The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (5 page)

T
o gain a better idea of what was going on in the streets of Tehran in early November 1978, Stanley Escudero arrived in Tehran. Fluent in Farsi, the thirty-five-year-old diplomat of Mexican ancestry from Daytona, Florida, had recently served for four years in the embassy. With dark hair and a dusky complexion, he could pass as a local—perhaps not from Tehran, he admitted,
but from an outlying area such as Azerbaijan. His previous assignment to Iran in the early 1970s had not been a particularly career-enhancing tour of duty. Escudero had annoyed his State Department superiors in Foggy Bottom by questioning the long-term viability of the Pahlavi dynasty. While he had not predicted the shah’s current difficulties, he openly questioned the viability of rule by the shah’s son. This assessment was not what Henry Kissinger and the State Department had wanted to hear. Compounding his impropriety of straying off the policy reservation, Escudero had met repeatedly with the shah’s opponents, especially religious leaders. “Iran was too important to the United States,” he later said. “I believed we would be better advised to have relations with whoever ran Iran, be it the shah or the opposition. This was not popular in Washington.”
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Escudero, relegated to working in the then less prestigious Bureau of International Organization Affairs at State, seemed destined for a lackluster career. But the shah’s troubles revived Escudero’s standing. In fall 1978, Harold Saunders, the deputy assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs, and Henry Precht, the country desk officer for Iran, each asked Escudero if he would be willing to go back to Tehran to assess the opposition and the shah’s likelihood of survival.

Reluctant, Escudero answered, “You want me to go out and meet with the same people that got me into trouble in the first place, and tell you things that you know are not going to suit current policy?”

Saunders and Precht acknowledged that Escudero had been correct in his predictions regarding the shah. They added, “We don’t have anyone else to send who stands a reasonable chance of survival.” Escudero decided to accept their offer. “I was young and stupid,” he said with a chuckle years later.
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Landing in Tehran, he set about going native and infiltrating the revolution. He donned Iranian clothes and cropped his beard close in a style common among Iranian men. To preserve his cover, he distanced himself from the embassy and traveled to its sprawling grounds only during darkness in order to provide updates to Ambassador Sullivan. He lived in apartments of trusted Iranian friends, moving frequently for his and their safety.

Escudero traveled to Qom and met with Ayatollah Sayed Shariat-Madari, an opponent of the shah, but less extreme than Khomeini and more favorably disposed to the United States. Posing as a journalist, Escudero met with religious leaders from Khomeini’s camp to glean their views of the revolt, which confirmed both Brzezinski’s views of Khomeini’s true intentions and Sullivan’s intuition about the importance of the ayatollah in the future of
Iran.
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He discovered that the religious leadership played a prominent role in mounting antigovernment demonstrations. “The demonstrations were very organized,” he observed. Wardens with armbands kept the crowd orderly, orchestrating their chants and keeping the mob unified. While the crowds were composed of a mixture of all the shah’s detractors, the Islamic movement was the most organized and best funded. Khomeini supporters, such as a fluent English speaker named Mohammad Beheshti, the ayatollah’s representative in Hamburg, Germany, played a pivotal role in orchestrating the protests.
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Masquerading now as a student, Escudero infiltrated the mobs protesting against the shah, where he blended in with the thousands of others, shouting “Death to the shah! Death to the shah!” and raising a fist in defiance as he joined the throngs confronting the Imperial Army. It was hazardous duty. Had the students or clergy discovered an American Foreign Service officer in their midst, vengeance would have been swift and deadly.

It soon became apparent to Escudero that the shah’s days were numbered. His reports reinforced Sullivan’s opinion of the inevitability of the monarch’s overthrow. In numerous cables to both Vance and Brzezinski, the ambassador wrote that the only solution available was to push for a democratic government before the revolution spiraled out of control and it became impossible to save anything from the disaster looming before them.
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Supporting Escudero’s reports, on December 12, 1978, veteran American diplomat and Middle East hand George Ball delivered a report on Iran to the president. Ball had worked Middle East issues for both the Nixon and Carter administrations, and he was instrumental in helping Nixon develop the twin pillars strategy. Echoing Sullivan’s views, he stated bluntly that the shah needed to act immediately to effect the transition to a civil government and transfer all power, except that as commander of the armed forces. Otherwise, Ball predicted, “he will collapse.”
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Carter reluctantly approved his first covert operation for Iran in a final stab at saving the shah. The president had a strong distaste for these actions, but had finally been convinced to try a small effort. The CIA began a very limited psychological operations campaign to highlight awareness of the Iranian communist Tudeh Party’s support for Khomeini’s return in a forlorn hope to rally anticommunists to support the shah and undercut the opposition movement. It failed and the CIA terminated it little more than a month later.
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While
Iranian protesters accused the American embassy of being a “den of spies,” a senior White House staffer wrote to Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski: “It is supremely ironic that we should stand accused of so much espionage out of our embassy in Tehran when we have done so little.”
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As Christmas 1978 approached, pessimism reigned in both capitals—Washington and Tehran. Emblematically, President Carter ordered the lights turned off the national Christmas tree behind the White House on the Ellipse to save electricity. The only caroling heard at the U.S. embassy in Tehran, Sullivan wrote, came from “a rather scruffy crowd of teenagers marching by the embassy and chanting ‘Yankee Go Home.’”
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O
n January 4, 1979, General Dutch Huyser arrived in the Iranian capital. As he drove through Tehran, he was shocked at the sight of the once vibrant city, now with stores shuttered and the streets empty of the usual bustling, chaotic traffic.

In view of Alexander Haig’s vocal objections to his mission, an uneasy Huyser insisted that Defense Secretary Brown provide him with written instructions. When the message arrived just before his departure for Tehran, the directives were as ambiguous and muddled as was U.S. policy toward the crisis. Huyser was told to convey to the shah the president’s continued support to the Iranian military as the critical link in the transition to a new stable government: “It is extremely important for the Iranian military to do all it can to remain strong and intact in order to help a responsible civilian government function effectively,” the instructions said. “As the Iranian military move through this time of change, they should know that the U.S. military and the U.S. government, from the President down, remain strongly behind them.”
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Precisely what this message conveyed to the Iranian military remained a mystery to Huyser. Vance had intended it to inform the Iranian generals that the United States backed the transition to a democratic government. Brzezinski, however, intended for Huyser to give the green light to the Iranian military to stage a coup, declare martial law, and take over the government. The muddled language of Huyser’s instructions represented a compromise between the two competing positions, but it left both the messenger and its intended audience utterly confused.

Huyser arrived at the embassy to meet with Ambassador Sullivan, the
first of many such meetings over the ensuing month. “The shah is finished,” the ambassador abruptly told Huyser. “The military has already decayed to the point they are incapable of doing anything.” Ayatollah Khomeini and an Islamic government would be better than a military coup, and the sooner the United States began mending relations with the powerful clerical force, the better in the long term. But Carter had prohibited any discussions with Khomeini on the grounds that they might undermine the shah’s tenuous authority. In response, Sullivan sent a combative message to Vance urging direct talks with Khomeini. “You should know that the president had made a gross and perhaps irretrievable mistake by failing to send an emissary to Paris to see Khomeini. I cannot understand the rationale for this unfortunate decision. I urge you immediately to join Harold Brown in this plea for sanity!”
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The next morning, January 11, both Huyser and Sullivan traveled across the city from the embassy to the shah’s expansive palace to deliver the president’s message of support and to discuss the Iranian leader’s prospects. They found the shah looking haggard, dressed uncharacteristically in a dark suit rather than the military uniform he had worn exclusively since the crisis began. Clearly ill, he showed no vitality or strength to inspire confidence in his long-term political survival.

After a bit of small talk, the shah raised the prospect of leaving Iran on an “extended vacation.” He hoped it would help calm the streets, apparently still dreaming that he might yet return to his throne after things calmed down. “When should I go?” he asked.

Sullivan immediately responded, “As soon as possible would probably be the best for all concerned.” The shah agreed.

As the meeting concluded, General Huyser reminded the shah of a conversation the two men had had just five months earlier, at the outset of the shah’s troubles. The shah had emphatically told the air force general that he would not lose control of power. “What happened, Your Majesty?” Huyser asked.

Mohammad Reza thought quietly for some time, glaring at Sullivan through his thick glasses. “Your commander-in-chief is different from me. I am a commander-in-chief who is actually in uniform and, as such, for me to give the orders that would have been necessary….” He paused. “Could you as commander-in-chief give the order to kill your own people?”
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On January 16, 1979, the shah left Iran for Egypt on his “extended vacation.” He never returned. Hundreds of thousands of jubilant Iranians
celebrated until nightfall. As Huyser walked across the darkened embassy to the secure room for his evening talk with Washington, it was extraordinarily quiet, but, Huyser sensed, “there was a different feeling in the air.”

Over the next month, General Huyser met repeatedly with Iranian military leaders. Huyser helped develop a series of military options to maintain order and ensure a smooth transition. The most extreme was Option C—a military coup designed to break any strikes and resistance, and to regain control over the country. When Huyser back-briefed this military option in a secure conference call with Brzezinski and Brown, the national security adviser latched onto it in congruence with his long-standing support of a military takeover to preserve a pro-American government. “The coup option needed to remain on the table,” Brzezinski stressed. “Could the army execute it?”

“Yes,” General Huyser responded, “as long as the army continued to hold together.”

Whether they would open fire on the opposition remained an open question, however, as the conscripted soldiers had shown no stomach for killing fellow Iranians. Furthermore, the shah had maintained tight control over the military leadership and did not reward generals who showed much initiative.

On February 1, Ayatollah Khomeini returned by jet to Tehran. Some five million people poured into the streets to welcome him. At Huyser’s urging, the Iranian military provided Khomeini with protection, escorts, and even a helicopter to travel about the city. It was a strange spectacle, as the shah’s military leadership ordered honor guards and protection for the man they all despised.

On the night of February 9, Iranian television broadcast a rerun of Khomeini’s return, inciting a group of low-ranking technical officers called Homafaran (the equivalent of warrant officers in the U.S. military) to protest openly against the shah at an air base in eastern Tehran that housed the Iranian air force’s headquarters. The Homafaran clashed with a detachment of the shah’s elite “Immortals” unit. The next morning, the Homafaran forced their way into an armory and began distributing weapons to other military defectors and leftist sympathizers. Pitched clashes between the rebels and the Iranian army soon broke out all over the city. Events culminated in a series of dramatic attacks on February 11, a day still celebrated in Iran as a national holiday called Islamic Revolution’s Victory Day. A mob stormed the Supreme Staff headquarters—the Iranian version of the Pentagon—and soldiers mutinied and shot dead the army chief of staff outside his own headquarters
building. By the end of the day, the remnants of the old regime had been swept away and nearly all Iran’s senior military leadership were in jail.
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A week later, back in Stuttgart, Huyser casually spoke to Haig about the latter’s retirement plans. An aide interrupted with an important phone call from Washington. Both Haig and Huyser picked up phones; on the other end of the line were the deputy secretary of defense, Charles Duncan, Brzezinski, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Jones. The men had just left a meeting at the White House in which the decision had been finally made to have European Command plan for military intervention in Iran. While the president had made no decision about executing such an operation, the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg had been placed on alert. Would General Huyser, Jones asked, be willing to return to Tehran and conduct a military takeover?