639. Revolution in Iran: Death in the Desert (Part 4)

12:35Tom Holland:went although mrs satcher didn't want us to go

12:37Dominic Sandbrook:she didn't want us to go and the athletes defied her yeah yeah so there you go and he's also carter here's a bit of irony he's asked congress for massive military aid to pakistan and he's stepped up cia support for the mujahideen in afghanistan yeah these noble fighters for freedom right yeah so this is the era have you seen the bond film the living daylights with timothy dalton yeah they're the heroes of that film one of them is played by art malik and it turns out he went to cambridge or something like that or oxford i can't remember which anyway none of this produces instant results in Iran.

13:11Dominic Sandbrook:And the problem for Carter is he has made the hostage crisis now the absolute kind of fulcrum, the test of his presidency.

13:17Tom Holland:But he couldn't really do anything else, could he? I mean, if you've got, you've had your diplomats kidnapped and they're on national news, I mean, you can't just ignore it and pretend it's not happening.

13:26Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah, I guess so.

13:27Tom Holland:I mean, that's what Kennedy would do, of course.

13:31Dominic Sandbrook:Nothing to see. Yeah. Kennedy would swim back to his hotel, put on a change of clothes.

13:37Tom Holland:Put on a spiffy outfit.

13:39Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah. But Carter has personalised it. He's cancelled all his trips, he's cancelled meetings, he's made a huge hullabaloo of going to prayer meetings and so on. Now at first he thinks, when the Soviets invade Afghanistan, he thinks, well this will actually work out very well for me. Because if there's one thing the Iranians hate as much as Americans, they hate godless Russian communists. So maybe if I take a restrained line towards Tehran, if I don't impose sanctions, which he doesn't, This will do the trick. Basically, the Soviet Union will scare the ayatollahs into my embrace. But the problem is, you know, he's still hoping that they will negotiate.

14:21But it's not clear to him still whom he's meant to be negotiating with.

14:29Dominic Sandbrook:Khomeini, who is the figurehead of the regime, has said explicitly, you know, he won't give up the hostages. We fight against America until death. we shall not stop fighting until we defeat it. I don't know why I've given him that voice, but I have.

14:43Tom Holland:Well, he's cast America as the great Satan. And if you're up against the great Satan, you have to keep fighting it, don't you?

14:48Dominic Sandbrook:No, you can't negotiate with the great Satan. The Americans are hoping that maybe he's just a very loud figurehead. So for example, he's got a new foreign minister at the beginning of 1980 called Sadek Gotbzada. What is it? Gotbzada, Tom. Do you want me to keep saying it? No, you got it. Yeah, I got it. it didn't take a thousand takes honestly so this bloke got pzada was a uh former student activist he'd been kicked out in the 50s he'd gone to georgetown university so he's american educated oh so a hotbed of radicalism he had become very close to hominy in paris he'd been on the flight with him from france and the americans say look at this bloke this bloke we can he's a man we can do business with he's american educated he looks very sort of smart and western and actually they're right, Gaurpzada wants to end the hostage crisis because he thinks, quite rightly, this is a gift to the hardliners.

15:40It's allowing them to kind of set in the regime further and

15:44Dominic Sandbrook:further down the kind of Islamist road.

15:46Tom Holland:So how has this American educated, clean-shaven technocrat come to be the foreign minister who's appointed him?

15:52Dominic Sandbrook:At this point, there is an interim government under a guy called Bani Sadr, who is, again, Again, slightly more technocratic, more moderate. At this point, remember, the regime is not fully established. There's still an awful lot of jostling for position, not least among the different paramilitary groups on the streets. And well, we can get massively bogged down at this point, but it's true of the Iranian regime from 1979 to the present. that there are always factions, different elements within it, reformists, conservatives.

16:27Tom Holland:And that great tension between the structures of democracy and the structures of Khomeini's religious focus rule.

16:35Dominic Sandbrook:Exactly. So on the one hand, you have Khomeini saying, if you oppose the government, because it's a government deriving its authority from the Quran and the Sharia, so if you oppose it, it's a blasphemy against God. And yet, at the same time, you have democratic elections, you know, competitive elections. Anyways. For Westerners, it's a very confusing picture. This spoke, Godbzada, he works on a deal in early 1980 through Argentine, French, Panamanian intermediaries. At one point, amazingly, in February, Carter's chief of staff, a guy from Georgia called Hamilton Jordan, he goes off to Paris to meet this foreign minister and he flies to Paris with a wig and false moustache that have been given him by the CIA.

17:17Tom Holland:It's so brilliant. the CIA have a supply of false wigs and mustaches yeah exactly it's very kind of um the pink panther

17:25Dominic Sandbrook:strikes again or something yes and it's in Paris it's in Paris exactly he gets there he has this meeting I presume he takes the mustache off or the wig off at least at the meeting but actually this doesn't go anywhere and the reason it doesn't go anywhere of course is that Khomeini has no intention of giving up the hostages he's not going to give away this brilliant card that allows him to cement his control over the streets so the weeks go by the breakthrough never comes and you can see the results in jimmy carter's approval rating it had shot up to about 50 at the turn of the year as people rallied around the flag but with every about two weeks or so when they do a new poll it's down another four or five percent and it's dropping all the time so by march it's into the 30s which is very bad for an incumbent president hoping to win re-election presumably this is also because of the recession so the recession is a massive part of this but also a perception I think of weakness a perception that Jimmy Carter at this point has what you might call he's got the basically the opposite of the Midas touch everything he touches crumbles into dust and it's not really his fault no because what credibly can he do again we could spend ages talking about this but I think political leadership is about seizing control of a narrative and appearing to be the master of events and also making the most of crises.

18:41Dominic Sandbrook:I mean, you say, what can he do? Franklin D. Roosevelt was president in the Great Depression, much worse economically than this. And yet he projected an image of vitality and vigor and activism and good cheer that resonated with enough Americans for him to win election after election, even though a lot of what he was doing didn't work out.

19:00Tom Holland:But he didn't have loads of diplomats who were being paraded every day on the TV stations of a

19:06Dominic Sandbrook:very hostile power no he didn't but if you look at um at reagan's time in office for example i mean there was some absolute disasters in reagan's time in office not just things like iran contra or economic you know borrowing loads of money and stuff yeah i suppose there were hostages in lebanon weren't there there were hostages in lebanon there was a massive attack the americans were basically kicked out of lebanon reagan was a you know a brilliant performer who was able to turn circumstances to his advantage carter you know famously looks haggard and gray haggard and gray and he doesn't have that Hollywood sheen.

19:38Dominic Sandbrook:And it may sound like a very trite thing, but as we've said since the very first episodes we ever recorded of this podcast, performance matters enormously for Roman emperors as it did for US presidents. And actually, this perception of weakness, by about March, April, even Carter's allies are really running out of patience. So there's an absolutely damning editorial in the Washington Post at the beginning of April. The Washington Post is much more likely to be pro-Democrat. Iran enough the United States far from earning respect for its restraint and forbearance is increasingly seen as a country that shrinks from asserting what even its enemies recognize as a legitimate interest in protecting its diplomats from a mob so it's interesting in our lifetime most of the discourse about the United States has been that it's much too trigger happy much too swift to intervene militarily to basically launch airstrikes against people and all of this and here Here is an instance where the president is taking deliberately a path of restraint because he thinks it will work better.

20:41Dominic Sandbrook:And he's just getting an absolute kicking from his own media and his own people for doing so. And yet, actually, what people don't know is that inside the White House, Carter and his aides have been actually talking about, you know, taking more serious action all this time. So in the very first week of the crisis, his national security advisor, I know you're a big fan of this guy's name aren't you Tom do you want to say his name for everybody uh Zbigniew Brzezinski yeah Zbigniew Brzezinski he's the hardliner Polish he has said to Carter in the first days of the crisis he said you know the hostages lives are really important but your greater responsibility is to protect the honor and dignity of our country and its foreign policy interests and Brzezinski says to him one day we may have to choose between the hostages and our nation's honour in the world.

21:33Tom Holland:I mean, that is ultimately the policy that the United States will adopt, isn't it, towards hostage taking in the Middle East?

21:39Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah.

21:40Tom Holland:So, I mean, that's why the hostages held by Islamic State were allowed to be killed, because there were no negotiations with them. So I guess it was a lesson learned, maybe. I guess. But, I mean, that's pretty tough for the hostages, right?

21:51Dominic Sandbrook:And also, 52 of them, a lot of hostages taken in one fell swoop. This is slightly different from isolated groups of hostages that have been taken over a longer period of time, I would say. Now, there have always been military options. So a task force within days had begun planning a possible rescue mission. We shall, of course, come back to this. But Carter's team had also discussed mining Iran's harbours, airstrikes against oil refineries, and bombing this gigantic oil complex at Abadan, which is one of the biggest oil complexes in the world. And Carter had actually been very tempted by this.

22:25Dominic Sandbrook:So he's not as weak as he's often painted. But his patrician secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, said this would be very reckless to rush into this because we would lose the moral high ground in the eyes of the world and the Iranians would surely kill the hostages. I mean, they would surely start executions. And even Brzezinski said, yeah, maybe we should give the diplomatic process a bit more time. We shouldn't rush into this. But over time, of course, you know we now we get to march 1980 and they're thinking well we're never going to get these hostages out so on the 22nd of march carter summoned his whole national security team to camp david ironically by helicopter and said they'd sit down and they say well what should we do and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff general jones says okay well this is the plan that we've been working on all this time and the bloke behind this plan is the man who opened this episode, Colonel Charlie Beckwith.

23:21Dominic Sandbrook:He has exactly the kind of resume you would want him to have. He was a former Georgia All-State footballer. He had turned down the Green Bay Packers in order to join the US Army in Korea.

23:33Tom Holland:Dominic, I think that is the most American sentence we've ever had on the rest of this.

23:38Dominic Sandbrook:I think it undoubtedly is. He had commanded a special forces unit in Vietnam, and he'd be hit in the chest and almost killed he'd also this is very pleasing he'd served as an exchange officer with the SAS in Malaya in the 1950s and again he almost died I think this time of disease and he absolutely loved the SAS he liked Britain Tom I'm pleased to say great man and he said um let's have an American the Brits are brilliant at this why don't we have an American SAS mad and he was pestered and pestered in 1977 his bosses gave him the green light to set up Delta Force.

24:14Tom Holland:I mean, that is such a great name for them.

24:17Dominic Sandbrook:It's so good. So Delta Force specialized in counterterrorism and special ops. So they're the sort of people, I know this will mean nothing to you, Tom, but if you play Call of Duty, you're kind of in a Delta Force kind of mindset.

24:32Tom Holland:So it's Delta Force that sprung Maduro out of Venezuela, right?

24:36Dominic Sandbrook:Right. So Delta Force got Maduro out of Venezuela. Delta Force were involved in the capture of Manuel Noriega from Panama. And Delta Force were the people who killed the Islamic state leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. He died like a dog. That was my Donald Trump, by the way, in case you're baffled. Yeah, they killed him as well. So they've got an impressive track record, if you like that kind of thing.

24:59Tom Holland:Donald Trump said that their operation in Caracas was like a movie.

25:05Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah, that's what they specialize in.

25:06Tom Holland:Their kind of operations, they specialize in things that will then become the subjects of movies right exactly and bedquith himself is a very hollywood character

25:14Dominic Sandbrook:he's always got a he's got a crew cut he's always got a cigarette at the corner of his mouth he loves a hard liquor an evening on the hard liquor he doesn't do his paperwork he's a man's man he's chosen them all himself so they're all kind of hard-bitten grim-faced taciturn men who can be relied on quite like me yeah just like you exactly but in 1979 they've never been tested they've never done anything they'd just finished their first major exercise in the forest of georgia when the um iranians seized the u.s embassy and beckwith was very excited when he heard this and he rushed straight back to fort bragg to start planning and his first attempt to plan was i mean even by hollywood standards it was bonkers delta force would be parachuted into an area east of teran near this big sort of highway this motorway we'll land there by parachute we'll hijack some trucks then we'll drive into tehran in these trucks we'll storm the embassy rescue the hostages at this point he said u.s bombers should hit all iran's military bases and oil refineries there'll be complete chaos in tehran and delta force can then fight their way out of tehran and get some more trucks and drive 400 miles to the turkish border hell yeah usa yeah but unfortunately his his bosses don't respond like that they say are you mad driving in here and there hijacking trucks you know that'll never work pen pushing blotter dotters so he goes back to the drawing board and there's a place called the farm of course in northern virginia which is like a cia base and there on the sort of tarmac they laid out the outline of the u.s embassy in tehran with masking tape or engineering tape and they basically did endless drills kind of working their way around the different rooms.

27:01Dominic Sandbrook:So they know the embassy better than their own homes. And they reckon if they can get to the embassy, they can kill the guards and get the hostages out. The question is, how do they get into the centre of Tehran? And this is the solution. It's quite complicated, Tom. There won't be a test. And they actually only did a bit of it, so it doesn't really need to be a test. So this is stage one. Eight marine helicopters will take off from the aircraft carrier NIMIT in the Gulf of Oman. and they'll fly to this salt desert in South Khorasan near the city of Tabas. They'll fly to this desert to a place that they've designated as Desert One.

27:40Dominic Sandbrook:So they land at Desert One and at Desert One, they will rendezvous with some Hercules transport planes, six of them, that have arrived from Egypt. There's helicopters and the aircraft carrier, there's the planes from Egypt, they'll land at this desert and these transport planes will be carrying Delta Force and some US Rangers. so 130 men or so and fuel supplies for the helicopters and at desert one they will refuel the helicopters then the delta force team will get onto the helicopters and they'll fly to desert two which is another desert checkpoint just outside tehran and here a secret cia team which will have been infiltrated into iran earlier will be waiting for them with a load of trucks they will um get in the trucks they'll go into tehran they'll storm the embassy and the iranian foreign ministry because remember three blokes are still in the foreign ministry that's trapped in the dining room of the foreign ministry so they rescue all of them do they contemplate taking i don't know

28:43Tom Holland:the iranian foreign minister as hostage or something no i don't think so that's what i

28:48Dominic Sandbrook:would have done yeah i'm more ruthless than delta force more ruthless clearly so um then they'll go across the street to a football stadium the amjadir football stadium and the u.s helicopters will pick them up from this football stadium and they'll fly them to an air base south of tehran an abandoned air base which in the meantime will have been secured by a team of u.s army rangers and at this airbase south of Tehran they'll be picked up by some more transport planes

29:17Tom Holland:and flown to safety in Egypt what could possibly go wrong I think listeners will have drawn their

29:25Dominic Sandbrook:own conclusions from my outline of the plan which by the way is a very simplified version of the plan it's extremely simplified it's much more complicated in reality I mean it would work in a Tom Cruise film wouldn't it it would but only just but they could be spotted at desert one desert too their trucks could be stopped on the way into tehran they might get delayed capturing the embassy they might struggle to they might not even be able to cross the streets the football stadium if there's a huge crowd there or if there's you know police well the traffic i mean it's terrible all of this and beckwith says it has said to his bosses look i mean you can whinge as much as you like but there is no other plan there is no other plan the hostages aren't getting out by negotiation that's pretty clear and he says do you know what it could work and he has a model in mind which is the israeli raid on entepe in 1976 to remind people about that 102 largely israeli hostages were taken um in an airline hijacking by palestinian and i think west german terrorists and they were flown to uganda to entepe in uganda and people thought it was impossible to get them out and a load of israeli commandos flew 2500 miles stormed the airfield stormed the planes and got almost all of the hostages out alive they were led by uh benjamin netanyahu's brother i think is that right i think so well and um this is the kind of operation you know that gave the israelis in the 70s this sort of reputation for extraordinary kind of um daring and military sort of prowess, a stunning feat.

31:04Dominic Sandbrook:And Carter and his men think, well, if we could do the same, what a brilliant thing this would be for Carter and for the United States. So even though they can all see the risks, they're all very tempted by it. The one person who's not tempted is Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. He says, this is an insane plan. Things are bound to go wrong and some of the hostages are bound to be killed. But Carter likes it and he says, start work on reconnaissance. so that was on the 22nd of march let's move forward a couple of weeks on the 7th of april carter broke off for the i mean it's amazing that he hadn't done this before he broke off diplomatic links with iran on the 9th of april brzezinski his national security advisor sends him a note and says in my view a carefully planned and boldly executed rescue operation represents the only realistic prospect that the hostages any of them will be freed in the foreseeable future And Brzezinski says, we've pursued a policy of restraint, very un-American, for the last few months, and it's got us a lot of understanding and sympathy, but nothing else, and it's time for us to act.

32:10Dominic Sandbrook:So two days after that, Carter convenes his National Security Council. Now, crucially, Cyrus Vance, the one doubter, is away on holiday. He's had this long-postponed holiday in Florida, which has finally gone on, and Carter has the meeting then when Vance is away, and they all agree, let's go with this plan. Vance gets back a couple of days later and he is horrified and he's outraged they've decided behind his back. And he says to Carter, if you do this, there will be huge reprisals against American teachers and businessmen still in Iran and indeed across the Muslim world. I think, by the way, he was probably right that if they had carried this out, this would have happened.

32:47Dominic Sandbrook:But nobody backs Vance up. There's a very embarrassing and excruciating meeting and he's left kind of smouldering. so the next evening is the 16th which is the moment we open the episode with this is Beckwith meeting Jimmy Carter and Beckwith you would think he would absolutely despise Carter as a wimp and a weed and stuff but he clearly doesn't from that account he thinks Carter is great he says in his memoirs Carter was really calm direct forceful he said no no nonsense and Carter said finally okay we'll do this and Beckwith in his memoirs it says I was full of wonderment I was proud to be an American and to have a president do what he'd just done and Carter gives him that last message if if this fails it's on me not on you and you know we don't leave any of our dead behind and Beckwith absolutely loves this this is music to his ears and that's just the meeting breaks up he says unimprovably he says god bless you mr president so everybody's wiping away a manly tear it's great the only person who isn't actually I I say everybody, Cyrus Vance isn't the Secretary of State.

33:53Dominic Sandbrook:He's absolutely furious. And a couple of days afterwards, Carter, this is perhaps the other side of Carter. Carter says, I've got a load of Methodists coming to the White House. I want someone to go and tell them that we're not going to do any military action. Could you do that, please? And Vance says, no, I'm not going to lie to you to a load of Methodists. And Carter's furious. This is the first time the Commander-in-Chief has been disobeyed by one of his subordinates. and then Vance gives him an envelope and it's a handwritten note from his secretary of state like a really important person a handwritten note saying I'm resigning I'm out as soon as that mission finishes I'm going to wait till after the mission but then I'm gone you know a bad blow for the Carter administration anyway we come to the big day Thursday the 24th of April Carter and his aides are in the White House they're pretending that it's just an ordinary day but this is the day that's been chosen.

34:45Dominic Sandbrook:And at 10.30 that morning he gets a call from General Jones. It's night in Iran. The weather is clear. It's all go. The choppers have taken off from the Nymits. Meanwhile in Egypt, Charlie Beckwith's men, Delta Force, are lining up for their final inspection in their airbase hangar. And they're all dressed kind of in plain clothes. They're all wearing jeans and kind of flannel shirts and black jackets. They haven't shaved because they want to blend in on the streets of Tehran. They've written farewell letters to their wives and girlfriends if the worst happens. And now a scene that is so made for Hollywood.

35:20Dominic Sandbrook:In the hangar, their ops officer, who's called Major Jerry Boykin, has put a big sort of photo, a montage of all the hostages' faces. These are the Americans that we are going to get out of Tehran. And Major Boykin gets out the bible and he reads from the first book of Samuel and David put his hand in a bag and took thence a stone and slung it and smoked the Philistine in the forehead so that the stone sunk into his forehead and he fell on his face to the earth so David prevailed over the Philistine with a stone and a sling he finishes and they all bow their heads in prayer and then and then one of them starts singing god bless america and they all join in and the sound kind of echoes around the hangar and it's actually i mean the reason i did this i think is that this is the last scene of the film the deer hunter which had been released just over a year earlier

36:17Tom Holland:and had been a massive hit at the oscars so i mean literally hollywood literally hollywood

36:23Dominic Sandbrook:and then they finish the song dies away and it's time to go operation eagle claw is underway

36:31Tom Holland:goodness me i mean dominic what a pitch for a hollywood thriller we will find out what happens after the break

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38:58Tom Holland:Welcome back to The Rest is History. Massive, massive tension, massive, massive drama brewing because it's the morning of 24th of April, 1980. And in the White House, Jimmy Carter is waiting by his phone for news from Iran.

39:18Dominic Sandbrook:So he knows that about midday, the first helicopter should reach Desert One. And he and his aides are looking at their watches. They're in all these meetings, but they're looking at their watches the whole time. And at lunchtime, he's having a sandwich in the Oval Office. And the Secretary of Defense, who's called Harold Brown, brings the news from Iran. And it's bad news, Tom. So the helicopters have been flying across the desert and they've run into an unexpected sandstorm, like a sort of dust storm, a really bad dust storm.

39:48Tom Holland:I mean, you say unexpected, but I imagine dust storms are pretty common. I think it was bad luck.

39:54Dominic Sandbrook:I think it was genuinely really bad luck though. You know, you could fly across 10 times and there'd be no dust storm, but on the 11th there's a dust storm and this is the 11th time. one of the helicopters has gone down in the dust storm because the dust is so terrible it's kind of got into their rotors or whatever and they've had to abandon this helicopter you know the men have got out and gone into the other helicopters but they've had to abandon it a second helicopter got totally lost in the dust storm and almost crashed into a mountain and has turned back to the gulf of oman but so instead of having um eight helicopters they now have six is that enough to get the hostages that is enough that is just enough now meanwhile charlie beckwith and delta force have landed safely and on time at desert one but here too there are some unexpected hiccups so first of all as they're landing they see two basically two vehicles which are oil tankers driven by iranian smugglers oil smugglers streaking across the desert and the u.s rangers chased after to these oil tankers because they said god we can't allow anyone to have seen us they took one of them out with an anti-tank rocket so the tanker kind of exploded whoa and um i mean that wasn't very discreet because they've blown up a an oil tanker with a kind of missile and the next thing that happens suddenly this bus appears out of the night and the bus is packed with pilgrims most of whom are women oh no and it's overloaded with the pilgrims luggage and the rangers this time they fire at the tires of the bus they disable the bus and they take all these women pilgrims off as prisoners so i mean we're talking about dozens and dozens of people and they're like what are we going to do with all these these women and they put them on one of their transport planes and they say well we'll hold them on this transport plane at desert one till the mission is over so So at midnight local time, they hear sound overhead and it's the helicopters, six of them.

41:55Dominic Sandbrook:And they're more than an hour late. So the helicopters land. And now this sort of patch of desert is very crowded. You've got transport planes. You've got helicopters. You've got all the blokes from Delta Force. You've got a burning wreckage of an oil tanker. You've got a captured bus and a load of captured pilgrims, all packed into this bit of the desert. And Beckwith is horrified when he sees they've only got six helicopters. That's the bare minimum to complete the mission. And they're running out of time. You know, they have to do all this under cover of darkness. So he says to his men, OK, hurry up.

42:27Dominic Sandbrook:Get your gear. Take it from the transports. Load on to the choppers. And then as they're doing that, one of the marine pilots comes up to him and he says, Sir, we have a problem. A pump on one of the helicopters has failed. And they did bring repair equipment with them. But it was in the helicopter they abandoned in the dust storm. Oh, no. suddenly Beckwith has this massive decision to make he could go on with a smaller team in just five helicopters but his written instructions are very clear next to the words less than six hellos is the single word and capital letters abort now he can't make that decision himself the commander in chief has to make it so back at the White House Carter's chief of staff Hamilton Jordan gets a call from his boss.

43:18Dominic Sandbrook:Hamilton Jordan is the bloke who previously was wearing a false moustache and a wig. Yeah, yeah. He's taken that off. Yeah. Not anymore. He's taken it off. And he gets this call. Come to the Oval Office. He goes to the Oval Office. Carter's sitting in there with his head in his hands, devastated. And Carter says, I've just had a call and I've given the order, abort the mission. Carter is absolutely crushed all that tension, all that excitement, but he's aborted the mission. And then he says, well, at least there were no American casualties and no innocent Iranians hurt and then the phone rings and carter picks up the phone and what color there is which isn't much drains from his already haggard features and he just says uh-huh are there any dead and then there's a pause and then he very quietly he says i understand and then he puts down the phone and what's happened what's happened carter's abort order had reached desert one they refueled the helicopters they prepared to abandon ship and move out and then one of the pilots the pilot of the helicopter bluebeard three in the darkness and in the dust as he was moving his helicopter he clipped the wing of one of the transport planes there was this great crack and then basically the helicopter fell out of the sky onto the plane there was a massive explosion and then the flames from that explosion spread to the plane's fuel supply and there was a second explosion like a fireball colossal fireball as the plane blew up amazingly only eight americans were killed five airmen in the transport plane and three in the helicopter and it's a scene of total devastation there's burning wreckage everywhere you know smoldering bits of planes whatever i mean you know it's a it's a shocking scene and understandably all the americans say oh my god we've got to get the hell out of here and they all pile into the remaining transport planes and they take off as quickly as they can can i just ask do they obey carter's orders and bring the bodies back with them because they're burning bodies in the middle wreckage of a

45:28Tom Holland:transport plane right because i have an incredibly vivid memory of there was a magazine called now right it was published by james goldsmith on the cover they had a charred body yeah of an american in the desert and it was really vivid in my memory because it's the first time i'd seen a photograph of a body yeah really shocking image and i was kind of wondering yeah when i read that passage at the beginning was my memory playing tricks but no no no not at all because actually you know they

45:57Dominic Sandbrook:leave behind in the desert you know they've left the smoldering records of the transport and the helicopter with the bodies in them they've left four perfectly good helicopters behind they've left the burning remains of an iranian oil tanker and a bus full of iranian pilgrims who are completely baffled and frightened by what's going on yeah yeah by what's i mean it must have seemed absolutely bizarre to them they're taken prison by the americans who then blow themselves up and then run away yeah i mean that was that's how you perceive it if you're an iranian right and what's worse they've left in the helicopters their mission instructions or the classified instructions.

46:32Tom Holland:Why do they do that?

46:33Dominic Sandbrook:They're leaving in the chaos and panic, right?

46:35Tom Holland:Yeah. They think the SAS would do that.

46:37Dominic Sandbrook:Maybe not. So in the Oval Office, Carter tells his team the news and no one speaks. In fact, the only person who breaks the silence is of all people, Cyrus Vance, who's about to resign, who just says, Mr. President, I'm very, very sorry.

46:52Tom Holland:That's decent of him.

46:53Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah. And there's this sort of funereal mood. Of course, the truth is it was always a massive long shot. And they did a report afterwards to the Pentagon and they said, you know, plans like this, you have to prepare for the worst. And we didn't. We put our men and our machines under intolerable pressure. There was no margin for error. And actually, it turned out that the CIA had predicted, even if you get to Tehran, even if you get to the embassy, probably half the hostages will be killed in the fighting. You'll only get half of them out alive.

47:22Tom Holland:do you think that um there was a sense that this was a kind of hollywood script penned by someone who saw himself as its star i mean i just asked because um what's his name the guy who founded the sas yeah he was very much that kind of figure wasn't he what was he called um david

47:43Dominic Sandbrook:sterling colonel david sterling yeah who um later talked about carrying out a coup in 1975 in britain against the Labour government.

47:50Tom Holland:I just wonder whether the kind of men who have the get up and go and imagination to set up units like this, maybe their imagination can sometimes run away with them.

48:00Dominic Sandbrook:Completely can, but that's how you have this, such a unit in the first place, isn't it? I mean, that's, I would say, an inherent part of the repertoire of such people. Yeah, an occupational hazard of it. Yeah, absolutely. That you have people who are coming up with these, what seem insanely reckless ideas, but you obviously need people to rein them in and say, well, okay, well, let's look at this piece by piece. Is this actually plausible? It's all going to work. Carter and Co. always knew that it was a long shot. I mean, they did it because they thought it's this or nothing. They were right, by the way, if this was the only way that they could plausibly get them out.

48:33Dominic Sandbrook:But the press were completely unforgiving. The New Republic, in a headline, called it the Jimmy Carter Desert Classic. And basically, Carter got all the blame. And everyone said, look at Carter. You know, there was a time when we had the best military in the world. but now when our helicopters are in the air they just crash even when they're on the ground they crash into each other and have to be abandoned and stuff this is what the state that jimmy carter has brought us to which is harsh i agree very unfair in iran the reaction was unbridled delight so there were huge crowds on the streets of tehran khomeini said this is all god's doing you know thanks be to god obviously and um you were talking about seeing the photo on james goldsmith's magazine so khomini's chief justice who was called sadegh kalkali who was nicknamed the hanging judge he went on iranian tv to exhibit these charred remains of the bodies oh my god a blackened forearm with the u.s military watch still on it so he took a ghoulish delight in showing off the bodies that the iranians had found at desert one carter um he was very decent about this he took all the blame on himself as he said he would he wanted to ring all the families personally um but was told not to by the pentagon it broke pentagon protocol the secretary of defense does another president he did fly to delta forces base to meet beckwith and the team a very hollywood scene again there's a lot of sort of manly tears and embracing and stuff and if the american people had seen that maybe they'd have a different view of jimmy carter but as it is they just see this bloke who yet again is coming on tv looking very pained announcing more bad news loser yeah they say he's a loser people just say this bloke is just a born loser seven out of ten people are saying now that it's time for a change carter's not fit to be president all of this kind of stuff so what now for the hostages they were split up and moved to prisons all over tehran and actually they disappear a little bit from the US front pages for most of the rest of 1980.

50:39Dominic Sandbrook:There's still business with the yellow ribbons and people ringing bells and whatnot, but they're not as prominent a story as they were. And obviously they're a reminder of failure and defeat.

50:48Tom Holland:I suppose if they vanish into prison cells, then they're not as visible, are they? They can't be put on television. And it's a bit like the hostage situation in Lebanon in the 80s. You know, if you're not seeing them, you can forget them.

50:59Dominic Sandbrook:Yes, out of sight, out of mind, frankly. But then they returned to the headlines in October and November, not because of anything in Iran, but because of the looming presidential election. So Carter was confirmed as the Democratic candidate. Kennedy had a little bit of a revival after the desert debacle, but it wasn't enough to stop Carter getting the nomination for the Democrats. The Republican side, Reagan is nominated, and he's now trying his best to win over blue-collar Democrats in industrial states. So basically, the kind of people who are like truck drivers or whatever, they listen to jimmy carter's speech about the crisis of confidence they thought he'd gone mad they're cross about their gasoline prices they're very annoyed that people are burning the american flag in the streets of tehran and humiliating the united states and they want a change of leadership so reagan leads in the polls but his lead was much smaller than is often remembered it was only three or four percent or so so carter still had hope and basically the reagan camp's fear is that if Carter can get the hostages back in October or early November, just before the election, that will swing it.

52:05Dominic Sandbrook:The Reagan camp's computers have decided that it would give him a 10 % boost and that would be enough to win the election for Jimmy Carter.

52:14Tom Holland:And so the notion of an October surprise by this point is part of American political discourse, is it?

52:20Dominic Sandbrook:It is, absolutely. So an October surprise coup that will transform the narrative. and the republicans are planting loads of stories about an october surprise actually to try and preempt it and saying oh carter's going to pull out an october surprise you know he's playing politics with the lives of the hostages how cynical all this kind of thing isn't the conspiracy

52:41Tom Holland:theory though that actually it's working the other way around and that it's the republicans who are in contact with the government in tehran to keep the hostages until after the election yeah is that

52:50Dominic Sandbrook:true now some of our american listeners will be waiting excitedly for this for our analysis of this so to explain the thesis is that reagan's campaign manager william casey who ended up running the cia and being involved in iran contra so the iran contra was this is going to be a very simplified version they were secretly selling arms to iran um as a sort of quid pro quo to try and get hostages out of lebanon and they were also channeling the profits from the arms sales to fund the Contra right-wing fighters in Nicaragua, which had been explicitly banned by Congress. So a very complicated and murky story.

53:28Tom Holland:Anyway, we touched on it, didn't we, in our series on Reagan.

53:30Dominic Sandbrook:So Casey was involved in this, and the October surprise conspiracy theory is that actually Casey was involved in dealings with the Iranians long before Iran-Contra. He was secretly meeting them in 1980 in Washington and Madrid, and he basically said to them, don't release the hostages hold on to them until after the election if you hold on to them until after the election the reagan administration will release iran's frozen bank assets and we will organize arms shipments to you via israel so conspiracy theorists i mean proper conspiracy theorists first floated this story in 1980 but then when the iran contra revelations came in the late is people said, well, hold on, maybe these stories are actually true.

54:14Dominic Sandbrook:And both the Senate and the House of Representatives held inquiries into this in the 1990s, and they said, it's actually not true, it's rubbish. And what's more, three different American news outlets, so Newsweek, The New Republic, and The Village Voice, and The Village Voice, you know, anti-establishment, definitely left-leaning. They all investigated this, and they said, it's tosh, actually. There wasn't a deal between Reagan and the Iranians. but it's never gone away there was a book published as recently as 2024 very well reviewed in the guardian among other places by a guy called craig unger an american journalist and he said no no no you know and he found a lot of people who said maybe there was a secret deal the issue is i mean there's one issue about craig unger craig unger specializes in this kind of thing because he wrote a lot about the bushes and the saudi royal family he's written loads about trump being an fsb agent and stuff.

55:08Dominic Sandbrook:Now, he might be right about all of those things, but I always tend to be a little bit sceptical when somebody sees conspiracies everywhere. That's a slight red flag for me. Not for some listeners, I guess. They might say I'm being too sceptical. I think the bigger point is that I think it's irrelevant. I don't think there was any way the Iranians were going to release the hostages before the election, because they have come to see this as a duel between Khomeini and Carter. And there's actually a degree, I think, of the bully about the Iranian regime when it comes to Carter. I mean, the way that Khomeini would taunt him, you know, in interviews and say Carter is weak, he hasn't got the guts to fight us, he hasn't, all this kind of thing.

55:46Dominic Sandbrook:There's a kind of sadistic glee to it. And I just don't see a world in which he would have released those hostages before the election. He didn't want to give Carter the satisfaction.

55:56Tom Holland:But why is he even contemplating releasing them to Reagan? Is he not worried that Reagan will be a much more formidable and hawkish opponent? Why does he want to give Reagan any rocket fuel for his presidency? Wouldn't an impaired, politically damaged Carter winning a second term be better for Iran than Reagan?

56:19Dominic Sandbrook:I don't think the Iranians are thinking that closely about the results of the US presidential election, first of all. But also, they would like to get their$8 billion in banking assets back. So, you know, I mean,$8 billion is a lot of money. Plus, after 1980, when they're fighting the Iran-Iraq war, the possibility of arms shipments becomes very important to them. So I think once the Iran-Iraq war has broken out, when Saddam Hussein has invaded, the Americans are no longer at the forefront of their mind. They probably just want to get this issue done and dusted, I think, and crack on with fighting Saddam.

56:57Dominic Sandbrook:So anyway, let's get to the first weekend in November. So there's four days to go until election day. Carter is still hoping for a last minute offer from the Iranians and actually on the Sunday the elections on Tuesday and on the Sunday he gets one from the Iranian parliament they say Carter's got to cancel all American financial claims against Iran he's got to hand over their frozen assets he's got to hand over the Shah's millions and he must promise never to intervene in Iranian affairs the problem is that this proposed deal is so complicated financially there is no way it'll be done before election day and Carter is gutted and then the next day the Monday the last full day of the campaign that is the day that marks the end of 12 months in captivity for the hostages and Carter's flying back after campaigning in Detroit to Washington and he puts on the TV news on Air Force One on his plane and he is absolutely horrified because all the three American networks ended their big news bulletins with montages of, it's been 12 months for the hostages in captivity.

58:02Dominic Sandbrook:Yellow ribbons and all that. Yellow ribbons, the scenes of them are blindfolded, burning helicopters in the desert. It is the worst possible publicity. And at that point, I think some of his aides thought, we've lost this election, because if that's what everybody's talking about, we're doomed. And they were right, because the next day, the Tuesday, Reagan won by almost 10%. He won 44 states to Carter's six. It was a landslide. And do you know what? This was not the end of Jimmy Carter's personal torment.

58:30Tom Holland:Well, no, because he's still got two months left as president, hasn't he, before Reagan's inaugurated?

58:34Dominic Sandbrook:Right. And his one big dream, you know, Carter has always been obsessed with the hostages. His one thing is, I want to be the president who welcomes them home. I want to get them home. It was the one thing I always wanted. so all through december and january the state department are negotiating this deal with the iranians basically through algeria which is the big intermediary they will hand over eight billion dollars in frozen assets and then when the iranians get the money they'll release these hostages the iranians i mean i think there's no doubt they are toying with carter they are loving every minute of this because they don't sign the deal until the last full day of his presidency Monday the 19th of January.

59:16Dominic Sandbrook:The terms are so complicated the money has to go from the Bank of England to the central bank of Algeria and then Tehran will release the hostages. Now Carter hasn't slept for days he's been in the Oval Office sort of obsessing over all the details of these transactions and he says to his aides the hostages matter more to me than anything. He's not going to have a farewell party in the White House as people normally do there's not going to be a drinks party for all the people who've worked with him, because he is waiting to fly to West Germany to an airbase where the hostages will be brought to go to a US military hospital.

59:51Dominic Sandbrook:And he reckons he can just about get to West Germany, greet the hostages, and then get back to Washington for Reagan's inauguration at midday on the Tuesday. So on Monday, he's sitting there in the Oval Office, waiting for the go-ahead. And then finally, they get news from Tehran. The Iranians have rejected one of the financial documents. of course they have and they're gonna have to start the transfer all over again you can't believe it he's waiting and waiting at two o 'clock in the morning he gets a call from the u.s treasury the iranians have now sent documents their own but they've sent the wrong bank code and the wrong figures i mean of course the iranians are doing this deliberately i think carter's aides are all asleep on the sofa but he's still you know sitting there in his cardigan making notes in his little pad, God hasn't slept for about a week, all of this.

1:00:37Dominic Sandbrook:And finally, he gets the call at 6.30 in the morning. The Bank of England have transferred the money to the Bank of Algeria, and the Algerians have sent word to Tehran, you can release the hostages now. And Carter, you know, it's come too late for him to go and greet them in West Germany, but at least, you know, it's kind of happened under his watch. And he, this is my favourite detail, he says to his aides, ring ronald reagan reagan is staying basically across the streets ready to take over he says ring reagan you know the incoming president will want to know and reagan's aides say oh he's given instructions not to be he's not he's asleep he's not getting up now to take your call he's given instructions not to get up not to be woken until after eight o 'clock carter can't believe this because this is antithetical to his way of of working yeah finally those tennis courts aren't going to book themselves right exactly finally what did reagan say they say hard work never killed anyone but i say why take the chance he gets through to reagan at 8 30 and then my favorite line of this entire iranian revolutionary story carter speaks to reagan for ages and then he puts down the phone and his aides say what are reagan saying he said oh how did it go and carter said well reagan just listened and then when i finished he said what hostages is that carter making a joke or i don't know i think it possibly is carter making a joke and if so hats off to jimmy carter That is a good joke.

1:01:59Dominic Sandbrook:It is a good joke. I mean, if it's Reagan's joke, it's even funnier. Anyway, the inauguration gets underway. Carter is still waiting for news. Ron and Nancy arrive at the White House, and Carter's still waiting. And they say to his aides, the hostages are still not there. They're literally sitting on airport buses. They're not being allowed onto the planes. So he won't get the one thing he wanted, which is the chance as president to announce that they have left Iran. he won't even get that at midday reagan is inaugurated carter standing next to him looks kind of like a ghost he's so tired in tehran the guards on the airport buses get the call basically reagan is in and carter is out and they say fine and they open the doors they rip their blindfolds off the hostages and they push the hostages out and the hostages are herded onto these Air Algeria planes, but there's a crowd there spitting at them and chanting, death to America, as they board the planes.

1:03:02Dominic Sandbrook:So the Iranians had claimed, of course, that they were guests. But I have to say, this is not a great moment in the history of Iranian hospitality. So all of that meant that it was Reagan, not Carter, who got to announce their release. And he did it in the most classic Reagan Hollywood style. He gives the speech at the inauguration lunch. And he ends, he's giving a toast. and he says you can do it Tom because you do a very good Ronald Reagan oh with thanks to almighty

1:03:26Tom Holland:God I have been given a tagline the get-off line everyone wants at the end of a speech some 30 minutes ago the planes burying our prisoners left Iranian airspace and are now

1:03:42Dominic Sandbrook:free of Iran then he raises his champagne glass and everybody cheers it's such a Hollywood moment carter was in his car going to andrews air force base when he got the news he flew eventually to wiesbaden west germany to greet the hostages not as president but as a very exhausted and gaunt ex-president and it was a very poignant scene some of the hostages um of course they're all absolutely traumatized and exhausted some of them were in tears some of them applauded him but actually he'd hoped for this great cathartic moment but some of them actually say why did you let the Shah in? Why didn't you rescue us?

1:04:17Dominic Sandbrook:What was that business about the desert? What's all that about?

1:04:20Tom Holland:I mean, I guess if there's a moral to this whole story, it's don't be kind, right? I mean, don't let dying dictators into your country.

1:04:30Dominic Sandbrook:Jimmy Carter didn't want to let a dictator in, didn't want to let the Shah in.

1:04:34Tom Holland:No, I know he didn't. But he did and everything followed from that, right?

1:04:39Dominic Sandbrook:Well, I mean, we can discuss the lessons in just a sec. What did it all mean the hostages were there for 444 days and i think when you read interviews with them i mean it's the defining moment in their lives and some of them never really recovered i think from the trauma of i mean the terror of being being held in teron and i imagine the physical

1:04:57Tom Holland:treatment as well being beaten up and starved and yeah people playing russian roulette with you or

1:05:05Dominic Sandbrook:whatever taunting you being dragged in front of a crowd blindfolded yeah all of those kinds of things for carter it becomes defining it becomes the moment that taints his presidency forever i think in many ways a much more interesting and and sort of forward-looking presidency than people remember i mean he's a pretty strange character by the standards of presidents jimmy carter but he's trying lots of different things and he's a definite break from the norm

1:05:30Tom Holland:um but the perception of weakness i mean that's how subliminally i remember him as a child who was first becoming aware of the news is i just thought of him as a loser yeah it was exactly for reagan

1:05:42Dominic Sandbrook:and the conservative movement it's a gift actually this whole story because it's um confirms this impression of the 1970s as a decade of humiliation retreat that you know it'll take a bit of hollywood magic uh to restore america's vigor and i think the iranian hostage crisis and the iranian revolution generally really mattered in the american imagination because i think it's always there in the background when other things happen in the 80s and 90s and 2000s. So Iran becomes, in the American imagination, the embodiment of sort of Oriental fanaticism and cruelty. And I think even though people aren't maybe consciously or directly thinking or talking about it, the scar of this is always there in 9-11, in the first Gulf War, in the invasion of Iraq, all of those kinds of things.

1:06:32Dominic Sandbrook:Americans had never thought about the Middle East, I think, before this. This is the point at which sort of Islamic fanatics really start to loom as enemies of the United States. Anyway, we'll end in Tehran. So we left the Iranian Revolution, really our narrative of it, in the end of 79 with Khomeini strengthening his grip. And the hostage crisis allowed him to complete that process. because in the next couple of years, the religious conservatives really took control of Iran. Part of it was that they were able to use anti-Americanism as kind of ideological fuel. They got an arguably an even bigger boost in September 1980 when Saddam Hussein invaded and the Iran-Iraq war started.

1:07:18Tom Holland:But that's a terrible war for Iran, isn't it? And indeed for Iraq.

1:07:21Dominic Sandbrook:It's like the First World War. Human wave attacks, trenches, gas, and it ends in a stalemate. Half a million people kill basically for nothing.

1:07:28Tom Holland:I remember I mentioned this stay in Hamadan in Iran, where I met the old Shah's officer who'd loved disco dancing in Chelsea. But I remember watching if there was a football match on. I think it was a British football match, English football match. and at half time instead of you know pundits coming on and analyzing var or whatever they showed maimed war veterans of that war kind of displaying their you know their injuries and their amputations and things and uh i mean you think i mean if that's if that's what you're getting even in sports programs yeah what a constant trauma yeah the stuff about the sort

1:08:10Dominic Sandbrook:martyrs of the iran iraq war i mean loom so large and certainly for iran sort of iranian sensibility um and left a massive scar i think but but of course what it did just as in the french or the russian revolutions it worked in the hardliners favor because doubters or moderates are seen as unpatriotic and people start to flee the center ground for the extremes and that allowed komeini and well his allies certainly and the more hardline elements to purge the sort of more moderate members of his coalition some of whom were actually executed they shut down dissenting newspapers they executed the more left-wing element of this sort of islamist spectrum and they were able to push through this sort of social and cultural revolution taking schools back into clerical control they nationalized lots of industry they launched all these campaigns against Western values.

1:09:04Tom Holland:Most notably being the obligational women to wear hijab.

1:09:07Dominic Sandbrook:But here's the interesting thing. That thing that we talked about earlier on and we've talked about before, the tension in Iran between the democratic and the Islamist elements was never resolved. So on the one hand, you know, Iran to this day, this sort of repressive autocratic state, but it does have contested elections. you know admittedly you know not everybody's allowed to run but it's not a monolithic autocracy and at the same time women's rights very severely restricted you know what women can wear how they look and so on and yet confusingly iran has more female engineers university educated engineers than any other country per capita in the world so it's a land of contrasts and paradoxes land of

1:09:53Tom Holland:contrast well you mentioned they they also have more gender reassignment operations than anywhere

1:09:58Dominic Sandbrook:else in the world and i guess the question i mean maybe we can talk about this in a bonus episode in more detail is whether it had to work out as it did are there parallel universes in which the iranian revolution turns out differently and i think as with the french and russian revolutions the answer is yes you know the shah could have handled things differently the americans certainly could they could have ditched the shah earlier they could have rushed into a military coup they could have tried to reach out to Khomeini. Maybe he might have behaved differently. I think it's unlikely. The hostage crisis, if that hadn't happened, maybe things would have played out differently on the streets of Tehran.

1:10:32My last thought is, I think it's odd that of the two

1:10:36Dominic Sandbrook:great 20th century revolutions, the Russian revolution is far better known in the West. So Lenin and Stalin are far better known than the Aitala Khomeini. But I would say the Islamic revolution in Iran is much more relevant in the 21st century than the Russian revolution.

1:10:55Tom Holland:Completely.

1:10:56Dominic Sandbrook:Because, I mean, there aren't many communists. You don't meet many communists. And it seems unlikely to me that a major industrialised country will be taken over by a communist coup. But there are a lot of Islamists. What Khomeini pioneered, so that blend of radical modernity and kind of backward-looking conservatism, the blend of religiosity and nationalism as well, actually and his ability to tap people's anxieties remains enormously powerful i would say i mean i

1:11:25Tom Holland:think that appeal to nationalism is a particularly iranian thing the sense iranians have of themselves as belonging to an incredibly ancient civilization because it's true is much more pronounced than it is in most other i think that's true muslim arab countries because iran is the country that doesn't arabize yes unlike egypt or syria or whatever agreed but i think the

1:11:48Dominic Sandbrook:style of politics his style that he pioneered and his ability and don't forget hominy was in many ways a very modern figure with his you know cassettes of his sermons with his message being broadcast from paris all of this kind of thing um and i think that that's been much more influential in the 21st century than anything that the russian communists ever did anyway next time something completely different the fall of carthage exciting hannibal the romans battle of

1:12:19Tom Holland:zama plunging right back in time and it will end with the destruction of the city that was in the opinion of the romans their greatest and most dangerous enemy so that will be the fall

1:12:31Dominic Sandbrook:of carthage good news for estes history club members tom isn't there there is they will get all four episodes of that Carthage series on Monday. And if you want to join them, just sign up at therestishistory.com. It's what Jimmy Carter would have wanted.

1:12:48Tom Holland:Yeah, not sure that's necessarily a commendation. Right.

1:12:53Dominic Sandbrook:Join Jimmy Carter at the Rest Is History Club. Yeah, the whole website would probably crash. And that's harsh because I,

1:13:00Tom Holland:you know, I'm left with a soft spot for Jimmy Carter. A decent man. Yeah, he was in many ways. Apart from getting Cyrus Vance to lie to the Methodists. That was very poor. Yeah. Anyway, on that note, thank you very much for listening. Thank you, Dominic, for a wonderful and timely series. Bye bye.

1:13:18Dominic Sandbrook:Goodbye.

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