| by Barry Lando
( October 4, 2012, London, Sri
Lanka Guardian) A U.S. administration is accused of not increasing security at
a sensitive diplomatic outpost in the Middle East, despite warnings from its
own intelligence agencies. The results are catastrophic.
We’re talking not just about
Libya today---but Iran 30 years ago—when 52 Americans were held hostage for 444
days.
According to several top secret
U.S. government documents, which we revealed on 60 Minutes on March 2,1980, the administration of Jimmy
Carter failed to heed warnings from top Iranian officials and its own diplomats
about the dangers if the U.S. were to admit the deposed Shah of Iran to the
United States.
On November 4, 1979, several
hundred radical Iranians, outraged at the U.S. decision to admit the Shah they
detested to New York for medical treatment, stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran,
overwhelmed the security guards, and took the American diplomats hostage.
It looked as if the Carter
administration was innocent, overwhelmed by events: they had simply extended a humanitarian hand
to a former ally who suddenly and desperately needed medical treatment.
It later turned out that the
taking of the embassy was far from spontaneous. On the other hand, as we
discovered, U.S. government planning for the Shah to come to the U.S. had begun
months before, and had continued despite ample warning of looming disaster.
Ironically, chapter and verse of
those warnings were provided by files seized during the embassy takeover. As
the mobs surged through the gates, officials inside frantically shredded
thousands of documents. The hostage-takers, however, turned over that supposedly
illegible mountain of debris to an army of local Iranians—many of them
supposedly skilled weavers. After months of effort, they painstakingly pieced
hundreds of documents back together. They were then published and put on sale
–outside the American Embassy itself, for instance, where we picked up a
copy.
Among that trove was a State
Department document classified “secret sensitive.” written in August 1979 and
titled “Planning for the Shah to come to the U.S.” That was three months before
the Shah’s arrival in New York. It said that once Khomeini is firmly
established “it seems appropriate to admit the Shah to the United States.”
The discussion between officials
in Washington and Tehran continued. In September, 1979, the embassy’s charge
d’affaires, warned that the Shah’s coming to the U.S. could spell trouble to
the embassy. “I doubt that the Shah
being ill, would have much ameliorating effect on the degree of reaction here.”
About that reaction, a State
Department report specifically warned of “the danger of hostages being taken”
and advised “When the decision is made to admit the Shah, we should quietly
assign additional American security guards to the embassy, to provide
protection to key personnel until the danger period is considered over.”
Despite that warning, Henry
Precht then head of the Iranian Desk at the State Department, admitted to us
that, “those guards were never provided.”
The Carter administration
attempted to defend itself by claiming that Iranian officials had assured them
that, if the Shah were to come to the United States, the Iranians would still
protect the embassy.
But Ibrahim Yazdi, Iran’s former
Foreign Minister, gave us a different story. He told us that he was officially
informed by the U.S. only 24 hours before the arrival of the Shah in New York.
Yazdi said that he then warned
the State Department, “You are playing with fire. There will be a very drastic
reaction.”
When President Carter asked then
Secretary of State Cyrus Vance if the embassy could be protected, Vance later
told Mike Wallace, “We said that we could. But we didn’t.”
 A U.S. administration is accused of not increasing security at a sen...){kind=link}