Pearls and Irritations

The last American Ambassador to Iran was William Sullivan, a debonair silver-haired Irish-American with much wisdom and diplomatic experience. If President Jimmy Carter and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance had followed his advice, Iran would probably not be US enemy number one as it is today. Maybe even an ally.

Sullivan got the summons to go to Tehran from Washington in the mid-1970s, when he was US Ambassador the Philippines. Over a farewell dinner in Manila he told close colleagues that he had an ominous feeling about this new posting. But he went anyway.

On arrival in Tehran, Sullivan found that few of his US-based staff spoke Farsi, and few of his locally-engaged staff were Muslims. He also discovered that the Shah had progressive ideas about economic management, but little practical experience about educating a growing industrial work force.

Among Sullivan’s early recommendations to Cyrus Vance and National Security Adviser Zbignev Brzezinski in Washington, was that he and his Embassy should broaden their contacts beyond the courtiers at Niavaran Place and reach out to the more moderate elements of the inchoate Shia revolutionary movement. Sullivan was told in short order to forget his progressive ideas. His main jobs were to supervise the arms trade and nursemaid the ailing Shah Pahlavi, and to get on with it.

Sullivan resisted the temptation to resign. He felt this would unsettle the hundreds of US citizens and their families living in Iran, especially the technicians helping the Iranian Armed Forces fit out and bring into service the large number of aircraft, helicopters and other weapons and munitions the Shah was busily buying from Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Bell. Armed with petro-dollars (Iran was pumping up to eight million barrels of oil a day in those days), the Shah was like a kid in a toy store. His buying spree was stimulated by a paranoid fear of the Soviet Union pushing down through Iran to establish a warm water port on the Persian Gulf.

Apart from being ill, the Shah had a rather inflexible personality. The fact, ignored by his courtiers and largely unknown by the diplomatic corps in Tehran, was that most less wealthy and rural Iranians were deeply religious, and found his secular views unacceptable. Many Iranian women also disapproved of Queen Farah’s progressive ideas about feminism.

Like a train wreck, the inevitable happened, almost in slo-mo. On 16 January 1979, too ill to carry on, the Shah went into exile, first to Egypt, then the United States. His duties with the Regency Council were hastily transferred to Shapour Bakhtiar, the opposition-based prime minister. On 1 February, the Ayatollah Khomeini returned from France to a rapturous welcome at Mehrabad Airport. On 11 February, a secular pro-western government was replaced by an anti-western Islamic Republic.

During this time, David Newson, Undersecretary of State, called Sullivan in Tehran with a suggestion from Zbigniev Brzezinski that a coup d’état could and should be carried out by the Iranian military to stop the revolutionaries in their tracks and reinforce Shapour Bakhtiar’s government.

Sullivan bluntly said ‘Tell Brzezinski to fuck off.’ Newsom observed that that was not a very helpful comment. ‘You want that translated into Polish?’ Sullivan replied, and hung up.

On 4 November 1979, against all the rules of diplomatic immunity, the United States Embassy in Tehran was stormed by the Revolutionary Guard. The trigger was the US refusal to repatriate the Shah to face trial in Tehran. Bill Sullivan and 53 of his US-based staff were taken captive. President Carter launched the abortive Eagle Claw rescue attempt on 24 April 1980. One rescue helicopter crashed into a transport plane and eight servicemen were killed. The Ayatollah said guardian angels had caused the destruction. Fifty-three US diplomats remained in captivity in Tehran for 444 days. Ambassador Sullivan was freed early and quickly returned for a de-briefing in Washington.

Sullivan fronted up to Cyrus Vance’s office in the State Department. Vance was apologetic and embarrassed. He said President Carter realised Sullivan’s judgement had been correct. The Embassy should have been instructed to cultivate elements in the Revolutionary Guard. Drawing himself up to his 6’2”, Bill thanked Vance for his message, but said he had absolutely no respect for the President’s judgement and resigned on the spot.

Bilateral relations never recovered. The Embassy in Tehran was turned into an anti-American war museum. In 2018 President Trump walked away from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), signed by all permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany and the EU. Under it, Iran had agreed to eliminate its stockpile of medium enriched uranium, reduce its stockpile of low enriched uranium by 98 percent, cut by two-thirds the number of its gas centrifuges, and allow the most comprehensive regular inspections of its existing nuclear assets by the IAEA.

The Iranians collectively shrugged their shoulders and resumed their nuclear research free from surveillance. Although Ruhollah Khomeini had earlier declared a fatwa against Iran possessing nuclear weapons, suspicions in the West have increased that Iran’s research, now unfettered by surveillance, may well be heading in that direction. The irony is that it was the US which supplied Iran’s first research reactor under its 1957 Atoms for Peace program, and its first batch of highly-enriched uranium in the 1960s.

Israel, which has its own undeclared nuclear weapons, wants the United States to launch a pre-emptive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities, a course many US hawks joining the forthcoming second Trump administration will support. If this occurs, it will expand the Middle East War in a whole new and dangerous direction, possibly leading to World War Three. What a tragedy, when forward-looking diplomacy of the kind advocated by Bill Sullivan could have led to a constructive bilateral relationship.

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