the revolution’s purity. The captors’ spokeswoman, Masoumeh Ebtekar, explained, “Every afternoon, I and several other students spent from four to six hours writing summaries of the documents [found in the embassy]. . . . The really important ones we would expose publicly, on television.”26 Khomeini and his revolutionary courts would purge those officials whom the students exposed as talking with the Americans, even if their interaction with the embassy was routine. Bazargan became the first victim.27
Not surprisingly, it became increasingly difficult for the Americans to find Iranians with whom to engage. Blinded by desperation, Carter’s aides hoped to find moderate revolutionaries who could sell a deal to Khomeini.28 They discounted signs that Iranian authorities were not interested in resolving conflict. Ignorance of where power lay in Tehran compounded the problem. Khomeini was in charge, but as Secretary of State Cyrus Vance recognized, even Khomeini “was not one to row upstream” against the flow of public opinion.29 Never mind that Khomeini helped shape public opinion. The mob mentality precluded traditional diplomacy; it is hard to negotiate with a regime that has gone rogue.
Instead of demanding that Khomeini end incitement and consolidate control as a precondition for diplomacy, Carter rushed to talk. This was understandable because of fears that the Iranians would execute hostages. Carter also believed that if he could get to Khomeini, he could temper the ayatollah’s hostility toward the United States. To this end, the president asked Ramsey Clark, the former attorney general, and William Miller, a retired diplomat, to carry a letter to Tehran to ask for the hostages’ release and to start a discussion about future bilateral relations. The duo were flag bearers for radicalism. Clark had met Khomeini during the ayatollah’s last day in Paris and had championed his cause,30 and Miller had described Khomeini as “a progressive force for human rights.”31 The two flew to Istanbul, but when Carter’s aides announced their mission, Khomeini refused them entry and forbade any negotiation before Washington extradited the shah.32 Clark and Miller returned to Washington, their letter undelivered. Had Carter kept his diplomacy quiet, perhaps Khomeini might have been willing to dial back the incitement and make a discreet deal to return the hostages within a month, instead of holding them for more than a year.
The administration would not take no for an answer. Soon, a delegation of congressmen left for Tehran. Rep. George Hansen, a Republican from Idaho, said that Congress might pass a resolution calling for Carter to extradite the shah in exchange for the release of some hostages. Again, the Iranians refused to negotiate. Each time Khomeini spurned Carter’s outreach, he could depict himself as strong and the Americans as weak. He won before the negotiations even began. Carter may have approached diplomacy enthusiastically, but goodwill is never enough in dealing with rogue regimes. It takes two to tango.
Not every aspect of Carter’s approach backfired. The president successfully rallied world opinion behind the United States. He won unanimous UN Security Council backing for a resolution seeking the hostages’ immediate release, and near-unanimous support for a resolution deploring Iran’s inaction.33 Sanctions failed only because of a Soviet veto.34 The International Court of Justice also declared the embassy seizure illegal.35 The revolutionaries simply ignored the ruling; rogue regimes by definition care little for international institutions or world opinion.
Carter’s aides justified multilateralism as a necessary precondition for successful diplomacy. Still, the seventeen days they spent courting the International Court were seventeen days in which Iranian revolutionaries could be confident that the United States would undertake no military strike that could prejudice the verdict. Rather than increase pressure on Iran, Carter’s diplomatic strategy relieved it.36 The debate over how to balance the benefit of international imprimatur with costs in terms of lost time continues to perplex diplomats. Nor did the international consensus that Carter marshaled sway Khomeini.
Carter continued to seek an intermediary even after Khomeini forbade all Iranian officials to negotiate with Americans.37 Vance explained, “Since we could not reach the ayatollah, we had no choice but to try to work through the Revolutionary Council,” even though he himself admitted that the hostage takers would not answer to the council.38
The Carter administration also attempted to use the United Nations to create back channels.39 Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim tried to arrange a meeting between Vance and Iran’s foreign minister, Abulhassan Bani Sadr, but failed before Bani Sadr lost his post after only two and a half weeks. Bani Sadr’s precarious position did not stop him from adding to Iran’s demands. In addition to the captors’ calls for the return of the shah, Bani Sadr also demanded the return of the shah’s assets, an end to interference in Iranian affairs, and an apology for injustices more imagined than real. No sooner did Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, a former trainer for Palestinian terrorists, assume the foreign minister’s post than the Carter team reached out to him as well. “He was a contact we had to pay attention to when routes to Khomeini were rare,” Harold Saunders explained.40
Carter considered dialogue to have no cost, but the price of desperation diplomacy was huge. Any Iranian partner had to bolster his revolutionary credentials, and so added fresh demands. The rush to engage the Iranians only deepened the crisis.
Carter’s inner circle split when they heard the new demands. Some wanted to hold the revolutionaries’ feet to the fire, while those in the State Department prided themselves on their cultural sensitivity and argued that any solution would require allowing Iranian leaders to claim victory.41 Saunders explained the diplomats’ logic: Even though they believed the Iranian regime should be accountable under international law, the State Department worried that Khomeini might not have the power to control the anti-American wave he had unleashed. Nor was complying with international law Khomeini’s top priority; consolidating the revolution was. Any solution, Saunders and his team argued, would require the Iranians to conclude on their own that it was in their revolutionary interest to release the hostages.42 The cost of such an approach was high: American diplomats working to preserve rather than undermine Khomeini’s regime.
Circles around Khomeini took advantage of American desperation. As the hostages ended their first month in captivity, America’s Iranian contacts suggested that if only the White House would be conciliatory, Iranian pragmatists might convince Khomeini to act in the same spirit. It was a strategy that appealed to Carter and prefigured the incentive packages that would characterize Western diplomacy toward Iran for more than three decades.43
Carter signaled openness to dialogue and would not tie his actions to Tehran’s. Even with American diplomats held hostage, he refused to sever diplomatic relations. He hoped that allowing the Islamic Republic to keep its embassy in Washington would facilitate diplomacy.44 Before its closure in April 1980, Khomeini’s embassy helped plan the assassination of a former Iranian official in Bethesda, Maryland.
Carter refused to accept that incentives would not sway an ideological adversary. When his incentives failed to win Khomeini over, he augmented them, in effect making the bribery of adversaries the basis of American strategy. Thus, instead of defending a leader who stood staunchly by America during the Cold War, Carter sought to hasten the cancer-stricken shah’s departure for Panama after reluctantly allowing him into the United States for medical treatment; he may also have encouraged Panamanian authorities to return the shah to Iran.45 The gesture did not assuage Khomeini. As Peter Rodman, a former aide to Henry Kissinger, noted, “The eagerness to prove goodwill to an intransigent opponent paradoxically makes a settlement less likely.”46
There is a logic to offering carrots rather than sticks, but there is also a drawback: the incentivizing of rogue behavior. The cost went far behind Iran, too. A willingness to reverse course under pressure and betray allies may have convinced Soviet leaders who already perceived Carter as weak and indecisive that American reaction to an invasion of Afghanistan would be slight.47
When the Swiss ambassador in Tehran reported that the Iranian government would assume control over the hostages so long as the U.S. government refrained from any measures to pressure Tehran, Carter played along. He delayed sanctions, alleviating pressure on a regime that was struggling to consolidate control. Khomeini took no action.48