Tell Brzezinski: America's Iran Failure

The Question No One Could Answer

In October 1979, when advisers briefed President Carter on admitting the Shah to the United States for cancer treatment, Carter asked a question that silenced the room: “What are you guys going to advise me to do when they overrun our embassy and take everybody hostage?”¹

Vice President Mondale later described the reaction: the room “went dead, if not ashen.”

Thirteen days after the Shah’s admission, students stormed the embassy. The hostage crisis lasted 444 days. Carter had predicted exactly what would happen, asked the right question, received no answer — and admitted the Shah anyway.

This pattern — correct diagnosis, paralyzed response — defined American policy toward Iran for the revolution’s entire thirteen months. The United States did not lose Iran because it failed to understand the danger. It lost Iran because understanding the danger and acting on it are different things, and the American policy apparatus was structurally incapable of doing both at the same time.

The Intelligence Failure

In August 1978 — after mass protests had erupted in Qom, Tabriz, Isfahan, and dozens of other cities; after Cinema Rex had killed over 400 people; after the revolution’s mourning cycle had been running for seven months — the CIA’s National Foreign Assessment Center produced its assessment. RPM 78-10422: “Iran is not in a revolutionary or even a ‘pre-revolutionary’ situation.”²

The Defense Intelligence Agency, the following month: the Shah was “likely to remain actively in power over the next ten years.”

The embassy had worked out twenty-six scenarios of possible destabilization in Iran. Not one accorded any role to Islamic resistance.³

To understand how this happened, you need to understand what the CIA did not have.

The CIA had almost no Farsi speakers covering Iran. The State Department had few Persian speakers in Tehran. The Halloween massacre of October 31, 1977 — Stansfield Turner’s restructuring of the clandestine service — had eliminated 820 operational positions: 649 through attrition, 154 by involuntary retirement, and 17 simply fired. The cuts reduced human intelligence capabilities at the worst possible moment.⁴

But the fundamental problem predated Turner. The Shah explicitly demanded that American intelligence maintain no contacts with Iranian opposition elements. The CIA had been “so intimately involved during the 1950s in setting up the Shah’s intelligence apparatus” that it relied on SAVAK for much of its reporting on the opposition. SAVAK did not provide misleading information about the opposition so much as give no information at all.⁵

Compare: Israeli intelligence agents — many of them Iranian Jews who spoke Farsi natively — interacted with elites and opposition alike, participated in demonstrations under cover, and “were thus able to sense the revolutionary atmosphere.” Even so, Mossad chief intelligence analyst Yossi Alpher later admitted: “No one in the Mossad or the Foreign Ministry actually possessed any deep knowledge about events there.”⁶

The cultural blindness ran deeper than language. Intelligence agencies “relied on increasingly obsolete models of secular revolutions” and “were skeptical of religion as a force for uniting disparate opposition elements.” The CIA’s analytical framework — secular, rational-actor, state-centric — could not conceptualize what was actually happening. Robert Jervis, who conducted the CIA’s own 186-page internal post-mortem, identified the reasoning as “nonfalsifiable”: if the Shah would crack down if seriously threatened, and he hadn’t cracked down, therefore the situation wasn’t serious. The Shah’s paralysis was read as evidence of control rather than evidence of collapse.⁷

James Bill called it the “Pahlavi premise” — the circular assumption that the Shah was in total control. Not until November 1978 — three months after the “not pre-revolutionary” assessment — did the CIA recognize Khomeini’s success at mobilizing public support.

The Two Camps

If the intelligence was blind, the policy was paralyzed — split between two men who agreed on almost nothing and reported to a president who could not choose between them.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, the National Security Advisor, viewed Iran exclusively through Cold War lenses. The Shah was a strategic asset in his “arc of crisis” — a belt of instability along the Soviet Union’s southern flank. He advocated the “iron fist.” On November 4, 1978, he called the Shah directly and told him the United States would “back him to the hilt.” Even after Khomeini’s return, Brzezinski wrote: “Islamic revivalist movements are not sweeping the Middle East and are not likely to be the wave of the future.”⁸

Cyrus Vance, the Secretary of State, believed repression created instability rather than containing it. He favored engagement with moderate opposition and genuine political reform. He opposed military solutions as counterproductive.

The structural dysfunction was worse than a disagreement. Carter used informal Friday breakfast meetings rather than formal NSC sessions — only ten formal NSC meetings compared to 125 under Nixon and Ford. No agendas were prepared and no formal records kept, “sometimes resulting in differing interpretations of the decisions actually agreed upon.” Brzezinski’s daily access to the president gave him structural advantages that Vance could not match. Gary Sick, who served on the NSC staff, described the policymaking as “bureaucratic guerrilla warfare.”⁹

The result was contradictory signals transmitted simultaneously. On November 3, 1978, Brzezinski sent a cable from “the highest authority” instructing the embassy to tell the Shah the United States supported him “without reservation.” Six days later, on November 9, Ambassador William Sullivan sent his “Thinking the Unthinkable” cable arguing that the Shah was finished — and comparing Khomeini to Gandhi.¹⁰

Brzezinski dismissed Sullivan’s description of Khomeini as “quaint.”

Brzezinski also opened a backchannel with Ambassador Ardeshir Zahedi, Iran’s ambassador in Washington, bypassing State Department channels entirely. Henry Precht, the State Department’s Iran desk officer, testified: “Brzezinski throughout the revolution was communicating with Zahedi or the Shah himself, to give his own personal opinions of how Iran should conduct itself in the revolution without coordinating with Vance.”¹¹

The Huyser Mission

On January 4, 1979, Carter dispatched General Robert “Dutch” Huyser — a four-star Air Force general who had designed the Shah’s military command-and-control system — to Tehran. Huyser was chosen because he knew Iran’s top generals personally. His superior, General Alexander Haig, “strongly objected,” arguing Huyser was “not qualified for a political mission,” and threatened to resign.¹²

Huyser’s orders were deliberately ambiguous — because the people who wrote them could not agree. Brzezinski wanted a green light for a military coup. Vance opposed any coup “at all costs.” Carter wanted both options held open. The result, as Edward Luttwak observed, was that “the predictable effect was to paralyze the Iranian military, the one group that might yet have saved the situation.”¹³

It is worth acknowledging honestly that the Huyser mission faced an impossible task regardless of its instructions. The Shah’s coup-proofing architecture had left the generals psychologically incapable of collective action. When Huyser tried to organize coordination among his “Group of Five” — the five most senior commanders — he discovered that some of them had never met each other. Gharabaghi, the Chief of Staff, told Huyser he “could not hold the military together if the Shah were to leave the country.” Huyser had to direct American military advisors to draw up operational plans that the Iranian command should have prepared months earlier.¹⁴

Three of the hawks — Generals Oveissi, Khosrowdad, and Rabii — told Huyser they were “prepared to wipe out the opposition leadership and, if necessary, to kill 100,000 Iranians.” They didn’t need Bakhtiar’s government. They could put the Shah back in power. What they needed was American support. Huyser strongly advised against proceeding.¹⁵

Huyser developed a three-step escalation plan: first, give Bakhtiar a chance; second, if the situation deteriorated, Bakhtiar would declare martial law; third, only if both failed, the US would endorse a military takeover. In practice, this framework ensured step three would never arrive in time.¹⁶

A coup plan was developed and “constantly discussed until finalized for February 10, 1979,” naming hundreds of political and religious leaders to be arrested. It was never executed. By then, 5,434 personnel had deserted from 31 garrisons. The oil workers had cut the military’s fuel supply. A major on General Badrei’s own staff leaked the plan to revolutionary forces.¹⁷

Huyser left Tehran on February 3, two days after Khomeini’s return. His final assessment: the military would hold together. Eight days later, it ceased to exist. His own description of the mission: “one that started with desperation and disunity and ended in disaster.” The US Army War College concluded it was “doomed by three critical factors: the Shah’s crippling organizational pathologies, the Carter administration’s dysfunctional decision-making, and Huyser’s severe lack of preparation."¹⁸

"Tell Brzezinski to Fuck Off”

The climactic confrontation came on February 10, 1979 — the day before the military collapsed.

Undersecretary David Newsom called Ambassador Sullivan from the White House Situation Room: “The National Security Advisor has asked for your view of the possibility of a coup d’etat by the Iranian military.”¹⁹

Sullivan’s response: “Tell Brzezinski to fuck off.”

Newsom: “That’s not a very helpful comment.”

Sullivan: “You want it translated into Polish?”

Sullivan was wrong about many things — his comparison of Khomeini to Gandhi was spectacularly wrong. But on this point, he was right. By February 10, the question of a coup was fantasy. The military was disintegrating. Its fuel was cut. Its own generals had never learned to coordinate. Its conscripts were deserting. One of the Shah’s closest military friends — General Fardoust — was a double agent who would, the next morning, provide the legal justification for surrender.²⁰

Precht and Sick, the two responsible officials at the working level, described their own relationship as having “fallen apart.” Precht’s assessment: “The failure of the two responsible people at the working level to work together was disastrous for American policy.”²¹

The New Year’s Toast

There is a moment that captured the entire American failure, and it happened before the revolution began.

On December 31, 1977, at a state dinner at the Niavaran Palace in Tehran, President Carter raised a glass and delivered a toast: “Iran, because of the great leadership of the Shah, is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world. This is a great tribute to you, Your Majesty, and to your leadership and to the respect and the admiration and love which your people give to you.”²²

One week later, the Ettela’at article was published. Seminary students rioted in Qom. Security forces fired live ammunition. And the forty-day mourning cycle that would destroy the Shah began.

Imagine watching a foreign leader raise a glass to the man your family feared — and knowing that toast carried more weight than anything your own protests had accomplished. The image of an American president raising a glass of alcohol to toast a hated ruler — in a country where alcohol would soon be banned and the ruler would soon be exiled — became one of the revolution’s most powerful symbols.

What Carter Could Not Have Done

The honest conclusion — and it is one that costs something to state, given America’s role in the 1953 coup — is that no American policy could have prevented the Iranian Revolution. The Lowy Institute’s assessment captures the scholarly consensus: “Since the 1950s, the United States had staunchly backed Iran’s pro-Western Shah, despite his terrible human rights record. By the time Carter became president, there was probably nothing he could have done to prevent the overthrow of the hated monarch.”²³

Carter’s human rights rhetoric did unsettle the Shah — but the pressure was remarkably gentle compared to what was applied to Argentina, South Korea, and the Philippines. Those regimes survived. Iran did not. The difference was not American policy but Iranian structure: the Shah had suppressed all legitimate opposition for decades. There was nothing between the regime and revolutionary opposition.

The real missed opportunity was not 1977-1979 but 1975, when the Shah created the compulsory Rastakhiz Party and declared that non-members should “emigrate or face imprisonment” — destroying the last pretense of political pluralism three years before the revolution arrived.

Carter’s presidency was destroyed by Iran — the revolution, the 444-day hostage crisis, the catastrophic failure of Operation Eagle Claw. But his human rights instinct was not wrong. Daniel Fried, former US Ambassador to Poland, offered the counter-history: “Carter reconnected that link between values and interests after the cynical and defeated Vietnam era. He did so just in time to catch the wave of freedom that swelled and crested with the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989.”²⁴

American idealism did not detonate the Iranian Revolution. It arrived too late, applied too inconsistently, to do anything but ensure that when the inevitable explosion came, the United States would be standing in the blast radius with no plan and no friends.

This article is part of 48 Hours. For the revolution’s near-death in summer 1978, see The Revolution That Nearly Failed. For the cinema fire that restarted the revolution, see Cinema Rex.

Carter’s question documented in Gary Sick, All Fall Down (Random House, 1985); Mondale’s description from multiple accounts. ↩
CIA assessment RPM 78-10422, “Iran: A Political Assessment,” August 8, 1978, National Foreign Assessment Center. ↩
DIA assessment from September 1978; 26 scenarios from embassy records documented in Sick, All Fall Down. ↩
Farsi speaker shortage and Turner restructuring from CIA post-mortem records and multiple scholarly analyses; 820 positions from Turner’s documented restructuring. ↩
CIA-SAVAK dependency from Robert Jervis’s 186-page CIA internal post-mortem, June 1979; James Bill’s analysis of the “Pahlavi premise.” ↩
Israeli intelligence comparison from Yossi Alpher’s testimony and scholarly analysis of intelligence failures. ↩
Jervis post-mortem analysis; “nonfalsifiable” reasoning identified in the CIA Senior Review Panel’s 1983 assessment. ↩
Brzezinski’s “arc of crisis” framework and his November 4, 1978 call to the Shah from multiple sources including Sick, All Fall Down; post-revolution assessment from Brzezinski’s writings. ↩
Carter’s informal meeting structure and NSC comparison from Sick, All Fall Down; “bureaucratic guerrilla warfare” quote from Sick. ↩
Brzezinski’s November 3 cable and Sullivan’s “Thinking the Unthinkable” from Eyes-Only diplomatic records. ↩
Precht’s testimony on Brzezinski’s backchannel from oral history records. ↩
Huyser mission origins and Haig’s objection from Huyser’s memoirs and multiple accounts. ↩
Luttwak’s assessment documented in military analysis of the revolution; contradictory instructions from Sick, All Fall Down. ↩
Huyser’s discoveries about the generals from his memoirs; Gharabaghi’s statement from Huyser’s account. ↩
Hawks’ offer to Huyser from his memoirs; “100,000 Iranians” from military records. ↩
Three-step escalation from Huyser’s January 12 cable to Defense Secretary Brown. ↩
Coup plan development, desertion figures, and the Badrei staff leak from military analysis and Huyser’s memoirs. ↩
Huyser’s departure and final assessment from his memoirs; US Army War College conclusion from their post-mortem analysis. ↩
Sullivan-Newsom exchange from multiple accounts including Sick, All Fall Down, and Sullivan’s memoirs. ↩
Fardoust’s double-agent role from post-revolutionary revelations and multiple scholarly sources. ↩
Precht-Sick relationship breakdown from Precht’s oral history. ↩
Carter’s New Year’s Eve toast, December 31, 1977, from transcript; subsequent events from revolution timeline. ↩
Lowy Institute assessment; comparative pressure analysis from Christian Emery’s scholarly review. ↩
Fried quote from diplomatic oral history; Carter’s human rights legacy assessed in multiple scholarly analyses. ↩