All Fall Down

By Gary G. Sick. New York: Random House, 1985. 366 pp. $19.95.

Reviewed by Andrew I. Killgore

U.S. Navy Officer Gary Sick had the best seat in the house from which to observe the political cataclysm in Iran which ousted Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlevi from his Peacock Throne and saw 50 American diplomats held hostage for 444 days at the American Embassy in Tehran. Working under President Carter's National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, Sick was immersed for three exhausting years in Iranian affairs.

All Fall Down is an honest man's account of those years, and the best exposition of that period to emerge from Washington. Nevertheless, although Sick's descriptions of interminable meetings on Iranian developments accurately convey the often sweaty reality of diplomacy and wheel-spinning inside the U.S. Government, those portions of his book might have been shortened with no loss to the general reader.

When Sick became an N.S.C. staffer in early 1977, Iran was headed unavoidably towards tragedy. The United States itself had already taken actions that doomed the monarchy. Viewed in this light, frantic efforts over three years by the White House, State Department and Embassy officials to save the Shah were so much ineffectual thrashing about.

The sorry story had begun in 1953. A nationalist upsurge threw out a weakling Shah. The C.I.A. set him back on the throne. The Shah ousted the landlord class. Much praised as land reform in the U.S., it nevertheless wrecked Iranian agriculture. About 1968 our Embassy stopped talking to the opposition. We listened only to the Shah. In May 1972 President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger gave carte blanche to the Shah to purchase any U.S. arms, save nuclear weapons. The disaster clock was ticking.

It is not merely that Sick, other White House and nearly all State Department officials were ignorant about Iran. Under the see, hear and report-no-evil guidelines, it was impossible for American officials to see behind the glitter of the royal court. Sick describes an environment of uncertainty where bureaucratic infighting flourished: White House versus State Department versus U.S. Embassy in Tehran; Brzezinski against Secretary of State Cyrus Vance; and everybody at one time or another against the purblindly optimistic Ambassador William Sullivan in Tehran. Vance casts an almost invisible shadow in All Fall Down. Brzezinski comes across as determinedly pursuing his own private diplomacy via Iranian Ambassador to Washington Ardeshir Zahedeh, a smoothly sociable son-in-law of the Shah.

Gary Sick sees that we ourselves had broken the Iranian Humpty-Dumpty, and that it could not be put back together again.

Another searing insight is his perception that Henry Kissinger threw away what lawyers would call "the last clear chance" to avoid tragedy in Iran. Kissinger's misbegotten decision to sell the Shah unlimited quantities of military equipment sealed the Iranian monarch's fate, and Kissinger's gag order to U.S. officials stopped criticism of the decision. In the "drunken sailor" spree that followed, up to $25 billion was expended on U.S. arms alone. The Shah talked grandly of an Empire that would excel that of King Cyrus the Great.

Sick correctly sees Kissinger's strange action—subordinating U.S. security decision making in the Persian Gulf to the person of the Shah—as "unprecedented, excessive and ultimately inexplicable." The first two it certainly was; but the "inexplicable" in fact resulted from Kissinger's zealousness on Israel's behalf. Indeed, Sick's failure to divine and examine the motives behind the Secretary of State's action is the real disappointment of All Fall Down.

The second volume of Henry Kissinger's memoirs of the Nixon era, Years of Upheaval, makes it clear that Kissinger made no decisions in the Middle East without Israel in mind. Kissinger used historic Persian-Arab antipathy, and the Shah's growing megalomania, to fashion the second half of a military pincer to squeeze the Arabs between a heavily-armed Israel and a similarly-armed Iran. The scheme failed because Iran's ramshackle economy and equally feeble political system collapsed under the burden.

Gary Sick might have dwelt more on corruption of the Iranian royal family, the human rights violations of SAVAK ("The Organization" was the dread appellation used by Iranians), and on our own role in fostering the Shah's grandiose visions. This would have put the fury of the Iranian mobs against the United States into a more understandable perspective for those who watched it displayed daily on U.S. television during the 15 months our Tehran Embassy staff was held hostage. Nevertheless, this former U.S. Naval Captain, who since leaving the N.S.C. has been teaching at Columbia University and working on U.S. foreign policy programs for the Ford Foundation, has written a "must" book for anyone seriously interested in Middle East affairs.