What’s the single decision you made as president that you most regret?
President Carter:
I would say the hostage rescue effort in Iran in April of 1980.
It was a perfectly planned, highly secret, somewhat complex procedure that everybody agreed to do.
And in order to extract all of the hostages plus all the rescue team from Iran, we had to have six functioning helicopters.
So I ordered eight helicopters and two of them had to fly from an aircraft carrier about 600 miles across areas of Iran and Oman and land in a desert, which we had already explored.
One of the helicopters, with no reasonable explanation since then, turned back to the aircraft carrier, which left us seven.
Another one was forced down in the desert by an unexpected sandstorm, which left us six, which was fine.
And so our whole rescue operation assembled there in the desert. And then one of the helicopters developed a hydraulic leak and couldn’t fly.
So I had to abort the rescue operation. We couldn’t have afforded to extract five-sixths of our people and leave one-sixth of our people in Iran to be executed, so we had to terminate the exercise.
So it was not sending a large enough squad of helicopters?
If I’d sent one more helicopter, there’s no doubt in my mind we would have had a successful operation.
The Iranians never knew we were there until after we all left. But we would have had the hostages rescued, I would probably have been reelected, and so forth. So that was a bit of a turning point.
WHEN Cyrus Vance decided to resign in 1980 he sought to do it with a minimum of fuss, for that was his style. He wrote to his president, Jimmy Carter, that a plan to try to rescue by force 52 Americans held prisoner in the United States embassy in Tehran had been made against his judgment and that he was resigning as secretary of state, whether the mission succeeded or failed.
Several days later, when the mission had failed, dismally, Mr Vance's resignation was made public. But he was not allowed to bow out quietly.
No one could remember a secretary of state, the highest post in the cabinet, resigning on a matter of principle.
It took some searching to find a single precedent, William Jennings Bryan, a pacifist who had resigned as secretary of state in 1915 because he believed American policy favoured joining the war in Europe.
Mr Vance was not a pacifist.
He had served in the navy in the second world war, and saw action in the Pacific. He had no liking for the revolutionary government that had taken over Iran. But he believed that some of the American prisoners might die in an attack, and that even if the mission, called Eagle Claw, were successful it would disturb an already unstable region.
He was doubtful about the ability of the army to cope with conditions in a land they had no knowledge of.
[NB - This is a blatant and complete lie : since the draw-down of US Forces and Vietnamisation of the Vietnam War in 1973, for five consecutive years, the Military Assistance Program (Arms Sales and CIA) to Iran was astronomically vast, with literally tens of thousands of experienced US service personnel, technicians and tacticians, with particular emphasis given to Special Forces, Black Ops and Covert Ops veterans being stationed in Iran, training the Iranian military, conducting joint exercises and developing firm relationships.
US military involvement and experience in Iran and with Iranians has always been intimate, comprehensive and extensive, but in the decade prior to 1980, it was second to none on the planet.
The idea that US Special Forces and military brass "didn't know" the Iranian nation, climate, territory and culture is just flat out deceitful.]
He had no great faith in the marvels of military technology. In 1962, when he was secretary of the army, the walkie-talkies of soldiers guarding blacks from white supremacists in the southern states failed at crucial moments. His misgivings were justified.
[NB - As with Desert One, sabotage is a far more likely explanation; these were not US Army Troops, they were Alabama National Guardsman, ordered to disobey their Commander-in-Chief Govenor Wallace and accept what they considered to be illegal orders from a foreign Head of State they didn't vote for and didn't like]
Eagle Claw never got near the prisoners. Helicopters that were the mainstay of the mission were disabled in an unanticipated sandstorm in the Iranian desert.
[NB - Again, this is a lie. One of them turned back in the Sandstorm, citing a red light in his control board warning of a loss of pressure due to microfracture in one of the rotor blades. The manual states that this warning light is not grounds for an abort, but requires an immediate maintaince check on return to base.
This red light had never occurred before in operation of this model of helicopter - two more of the helicopters developed the same fault on this mission - one more had a hydraulic fault requiring the system to be flushed, which couldn't be done in the desert.
With insufficient lift to complete the mission, the President order them to withdraw and abort the phase one insertion.
No lives had been lost, and the mission itself not compromised - the insertion team had not been detected by Iranian radar.
Then one of the remaining choppers crashed into one of the two C-130 Hercules on the ground, whilst refuelling and people began to die before the withdraw could begin.
None of this had anything to do with the sandstorm]
Eight American servicemen died and eight aircraft were lost. The mission was judged a brave one, but stupid.
[NB - It wasn't, and it wasn't anything LIKE as stupid as the NEXT rescue plan they began developing, Operation Credible Sport...]
The embassy Americans were eventually freed as a result of painstaking negotiation, a process Mr Vance had pressed for.
Cyrus Vance was aware that, despite his exalted job, others could have a say in making and carrying out American foreign policy, particularly at times of great national stress. (The present star in the war against terrorism is the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, a man of strong words and once a champion wrestler.)
At the time of Eagle Claw Mr Vance's rival for President Carter's ear was his hawkish national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski.
For much of his three years as secretary of state Mr Vance was uneasy as he battled with Mr Brzezinski for influence over foreign policy. Mr Vance knew that the president backed him in many ways, particularly in the view that human rights should be a pillar of American foreign policy; that was one of the reasons he had been picked for the job.
But in the run-up to an election against Ronald Reagan, Mr Carter wanted to show that he could be tough with the Iranians.
[NB - Not true. He was told it would work, and there is no reason that it wouldn't work]
Mr Vance was even bothered that his office in the State Department was a mile or so from the White House, whereas Mr Brzezinski's office was next door to the president's. Even the great and the good exhibit human fears.
[NB - But justified; Brezezinski has frequently boasted about this in relation to his "rivalry" with Vance, stating "it's not hard to control a President in such a way"]
Polish-born Mr Brzezinski, a naturalised American, was clever, ambitious and ten years younger than Mr Vance. He saw him, he wrote later, as a relic of “the once-dominant WASP elite” whose “values and rules were of declining relevance”.
[NB - As charming as usual, Ziggy...]
Mr Vance was indeed a WASP, born to a prosperous family in West Virginia and expensively educated. He had a successful career as a lawyer and seemingly was without political ambition. He once said,
"A lot of us were raised in families where we were taught that we were very fortunate, that we were going to have a good education, and that we had the responsibility to return to the community some of the benefits and blessings we had, and that there was an obligation to participate in government service at the local, state and national level."
For some 30 years various presidents, among them John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson as well as Jimmy Carter, together with international organisations, valued his WASPish talents.
His departure as secretary of state did not end his service to government and the United Nations. He would be lured away from his law practice, given a working title, special this or special that, and asked to take on problems that had no solutions but could perhaps be made less menacing.
So he went off to the Middle East, to the Balkans, to the Koreas, to Cyprus, and, until it broke up and created a new set of problems, to the Soviet Union. He was sceptical of any proposed American “master plan” for the world. His method was to take each problem, look at it as a lawyer would a brief, judge what could be negotiated, and draw up a contract.
[NB - Bilderberger AND Trilateral Commissioner]
Mr Vance was sometimes compared with another indefatigable American traveller, Henry Kissinger.
Philip Habib, an American career diplomat who worked with many negotiators, greatly admired Mr Kissinger.
[NB - Habib is an Iranian-born Kissingerite Rockefeller Man greatly implicated in October Surprise and the fall of the Peacock Throne.]
His capacity “to put things together, to move, to produce the precise word at the right time, and his wit, were marvellous things to behold”.
But Cyrus Vance's “absolute, total and complete honesty” made him “probably the finest public servant I ever worked with”.
[NB - That Cyrus is named for the the greatest Persian ruler in Historu (as is fellow October Surprise alum and Israeli arms dealer, the late Persian Jew Cyrus Hoshemi, is a fact also not lost on Habib]
Not bad for a WASP of declining relevance [Working for the Central Intelligence Agency].
Gary Sick, your national security advisor for the Middle East, and a number of others have written convincingly that Reagan’s campaign staff were conspiring against you to keep the hostages held for fear you’d win reelection if they were released.
Do you believe that? Does that resonate with you?
I never have taken a position on that because I don’t know the facts.
I’ve seen both sides.
I’ve seen the explanations that were made by George H. W. Bush and the Reagan people, and I’ve read Gary Sick’s book and talked to him.
I don’t really know.
The thing that I do know is that after they [the Iranians] decided to hold the hostages until after the election, I did everything I could to get them extracted, and the last three days I was president, I never went to bed at all.
I stayed up the whole time in the Oval Office to negotiate this extremely complex arrangement to get the hostages removed and to deal with $12 billion in Iranian cash and gold.
And I completed everything by six o’clock on the morning that I was supposed to go out of office.
All the hostages were transferred to airplanes and they were waiting in the airplanes.
I knew this—so they were ready to take off—and I went to the reviewing stand when Reagan became president.
Five minutes after he was president, the planes took off. They could have left three or four hours earlier.
But what, if any, influence was used on the Ayatollah to wait until I was out of office, I don’t know.
Excerpted from Conversations with Power: What Great Presidents and Prime Ministers Can Teach Us about Leadership
by Brian Michael Till.
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