President Carter
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As conditions worsened, a series of crisis appeals arrived at the White House from American and Iranian Jewish representatives seeking leniency or even loopholes in the president’s expulsion order. They landed on my desk, and we arranged a White House meeting on April 8 with a delegation composed of 12 Iranian Jews. It was led by Moussa Kermanian and included his son, Sam, speaking for the Iranian students like himself who were at risk of being sent home, and a successful young businessman, Isaac Moradi, who would lose all his assets in Iran as a result of the revolution.124
At the meeting on the government side were not only Crosland, who literally held the key to a solution, but a formidable list of officials representing State, Justice, the NSC, and OMB. We met in the large Domestic Policy Staff conference room, and as everyone walked in, each one on our side went around the table to shake the hands of our troubled visitors and help calm their nerves. As we began to discuss how we could help, I was struck by the fact that it was the State Department’s representative, Hume Horan, who was the most resistant in arguing that the president’s executive order had the force of law and could not be altered. I thought how little had changed since the days before and during World War II, when State also led the government’s resistance to admitting Jews fleeing Nazi persecution.
Horan’s legalism set off Talisman, rotund and tiny but a ball of talent and energy. His face turned beet-red as he banged his fist on the conference room table—something White House visitors almost never dared to do—and in a torrent of angry words declared that the American Jewish community would never again stay silent as its elders had supinely done in the time of Franklin Roosevelt. Sam Kermanian took the opportunity to point out with logical clarity that “by definition Iranian Jewish students in the U.S. could not be supporters of an Islamic revolution and had not participated in any demonstrations, let alone riots, in support of creating an Islamic republic.”125
But the complications seemed endless. The passports of many Iranian students in the United States were no longer valid, or their visas had expired. There were 56,000 Iranian students here, 7,000 in violation of their visas, and while most had applied for asylum, some had already been deported. For those whose visas had expired, there could be no extensions unless they had an immediate relative in the United States, required medical attention, or had applied for asylum. I also wanted to have their threatened families admitted to the United States from Iran, but how? On what kind of visa?
As the meeting was finishing, Moussa Kermanian, a trained attorney, turned to me and said with earnestness: “Mr. Eizenstat, we understand that an executive order carries the weight of law, but as a lawyer you would surely agree that all laws are created to serve a purpose. We do not believe the purpose of the president’s executive order is to send Iranian Jews back into the hands of the Islamic republic’s prosecutors. So in this particular instance, it is not just the letter of the law that needs to be taken into account, but more so it is the spirit of the law that should be followed.”
I had already tried to come up with creative solutions that would not require amending the tough executive order, and were based on moral and legal principles. I was also determined to seek special treatment not only for Iranian Jews but other endangered religious minorities as well. I turned to Crosland and asked what options existed for anyone fleeing persecution. He said they could apply for political asylum. I then asked what would happen to the applications. He replied that if they could establish a reasonable fear of persecution, when their applications were reviewed they would be granted asylum status and residency in the United States. And if they could not they would be deported.
A bell went off in my head. How long did it normally take the INS to process the applications? Was the INS legally compelled to act within a specific time? Crosland said there was no legally mandated period, but the INS usually processed asylum requests as soon as they were received. Then what was the interim status of those waiting for the INS to process their applications? Crosland responded that their legal status was frozen. Then I said: “Considering the nature of the current regime in Iran, it would be reasonable to assume that members of Iranian religious minority groups could face potential persecution and their deportation to Iran could place them in danger, even if they cannot prove a reasonable fear of persecution on an individual basis.” I rhetorically asked Crosland, “What if the White House asked that asylum applications for such applicants not be processed until the situation in Iran changes or the Shah is restored to power?” Crosland replied, as I hoped he would, that the applicants would remain frozen in their legal status until processing resumed.126
That solved the students’ problems, but thousands were flooding out of Iran, knocking at the door but left in limbo, their applications delayed or rejected outright by U.S. embassies throughout Europe. I asked Crosland what we could do to help them. Crosland replied that essentially the same rules applied to those outside U.S. borders: They would need to show a reasonable fear of persecution, but this could be presumed if they belonged to religious minorities. With this series of pointed questions from the White House and answers from the INS, Hume of State finally came around.
Colleges and universities were informed that all Iranian students who were members of religious minority groups were exempt from the executive order. All younger children whose parents had applied for asylum or entered the country as refugees were to be allowed to continue their studies or admitted outright, which also took care of those who had graduated and normally would have had to leave. All this had been arranged quietly, quickly, and informally, which shows what government can do to help the world’s abandoned people when it wants to extricate them from human-made dilemmas. Carter supported our solution enthusiastically, although he received no political reward from the American Jewish community, which gave him the lowest-ever proportion of its support for any Democrat when he ran for reelection.
When the Reagan administration took office, newly appointed officials at the INS noticed thousands of unprocessed applications for political asylum from Iranian religious minority groups—Jews, Christians, Baha’is, Zoroastrians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, and Sunni Muslims. Unaware of the secret agreement we had reached to avoid Khomeini’s brutal retribution, they began processing the applications and denying a significant number. I was back in private practice as a lawyer and was quickly alerted by Sam Kermanian. I contacted Elliott Abrams, a senior member of the Reagan NSC staff, and urged him to continue doing nothing—simply allow the applications to lie dormant until the political situation in Iran became more favorable to religious minorities—which it has not to this day. He agreed. Shortly afterward the processing and denials stopped, and tens of thousands of Iranian minorities made their way to the safety of the United States.
DISASTER AT DESERT ONE
In the early months of 1980, it became apparent that diplomacy, negotiation, and international pressure were having no effect. Carter began working on a very different kind of rescue with his military commanders to free our hostages. On the day of the hostage taking the White House asked the military if an immediate rescue effort could be successfully launched, but the Pentagon replied it could not be successful at that early date. Israel, which had rescued hostages in a daring raid at Entebbe airport in Uganda, concurred. But Brzezinski convened a secret military committee, which met several times every week to plan a rescue mission.127
Under the plan that evolved, first a small plane, a twin-engine Cessna, would be sent on what they called an Otter mission128 to deliver a portfolio of observations of an isolated place within striking distance of Tehran. They had to determine if the ground at a remote site in the desert was firm enough to bear the heavy weight of the C-130 cargo planes that would carry the hostage-rescue team, fuel for the helicopters, and equipment. This was to be the staging point for the mission. Another small plane from Oman landed to test directly if the ground would be firm enough to support landings by large H-53s, the heavy lifters of our helicopter force
, to take out more than fifty hostages and, equally important, aerial tankers carrying enough fuel to resupply the helicopters on the long journey from an aircraft carrier offshore. With this information the president decided on the precise location for the place they called Desert One.129
The so-called Operation Eagle Claw posed a daunting challenge. The embassy was located in a compound that had been purchased in the 1940s, and was then on the outskirts of the city. But Tehran had spread around it, and the chancery was an unattractive redbrick building that looked like an American high school. Because of its alien architecture and central location, it stuck out as a sore spot to politically sensitive Iranians.
The Pentagon was not fully prepared with a team trained to pluck the hostages from such a place, although hostage operations by other countries during the 1970s made its commanders aware of the need. When the British deployed their Special Air Services commandos to rescue hostages from a London hotel, the Pentagon realized it had no comparable capability, and around 1975 created a top-secret army covert strike group called Delta Force, equipped with about a hundred airplanes and helicopters. The Israelis had a similar elite force, Sayeret Matkal (directorate of intelligence), famed for its hostage rescue at the Entebbe airport. They were called in for an assessment and declared that the location of the embassy in the middle of a major city made the rescue plan unworkable.130
One of the few factors favoring the mission was its timing. The date chosen was April 24. The monotony of keeping the captives day after day for half a year had led the captors to let down their guard; they also had little or no professional training or military support, so if Delta Force could actually penetrate the embassy compound, it had a good chance of overwhelming the guards and bringing out the hostages. An early plan also included punitive strikes in Tehran to divert attention and cripple countermeasures by knocking out the city’s electric grid. As the rescue plan unfolded, the military pondered whether to mount the strikes in conjunction with the rescue attempt or, if it had to be aborted, then, as the Pentagon’s General John Pustay told me, because of the “humiliation of the United States, we would do that just to demonstrate that we still had muscle.” The generals later restrained themselves and did not recommend these ancillary strikes in the plan they presented to the president. But Carter would not agree to make this show of force under any circumstances, even if the rescue effort succeeded.131
The commander of the ground assault was Col. Charles Beckwith, a large, tough, brave soldier who was one of the creators of the Delta Force. When he met the president in the Situation Room, Carter found out he was from the South and asked if he came from Georgia. Beckwith said: “Even better, Mr. President, I’m from Sumter County”—Carter’s home county. Amazed, Carter asked: “Really, who are your folks?” They then started trading stories about who knew whom. But things turned serious as the leadership briefed the president and his top aides on the details. Carter asked Beckwith how many helicopters he needed—six was the minimum, he replied. Afterward Ham turned to Vance and asked if he felt any better about the mission after hearing the briefing. Vance replied that he had sat through more than his share of such upbeat military briefings while serving as Lyndon Johnson’s secretary of the army during the Vietnam War, and the one thing he had learned was that “the military will never tell you they can’t do something. I just don’t believe it.”132
Secrecy was of paramount concern, so there was no outside review of the plans that had been as carefully constructed as a house of cards. Even before presidential approval, preparations had begun in November 1979, and in December helicopter pilots rehearsed in the desert of the American West. Operation Eagle Claw called for a multiservice force, Delta One, to fly helicopters to an abandoned airstrip in the Iranian desert. There, they would meet up with five C-130 Hercules air transports that had arrived earlier carrying a team of about fifty Army Rangers and huge bladders of aviation fuel. The choppers would refuel and remain at Desert One through the day, hidden under camouflage netting. The Rangers would remain behind to secure the eventual escape route.
The following day the choppers would fly to the next rendezvous point, a mountain hideaway known as Desert Two, about fifty miles northeast of Tehran. There, they would pick up Green Beret assault troops who had infiltrated into Iran and had acquired unmarked trucks from Iranian contacts. This force would ride in the trucks to warehouses on the outskirts of Tehran for final intelligence reports and divide into two contingents: one to the Foreign Ministry to retrieve Laingen and his two diplomatic comrades, and the larger Delta Force to the American Embassy compound. Farsi-speaking operatives, rare in the CIA, would help guide them and intervene as necessary. A former embassy cook, a Pakistani, had already told CIA agents in Tehran precisely where the hostages were being held inside the building. The assault troops would blow a hole in the embassy wall, free the hostages, and call in the helicopters (already en route from Desert Two). They would land in the embassy parking lot and at a nearby soccer field, pick up the hostages and fly them back, where they would board a C-130 after destroying the helicopters on the ground.
Contrary to almost universal criticism after the fact, the problem with the rescue was not too few helicopters. The Joint Chiefs recommended six at a minimum to carry out the mission, and one more as backup in case anything went wrong. During the penultimate meeting, David Aaron, Brzezinski’s deputy national security adviser, handed General Jones a handwritten note that said: “Zbig wants to know the long pole in the tent,” meaning the most vulnerable part of the mission plan—the pole whose collapse would doom the entire operation. It was that there were only seven helicopters.133 So to provide an extra margin for safety, Carter ordered an eighth helicopter added to the mission, two above the minimum needed.
As Carter later told me: “We felt they were reliable helicopters [and] we originally planned to have one spare just to make damn sure. And I said: ‘Why don’t we have eight to make double sure?’” That was the maximum that could be held under the deck of the aircraft carrier to avoid Soviet surveillance.134 Zbig carefully noted that it was the civilians and not the military who raised the number. In his view the problem with the mission was the lack of ancillary strikes: “We weren’t prepared in general to use force before or after to back this up or to intimidate the Iranians.”135
Maintaining secrecy was essential to the element of surprise. There was so much concern about secrecy that General David Jones, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and General Pustay, his top staff man, would leave the Pentagon for the White House in civilian clothes because they knew that Soviet agents were always watching the White House, and would pick up any suspicious behavior. Pustay also recalled another important intervention just weeks before the risky effort. As everybody stood up to leave, Brzezinski said: “But Mr. President, we haven’t firmly established the line of communication.” The president replied: “This operation will be conducted by the military,” and he would keep abreast of it through General Jones and Defense Secretary Brown. He then added: “If it is successful it will redound to the benefit of the military. And if it is a failure, it would be my failure.”136
Years later both generals expressed their admiration for Carter’s readiness to shoulder the responsibility as commander in chief. As General Pustay put it, “The President stood really, really tall.”137 Jones also said he felt that the number of helicopters was adequate “or we wouldn’t have gone.” So eight helicopters would be taking off from the U.S. aircraft carrier Nimitz, two more than envisioned in the original plan.
After months of fruitless diplomacy, the rescue was seen as a last resort by Carter and his inner circle, with Vance as the one exception. Brzezinski was lukewarm from the start and told me later that “it would have been a miracle if it had worked [but] we were so committed to its success, we did not anticipate all that needed to be done.… There were multiple takeoffs and landings; each had to be perfect.” While he loyally supported the rescue mission, he insisted he was the only
one at the crucial NSC meeting to raise the question “What do we do if it fails?”138
He recommended that the scope be expanded to include bombing Iran so that the rescue mission could be presented as part of a retaliatory strike rather than a solitary failure. Carter vetoed that, lest Iranians be killed before the hostages could be saved; he maintained that his primary responsibility as president was “for the lives of Americans.” Nevertheless Brzezinski felt strongly that the lives of the hostages, as important as they were, should have carried less weight than the fact that as long as the hostages were held, the country “was being incredibly damaged, and I thought the president was being incredibly damaged.”139
Vance opposed the mission for two reasons. First, like the president, he felt personally responsible as secretary of state for the safety of the hostages, most of whom were foreign service officers. Second, even if it succeeded—and Vance was firm in believing it would not and said so on separate occasions to both Carter and Mondale—he felt the mission would only create an even more intense confrontation with Iran. His position was that the hostage crisis would only be resolved when the Iranians decided to let them go, and “we [should] allow them to slowly unravel from an outrageous position.”140
Carter’s recollection is different: “You know, Vance had been completely on board; he was in all the early meetings with the Delta Force commander and with Harold Brown, Brzezinski, and me, and the Vice President.”141 While unaware it was being planned, Laingen later told me he did not favor the rescue mission because it was too complicated and could not have been accomplished without a loss of blood, including that of the hostages.142