President Carter

by Stuart E. Eizenstat

  One could fill an ocean with what the United States did not know about developments in Iran. It amounted to one of the most massive intelligence failures in American history, attested to later by CIA Director Turner, who admitted his agency “let Carter down badly on Iran,”12 and more colorfully by the NSC’s Iran expert Sick, who concluded the CIA’s intelligence was “sheer gobbledygook masquerading as informed judgment.”13

  But there was an underlying reason for the dearth of intelligence about this nation so deeply connected to American security. To seven American administrations the Shah was Iran and Iran was the Shah. He was modern, sophisticated, a reformer of sorts, and a friend. At his insistence Iran was one of the few major countries where we did not position intelligence officers to focus on its internal politics and report on what was actually happening on the ground. The Shah insisted his own SAVAK do that. So while there may have never been a formal directive to avoid contact with opposition groups, there was, as noted by Brzezinski’s Iranian specialist Sick, a “clear awareness that the Shah was annoyed and suspicious about such contacts and they gradually dried up.”14 The CIA had assets in Iran, but they were focused across the border on the Soviet Union. As Joint Chiefs of Staff head General David Jones put it, “We will rely” on SAVAK for internal developments.15 And since the Shah himself depended on SAVAK, he believed his own propaganda when he saw popular demonstrations organized on his behalf.16

  The result was catastrophic. As Sick told me: “We misjudged the Shah, absolutely. We believed that he was the leader that he portrayed himself as being. We were convinced that he was capable of basic decision making. We did not know of his illness. And we didn’t know about his fundamental indecisiveness. By the time we realized he couldn’t in fact bring Iran out of this thing, it was really too late.”17 And if it had been admitted even privately to ourselves, it would have meant declaring a generation of American policy toward Iran bankrupt.

  The Shah’s health played a decisive role in his fall. Although the physical condition of important world leaders is a standard feature of their secret CIA profiles, it was a total blank in Iran and further evidence of a massive intelligence failure. Not even the Shah’s confidant, his dashing ambassador to Washington, Ardeshir Zahedi, knew the ruler was suffering from cancer; the Shah lied that he was plagued by gout. There were sharply conflicting reports: Some had him depressed and appearing sallow, others said that he looked hardy and resolute. To dispel rumors, Ambassador Zahedi arranged to have the Shah waterskiing when Barbara Walters traveled to Iran for a TV interview.18

  Nor did Carter help the Shah when he made a New Year’s Eve visit to Tehran as the last stop on a foreign swing closing out his first year in office. The results belie any notion that he was distancing himself from the Shah, let alone preparing to throw him to the wolves. They settled the details for the civilian nuclear reactors we were selling Iran, and the president also asked for Iran’s consolidated shopping list of weapons for the next five years. His briefing papers reminded him of the persistent clashes between student opponents and the police, so Carter was nuanced and cautious on human rights. At the state dinner on the eve of 1978, he gracefully touched on this delicate issue by quoting the revered thirteenth-century Persian poet Saadi: “If the misery of others leaves you indifferent and with no feelings of sorrow, then you cannot be called a human being.”19

  Unfortunately the only thing that was remembered from that formal toast was a phrase of unscripted hyperbole (a regular occurrence that normally brought smiles to those of us who worked with him). Carter tried to boost the Shah’s morale by calling Iran “an island of stability in a turbulent corner of the world” (emphasis added). At the time he thought of the visit as a “big, wonderful gala” attended by King Hussein of Jordan and press celebrities like the TV anchorman Walter Cronkite, and of himself as the seventh successive president since Franklin Roosevelt who had dealt successfully with the Shah. Nobody, least of all Carter, and certainly not his intelligence agencies, foresaw that riots would rudely push the Shah from his pedestal in the coming year.20 Later, with 20–20 hindsight, his statement was seen as naive.21

  The Khomeini forces heard the president’s toast in a very different key. Mohsen Zara Sazegara, one of Khomeni’s closest aides in exile, told me it only fanned the smoldering flames of revolution.22 If a revolution can be said to have started on any given day, that would be January 7, 1978, a week after Carter’s visit, when the government-controlled newspaper Tellat published an article accusing the ayatollah of being a foreign agent. That touched off a spiral of protests starting January 9 in Iran’s holy city of Qum, during the Shiite holy month of Muharram, and only two months after the death of Khomeini’s son, which some blamed on SAVAK. The police killed several of the Qum demonstrators, and the leading cleric in Iran, Ayatollah Shariatmadari, called the Shah’s government anti-Islamic. A month later Khomeini appealed across the border from his exile in Iraq to Iranians to commemorate the killings in Qum, which ignited a large demonstration in Tabriz. This time about sixty demonstrators were killed. In Shiite tradition, the Khomeini forces then commenced memorial demonstrations for the dead at each forty-day interval throughout much of the rest of the year.

  Sick sent Brzezinski an ominous memo disputing the official Iranian assertion that the riots were provoked by Communists, and arguing that they originated with “the reactionary Muslim right wing, which finds [The Shah’s] modernization program too liberal and moving too fast away from the traditional values of Iranian society.”23 This was also Sazegara’s view: It was not America’s support but the Shah’s own vigorously pursued modernization program that ignited the Islamic opposition.24

  For the sake of stability Carter was prepared to give the Shah a wide margin for maneuver. Over the objections of Patt Derian, the State Department’s designated defender of human rights, the White House on March 28 approved a shipment of tear gas to Iran to control the spreading demonstrations. In April SAVAK bombed the homes of non-Islamic opposition leaders, as the Shah escalated the repression of his domestic opponents. Then the overthrow of the conservative Daoud regime in neighboring Afghanistan reinforced the Shah’s belief that he was facing a Communist-Islamic conspiracy, however unlikely such a political alliance may seem.

  In the summer of 1978, the Shah expressed the totally unfounded fear to Henry Kissinger, who was visiting him at his vacation palace, that Carter and the Soviets had reached a deal in which Iran would be under Russia’s sphere of influence, and Saudi Arabia America’s.25 The Shah soon asked for more U.S. military aid, and in a disastrous news conference appeared indecisive and uncertain about whether to take a hard or soft line to deal with the demonstrations against his rule.

  How to best respond to events that called into question four decades of America’s unstinting support for the Shah? The president approved most of Iran’s military requests. But the summer brought a lull in the demonstrations as the Shah developed a carrot-and-stick policy of sharply repressing the dissidents, while announcing such modest reforms as replacing the head of SAVAK, committing to free elections in 1979, and promising press freedom and space for opposition groups in politics. His opponents had heard all these unfulfilled promises before.

  Ambassador William Sullivan, an independent-minded operator who previously had occupied a similar role in Vietnam, returned from Tehran to report that the worst was over and the Shah would survive. But it turned out to be the calm before the storm. The Shah’s promises of more liberalization only whetted the appetite of the clerics, who saw weakness instead of confident rule. By backing off even slightly, Sazegara said, the Shah sent a “very significant signal to the people of Iran” that they could push harder.26 Worse, without realizing it, he helped define the split between secular nationalists who sought democracy, and Islamic fundamentalists who always wanted theocratic rule. When the Shah was eventually forced from power, the two wings grappled to fill the vacuum and the clerics turned out to be the most implacable, as well as ruthless
, in exploiting and manipulating the Shah’s most extremist opponents, most notably the radicals who later seized the U.S. Embassy.

  Widespread demonstrations broke out later in the summer around the country, leading the Shah to impose a curfew on Isfahan and then other cities. Then fire was literally added to the smoldering embers of revolution when 477 people died in the Rex cinema in Abadan, the site of a major oil refinery, on August 19, 1978—another important day leading to the Shah’s demise. The Shiite radicals wrongly blamed this theater disaster on SAVAK and the Shah.

  When Sullivan returned late in August from a vacation of almost three months—amazing in its length at such a crucial period—he wrote a reassuring assessment of the Shah’s promised reforms but concluded that they were not yet recognized by the public. But meanwhile events moved faster than we could. The Shah appointed a new prime minister who was not a strong figure and had a corrupt reputation. More demonstrations filled the streets. On September 5 tens of thousands of Islamists rallied in Tehran’s Jaleh Square, and the army opened fire, killing hundreds. The government imposed martial law, but the killings finally registered with the Shah. He announced a shift in priorities, under no pressure from Carter, scaling back his military budget and shifting the money to pay families of those killed in the riots and the Rex cinema fire.

  All this resonated far beyond Iran’s borders. Iranian ambassador Zahedi27 met with his longtime friend Israeli foreign minister Moshe Dayan as he was on his way to the Camp David peace talks. Dayan told him the fate of the Shah was more important to Israel than the negotiations with Sadat. At the same time the Shah told Carter there was a plot to take advantage of his liberalization program and asked for Carter’s support as he restored law and order. The upshot was a presidential statement reaffirming the close relationship with Iran, regretting the loss of life, and supporting his continued liberalization.28

  When Sullivan met with the Shah on October 10, he found him “looking drawn and tense, but the conversation was animated,” as he expressed concerns about the loyalty of his military.29 The Shah even considered inviting Khomeini home from exile, which Sullivan told him was a terrible idea.

  THE SHAH SEALS HIS FATE

  What the Shah next did to Khomeini probably sealed his own fate: He had the radical cleric moved out of his exile in an Iraqi backwater under the thumb of Saddam Hussein to the center of what turned out to be an international media circus in France. Mistakenly believing that pushing the ayatollah far away would lessen his influence by reducing his proximity to Iran, the Shah asked Saddam to squeeze him out of the country. The Iraqi dictator was only too happy to get rid of him, but instead of taking refuge in another Muslim country like Algeria or Syria, he chose France on the recommendation of a young acolyte, Ibrahim Yazdi, a committed Iranian nationalist who had fled Iran because of his activities against the Shah, and who felt Paris would provide Khomeini a world stage.

  When Khomeini sought permission to enter France, the French government agreed as long as Iran did not object, and the Shah fatefully did not. Ironically, in Paris, the birthplace of the Enlightenment, the cleric could take advantage of the Western freedom of expression that played no part in his religious scheme of governance. Khomeini and his entourage stayed for only one week in the capital because the neighbors complained of the steady stream of visiting Muslim activists. So they moved to Neauphle-le-Château, a small village only a half-hour’s drive outside Paris, and home to an Iranian activist with a small apple orchard where Khomeini liked to stroll. He had an office in the house and slept there, but he held court in a tent erected nearby, where he would meet the world’s press, lead Friday prayers, and preach sermons.

  Yazdi, who was at Khomeini’s side in France, had received a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Tehran, and joined an underground movement after the 1953 coup that deposed Mossadegh and restored the Shah to his throne. In 1961 he moved to the United States, earning a doctorate in biochemistry from Baylor University in 1967, cofounding the Freedom Movement of Iran Abroad, and eventually becoming an American citizen while working for the Veterans Administration. After Carter’s election Yazdi flew to Najaf to inform Khomeini that the new president was putting pressure on the Shah to liberalize as part of his human rights campaign, and that Mehdi Bazargan, one of the founders of the Liberation Movement of Iran, planned to write an open letter calling on the Shah to leave Iran. He sought Khomeini’s blessing to help him obtain thousands of signatures across the political spectrum from Muslim nationalists to Marxists, and the letter was published. Yazdi, who remained under a form of house arrest in Iran until his death in 2017, at the age of 85, for his work seeking a more democratic Iran, was one of the revolution’s many children it devoured. He came to realize that Carter’s human rights policies had no effect on the Shah’s dealings with the Iranian opposition. (I learned about Yadzi through his son-in-law, Dr. Mehdi Noorbaksh.)30

  Yazdi threw in his lot with Khomeini and was joined by a few other followers, including Mohsen Sazegara, who gave me a unique perspective on Khomeini and the radical Islamic revolution. Sazegara became an observant Muslim toward the end of high school and recalled that during the 1970s “SAVAK controlled everything and every activity,” even all of Iran’s photocopiers. He attended Sharif University of Technology in Tehran as an Islamic activist, then spent three years at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he joined the Muslim Student Association. Only a month after Carter’s election, Sazegara published an analysis of the new president’s human rights policy in the Islamic student newspaper, declaring that it would lead to changes in Iran. He did not expect that the Shah would be overthrown but felt the time had come to spread the Islamic movement. After completing his examinations, he returned home and immediately became involved in activities against the Shah in the mosques and universities in Tehran and Isfahan, which he said had become possible because of Carter. He traveled back and forth between Tehran and Chicago, and always had in his mind the 1953 Anglo-American coup that overthrew Mossadegh.

  Soon after Khomeini was ensconced at Neauphle, an aide asked Sazegara to join the ayatollah. For the young Sazegara it was the chance of a lifetime. He borrowed $200 from an Iranian doctor in Chicago and bought a one-way ticket to Paris, where Yazdi met him at the airport. He joined a group of four students who helped with the arrangements for the flood of press requests: Khomeini held more than four hundred interviews and press conferences, and the students would translate the questions into Farsi and then relay his answers in English or French. Sazegara and his fellow students also read forty or more newspapers and magazines every day and prepared news summaries in Farsi of two or three pages for Khomeini, which they would give him each night. Sazegara told me: “Every night we had a discussion of what Brzezinski said, what Carter said, what the Shah said, and what’s the situation.”31

  Volunteers were arriving from Iran and throughout Europe, eager for armed struggle against the Shah, and Sazegara soon had another role. In the small inn adjoining the ayatollah’s house he ran four-day courses to train them in techniques of organizing underground guerrilla cells, obtaining weapons from army garrisons, and protesting “against a police state.” He was inspired by the Viet Cong and said, “We believed in armed struggle, a long battle with the regime of the Shah and the Americans who support him.” Many of these volunteers returned to Iran after the fall of the Shah and were folded into the Revolutionary Guard, which was designed by Sazegara and his colleagues to be exactly what it is today, an army outside the regular armed forces, defending the radical Islamic revolution from internal enemies. In more recent years it has been dispatched to Syria and Iraq to fight for the interests of Iranian Shiism.

  At the tender age of 23, Sazegara remained at the ayatollah’s right hand when he later returned to Tehran in triumph, and he held a number of high offices in the revolutionary government. He found the 76-year-old Khomeini “very smart … [he] listened to whatever you said very carefully, but didn’t look at you
,” while folding his hands together. During the night Khomeini would wake up and pray; he was celebrated as a religious leader for doing this for half a century. This pious behavior, said Sazegara, made the cleric’s later conduct of “killing people, torturing people” all the more surprising.32

  If the CIA knew little about the internal turmoil in Iran, and less about the Shah’s terminal illness, it is equally stunning how little they knew about Khomeini’s activities in his French exile, from either electronic surveillance or human contacts. Although he was delivering public sermons with the world press in attendance and sending tape cassettes of his fiery sermons back to Iran, neither U.S. nor French intelligence seemed to appreciate his ultimate goal of establishing a fundamentalist Islamic republic, perhaps believing Yazdi’s soothing words that Khomeini would remain a spiritual presence while moderate officials would run the government.

  A young Afghan-born Ph.D. from Columbia University, Zalmay Khalilzad (later President George W. Bush’s ambassador successively to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the UN), told me that he took a New Year’s trip to Paris with his new wife and decided on a lark to try to meet Khomeini. He had an introduction to Yazdi, and asked him why a moderate like him would be working for Khomeini against the Shah. Yazdi replied that Khomeini was only a religious figurehead, who, along with his clerical colleagues, would remain on the sidelines when the revolution deposed the Shah. The next day Khalilzad met Khomeini, who was dressed in black clerical robes and sitting unsmiling, cross-legged on the floor in his tent. An aide, initially not realizing that Khalilzad was fluent in Farsi, reminded Khomeini to “tell the American professor that we want democracy and rights for all—this is what the Americans like to hear.”