Before and After the Shah
ANDERSON, RAYMOND H.
Before and After the Shah Mission to Iran By William H. Sullivan Norton. 269 pp. $14.95. America Held Hostage: The Secret Negotiations By Pierre Salinger Doubleday. 349 pp. $16.95. Reviewed...
...Despairing over what he saw as the Administration's wishful thinking, Sullivan sent a sharp message to his superiors...
...But the tragic collision of a C-130 and a helicopter in the hurried withdrawal before dawn killed eight crewmen and destroyed the charade-as well as Jimmy Carter's Presidency...
...Advice from the scene was rejected or ignored...
...The fiery Iranian nationalist was soon under arrest and the Shah was back on the throne, appropriately grateful...
...Numerous individuals took bows to the applause at the outcome, yet there is a feeling that the hostages would have been freed even without all the elaborate financial deals to unfreeze Iranian assets...
...The Shah, having flown to Egypt, waited there for some time, for another invitation to return to Teheran...
...Especially thought-provoking and shocking is his report on a CIA estimate that Operation Eagle Claw, the ill-fated mission ostensibly aimed at rescuing the hostages, would have led to the deaths of 60 per cent of the52 Americans being held...
...Breaking through the surface at intervals is a profound contempt for National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezin-ski...
...when he should have offered conciliation, he lashed out brutally...
...The toast was a pivotal point, inflaming the Shah's foes and turning them against the U.S...
...Sullivan, a career Foreign Service officer who is too tactful to say so directly, nevertheless makes his feelings clear: If one person can be held liable for the agony of the 52 American hostages, that person is Brzezinski...
...The United States, Sullivan declares, built its plans for a Western bulwark in the Middle East on a weakling...
...In the brilliant CIA countercoup almost three decades ago, General Norman Schwarzkopf, an American who had trained and commanded the Shah's security police, arrived in Teheran at a critical moment with money and plans to embolden the Shah, who had fled abroad, for a move against Mossadegh...
...He recalls his astonishment at hearing the notorious 1977 New Year's Eve toast by Carter, effusively praising the Shah as a beloved ruler...
...Sullivan suggests that Brzezinski himself seemed to be guided more by a yearning to upstage the successes of another strategic thinker- his rival and predecessor, Henry Kissinger...
...It should also be studied very carefully by those enigmatic intellects known as "national security advisers...
...Its purpose was simply to enable President Carter to make a dramatic announcement that there had at least been an attempt to save the hostages...
...Pierre Salinger's America Held Hostage takes up the tale where Mission to Iran leaves off...
...The response was "a most unpleasant and abrasive cable" from the White House that cast aspersions on his loyalty...
...Contrary to the Monarch's image as a strong and confident leader taking his country firmly but with noble intentions into the future, Sullivan found that Pahlevi was actually vacillating and easily flustered...
...visiting lecturer, University of Wisconsin School of Journalism These two important books give troubling insights into the causes and effects of America's recent humiliation at the hands of Iran's Islamic revolutionaries...
...diplomat in the Middle East and other dangerous areas...
...Mission to Iran also lifts the veil from one aspect of the Shah long mis-perceived by Iranians and others...
...Sullivan decided to retire f rom the Foreign Service once his duties in Iran were completed...
...Salinger provides a valuable epilogue to the hostage drama and a useful chronology...
...Differently, no doubt...
...To baffling problems Brzezinski brought simplistic textbook solutions and a readiness to indulge in violence to keep the Shah's grip around the Iranian people's neck...
...The work is exhaustive and sometimes exhausting as it follows the often farcical talks up to their culmination in Algiers and the release of the hostages in the first minutes of the Reagan Administration...
...William Sullivan's account of his 1977-79 tour of duty as the last U.S...
...The step was made easier by a subsequent invitation to become president of the American Assembly, a policy-study organization affiliated with Columbia University...
...Sullivan provides a terse, hard-hitting narrative of mindless policies, ambivalence and arrogance in Washington when clear thinking was needed...
...Salinger, ABC's bureau chief in Paris, had the journalistic good fortune to be approached there by representatives of the Iranians-Christian Bourguet, a French lawyer, and Hector Villalon, an Argentine expatriate and entrepreneur-seeking to make contact with the U.S...
...Ambassador to Iran reveals a puzzled and angry man-puzzled that President Carter chose him for such an inappropriate assignment (he is an authority on the Far East, not the Middle East), and angry because of the inept, confused guidance (or lack thereof), he received from the White House while the regime of Mohammed Riza Shah Pahlevi was sliding toward the precipice...
...In Washington's 1978 attempt to restore the Shah's pre-eminence, General Robert Huyser, deputy to then nato Supreme Commander General Alexander M. Haig Jr., was ordered to Iran to bolster the military against the Islamic revolutionaries...
...During the final weeks of his rule, the Shah sadly concluded that Washington had nogrand design for Iran, that it was acting by some "inexplicable whim...
...This adds strength to the suspicion of a number of specialists, including a former commander of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lieutenant General Daniel Graham, that Carter and Brzezinski never intended the rescue forces to go into Teheran...
...as well...
...Since Salinger first gained prominence as John F. Kennedy's press secretary, a reader cannot help wondering how Kennedy would have handled the detention of Americans by a hostile government for more than a year and three months...
...The Iranians could tweak Carter's nose, but they were worried about how Reagan would react to their intransigence...
...Iran's King of Kings, Light of the Aryans, thus decided the time had come to seek a haven abroad...
...Meanwhile, the White House evidently hoped to re-enact the tactics that in 1953 had led to the ouster of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and the restoration of the Shah to the Peacock Throne...
...When he should have acted forcefully, he hesitated...
...Growing out of Salinger's acclaimed three-hour ABC special of the same title, the book is the product of a broad and diligent effort by many people in many places to put together a chronicle of the painful and prolonged negotiations to win freedom for the 52 Americans...
...Mission to Iran in particular should be required reading for every U.S...
...For this was deemed sufficient to revive his flagging popularity in the eyes of the American people, who were exasperated by long inaction...
...Reviewed by Raymond H. Anderson Former foreign correspondent, New York "Times...
...According to the skeptics' scenario, the mission was to be canceled while still in the desert southeast of Teheran even without any helicopter malfunctions...
...The Ambassador returns repeatedly to the National Security Adviser's antics, citing instance after instance of the "erratic ambitions" apparent in his capricious decisions and disruptive interventions...
...Both authors agree that Carter's overriding concern during the hostage crisis was its potentially devastating effect on the 1980 elections...
Vol. 64 • December 1981 • No. 23
