When the Shah's medical condition took a turn for the worse in October, Carter relented and agreed to let the Shah fly to New York for emergency treatment. Celebrating Carter's reversal, Rockefeller's aide Joseph Reed wrote in a memo, "our ˜mission impossible' is completed. " My applause is like thunder.
When the Shah arrived in New York on Oct. 23, 1979, Reed checked the Shah into New York Hospital under a pseudonym, "David Newsome, a play on the name of Carter's undersecretary of state for political affairs, David Newsom.
Embassy Crisis
The arrival of the Shah in New York led to renewed demands from Iran's new government that the Shah be returned to stand trial.
In Tehran, on Nov. 4, 1979, students and other radicals gathered at the university, called by their leaders to what was described as an important meeting, according to one of the participants whom I interviewed years later.
The students gathered in a classroom which had three blackboards turned toward the wall. A speaker told the students that they were about to undertake a mission supported by Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran's spiritual leader and the de facto head of the government.
"They said it would be dangerous and that anyone who didn't want to take part could leave now, the Iranian told me. "But no one left. Then, they turned around the blackboards. There were three buildings drawn on the blackboards. They were the buildings of the U.S. embassy.
The Iranian said the target of the raid was not the embassy personnel, but rather the embassy's intelligence documents.
"We had believed that the U.S. government had been manipulating affairs inside Iran and we wanted to prove it, he said. "We thought if we could get into the embassy, we could get the documents that would prove this. We hadn't thought about the hostages.
"We all went to the embassy. We had wire cutters to cut through the fence. We started climbing over the fences. We had expected more resistance. When we got inside, we saw the Americans running and we chased them.
Marine guards set off tear gas in a futile attempt to control the mob, but held their fire to avoid bloodshed. Other embassy personnel hastily shredded classified documents, although there wasn't time to destroy many of the secret papers. The militant students found themselves in control not only of the embassy and hundreds of sensitive U.S. cables, but dozens of American hostages as well.
An international crisis had begun, a hinge that would swing open unexpected doors for both American and Iranian history.
Hidden Compartments
David Rockefeller denied that his campaign to gain the Shah's admittance to the United States had provoked the crisis, arguing that he was simply filling a vacuum created when the Carter administration balked at doing the right thing.
"Despite the insistence of journalists and revisionist historians, there was never a ˜Rockefeller-Kissinger behind-the-scenes campaign' that placed ˜relentless pressure' on the Carter administration to have the Shah admitted to the United States regardless of the consequences, Rockefeller wrote in Memoirs.
"In fact, it would be more accurate to say that for many months we were the unwilling surrogates for a government that had failed to accept its full responsibilities.
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