This Is What the Deep State Actually Looks Like

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

31 December 19

The story of Jimmy Carter's administration and the shah of Iran tells us a whole lot about American meddling overseas and overseas meddling in America. So does Ronald Reagan's role.

t has become necessary for us all to background ourselves in the history of how the bad actors of many lands conspire with the bad actors of this one for the purposes of ratfcking presidential elections. Everyone now seems familiar with how Richard Nixon and Claire Chennault combined to monkey-wrench the Paris Peace Talks in order to install History’s Yard Waste in 1968. But this week, on what we’ve come to know these days as WTF Sunday, The New York Times drew a very clear picture of another, more recent, episode, this one involving the campaign of another departed Republican demigod.

This is a story that almost everyone believed at the time, that a lot of people still believe, but which it was decided long ago no one should care about because that would be divisive and scare the children.

The shah sought refuge in America. But President Jimmy Carter, hoping to forge ties to the new government rising out of the chaos and concerned about the security of the United States Embassy in Tehran, refused him entry for the first 10 months of his exile. Even then, the White House only begrudgingly let him in for medical treatment. Now, a newly disclosed secret history from the offices of Mr. Rockefeller shows in vivid detail how Chase Manhattan Bank and its well-connected chairman worked behind the scenes to persuade the Carter administration to admit the shah, one of the bank’s most profitable clients.

At which point, of course, Iran exploded. Students took over the American embassy and held hostages for over a year. Ted Koppel got a new job and President Jimmy Carter pretty much lost his.

Mr. Rockefeller’s team called the campaign Project Eagle, after the code name used for the shah. Exploiting clubby networks of power stretching deep into the White House, Mr. Rockefeller mobilized a phalanx of elder statesmen. They included Henry A. Kissinger, the former secretary of state and the chairman of a Chase advisory board; John J. McCloy, the former commissioner of occupied Germany after World War II and an adviser to eight presidents as well as a future Chase chairman; a Chase executive and former C.I.A. agent, Archibald B. Roosevelt Jr., whose cousin, the C.I.A. agent Kermit Roosevelt Jr., had orchestrated a 1953 coup to keep the shah in power; and Richard M. Helms, a former director of the C.I.A. and former ambassador to Iran.

Hey, White House. That right there is the deep state at work.

This always was the original stupidity at the heart of over 40 years of poisonous relations between this country and Iran. (The 1953 coup that brought down the Mossadegh government in favor of bringing the shah to power was not stupidity. It was the calculated logic of imperium, which is not the same thing.) The documents examined by the Times for this report clearly indicate that the Carter Administration knew good and well that admitting the shah was the equivalent of lighting a fuse. But, like LBJ folding on Vietnam to the Harvard alumni association in his administration, Carter couldn’t or wouldn’t stand up against this gathering of the foreign policy Ents that came loping up the driveway of the White House. So the shah came to America and everything went to hell.

But the tastiest morsel of history in this story comes along a little later.

The hostage crisis doomed Mr. Carter’s presidency. And the team around Mr. Rockefeller, a lifelong Republican with a dim view of Mr. Carter’s dovish foreign policy, collaborated closely with the Reagan campaign in its efforts to pre-empt and discourage what it derisively labeled an “October surprise” — a pre-election release of the American hostages, the papers show. The Chase team helped the Reagan campaign gather and spread rumors about possible payoffs to win the release, a propaganda effort that Carter administration officials have said impeded talks to free the captives.

“I had given my all” to thwarting any effort by the Carter officials “to pull off the long-suspected ‘October surprise,’” Mr. Reed wrote in a letter to his family after the election, apparently referring to the Chase effort to track and discourage a hostage release deal. He was later named Mr. Reagan’s ambassador to Morocco. Mr. Rockefeller then personally lobbied the incoming administration to ensure that its Iran policies protected the bank’s financial interests. The records indicate that Mr. Rockefeller hoped for the restoration of a version of the deposed government.

Jesus H. Christ on the Love Boat, we’re back to this again. I spent a week in D.C, in 1981, covering the Reagan inauguration for the Boston Phoenix, and I can tell you that it was believed by almost everyone that the Reagan campaign had arranged something with someone that would keep the hostages in custody until after that fall’s election.

(The Reagan people tried to run the riff that Reagan’s election had scared the Iranians into releasing the hostages. The Iran-Contra scandal took care of that fantasy, but that was five years later.)

Later, of course, in 1991, a former national-security official named Gary Sick wrote an op-ed in the NYT that argued for the existence of a secret deal between the Reagan campaign and the Iranian government. If Iran held onto the hostages until after the election, and if Carter lost the election, the Reagan emissaries promised to unfreeze Iranian assets and supply Iran with military hardware for its war with Iraq. The hostages stayed in custody. Later, those assets were unfrozen and Iran got its weaponry. These transactions were treated as coincidental, and most of the foreign-policy community actually pretended to swallow that fairytale.

Sick’s accusations were at first ridiculed as a conspiracy theory, and then they fell into that Washington netherworld of things that people believe but choose to ignore. Two congressional investigations ended inconclusively and, with the arrival of the Clinton Administration, the establishment’s taste for pursuing Reagan-era crimes, which never was very great, dissipated entirely. And come now these documents that present compelling evidence, as if any more was needed, that American meddling overseas and overseas meddling in America are quids to match quos, and always have been.