The Foreign Service Journal, November 2019

86 NOVEMBER 2019 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL me to do when our embassy is overrun and our people taken hostage?” Jordan did not record any answers. In Tehran, we at the embassy learned of the president’s deci- sion on Oct. 20. The message to us was clear: “You are expend- able. Good luck.” Never was there any mention of total or partial evacuation of embassy staff. Someone apparently believed that the United States could have it all: admit the shah, keep an embassy in Tehran and continue to resist Soviet expansion. Iranian Plans: Who Is the Enemy? In all this fog a group of engineering students from five Tehran schools met to decide how to show their dissatisfac- tion with the course of events. According to (later) accounts of their leaders, the group believed they needed to take some anti-American action and began planning a brief occupation of the American embassy. Two of the original five—including a future president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—disagreed with the plan and proposed attacking the Soviet embassy, which, in their view, was supporting the Iranian leftists—the most serious threat to the revolution. The others objected, claiming that America was giving shelter to the deposed shah and plotting his return in a rerun of the 1953 coup, and was thus the greater danger. Ahmadine- jad and his ally left the group, although later, as president from 2005 to 2013, he would bring former hostage-takers into his cabinet. Recent research has revealed that these students also feared that their leftist rivals would outflank them with their loud anti-American rhetoric. If the Islamists took no action, they would be vulnerable to charges of being “pro-American” and would find themselves isolated and weakened in the ongo- ing domestic power struggles. By attacking the American embassy, they could seize the anti-American mantle, preempt the leftists and proclaim: “Others talk. We act.” Events unfolded precisely as President Carter and COM Laingen had foreseen. When the students attacked the embassy, the nominal Iranian authori- ties could do nothing. Urgent calls to officials of the provi- sional government met only questions about visas. The Marine Security Guards had orders not to fire on the attackers; thanks to these young men’s training and discipline, we avoided a bloodbath. Ayatollah Khomeini may have been unhappy with the students’ action, but he would not end it. Presented with a fait accompli and an apparent surge of support in the streets, he decided to ride this wave rather than stand against it. He understood how to use the occupation to cement control of the new state by his closest allies, clerical ideologues sharing his harsh vision of Iran’s future. He endorsed the occupation, calling it “a second revolution, greater than the first” and used it to purge nationalists, moderates and, eventually, leftists from the revolutionary coalition. Iran’s provisional govern- ment, now exposed as powerless, collapsed. Anyone who would answer American phone calls could do nothing; those who could do something were not taking calls. All these calculations meant that we at the embassy were Former Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh (front right). The democratically elected prime minister was removed from power on Aug. 19, 1953, in a coup supported and funded by the British and U.S. governments. He was imprisoned for three years and then put under house arrest until his death in 1957. AFP/GETTY IMAGES