President Carter

by Stuart E. Eizenstat

  Brzezinski felt that Carter had a genuine aversion to the use of force, whether it would have been deployed by the Shah’s army to put down the rebellion or by the U.S. military to free American hostages: “The president didn’t want to, pure and simple. Even at the very last minute, there was an opportunity to knock off Khomeini when he was returning to Iran, and Bakhtiar [the Shah’s last prime minister] was willing to do it, and the president wasn’t.” Carter, he said, “really is a decent person, and I think that decency was perhaps too strong.”76

  And Brzezinski really meant it: He said he would have been willing to “bomb the hell out of Tehran and risk having the hostages killed. There would have been such a surge of patriotism and support for an embattled president, he would have been reelected. But he wouldn’t do that. I think he knew he was losing the election in part because of that.”77 Originally Carter had seemed to him a “gutsy type”: He solved festering problems before they got worse, and he demonstrated this in the Middle East, Afghanistan, the push to return the Panama Canal, normalizing relations with China, and his advocacy of human rights. But on the other hand, Zbig said Carter had this preoccupation with “quote-unquote ‘peace,’” and his national security adviser believed it was based in his religion, so that he could be tough, for example, in his Middle East negotiations “because peace was the objective.”78

  I do not think bombing Tehran would have been wise from any perspective, except as retribution after the hostages had been safely removed. But I believed then, and I believe now, that with all the risks, that either mining or blockading the Iranian harbors, rather than negotiating endlessly with an almost empty hand, would have shown Khomeini that he could not hold the United States or its diplomats hostage. Even if we had moved a significant American naval force into international waters close to Iran, it would have sent a signal that our patience was not infinite and might have made a difference. As for the concern that the radical students would have executed the hostages, it seems to me that when Khomeini was just consolidating his power, even he would have recognized that these murders would have been an act of war and would have led to a fierce response, threatening his regime.

  But Carter felt otherwise, so strongly that he closed off some of his own options. When Mondale told the president that everyone he talked to urged toughness and supported an oil blockade, Carter said: “I know that, and I am not going to have it on my conscience that it would kill the hostages.” Mondale himself feared that using military power could cost the hostages their lives, but unlike Brzezinski, he saw no evidence of religious scruples in Carter’s determination to get them home safely. In any case, no one had come up with any plan that would not in some way risk the hostages.79

  Six days after the hostages were taken, the president met with their families. Brzezinski told Carter that his biggest mistake was seeing the families the first week, which personalized the crisis. As Rafshoon put it: “They all had faces and he thought about the families.”80 I disagree. He could hardly have avoided them without being publicly savaged for being hardhearted and even unconcerned, despite efforts to free their relatives through every available diplomatic channel. The meeting was on his public schedule, but any comments were supposed to be off the record to avoid disturbing any negotiations.

  But when Carter later told the families he would do nothing, including military action, that might lead to the physical harm of the hostages, or “arouse the unstable captors of our hostages to attack or punish them,” this was immediately leaked to the press by the anxious families.81 This sent a clear signal to Iran they had no reason to fear an attack or other retaliation, thus undercutting any threat of force to strengthen the president’s negotiating hand.

  However comforting that ill-considered statement may have been to the hostage families, it was a serious mistake. At a minimum Carter should have kept Khomeini and the students guessing. At that point Carter believed the hostages would not be held long and would be returned safely, and here religion did play a role. He told Rafshoon that Khomeini would not kill the hostages “because he’s a religious man; that would be murder.” Rafshoon replied: “Well, Mr. President, I think his religion and your religion are two very different things. He believes in retribution, and if he thinks these are evil people, which evidently he does, he would not hesitate to kill them.”82

  Initially, the president and his advisers believed that the hostages would be released in a few days, and, in a bellicose mood that faded as the crisis continued, he was ready to deploy the U.S. military to punish the rebellious upstarts. On November 20, two weeks after the hostages were taken, he agreed with Brown’s recommendation to move forces into the area and ordered the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk and other military assets closer to Iran. But on December 1, Brown sent a memo to Carter recommending diplomacy and economic sanctions as the best options. The Defense secretary felt that mining the harbors was less risky than blockading them:83 If sowing naval mines was an act of war, he argued that it was a “bloodless act of war, like invading an embassy and taking hostages.” Carter intially agreed to mine the harbors, stating in a note: “Zbig, Harold and I agree completely.”84

  BOXED IN BY BANKERS, DIPLOMATS, AND GEOPOLITICS

  But Carter wanted to try economic sanctions first. However, the longer military action was withheld, the less effective it would be. The Iranians were on alert, probably preparing both military and diplomatic retaliation to try to neutralize our actions. Moreover, U.S. sanctions alone, without either coordinated allied support or a credible military threat, or both, is rarely effective. We had neither here. Many years later in the Clinton administration, when I was a leader in dealing with a whole range of sanctions against Iran, Libya, Cuba, and other countries, I learned that for all our economic power, unilateral economic sanctions by the United States are rarely effective in changing the conduct of any target country. And whatever one’s view of the nuclear deal with Iran in 2015, there is almost universal agreement that the Iranians came to the negotiating table only because the Obama administration persuaded the European Union to put its economic muscle behind the United States. But during the Iran hostage crisis, we got only fitful cooperation, and to my mind, this was all the more reason to have a military weapon like a blockade or harbor mining, or at least a credible threat, not only to use against Iran, but to spur our allies to join us in a strong coalition.

  Beyond freezing billions of dollars of Iran’s assets, our multipronged strategy, in which I was deeply engaged, included imposing economic sanctions on Iran. They could only be effective if the major industrial nations joined in, and our European and Japanese allies disgracefully put their pocketbooks before their principles at a time of critical need for their most important ally. I worked almost daily on sanctions through a Special Coordinating Committee (SCC) of the National Security Council. The president and all his national security advisers agreed we should seek a UN Security Council resolution condemning the hostage taking and threatening sanctions. Carter’s hope was that a resolution would strengthen our hand in asking major countries to join us in cutting off Iran from international markets. But the Soviet Union vetoed it, and we had to go through the painstaking effort of rallying our allies against Iran.85 He personally contacted more than 25 world leaders to urge them to pressure Iran to release the hostages, but the real power, the Ayatollah Khomeini, was impervious; no one could reach him.86

  Carter sent high-level missions to Europe and Japan; but they returned with only limited results. It made little difference that we exchanged expressions of contempt among ourselves for the lack of solidarity by our allies.87 The Germans criticized the Iranian asset freeze, and Japanese and Canadian companies were doing business as usual. West German banks agreed only to refuse new Iranian deposits in American dollars (solid German marks were acceptable). Switzerland wanted Treasury cooperation to keep the dollar strong so that its safe-haven banks would not be inundated with foreign deposits. The British were willing to be helpful so long as a
ny restrictions on London banks were tied only to the hostages and would be removed as soon as they were released. The French resisted any economic action, and the Italians worried about their oil imports from Iran. Japan continued to be a worrisome outlier, buying oil on the spot market and driving up prices, and Japanese banks were even helping Iran avoid having its assets frozen by refusing to identify Iranian transactions.

  The governments were arguing that they had no power over their banks, and the Treasury’s Tony Solomon suggested we should publicize their lack of cooperation and warn them it would damage their banking relationships with the United States. With the dollar as the world’s major trading currency, this could have bite. Solomon reported that Iran was “awash with money for oil.” How were they hiding it? Even though we managed to persuade the European banks to limit dollar transactions, our intelligence found that the Iranian funds were covered up under nominees in Algeria and Libya. State continued patiently to pursue negotiations country by country. Totally frustrated, Solomon, a tough, laconic, but brilliant and experienced official, who had been the driving force in our successful dollar-rescue program, called me to say that we had to use their reliance on America’s protective military shield as leverage to persuade them to evacuate their citizens in Iran, whom they were using as excuses for inaction. He said they had to be told the only way to stop us from taking military action like a blockade would be to support tough economic sanctions. I fully agreed and passed this along to Brzezinski, but there seemed to be no disposition by State or the president for such action.88

  MILITARY OPTIONS

  In fact, the decision to mine or blockade with our navy was excruciatingly difficult. There was another consideration in the debate—the Cold War. One of the administration’s prime objectives was to keep the Soviets out of the Gulf and away from Iran. There was a very real concern that the Soviets might have tried to win the favor of the new Islamic regime by confronting the U.S. and removing the mines or challenging the blockade, and that we would be driving the Iranian’s into the waiting arms of the Soviets.89 It would also risk a military confrontation with the Soviet Union. As the NSC’s Sick dramatically put it to me, “Are we going to shoot at the Russians as they come in and risk the start of a third world war?”90 If this was not complicated enough, Lt. General John Pustay, top military aide to Joint Chiefs General David Jones, shared with me another concern with mining or a blockade. The Pentagon feared that the Iranians might try to mine the Straits of Hormuz, blocking the sea lanes to all oil and commercial traffic through this narrow passageway out of the Gulf, including our own naval forces.91

  I did not think then, nor do I think now, that these doomsday scenarios were likely. A show of strength might have helped the Soviets understand that we had a right to get our diplomats back. And mining could have avoided a confrontation. But opinions were sharply divided, and the options were brutally difficult.

  Vance strongly opposed any show of force, in favor of traditional diplomacy. Laingen favored sanctions and negotiation, although he later said there would have been a good case for using force in the first days as an immediate reaction to an act of war. But he thought force would have led us down a slippery slope. Although he dared not say it from what was in effect his jail cell in the Foreign Ministry, he later reflected that passions in Tehran were running so high that the student militants would have responded by abusing and even executing hostages, just as Carter feared. Moreover, he said: “I believed that the passion was such that Khomeini’s vindictiveness, determination, and rigidity [made] it impossible to see him back down.” Laingen added: “Military force in dealing with terrorists is a very difficult option that doesn’t usually work.”92

  When the hostages finally arrived on the South Lawn of the White House, President Reagan warned of swift retribution if something like this happened on his watch. But his bluster vanished in the first crisis of his presidency: When confronted with the hijacking of a TWA airliner in Beirut, he did not use force to save the passengers but negotiated a solution. Another hostage crisis in Beirut also extended for years, but the Reagan administration could not find a way to deploy military force effectively and struck what later turned out to be a notorious deal to trade arms for the hostages’ release. Carter refused to stoop to this subterfuge. Even more dramatic, a 1983 terrorist attack in Beirut killed 241 U.S. Marines in their barracks in Beirut; and an explosion in the U.S. Embassy there almost killed U.S. Ambassador Reginald Bartholomew, with no retaliation and Reagan’s decision to withdraw all American officials.

  Carter also decided not to engage in a tit-for-tat expulsion of Iranian diplomats; he waited until a few weeks before the failed effort to rescue the hostages. The Iranians had around sixty diplomatic personnel in their Washington embassy, and diplomatic relations, if strained, proceeded correctly because, as he later explained to me: “I always feel, and still do, it is a mistake when the U.S. withholds communication with someone with whom we have a difference.”93 However, only a month after the crisis began he asked Vance to reduce the number of Iranian consulates around the country. The State Department said it was hard to make prompt arrangements to expel everyone and their families. Carter complained: “We treat Libya worse than Iran, without justification.”94

  Carter did threaten military action if any of the hostages was harmed or put on trial, and that worked.95 A few weeks after they were taken, the president convened a meeting with his foreign-policy team at Camp David and drafted a message warning Khomeini that if the Tehran Embassy hostages were put on trial or harmed in any way, he would take immediate action. The message was passed through the Germans and the Swiss to ensure that it would be read and understood. Carter recounted: “We told him that if a hostage was injured, that we would cut off all trade by sea between Iran and the outside world. And if a hostage was killed that we would launch a military strike against his country.” As a result Carter said, “Khomeini was meticulously careful that he never injured or killed a hostage. That was the first time we’d laid down the gauntlet to him.”96 Although it would have helped Carter politically to share this strong and decisive message with the American public, he felt that if word came out Khomeini might have to do the exact opposite to save face. We all had little doubt that Carter’s threat ensured that they would survive their captivity physically unharmed.

  By April 1980, as the crisis continued unabated, Carter demanded action, and again leaned toward mining the harbors, while his advisers had already moved toward mounting a rescue mission. Brown conceded that neither blockading nor mining Iran’s harbors would bring home the hostages. To which Ham Jordan added, “Except in boxes.”97

  As days passed into weeks and then months, Mrs. Carter was the president’s eyes and ears to the public during his self-imposed isolation from campaigning. She told him: “Mine the harbors; do something; mine the harbors!” But he would tell her: “And have them take one hostage every day? Line them up before a firing squad and kill them and shoot them?”98

  When I asked Carter years later on why he did not impose a blockade immediately, he replied: “It would have been an act of war.” I countered that they committed an act of war by invading our embassy and capturing our diplomats, and his response was revealing: “Well, I’m not trying to equate the two, but when a navy moves in and blockades all of their ports around an entire country, that is much more authentically an act of war than holding 52 hostages. It was a terrible thing that they did; but they never injured a hostage.”99

  Carter’s decision not to deploy the U.S. Navy raises a broader question about his personal beliefs concerning the use of military force. As a Naval Academy graduate and nuclear submarine officer, not only had he experienced the great military might of the United States but he would have been required to use it in the course of duty if commanded to do so. Yet, as commander in chief, he had a great aversion to the demonstration of military force until the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan at the end of 1979, only months after the hostages were take
n.

  He used to state publicly how proud he was that not one American soldier had died in combat in his presidency. To a degree that is laudable, in contrast to the misjudgments by the George W. Bush administration in invading Iraq, which led to the killing and wounding of thousands of Americans in a needless conflict that upended the Middle East order. Ham, one of the few in the White House who had actually served in combat, used to tell Carter to take care about his boast because it could undermine the use of America’s military might. Throughout the hostage crisis, his refusal to threaten robust military action, or at least to keep it as a live option, undercut American diplomatic and economic leverage, and allowed Khomeini to simply play out the string in months of fruitless, debilitating, and humiliating negotiations. But he simply placed the safety of the hostages higher on his scale of priorities than the damage to American prestige and his own political standing.

  ROSE GARDEN STRATEGY

  As it became clear the hostages would not be released immediately, Carter adopted a domestic stance that had the unintended effect of focusing American public attention instead of diverting it from what turned out to be a national humiliation. It was called by critics the “Rose Garden strategy.” This decision made Carter hostage to the hostage crisis. He announced that he would not leave the country or participate in any campaign activities for his reelection, even though Senator Kennedy was launching a vigorous effort to unseat Carter as the Democratic Party nominee. Initially this proved to be politically wise, as the American people rallied around their president, and the president regained his standing in the polls. There were symbolic and substantive reasons for Carter to stay in the White House and be seen concentrating on the crisis. That not only played well in public, but during the first few weeks was essential. So many things were going on behind the scenes that Carter needed to coordinate them and stay close at hand to make quick decisions.