President Carter

by Stuart E. Eizenstat

  At the risk of his life, Golacinski, the security officer, went out into the compound to try to negotiate with the demonstrators. He was captured. The embassy’s most fluent Farsi speaker, John Limbert, opened the steel door and attempted to talk the students out of their mission, but he too was captured. Smoke was coming through the steel door, suggesting the radicals were trying to burn the chancery. When the diplomats had held out long enough to destroy most of the classified equipment, Laingen ordered them to surrender if they felt they had no other alternative. The radicals then stormed through the open door, tied and blindfolded the staff, and forced them to sit on the floor. The officials in the classified-code room held out longest, but they also were forced to surrender. The security team at the embassy frantically sought to destroy as much sensitive material as possible.

  But because of the unexpectedly rapid success of the assault, some of the CIA station chief’s highly sensitive papers fell into the hands of the radicals. The CIA stamp alone sent them into a frenzy. As they held the Americans in darkness, they beat some who resisted interrogation, and subjected others to mock executions. The zealous student captors laboriously pieced together many of the documents that had been torn to shreds, and from them they obtained important information for both operations and propaganda. Some documents exposed Iranians who had worked with the United States and helped Khomeini eliminate his opponents. Others were internal diplomatic memoranda, which reported on how Khomeini and his followers demonized the embassy as a “nest of spies.”53

  Remarkably, the embassy’s political officer, Elizabeth Ann Swift, was able to give Hal Saunders at the State Department a chilling firsthand account of the assault until the radicals cut the line. When Ham Jordan was informed, his reactions were, “My God, this could mean war,” and then, “What will this do to the campaign?” The president’s initial worst-case fear was that the revolutionaries might assassinate one hostage every day at sunrise until the Shah was returned.54

  But Sick believes that the students’ original intent, as far as it can be divined, was to stage an American-style sit-in for a relatively short time, a tactic many of the students had learned while studying abroad; they had issued a bulletin announcing that they would hold the hostages for a week. Sazegara agrees and felt that the students expected to be “kicked out of the embassy” in a short time.55 But there was a danger of escalation: Some students were more radical and wanted to kill some of the hostages during the first hours of the takeover.

  * * *

  During this confused time Yazdi was still on a plane returning from the Algiers celebration, where he had been with Prime Minister Bazargan.56 Laingen raced up the stairs of the Foreign Ministry to demand that Deputy Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi immediately take steps to end the siege. He and his staff were as bewildered as the Americans themselves and were frantically trying to get help.57 Laingen said that Yazdi came from Algiers shortly after the hostage taking and went directly to the Foreign Ministry, where he demanded that the government evict the students. Yazdi tried to duplicate what he had achieved in February, but he clearly had lost his power over the radical students and clerics.

  Yazdi’s role hardly matters compared with Khomeini’s. When did the ayatollah throw his decisive support behind the student seizure of the embassy, and why? The key actors, Sazegara, Yazdi, and Laingen, as well as Carter, agree that the ayatollah did not order the attack. Sick believes that Khomeini must have been briefed in advance of the students’ plans but did not intervene in order to determine what the reaction would be.58

  His son, Ahmad Khomeini, must have played a seminal role because the next afternoon he visited the embassy compound and returned to advise his father to consolidate his power by embracing the radical students.59 Yazdi and Sazegara learned that Ahmad had gone to see his father at Qum and convinced him that the public would be angry if he did not support the students. So the ayatollah immediately wrote a letter addressing the students and complimenting them for “a great job. You made a second revolution, which is more important than the first revolution.” The students became heroes.60

  The precise timing will probably never be known, but the ayatollah’s goal has become absolutely clear: to confirm his power over a revolutionary movement mixing ideologies ranging from Marxism to strict observance of Muslim custom and law, and crucially, to undermine Bazargan’s civilian government, which he had initially created but which had been seeking to restore normal ties with Washington. Khomeini knew that he did not have full political control of his country and his movement, and while he was an anti-American revolutionary like many other Shiite clerics, like them he also depended on the support of others, since traditionally they live off donations.

  “They very soon understand what the people want, and they say whatever the people want,” Sazegara told me. Khomeini, with his ear to the ground, “very soon found out the atmosphere of the country was anti-U.S., and he did not want to lose the majority of the nation who were anti-U.S., angry against the Shah and the U.S., and wanted revenge against the Shah. They wanted the Shah to be delivered to them for trial. So because the people were against the U.S., the ayatollah was against the U.S.”61

  And exactly as Khomeini hoped, the takeover of the U.S. Embassy rallied the public behind him. The ayatollah saw the operation as putting a final wedge between Iran and the United States and other great powers that had intervened in Iranian life over the centuries, after Persia had ceased to be a great empire. The proof of his success came almost immediately.

  By Turner’s own admission, the CIA was clueless about who the hostage takers were and their objectives.62 It is now clear that the real goal of the radical students was not to put the Shah on trial but to undermine the Bazargan government’s moderate course, destabilize it, and open the way to a more radical, clerical government that had no interest in any reconciliation with Washington. One of the radical chants, based on Yazdi’s photo taken in Algiers with Brzezinski, was that he had been negotiating with the Americans. Thus the hostages were really pawns in an internal power struggle.

  The diplomats stranded at the Foreign Ministry were in a somewhat more enviable position than their colleagues at the U.S. Embassy, but their situation became far less attractive as the days stretched into more than a year. On the first day Iranian officials gave Laingen a telephone line to communicate with Washington. He sat throughout the day at the side of Yazdi’s large desk, determined not to give up the connection. From this unusual place of captivity, Laingen called everyone he could to insist on security for himself and all his colleagues, including those confined in the embassy. The Foreign Ministry officials escorted the three to their elegant diplomatic reception room, fed them from the ministry’s kitchen, and let them sleep on the couches. Yazdi came to see them on the second day, and they were kept under guard by older soldiers and not student radicals. As the days wore on, most seemed to become fed up with the revolution and grew friendly, continuing to provide them with adequate food and access to toilets. Yazdi assured Laingen that this was no more serious than the sit-ins at American colleges in the 1960s and would soon be over.

  However, when it became clear that Bazargan and Yadzi had no influence over the students, and that power rested solely with the ayatollah, Bazargan, protesting the students’ conduct as contrary to Islam and international law, resigned along with Yazdi and his government within 36 hours after the embassy had been seized. This closed off any official channel through which the U.S. government could conceivably conduct normal relations. From then until February 1980, Laingen used the Foreign Ministry telex to communicate with Washington in carefully phrased messages. They were visited by the ambassadors of Britain, Germany, Turkey, Switzerland, and Canada, and it was through them that Laingen could communicate sensitive messages for transmission to Washington.

  When Washington finally severed diplomatic relations with Iran in April 1980, the Swiss Embassy became their protecting power and method of communicating with the administration
. When the Swiss officials visited, Laingen wrote abbreviated messages to Washington on small bits of paper and handed them over in ways that did not attract the attention of the Iranian guards. Laingen was also allowed periodic telephone contact with the State Department until one day in October 1980 the phone rang with an improbable call from a radio station in Seattle. Laingen told the caller he was in no position to grant an interview, but the station called again, and then a third time. At this point Laingen simply said that negotiations for the hostages’ release were at a sensitive stage and the American public needed to keep cool. These brief comments were picked up by the media in Iran and around the world, which led the militants to cut the telephone line for the duration.

  * * *

  From the start of the hostage crisis, the president gave us strict orders to separate it rigorously from the daily demands of governing. In an Oval Office meeting with his inner circle, Carter was explicit about how we were to behave: “I want to compartmentalize this and keep you out of it, so I can deal directly with my cabinet officers on this.” I urged him to issue a statement appealing to the American people to be calm and resolute.63

  In order to keep alive every diplomatic option during that period, Carter allowed the Iranian Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington to remain open and for their diplomats, unlike ours, to move about freely, until April 6, 1980, when he severed relations. From thousands of miles away, this policy bothered Laingen, but even more so his wife at home. She organized regular Sunday-night prayer vigils from their Washington parish, All Saints Church, and sang the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” standing outside the Iranian outpost on Washington’s Embassy Row.

  Laingen lived on hope, reinforced when thirteen black and female hostages were released within weeks, following the intercession of the PLO’s Yāsir Arafat. He told himself that the Iranians could not possibly keep the hostages through Christmas, but as he poignantly put it later: “Thanksgiving and Christmas came, New Year’s came, St. Patrick’s Day came, birthdays came, a second Thanksgiving and a second Christmas, even.”64

  Meanwhile the administration frantically approached all our Western European allies, Muslim countries, even Muslim religious leaders, to try to find someone who knew this shadowy figure Khomeini. But it came to naught because no one had a connection to this isolated Shiite radical. We in the White House at first thought that the hostages would be released as quickly as the first batch back in February. But gradually there was a sinking feeling to the contrary as the revolving door of Iran’s revolutionary politics threw up and then threw out one unknown individual after another. “It began to dawn on us,” said Ham, “that the situation was so chaotic in Iran that maybe it wouldn’t be over soon.”65

  Sixty-six Americans were initially taken captive in the embassy, including Laingen and his colleagues in the Iranian Foreign Ministry.66 But one of the few bright spots was the story of six American diplomats who were away from the embassy in Tehran at the time of the assault. They hid in several different places around Tehran, including in the apartment of Tomseth’s Thai cook. Eventually they managed to contact a senior Canadian diplomat who said: “My God, where have you been?! Why didn’t you call us before?!”67

  The Canadians’ heroic reception and assistance from the Canadian ambassador, Ken Taylor, and the diplomats’ escape in January 1980, through an elaborate CIA masquerade as a Canadian film crew, were memorialized in a book and the Oscar-winning film Argo. Canadian foreign minister Flora McDonnell worked with the administration to give the six what looked like authentic Canadian passports. Because it was illegal to issue a false passport, the Canadian parliament had to go into special private session to authorize them. Carter ordered complete secrecy in the White House even after the caper, lest the remaining hostages suffer for its success, even though he could have gotten a political boost if the story had leaked out. Several reporters learned about it, but they were also implored to sit on it, and they did. Even during the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations, Carter never revealed his administration’s central role: “We gave full credit to the Canadians,”68 he told me. We too often take our neighbors to the north for granted, but no one could ask for better friends close by than Canada. Nevertheless, the longer the whole miserable story of the hostages lasted, the worse it became.

  BLOCKADE, BOMB, OR TALK?

  Nothing in his term as president so brutally shone a spotlight on Jimmy Carter as the Iranian hostage crisis, all 444 days of it emblazoned across the nation’s front pages and television screens. His reactions showed his great strengths and his weaknesses—his tenacity, his iron will, his deep commitment to bringing back the hostages safely through every nonmilitary means from diplomacy to sanctions, and even a daring if disastrous rescue mission. As with so many of his decisions, foreign and domestic, it also demonstrated his determination to do what he felt was right over what was politically advantageous. But it also exposed the cost of his decision from the start to make their personal safety the paramount concern above the broader reputation of the United States. The hostages themselves must have appreciated the president’s choice; Sick told me if he had been a hostage he would have wanted President Carter negotiating for his release.69 But the broader implications were something they and their families could not fully appreciate.

  The problem was that once it became clear that Carter was unwilling to use even a show of military force, he lost possible leverage to release the hostages. And as their captivity dragged on, he relied on negotiations with an Iranian government that did not have the power to make a deal, even when the hostages had served their political purpose and the powers in Iran wanted to get rid of them. Carter could negotiate a historic Middle East peace agreement with Sadat and Begin, but Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini so hated the United States that he overrode his own government and refused to negotiate at all. At the root of their extended captivity, Laingen said, was the fact that “Khomeini hated Carter for his involvement with the Shah.”70

  At the dawn of the Islamic fundamentalist movement, Carter and the administration can be forgiven for their meager understanding of this rigidity and deep animus toward the United States. What is much harder to understand is the woefully inadequate intelligence about the movement and Khomeini himself. The manner in which Carter dealt with the hostage crisis provided an open door for Ronald Reagan, who started well behind him in the polls because he was wrongly viewed as a mere movie actor still cast in a shoot-from-the-hip Western, but was able to defeat the Carter administration, in significant part, because the United States was outmaneuvered by an aged Islamic radical.

  I sat in on one of the first National Security Council meetings, where a range of options was on the table. From my place in a chair along the wall of the basement-level, windowless Situation Room, I suggested we could effectively shut down the Iranian economy by immediately blockading Kharg Island, from which Iran exported the bulk of its oil. I reminded the officials that President Kennedy had successfully employed a naval blockade to force back Soviet ships resupplying Cuba during the 1962 missile crisis, and I argued that in the early months of the new government, Khomeini might relent rather than risk his drive to consolidate his power. Defense Secretary Harold Brown said we could mount a naval blockade, but that a better option would be to seed mines in the Iranian harbors and not risk our own warships.71

  Throughout the crisis, until he overruled Vance on the mission to rescue the hostages, Carter adhered to Vance’s line of negotiations, negotiations, and more negotiations. They were backed by economic sanctions that lacked bite because our traditional allies failed to join us at a critical time. In this Vance was supported by that figure of the legal establishment, White House Counsel Lloyd Cutler.

  From the start, Zbig pressed for some sort of blockade of Kharg Island as a tourniquet to squeeze the flow of Iran’s oil exports—the lifeblood of its economy. I strongly favored this position, but my role in this crisis was focused on the energy implications and the ec
onomic sanctions, as we were fighting a two-front war to release the hostages and limit the inflationary fallout of the Iranian revolution. Zbig said it was a “terrible mistake” not to employ force and talked with me, Ham, and Jody to drum up support for blockading Kharg Island by mining its harbors. That way the tankers would be most at risk—and more likely stay away—and we would not have to interpose the U.S. Navy and risk a confrontation with Iranian or possibly even Soviet warships.72

  Yet on the first day of the takeover, it was decided not to divert an aircraft carrier group into Iranian waters lest it provide an excuse for the kidnappers to kill their hostages. As more than two weeks passed with no sign that the hostages would be freed, Carter’s top advisers held a crucial meeting at Camp David on November 20 to consider a range of options, including a naval blockade, mining Iranian harbors, seizing oil stored on Kharg Island, and bombing the refinery at Abadan. All were militarily feasible, but it was unclear if any would lead to the release of the hostages.73 Ham argued against the blockade because he felt it it would only ratchet up the confrontation and would not bring the hostages home anyway. He continued: “It might have even resulted in the hostages being killed. And what would we have done then?”74 Jody Powell had the same attitude. Defense Secretary Harold Brown later told me that if we decided to mine Iran’s harbors, the Soviets might have tried to win the favor of the new regime by confronting the United States and removing any mines.75