The Foreign Service Journal, November 2019

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER 2019 87 in for a long detention as we waited for the adults in the room to intervene. Those adults never appeared, however; and our hours in captivity became days, weeks and months. Khomeini relished his role as “defier-in-chief,” rejecting appeals from dozens of international figures. The more obstinate he was, the more popular he became, earning the title aashti naa- pazir (implacable). Some of our captors have since claimed that they never intended events to unfold as they did, but that they were used and caught in the role of long-term prison guards and pawns in Iran’s raucous political chess game. They became like the dog that caught the bus. They had captured the embassy and its people. Now what should they do? One of them told me bluntly: “All this is not about you. It’s not about the shah. It’s not about the United States. We have scores to settle with our Iranian enemies, and you are crucial to our doing so.” How does one answer that? One sits and waits. Lessons Learned … and Ignored It is certain there are lessons to be learned from these events. It is less certain anyone has learned them. Respect the power of history and ghosts. Powerful ghosts of repeated humiliations have troubled Iran’s relations with the outside world for more than 200 years. These indignities long predate any U.S.-Iranian interaction. They include the unequal treaties of Gulistan (1813) and Turkmanchai (1828), the larcenous D’Arcy oil concession of 1901, the cynical Anglo- Russian agreement of 1907 and the Allied occupation of Iran during World War II. More recent humiliations did involve the United States. They include the CIA coup of 1953, the status of forces agree- ment of 1964, the appointment of the head of the Central Intelligence Agency as U.S. ambassador to Iran in 1973 and the death of 300 civilians in the destruction of an Iranian airliner in 1988. When President Carter agreed to let the shah come to the United States, he ignored history and the ghosts of 1953, when Washington had helped topple a nationalist prime minister and returned the shah from abroad. In October 1979 our orders in Tehran were to “inform the Iranian government that the shah’s admission was based on purely humanitarian grounds and had no political motive.” We did our best. But, given the history, what Iranian over the age of 3 would believe such a statement—even if it were true? Expect the unexpected and avoid the easy assumption. We fell into a trap of our own making when we made assump- tions about likely Iranian reactions to admitting the shah. President Carter ignored his own misgivings. His administra- tion ignored clear reports from its diplomats in Tehran and media stories about the prevailing anarchy there and the growing power of extremists. It misread the situation of Iran’s provisional government and its ability to control events. It assumed the clerical authorities, particularly Ayatollah Khomeini, would calculate their interests in a certain way. It never considered that those with power in Iran would encourage and exploit anarchy rather than control it. The irony is that events of 1978—the uprisings that led to the shah’s downfall—should have taught us to question all assumptions. A few weeks before the first of those upris- ings, President Carter was in Tehran toasting the shah as a beloved leader of a country he called “an island of stability in a troubled region.” A year later the shah was gone, and the island of stability was in chaos. Obviously, we learned nothing from those unexpected events, when the leader of a strong, prosperous and friendly country could be toppled so easily by unarmed crowds loyal to an aging, exiled theocrat. In 1979 we repeated our failure of 1978 when we declined to look closely at reality and instead continued to believe what we wished to be true. Perhaps in both cases reality was too unpleasant to consider. Make noise, and be a pain in the ass. This is hard. We are a disciplined, polite and collegial Service; but we still owe the country our best (and often unwelcome) judgments. We are not sent overseas to participate in groupthink and to remain silent when ill-considered decisions put lives in danger. In Tehran 40 years ago we survived only by good fortune. A more violent Iranian group could have attacked the embassy; a Marine Security Guard could have panicked and opened fire; we could have faced an uncontrolled mob of 100,000; the rescue mission sent in April 1980 might have reached the embassy, with unpredictable consequences. (As it were, that mission cost the lives of eight American airmen and Marines in the central desert.) 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.