Benghazi 2012-Tehran 1979: Another big screwup

A U.S. administration is accused of not increasing security at a sensitive diplomatic outpost in the Middle East, despite warnings from its own intelligence agencies. The results are catastrophic.

We’re talking not just about Libya today---but Iran 30 years ago—when 52 Americans were held hostage for 444 days.

According to several top secret U.S. government documents, which we revealed on 60 Minutes on  March 2,1980, the administration of Jimmy Carter failed to heed warnings from top Iranian officials and its own diplomats about the dangers if the U.S. were to admit the deposed Shah of Iran to the United States.

On November 4, 1979, several hundred radical Iranians, outraged at the U.S. decision to admit the Shah they detested to New York for medical treatment, stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran, overwhelmed the security guards, and took the American diplomats hostage.

It looked as if the Carter administration was innocent, overwhelmed by events:  they had simply extended a humanitarian hand to a former ally who suddenly and desperately needed medical treatment.

It later turned out that the taking of the embassy was far from spontaneous. On the other hand, as we discovered, U.S. government planning for the Shah to come to the U.S. had begun months before, and had continued despite ample warning of looming disaster.

Ironically, chapter and verse of those warnings were provided by files seized during the embassy takeover. As the mobs surged through the gates, officials inside frantically shredded thousands of documents. The hostage-takers, however, turned over that supposedly illegible mountain of debris to an army of local Iranians—many of them supposedly skilled weavers. After months of effort, they painstakingly pieced hundreds of documents back together. They were then published and put on sale –outside the American Embassy itself, for instance, where we picked up a copy.   

Among that trove was a State Department document classified “secret sensitive.” written in August 1979 and titled “Planning for the Shah to come to the U.S.” That was three months before the Shah’s arrival in New York. It said that once Khomeini is firmly established “it seems appropriate to admit the Shah to the United States.”

The discussion between officials in Washington and Tehran continued. In September, 1979, the embassy’s charge d’affaires, warned that the Shah’s coming to the U.S. could spell trouble to the embassy.  “I doubt that the Shah being ill, would have much ameliorating effect on the degree of reaction here.”

About that reaction, a State Department report specifically warned of “the danger of hostages being taken” and advised “When the decision is made to admit the Shah, we should quietly assign additional American security guards to the embassy, to provide protection to key personnel until the danger period is considered over.”

Despite that warning, Henry Precht then head of the Iranian Desk at the State Department, admitted to us that, “those guards were never provided.”

The Carter administration attempted to defend itself by claiming that Iranian officials had assured them that, if the Shah were to come to the United States, the Iranians would still protect the embassy.  

But Ibrahim Yazdi, Iran’s former Foreign Minister, gave us a different story. He told us that he was officially informed by the U.S. only 24 hours before the arrival of the Shah in New York.

Yazdi said that he then warned the State Department, “You are playing with fire. There will be a very drastic reaction.”

When President Carter asked then Secretary of State Cyrus Vance if the embassy could be protected, Vance later told Mike Wallace, “We said that we could. But we didn’t.”

Iran, Israel, the U.S: Blind Mans Buff

In a perilous spiral of assassinations, threats and counter-threats, the leaders of Washington, Jerusalem and Tehran keep ratcheting the tension. What is most alarming about the situation, is that the principle players and their advisors are engaged in an incredibly dangerous three-way game of blind mans buff.  

None of them expresses a real understanding of the others: of their motives, their concerns, nor their likely reactions. That’s true even with Israel and the United States:  though the U.S. risks being sucked into any conflict between Israel and Iran, the Obama administration is currently forced to guess what its supposed Israeli allies are planning.

What would America or Israel --or any country-- do if five of its scientists were assassinated by an enemy power?  How would they react if, at the same time, the mightiest country on the planet dispatched its forces towards their borders even as it tightened a blockade to garrote their economy?

Would they kowtow to the demand that they terminate any activities related to the research or development of nuclear weapons [which, of course, both Israel and the U.S. possess]--or lash out in violent reprisal?

A lot of people with important sounding titles pontificate on what lies ahead, but who are they kidding? It’s like we’re watching kids playing around with vials of highly volatile chemicals. No one’s sure when an explosion will come, nor how calamitous might be the chain reactions it ignites.  

What makes the situation even more perilous is the fact that the leaders of the three countries involved—Israel, Iran and the U.S.--are all challenged by strident enemies in their own countries.  Since this current dispute plays front and centre, every move they make is automatically the target of virulent homegrown--and often woefully ignorant--opponents.

In other words, if the leaders and their advisors were more secure on their respective thrones, they might all be able to follow a much cooler, more rational course. They might even be able to sit down and negotiate.  

Worse, is the likelihood that the principle actors, their advisors, intelligence agencies and domestic critics, don’t really comprehend what the others are up to—where they are coming from and what they want to achieve.

If it’s not blind-man’s buff, it’s shadow boxing—sparring with caricatures: In this corner, the deceitful bearded mullahs in Tehran obsessed with obtaining nuclear weapons to exterminate Israel and establish a new Caliphate. In that corner, the  grasping imperialists in Washington, who for decades have used the CIA and American military to put down movements of national liberation, sustain the Zionist State of Israel and the corrupt oil-rich Arab dictators.

Those caricatures become so deeply embedded that even the supposedly objective intelligence agencies of each of the combatants—not to mention the mainstream media--tend to censor, edit out, or shy away from information that runs counter to official “truth”.

I had a personal run-in with this phenomenon in 1980 when I was a producer at 60 Minutes covering the on-going revolution in Iran during the hostage crisis.

Travelling back and forward between Tehran, New York and Washington, I was struck by the total inability of Americans—even at the highest level—to understand the emotions and history that drove the hatred of all things American that had exploded in Iran with the fall of the Shah.

Just up West 57^th street from CBS News, for instance, was a huge billboard with the diabolical image of Khomeini glowering down on New York.

I suggested we do a report to give Americans a better idea of what was driving Iran’s revolutionaries and their violent feelings against the United States.

Though certainly encouraged by radical elements in Tehran, that hatred was fueled by real facts: the shameful history of U.S. intervention in Iran, from the CIA’s organizing a coup to oust the democratically elected nationalist leader Mohamed Mossadegh in 1953 to America’s subsequent backing of the Shah of Iran.

That support included the closest of relations between the CIA and the Shah’s infamous secret police, the SAVAK, notorious for torture and brutality. [In the future, of course, SAVAK’s brutality would pale beside the horrific prisons and savage repression of Khomeini and the regimes to follow. ]

To give an idea of America’s relations with the Shah and SAVAK, I stitched together a tough report with Mike Wallace based on a series of interviews in New York and Washington. “You’d have to be blind, deaf and dumb and a presidential candidate not to know there was torture going on in Iran under the Shah,” Jesse Leaf, a former C.I.A. analyst told us.

“We knew what was happening and we did nothing about it and I was told not to do anything about it. By definition, an enemy of the Shaw was an enemy of the CIA. We were friends. This was a very close relationship between the United states and Iran.”

Another former CIA officer, Richard Cottam, also condemned the U.S. and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, for turning a blind eye to the excesses of the Shah, and refusing to have any contact with the opposition groups.

“What you seemed to be saying, Professor Cottam, “Mike Wallace interjected, “is that when the question “Who lost Iran?” is finally asked, Henry Kissinger is at the top of your culprit’s list.”

“I think Henry Kissinger’s idea of diplomacy in this sense is…is intolerable,” replied Cottam.

We also reported on some of the classified U.S. government documents divulged by the Iranians who had taken over the American Embassy. Those documents showed that American diplomats based in Teheran had warned Washington months earlier of the threat of a possible hostage taking--particularly if the U.S. allowed the despised Shah to come to America for medical treatment, as the U.S. ultimately did. Those warnings had been completely ignored by Washington.

In return for releasing the hostages what the Iranian government of President Bani-Sadr was demanding was a pledge by the U.S. not to interfere in the future affairs of Iran and an agreement not to block their efforts to get back the Shah and the wealth of Iran he embezzled. They also wanted an admission by the U.S. of past wrongs. In light of that past, we asked, were those demands so outrageous?

In the context of America’s superheated passions at the time, however, even posing that question was considered outrageous.

Over the next few days, as we were preparing the report, we received calls from many Washington officials concerned about the broadcast. This was capped by President Jimmy Carter himself who called Bill Leonard, the President of CBS News, to try to convince him not to broadcast report. It would, he said, undermine U.S. negotiations with Iran at a very delicate time.

To his credit, Bill Leonard refused to back down. The only thing he requested was to change the title of our report from “Should the U.S. Apologize?”  to a more neutral “The Iran file.”

When questioned by Leonard, we argued that it was difficult to understand how our report could upset the hostage negotiations.  We were not revealing any secrets to Iran. The Iranians already knew well the role of the U.S. in their own history. The people we were informing were 20 million Americans—who didn’t understand what was really roiling Iran.  

And still don’t.