Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (17 page)

After Logan Fitch, a tall, taciturn Texan, had hiked from rendezvous point to rendezvous point for days, he was finally told, “Get on the truck,” and driven back to the unit’s camp. He was left there without a word of explanation.

“What do I do?” he asked.

“Just stay here until we come and get you.”

He spent a long depressing day, certain that he had been dropped from selection when just the opposite was true.

Many hard men cracked under treatment like this. If the physical demands didn’t defeat them, the uncertainty did. Some foundered because they couldn’t cope with operating alone in the wild for days on end. Their judgment failed them. Many of those who failed did so because they chose to give up.

It resulted in a different kind of military force, one in some ways starkly at odds with tradition. Armies had always been about teamwork, formal recognition for achievement, and a rigidly enforced hierarchy. Delta attracted men who preferred working alone, who shunned attention, and who had little patience for the protocol and rituals that defined military life. It was made up of mature, independent soldiers who had been chosen in part for their ability to function outside the chain of command. The unit’s “operators,” as they were called, or “shooters” (they disliked the term “commando”), dressed in civilian clothes, had civilian haircuts, and unless they were involved in a mission or exercise kept their own hours. When one of Beckwith’s superiors floated the idea of coming down to Fort Bragg to do early morning physical exercises with the men, an honor for any other army unit, Beckwith had backhanded the gesture. It would be inconvenient, he responded. His men did not exercise together, but individually or in pairs, whenever they wished.

No matter how unpopular Beckwith and his unit were, however, they had cleared the army’s last official hurdle. The colonel had gone to sleep shortly before dawn that morning with a sense of triumph.

Two hours later he was on the interstate back to Fort Bragg to begin the planning of Delta’s first mission.

Beckwith was northbound on Interstate 95 when Hamilton Jordan arrived in Washington. The White House chief of staff had spent Saturday on Maryland’s eastern shore at the home of a presidential friend and with two top members of Carter’s reelection committee, plotting moves for the coming election year. The night before, he had received news that Senator Edward M. Kennedy, from whom President Carter expected a tough challenge in the coming Democratic primaries, had performed badly in a prime-time interview to air on CBS that night, stumbling over questions about his embarrassing role in the accidental drowning of a young woman ten years earlier at Chappaquiddick Island in Massachusetts. Despite that scandal, the Massachusetts senator had been an unofficial crown prince for almost two decades after the assassinations of his famous brothers, and was expected to announce his long-awaited campaign for the White House. Jordan hadn’t seen the interview yet, but if the reports were true, then it was the kind of TV moment that might destroy Kennedy before he got started. Carter’s longtime campaign manager, Jordan had gone to bed that night delighted with the news and scheming about how to capitalize on it. The call from the White House situation room awakened him at about four, informing him of the troubling events in Tehran.

Iran was not even on the radar as an important issue. Ever since World War Two, the oil-rich nation had figured prominently in American foreign affairs as a significant oil supplier and a bulwark against Soviet ambitions in the Middle East. On New Year’s Eve in 1977, Carter had toasted the shah of Iran at a state dinner in Tehran, calling him “an island of stability” in that region. He had also saluted the ruler’s “wisdom,” “judgment,” “sensitivity,” and “insight,” words that stuck in the craw of human rights activists in and out of Iran, who knew the shah as a patronizing dictator who employed brutal methods to suppress dissent and political opposition. It had been an uncharacteristic moment in Carter’s term, because during his campaign and in office he had made morality a controversial priority in his foreign policy.

In style and character, the Georgia peanut farmer’s administration could not have been more different than the Pahlavi monarchy. Carter came from rural Georgia, and despite his background as a naval officer in the nuclear submarine command he sold himself as a man with humble roots. His election in 1976 was in part a national purging of the Watergate scandal. Public distrust of the nation’s traditional governing, ruling class was at its height, and the humble peanut farmer who promised he would never tell a lie to the American people had looked like an attractive alternative. His political cabinet was made up primarily of men like Jordan and press secretary Jody Powell, fellow Georgians who had been with him through the years he had served as governor of that state. They were exemplars of the modern South, with unpretentious good ole boy manners, first-rate educations, and solid liberal ideals. Carter was the latest beneficiary of the American electorate’s occasional need to scratch a populist itch, a citizen president, shunning the trappings of power, right down to refusing a limousine and walking from the inaugural stand to the White House on the day he assumed office, making a point of carrying his own luggage. The Machiavellian style of the Nixon-Kissinger years was out, and in was the simple decency of Carter’s born-again Christian faith. The new president bent the long-standing priority of containing communism, which had for decades justified American support and alliance with all manner of tyranny, to accommodate a stronger emphasis on human rights. Most recently and notably, he had withdrawn vital American support for Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza and, after he was chased from power, backed millions in aid to the leftist Sandinistas. Carter’s rhetoric and actions had stirred hope to many in Third World countries, including those in Iran who wanted to oust the shah and form a truly representative government. Carter had dashed those hopes with that effusive televised toast at the state dinner in Tehran. It had been a mere formality for the president, a perfunctory salute to a longtime American ally, but the words carried tremendous significance in Iran. To the percolating revolutionists, America had once again chosen sides against the people. It marked Carter as a hypocrite and an enemy.

As tyrants go, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi was fairly tame. He was a timid, vain, vacillating man with good intentions who had been raised to rule and who bought readily into the anachronistic notion of the divine right of kingship. But it wasn’t Allah who had placed him on the throne; it was Kermit Roosevelt, the CIA’s man in Tehran. Pahlavi’s father had been elected shah in 1925 four years after the military coup and ruled until Great Britain and the Soviet Union ousted him early in World War Two after he leaned openly toward Nazi Germany. The Allied powers occupied Iran during the war, commandeering the nation’s vast oil supplies to fuel Stalin’s fight against Hitler. The young Pahlavi was handed his father’s throne because it was convenient to maintain the fiction of Iran’s independence. Educated in Switzerland, the young king passed his time during those years as an unimaginably wealthy international playboy, and he probably never would have assumed real power were it not for the Western appetite for Iranian oil.

To his credit, the young shah had tried to mollify the outright plunder of his country’s natural resources after the war by urging the United States and Great Britain to share the profits from selling Iranian oil with Iran. Still just a figurehead leader, he argued that letting his country keep half of the profits would underwrite domestic prosperity and undercut the gathering socialist and nationalist political movements. The idea was rejected out of hand by the powerful Anglo-Iran Oil Company, one of the richest private corporations in the world. Outraged Iranians rallied behind the odd but charismatic Mohammed Mossadeq, a dour, frail, but principled descendant of the family that had ruled Iran for almost two hundred years before the Pahlavi family seized power. Voted prime minister by the Majlis in 1951, Mossadeq immediately did what the shah would never have dared; he defied the great powers by enforcing nationalization of the oil industry. The move was hugely popular at home and so potentially world-altering—a Third World country asserting ownership of its own resources—that Time magazine named Mossadeq its “Man of the Year.” In a speech before the United Nations, Mossadeq said, “The oil resources of Iran, like its soil, its rivers and mountains, are the property of the people of Iran.” While self-evident, the concept proved much too bold. The financial interests of the Anglo-Iran Oil Company and America’s concern that Mossadeq would drift further toward a centralized socialist system and into the Soviet sphere combined to inspire a coup d’état, which was ordered by President Dwight D. Eisenhower and (with perhaps fewer pangs of conscience) by Britain’s most famous diehard colonialist, Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

The young Pahlavi was perfectly situated to legitimize this plot. Through nearly all of its history, reaching back to ancient Persia, the country had been ruled by kings called “shah.” Pahlavi’s father had assumed power after ousting the nearly two-hundred-year-old Qajar dynasty, but assumed the title “shah” only with the approval of Iran’s Congress, the Majlis. In those years, Iran was gradually evolving into a representative democracy, and the ouster of the elder shah during the war had speeded that transition. Mossadeq’s popularity made it appear as though the young shah would remain an honorary figure at best. Roosevelt preyed upon Pahlavi’s vanity and royal presumption by offering him “full” power (Iran would remain, of course, America’s client state). The shah’s support would give an authentic Iranian imprimatur to what was in truth a foreign-backed coup, enabling America to claim it was “rescuing” the government, not overturning it. A more honorable, selfless man would have said no.

Pahlavi said yes. Roosevelt shuttled back and forth to meetings with the shah in 1953, hidden in the backseat of a car under blankets, plotting to dismantle Iran’s elected government and hand full power to him. By then, Mossadeq had been weakened politically by the financial fallout from nationalization; Iran lacked the know-how and resources to profitably operate its oil pumping and refining plants. Its customers found new suppliers, and economic stagnation set in. The affluent upper class that had profited under the old oil arrangements, including military leaders, had grown increasingly impatient with this radical nationalist experiment. Mossadeq turned in vain to the Eisenhower administration for help in brokering a deal with the British that would restart its oil industry under Iranian supervision. Instead, Washington decided to shove the vulnerable old man offstage.

Roosevelt orchestrated street demonstrations and a campaign of false stories in the Iranian press against Mossadeq, and systematically bought off military leaders, who arrested the prime minister on trumped-up charges of treason (he was convicted and after a three-year term in prison remained under house arrest until his death in 1967). During the days of the actual coup, the shah fled to Rome with his wife until it was safe to return—“to avoid bloodshed,” he said, most conspicuously his own—and then assumed the throne offered on a platter by his American friends, adorning himself “Light of the Aryans” and with pomp befitting a position known historically as the “Peacock Throne.” The new regime was offered a far better deal on oil revenues, and the shah promised nothing less than the complete modernization of his country in his lifetime, to make it the financial and cultural equal of Europe. The United States subsidized this Pahlavian fantasy, cynically betraying its democratic principles in the name of containing communism and facilitating the uninterrupted flow of oil. And to some extent it worked, most of all for the United States. The shah’s Iran helped keep the Soviet Bear from Middle East oil supplies and provided a strong guarantee of Western access. Roosevelt’s successful plot became the textbook CIA-engineered coup, and its fame spread well beyond the secret walls of Langley, Virginia. An article by Richard and Gladys Harkness, in the 1954 Saturday Evening Post (widely reprinted in Iran), laid out the whole scheme as a clever American triumph against the creeping Red Menace. It made Roosevelt a legend in the world of clandestine operations. Nearly a quarter of a century later Carter would be toasting the elaborately bedecked, gray-haired shah’s “stability.”

Eventually the shah did wrest billions in oil profits for his nation and presided over several decades of relative prosperity, empowering women and moving his country away from literal adherence to the Koran. His rule became increasingly strict and self-assured as he became more and more self-deceived, believing that God Almighty was behind the squalid machinations that had placed him in power, and that his state decisions, being divinely inspired, were infallible. “My visions were miracles that saved the country,” he boasted to Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci in a series of interviews two decades after the coup. With American help he had blossomed into an openly arrogant monarch, proud of his unflinching willingness to shoot dissidents, convinced of the inherent inferiority of Western-style democracy. He presided over a military large and modern enough to rival Israel’s but wasted billions on ill-conceived economic schemes. Despite his “expert” personal reconstruction of Iran’s economy and culture, the majority of his people stayed poor, and remained devout. Land reforms improved agricultural production, but not fast enough for Iran’s mushrooming urban population, and by the mid-1970s more than 40 percent of its people were undernourished. Oil wealth fed urban enclaves of educated, Westernized, well-connected citizens, loyal to the regime, but the disparity between this small affluent class and the majority of Iranians was vast and growing. By the twentieth year of his reign, the shah was deeply unpopular, reviled by Iran’s educated class as a tyrant and American puppet and by the multitudes of poor and uneducated for his efforts to dismantle their religious traditions. As discontent grew, the usual cycle of repression and rebellion set in. The shah relied more and more on SAVAK, his secret police, to root out and smash rebellion, which spread discontent and turned it into hatred. Dissident mullahs such as the Ayatollah Khomeini, too popular to imprison or kill, were exiled.