Copeland's deep Southern accent spit out the words with a mixture of amazement and disgust. To Copeland and his CIA friends, Carter deserved respect for a first-rate intellect but contempt for his idealism.
"Most of the things that were done [by the United States] about Iran had been on a basis of stark realism, with possibly the exception of letting the Shah down," Copeland said. "There are plenty of forces in the country we could have marshaled. "
"We could have sabotaged [the revolution, but first] we had to establish what the Quakers call "the spirit of the meeting' in the country, where everybody was thinking just one way. The Iranians were really like sheep, as they are now."
Altar of Ideals
But Carter, troubled by the possibility that the Shah would have to launch a bloodbath to retain power, delayed taking decisive action and missed the moment of opportunity, Copeland said. Infuriating the CIA's Old Boys, Carter had sacrificed an ally on the altar of idealism.
"Carter really believed in all the principles that we talk about in the West," Copeland said, shaking his mane of white hair. "As smart as Carter is, he did believe in Mom, apple pie and the corner drug store. And those things that are good in America are good everywhere else."
Veterans of the CIA and Republicans from the Nixon-Ford administrations judged that Carter simply didn't measure up to the demands of a harsh world.
"There were many of us -- myself along with Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, Archie Roosevelt in the CIA at the time -- we believed very strongly that we were showing a kind of weakness, which people in Iran and elsewhere in the world hold in great contempt," Copeland said.
"The fact that we're being pushed around, and being afraid of the Ayatollah Khomeini, so we were going to let a friend down, which was horrifying to us. That's the sort of thing that was frightening to our friends in Saudi Arabia, in Egypt and other places."
But Carter also bent to the moral suasions of the Shah's friends, who argued on humanitarian grounds that the ailing Shah deserved admission to the United States for medical treatment. "Carter, I say, was not a stupid man," Copeland said, adding that Carter had an even worse flaw: "He was a principled man."
So, Carter decided that the moral act was to allow the Shah to enter the United States for treatment, leading to the result Carter had feared: the seizure of the U.S. Embassy.
Frozen Assets
As the crisis dragged on, the Carter administration cranked up the pressure on the Iranians. Along with diplomatic initiatives, Iran's assets were frozen, a move that ironically helped David Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan Bank by preventing the Iranians from cleaning out their funds from the bank's vaults.
In Memoirs, Rockefeller wrote that the Iranian "government did reduce the balances they maintained with us during the second half of 1979, but in reality they had simply returned to their historic level of about $500 million," Rockefeller wrote. "Carter's "freeze' of official Iranian assets protected our position, but no one at Chase played a role in convincing the administration to institute it."
In the weeks that followed the embassy seizure, Copeland said he and his friends turned their attention to figuring a way out of the mess.
"There was very little sympathy for the hostages," Copeland said. "We all have served abroad, served in embassies like that. We got additional pay for danger. I think, for Syria, I got 50 percent extra in salary. So it's a chance you take.
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