Freeing the hostages: The Carter administration, the Soviet Union and revolutionary Iran, 1979-1981

This study is an examination of the efforts made by the Carter administration to free American hostages held in Iran from November 4, 1979 to January 20, 1989, as well as Soviet behavior during the same period. Featuring the development and application of a framework for analyzing negotiations, the study is based primarily on interviews with high-level officials in the Carter administration and a survey of the Soviet media in an effort to determine how decision-makers define and seek to alter the negotiating environment, as well as how they construct and advance formulae for resolving disputes. The major findings of the study are: (1) The Carter administration's obsession with releasing the hostages, rather than supplementing US objectives in the Middle East, actually worked to supplant them. Meanwhile, the Soviet leadership was remarkably restrained and appears to have been both divided and bewildered by the hostage crisis. (2) Definitions of the general and specific aspects of the hostage crisis differed across actors and agencies in the Carter administration but were neither detailed enough to identify the precise nature of factional infighting within the Iranian leadership nor did they compel a shift in operating assumptions. (3) US officials did not fully comprehend the definition of the situation held by Ayatollah Khomeini and therefore did not understand that efforts to compel him through traditional diplomacy and coercion would fail. (4) Affecting the decisions of another government may lie less in the pressure one is willing to bring upon that leadership than the ability to generate a consensus in the other government for a political settlement of the issues in dispute. (5) Altering the negotiating environment to produce convergence around a favored formula must recognize that certain formulae may also affect the negotiating environment. Those formulae most likely to affect that environment in the desired direction proceed from a clear understanding of the other's definition of the situation. The Carter administration's unwillingness to seriously consider the issuance of a public apology to Iran illustrates its inability to understand this critical point.