and undercut the opposition movement. It failed and the CIA terminated it little more than a month later. While Iranian protesters accused the American embassy of being a “den of spies,” a senior White House staffer wrote to Carter’s national security adviser Zbig­niew Brzezinski: “It is supremely ironic that we should stand accused of so much espionage out of our embassy in Tehran when we have done so little.”

As Christmas 1978 approached, pessimism reigned in both capitals — Washington and Tehran. Emblematically, President Carter ordered the lights turned off the national Christmas tree behind the White House on the Ellipse to save electricity. The only caroling heard at the U.S. embassy in Tehran, Sullivan wrote, came from “a rather scruffy crowd of teenagers marching by the embassy and chanting ‘Yankee Go Home.’ ”

On January 4, 1979, General Dutch Huyser arrived in the Iranian capital. As he drove through Tehran, he was shocked at the sight of the once vibrant city, now with stores shuttered and the streets empty of the usual bustling, chaotic traffic.

In view of Alexander Haig’s vocal objections to his mission, an uneasy Huyser insisted that Defense Secretary Brown provide him with written instructions. When the message arrived just before his departure for Tehran, the directives were as ambiguous and muddled as was U.S. policy toward the crisis. Huyser was told to convey to the shah the president’s continued sup­port to the Iranian military as the critical link in the transition to a new stable government: “It is extremely important for the Iranian military to do all it can to remain strong and intact in order to help a responsible civil ian gov­ernment function effectively,” the instructions said. “As the Iranian military move through this time of change, they should know that the U.S. military and the U.S. government, from the President down, remain strongly behind them.” Precisely what this message conveyed to the Iranian military re­mained a mystery to Huyser. Vance had intended it to inform the Iranian generals that the United States backed the transition to a democratic govern­ment. Brzezinski, however, intended for Huyser to give the green light to the Iranian military to stage a coup, declare martial law, and take over the gov­ernment. The muddled language of Huyser’s instructions represented a com­promise between the two competing positions, but it left both the messenger and its intended audience utterly confused.

Huyser arrived at the embassy to meet with Ambassador Sullivan, the first of many such meetings over the ensuing month. “The shah is finished,” the ambassador abruptly told Huyser. “The military has already decayed to the point they are incapable of doing anything.” Ayatollah Khomeini and an Islamic government would be better than a military coup, and the sooner the United States began mending relations with the powerful clerical force, the better in the long term. But Carter had prohibited any discussions with Kho­meini on the grounds that they might undermine the shah’s tenuous author­ity. In response, Sullivan sent a combative message to Vance urging direct talks with Khomeini. “You should know that the president had made a gross and perhaps irretrievable mistake by failing to send an emissary to Paris to see Khomeini. I cannot understand the rationale for this unfortunate deci­sion. I urge you immediately to join Harold Brown in this plea for sanity!”

The next morning, January 11, both Huyser and Sullivan traveled across the city from the embassy to the shah’s expansive palace to deliver the presi­dent’s message of support and to discuss the Iranian leader’s prospects. They found the shah looking haggard, dressed uncharacteristically in a dark suit rather than the military uniform he had worn exclusively since the crisis began. Clearly ill, he showed no vitality or strength to inspire confidence in his long-term political survival.

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?”

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.

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. 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.

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.

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 coun cil 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.

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.

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 protests 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, Ba ­zargan, 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.

The United States tried repeatedly to negotiate with the Iranians, but to no avail. A State Department report summed up the challenges of negotiat­ing with the Islamic Republic: “It is clear that we are dealing with an outlook that differs fundamen­tally from our own, and a chaotic internal situation. Our character, our society are based on optimism — a long history of strength and success, the possibility of equality, the protection of institutions, enshrined in a constitution, the belief in our ability to control our own destiny. Iran, on the other hand, has a long and painful history of foreign invasions, occupations, and domination. Their outlook is a function of this history and the solace most Iranians have found in Shi’a Islam. They place a premium on survival. They are manipulative, fatalistic, suspicious, and xenophobic.”

The U.S. military developed a series of plans, including imposing a naval blockade of Iran. A combative naval officer in the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations named James “Ace” Lyons, who was destined to play a sig­nificant role regarding Iran over the coming decade, formulated a plan to use marines backed by carrier air to seize the key Iranian island of Kharg, through which 95 percent of all Iranian oil flowed to awaiting tankers. The island was unguarded and relatively easily accessible by American amphibi­ous forces. “You take Kharg,” Lyons said, “and Iran can’t export a single drop of oil.”

On March 20, 1980, following a meeting with Carter’s principal foreign policy advisers at the White House, Deputy National Security Adviser David Aaron and Joint Chiefs chairman David Jones cleared the room of everyone but the small handful of individuals involved with military strategy. Aaron then asked about the blockade plan: “Would you just halt oil exports, or would you need to blockade all their ports as well? If the U.S. took such action, what would be Iran’s response?”

CIA Director Stansfield Turner answered Aaron’s question. “To be effec­tive, it would have to be a complete cutoff of all imports, including food. It would have a significant impact on Iran’s economy within two weeks.” But Japan would be hit hard, because that nation imported 10 percent of all its fuel from Iran. Turner added that the loss of oil on the world market and the ensuing crisis would drive oil prices up 15 to 30 percent.

In response to Aaron’s second question, State Department representative David Newsom cautioned that a blockade would lead to a strong reaction in both Iran and the Islamic world, “which, in the worst case,” he warned, “could lead the militants to start killing the hostages.”

Turner rejected that dire prediction, however, believing that such action could strengthen the hand of the Iranian moderates. The meeting ended with no decision. In the end, President Carter rejected the blockade option unless the hostages were put on trial.

The only military plan Carter ever seriously considered was the rescue mission code-named Eagle Claw, using the newly formed elite Delta Force. General David Jones formed a new, compartmented planning cell within the Joint Staff’s J-3 directorate to be known as Special Operations Directorate. Months of planning and training in the United States, Egypt, and Oman fol­lowed. In spring 1980 Carter authorized the operation.

On April 24, 1980, U.S. helicopters took off from the deck of a U.S. air­craft carrier with a cargo of elite U.S. forces intent on an eventual rendezvous with a network of supporters near Tehran, organized by the CIA, who would truck them into Tehran. Upon the rescue of the hostages, the entire group would gather at a stadium near the embassy, where helicopters would arrive and fly them all to freedom.

Following a series of helicopter mechanical failures, however, U.S. forces decided to abort the risky rescue mission. One helicopter had crashed into a four- engine C-130 during a refueling operation at a remote Iranian desert airstrip known as Desert One. Eight Americans died. After the failed hostage rescue mission, eleven CIA officers who had infiltrated Iran fled, escaping via Tehran’s airport disguised as businessmen or through the rugged province of Baluchistan, on Iran’s eastern border, with the help of friendly Iranians. With them went Carter’s presidency and any realistic hopes for rapprochement with Iran.

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