Blurred View from the Embassy

Captured papers reveal a confused U.S. policy about the Shah

Tehran, Iran Nov. 1,1979

Dear Penne,

Well, this has been another one of these special sort of days in Iran . . . a day that had us worried but turned out not so bad after all. . .

So begins a letter, poignant in retrospect, written by Charge d'Affaires L. Bruce Laingen of the U.S. embassy in Tehran to his wife in Bethesda, Md. The deposed Shah of Iran had been admitted to the U.S. for medical treatment less than two weeks earlier, and Laingen was describing an anti-American demonstration outside the embassy. Laingen left the letter on his office desk. Three days later—on Nov. 4, 1979—the embassy was overrun by Iranian militants and America's 444-day hostage ordeal began.

The Laingen letter is among hundreds of classified embassy cables, Government documents and personal papers seized by the militants and published in a set of 13 paperback books in Iran last spring. Though the volumes have been sold in Tehran for months, for about $8 a set, the contents became widely known only as the books began to be distributed in Europe in recent weeks. Many documents were found intact by the embassy attackers but others had been shredded by frantic U.S. personnel. These have been painstakingly pasted back together by the militants. The papers were of different colors—blue, pink, yellow and white-which helped the reassembly process. Even so, the militants might have needed 40 hours to paste together a page. Said one Iranian official last week: "We succeeded because God is with us."

The paperbacks, which include commentaries in Farsi, would appear to represent an extraordinary collection of secret diplomatic and intelligence reports covering U.S. policy toward Iran from 1966 to '79. Though not every one of the 1,000 published pages has been judged authentic, U.S. diplomatic experts privately admit that the papers appear to be genuine.

The documents were carefully selected by the Iranians to support their charges of U.S. subversion. Yet what emerges from the papers that came from the "nest of spies," as the Iranian annotations put it, is a contradictory and confused attempt by U.S. diplomats to comprehend the Shah's regime, the rebellion and the post-revolution government of Ayatullah Khomeini. Some analyses were chillingly prescient, others dangerously naive.

Throughout the early 1970s, as Iran's importance as a U.S. ally grew, Washington remained generally confident about its ties with Tehran. "Iran-U.S. relations with the Shah are excellent," wrote U.S. Ambassador Richard Helms in 1974. But Helms also advised that embassy officials take "great care" in talking to dissidents lest the Shah be offended. U.S. intelligence thus remained fragmentary, crippling U.S. efforts to under stand the growing opposition that would eventually topple the Peacock Throne.

By the mid-'70s there were mixed reports on the Shah. He was characterized as weak and isolated, his advisers as venal and immoral. Claimed one 1976 CIA report: "In the Shah's family are an assortment of licentious and financially corrupt relatives, notably his twin sister Ashraf, a lady possessed of a greedy nature and nymphomaniac tendencies."