The Foreign Service Journal, November 2019

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER 2019 85 The American Setting: Mission Impossible In 1979 officials of the Jimmy Carter administration struggled with two questions: What had happened in Iran, and what do we do now? The first led to the ever-popular Washington game of finding a scapegoat. Historians, journal- ists and former officials—both Iranian and American— continue their arguments on this subject to the present day. As for the second question, no one knew the answer. In 1979 the Cold War “prime directive” of Washington’s Iran pol- icy—resist communist expansion—remained in force despite the upheavals in Tehran. “We have a common enemy to your north,” Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski told Bazargan’s provisional government. Thus, the Cold War gave U.S. Embassy Tehran its mission: maintain a relation- ship with whoever rules Iran, which remains important for its oil and location, as a customer of American goods (including military equipment) and—above all—as a barrier, whether as monarchy or theocracy, to Soviet ambitions. The United States could not remain untouched by Iran’s post-revolution strife. Maintaining anything like a normal relationship was going to be very difficult, and would require more agility and good luck than was available. Islamists and leftists were beating their anti-American drums, amplified by state radio and television under the leadership of the quixotic Sadeq Qotbzadeh (a former Georgetown student). Neither group was interested in anything approaching normality, which they equated with betrayal. In October 1979 Secretary of State Cyrus Vance encountered this reality at the United Nations when his question to his Iranian counterpart— “Where can our two countries go from here?”—elicited only a recital of grievances. The final straw was the fate of the deposed shah and his desire to come to the United States. In July 1979 Chief of Mission Bruce Laingen advised Secretary of State Vance that admitting the shah while Iran remained unsettled would have the following results: • The moderate provisional government would fall. • Any chance of a U.S.-Iran relationship would vanish. • There would be no Ameri- can embassy in Tehran. Until October 1979 President Carter and Secretary Vance had resisted calls to admit the shah. That month the president learned—apparently for the first time—that the shah was sick with cancer in Mexico and needed to come to the United States for urgent treatment. The shah’s illness led Vance to change his position; and Carter, isolated among his staff, reluctantly agreed. According to Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan’s account, the president asked his advisers: “Tell me one thing. What are you going to advise Members of the diverse coalition that brought down Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last king of Iran, were soon at each other’s throats. Iranian students climb over the gate of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, Nov. 4, 1979. WIKIMEDIACOMMONS