recruited agents (who do the actual spying), discovery by Iranian authorities while meeting clandestinely with a CIA officer was a death sentence.11 The ACOS maintained that our Iranian assets deserved to be handled by experienced officers with proven track records. Further, any operational compromise whatsoever would unquestionably carry severe repercussions for U.S.-Iranian relations, which the Carter administration was striving mightily to preserve and improve. I was offered another station as an alternative. I understood, accepted, and even agreed with the ACOS’s decision at the time; and years later its wisdom is still clear to me.
I graduated from the FTC on 7 June 1979 and was assigned another position in NE Division. But in late June or early July I was again offered Tehran. A permanent COS had finally arrived, and when my candidacy was raised with him, he said yes. Later, he told me that given a choice between a well-trained, aggressive, and smart first-tour officer (all of which he apparently assumed I was, sight unseen) who wanted to be there and a more experienced officer who would rather have been somewhere else, he would take the first-tour officer. I thought then, and have ever since, that the COS made a courageous decision—I probably would have decided differently had I been the chief. He earned my respect even before we met, and it has never waned. He was a professionally demanding boss but also scrupulously fair, possessing the highest standards of personal and professional integrity. I was fortunate to be working for him, especially at the beginning of my career.
I accepted the Tehran assignment on the spot, never giving it a second thought. When I am asked today what in the hell I was thinking when I took that assignment, my answer is simple: that’s where the action was. I was always disappointed that I never made it to Vietnam as an enlisted Marine, and even more so that I couldn’t do more when I was there as a carrier aviator. As the junior officer and least experienced aviator in the squadron, I was not fully combat qualified when we arrived on station and so was limited for some time in the types of missions I could fly. This last circumstance left me perpetually frustrated and, more than a few times, unreasonably angry; Vietnam was to have been my war, probably the only one I would ever experience, and I wanted to make the most of it. It didn’t happen that way. Tehran seemed to be a second chance to serve in an assignment that was potentially more meaningful and demanding than routine operations. I was elated at the thought of going to a high-visibility post of significance to policymakers.
Also, I remembered a story recounted to my CT class in the early days of our training by Don Gregg, a senior Agency officer.12 In the course of making several points, Gregg told us what things had been like after he joined the Agency during the Korean War. While in training, his class was asked if they would be willing to parachute into North Korea and undertake secret missions. Gregg told us that he and his classmates responded in the affirmative without bothering to mull it over, even for a minute. Why? Because if that is what your country and your Agency asked you to do, you did it. There was nothing to think over. That’s what the business was about and that’s what you did when you made your living serving your country.
When the day came to depart for Tehran, I made the standard courtesy call on DC/NE. He ushered me into his office, chatted a minute or two about my itinerary, and wished me well. Then he walked me to the door, shook my hand, looked me in the eye, and sagely advised, “Don’t fuck up.” It was a heartwarming send-off.
I arrived in Tehran on 12 September 1979 and began the first of what turned out to be only fifty-three days of freedom. I worked at least eight hours a day as the political-military affairs officer and found that I enjoyed that assignment almost as much as my “real” job—which I was doing in the evenings and on weekends. It made for long days, but it was all interesting and fun. I also discovered that if I knew little about Iran, I knew even less about Iranians.
My entire exposure to Iranian history and culture, beyond the evening television news, came from a three-week area studies course at the State Department and what I had picked up during five weeks on the desk reading operational files and intelligence reports. Virtually all my insights into the Persian mind and personality came from a lengthy memo written by John Stempel, the recently reassigned political counselor, that described in detail (the accuracy of which I would have ample time to confirm) how Iranians viewed the world and why and how they thought and believed as they did. It did not take much effort to discern that even friendly and pro-Western Iranians could at times be difficult for an American to deal with or comprehend.
The thrust of Stempel’s memo was neatly summed up by U.S. Navy captain Gary Sick, the Iran action officer on the National Security Council (NSC) staff under President Carter, in the book he wrote about the hostage crisis: “Iranians assume that a simple forthright explanation of events is merely camouflage concealing the devious intricacies of ‘reality.’ Thus, to Iranians, any significant political, economic, or social upheaval in Iran must be traceable to the manipulation of external powers. As such, events are perceived as neither random nor aimless; rather, they must be understood as purposeful and integral to some grand scheme or strategy, however difficult it is to fathom.”13
My first encounter with the Iranian elite several weeks after my arrival served as a memorable introduction to this cultural phenomenon. I was meeting with an Iranian woman who, with her husband, owned a successful construction company. This couple was wealthy and highly educated, well traveled and experienced in foreign cultures. This background notwithstanding, the woman insisted that the Iranian government was directly controlled by the CIA—a common perception in Iran ever since the 1953 coup. She was positive the chief of the Iranian desk at CIA headquarters talked every day to the shah by telephone to give him his instructions for that particular day. She asserted that the U.S. government had made a deliberate decision to rid Iran of the shah for some unknown reason. Since the U.S. government had not, in her scenario, decided who should replace the shah as ruler, Khomeini had been installed as the temporary puppet until the CIA could select a new shah. Once the Agency had made that decision, it would manipulate events to place the lucky man on the Peacock Throne. She held no edifying insights into what the CIA’s plans were for Khomeini once his utility to the American government had been exhausted.
I was both fascinated and stupefied by this exposition. The woman’s unshakable theory did not encompass an explanation of why the United States would have permitted the bloody street riots in 1977 and 1978. Nor did it explain why, if the U.S. government (or the CIA) wanted the shah to leave as early as 1977, he was not just ordered to go, thereby avoiding the enormous problems visited on revolutionary Iran. To an American it was just plain nuts; to an Iranian it made perfect sense.14
My initial weeks in Tehran passed quickly. The chargé d’affaires ad interim, a courtly and highly respected career Foreign Service officer named L. Bruce Laingen, was both gracious and enormously helpful in seeing that I was included in high-level meetings with Iranian officials, as was air force major general Phillip Gast, head of MAAG.15 Both of these exceptional gentlemen generously ensured that I participated in substantive meetings at the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Defense, and at the Iranian General Staffs headquarters. I worked essentially full-time during the day on my cover duties, which were much more interesting than onerous and dealt with issues of genuine import; in the evenings, I reverted to my “true” persona as a CIA case officer. I was thirty-two years old and at the top of my form, physically and, especially, mentally, and during those fifty-three days on the streets of Tehran I reveled in it all. On 21 October, however, I realized that my euphoria would probably be short-lived.
RETROSPECTIVE: A HISTORY LESSON
America and Iran were never natural allies.
