Role of US Former Pres. Carter Emerging in Illegal Financial Demands on Shah of Iran

Volume XXII, No. 46 Monday, March 15, 2004 Founded in 1972 Produced at least 200 times a year

Exclusive. Analysis. By Alan Peters,1 GIS. Strong intelligence has begun to emerge that US President Jimmy Carter attempted to demand financial favors for his political friends from the Shah of Iran. The rejection of this demand by the Shah could well have led to Pres. Carter’s resolve to remove the Iranian Emperor from office.

The linkage between the destruction of the Shah’s Government — directly attributable to Carter’s actions — and the Iran-Iraq war which cost millions of dead and injured on both sides, and to the subsequent rise of radical Islamist terrorism makes the new information of considerable significance.

Pres. Carter’s anti-Shah feelings appeared to have ignited after he sent a group of several of his friends from his home state, Georgia, to Tehran with an audience arranged with His Majesty directly by the Oval Office and in Carter’s name. At this meeting, as reported by Prime Minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda to some confidantes, these businessmen told the Shah that Pres. Carter wanted a contract. previously awarded to Brown & Root to build a huge port complex at Bandar Mahshahr, to be cancelled and as a personal favor to him to be awarded to the visiting group at 10 percent above the cost quoted by Brown & Root.

The group would then charge the 10 percent as a management fee and supervise the project for Iran, passing the actual construction work back to Brown & Root for implementation, as previously awarded. They insisted that without their management the project would face untold difficulties at the US end and that Pres. Carter was “trying to be helpful”. They told the Shah that in these perilous political times, he should appreciate the favor which Pres. Carter was doing him.

According to Prime Minister Hoveyda, the Georgia visitors left a stunned monarch and his bewildered Prime Minister speechless, other than to later comment among close confidantes about the hypocrisy of the US President, who talked glibly of God and religion but practiced blackmail and extortion through his emissaries.

The multi-billion dollar Bandar Mahshahr project would have made 10 percent “management fee” a huge sum to give away to Pres. Carter’s friends as a favor for unnecessary services. The Shah politely declined the “personal” management request which had been passed on to him. The refusal appeared to earn the Shah the determination of Carter to remove him from office.

Carter subsequently refused to allow tear gas and rubber bullets to be exported to Iran when anti-Shah rioting broke out, nor to allow water cannon vehicles to reach Iran to control such outbreaks, generally instigated out of the Soviet Embassy in Tehran. There was speculation in some Iranian quarters — as well as in some US minds — at the time and later that Carter’s actions were the result of either close ties to, or empathy for, the Soviet Union, which was anxious to break out of the longstanding US-led strategic containment of the USSR, which had prevented the Soviets from reaching the warm waters of the Indian Ocean.

Sensing that Iran’s exports could be blocked by a couple of ships sunk in the Persian Gulf shipping lanes, the Shah planned a port which would have the capacity to handle virtually all of Iran’s sea exports unimpeded.

Contrary to accusations leveled at him about the huge, “megalomaniac” projects like Bandar Mahshahr, these served as a means to provide jobs for a million graduating high school students every year for whom there were no university slots available. Guest workers, mostly from Pakistan and Afghanistan were used to start and expand the projects and Iranians replaced the foreigners as job demand required, while essential infrastructure for Iran was built ahead of schedule.

In late February 2004, Islamic Iran’s Deputy Minister of Economy stated that the country needed $18-billion a year to create one-million jobs and achieve economic prosperity. And at the first job creation conference held in Tehran’s Amir Kabir University, Iran’s Student News Agency estimated the jobless at some three-million. Or a budget figure of $54-billion to deal with the problem.

Thirty years earlier, the Shah had already taken steps to resolve the same challenges, which were lost in the revolution which had been so resolutely supported by Jimmy Carter.

A quarter-century after the toppling of the Shah and his Government by the widespread unrest which had been largely initiated by groups with Soviet funding — but which was, ironically, to bring the mullahs rather than the radical-left to power — Ayatollah Shariatmadari’s warning that the clerics were not equipped to run the country was echoed by the Head of Islamic Iran’s Investment Organization, who said: “We are hardly familiar with the required knowledge concerning the proper use of foreign resources both in State and private sectors, nor how to make the best use of domestic resources.” Not even after 25 years.

Historians and observers still debate Carter’s reasons for his actions during his tenure at the White House, where almost everything, including shutting down satellite surveillance over Cuba at an inappropriate time for the US, seemed to benefit Soviet aims and policies. Some claim he was inept and ignorant, others that he was allowing his liberal leanings to overshadow US national interests.

The British Foreign & Commonwealth Office had enough doubts in this respect, even to the extent of questioning whether Carter was a Russian mole, that they sent around 200 observers to monitor Carter’s 1980 presidential campaign against Ronald Reagan to see if the Soviets would try to “buy” the presidency for Carter.

In the narrow aspect of Carter setting aside international common sense to remove the US’ most powerful ally in the Middle East, this focused change was definitely contrary to US interests and events over the next 25 years proved this.

According to Prime Minister Hoveyda, Jimmy Carter’s next attack on the Shah was a formal country to country demand that the Shah sign a 50-year oil agreement with the US to supply oil at a fixed price of $8 a barrel. No longer couched as a personal request, the Shah was told he should heed the contract proposal if he wished to enjoy continued support from the US. In these perilous, political times which, could become much worse.

Faced with this growing pressure and threat, the monarch still could not believe that Iran, the staunchest US ally in the region, other than Israel, would be discarded or maimed so readily by Carter, expecting he would be prevailed upon by more experienced minds to avoid destabilizing the regional power structure

and tried to explain his position. Firstly, Iran did not have 50-years of proven oil reserves that could be covered by a contract. Secondly, when the petrochemical complex in Bandar Abbas, in the South, was completed a few years later, each barrel of oil would produce $1,000 worth of petrochemicals so it would be treasonous for the Shah to give oil away for only $8.

Apologists, while acknowledging that Carter had caused the destabilization of the monarchy in Iran, claim he was only trying to salvage what he could from a rapidly deteriorating political situation to obtain maximum benefits for the US. But, after the Shah was forced from the throne, Carter’s focused effort to get re- elected via the Iran hostage situation points to less high minded motives.

Rumor has always had it that Carter had tried to negotiate to have the US hostages, held for 444 days by the Islamic Republic which he had helped establish in Iran, released just before the November 1980 election date, but that opposition (Republican) candidate Ronald Reagan had subverted, taken over and blocked the plan. An eye-witness account of the seizure by “students” of the US Embassy on November 4, 1979, in Tehran confirms a different scenario.

The mostly “rent-a-crowd” group of “students” organized to climb the US Embassy walls was spearheaded by a mullah on top of a Volkswagen van, who with a two-way radio in one hand and a bullhorn in the other, controlled the speed of the march on the Embassy according to instructions he received over the radio. He would slow it down, hurry it up and slow it down again in spurts and starts, triggering the curiosity of an educated pro-Khomeini vigilante, who later told the story to a friend in London.

When asked by the vigilante for the reason of this irregular movement, the stressed cleric replied that he had instructions to provide the US Embassy staff with enough time to destroy their most sensitive documents and to give the three most senior US diplomats adequate opportunity to then take refuge at the Islamic Republic Foreign Ministry rather than be taken with the other hostages. Someone at the Embassy was informing the Foreign Ministry as to progress over the telephone and the cleric was being told what to do over his radio.

The vigilante then asked why the Islamic Government would bother to be so accommodating to the Great Satan and was told that the whole operation was planned in advance by Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan’s revolutionary Government with Pres. Carter in return for Carter having helped depose the

Shah and that this was being done to ensure Carter got re-elected. “He helped us, now we help him” was the matter-of-fact comment from the cleric.

In 1978 while the West was deciding to remove His Majesty Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi from the throne, Shariatmadari was telling anyone who would listen not to allow “Ayatollah” Ruhollah Khomeini and his velayat faghih (Islamic jurist) version of Islam to be allowed to govern Iran. Ayatollah Shariatmadari noted: “We mullahs will behave like bickering whores in a brothel if we come to power ... and we have no experience on how to run a modern nation so we will destroy Iran and lose all that has been achieved at such great cost and effort.”2

Pres. Carter reportedly responded that Khomeini was a religious man — as he himself claimed to be — and that he knew how to talk to a man of God, who would live in the holy city of Qom like an Iranian “pope” and act only as an advisor to the secular, popular revolutionary Government of Mehdi Bazargan and his group of anti-Shah executives, some of whom were US-educated and expected to show preferences for US interests.

Carter’s mistaken assessment of Khomeini was encouraged by advisors with a desire to form an Islamic “green belt” to contain atheist Soviet expansion with the religious fervor of Islam. Eventually all 30 of the scenarios on Iran presented to Carter by his intelligence agencies proved wrong, and totally misjudged Khomeini as a person and as a political entity.

Today, Iranian-born, Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, the dominant Shia leader in Iraq faces Shariatmadari’s dilemma and shares the same “quietist” Islamic philosophy of sharia (religious law) guidance rather than direct governing by the clerics themselves. Sistani’s “Khomeini” equivalent, militant Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr, was gunned down in 1999 by then-Iraqi Pres. Saddam Hussein’s forces. Sadr’s son, 30-year-old Muqtada al-Sadr, lacks enough followers or religious seniority/clout to immediately oppose Sistani but has a hard core of violent followers biding their time.

According to all estimates, the young Sadr waits for the June 2004 scheduled handover of power in Iraq, opening the way for serious, militant intervention on his side by Iranian clerics. The Iranian clerical leaders, the successors to Khomeini, see, far more clearly than US leaders and observers, the parallels between 1979-80 and 2004: as a result, they have put far more effort into activities designed to ensure that “Reagan’s successor”, US Pres. George W. Bush, does not win power.

I don't know whether this article is true or not, but Carter wasn't quite as pure as he led the country to believe.

Some tidbits I learned about Carter this year from a few books:

AMERICAN EVITA
(Hillary Clinton’s Path to Power)
Christopher Anderson

Bill Clinton ran Carter’s presidential campaign in Arkansas. Hillary took a leave from the University to become Carter’s deputy campaign director in Indiana. Carter rewarded Hillary for her help in Indiana with an appointment to the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), a federally funded nonprofit organization established by Congress. When asked during her Senate confirmation hearing whether the Rose Law Firm would recuse itself from cases involving organizations that received $$ from the LSC, she would NOT say yes.

While she continued to rack up fees at her Arkansas law firm, Hillary oversaw the LSC budget that swelled from $90m to $321M – money that was used, among other things, to try to defeat California’s tax-cutting Proposition 9, get Medicare to pay for welfare recipient’s sex change operations and support legal efforts in Michigan to give standing Black English (Phonics) as a separately language.

In the final days of the Carter administration, the LSC would frantically dole out $260M in taxpayer funds to keep the money out of the hands of the incoming Republican appointees. The General Accounting office would issue a report on the LSC under Hillary Rodham and conclude that “many of the people associated with it are uniquely reprehensible.”

When Bill was Governor of Arkansas, he was not prepared for Carter’s decision to relocate 20,000 Cuban refugees – primarily mental patients and convicts who had been shipped by Castro to the US, as part of the notorious Mariel boat lift – to Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, for resettlement. A political bombshell was in the making. Furious that they had been betrayed by their friend from Georgia, Hillary urged Bill to call the WH and demand that they rescind the order. The WH refused to rescind it and Bill flew into one of his legendary purple-veined tantrums.

The Real Jimmy Carter
Steven F. Hayward

Carter told his biographer, Douglas Brinkley, that American foreign policy restrictions "did not apply to me." That is, of course, not correct. When he went to the Middle East in 1986, he sent the State Department a false itinerary that omitted mention of his planned trip to Damascus to see Assad.

$$ from Saudi Arabia helped fund Carter's library. It's a matter of public record, but naturally the Old Media types don't think it's important to mention.

Douglas Brinkley wrote that Carter involved himself in fund raising operations for the PLO. Arafat lost millions in support from Arab nations because they did NOT support Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and Arafat did support it. Carter directly appealed to Saudi Arabia to restore funds to the PLO after the Kuwait matter, even as it became evident through Freedom of Information Act requests that Arafat personally ordered the assassination of two American diplomats in 1973. Arafat also sponsored the Black September militants who hijacked and blew up several passenger airliners in the desert that same year. This obviously did not matter to Carter.

Carter injected himself in the Somalia mess during Clinton's term. When the White House nixed Carter's ambition to get involved, Carter simply invited a Somalian delegation representing the wanted warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid to visit him at the Carter Center in Atlanta. Aidid was the warlord US Army Rangers were hunting in 1993 during the Black Hawk Down incident and his goons killed 17 American soldiers. Carter criticized UN attempts to capture Aidid as "regrettable."

Despite opposition in the State Department and National Security Council, Clinton gave Carter permission to negotiate in the Haiti mess in 1994. The only thing Carter was authorized to negotiate was the departure of Cedras from Haiti and how that would come about. Carter immediately began negotiating his own policy when he arrived in Port-au-Prince and drafted an agreement promising the lifting of US trade embargo and made no mention about restoring Aristide.

Carter called CNN and arranged a live p ress conference to give details of the deal before even informing the White House. It infuriated the Clinton administration, naturally, and was against all protocol and policy.

In the matter of Bosnia and ethnic cleansing, Carter complained that the American public was only getting one side of the story and he actually sided with the chief architect of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, Radovan Karadzic. This was too much for even the liberal media and the New Republic editorialized that Carter was a menace, an indecent farce and suggested that a "statue of the vain, meddling, amoral American fool should stand in every ethnically cleansed square."

There is an entire large section of the book about how Carter undermined the Clinton administration in the North Korea matter and we now find ourselves facing a nuclear armed North Korea as a direct result of Carter's intervention and Clinton's inattention to the matter. Carter personally dropped demands that UN inspections resume and that N. Korea surrender its fuel rods. Kim agreed to Carter's proposal, naturally. In addition, Carter never mentioned Kim's human rights violations in the last century. It's an astounding section of the book and condemns Carter in the strongest words possible.

In 1995 Carter phoned Castro which infuriated Clinton and drew an enraged phone call from Gore. Contacting Castro without the approval of the US government was a big no no.

Carter gave four prime time televised speeches to the Cuban people while there and embarrassed both the US government AND Castro ( a double whammy). The details are too long to go into here.

All of the above prompted a Time magazine columnist to write that some of Carter's Lone Ranger work has taken him dangerously close to the neighborhood of what we used to call treason.

Carter also made direct contact with Soviet officials and tried to subvert Reagan's anti-communist policies.

There are numerous instances of when Carter was running for Governor and then President that he used race baiting tactics...on both sides of the fence. At times he seemed to be appealing to racists and at other times he seemed to be calling his opponents racists. There are numerous instances of this from both commercials he ran and flyers he distributed. At the time, he was called the meanest politician in American history. He has since, of course, changed his image with the help of a PR firm.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.