"The popular impression for the four decades since his presidency is that Jimmy Carter, who died this week, is responsible for somehow "losing" Iran. His passivity, it has often been argued, helped build the militant Islamist state that has stalked the Middle East since Iran's revolution in 1979.
But if that is seen as his most meaningful legacy, the archives of the time tell a different story. No American tried harder to thwart the revolution than Carter. And when that failed, he plotted to subvert the Islamic regime.
The mid-1970s, when Carter took office, was a time of U.S. retrenchment. The twin shocks of Watergate and Vietnam had caused many Americans to lose confidence in their politicians and institutions. The Arab-Israeli War of 1973 was followed by an oil embargo and dramatic spike in petroleum prices; those in turn pushed a new term, stagflation, into our lexicon, meaning simultaneously high inflation and unemployment.
An exhausted America had to step back and rely on proxies and allies to patrol the critical regions of the world. In the Middle East that meant Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran. He was a rare leader in the region who sided with America in the Cold War, embraced Israel and refused to join Arabs in their oil embargoes. He was willing to spend billions on American arms to protect the Persian Gulf. Retrenchment from the Middle East was not costly for Washington so long as the shah stood sentry.
Carter recognized this, and on one of his first trips abroad as president, in December 1977, he journeyed to Tehran. In a much-remembered toast, he celebrated Iran as an "island of stability" because of the shah's leadership. But over the next year, the Iranian revolution unfolded faster than U.S. policymakers could adjust their long-held assumptions about the shah.
It was not unreasonable for them to presume that a cagey ruler who had been in power for 37 years, commanding a formidable military, could handle a few convulsions like student protests among his citizenry. But they also underestimated a religious revival -- fueled partly by anger at corruption and repression in a ruling elite enabled by Western allies. Meanwhile, it was not known in Washington, D.C., that the shah suffered from cancer, which exacerbated his tendency to fade in times of crisis.
Carter himself was preoccupied in 1978 with other priorities: arms control with the Soviet Union, normalization of relations with China and Arab-Israeli peacemaking culminating in the Camp David accords in September. It was not until then that he turned to Iran and found his own administration divided, with State Department doves opposing the National Security Council hawks who wanted the strongest intervention to support the shah.
Carter was made of tougher stuff than his liberal aides and usually sided with his more hawkish deputies. For a president who often blended idealism with pragmatism, preserving the shah's regime was not a difficult call.
It is rare for an American president to tell a sovereign leader to repress his rebellious subjects. But in November 1978, Carter instructed his ambassador, William Sullivan, to inform the shah, "We have confidence in the shah's judgment. . . . We also recognize the need for decisive action and leadership to restore order and his own authority," according to then-National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski's memoir.
It was the shah who rejected this option and wondered "why the president thought a military government could be successful," according to a cable Sullivan sent after their meeting; he also noted that "the situation was vastly different from 1953," when the CIA had helped the shah's military overthrow a nationalist government.
By January 1979, Iran was coming undone. The streets were filled with demonstrators and the economy was crippled by strikes. The shah essentially gave up and left the country, leaving behind a caretaker prime minister to deal with the vengeful revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Carter did not mourn Pahlavi's departure, telling his aides on Feb. 5 that "even to save his own ass, the shah had not been willing to order massive bloodshed," in a recording preserved in the Carter Presidential Library. He now began to contemplate the so-called Option C -- C standing for coup. He dispatched General Robert Huyser to Tehran to ready the Iranian military to take over.
Neither Carter nor Huyser seemed to recognize that the Iranian generals were as hesitant as the monarch they had served and had no stomach for a crackdown. At a time when Huyser was trying to prod them into action, they were busy making their own exile plans.
On Feb. 11, both the monarchy and American hopes crumbled. The revolutionaries were taking over government buildings, arms depots and radio stations across the country. The shah's generals were fleeing and their conscripts defecting. This did not deter Carter and his advisers, who dusted off Option C. They even considered sending Huyser back to Tehran, but the Iranian military declared its neutrality and succumbed to history's verdict.
After the revolution, there was some optimism that America could come to terms with the provisional government, which featured moderate and nationalist voices. But on Nov. 4, 1979, ostensibly to protest the shah's admission to America for medical treatment, militant students seized the U.S. Embassy and held American diplomats hostage for 444 days. There was always more to the hostage crisis than its stated rationale. The embassy seizure was Khomeini's revenge against America and an expression of his personal animus toward Carter for enabling the shah's repression.
The American response came with the failed rescue mission called Operation Eagle Claw. The complex logistical mission was aborted when helicopters crashed in the desert. The lasting image of that operation that was beamed across the world was one of burned-out helicopters and bodies of eight dead American servicemen being inspected by grinning mullahs. Carter was seen as a weak, indecisive leader who could not punish a second-rate power for humiliating America.
Though the rescue mission was a failure, behind the scenes, Carter was hardly a passive player. In December 1979, two months into the hostage crisis, he issued a Presidential Finding ordering the CIA to "conduct propaganda and political and economic action operations to encourage the establishment of a responsible and democratic regime in Iran" and "make contact with Iranian opposition leaders and interested governments to encourage interactions that could lead to a broad, pro-Western front capable of forming an alternative government."
Given his penchant to inject idealism into unsavory measures, Carter hoped to displace the theocracy with a democratic government. As far as it can be determined from the available archival records, Carter is the only president to formally commit the U.S. to regime change in Iran.
To discharge this task, a committee was established in the White House headed by Deputy National Security Adviser David Aaron. The committee gave itself the morbid title of the "Black Chamber," and went about enlisting exiles and trying to contact dissidents in Iran. The precise operational details remain classified, and the committee seems to have been disbanded once President Ronald Reagan's team took over in 1981.
Jimmy Carter did not lose Iran, but he misunderstood it. He seemed to believe that one of the great populist revolutions of the 20th century could be stopped by foreigners. He failed to appreciate that his royalist allies were broken men eager to abandon their inheritance. His coup scheme seems fantastic in retrospect given the timidity of the shah's generals in the face of a determined popular rebellion. And he assumed that a regime born out of a revolution that enjoyed popular legitimacy -- at least at the start -- could be displaced by a committee operating out of the White House.
In this sense, Jimmy Carter was quintessentially American, a president who thought he could determine outcomes in a faraway country that he knew little about.
---
Ray Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of a forthcoming book on Jimmy Carter and Iran." [1]
1. REVIEW --- The Untold Story of Jimmy Carter's Hawkish Stand on Iran --- The late president was criticized as too passive in engaging a new U.S. enemy. But his attempted interventions were forceful -- just misguided. Takeyh, Ray. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 04 Jan 2025: C5.
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