Blurred View from the Embassy

By James Kelly

Captured papers reveal a confused U.S. policy about the Shah

Tehran, Iran Nov. 1,1979

Dear Penne,

Well, this has been another one of these special sort of days in Iran . . . a day that had us worried but turned out not so bad after all. . .

So begins a letter, poignant in retrospect, written by Charge d'Affaires L. Bruce Laingen of the U.S. embassy in Tehran to his wife in Bethesda, Md. The deposed Shah of Iran had been admitted to the U.S. for medical treatment less than two weeks earlier, and Laingen was describing an anti-American demonstration outside the embassy. Laingen left the letter on his office desk. Three days later--on Nov. 4, 1979--the embassy was overrun by Iranian militants and America's 444-day hostage ordeal began.

The Laingen letter is among hundreds of classified embassy cables, Government documents and personal papers seized by the militants and published in a set of 13 paperback books in Iran last spring. Though the volumes have been sold in Tehran for months, for about $8 a set, the contents became widely known only as the books began to be distributed in Europe in recent weeks. Many documents were found intact by the embassy attackers but others had been shredded by frantic U.S. personnel. These have been painstakingly pasted back together by the militants. The papers were of different colors--blue, pink, yellow and white-which helped the reassembly process. Even so, the militants might have needed 40 hours to paste together a page. Said one Iranian official last week: "We succeeded because God is with us."

The paperbacks, which include commentaries in Farsi, would appear to represent an extraordinary collection of secret diplomatic and intelligence reports covering U.S. policy toward Iran from 1966 to '79. Though not every one of the 1,000 published pages has been judged authentic, U.S. diplomatic experts privately admit that the papers appear to be genuine.

The documents were carefully selected by the Iranians to support their charges of U.S. subversion. Yet what emerges from the papers that came from the "nest of spies," as the Iranian annotations put it, is a contradictory and confused attempt by U.S. diplomats to comprehend the Shah's regime, the rebellion and the post-revolution government of Ayatullah Khomeini. Some analyses were chillingly prescient, others dangerously naive.

Throughout the early 1970s, as Iran's importance as a U.S. ally grew, Washington remained generally confident about its ties with Tehran. "Iran-U.S. relations with the Shah are excellent," wrote U.S. Ambassador Richard Helms in 1974. But Helms also advised that embassy officials take "great care" in talking to dissidents lest the Shah be offended. U.S. intelligence thus remained fragmentary, crippling U.S. efforts to under stand the growing opposition that would eventually topple the Peacock Throne.

By the mid-'70s there were mixed reports on the Shah. He was characterized as weak and isolated, his advisers as venal and immoral. Claimed one 1976 CIA report: "In the Shah's family are an assortment of licentious and financially corrupt relatives, notably his twin sister Ashraf, a lady possessed of a greedy nature and nymphomaniac tendencies."

By mid-1978, as religious riots began to erupt across Iran, Washington still believed the Shah to be in firm control, but the embassy's political officers were decidedly more pessimistic. Concluded a report that June: "The U.S. is supporting the Shah, hence religious ideologues attack the U.S. There are situations in which the U.S. could turn very swiftly into a scapegoat for Persian problems."

Through the fall of 1978 the cables sent to Washington by U.S. Ambassador William Sullivan remained optimistic. He wrote on Oct. 19: "The Khomeni star seems to be waning." But by late December, Sullivan was admitting that the "situation is fast approaching anarchy." On Jan. 16, 1979, the Shah left the country, and two weeks later Ayatullah Khomeini was in Iran.

In the months before the embassy takeover, the documents indicate, U.S. officials in Tehran made a good-faith effort to mend relations. Yet there were attempts at old-fashioned spying. The papers purport to show that the CIA attempted to recruit Abolhassan Banisadr, then an adviser to Khomeini and later President of Iran, to be an informer in the summer of 1979. A CIA agent posing as an American businessman approached Banisadr in Tehran and offered to hire him as a business consultant for $5,000 a month, but the attempt failed.

These documents involving Banisadr were used against him in the summer of 1981 when, as President, he was waging a power struggle with the clerics around Khomeini. Banisadr finally fled the country last July, and now lives outside Paris. He blasts the Iranian militants for accusing him of working for Washington. "American foreign policy is filthy," he says, "but the Khomeini regime is filthier. It distorted documents in translation to convince the Iranian people that I had ties with the U.S. Government."

Meanwhile, the Shah wanted to come to the U.S., but embassy officials in Tehran were wary. "For us now to give refuge to the Shah would almost certainly trigger massive demonstrations against our embassy," Laingen cabled to Washington in July. "With luck, they may stop at that, without a physical assault. But there could be no assurance of that..."

When the Shah was finally admitted to the U.S. for medical treatment, Laingen initially reported only a "minimal" response in Iran, but he soon knew better.

"A negative reaction has been gradually building," he cabled on Oct. 28. Three days later, the last message from Laingen recounted a conversation with a leading Iranian diplomat. Reported Laingen: "He made an emotional and unofficial plea to explain why Shah must leave U.S outside pressures on the Foreign Ministry were too strong . . . otherwise there will be a crisis." Four days later, the crisis began.

One intriguing document did not touch upon U.S. -Iran relations at all. Titled Israel: Foreign Intelligence and Security Services, the 47-page CIA study, issued in March 1979, offered tidbits about Israeli efforts to blackmail and wiretap U.S. Government employees. For example, Shin Beth, the Israeli counterespionage branch allegedly rigged a fake abortion case against a clerk at the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem in an unsuccessful effort to recruit him, apparently in the early '50s. There are accounts of efforts to bribe Marine guards, and in 1954 a hidden microphone planted by the Israelis was discovered in the U.S. Ambassador's offices in Tel Aviv.

Though Israeli officials neither confirm nor deny the charges, they point out that the incidents supposedly took place in the '50s, and claim that they would never occur today. They contend, moreover, that much of the report is "disinformation" engineered by the Soviet Union.

After the embassy was first seized briefly by the militants in February 1979, Ambassador Sullivan ordered many sensitive papers shipped back to Washington. But in the following months, as relations between the U.S. and Iran seemed to improve, most of the documents were returned to Tehran. Washington has at least learned some lessons from the massive loss of documents. "We obviously failed to destroy material that should have been," admits Laingen. The State Department is now testing more efficient means of destruction, experimenting with storing sensitive information in computer banks, and transferring data electronically, thus reducing the need for keeping so many documents at U.S. embassies.

The files from the embassy in Tehran may haunt Washington for years. One high-ranking Iranian official, TIME has learned, claims that the published papers are "only the tip of the iceberg." He says the militants recently discovered an extensive microfilm library of U.S. documents in the embassy. "We had no inkling we were sitting on such a gold mine," said the official. "We shall release these documents at sensitive times, in the best interests of the revolution." The story of how the U.S. failed to grasp what was happening in Iran seems to be far from over.

With reporting by David S. Jackson, Raji Samghabadi

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