President Carter

by Stuart E. Eizenstat

  The Shah believed that the National Front would come up with a suitable cabinet, but as the year ended, his options had narrowed to only two: Leave the country or stay and apply an iron fist to restore order. Bakhtiar held firm as the Shah’s appointed prime minister, but his efforts to build a national unity government of moderate secularists and Islamists was proceeding too slowly to catch up with the realities in the street. This was exactly what Khomeini wanted, although not what his young defenders were telling the world’s press. Yazdi began a charm offensive indicating that Khomeini was committed to an Islamic republic that would hold free elections, guarantee freedom of speech and the press, support the military, and seek good relations with all countries, including the United States. This line was also conveyed to the administration at a meeting Yazdi held with Henry Precht, the State Department’s Iran desk officer, who seemed impressed by the soothing nostrums.

  By December 30, 1978, almost a year after the president’s toast to Iran as an “island of stability,” it was anything but. Ignoring his instructions, and without Washington’s approval, Sullivan was trying to strike a bargain with the Khomeini forces.54 Carter was so furious that he demanded Vance sack him, but Vance pushed back and agreed only to ease him out when the crisis had passed. Carter later said: “I wish I had gone ahead and done it.”55

  At a summit meeting on the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe in the first week of January 1979, with the leaders of Britain, France, and West Germany, Carter discussed the Iran crisis. He remained supportive of the Shah, his prime minister, Bakhtiar, and the use of the military to support him if the Shah left the country.56 No one at the White House was willing to force out the Shah, even as his regime was collapsing. Neither the president nor Brzezinski realized that the Iranian military was not willing and indeed barely able to mount a coup. So events unrolled on their own because, to paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, men could not ride them.

  The administration desperately tried to save the day, but Sick warned Brzezinski that a harsh military regime would not work because the fragile Iranian army was being diminished by daily desertions, and that the Shah should limit his powers and become a constitutional monarch under the 1906 constitution. The president approved a cable to Sullivan instructing him to tell the Shah that continued uncertainty was undermining military morale and that a Bakhtiar civilian government was preferable, but if this was in doubt, a strong military government should be chosen. But when Sullivan presented this message, the Shah said the military had not asked to use an iron fist, that the administration’s recommendation for a military government would cause more bloodshed, and that he “did not have the heart” for a crackdown on his own people.57

  THE PEACOCK DETHRONED

  Huge crowds of Iranians were taking to the streets all night, without sleep, attacking police stations and military garrisons. At this point there was a united front of all factions to oust the Shah—the nationalists, Communists, the bazaar merchants, and the Islamists. This unity would not last long. On January 16, the very day the Shah was leaving, Carter met with congressional leaders at their regular breakfast and conceded that the United States “couldn’t control Iran’s internal affairs, and there was no way to forecast developments”58—for good reason, as Khomeini attacked Carter from France as “the vilest man on earth.” The ayatollah also announced he would return on February 1, calling for Iranians, including soldiers and civil servants, to disobey the government. His messages were broadcast on loudspeakers, and there was little that Bakhtiar, the army, or the United States of America could do about it. From his villa in France, Khomeini announced formally for the first time that he was forming a council for an Islamic republic and would install a government upon his return.59 He sent cassette tapes to Iran urging the armed forces and the people to unite against foreign “hoodlums.”

  On January 16, 1979, the Shah’s 37-year tenure on the Peacock Throne ended in humiliation with his forced departure from Tehran. Not then or indeed ever did he renounce his monarchy, but he left Iran with a message supporting the Bakhtiar government. He blamed everyone but himself: confusing signals from Washington; lack of direct contact with Carter; even his own ambassador, Ardeshir Zahedi, whom he said had served him badly with “inaccurate reporting.” He later reflected that while his generals urged him to use force, “I know today that had I ordered my troops to shoot, the price in blood would have been a hundred times less severe than that which my people have paid since the establishment of the so-called Islamic Republic.” But fundamentally the choice was his. He admitted that while a dictator can save his regime with violence, “a sovereign may not save his throne by shedding his countrymen’s blood.”60

  Sick saw it from a slightly different and less complimentary perspective, writing later that the Shah was unwilling to order a bloody military crackdown “even to save his own skin.”61 All this undercut Brzezinski’s dogged insistence on a military coup to save the Shah, as well as Carter’s critics who complained that American force could have saved the Shah.

  The day after the Shah fled, the president dispatched General Robert Huyser, deputy commander of NATO, who had long-standing ties with the Iranian military. His mission, in the words of Joint Chiefs chairman Jones, was to “give backbone” to the Shah’s generals to stick together—when, no longer if—the Shah left. Huyser was instructed by Carter to inform Iran’s generals that the United States felt it was vital for Iran to have a strong, pro-American government, that the military leaders remained in Iran to ensure this, and finally to assure the generals that the United States would support them.62 But Ambassador Sullivan was still marching to his own drummer.

  When Sullivan and Huyser met the Shah, he asked them when he should go—with Sullivan saying as soon as possible and Huyser urging delay to have time to rally his military leaders.63 This proved to be a mission impossible. The generals feared for their own lives if they remained and the Shah was no longer there to lead and protect them.

  New instructions were issued by the administration to Sullivan and Huyser to support the Bakhtiar government, to open lines of communication with the religious community, but to avoid bringing radicals into the government. Huyser and Sullivan interpreted the instructions differently, with Huyser believing his support of the Bakhtiar government included action by the Iranian military if necessary, while Sullivan wanted the military to step aside and let the political forces fight it out.64 The administration spent hours debating the possibility of a coup against the Khomeini government, but never agreed, in part because the leaderless, divided Iranian military simply was not willing or able to carry out such a difficult and bloody mission.65

  * * *

  It is important to avoid viewing this dramatic history with the false assurance of perfect hindsight. Khomeini’s Islamic fundamentalism was novel and not well understood at the time. It was difficult to understand the appeal of an aging radical cleric in medieval religious garb, who had been exiled for years by a monarch in a rush to modernize his nation—indeed, as we came to recognize, in too much of a rush. Ironically, this cleric who seemed to come from a distant past pioneered the political use of a new device to rally his followers. American intelligence was clueless about the impact of the tape-recorded cassettes of his venomous sermons circulated clandestinely to mosques, which galvanized support around the country. It was a primitive precursor to the sophisticated use of social media—ranging from direct-mail specialist Richard Viguerie’s efforts for Ronald Reagan to today’s political campaigns, Donald Trump’s use of Twitter, and the sinister deployment of Facebook as a recruiting vehicle by radical Islamic groups. Khomeni’s skills had been vastly underestimated. This robed 76-year-old cleric, a ruler of crowds and a pioneer of manipulation by modern electronic media, would be America’s new opponent in what was once its client state and an anchor of U.S security in the Middle East.

  But did Jimmy Carter “lose Iran”? No. The Shah of Iran, in power for almost four decades, lost his own country. Khomein
i, in Brzezinski’s words, “crystallized the frustrations” of a wide swath of the Iranian public over the Shah’s autocratic, lavish Western lifestyle, SAVAK’s repression of all opposition, and the initial appeal of the seemingly humble ayatollah.66 The Shah refused to cede any authority to the secular opposition and turn himself into a constitutional monarch. To his credit but also to his loss, he refused to order his army to kill demonstrators in large numbers, which probably would only have forestalled the uprising, not ended it. There were limits to what the United States could do to save an unpopular ruler, as the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations learned in Cuba with Fidel Castro’s revolution against Fulgencio Batista, and the Obama administration discovered years later when demonstrators in Cairo drove President Hosni Mubarak from power.

  However, the Carter administration certainly did not cover itself with glory. The lack of reliable intelligence was an unacceptable fault in failing to keep the president and his advisers abreast of the nature of events on the ground in real time. The divisions between Vance and Brzezinski and the rogue diplomacy of Ambassador Sullivan impeded the formation of a consistent policy. Although there was consistent support for the Shah, he was not given clear guidance.

  A new American face, Bruce Laingen, appeared later as our representative in Tehran. He had been stationed in Iran as a junior diplomat, knew the country, and understood the Shah, who, he said, “lacked the capacity to trust anyone, like all despots.”67 He became a principal figure facing this new and more virulent radical Islamic despotism in the final act of the Carter administration.

  27

  THE FALL OF THE PRESIDENT

  “Nobody can prevent me,” declared Ayatollah Khomeini as he returned from exile to wildly welcoming crowds of Iranians numbering in the millions.1 The owner of the villa in Neauphle had chartered an airplane from Air France, and when Sazegara asked Khomeini how many people he wanted to accompany him, the ayatollah responded that he wanted not only his entire entourage of about thirty-five people but all of the some three hundred journalists. Air France was concerned that the plane might be turned away from Tehran, so they insisted the airliner carry more fuel and fewer people. Sazegara had the unenviable task of bumping more than half the journalists.

  The plane left at midnight from Paris’s Orly Airport, with Sazegara the last passenger to jump on as he negotiated until the last minute with journalists begging to join the historic flight. At 9:00 a.m. on February 1, 1979, the Khomeini “Victory Flight,” as his adherents in exile called it, landed at Mehrabad Airport in Tehran. General Amir Hossein Rabii had vowed to shoot down Khomeini’s plane when it tried to land in Tehran, but only if he had U.S. approval, which he did not receive. He was among the many senior officials under the Shah later shot by the revolutionaries. A new era began in the long history of Iran and its relationship with the United States, and no one could be certain of the outcome at that heady moment.

  As the plane’s doors swung open, Sazegara found himself looking down on the leaders of the Iranian air force, guns at the ready, and could not be sure what they would do. But he was reassured when Khomeini’s brother and his friend Morteza Motahari, who had visited at Neauphle, came running toward the plane. Sazegara let the photographers off first to record the ayatollah’s historic return, and the pilot then helped Khomeini down the stairs. Khomeini asked to be driven to a cemetery south of Tehran, where, in Sazegara’s words, “the martyrs of the Revolution were buried.”

  Then Khomeini got down to business and held a press conference at an Islamic high school to announce the appointment of his new prime minister, Mehdi Bazargan, the man who had organized a letter with thousands of signatures opposing the Shah. That put him in direct opposition to Shapour Bakhtiar, a longtime secular opponent of the Shah who nevertheless was not acceptable to Khomeini because he had been named by the Shah. Even before he left France he had directed Dr. Hassan Habibi, an Islamic legal scholar, to begin drafting a new constitution based explicitly on Islamic law. Bakhtiar did not oppose this on principle but insisted that he was the legal prime minister. Khomeini rejected this out of hand, and used the power of public demonstrators to shout: “Independence! Freedom! Islamic Republic!”2

  The army, trained for decades by the United States and still armed with American weapons, was powerless against the crowds, and gradually switched its loyalty to the ayatollah and his virulently anti-American, anti-Western stance. But it did not happen overnight.

  While Brzezinski surreptitiously organized the evacuation of thousands of Americans on C-130 planes, General Huyser for his part spent weeks following the Shah’s departure trying to rally the military to support Bakhtiar and block Khomeini’s accession to power. The Shah was suspicious of his own military leaders and had never permitted the heads of his air force, army, and navy to meet together. Huyser organized the top six military leaders into an operating group for the first time and did everything he could to stiffen their joint resolve before Khomeini’s return. Huyser felt that the military leadership remained willing to work with Bakhtiar and a regency council the Shah had created, but the general constantly had to fight off Sullivan, who lacked confidence in the military.3

  In the end military support for Bakhtiar evaporated when the soldiers abandoned their units along with the outpouring of public support for Khomeini on his return. In his initial speech he promised to protect the soldiers who supported him and hang as traitors those who did not and remained loyal to Bakhtiar. This promise of amnesty, made by Khomeini’s appointed prime minister, Bazargan, ended Huyser’s mission.4 The February 11 cable from the U.S. defense attaché at the embassy captured the reality: “Army surrenders; Khomeini wins. Destroying all classified.”5

  In the words of the last chief of staff of the Shah’s armed forces, General Abbas Gharabaghi, we “melt[ed] down like a snowball.”6 With the army neutered, the last vestiges of the Shah’s regime were destroyed. Bakhtiar fled to France after only thirty-seven days in power. The State Department’s hope of a peaceful transition, upon which Sullivan and State Department Iran desk officer Henry Precht had based their hopes, never had a chance.

  WASHINGTON’S FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH RADICAL ISLAM

  It became imperative for Washington to establish a relationship with Tehran’s new government, or at least to try. The reasons were compelling: the Soviet potential for intervention through its Communist proxy, the Tudeh Party, in a country that was one of the world’s largest oil producers, and the security of the Persian Gulf more broadly. Carter was under no illusions about the dangers posed by Khomeini, but because of the long-term interests of the United States in Iran, he immediately established diplomatic relations with the revolutionary government.7 The Iranian revolution of 1979 followed the same path as the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The most ruthless, organized, and radical forces prevailed, even though they did not initially constitute anything like a majority of the opposition to the established order.

  This is generally the rule in such upheavals. The moderates are divided and play by more traditional rules that simply do not apply in the vacuum left by the collapse of the established order. Just as the Bolsheviks were never thought to have the staying power to govern post-czarist Russia, so too were the clerical fundamentalists thought to be incapable of establishing control over post-Shah Iran. In both instances there was a great deal of wishful thinking. Brzezinski’s own report to the president a day after Khomeini’s triumphant return warned him: “Islamic revivalist movements are not sweeping the Middle East and are not likely to be the wave of the future. More concretely, it is worth noting that … religious institutions rarely succeed in dominating the political systems of Muslim countries.”8 But in medieval revenge, they executed those top advisers to the Shah who did not flee when he did, beginning a bloodbath of killing anyone associated with him.

  Brzezinski’s Iran specialist, Gary Sick, later described the situation far more acutely: “Khomeini’s call for the establishment of a religious philosopher-king, the vel
ayat-e faqih—and clerical management of political institutions according to religious law was so unexpected, so alienating to existing political traditions that it was less a surprise than an embarrassment … the notion of a popular revolution leading to the establishment of a theocratic state seemed so unlikely as to be absurd. Unfortunately, there were no relevant models in Western political tradition to explain what we were seeing in Iran during the revolution.… The world was surprised not once but twice by the Iranian revolution. It was surprised in the first instance by the breadth and depth of popular opposition to the Shah and the success of revolutionary organization emanating from the mosques.” The world was surprised once again when Khomeini was able to sustain his “fanciful” notions of an ideal theocratic state. Nothing quite like this had occurred since the Reformation, and secular observers may be forgiven for their stubborn refusal to believe that this preoccupation with theological niceties in Tehran was anything more than a minor bout of eccentricity that would soon pass.”9

  But at the time, as so often happens, those in power clung to the classic illusion that “this time is different.” There was some hope that the new revolutionary government would maintain a relationship with the United States. Bazargan had excellent credentials that made him widely acceptable to the mass of Iranians as prime minister. He had been a minister in the Mossadegh government that was overthrown by Western intelligence. Bazargan and Yazdi, his foreign minister, were members of the more moderate Freedom Movement of Iran. The prime minister was an engineer and technocrat, and while an early and pious supporter of Khomeini, he was Westernized and liberal, and had hopes that once the Shah was deposed, Iran would become a state in which human rights were respected and civil society prevailed, and that Khomeini might be content to serve as a religious but not a political figure.