Bungle claim over Iran hostage crisis

Last Saturday morning, around breakfast time, a wild and charming thing happened at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York, which is to New York what the Savoy is to, say, London, the Imperial to Vienna.

A Mrs Shepherd, a lady from Connecticut, was staying at the Waldorf with her husband. They got up, went down to breakfast and then, leaving her husband in the lobby, she went back up to their room. It wasn't there. It had disappeared. She looked at the number on her room key and she padded up and down the corridors. There was no such number! A typical opening to a Hitchcock movie, but Mrs Shepherd didn't think she was in a Hitchcock movie, she thought she was having a breakdown. 

She went down to the lobby to search out her husband – two people couldn’t have a nervous breakdown at the same moment – and then she reconsidered. She said to herself, 'Wait a minute! You're 48 years old, you can read numbers and you can handle this by yourself.' So, she poked around the corridors again till she found the maid carrying the comfortable sound of jangling master keys. The maid knew exactly where 3105, or wherever was, but when they got there, it still wasn't there. They wandered, they peered and, sure enough, there was no such room. 

At this point and not a minute too soon, Mr Shepherd appeared. He had the answer. Overnight the hotel had changed all the room numbers and the telephone numbers that went with them. A little notice to this effect had been slipped under the door of every guest. Some of them, naturally, missed it. Maybe it slid under the carpet. 

What had happened was that the hotel management had planned a masterpiece of technological conversion. The actual numbers on the doors of a thousand rooms and all the telephones were to be changed in a few hours, the wee hours of Saturday morning, through the magical installation of a computerised telephone system at a cost of $2 million. What this system does, what it was meant to do, was to reduce the load on incoming calls, make it possible for guests to dial everything, including overseas calls direct, and it could handle up to 400 wake-up calls in the space of five minutes. The mere press of a button would tell the staff in reception exactly which rooms were occupied, vacant or coming vacant. Marvellous! 

Unfortunately, the system had no sooner been installed than there was a failure in a computer circuit and, as you may know, the trouble with computers is that they don't go dead like a failed light bulb, they go eccentric like a mad mathematician. The system worked all right, in a way. Incoming calls rang in the wrong rooms, there were no outgoing calls at all. Well, it took 11 hours and 1,800 hotel employees – an emergency call to 400 part-timers to help out the regular staff of 1,400 – for them to get everything back to normal, that is, as it had been before the smart-alec computer took over. 

There must be a parable for our times in this but I’m not going to go looking for it. I’m sure I seized on this story because it offered me, and you, the glimpse of an escape-hatch from the American embassy in Tehran in which, as I talk at least, we all seem to be imprisoned. 

It's very rare that an issue as critical as this – what, for once, can truly be called ‘a political crisis’ – it's rare for one to go unresolved for so long. Kennedy's Bay of Pigs was an invasion one day and a fiasco the next. In the Cuban missile crisis, the president had the air force reconnaissance photographs in his hands and within days we seemed to be tottering on the edge of a nuclear war. By the weekend, the Russians had backed down, we sang hosannas and it was all over. 

But I have to say that Americans, of all sorts and every age, have been talking and fretting about the hostages in Tehran for three weeks now and it really is impossible to send a Letter From America which doesn’t carry the Iranian crisis as its burden. 

Last time I stressed, I think, how the American presidential candidates, who are already off paying their precious respects to the farmers and the labour unions and the army veterans and every other special interest, how they seemed, to a man, to be lying doggo – or as we now say 'keeping a low profile' – on the one, big, burning issue of the day. They all redoubled their gaudy promises about ending inflation, producing new forms of energy, cleaning up the cities and the rest of it. They went after all the things on which they find the Carter administration vulnerable. And they seemed to be thanking the Lord that they weren't already in the White House and having to cure the crashing headache of Iran. 

But this has changed, or is changing, thanks to the New York Times which is, at all times, a national institution and, too often for the complacency of the administration in power, a powerful nuisance. It was the Times which first brought to light the surprising fact that the event of 4 November, the seizure of the American embassy by the Ayatollah's revolutionary forces, was not an overnight coup that left us panting, but was something that the administration, its ambassador in Tehran, the government of Mr Bazargan, President Carter and all his close advisers, something they'd all anticipated and feared for months. 

We didn’t know until about 10 days ago that the White House had been pressed insistently by the Rockefeller family and by Dr Kissinger, among others, to let the Shah in, not as a desperately sick man needing medical attention he could get in New York and nowhere else, but as an old friend and ally of the United States who ought to be granted political exile here. We didn’t know that the administration had pondered doing this, that Dr Kissinger, in particular, had been in Mexico seeing the Shah, that the staff of the White House, I mean the top people, like the secretary of state, the secretary of defence, the national security adviser and so on, had been divided, at first, entirely on the question of whether, at last, the Shah ought to find his permanent home in the United States. 

Now I'm not saying, nobody's saying, that the Shah's illness was a ruse, but somewhere along the line of the messages and arguments going between the White House and the acting ambassador, as he is in Tehran, the Shah's sick condition became a powerful pretext. It was none of the administration's doing that the American doctor, who at first diagnosed the Shah's cancer four or five years ago went down from New York to Cuernavaca, looked the Shah over again and came back to say that he was dangerously ill, that the Mexicans could not provide the expert care, the surgery and the follow-up treatment that he needed. It then seemed to President Carter and a consensus of his advisers that it would do no harm and was nothing less than simply compassionate to let the Shah come to New York for the period only of his operation and his convalescence. 

At that point, the president communicated to the Bazargan government, which was the only government in being the United States recognised, that the Shah was coming here for medical treatment only and that he would be required to leave as soon as his condition allowed. That, surely, seemed a fair way out. But when the White House transmitted this decision to the acting ambassador, he, in turn, passed in on to Mr Bazargan and he replied quite firmly that it wouldn't work, that the Ayatollah and the revolutionary council would not accept the medical story. The acting ambassador then warned the White House that the revolutionary forces would almost certainly invade the embassy compound and take its staff hostage. 

While the White House was thinking this over, the Bazargan government said, 'All right, if you’re going to do it, we're pretty sure we can protect your people in the embassy.' This seems, from what we know, to have been the turning point between negotiation and disaster. We don't know whether the acting ambassador or Mr Bazargan got the word to Washington that, on the contrary, they wouldn't be able to protect the embassy. What Mr Bazargan didn't anticipate was his government was doomed the day the Shah arrived in New York and that it collapsed in the very moment of the revolutionists' seizure of the hostages. 

Some time between the warning of the acting ambassador and President Carter's conclusion that the embassy could be made safe, he certainly seems to have had strong misgivings. Faced with the reassurance of his advisers that nothing alarming would happen in Tehran if the Shah came in, he said forlornly, 'and when they take the embassy and hold our people hostage, then what will you advise me?'. 

Well, in the result, the acting ambassador was right and, from a political point of view, Mr Carter's decision was wrong. He couldn't go back on it because, having advertised the Shah's grave condition as the only reason for his entry, he would have seemed an inhumane monster. 

So, now, the recriminations are fulminating. The administration is making Dr Kissinger out to be the villain of the piece. The president’s opponents, in and out of his party, are saying the whole thing was bungled. Nobody that I've heard of suggests for a minute that the Shah should be handed over to the Ayatollah as a criminal. For one thing, the main thing the United States does not have an extradition treaty with Iran. 

And, meanwhile, the Kitty Hawk, the great super aircraft carrier, steams symbolically toward the Gulf. The chiefs of staff have paraded their contingency plans. The president, I think, has seen beyond the embassy incident to the really dreadful possibility of a massive Islam revolt, something stirred by the Ayatollah's willingness to let the rumours stand that it was the Americans who inspired the invasion, the defilement of the mosque, at Mecca. 

In 1095 AD when the Turks seized the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem, it set off a holy war, a series of eight crusades that lasted for 350 years, and now to spread it abroad that the Americans had committed a similar crime at Mecca could be enough at least to arouse a 'Hate America' campaign throughout Islam. Hence, as I speak, the very serious decision to begin to evacuate non-essential diplomats and all other Americans from 10 or more Moslem countries. 

Whatever happens in Tehran, to the Ayatollah and to the Shah, the United States is in for a long feud, at best, with Moslems everywhere. And the only consolation for President Carter is that it makes the electioneering of his presidential opponents seem trivial, even self-serving.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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