Attack began. They were over the walls and soon the chain on the main gate was cut. This was filmed by a student. The motor pool was behind the main gates. He right was the chancellor that house the sensitive medications systems. The front doors of the chancellery had been bolted shut. Inside were 45 americans. The marine guards inside fired tear gas to buy time. When it was realized help was not coming, one of the Security Officers tried to persuade students to leave. He was immediately captured. The staff are treated floor by floor. One american who spoke farsi went out. He was immediately threatened with death. The americans surrendered. Just a portion of a canadian documentary which will be seen later today. We want to welcome stuart eizenstat. His new book, president carter the white house years. And john limbert negotiating with iran wrestling with history. We saw a portion of you in that documentary. Explain what happened as he went outside and then were taken hostage. First, thank you for having the program. As they mentioned the documentary, those responsible for our safety, the iranian government, was clear they were not going to do anything. Or could not do anything. When i called over there, i reach the Prime Ministers office. The first thing she said was what about those passwords we sent over . Are the visas ready . They were not going to help. We were on our own. Going out to talk to the crowd was not a smart thing to do. It was one of the least successful negotiations that i had. We did not have a lot of choices. The priority was to make sure no one got hurt. If somebody did, if there had been bloodshed, and i take my hat off to our Marine Security guard, if they had started shooting or somebody has started shooting, things would have ended differently and i probably would not have been here today. Take a step back. The hostage crisis began in november 1979 but the roots extend back before that. You were inside the Carter White House as this unfolded. How you have to go back to 1953, when a popularly elected Prime Minister of iran was deposed in a coup by the cia and British Intelligence because he was going nationalize the oil industry. This young shah was put on his fathers throne. From that time through 1979, the shah was our man in the middle east. He was our principal ally. Republican and democratic president s gave him an open shopping list. By the time we had come into office, almost 11 billion of military aid half of it went to iran. He had some of our most sophisticated planes and arms. He was able work able work a bulwark against the soviet union. He was the principal supplier of oil for israel. He was suave, debonair, beautiful wife, gorgeous palace. He seemed impregnable. No one would have foreseen that what we saw occurring here in november of 1979 would have happened except when the shah was forced to leave. When he was, there was an earlier efforts to get into the embassy in february of 1979, which john will remember. In that instance, i told the leader of the radical revolutionaries the Prime Minister and foreign minister got the police to intervene and take students out of the embassy. This was a repeat later in that same year after circumstances had changed. You have to go back to 1953 to understand the feeling in iran that the shah had been imposed on their country. One last point you cannot say the shah was a typical autocrat. He had a tough Security Service that went after any opposition, but he was a reformer in many ways. He had a white revolution to compete with the red revolution of communism. He empowered women, did not require them to wear the veil, stressed education, try to reform. In a sense, got in front of a very fundamentalist conservative society. He was diagnosed with cancer the late 1970s. In an oral history in 2006, you said the following i was not privy to the exchanges that went on before the shah was admitted to the u. S. Because of his cancer. What i have seen sense is that he said if you do this you are putting all of us in danger. Jimmy carter himself, when he come against his own better judgment, decided to allow the shah to come in, along with his chief of staff and press secretary, said if i do this, what are you going to advise me to do when our embassy is overrun and our people taken hostage . President carter and very smart man president carter, very smart men. He foresaw what was going to happen. Our chief had warned him this would have serious consequences, including the loss of the embassy. Somewhere around october 20, when they made the decision to admit him for medical treatment, we were essentially informed. The message to us was you are expendable. You are out there. Good luck. Do the best you can. Why not have us come back . That is a good question. When i used to teach at the naval academy, my students would ask exactly that same question. It seemed so obvious to them. I have asked people within the administration. As i can piece events together, it was never discussed. Perhaps the reason was cold war calculations. It sounds strange saying this now, but iran was a piece in the cold war game with the soviets. The centerpiece of our policy since the 1940s was to keep the soviets out of iran. The 1953 coup that was just mentioned was justified in washington as an anticommunist step that would not be able to resist communist influence. At that point, the administration looked at it and said, if we leave, we are abandoning 30 years of resist american policy of resistance to the soviets. We are turning over iran to our enemies. I think the problem was the administration thought it could have its cake and eat it too. We can admit the shah and preserve this foothold in iran with its antisoviet goals. Is that a Fair Assessment . It is. In my book i am candid about mistakes. This was the single worst intelligence failure in american history. The cia, which had reinstalled the shah and who was our key ally in the region, did not know for five years he was secretly getting cancer treatments for incurable lymphoma. They did not realize his Domestic Support rested on quicksand. They did not appreciate the leader of the radical revolution in exile the cassettes he was sending back were stirring up fundamentalist revolution. They do not understand the leader himself. They did not understand the domestic politics. It is an unacceptable intelligence failure. In my book, the head of the cia apologized and said we did not give the president the intelligence he needed. Why didnt he then withdraw . In february, when the first assault was made against the embassy, it was repulsed. The government was able to repulse it. There was not an appreciation for the underlying conflict between the prodemocracy nationalists and the fundamentalists. He used john and the hostages as political pawns to solidify his support and push out the democratic nationalists. They resigned after the hostage crisis. Because of opposition to international principles. Why didnt we in february say we had one of these. Lets take everybody out. There were 1000 people on the staff and the ambassador got it down to 70. He reinforced the gates. He put more security in. At the end of the day, we had so many assets in iran. Planes, spare parts, cia opposition to the soviet union and the cold war, and since they had once repulsed students, the feeling was that would happen a second time. In the cold war calculation, we do not want to turn iran over to the soviet union. We have a poll on twitter cspan. Was the iran hostage crisis the main reason why president carter was defeated in 1980 . Join in and participate in the pool and we will have more results later. Let me ask you what it was like for you personally. You were held hostage for just over a year. Where were you held and what was it like . It was not pleasant. On the other hand, we all survived. All of us came out. All of us survived, which is a great tribute to president carter and his patience. He was determined that we were going to stay alive. It did not necessarily have to happen that way. It could have gone in a different direction, very badly. The iranians still repeat a narrative that we were treated well, that we were guests in a hotel. This is absolute nonsense. In the 14 months i was there, i was nine months in solitary, threatened many times. They arranged mock executions for us. They cut us off from news and information. We were held in camino cotto they attempt to convince us we had been forgotten. We had little to communiction with family. We were part of the time in tehran, part of the time after the failed rescue mission in april scattered around the country. We were in a prison in downtown tehran. Very easy to hear the iraqi planes that point attacking tehran. We were held in various places around the city until we were released in january. Our plane took off just 15 or 20 minutes after president carter left office. We will get to that later the program. You met with the current head of iran. What was that like . That was a very strange meeting. He was at the time a second rank cleric. We fell into a iranian host and guest interaction. I do not abuse him. I did not use bad language. It was tempting to do so, but i did not. Instead, my message to him was. Was sir, i know how to be a guest in your culture. You treat a guest in a certain way. I treated him as a guest in my space. I asked him to sit down. I offered him whatever i had. My message to him was, i know how to treat a guest. You do not. What has happened here is absolutely shameful, disgraceful, and violates every tenant not just of religious law, of international law, but of the deepest principles rooted in your culture. The iranians have an expression. You cut off someones head with cotton. That was my purpose. Let me add something to johns moving account and something he would not have known at the time. President carter decided not to use military action at the beginning. I had recommended it along with our National Security advisor, blockade the harbors. He chose instead diplomacy but he passed a clear message to the germans and others that if one hair on the head of any of our hostages was harmed, if there was any torture, if there were show trials in which they were forced to admit some guilt, there would be immediate military action. As a result, there was none. While john and his colleagues were mistreated, the absence of torture, of show trials, came because of that repeated message by president t carter that military action by president carter that military action will result if those actions occur. 40 years since the iran hostage crisis and that is our focus here on cspan. Joining us for the conversation is stuart eizenstat, senior domestic policy advisor to president jimmy carter. He is now the author of the book president carter the white house years. And john limbert his book, negotiating with iran. He served as the political officer in iran. He was held hostage for 441 days. We will go first to mickey from milwaukee. Good morning. To mr limbert i am very sorry about what you went through in iran. Im iranian. It is a sad part of iranian history and our relations. It is widely known amongst iranians that jimmy carters presidency was responsible for the downfall of the shahs regime. The ideas william sullivan, the last ambassador to iran, and his message to the shah that president carter wants you to leave iran. I wanted your opinion on the mistakes of the carter presidency and the price we have been paying for the last 40 years. Thank you for the call. I will have you take that first. I am candid in my book about the mistakes the administration made. Terrible intelligence, muddled messages, differences between the secretary of state and National Security advisor, rogue diplomacy of ambassador osullivan, and much else. It is unfair to suggest that jimmy carter lost iran. The shah lost iran by losing support of his own people. As a result, we have the situation we have today. It is no more fair to say that jimmy carter lost iran that would be to say and i would say this to your viewer that Dwight Eisenhower as president lost cuba when we had a castro communist revolution 90 miles from our shore or that president obama was responsible. There are certain things a superpower 7000 miles away cannot do. The only way the shah could have been saved would have been massive use of military force, which he himself in his own memoirs said a monarch cannot shed the blood of his own countrymen to save his throne or a very clear message from the Carter Administration that the shah should use such force. There was a muddled message in that respect. The bottom line is the shah lost iran, not jimmy carter. There is a picture in your book from september 1977 in the white house. There is teargas that was in the air. You can see the shah is wiping his eyes. Explain this photograph. The first state visit the shah made in the Carter Administration was in november of 1977. In the outdoor welcoming ceremony, there were demonstrations across the south lawn of the white house in the park by iranian students. They were radical students. To disperse the crowd, the National Park service used teargas. The wind blew it into the face of the shah and the president , causing them to tear up. It was the first sign that anybody had that the shah might be in trouble. , time and time again, time and time again, when the immigrations occurred, the president demonstrations occurred, the president supported the shah. He wanted to fire our abbasid or for suggesting we should reach out to khamenei. Carter ordered teargas and other supplies to be given to the shah to put down demonstrations. He constantly and consistently back to the shah but the shah lost support and lost support of much of the military, which was his real all work bulwark. What your viewer said is a common and powerful narrative. Many of my iranian friends believe that the shahs fall was arranged by president carter. I agree with i dont agree with that. I would say to your iranian viewer we did it to ourselves. What you had was middleclass people, middleclass secular people, teachers, doctors, professionals, lawyers all out there marching and calling for an Islamic Republic without knowing what an Islamic Republic would bring them. President carter had gone to iran in late december, early january of 1978 1977, 1978 and made a speech, a toast, and a dinner in which he spoke about iran being an island of stability in a turbulent region. A year later, the shah was gone and iran was in chaos. If i might make one last comment on this from the shahs point of view, and the shah believed what are viewer said. He believed president carter and other western leaders had decided to get rid of him for reasons that he did not know. They were superpowers. They could do what they want. They did not have to tell him. From his point of view, looking at it from his point of view, when he got in trouble in 1978, president carter would not as he went to president carter and said what should i do, president carter said it is his country. He is the king. I cannot tell him what to do. Which is quite correct. From the shahs point of view, for 30 years american president s had told him what to do. Looking at it from his point of view, he said president carter has abandoned me and thrown me under the bus. Joining us from damascus, maryland. I have a quick question because i have to leave for church in about three minutes. I was wondering how the gentleman feels because iran and russia are aligned. This is been historic since kemeny meaning khameni came to power. How do they feel about the fact that President Trump has given away syria to russia and iran . Iran is a factor here as well because iran is not only the worlds worst supporter of terrorism but in syria as well iran is trying to build a Permanent Military base with missiles that would be able to attack israel. Interestingly, the administration, with all of its chest puffing, is pulling out of the middle east and sending the signal to the russians in particular that we do not want these endless wars so we step back from supporting the kurds, who have done so much for us. We are reducing our footprint in iraq and afghanistan. It sends a clear signal to iran and russia, who are filling that vacuum, that it is fair game and the u. S. Is not going to block them. That is what is happening in syria now. Instead of having a proamerican the proamerican kurds, we have the russians and irradiance. Iranians. Walk us through how the initial moments of the event unfolded. You are inside the u. S. Embassy in tehran. You leave the front door. What happened after that for you and your other colleagues . When i went outside to talk to these people, they had me and one of our Security Officers, who was mentioned the documentary. They were in front of the door. They were in front of an iron door, which was the second floor about chancellery to the second floor of the chancery building where both american and iranian staff had taken refuge they put pistols to our heads. And they said, if you dont open this door in five minutes, we are going to shoot these two people. We are going to shoot these two men. Were they bluffing . I dont know. But i have always been gratified we did not call their bluff and find out. Once that happened the embassy would have fallen eventually anyway. When in any embassy, anywhere in the world, it is the host government that is responsible for the security of diplomats. If the case in washington. It is the case in london. It was the case in benghazi. Sometimes governments build their commitments. Obviously in tehran, they did not. The provisional governments, of which six months earlier had thrown out a group of invaders, by the way, who had absolutely left us unarmed, in this case was simply unable to respond. The only one who could have given the order was khomeini, and he was not going to do it. The political environment in the country where senator edward m. Kennedy, was about to challenge president carter where were you involved in iran . I was very much involved. I was involved in trying to develop an Energy Policy because of the cut off of iranian oil. Its very important to understand, the notion that we left the shah to his own devices is not true. We said, you have two options. A military government or a Coalition Government with the Second International front