A crucial month in the country
Edward Mortimer
MISSION TO TEHRAN by General Robert E. Huyser Andre Deutsch, f12.95 General Robert E. 'Dutch' Huyser, USAF, is a classic example of those charac- ters in history who are only on stage for one scene, but during that scene are centre stage all the time and play a crucial role in the drama. The drama in question was the Iranian revolution and Huyser's scene was one of the most dramatic of all. He was in Iran for exactly a month, arriving on 4 January 1979 — 12 days before the depar- ture of the Shah — and leaving on 3 February two days after the arrival of Ayatollah Khomeini.
Huyser was at the time deputy commander-in-chief of the US European Command, based in Stuttgart. He was also responsible for US military sales and assist- ance programmes to 44 countries, of which Iran at the time was one of the largest. He had won the confidence of the Shah and at the latter's request had been sent to Iran in 1978 `to help him to set up a command control system, and to develop doctrine and operational concepts for the reorga- nisation of his armed forces'. He was therefore on very close terms with many of the top Iranian military leaders, and was the obvious choice when the Carter admin- istration decided, on 3 January 1979, to send someone to maintain contact with those leaders and assure them of con- tinuing American support. Support for what? The question was widely asked at the time and has not really been answered since. At first intended to be secret, his presence in Tehran became public within three days of his arrival. It was generally assumed by the Western media, presumably on the basis of some guidance from Washington, that he was there to convince the Iranian generals that the US was firmly behind Shahpur Bakh- tiar, the new prime minister (formerly an opposition leader) whom the Shah had just named, and to discourage them from car- rying out a military coup. The Soviet media, however — predictably enough accused Huyser himself of 'conducting a creeping military coup'. A variant of this charge was made later by Western writers sympathetic to the revolution and hostile to the US administration: Huyser, they said, had been sent to Iran in an unsuccess- ful attempt to forestall the revolution by organising a military coup. Yet the Shah himself, in his memoirs, Answer to History, quoted air force General Amir Hossein Rabii — one of those with whom Huyser had been in daily contact during his stay in Tehran — as having said just before his execution by firing squad: 'General Huyser threw the emperor out of the country like a dead mouse.'
Was Huyser sent to organise a coup, or to prevent one? Was his mission a last- ditch effort to save the Shah's regime, or did he indeed throw the unhappy monarch out of the country 'like a dead mouse' in the hope (vain as it turned out) of preserv- ing some kind of working relationship-with the new regime, or at least (which has proved less vain) of enabling the Islamic regime to consolidate itself before com- munists had too much time to exploit the chaos?
The first quasi-authoritative answer to these questions was given by William H. Sullivan, US ambassador in Iran at the time — first in an article in Foreign Policy and soon afterwards in his book Mission to Iran (W. W. Norton & Co, 1981). Sullivan revealed that he himself had concluded, by the time Huyser arrived in Iran, that the victory of Khomeini's revolution was un- avoidable, that neither Bakhtiar nor the armed forces had any chance of stopping it, and that the only hope was 'a rapid reconciliation between the military and the religious, who shared a common antipathy towards communism.' He seems to have regarded the Bakhtiar government as no more than a face-saving device for getting the Shah out of the country. He had no objection to the sending of Huyser, 'a large, rough-hewn man who was complete- ly without guile', who 'had the confidence of most of the senior officers and might be able to assess their attitudes in the current situation'; but 'I was not sure Huyser could do any good by coming to Iran.' Huyser's written instructions, although vaguely worded, 'indicated that one of his tasks would be to assist the military in the difficult psychological task of abandoning their traditional oath to the Shah and transferring their loyalties to the civilian authority of the prime minister.' But his telephone instructions, received daily from Washington, were 'designed to brace the military for a confrontation with the re- volution': something Sullivan regarded as hopelessly unrealistic. On this point a serious difference of opinion developed between Sullivan and Huyser, though their personal relations remained cordial.
That version of events was amplified considerably by Gary Sick, who was the National Security Council staff member dealing with Iran in the White House, in his book All Fall Down (reviewed in the Spectator on 5 October 1985). According to Sick, Huyser's job was `to convey to the top military leaders that the United States regarded it as vital that the Iranian people have a strong and stable government friendly to the United States', to urge them to remain in Iran, and `to offer assurances that the United States would stick with them.' These instructions were temporarily suspended when rumours reached Washington that the Iranian military was about to carry out a coup, but then — after consultation between Carter and his National Security adviser, Zbigniew Brze- zinski — confirmed. In other words, the ambiguity about the US attitude to a possible coup was present from the start. Sick also revealed that. Carter had lost confidence in Sullivan — being persuaded only with difficulty by Cyrus Vance, the secretary of state, that it would be a mistake to remove his ambassador from Iran in the middle of the crisis — and therefore began `to rely primarily on General Huyser's reports'. On the basis of these reports a strategy of 'three sequential options' was worked out. Huyser had the greatest difficulty, Sick adds, 'in getting the various military lead- ers to work together on anything', and his report that the military was deserting at a rate of 500 to 1,000 a day caused gloom in Washington even though he himself mini- mised its importance. However, Brzezinski continued to stress the importance 'of planning to make sure that the military option remained open', if only so that the `credible threat' of a coup could discourage any rash actions 'by Khomeini's suppor- ters' and 'buy time for Bakhtiar to consoli- date his position.' Huyser worked on this, and by the time he left Iran and reported in Washington in early February he felt confi- dent that the officers 'were capable of restoring order at vital points and to use that as a starting point to re-establish a functioning government'. Inevitably this report appeared somewhat optimistic, if not naive, when the armed forces disinte- grated completely a few days later and Khomeini's supporters seized power.
Sick's account was a masterly collation of his own memories with the evidence of others, both oral and written. Huyser's, like Sullivan's, is purely personal, giving his own side of the story. It is rather a pity, therefore, that he has waited so long to publish it. Had it appeared earlier, it would have been a useful extra source for Sick to draw on. Coming now, it seems more like an appendix to Sick than a new work in its own right, since Sick has already incorpo- rated in his own synthesis a good deal of Huyser's point of view, expressed in his reports at the time. Both argue that Sulli- van's attitude to the revolution was unduly defeatist, his hopes of a modus vivendi with a post-revolutionary regime unrealis- tic, his obvious lack of confidence in Bakhtiar to some extent self-fulfilling and contrary to the proclaimed policy of the administration he was supposed to repre- sent. The main difference is that while Sick puts most of the blame on Sullivan perso- nally for ignoring his instructions and improvising an entirely new policy on his own authority, Huyser prefers to empha- sise the contradictory signals coming out of Washington.
He is also, naturally, at pains to defend his own judgments. Whereas Sick accuses him of naive over-confidence in the Iranian chief of staff, General Abbas Gharabaghi — who was eventually to pull the military out of its confrontation with Khomeini, proclaiming its 'neutrality' in the political conflict — Huyser repeatedly stresses his doubts about Gharabaghi, whom he clearly regarded as the weak link in the chain of command. In spite of this, he claims to have 'maintained intact the means by which the Bakhtiar government might have achieved success'. It was, he says, the US government that 'failed to provide the catalyst to ensure that Mr Bakhtiar used that capability'. Each time the armed forces were given 'firm and clear orders' they 'responded as a professionally trained military'. But, for a reason Huyser regards as still unexplained, but which he implies must have been lack of clear and firm US support, `Mr Bakhtiar never chose to use the only effective lever he had to regain control.'
Part of the trouble, Huyser says, was that he himself never met Bakhtiar. He took his brief as being to deal exclusively with the military leadership, leaving the political side to the ambassador. (He was, he says, not given any hint that the real reason for sending him to Iran was that the adminstration had lost confidence in Sulli- van.) Perhaps if he had met Bakhtair he would have understood why Sullivan re- garded the idea of backing him against the revolution as so futile. I myself attended Bakhtiar's last press conference as prime minister, shortly after Khomeini's return to Iran, at a point when the whole country was being swept by Islamic fervour. I was struck — as Sullivan had been three weeks earlier when Bakhtiar was installed in office — by the utter incongruity of this figure who 'spoke exclusively in French . . . dressed in French-tailored clothes . . . had French mannersisms, and . . . even looked like a French country gentleman'. I thought at least, in the circumstances, he might choose to open his press conference with a verse of the Koran. But no, he began with a quotation from Leon Blum. He was (and is) a brave and well-meaning but absurdly conceited man, who perhaps commands some genuine support among Iranians now that the bitter fruits of the revolution have been digested but who, at the time, appeared quite simply irrelevant to what was going on.
Huyser's book is not at this stage likely to persuade many people to revise the opinions they have already reached about what the United States could or should have done, while his indictment of the fragmentation of the executive branch of the US government is by now well-worn conventional wisdom which is not to say that anything at all convincing has been done about it: the fiasco of the attempt by Huyser's mentor, General Haig, to restore the exclusive control of the secretary of state over foreign policy is still well remem- bered, and has left the Reagan administra- tion's policies quite as confused and con- tradictory as those of its much derided predecessor. Iran seems to have a special talent for showing up these defects, illus- trated again recently by the grotesque episode of Mr Robert McFarlane's visit to Tehran.
On the other hand, Huyser's is a first- hand account of a particularly dramatic few weeks, and as such very gripping reading. He recounts events literally day by day, with many verbatim conversations, which leaves one wondering a little uneasily how he managed to recall or reconstruct them in such precise detail: there is no mention of a diary, and indeed the narrative itself makes it pretty clear he could not possibly have had time to keep one. Also, the Iranian generals all emerge as such pathe- tic characters, reduced by the Shah's immi- nent departure to complete panic and consumed by jealousy and suspicion of each other, constantly having to be told by Huyser himself to pull themselves together, that his argument that they could have restored order in the country if only the US had given a clearer political lead is really credible only if one takes that phrase as meaning that Huyser himself had been authorised to stay in Iran and assume direct command; and the political risks involved in that decision would surely have been greater than any US administration in recent history would be prepared to con- template.
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