The Untold History of the United States

by Oliver Stone

  In effect, the morning briefing involved a touching of bases, some prodding of the President to think about problems that in my judgment needed attention, the planting of basic ideas, and—especially in the first months of his Presidency—some wider discussions of conceptual or strategic issues. This was particularly important in the initial stages, when we were defining our broad goals and setting our priorities. I also used the sessions occasionally to make suggestions to Carter as to what he ought to stress in his public statements, including possible formulations or wordings. He was extremely good at picking up phrases, and I was often amazed how after such a morning briefing he would use in a later press conference or public appearance words almost identical to those we had discussed.

  Priding himself on being Carter’s ventriloquist, Brzezinski outlined the additional steps he had taken to make sure that his lessons sank in. In addition to repeated daily conversations, he began sending Carter a weekly NSC report, which was “meant to be a highly personal and private document, for the President alone.” It usually opened with a one-page editorial from Brzezinski in which he “commented in a freewheeling fashion on the Administration’s performance, alerted him to possible problems, conveyed occasionally some criticism, and attempted to impart a global perspective.”40

  Brzezinski noted that Carter sometimes disagreed with his analysis and was “irritated” by his reports. But the record of the administration shows that Brzezinski’s obsessive anticommunism—he bragged about being “the first Pole in 300 years in a position to really stick it to the Russians”—eventually wore Carter down and won him to Brzezinski’s point of view.41

  Carter came to office committed to promoting human rights, but he used human rights as a vehicle for attacking the Soviet Union, causing relations between the two countries to chill. The Soviets, proud of the fact that they had expanded civil liberties and decreased the number of political prisoners in recent years, countered that Soviet citizens had rights that Americans didn’t enjoy. The Kremlin instructed Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin to ask Vance how the Americans would feel if the Soviets tied détente to ending U.S. racial discrimination or unemployment.42

  Carter also overreacted to the USSR’s support of Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia. Mengistu had come to power in a 1974 coup that had overthrown Emperor Haile Selassie. During those years, the Soviet Union was taking advantage of the turbulence throughout Africa and the rest of the third world to align with progressive forces and push socialist models of development. But third-world involvements would repeatedly trap the Soviets in their own quagmires economically, politically, and militarily. Ethiopia proved to be such a case. In late 1977, Soviet leaders, encouraged by Castro and his support for African liberation movements, responded to requests from Mengistu, who was facing invasion from neighboring Somalia and opposition from a Somali-supported Eritrean independence movement. Despite their criticism of Mengistu’s often brutal behavior, the Soviets significantly increased support for Ethiopia’s revolutionary government, providing over a billion dollars’ worth of military equipment and a thousand military advisors. They also assisted in transporting 17,000 Cuban military and technical personnel to assist the Ethiopians. Most African nations applauded the Soviet intervention, viewing it as a legitimate response to Somali aggression.

  Carter with Zbigniew Brzezinski, whose selection as national security advisor would help doom Carter’s progressive agenda. The hawkish son of a Polish diplomat and an obsessed anti-Communist, Brzezinski set out to deliberately and systematically shape Carter’s thinking on foreign policy.

  Carter responded mildly at first, sharing Soviet leaders’ sense that détente and arms control were the top priorities. Brzezinski, however, urged the president to stop being “soft” and stand up to the Soviets. “A president must not only be loved and respected; he must also be feared,” the national security advisor argued. He urged Carter “to pick some controversial subject on which you will deliberately choose to act with a degree of anger, even roughness, designed to have a shock effect.”43 Carter thought Ethiopia a good place to start. Despite Vance’s strong objections, Carter accused the Soviets of “expanding their influence abroad” through “military power and military assistance.”44 Brzezinski was thrilled by Carter’s denunciation of Soviet actions. He would later remark on several occasions that “SALT lies buried in the sands of the Ogaden.”45 The Right was more strident in its attack on Soviet adventurism in Africa. Reagan warned:

  If the Soviets are successful—and it looks more and more as if they will be—then the entire Horn of Africa will be under their influence, if not their control. From there, they can threaten the sea lanes carrying oil to western Europe and the United States, if and when they choose. More immediately, control of the Horn of Africa would give Moscow the ability to destabilize those governments on the Arabian peninsula which have proven themselves strongly anti-Communist . . . in a few years we may be faced with the prospect of a Soviet empire of protégés and dependencies stretching from Addis Ababa to Capetown.46

  Soviet leaders did not anticipate such a strong response in light of similar U.S. actions in its sphere of influence. But they did overestimate U.S. willingness to accord them equal status. Many within the Soviet hierarchy and intelligentsia were already questioning the wisdom of Soviet involvement in countries such as Afghanistan, Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Somalia, and South Yemen, given the repeated unwillingness of their repressive leaders to heed Soviet advice on political and economic issues.

  Carter’s support for human rights prompted Soviet countercharges. In July 1978, Carter “deplored” and “condemned” Soviet sentencing of dissident Anatoly Sharansky to thirteen years in prison for allegedly spying for the CIA. Carter’s charges particularly galled the Soviet leaders because he and Brzezinski had been cozying up to China, whose human rights record was far, far worse. Brzezinski admitted to Carter that China was executing as many as twenty thousand prisoners a year. However, the sting of Carter’s accusation was blunted by UN Ambassador Andrew Young’s telling a French newspaper that there were “hundreds, maybe even thousands of people I would call political prisoners” in U.S. jails.47

  Criticizing Soviet human rights lapses while supporting other egregious human rights offenders was a dangerous game to play and sometimes backfired. In 1967, Great Britain announced plans to withdraw its forces from east of Suez. The United States decided to fill the void. It built a military base on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, from which the British had expelled almost two thousand natives between 1968 and 1973. The United States would use the base as a launch pad to protect its interests in the Persian Gulf.48 It also tied its fortunes even more closely to the shah of Iran, who, along with Israel, became the principal defender of U.S. economic and geopolitical interests in the Persian Gulf, which held 60 percent of the world’s known oil reserves. During these years, the oil-rich Gulf states had begun to play an important role in world economic affairs, importing goods from the United States and Europe and investing billions of petrodollars in U.S. banks.

  During the 1960s and ’70s, the United States supplied Iran with an arsenal of sophisticated weapons. In what must seem a cruel irony to a later generation, the United States even urged Iran to begin a large-scale nuclear power program to save its abundant oil reserves. U.S. leaders’ open embrace of the repressive shah so soon after the CIA had overthrown an extremely popular Iranian leader enraged most Iranians. One leading opponent of the shah and his modernization program, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, declared, “Let the American President know that in the eyes of the Iranian people, he is the most repulsive member of the human race today because of the injustice he has imposed on our Muslim nation.”49 For this and other outbursts, the shah’s government exiled Khomeini from his homeland in 1964. Over the next fifteen years, the Iranian cleric kept up a steady stream of invective against both the shah and his U.S. backers from Iraq and Paris.

  Iranian discontent continued to grow, fueled b
y the 1970s economic slowdown. Despite the shah’s dismal human rights record, Carter had backed additional arms sales to Iran, which had already been receiving more than any other nation. Ties between Carter and the shah, whom the New York Times described as “a ruler as close to an absolute monarch as exists these days,” seemed to be strengthening, provoking many to decry Carter’s hypocrisy on human rights.50 The Iranian royal couple paid a visit to the Carters in November 1977, staying at the White House. During their discussions, Carter gave preliminary approval to the sale of six to eight light-water nuclear reactors to Iran. When combined with the fourteen to sixteen that the shah was negotiating to buy from France and West Germany, Iran would have a substantial nuclear power program.

  Hoping to show support for their beleaguered ally, President and Mrs. Carter shared an ornate and lavish New Year’s Eve with the shah in Tehran as protesters demonstrated in both nations’ capitals. Five crystal wineglasses adorned the place setting of each of the four hundred guests. Carter was effusive in his praise for his host: “Our talks have been priceless, our friendship is irreplaceable, and my own gratitude is to the Shah, who in his wisdom and with his experience has been so helpful to me, a new leader. There is no leader with whom I have a deeper sense of personal gratitude and personal friendship.”51

  In subsequent months, huge protests renewed across Iran. In September, the shah imposed martial law. Brzezinski urged Carter to either aggressively support the shah or support a military coup. Fearing that the Soviets would seize the opportunity to move into the Gulf, he asked the Pentagon to draw up plans for the United States to occupy Iran’s oil fields. In December, he warned Carter that the United States faced “the most massive American defeat since the beginning of the Cold War, overshadowing in its real consequences the setback in Vietnam.”52 Brzezinski maneuvered behind the scenes to see if a coup was possible. Ambassador William Sullivan recalled, “I received a telephone call relaying a message from Brzezinski, who asked whether I thought I could arrange a military coup against the revolution. . . . I regret the reply I made is unprintable.”53

  In January 1979, the shah fled his country. Brzezinski feared a Communist takeover. In what turned out to be a colossal failure of intelligence, the CIA and State Department downplayed the threat posed by Islamic fundamentalism. Henry Precht, the State Department’s Iran desk officer, recounted how he had figured out what was brewing:

  Late in November 1978, we called in all the experts on Iran . . . to discuss what to do about Iran and what was going to happen there . . . the night before I’d guest-lectured at a class at American University, and . . . there were a lot of Iranian students there. . . . when I asked what they thought was going to happen in Iran, they all said: Islamic government. The next day, at our conference, we went around the room all saying what we thought would happen, and people were saying things like, “There will be a liberal government, with the National Front, and Khomeini will go to Qom.” When my turn came I said, “Islamic government.” I was the only one.54

  In February, seventy-seven-year-old Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Tehran to a hero’s welcome and set about establishing an Islamic republic based on Sharia law. The goal was to create a new caliphate. The head of the Iran branch at Langley assured the CIA’s Tehran station: “Don’t worry about another embassy attack. The only thing that could trigger an attack would be if the Shah was let into the United States—and no one in this town is stupid enough to do that.”55 No one, that is, except for Carter, who buckled under pressure from Kissinger, David Rockefeller, Brzezinski, and other friends of the shah. The Iranian public erupted in anger. In November, students burst into the embassy and seized fifty-two American hostages, whom they held for 444 days. Fearing Soviet intervention to quell the rising tide of Islamic fundamentalism, Carter rushed twenty-five warships to the Persian Gulf, including three nuclear-armed aircraft carriers, and 1,800 marines. He also blocked the release of Iranian assets in the United States and cut off oil imports from Iran.

  When those measures didn’t lead to the hostages’ release, the American public grew restive. Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan alerted Carter to the fact that “the American people are frustrated at our country’s inability to do anything to free the prisoners and retaliate in a fashion that makes us feel better about ourselves.”56 But Carter continued to show restraint. Khomeini’s mistrust of the Soviet Union and its left-wing Iranian allies limited the extent to which the Soviets could exploit the situation. Khomeini’s anti-Soviet feelings deepened when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979 and hardened further after Soviet-allied Iraq invaded Iran in September 1980.

  The Americans were lucky in one regard in terms of Iran. As part of Eisenhower’s “atoms for peace” program, the United States had sold dozens of research reactors to countries all over the world, including Iran, and had been supplying highly enriched uranium to fuel them. Some of the reactors used fuel enriched to 93 percent. Shortly before the shah’s ouster, the United States had sold Iran fifty-eight pounds of weapons-grade uranium. Fortunately, the fuel had not yet been delivered when the revolutionary government seized power, and the sale was suspended.57

  Crises seemed to be flaring all over. Central America, after suffering decades of poverty under U.S.-backed right-wing dictators, was ready to explode by the late 1970s. In Nicaragua, the Sandinista National Liberation Front, named after martyred guerrilla leader Augusto Sandino, threatened to overthrow President Anastasio Somoza Debayle. The Somoza family’s brutal and corrupt forty-three-year rule had united the impoverished citizens in opposition. Carter administration officials feared that a Sandinista victory would embolden revolutionary forces in neighboring countries, especially Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Brzezinski argued for military intervention, citing the humiliation of appearing “incapable of dealing with problems in our own backyard.”58 While Carter weighed his options, the Sandinistas seized power in July 1979—Latin America’s first successful revolution since Cuba’s twenty years earlier—and began an ambitious program of land, education, and health reform. They put out feelers for better relations with the United States, and Congress responded by appropriating $75 million in emergency aid to the new government. But as reports surfaced that Nicaragua was transferring arms from Cuba into El Salvador, Carter halted aid twelve days before Reagan took office in January 1981.

  Despite the Iranian ruler’s dismal human rights record, President Carter never ceased to support the beleaguered shah, outraging most Iranians. At a lavish 1978 New Year’s Eve celebration with the shah in Tehran, as protesters demonstrated in both nations’ capitals, Carter offered his host this adulatory toast: “Our talks have been priceless, our friendship is irreplaceable, and my own gratitude is to the Shah, who in his wisdom and with his experience has been so helpful to me, a new leader. There is no leader with whom I have a deeper sense of personal gratitude and personal friendship.” Riots broke out soon after the Carters left. In January 1979, the shah fled Iran.

  Protest against the shah during the Iranian Revolution. In what turned out to be a colossal intelligence failure, the CIA and State Department downplayed the threat of Islamic fundamentalism.

  Carter also faced a moment of reckoning in El Salvador, where a small group of wealthy landowners—the Forty Families—had ruled for over a century, using any means at their disposal to subdue the impoverished masses. Death-squad murders increased in the 1970s to quell growing popular resistance. Following the 1980 assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, the various insurgent groups had coalesced to form the Frente Faribundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN). By late 1980, with the FMLN insurgents poised to triumph, Carter, pressured by Brzezinski, opted to restore military aid to the dictatorship.

  A storm was also gathering in Afghanistan, a backward nation with a per capita annual income of only $70 in 1974. In 1976, the State Department reported that the United States “is not, nor should it become, committed to, or responsible for the ‘protection’ of Af
ghanistan in any respect.”59 But things changed when pro-Soviet rebels led by Nur Muhammad Taraki and Hafizullah Amin seized power in April 1978. Taraki, the new head of state, proclaimed, “The future for the people looks very bright.” New York Times reporter William Borders took issue with that assessment: “By the standards of almost any place else in the world, however, the future really does not look all that bright—not in a land where the life expectancy is 40 years, where infant mortality is 18 percent and no more than one person in ten can read.” Borders continued, “Afghanistan has very few highways and not one mile of railway, and most of its people live either as nomads or as impoverished farmers in brown mud villages behind high walls, a life scarcely different from what it was when Alexander the Great passed this way 2,000 years ago.”60

  The Soviet Union, which had friendly relations with the previous government, actually opposed the coup, despite the prior government’s repressive behavior toward Afghan Communists. The new government’s reform policies—particularly educational programs for women, land reform, and plans for industrialization—and harshly repressive tactics animated the growing insurgency by Afghan mujahideen, Islamist holy warriors operating out of Pakistan. A civil war was soon raging.

  The United States cast its lot with the mujahideen. Carter, uncomfortable with the religious zealotry and reactionary views of the insurgents, initially rejected Brzezinski’s plans for covert operations against the new government. Brzezinski instead worked with the CIA to train and secure outside funding for the rebels. In February, Islamic extremists in Kabul kidnapped U.S. Ambassador Adolph “Spike” Dubs, who was killed when Afghan police and Soviet advisors stormed the hotel in which he was being held. The United States subsequently deepened its involvement in the country.