An Outsider in the White House: Jimmy Carter, His Advisors, and the Making of American Foreign Policy

17. SCRAMBLING FOR OPTIONS

176 17 SCRAMBLING FOR OPTIONS On October 20, 1979, President Jimmy Carter agreed to admit Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi into the United States for medical treatment in New York City. Two weeks later, on a rainy morning, several hundred militant Iranian students stormed the American embassy in Tehran. The women among them cut through the gates in front of the compound, pulling out bolt cutters hidden beneath their chadors. Because it was a Sunday, few of the thirteen Marines charged with guarding the embassy were on duty, and none were stationed at the front gate.1 The Iranian police around the embassy simply faded away, and by 4:00 p.m., over sixty American diplomats and aides had been taken hostage. The man who had initiated the takeover , Ibrahim Asgarzadeh, a tall and handsome engineering student at the Aryamehr University of Technology,said his original idea was to seize the U.S.embassy for“fortyeight or perhaps seventy-two hours—unless the provisional government evicted them earlier.”The students’ goal was to voice their complaints against America.2 A day after the takeover, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, dressed in a black robe with a“perfectly wound” black turban around his head, symbolizing his descent from Muhammad, made a public statement that changed the nature of the takeover.3 “Today,” he said, “underground plots are being hatched in these embassies, mostly by the great Satan America...they must sit in their places and return the traitor [the shah] soon.”4 With this, the Provisional Revolutionary Government headed by Mehdi Bazargan resigned, yielding all governmental power to Khomeini and the secret Revolutionary Council, a body with a membership unknown to U.S. government officials.5 Thus began the hostage crisis with which Carter would struggle until he left office almost fourteen months later on January 20, 1981. In admitting the shah to the United States, Carter was the victim of bad advice and an intelligence failure. The shah had been a man without a country ever since his departure from Iran on January 16, 1979.6 Beginning in the spring of 1978, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller (whose Chase Manhattan Bank represented economic interests tied to the shah’s government), and National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski pressed Carter to admit him.7 Vice President Walter Mondale joined them on July 27. Finally, at the president’s October 19 foreign affairs breakfast, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, the last holdout of Carter’s advisors, came aboard. The shah, he pointed out, was suffering from a potentially fatal lymphoma, and the State Department’s medical advisor concluded that he could not be properly treated in Mexico, where he currently resided.8 At one point in the discussion Carter raised the question,“What are you guys going to advise me to do if they overrun our embassy and take our people hostage?” When SCRAMBLING FOR OPTIONS 177 no one responded, Carter continued,“On that day, we will all sit here with long drawn, white faces and realize we’ve been had.”9 Carter had reason for concern. Ibrahim Yazdi, foreign minister in the Bazargan government, warned American policymakers when he was told that the shah was coming to the United States,“You’re opening Pandora’s Box with this.”10 Butevengiventhetreatmentambiguities,themedicalsituationcouldhavebeenmore prudently handled. Once the shah was in the United States, the Carter administration could have assured the Iranians—suspecting as they did that his admission was just an excuse for him to reassemble and attempt a return to power in Iran—that he was indeed a very ill man. But Carter rejected the Bazargan government’s request that Iranian doctors be allowed to directly review the medical findings to verify the accuracy of the diagnosis.11 A second suggestion that the State Department agreed to—that the shah’s doctors discuss the case with physicians selected by Iranian officials—fell by the wayside when the U.S. physicians refused to agree on a consultation.12 Instead, the Iranians had to rely on an uninformative public news conference given by Morton Coleman, the shah’s American cancer specialist. Coleman’s suggestion that the shah might have to stay in New York for intensive chemotherapy for at least six months, and possibly up to eighteen months, reinforced Iranian fears that the shah had come to the United States not for medical treatment, but to set up counter revolutionary headquarters.13 The U.S. embassy in Tehran, too, could have been better protected...