Naas understood that Iran’s new prime minister, a secular politician named Mehdi Bazargan, and his key advisers (also secularists for the most part) recognized the potential threats posed by the USSR and Iraq and wanted to retain Iran’s traditional security arrangements with the United States. Of the two, the USSR was deemed the primary menace. Faced with potential aggression from these foes, Bazargan believed that an American presence would deter any adventurism. Naas held a series of discussions with Bazargan and his advisers in which the Iranians made this point “very clear.”6 And in fact, these fears were borne out more than once after the U.S. embassy was captured in November 1979 and the United States was no longer Iran’s ally.
Soon after the embassy takeover in November 1979 the CIA acquired indisputable intelligence that the Soviets were dusting off contingency plans for a military occupation of the northern third of Iran contingent on hostile action by the United States or any other perceived threat to Soviet interests. This was followed by equally convincing intelligence that the Red Army was conducting training maneuvers north of their joint border with Iran. By August 1980 intelligence assessments indicated that the Soviets were training for a large-scale invasion of Iran with the Persian Gulf a potential objective. In a report to the president examining the potential for a political “break-up of Iran,” Brzezinski noted that the United States “can’t really influence the outcome of an Iranian civil war [should one eventuate], while we do know the Soviets have started training for military operations directed at Iran.”7
Nor were U.S. government officials the only ones concerned about a possible Soviet move into Iran. A prominent scholar who had long followed U.S.-Iran relations met with presidential assistant Hedley Donavon in late January 1980 to discuss the same issue. In the meeting Professor James Bill appeared to Donavon to be “extremely apprehensive” regarding Soviet intentions vis-à-vis Iran. Bill expressed concern that the Soviets might use Iran’s support for Islamic resistance fighters in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan as a “provocation” to move into Iran. If the Soviets did move, Bill projected an airborne assault on Iran’s oilfields.8
Following the earlier short-lived embassy takeover in February 1979, the Carter administration had reduced the embassy staff to about sixty, including State officers, the CIA station, military attachés and the MAAG cadre, administrative personnel, and Marine security guards.9 The Marines were to serve in their traditional role of furnishing internal embassy security and protecting classified materials and U.S. government property. External security—the defense of the embassy grounds and compound from intrusion—was a different matter. The guardianship of every American embassy is vested in the host government, usually in police units, military forces, or, in some locales, contracted private security firms. But after 14 February, “security” at the American embassy in Tehran was courtesy of a ratty, unkempt, undisciplined group of Iranian “revolutionaries” who roamed the grounds at will with automatic weapons, making everyone uncomfortable.10 Only at the end of the summer was anything resembling a legitimate guard force placed at the embassy gates. When the demonstrators came to the gates on 4 November, these “guards,” to the surprise of no one in the embassy, melted away into the crowds.
By March 1979 the Tehran station consisted of case officers rotating in and out on a temporary duty (TDY) basis. But NE Division was looking ahead to the time when the station could again be staffed with permanently assigned personnel and functioning as a station should—recruiting agents and collecting intelligence. And that was the state of affairs when I met DC/NE in Langley on that spring day.
The deputy division chief’s decision to assign me to Tehran was, I suppose, a matter of balancing the plusses and minuses. On the positive side of the ledger, my special program had kept my cover clean: I had no visible affiliation with the U.S. government, much less with the Agency or any of its usual cover providers. I did have military service—eight years of active duty with the U.S. Marine Corps—but between those years and my entry on duty with the Agency I had spent five and a half years as a university student. Moreover, it was just eight years since the end of the draft and four years after the conclusion of the Vietnam War, and most male government employees at that time possessed a military background. So this was no reason for a hostile intelligence or security service to suspect automatically that a particular U.S. government official was an intelligence officer.
Second, the nature of my military experience and education weighed in my favor. The majority of my military service was in the aviation community, first as an air traffic controller, and then flying with Marine fighter-attack squadrons, including a Vietnam tour. On leaving active duty in 1974, I returned to academia, earning a B.S. in social sciences from the University of California-Irvine. Next it was off to Claremont for the Ph.D. Thus, at age thirty-two I was not the usual career trainee.
If the positive aspects of my assignment to Tehran were evident, the negatives were at least equally so: I had no actual operational experience in the espionage business; I spoke not a word of Farsi; I knew nothing about either modern Iran or Persian history and had no knowledge of the country’s culture and customs; and I had only limited knowledge about the organization that was sending me overseas. These shortcomings may make my assignment to Tehran seem like an act of madness, but in the weighing at that time, the scales apparently tipped to the positive side. My lack of Farsi was mitigated by my cover assignment as the embassy’s political-military affairs officer. In that position I would be meeting regularly with officials in the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Defense, individuals who usually spoke excellent English. In any case, I was pleased with the assignment and confident that I would accomplish what was expected of me.
Near the end of the FTC, however, the offer of the Tehran assignment was withdrawn. When the acting chief of station (ACOS) was offered an inexperienced first-tour officer, he not unwisely rejected me. His position was that Tehran was a hostile operating environment for intelligence officers and their contacts. As most Iranians considered anyone in the U.S. embassy to be CIA, even innocuous encounters with an American official could imperil an Iranian. For recruited agents (who do the actual spying), discovery by Iranian authorities while meeting clandestinely with a CIA officer was a death sentence.11 The ACOS maintained that our Iranian assets deserved to be handled by experienced officers with proven track records. Further, any operational compromise whatsoever would unquestionably carry severe repercussions for U.S.-Iranian relations, which the Carter administration was striving mightily to preserve and improve. I was offered another station as an alternative. I understood, accepted, and even agreed with the ACOS’s decision at the time; and years later its wisdom is still clear to me.
I graduated from the FTC on 7 June 1979 and was assigned another position in NE Division. But in late June or early July I was again offered Tehran. A permanent COS had finally arrived, and when my candidacy was raised with him, he said yes. Later, he told me that given a choice between a well-trained, aggressive, and smart first-tour officer (all of which he apparently assumed I was, sight unseen) who wanted to be there and a more experienced officer who would rather have been somewhere else, he would take the first-tour officer. I thought then, and have ever since, that the COS made a courageous decision—I probably would have decided differently had I been the chief. He earned my respect even before we met, and it has never waned. He was a professionally demanding boss but also scrupulously fair, possessing the highest standards of personal and professional integrity. I was fortunate to be working for him, especially at the beginning of my career.
I accepted the Tehran assignment on the spot, never giving it a second thought. When I am asked today what in the hell I was thinking when I took that assignment, my answer is simple: that’s where the action was. I was always disappointed that I never made it to Vietnam as an enlisted Marine, and even more so that I couldn’t do more when I was there as a carrier aviator. As the junior officer and least experienced aviator in the squadron, I was not fully combat qualified when we arrived on station and so was limited for some time in the types of missions I could fly. This last circumstance left me perpetually frustrated and, more than a few times, unreasonably angry; Vietnam was to have been my war, probably the only one I would ever experience, and I wanted