US Foreign Policy and the Iran Hostage Crisis

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1 Jimmy Carter and the tragedy offoreign policy

When an American president has been defeated at the Novemberelection held to determine who will sit in the Oval Office for the next

four years, he usually spends the last days and hours of his presidencypreparing for the handover of power which takes place the followingJanuary. He contemplates, usually with much regret, the change whichhas come over his life, undoubtedly mulling over the unpleasant andsometimes icy task of escorting the winning candidate to his inaugur-ation. He begins to plan what will come next, perhaps thinking aboutthe arrangements for the presidential library which will carry his name.

The end of Jimmy Carters presidency was different. His last twodays were spent cloistered in the Oval Office with his closest advisers,enmeshed until the very last minutes in an issue which had come toobsess him personally and which helped destroy any prospect he mighthave had of achieving re-election in 1980: the release of the Americanhostages who had been held in Tehran for almost 444 days. That issuewas about to become another mans problem. But Jimmy Carter was nota man to leave loose ends. There was unfinished business to do.

The president and his closest advisers worked around the clock,eating their meals in the Oval Office, their only sleep an occasional cat

nap on one of the sofas which now adorn the Jimmy Carter Library inAtlanta. The black and white photographs of these last hours tell thestory more vividly than any words can. The photos reminiscent of thevivid portraits of Lyndon Johnson during the last days of his struggleover Vietnam show a haggard, sleep-deprived president, surroundedby similarly exhausted advisers doing what they can to reach a dealbefore time runs out. The photographs, and the ABC News film shot onthe day Carter left the presidency, paint a compelling and tragic pic-ture. Even in the car on the way to the inauguration ceremony that

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would see Ronald Reagan become Americas 40th president, Carterwas still receiving last minute reports from his adviser Hamilton Jordanon the hostage situation.

The pressure on Carter to act decisively, to do something whichwould bring the crisis to its resolution and bring the hostages home,

had been immense. From the very beginning, the hostage crisis hadexerted a striking effect on ordinary Americans, who gradually becameas obsessed as Carter with the fate of their countrymen.1 On ABCtelevision, Ted Koppel began hosting a nightly programme whichlater becameNightline endlessly detailing the latest developments inthe crisis, while on CBS Walter Cronkite, a man implicitly trusted bymost Americans, kept up the continual pressure on Carter by signingoff his newscast each night with the number of days the hostages hadbeen held in captivity. Americans bought yellow ribbons and Iranian

flags in record numbers (the ribbons for tying to oak trees, the flags forpublic burning). Stunned by the hatred they saw broadcast daily fromIran on the nightly news but found well-nigh incomprehensible,Americans had responded with a nationalism, and often a jingoism, oftheir own. Archival television footage captures the vivid colours of thetimes: the yellow of the ribbons, the red, white and blue of Old Gloryand effigies of Uncle Sam, the green and rusty brown of Irans standard,and, perhaps most of all, the symbol-laden red and orange of fire.

By the spring of 1980 Carter had tried every peaceful means he couldthink of to obtain the release of the hostages. He had stopped importingIranian oil, broken off diplomatic relations, asked the United Nations tointercede, sent a variety of third parties and intermediaries to Tehran,brainstormed Americas Iranian experts in the universities, and morebesides. Nothing he tried had produced the desired result. Five monthsinto the crisis he had then, on 24 April 1980, resorted to a military rescuemission, an option initially considered so difficult to implement that ithad been more or less rejected by military planners early on.

The mission was the greatest disaster of Carters presidency. Eightservicemen died in the rescue attempt, all as a result of a collisionbetween aircraft which occurred following the cancellation of the oper-ation midway through. To make matters worse, the remaining mem-bers of the rescue force chose or were compelled to leave behind thebodies of their colleagues together with sensitive government docu-ments in the Iranian desert. Both the bodies and the documents were

1 Gary Sick,October Surprise: Americas Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan(New York: Times Books/Random House, 1991), pp. 1718.

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Woolsey also voiced their support in the days after the failed raid.4

In the longer term, however, the effects were deeply negative. By themiddle of Summer 1980, the proportion of Americans saying that theyapproved of Carters overall performance had fallen to a low of 21 percent.5 For many in the American and international media, the failed

mission was emblematic of the Carter administration as a whole, pro-viding yet further evidence of the foreign policy incompetence withwhich they had long charged James Earl Carter as a president.6 Thecampaign of Ronald Reagan consciously fed upon the atmosphere ofdisillusionment, frustration and national impotence which the failedrescue mission had helped to instil. While foreign policy was certainlynot the only or decisive factor which led to Carters defeat in thepresidential election of 1980 the state of the economy, as is so often thecase at national US elections, had a decisive effect upon the incumbents

fortunes seemingly insoluble foreign and economic policy difficultiesmeshed together to create the inevitable appearance of a well-inten-tioned but ultimately failed presidency.

This book is about the crisis which brought Jimmy Carter to thispoint. It is about a tragedy in American and Iranian foreign policywhich continues to affect relations between the two nations today,memories of which continue to engender distrust and dislike. Beforeembarking upon the narrative which follows, however, some dis-claimers are in order. This book is not intended as a full history ofUSIranian relations. This task has already been undertaken with con-summate skill by others. Nor is it even intended as a full history of theIranian hostage crisis, or an attempt to document the twists and turnswhich beset the process of negotiating the release of the hostages(interesting though these may be to students of diplomacy or bargain-ing technique).7 Some phases in the hostage crisis are deliberately given

4 See US Patience Not Endless, Kissinger Says of Effort, Los Angeles Times, 26 April 1980;R. James Woolsey, Sometimes The Long Shots Pay Off, Washington Post, 28 April 1980.

5 The polling data are taken from James Q. Wilson, American Government: Institutions andPolicies, 5th edn (Lexington, Massachusetts: DC Heath, 1992), p. 557 and Charles Kegleyand Eugene Wittkopf, American Foreign Policy: Pattern and Process (New York: St.Martins Press, 1996), p. 280.

6 See, for instance,Newsweek, 5 May 1980;Time, 5 May 1980; Richard Barnet, The Failureof a Raid and of a Policy,Los Angeles Times, 29 April 1980;The Economist, ShrunkenAmerica, 3 May 1980.

7 See for instance, James Bill, The Eagle and the Lion: The Tragedy of AmericanIranianRelations (London: Yale University Press, 1988), which is probably the best introductionto the subject in print. For a detailed analysis of the negotiations, see Russell Moses,Freeing the Hostages: Re-Examining the USIranian Negotiations and Soviet Policy, 19791981(Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985).


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more attention than others in this book, and the bulk of the narrativefocuses by necessity on the American side rather than the Iranian one,not least because we know so much more about the former than we dothe latter. Rather than attempting to be any of these things, this bookrepresents an effort to understand the positions taken by the major

actors in the conflict over the hostages. It seeks to explain, in broadbrush strokes, why they came to the decisions they did at key momentsof decision.

The puzzles to be explained

Any thoughtful reader of historical accounts of the Iran hostage crisis isconfronted by numerous puzzles which seem to demand ones atten-tion. Not least of these from a Western commentators perspective at

least is why the crisis occurred at all. On 4 November 1979 severalhundred Iranian students managed to storm the American embassy inTehran and take the embassy staff hostage, thus precipitating one of thelongest and most diplomatically damaging crises in both American andIranian history. And yet our understanding of why the students actedas they did is still incomplete. Many of Carters former advisers to thisday dismiss the action as a politically inspired if ingenious ruse con-structed by the Ayatollah Khomeini to drum up support for his own

faction in the power struggle which accompanied the Iranian revol-ution of 1979. Others notably Carter himself suggest that it wassimply an act of madness, so irrational that it cannot be explained interms reasonable people might comprehend. Neither of these explana-tions seems to accord with the facts now available, however. This studyis motivated in part by the conviction that there has to be some morehuman reason why the students seized the embassy building in thefirst place. In the United States particularly, it has been difficult for eventhe most sober commentators not to get swept up in the emotions which

the hostage crisis inevitably evoked. Rather than seeking to condemn orcondone the students actions, however, this book simply attempts toexplain why these actions occurred.

The puzzles multiply on the American side of the equation. Initially,the Carter administration tried to resolve the crisis by peaceful means.Spearheaded by Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, the United States triednumerous attempts to open up negotiation channels with the Khomeiniregime in Tehran. This track was abandoned in April 1980 when Presi-dent Carter tried to free the hostages using military force. Why, though,

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did Carter and Vance two individuals strikingly similar in world-view and overall philosophy come by the early part of that year tosuch different conclusions about the prospects for a negotiated sol-ution, the latter to the point where he felt he could no longer in goodconscience serve the former?

Vance had always opposed the rescue bid, and he resigned soon afterits failure, having already tendered his resignation in private before themission was launched.8 Whereas Carter felt that the mission should goahead because our people would be far safer in the hands of theAmerican rescue team, Vance was convinced that negotiations had tobe given more time, that even a successful mission would backfire onthe United States, and that it probably would not succeed in any case.Why, though, was Vance so persuaded that this was likely to be so, andon what basis did he continue to predict that the hostages would

eventually be released unharmed in the absence of military action, evenafter practically everyone else in the government ardent doves in-cluded had concluded that enough was enough? Clearly, simplebelief system approaches will not suffice to account for such variability,so some explanation is needed as to why the secretary of state disagreedso strongly with the Presidents other advisers and with Carter himself.

A third puzzle addressed here concerns the Iran rescue mission itselfand the reasons why a president like Jimmy Carter would undertakesuch an operation. The greatest puzzle of all in the Iran hostage crisis,and arguably the hardest to understand, is why a president asmoralis-tic, idealistic and committed to non-military means of conflict resolu-tion as this one would launch an operation which he had been warnedwould almost certainly result in at least some loss of life. As numerouscommentators on his administration have pointed out, Jimmy Carteradvocated an intensely moralistic vision of foreign policy in whichhuman rights were to be given overall priority, and government was toengage in a humane mission or crusade to convert the rest of the world

to American ideals. William Morris, for instance, has argued that Carteris propelled by powerful moral passions, which he traces to his evan-gelical Christian faith, Southern populism and the influence of the1960s civil rights movement.9 Erwin Hargrove similarly notes that forCarter religious faith was central to his life. Faith shaped his under-standing of himself and others, his belief about the political purposes of

8 He was the first holder of that office to resign on a matter of principle since WilliamJennings Bryan in 1915, and the only one in the years since.

9 Morris,Jimmy Carter, pp. 78.


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government and his style of authority . . . he saw politics as a moralactivity.10 Stephen Skowronek also sees a strong moral strain in Carter,arguing that he set himself leadership standards so high that they werewell-nigh impossible to meet,11 Charles Jones notes that Carter is amoralizer . . . motivated to do what is right12 and Gary Sick says that

Carter was the personification of small-town middle-Americanvalues, with religious beliefs that were so deep as to be instinctive.13

In the Iranian case, this general concern with morality and rightstranslated into a particular concern for the lives of the hostages, and ledto a determination to give the matter absolute priority. As Carterhimself points out in his memoirs, the safety and well-being of theAmerican hostages became a constant concern for me, no matter whatother duties I was performing as President . . . I was restrained from apreemptive military strike by the realization that the Iranian fanatics

would almost certainly kill the hostages in response.14 And yet, aspresident, Carter embarked upon a course of action which since evensuccessful rescue operations invariably lead to some loss of human life seemed irretrievably bound to violate his own canonistic ideals.According to one estimate provided in a memorandum sent to CIADirector Stansfield Turner on 16 March 1980 a little over a monthbefore the mission was launched no less than 60 per cent of thehostages were likely to lose their lives if the raid went ahead: 20 per centduring the initial assault on the embassy, 25 per cent during the locationand identification of the hostages and 15 per cent during their evacu-ation to the waiting American C-130 aircraft. It is presumed to beequally as likely that the Amembassy (sic) rescue attempt would be acomplete success (100% of the Amembassy hostages rescued), as itwould be a complete failure (0% of the Amembassy hostages rescued),the report concluded.15

Of course, such estimates can only be conjecture, since the operation

10 Erwin Hargrove,Jimmy Carter as President: Leadership and the Politics of the Public Good

(Baton Rouge, Lousiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), p. 8.11 Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill

Clinton(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 1997).12 Charles Jones, The Trusteeship Presidency: Jimmy Carter and the United States Congress

(Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), p. 217.13 Gary Sick, All Fall Down: Americas Tragic Encounter With Iran (New York: Random

House, 1985), p. 257. See also David Kucharsky, The Man From Plains(London: Collins,1977).

14 Jimmy Carter, Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President(Fayetteville, Arkansas: Universityof Arkansas Press, 1995), p. 468.

15 Cited in Pierre Salinger, America Held Hostage: The Secret Negotiations (Garden City,New York: Doubleday, 1981), pp. 2378.

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never actually reached the stages alluded to. Moreover, the significanceof the above report has subsequently been discounted by StansfieldTurner as playing no meaningful role in the decision-making. Therewas such a report, Turner admits, but he argues that its message andsignificance have been greatly exaggerated. The report began, he said,

with a description of a social scientific theory which purported topredict the likelihood of events occurring. Written by someone lowerdown in the echelons of the CIA, I received this report which said thatthere was about a 35% probability of success, but it also concluded thatthis is not something on which you should make a decision.16

It is unclear whether the president himself ever saw this report.Nevertheless, what is clear is that Carter knew that there would almostcertainly be at leastsomecasualties if the mission went ahead. Accord-ing to Benjamin Schemmer, Carter was explicitly told that there could

be casualties on both sides if something went awry in a meeting withmilitary briefers on 16 April 1980, a week before the mission wentahead.17James Vaught, one of the missions commanders, estimated atthe meeting that six or seven members of Delta and two or threehostages would likely be killed in the operation.18 As Carters presssecretary Jody Powell puts it, no one doubted that there would beAmerican casualties, even in a successful operation. One Israeli soldierand three hostages had been killed at Entebbe, and the problems thatfaced our planners, and would face the strike force, were many timesmore difficult than anything the Israelis had confronted.19 And mostcritically, according to Admiral James Holloway author of an officialbut limited post-mortem which examined the military conduct of theoperation the Joint Chiefs had estimated that the mission had a 6070per cent chance of success, but as Paul Ryan notes, this estimate meantalso that it had a 30 to 40 percent chance of failure. These were not goododds when the lives of fifty-three American hostages were hanging inthe balance.20 Chairman of the Joint Chiefs David Jones and his col-

leagues were telling Carter, in other words, that the chance of failurewas one in three.

16 Stansfield Turner, interview with the author, McLean, Virginia, 28 October 1994.17 See Benjamin Schemmer, Presidential Courage And the April 1980 Iranian Rescue

Mission,Armed Forces Journal International, May 1981, p. 61.18 Quoted in David Martin and John Walcott,Best Laid Plans: The Inside Story of Americas

War Against Terrorism (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), p. 4.19 Jody Powell,The Other Side of the Story(New York: William Morrow, 1984), p. 226.20 Paul Ryan,The Iran Hostage Rescue Mission: Why it Failed(Annapolis, Maryland: Naval

Institute Press, 1985), p. 125. See also Special Operations Review Group, RescueMission Report, August 1980, Jimmy Carter Library.


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As well as the danger to the hostages and to American agents on theground, Holloway argued, there would have been significant casualtiesand loss of life among their Iranian captors had the mission gone ahead.As Ryan puts it, once the American servicemen were inside the em-bassy it was certain that the Iranian guards would have been met by a

stream of bullets, and in the words of Chargin Charlie Beckwith another commander of the operation the Iranians would simply havebeen blown away.21 When asked by Deputy Secretary of State WarrenChristopher at the 16 April briefing what would happen to the Iraniancaptors, Beckwith reportedly replied were going to shoot each of themtwice, right between the eyes.22 We know that any resistance encoun-tered outside the embassy for instance, from an Iranian mob wouldalso have been quelled using military force. In the words of MajorLogan Fitch, who would have led the assault on the embassy had it

gone ahead as planned, we were going to kill a lot of people.23Although Carter states in his memoirs that the rescuers were under

strict orders to avoid bloodshed whenever possible and claimed in amessage to Congress that the rescue operation was a humanitarianmission,24 it is virtually inconceivable that this particular president immersed as ever in the details was unaware of the uncomfortablefacts stated above.25 As Martin and Walcott note, no one who listenedto Charlie Beckwith could mistake the fact that the President wassending men to their deaths.26 For Carter to give the go-ahead for anysort of military operation was deeply uncharacteristic. During hiswhole four years in office, this was in fact the only such operation forwhich the president gave his approval. How, then, did Carter and hisadvisers (bar Secretary Vance) convince themselves that the consider-able risks inherent in the mission were manageable ones?

Like the conflict with Vance, the fact that Carter went ahead withthe rescue mission presents a genuine puzzle for those who wouldargue that beliefs or ideas are what motivate human behaviour. There

is a long tradition in the study of foreign policy decision-making(FPDM) which views belief systems as the central determinants of

21 Ryan,Iran Hostage, pp. 125, 102. According to Ryan, Beckwith had a sign on his deskwhich read Kill Em All. Let God Sort Em Out.

22 Martin and Walcott,Best Laid Plans, p. 4. 23 Ibid.24 See President Carters 26 April communication to the House and Senate, reproduced in

Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 96th Congress Second Session 1980, volume XXXVI(Washington DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1981).

25 Carter,Keeping Faith, p. 520. Indeed, the phrase whenever possible indicates a recog-nition that it would not always be possible to avoid bloodshed, and that casualties wereperhaps inevitable. 26 Martin and Walcott,Best Laid Plans, p. 5.

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decisions.27 It has never been satisfactorily explained, however, whysomeone so obviously wedded to idealism as a public philosophyshould have been so seemingly seduced by the notion of a rescueoperation which, even if successful, would have inevitably led to theloss of life. At the time there was no indication that any of the hostages

had been killed or tortured or that immediate harm was about to cometo them. As Rose McDermott notes, Carters action was not onlycompletely contrary to his humanitarian emphasis in world politics butwas a highly risky prospect from a military standpoint as well.28

Our fourth and final puzzle is actually a set of puzzles, which can begrouped together under the general heading of why the mission wasimplemented in the way it was and not in any other way. This was tobecome an important question during the post-mortems on the rescuemission, many of which were critical of the manner in which the rescue

planners had proceeded. Why, in particular, were so few in fact, onlyeight helicopters used in the operation? Why was there such an effortinitially to employ an even smaller number? In accounts of JimmyCarters management style, one tendency has been widely and repeat-edly attributed to his presidency that of micromanagement. Carterhad a well-known habit of immersing himself in details, a trait whichhas been traced to his technical frame of mind. And yet, when the Iranhostage operation was mounted, the president essentially left the keyoperational details to the on-site commanders, James Vaught, JamesKyle and Charles Beckwith.29

This presented a notable contrast with the practice of previous execu-tive level officials. As defence secretary under Gerald Ford during theevacuation of American personnel from Lebanon in 1976, Donald Rum-sfeld was apparently in constant telephone contact with and givingdirect orders to the military rescuers. According to Edward Luttwak,during the Mayaguez rescue operation of 1975 President Ford spokedirectly with Navy pilots actually over the target, to make tactical

27 For some classic discussions representative of this approach, see for instance OleHolsti, The Belief System and National Images: A Case Study, Journal of ConflictResolution, 6: 24452, 1962; Alexander George, The Operational Code: A NeglectedApproach to the Study of Political Leaders and Decision-Making, International StudiesQuarterly, 23: 190222, 1969; Alexander George, The Causal Nexus between CognitiveBeliefs and Decision-Making Behavior: The Operational Code Belief System, inLawrence Falkowski (ed.), Psychological Models and International Politics (Epping:Bowker, 1979).

28 Rose McDermott, Prospect Theory in International Relations: The Iranian HostageRescue Mission,Political Psychology, 13: 23763, 1992, p. 237. In the existing literature,only McDermott has attempted to resolve this conundrum.

29 Schemmer, Presidential Courage, p. 61.


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US Foreign Policy and the Iran Hostage Crisis