However, by refusing to campaign during the hostage crisis, Carter had gotten himself into another box of his own making. Carter helped make the hostages into national icons by his singular focus on their fate, raising their value to the Iranians and tying his hands. His explanation was that he knew he would be asked questions about his efforts to free the hostages, and he did not want to tip his hand about secret contacts, some of them seen as disreputable, such as Gadhafi and Arafat: “I didn’t want to either mislead the American people or say, ‘I can’t answer that question,’ or be obviously devious.”100 But as time passed, the hostages became a political albatross he could not shake from his shoulders.
Ham said that it was not initially Carter’s idea, but his own, for Carter to stay at work in the White House. That began almost immediately with the cancellation of a state visit to Canada at Jordan’s urging because of “the fever pitch in the country.” Ham explained that we “kind of backed into it. But once we backed into it, there was a legitimate reason for him to be there.” But when Carter was faced with an impending Iowa primary debate against Kennedy, he told Ham: “If I go out to debate Kennedy in Iowa, I’m going to go out there as a president and I’m going to come back just as a politician. I need to stay on the high ground.” So, said Ham: “We got stuck in that posture, and the thing dragged on and on and on. It looked like an excuse for Carter to hide behind the issue and to avoid the campaign.”101 By election day in November 1980, widespread but unjustified suspicions arose that he was manipulating the crisis for his own benefit as the result of a stay-at-home decision that had been made when no one at the White House imagined it would last longer than a few weeks.102
ON TV FOR 444 NIGHTS
The Rose Garden strategy had another unintended and deeply pervasive effect. It totally personalized the crisis in the American media by focusing the responsibility on the Oval Office and showing the terrorists they could put the American presidency itself into dysfunction. Television could not get enough of the story and even invented new platforms for blanket coverage launched into America’s living rooms. Foremost among these was ABC’s program later established as Nightline and hosted by Ted Koppel, an experienced diplomatic reporter.
Another was the decision by Walter Cronkite to end his trusted nightly CBS newscast by reminding viewers how many days the hostages had been held. Neither imagined, any more than Carter himself, that the hostages would be held for 444 days, that their captivity would hold the country’s attention for so long, or that Carter by inadvertent word and deed would help keep the attention of the nation on this unprecedented event. After Carter lost the election, Cronkite visited the outgoing president in the Oval Office and “told him how sorry he was that he was the one who started the ‘one day, second day of the hostage crisis, third day and so forth.’”103
Jody Powell agreed that the story was “an absolute, total negative” for Carter, and as press secretary tried without success to keep it low in public importance.104 But yellow ribbons sprouted all over the country, and the nation was transfixed. Rafshoon later researched TV usage and calculated that during its fourteen months the hostage crisis astonishingly received more minutes of television time than the Vietnam War, which lasted ten years.105
Could the hostage crisis have been handled in ways that did not personalize it so greatly to the president himself? Could the negotiations have been left largely to the State Department and kept away from the president? Judy Woodruff of PBS, who had covered Carter as governor, feels that if he had underscored that the hostage issue was one of many he was handling, he would have seemed “less a victim of it.”106 Andy Glass, the Washington bureau chief for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who also had covered Carter for years in Georgia, believes that while the president saw the hostages as a humanitarian issue demanding his attention, he could have declared that the White House held Iran responsible for their safety and announced it would have nothing further to say until the Iranians responded to U.S. diplomatic initiatives.107 After that, said Ted Koppel of ABC News, “the media would soon have found itself with very little on which to report, and certainly not enough to sustain a nightly television program devoted to the hostages, if the administration had not turned it into a crisis from the get-go.”
While international relays by satellite had been possible for several years, the high cost of the link made them rare. But with a growing audience, it was worthwhile for Koppel to sit in his Washington studio and serve as a willing conduit for the Iranian foreign minister to give his views from Tehran or to interview a Russian guest in Moscow. The show had started with a producer’s exaggerated title, America Held Hostage, and then caught the eye of the network’s news chief, Roone Arledge, a broadcasting phenomenon who had made his name in sports TV. He had been looking for a vehicle to fill the 11:30 p.m. spot that might help ABC challenge the late-night comedians on the two other major networks, and made a risky but winning bet. Nightline became so popular that Johnny Carson, the master of late-night TV on NBC, called Koppel only half jokingly to say: “You’re killing me, what the hell are you doing?” Koppel’s show drew an average of 7 million viewers and lasted for 6,000 programs before he retired in 2005, long after Carson had gone.
Koppel’s program provided the in-depth coverage so rare in television—and also made him a star. For this he gives Carter some of the credit—but he also blames him for his total focus on getting the hostages home safely, including his declaration that their fate was “the first thing I think about in the morning when I get up and the last thing I think about at night.” Drawing a verbal picture perfectly suited for television, Koppel explained: “The president is the man dealing with this international crisis. Watch him deal with it. Look how presidential he is. Look how well he’s dealing with this crisis. And for the first few days that was just fine. I think it did what you guys intended it to do.” But after a few weeks, what became a political asset while Kennedy was campaigning around the country became a liability. In Koppel’s view the image changed from “look how presidential he is, [to] look who’s the president and look how feckless he is. He’s not getting it done; Why are those hostages still over there? How were they able to do that to us?” And this was capped by the failed rescue mission. Koppel concluded: “Everything that could go wrong did go wrong”—even in the balance of forces with Khomeini: “The folks in Tehran got a sense that they had the president by the short hairs.”108
After leaving office, Carter seemed to agree: “I think the issue would have died down a lot more if I decided to ignore the fate of the hostages, or if I had decided just to stop any statements on the subject. That may have been the best approach.”109 But that was not Jimmy Carter’s nature.
GRASPING AT STRAWS
Less effective than the initial stages of the Rose Garden strategy were the administration’s attempts—some of them bizarre—to work through special emissaries. On November 7, at the first congressional leadership breakfast after the hostages were taken, the president blamed “religious fanatics” and reported that the UN was working with the PLO to go to Tehran. He said he was sending former attorney general Ramsey Clark, now a left-wing activist sympathetic to the Islamic revolution, to seek an audience with Khomeini.110 Khomeini refused to see Clark, and he returned to Tehran on his own in June 1980, for the more insidious purpose of participating as an American delegate to the “Crimes of America Conference.”
With the military option withheld, Carter took several early constructive steps. He surprised Khomeini by issuing a presidential directive banning all crude oil imports from Iran. Ten days after the hostages were taken, the Iranian government announced that it intended to pull all its deposits out of American and other Western banks, but we were ready. At 8:00 a.m. Washington time that same day, Carter signed an executive order freezing more than 10 billion dollars’ worth of Iranian assets in American banks but, controversially and even more effectively, extending it to Iran’s dollar deposits in branches and subsidiaries of
U.S. banks abroad.111 Howls of protest arose about America overreaching outside its borders, but the directive worked and it stuck.
There were few other viable options. At the request of the United States, the International Court of Justice ruled that the seizure of our embassy in Tehran was illegal, but the ayatollah could not have cared less about international law.112
On November 28, Carter, grasping at straws, suddenly suggested sending none other than Muhammad Ali to Tehran: “He is a Muslim and the most popular person in the world.”113 The great boxer went, but to no avail. As for Arafat of the PLO, he clearly saw an opportunity to ingratiate himself with the United States, while Khomeini saw another chance to divide the American public. Despite the 1975 congressional ban on contacts with the PLO, the CIA activated a long-standing back channel with PLO headquarters in Beirut. It was at Arafat’s urging that the ayatollah allowed the release of thirteen hostages during the first few weeks.114 Iran announced it was releasing the blacks because they lived under American oppression and tyranny.
If the pretext for the embassy assault was the Shah’s entry into the United States, then perhaps getting him out would resolve it. So the White House and State Department went all over the world to try to find him another home. The only positive response came from Sadat, and in the end the Shah ended up in Egypt, where he died while the hostages remained immured in the embassy.
As the crisis continued, and the hostages became less of a domestic political lever in Iran and more of a diplomatic burden, Iran’s newly elected president, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, read in Time an account of Ham’s efforts to move the Shah out of the United States to Panama. Aware that he was Carter’s closest aide, he decided that Ham was the person to negotiate a resolution, and reached out to a French lawyer, Christian Bourguet, and an Argentine attorney, Hector Villalon, who had known Khomeini in exile in Paris and were sympathetic to the Islamic revolution. They in turn reached out to Ham, who began months of clandestine negotiations in Paris, London, and even Washington. He met directly with high Iranian officials including Foreign Minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh (a close aide of Khomeni’s during his Paris exile, later executed for supposedly being too close to the United States and trying to overthrow the clerical regime).
Ham flew on the supersonic Concorde to arrive as quickly as possible and avoid detection by going through the luxury jet’s special passenger entrance. He joked to Rafshoon: “Don’t tell Jimmy, because he would say: ‘Can’t you fly coach?’” Within the government his mission was coordinated with the State Department’s own worldwide campaign instructing every American ambassador to press the host government to appeal to the Iranians to release the hostages. Ghotbzadeh first asked Ham to ban all American press from Iran, which Ham told him was impossible; the foreign minister replied that it certainly could be done because it was a known fact that the Jews ran all the television networks.115
Because Ham’s face was so well known, when he traveled abroad he went in disguises provided by the CIA, sometimes wearing a mustache and tinted glasses, with a fake passport for a Mr. Thompson. But Ham was also worried, as he colorfully put it, that if it became known he was involved in sensitive diplomatic negotiations, people would say “‘My God, we’ve got this terrible crisis and Carter’s got this jerk Jordan involved in it.”116 This was no rogue mission: He teamed with Hal Saunders, the State Department’s senior Middle East expert, who had played an important role at Camp David. They worked under very precise written scenarios for resolving the crisis.
The Jordan-Saunders gambit came very close to success in March and then again in April 1980. The administration also worked with the United Nations in a futile effort to end the crisis. Secretary General Kurt Waldheim (whose Nazi past would later be revealed) visited Tehran in January 1980, but was threatened by angry demonstrators.
A UN Commission of Inquiry gave some promise of breaking the impasse. The idea was that it would serve as a vehicle for the Iranians to air their grievances against the Shah, meet with the hostages, move them out of the hands of the radicals in the embassy to the Iranian Foreign Ministry, and to the Iranian government for release. Fifty cots and steel lockers were installed in the Foreign Ministry’s reception room. With Ham and Saunders working through Bourguet and Villalon as intermediaries, they won the agreement of what passed for a civilian government headed by Bani-Sadr and Ghotbzadeh. But the frustrated UN commissioners departed when, as always, the stumbling block was Khomeini, who refused to cooperate and asserted that the fate of the hostages would have to await Iran’s parliamentary election.117
That was the last straw for diplomacy. Protocol had already been abandoned and tempers were short. In April 1980, the Iranian chargé Ali Agah went to the State Department to formalize his departure with Precht, the Iran desk officer, and insisted that the hostages were being treated humanely. Precht responded in most undiplomatic fashion: “That’s bullshit!”118 As Ham told me, in the end, after all their careful checking: “We were dealing with people who claimed to be speaking for Khomeini, but who ultimately didn’t.… So every time we got close to making something happen, Khomeini would fail to act or fail to bless something happening.” Ham realized that the crisis would work itself out only when the Iranians realized they would be better off without the hostages. What belatedly turned things around, he believed, was Iraq’s war on Iran. It began late in September 1980, when the Iranians came to understand that holding on to the hostages blocked the shipment of spare parts they needed for their American planes and weapons.119
SAVING THE IRANIAN REFUGEES
We did have one unmitigated success with many of the ayatollah’s hostages—even if they were not our own. The story has never before been disclosed. The human dilemmas it presented and the bureaucratic delicacy with which they were untangled resonate in today’s anti-immigrant fervor. More than fifty thousand Iranian Jews, Christians, and Baha’is escaped Khomeini’s Islamic reign of terror against “infidels” and took refuge in America, thanks to our unprecedented and—I must admit—ingenious reading of the immigration rules.
Jewish life in Persia dated back at least to the liberation of the Jews in Babylon by the emperor Cyrus, after their exile following the destruction by the Romans of the First Temple in 586 B.C.E. Over the centuries the Jewish community survived large swings in their status until they reemerged with influence and security under the protection of the Pahlavi Dynasty and were even allowed close ties with Zionism and the new state of Israel. But the Islamic revolution placed all religious minorities in grave danger, and that was when I entered the fray on behalf of the Carter White House.
Many Iranian Jews began to leave, seeing the unhappy handwriting on the wall. When Khomeini’s revolution finally swept the Shah off his throne, all elements seen as sympathetic to his regime began to be purged.
Mark Talisman, the head of the Washington office of the Council of Jewish Federations, arranged a meeting between Habib Elghanian, the leader and symbol of the Iranian Jewish community, and House Speaker O’Neill to describe events in revolutionary Iran. They begged Elghanian not to return, but he believed his standing as an industrialist and philanthropist with close ties to the Muslim clergy would keep him safe and help to reduce danger to Iran’s Jews. Instead he was arrested, tried by a revolutionary court as a Zionist, and executed as a spy for Israel. Pictures of his bullet-riddled body, posted prominently in the Iranian press, panicked the Jewish community. Thousands tried to flee, and parents sent out their unaccompanied children by any means possible. With the seizure of the U.S. Embassy, the visa section was shut down. Three days later, at an Oval Office meeting, Carter for the first time discussed deporting all Iranians who were in the United States illegally and revoking all visas for Iranians who were not full-time residents. The president said: “We need to get the bastards out of here.”120
Executive Order 12172 was issued on November 27, expelling all nonresident Iranians and suspending visas for new arrivals. It extended beyond the militant students t
o thousands of Iranian Jewish students currently studying in this country; thousands of Iranian Jews, Christians, and Baha’is who had fled Iran and were already in the United States; and tens of thousands who had family here and were fleeing Khomeini’s reign of terror. All were at risk of being expelled back to Iran. Carter wanted exceptions made on humanitarian grounds, and although Jody announced this publicly, the order was vague on details.
I received disturbing reports from Mark Talisman that Jews and other minorities had made their way out of Iran to U.S. consulates in Europe, only to be turned back because they did not have proper visas.121 While the order was being drafted, I discussed it with Attorney General Civiletti, who assured me that the government would not send back anyone”who would be hurt, such as Jewish kids”—but he conceded it would be difficult to distinguish the Jewish students from others, such as pro-Khomeini students.122 Those in danger if they were forced to return to Iran could seek asylum on the legal grounds of a “well-founded fear of persecution,” but that would leave them in limbo.
The U.S. government was not yet ready to declare them refugees outright because we were still hoping—against hope—that we could establish some form of diplomatic relations with the revolutionary government. The urgency of the situation combined with the arbitrary nature of our immigration bureaucracy demanded a clear policy. The problem was magnified because any Iranians who declared to U.S. authorities that they feared persecution under the new government would endanger both themselves and their families in Iran.
To help untangle this dilemma, I organized a series of meetings, starting at the end of January 1980,123 with Senator Charles “Mac” Mathias, a Maryland Republican; David Crosland, the director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service; Doris Meisner of the Justice Department; David Brody of the American Jewish Congress; and Talisman. Crosland insisted that as long as the Iranian students had entered the United States legally their best protection would be to file an asylum request on the basis of fear of persecution, because it would delay their departure while the request was adjudicated. The requests would be kept secret as they proceeded through the State Department, and the government could also arrange that “they won’t proceed,” effectively allowing them to stay.
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