The Shah and Carter had never seen eye to eye. Carter, with his genuine Christian faith, had serious problems with the Shah’s repressive rule, especially the Shah’s use of SAVAK, Iran’s secret police. Carter also knew that he needed the Shah to remain a U.S. ally, as Iran occupies a strategic position in southwest Asia, and the country also sits atop some of the world’s largest oil and natural gas reserves. Iran also hosted NSA listening posts on the Caspian Sea, which provided valuable insight into Soviet missile tests. These sites were also crucial to Carter’s ambition for a new SALT treaty with the Soviet Union, as the Senate would not ratify the treaty without verification measures provided by the NSA sites on the Caspian.
The Shah felt that Carter didn’t understand that a liberal, Western style democracy was simply not possible in a country like Iran. He also irrationally blamed Carter and the U.S. for increasing Iranian student unrest. When the Shah came to visit the U.S. in 1977, thousands of Iranian students protested against the visit, nearly shutting down Washington. A famous picture of that visit shows the Shah and Carter on the Truman balcony, both of them wiping their eyes from residual tear gas used to disperse the protests. I watched these protests on a bus ride home from high school, as my fellow McNamara students chanted “Sha-na-na-Sha-na-na get a job!”
Carter visited Tehran in January of 1978, and at a state banquet on New Years Day, he toasted the Shah as “a man beloved by his people” and Iran as “an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world”. As 1978 progressed, more unrest began to roil Iran. By September the Shah was forced to put a military government in charge of the country, and the new government began to use lethal force against protesters. But as far as the CIA was concerned, everything in Iran was fine. A CIA assessment in August concluded that the Shah had firm control of SAVAK, the police and the military, and that the country was not in a revolutionary or even a pre-revolutionary state.
The U.S. ambassador to Iran, William Sullivan, had a different take on the situation in Iran. By talking to students, middle class Iranians, and observing the growing use of lethal force against protesters, Sullivan realized that the Shah’s days were numbered. On 9 November, 1978, Sullivan sent a cable to Washington entitled “Thinking the Unthinkable”. The cable outlined the growing unrest in Iran, the hatred most Iranians had for the Shah, and--most alarmingly--the growing religious fervor sweeping the country. Sullivan said that all these factors could force the Shah to abdicate in the very near future, which is precisely what happened on 16 January, 1979, when the Shah and his wife left the country.
Unknown to the CIA and Carter, the Shah was suffering from advanced lymphatic cancer. He was in Mexico in October of 1979, when he petitioned Carter to allow him to enter the United States for cancer treatment at New York’s Soan Kettering center. On 20 October, Carter, ever the Christian, allowed the Shah to come to the U.S. on compassionate grounds. Allowing the Shah to enter the United States enraged student protesters in Tehran and the newly formed government of Khomeini, who demanded that the U.S. send the Shah back to Iran to stand trial for “crimes against humanity”. Carter, knowing that sending the Shah back would seal his fate, refused.
On Sunday, 4 November, thousands of students gathered outside the U.S. Embassy, chanting “death to America, death to the Shah!”. As the crowd began to press against the gates of the embassy, the Iranian security forces drew back, leaving the embassy open to the student protesters. Some of the protesters had metal cutters, which they used to cut the bolts on the embassy’s gates. Once the gates were forced opened, the students rushed into the compound. The Americans were in the process of destroying sensitive documents when the students burst in and surrounded the staff. Soon, the Americans were blindfolded and led outside the compound to the jeers of thousands of protesters outside the embassy.
President Carter was awakened on Sunday morning by his National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who informed the President that the embassy had been overrun and that at least 50 Americans had been taken hostage. Later that morning networks broke into their regular programming with video of the embassy seizure and pictures of blindfolded Americans surrounded by Iranian students. As a sophomore in college, I was stunned at the news, but like President Carter, I expected the crisis to be quickly resolved. Little did I, or the President, realize how much this crisis would consume the country.
