Jimmy Carter, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Iran Hostage Crisis

With the passing of former United States president Jimmy Carter, I thought that it was pertinent to look at a key part of Carter's legacy, the Iran hostage crisis.

  

On November 4, 1979, a group of armed Iranian university students seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and captured 66 American citizens.  A total of 52 United States diplomats and other U.S. citizens were held hostage 444 days and were finally released them on January 20, 1981, the day that President Ronald Reagan took office.  The crisis was precipitated by the departure of the U.S. puppet dictator Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi who had been placed into his leadership position after the CIA overthrew the democratically elected Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh in August 1953 as punishment for his nationalization of Iran's oil industry.  As a "gift" to the people of Iran, in 1957, intelligence officers from the United States and Israel assisted the Shah of Iran with the establishment of Sazeman-i Ettelaat va Amniyat-i Keshvar (the National Organization for Intelligence and Security) better known in the West as SAVAK or the Shah's Secret Police.  SAVAK's purpose was to provide intelligence for the Shah, providing him with information on his opponents and any opposition movements within Iran.  SAVAK had the power to investigate, arrest and indefinitely detain Iranians deemed guilty of opposition to the Shah's rule.  SAVAK also payed the role of hearing examiner, remanding prisoners to trial with many trials being held in secret and without the use of witnesses and defense lawyers.   According to 1979 testimony from Hassan Sana, a 23-year veteran of SAVAK, the Israelis wrote SAVAK's operational manuals and the CIA trained SAVAK agents in the use of both physical and psychological torture techniques including the use of electrodes and heated needles.  At its peak, SAVAK is believed to have had as many as 60,000 agents serving in its ranks.  Following the Revolution of 1979, many former members of SAVAK were executed by Iran's new leadership.   

 

What is little discussed about the hostage-taking is that the Iranian students in the U.S. embassy found thousands of pages of shredded and unshredded documents belonging to the CIA and the State Department.  Some Iranians had long believed that the U.S. Embassy was being used as an intelligence base by the CIA.  Staff at the U.S. Embassy had been busy shredding these documents in an attempt to prevent them from falling into the "wrong hands" as the nation fell into chaos during the early days of Ayatollah Khomeini, however, the thin strips of paper that the students found were reassembled into useable documents by Iranian carpet weavers as shown here:

 

 

These documents were then released to the public in 1982; the 54 volumes were published under the title "Documents from the U.S.Espionage Den".   By 1995, the number of volumes had risen to 77.  This inadvertent "security leak" is widely viewed as one of the most damaging intelligence breaches in history and predates the much discussed WikiLeaks Department of State and Edward Snowden breaches by decades.

 

Here is one of the more interesting documents that shows the lengths that Embassy staff went to to provide cover for the CIA officers living in their midst:

 

 

Here is the text:

 

"1. S - ENTIRE TEXT

  

2. I concur in assignments Malcolm Kalp and William Daugherty as described Reftels.

  

3. With opportunity available to us in the sense that we are starting from a clean slate in SRF coverage at this mission, but with regard also for the great sensitivity locally to any hint of CIA activity, it is of the highest importance that cover be the best we can come up with. Hence there is no question as to the need for second and third secretary titles for these two officers. We must have it.

 

4. I believe cover arrangements in terms of assignments within embassy are appropriate to present overall staffing pattern. We should however hold to the present total of four SRF officer assignments for the foreseeable future, keeping supporting staff as sparse as possible as well, until we see how things go here.

 

5. We are making effort to limit knowledge within emb of all SRF assignments; that effort applies particularly to Daugherty, pursuant to new program of which he is a product and about which I have been informed.

  

6. I suppose I need not mind the Department that the old and apparently insoluble problem of R designation for SRF officers will inevitably complicate and to some degree weaken our cover efforts locally, no matter how much we work at it. 

  

LAINGEN BT
#8933
NNNN
SECRET
TEHRAN 8933"

  

Embassy Charge d'Affairs Bruce Laingen was concerned about cover arrangements fro CIA officers Kalp and Daughterty.  The "R" designation is the Foreign Service Reserve status that flagged CIA officers that were operating under the cover of the State Department.  

  

Here is a document that provided the cover details for Thomas Ahern, the CIA's station chief in Tehran:

 

 


Here is the text:

 

"S E C R E T

  

Page 1

 

Cover Considerations

 

According to personal data in your passport, you are single, were born in Antwerp, Belgium 08Jul34, have blue eyes, have no distinguishing characteristics, and are approximately 1.88 meters tall. Your cover occupation is that of a commercial business representative.

 

It is not uncommon to find a Belgian whose native language is Flemish living in a nominally French-speaking section of Belgium, such as Jette. You can say that you were born in Antwerp, began work with a company with a regional office in Antwerp, then was transferred to the main offices in Brussels. Despite the fact it is only about 90 minutes driving time between Brussels and Antwerp, you decided to live in one of the suburbs of Brussels, Jette. This would explain the issuance locale of your documentation. Working from your Brussels base, you have travelled in Europe on business in the past (as reflected in your passport) and are now assigned to the Middle East section of your company. Your non-backstopped address in Jette is 174 Avenue de Jette, Jette, Belgium.

 

S E C R E T"

 

Here is a document from the U.S. Ambassador in Tehran, Laingen, to the Secretary of State seeking conditional entry or refugee status and visa clearances for former members of the Shah's regime, including members of SAVAK, the nation's dreaded secret police, formed under the guidance of the United States and Israel in 1957.  Note that the embassy files for this subject had already been destroyed or moved to Washington:

Incidentally, after the Iranian Revolution, SAVAK was dissolved by Ayatollah Khomeini and 61 SAVAK officials were executed between 1979 and 1981.  While the exact number of SAVAK's victims is unknown, the organization is estimated to have tortured and murdered thousands of the Shah's opponents.

 

In general, I admired President Carter, particularly his post-presidency acts of charity, and realize that the blame for the 1979 hostage crisis cannot be laid solely at his feet, however, thanks to his interactions with the Shah of Iran, he did represent Washington's meddling in Iran's internal affairs that was done solely to benefit the United States and not the people of Iran.  Thanks to the release of these documents, we now have a good sense of why Iran's leadership and many of its citizens do not trust the West given their lengthy history of unwanted interference in Iran.