Author: terencef

An edited transcript of an interview on NPR’s Here and Now with the host, Robin Young, on January 2, 2020:

The attack on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad this week is serving as a warning about the dangers of shadow diplomacy.

The Washington Post reported this week that Rudy Giuliani was part of a back-channel effort to ease President Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela. President Trump’s personal lawyer was also involved in an effort to interfere in U.S. policy in Ukraine, the subject of the upcoming impeachment trial against the president.

Shadow diplomatic efforts like those orchestrated by Giuliani and others are “not new,” says former New York Times reporter Terence Smith. Smith reported on this in the late 1970s when David Rockefeller, heir to the Standard Oil fortune and chief executive of Chase Bank, tried to convince a reluctant President Jimmy Carter to bring the Shah of Iran – who was deposed in the 1979 revolution – to the U.S.

Nearly 40 years later, the Times’ David Kirkpatrick used Rockefeller’s private minutes to corroborate much of what Smith wrote in a 1981 piece about those puppet masters.

Carter’s decision to bring Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran to the U.S. prompted angry Iranians, who wanted the shah tried for corruption, to attack the U.S. embassy in Tehran – holding 52 hostages for 444 days.

View of a massive demonstration against the Shah of Iran in downtown Tehran, Iran, Oct. 9, 1978. (Michel Lipchitz/AP)
View of a massive demonstration against the Shah of Iran in downtown Tehran, Iran, Oct. 9, 1978. (Michel Lipchitz/AP)
After he was deposed, Mohammad Reza Shah went on an “odyssey,” Smith says, looking for a country that would accept him, his family and small band of supporters. Carter didn’t want to let the shah into the country for a number of reasons, including the fact that he wanted to establish a relationship with Iran’s new leaders.

Carter reluctantly brought the shah to the U.S. because he was told that Mohammad Reza Shah was very sick, and he could only get the treatment he needed in New York. Smith says when he asked Carter in 1981 why he admitted the shah, his answer revealed he was misinformed about the shah’s health.

“He said, ‘Well, I was told that he was close to death and that he … needed to come to New York for medical treatment and that New York was the only place where he could get this,’ ” Smith says.

“I had interviewed Dr. Benjamin Kean, who had examined the Shah and knew firsthand that that was not true,” he adds. “So I said to the president, ‘You know that’s not correct. That he was not at the point of death, and New York was not the only facility that could save him.’ In fact, the work that needed to be done could have been done anywhere, including in Mexico where he was.”

Smith says Carter “insisted vehemently” that he was told this narrative. “And I don’t doubt him for a minute,” he says.

Kirkpatrick’s latest reporting in the Times shows that Carter was in fact misled. But Carter was perhaps oblivious as to who was pulling the strings behind the scenes.

Picture of exiled Muslim leader Ayatollah Khomeini overshadows huge anti-Shah demonstration commemorating 25 years of the monarch’s rule and symbol of his power, Dec. 10, 1978, in Tehran. (Michel Lipchitz/AP)
Picture of exiled Muslim leader Ayatollah Khomeini overshadows huge anti-Shah demonstration commemorating 25 years of the monarch’s rule and symbol of his power, Dec. 10, 1978, in Tehran. (Michel Lipchitz/AP)
Rockefeller, a Republican, and his supporters were working very closely with the presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan – Carter’s opponent in the 1980 election – to ensure the hostages weren’t released until after the election. If they had been set free beforehand, Carter might have won reelection.
“David Rockefeller was a great friend and supporter of the Shah of Iran, along with Henry Kissinger and [former shah attorney] John J. McCloy, and so they had … their own agenda, as you say, their own foreign policy, if you like, which was to persuade President Carter to admit the shah,” Smith says. “And so they mounted quite a campaign to do it.”

Rockefeller was such a staunch supporter of Mohammad Reza Shah because his bank was very profitable with Iran when the shah was in power, Smith says.

“In fact, by 1979, the bank had syndicated more than $1.7 billion in loans for Iranian public projects. And that’s the equivalent of maybe $5.8 [billion] to $6 billion today,” he says. “So as they say in Washington, there was real money involved.”

The attack on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad by an Iran-backed militia is almost a repeat of history, Smith says.

“The outbreak of violence in the U.S. embassy in Baghdad in the last couple of days is so haunting because it’s almost a carbon copy of what happened in Tehran, actually nine months before the hostages were taken, and then again, when the hostages were taken,” he says.

Smith says the difference between what happened in the ‘70s and the shadow diplomacy of today is that Giuliani’s tactics are “much more direct.”

“This is the president’s personal lawyer … Rudy Giuliani taking an active role to try to bring about events that would, he hoped, help President Trump in his reelection and damage his presumed opponent, Joe Biden,” Smith says. “So this, I would argue today, is a much more blatant and out front obvious manipulation by, in this case, the president’s personal lawyer, than what you had before [which] was positively subtle and gentlemanly by comparison.”

Cassady Rosenblum produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Tinku Ray. Samantha Raphelson adapted it for the web.

This segment aired on January 2, 2020.

It is cold comfort, of course, but the murderous assault on The Annapolis Capital’s newsroom on June 28 was a colossal failure for the shooter.
If the shooter’s goal was to silence The Capital’s voice, he obviously failed at that. The paper has not missed an issue.
If he hoped to settle some years-old score, some twisted grievance against a columnist and an editor long gone from the paper, he missed entirely. Both were elsewhere when he attacked the newsroom.
If he thought he could echo the “fake news” and “enemy of the people” accusations that are hurled at President Trump’s rallies, he did not.
If, most importantly, he thought he could isolate the Capital from Annapolis by killing five of its finest people, his attack had exactly the opposite effect.
In fact, the tragedy instead vividly illustrated the extraordinary bond that exists between a community and its newspaper that, in the case of The Capital and Annapolis, has been built up in good times and bad over nearly three centuries.
That bond was expressed in the universal horror among Annapolitans at the first news of the attack, by the poignant candlelit vigil down Main Street the night after the shooting, by the flags at half-staff, by the applause that welcomed the contingent of Capital staffers in the July 4 parade and by the outpouring of sympathy and support that continues every day in every issue of The Capital.
That bond between the community and its newspaper was not nearly so obvious before the shooter acted. (Note: I’m deliberately not using the shooter’s name, lest he get some of the notoriety that he apparently craves.) Like any town and its newspaper, there have been controversies and even angry arguments over specific issues over the years between the Capital and some of its readers. Such battles are inevitable and doubtless will not stop.
But we can now see, from the public reaction to this attack, that the people of Annapolis care deeply about their newspaper and consider it an essential, integral part of the community.
“Journalism Matters” t-shirts dotted the July 4 parade, along with others that read: “Press ON Annapolis, “Annapolis Strong” and “Respect the Locals.” Those sentiments may not be surprising given what has happened, but they were not apparent or so close to the surface before the June 28 attack. The Annapolis public clearly sees the journalists at The Capital as what they are, not “enemies of the people,” but the people themselves.
The question has been raised whether the shooter was motivated or inspired by the hostile anti-media attitudes expressed nationally these days. Only he can answer that definitively, but put me down as skeptical. From everything we have learned about the shooter’s long-standing grudge with the paper, his assault appears to have been a personal act of vengeance rather than a political statement. He was trying to settle a personal score, not make some broader comment about the media. Even in that, he failed.
The true victims, of course, are the five who perished: Gerald Fischman, 61, the editorial page editor; Rob Hiaasen, 59, editor and columnist; John McNamara, 56, sportswriter; Rebecca Smith, 34, sales assistant and Wendi Winters, 65, features writer. And their families. And the two staffers who were injured, but survived.
The people of Annapolis have already shown their appreciation of the victims and will continue do so through the Families Fund that has been established. A fund-raising concert is being planned for later in the summer.
These and other efforts will illustrate again and again the palpable bond between the city and its newspaper that seems stronger than ever after the shooting.

In the end, after two nightmarish days set off by the mad shooting June 28 in the newsroom of the Annapolis Capital, after countless questions in a score of radio and television interviews, after trying to explain the unexplainable, it was the candlelit vigil down Main Street on Friday night that got to me. As a life-long journalist, I am supposed to be detached from the stories I cover, but this one hit my soul.
The vigil marchers were silent as they headed toward Annapolis’ City Dock. The respectful spectators on the sidewalks barely made a sound.
“Honor the journalists,” said one speaker at the rally of the five who died, of the injured and of those that worked tirelessly to put out a fine Friday edition of the paper under the most difficult of circumstances. In the darkness, the audience applauded and the intimate bond between the people of Annapolis and The Annapolis Capital was palpable.
Speaker Mike Busch, the delegate for Annapolis, spoke of his hometown paper — “The Evening Capital,“ he called it, as it once was known. He said he knew four of the five journalists “who were murdered.” “Murdered,” he repeated, “there is no other way to put it.” He was right.
As a guest columnist who has written in this space for the last three-plus years, I am not a member of the Capital staff, nor can I speak for them. But I’d like to think that I am a distant cousin in the Capital family and certainly I am a colleague.
As such, I fielded dozens of requests Thursday and Friday for interviews from near and far. News organizations called me for comment because editor Rick Hutzell and the surviving staff had rightly decided to devote all their energy into putting out their newspaper. “I’ll let my column speak for me,” Rick explained to me in an email Saturday morning. The “speechless,” nearly blank Capital editorial page on Friday was eloquent in its emptiness.
The breadth of national and international interest in the Annapolis story was remarkable. I got requests for comment from all over the United States, from Canada, the U.K., Australia and Brazil. This assault on journalists and journalism resonated far and wide.
As it happened, Jared Ramos’s attack appeared to be an act of personal vengeance, not partisan politics. He seemed to be settling a score against the newspaper, not scoring points in some ideological debate about “fake news.”
The journalists Ramos killed were not “enemies of the people,” they were “the people.” They were people doing a job that is worthy and protected by the first amendment to the constitution.
May they rest in peace.