"When you join the army, you take a chance of getting in a war and getting shot. If you're in the diplomatic service, you take a chance on having some horror like this descend on you.
"But on the other hand, we did think that there were things we could do to get them out, other than simply letting the Iranians, the students, and the Iranian administration know that they were beating us, Copeland said. "That we could have gotten them out is something that all of us old professionals of the covert action school, we said from the beginning, ˜Why don't they let us do it?'
According to The Game Player, Copeland met his old friend, ex-CIA counter-intelligence chief James Angleton, for lunch. The famed spy hunter "brought to lunch a Mossad chap who confided that his service had identified at least half of the ˜students,' even to the extent of having their home addresses in Tehran, Copeland wrote. "He gave me a rundown on what sort of kids they were. Most of them, he said, were just that, kids.
Periphery Strategy
The Israeli government was another deeply interested player in the Iran crisis. For decades, Israel had cultivated covert ties with the Shah's regime as part of a Periphery Strategy of forming alliances with non-Arab states in the region to prevent Israel's Arab enemies from focusing all their might against Israel.
Though losing an ally when the Shah fell " and offended by the anti-Israeli rhetoric from Khomeini's supporters " Israel began quietly rebuilding relations with the Iranian government.
One of the young Israeli intelligence agents assigned to this task was an Iranian-born Jew named Ari Ben-Menashe, who had immigrated to Israel as a teen-ager and was valuable because he spoke fluent Farsi and still had friends in Iran, some of whom were rising within the new revolutionary bureaucracy.
In his own 1992 memoir, Profits of War, Ben-Menashe said the view of Israel's Likud leaders, including Prime Minister Menachem Begin, was one of contempt for Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s.
"Begin loathed Carter for the peace agreement forced upon him at Camp David, Ben-Menashe wrote. "As Begin saw it, the agreement took away Sinai from Israel, did not create a comprehensive peace, and left the Palestinian issue hanging on Israel's back.
After the Shah fell, Begin grew even more dissatisfied with Carter's handling of the crisis and alarmed over the growing likelihood of an Iraqi attack on Iran's oil-rich Khuzistan province. Israel saw Iraq's Saddam Hussein as a far greater threat to Israel than Iran's Khomeini.
Ben-Menashe wrote that Begin, recognizing the Realpolitik needs of Israel, authorized shipments to Iran of small arms and some spare parts, via South Africa, as early as September 1979.
Taking Sides
After the U.S. hostages were taken in November 1979, the Israelis came to agree with Copeland's hard-headed skepticism about Carter's approach to the hostage issue, Ben- Menashe wrote. Even though Copeland was generally regarded as a CIA "Arabist who had opposed Israeli interests in the past, he was admired for his analytical skills, Ben-Menashe wrote.
"A meeting between Miles Copeland and Israeli intelligence officers was held at a Georgetown house in Washington, D.C., Ben-Menashe wrote. "The Israelis were happy to deal with any initiative but Carter's.
"David Kimche, chief of Tevel, the foreign relations unit of Mossad, was the senior Israeli at the meeting. " The Israelis and the Copeland group came up with a two-pronged plan to use quiet diplomacy with the Iranians and to draw up a scheme for military action against Iran that would not jeopardize the lives of the hostages.
In late February 1980, Seyeed Mehdi Kashani, an Iranian emissary, arrived in Israel to discuss Iran's growing desperation for spare parts for its U.S.-supplied air force, Ben-Menashe wrote.
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