A Very Different 1980s - a Vignette

Arguably, the events that caused some of the most dramatic events of the last thirty years can be traced back to the American & British-backed coup d’état that took place in Iran in 1953. That disastrous action would have consequences beyond comprehension. Perhaps if there had been no intervention in Iran all those years ago, things would have been very different.

We shall never know.

In the autumn of 1979, massive protests against the regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi broke out as thousands of students took to the streets to oppose his actions. The Shah ruled with an iron fist, cracking down on dissent ruthlessly with his Savak secret police. A campaign of torture and politically-motivated murder took place across the country as the Shah sought to put down the revolution. All of his efforts would fail as the revolutionaries gained control of Iran’s institutions, surrounding the American embassy on November 1st and storming the building four days later. Fifty-two American embassy workers, including civilians, CIA personnel and military attaches, were taken hostage. The armed students – in the service of the Ayatollah’s who now ruled the Islamic Republic of Iran – demanded that Sha Pahlavi be extradited back to Iranian custody to face justice for his actions. These events were nothing short of an absolute disaster for the failing presidency of Jimmy Carter, who sought desperately to resolve the crisis peacefully. Carter had an election coming up though, and if he had any chance of winning he had to bring those hostages home through military force. The US Armed Forces had been planning a rescue attempt since the beginning of the hostage crisis, and although all options were risky, the Pentagon believed it had a plan that would work. President Carter was reluctant to take military action, but found himself with little choice to do so.

Operation EAGLE CLAW was authorised and took place on the 24th April 1980. It was a disaster on a scale that arguably outweighed Vietnam. Over two hundred Delta Force commandos managed to infiltrate Tehran in trucks acquired by a Special Forces team that was already in Iran. They successfully stormed the embassy, killing all of the hostage takers and rescuing forty-eight of the fifty-two hostages, albeit with several casualties amongst the assault team. The freed hostages and their rescuers moved to a sports stadium across the road from the embassy grounds, and began taking fire from arriving Iranian Revolutionary Guard troops. The initial Iranian attacks were held off, but calamity struck when a pair of the US Navy helicopters sent to retrieve the commandos and hostages were shot down as it approached the stadium by surface-to-air missiles. With Iranian air defences far heavier than expected, the US Military failed to bring in aircraft to extract the Americans trapped in the heart of Tehran. American warplanes bombarded Tehran from the air, but they couldn’t halt the ground assault and there was no means of rescuing the American personnel below. The troops in Tehran fought their way back to the embassy with the hostages in tow, choosing to take a stand there in the vain hope that they could inflict enough casualties to make the Iranians back off; this plan was never going to work. Of all the hostages and Delta Force operators, less than twenty managed to escape and evade their way to the safety of the Turkish border. Many more killed or captured.

President Carter had no choice but to authorise an invasion of Iran after the deaths of so many American soldiers and civilians, many of whom had been publicly tried and executed after being captured alive. US Air Force B-52 bombers pounded targets across Iran, causing massive economic damage. The eruption of full-scale war in the Persian Gulf caused oil prices to sky-rocket, thus providing a dramatic lift to the Soviet economy. American Marines and Army paratroopers landed at Chah Bahar and Bandar Abbas respectively. Ground forces slated as reinforcements for NATO during wartime under the III Armored Corps and the XVIII Airborne Corps landed behind those elite troops, pushing through the Zagros Mountains and fighting their way inland over the course of a gruelling four-month land invasion until they reached Tehran. Turkey had denied the US the right to use its territory for the invasion, and Iraq under Saddam Hussein, while keen to undermine the theocratic Iranian regime, was too focused on cosying up to the USSR, itself having narrowly avoided going to war in Afghanistan, to allow for this. The result was a bloody and painful war that would eventually cost the lives of over fifteen thousand American servicemen and women, and provide an intense economic boost to the Soviet Union. While all this was happening, the US was undergoing an election campaign. Former actor Ronald Reagan, a Republican favourite, won the nomination against the backdrop of the US invasion of Iran. Carter had hoped that military action against Iran would save him, but this was not to be; there was no rally-around-the-flag effect after the disaster in Tehran in which so many American soldiers had been killed or captured and then publicly murdered.

President Reagan’s first term as president was cut short by bullets. John Hinckley Jr was not a religious fanatic or a Communist or anything of the sort as the conspiracy theorists would claim; he was a madman inspired by the 1976 film Taxi Driver to assassinate the President of the United States in order to impress actress Jodie Foster. The president died in a hail of bullets on March 30th, 1981, and the world held its breath. Some initially thought it was an Iranian agent sent by the Ayatollahs to extract revenge as US forces took Tehran in bloody house-to-house fighting. This wasn’t to occur though; it was simply the act of a lone gunman. Dutifully, Vice President Jeane Kirkpatrick, a former Democrat who had befriended Reagan while serving as foreign policy advisor during his election campaign, stepped up to take charge over the United States.

Kirkpatrick faced a major test in her presidency when in 1982, Argentine forces invaded the British-owned Falklands Islands. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ordered the Royal Navy to assemble a task force to recapture the islands. At the United Nations, under the direction of President Kirkpatrick, the United States thoroughly opposed Britain taking military action in South America, viewing it as a destabilising move against the anti-Communist nations in Latin America that the US had befriended. As the Royal Navy task force sailed southwards, Thatcher and the British government came under ever more intense pressure from the US to fall back and accept the loss of the Falklands Islands. President Kirkpatrick also ordered a US Navy carrier battle group into the region as a ‘peacekeeping’ force to ‘ensure that no conflict erupts’ in the South Atlantic. Facing the threat of economic sanctions as well as the presence of US forces in the region in a disturbingly threatening manor, as well as many behind-the-scenes threats and arguments, Britain withdrew its task force as Thatcher was left no choice but to give in. The consequence of not doing so would have been economic-ruin threatened by the Americans. Thatcher’s government fell with a motion of no confidence and the Labour Party under left-winger Michael Foot rose to power. Foot immediately proposed a bill to force the removal of US forces from British soil. His bill passed with a small majority; the threats made by the United States had infuriated Britons both on the left and right, and there was a widespread national desire for revenge as British citizens were forcefully deported from the Falklands Islands and sent back to the mainland UK.

Back in the Middle East, the US was struggling to keep a hold on Iran. There was an insurgency on a massive scale with heavy casualties being sustained amongst US forces occupying the mountainous country. There were Soviet-backed communists, nationalists and Islamic fundamentalists all fighting against both each other and the US Military. With Iran draining a huge amount of the US Military’s resources, North Korea invaded the south in January 1983. Tens of thousands of American troops were pinned down in Europe or Iran, the Kim regime reasoned, and there was little the US could do to reinforce its Asian ally. NKPA forces broke through South Korean and American lines along the DMZ after several days of utterly ferocious fighting, and moved to encircle Seoul, using chemical weapons against ROK troops and civilians as they went. President Kirkpatrick, on the advice of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ordered the use of three tactical nuclear weapons against advancing NKPA troops in South Korea, bringing an end to the Second Korean War with a trio of blinding explosions, the bombs having been dropped by B-52 bombers. There was outrage from the USSR and China at the US use of nuclear weapons against North Korea, but America’s allies were at least somewhat supportive; the North Koreans had started a war of aggression and used chemical weapons in the process of doing so, they argued. The US couldn’t have deployed enough troops to save South Korea, with so many men being deployed in Iran, and the alternative to going nuclear was to let millions of South Koreans fall under the heel of the Juche jackboot.

Following the Korean War, more events took place in Britain. Prime Minister Michael Foot attempted to withdraw from NATO, and found himself a target of a nefarious campaign by the intelligence services to prevent this from happening. One rainy evening in September, 1983, the Director-General of MI5 confronted Foot in his office and a debate unfolded. The words said are still unknown. What is known is that Foot, two hours after that conversation, resigned from office on grounds of ill health. The more moderate Roy Hattersley took over as prime minister, leading Britain with a far more moderate government that what Foot had been offering. The Conservatives were pleased to see that old fool Michael Foot gone, and the moderates in the Labour Party all breathed a secret sigh of relief that he had resigned, with only a few knowing that he had been forced out of office by the security establishment. Those who did know the truth joked that Britain had joined the ranks of nations such as Chile and Argentina, where hard-left governments were thrown out of office by the interference of soldiers and spies.

The middle of the decade passed relatively quietly.

Kirkpatrick lost the 1984 election to her Democratic rival, Ted Kennedy, who in turn quickly withdrew US troops from Iran. There was much criticism of this, with fears that Kennedy was inviting the Soviets into the Persian Gulf. That scenario was avoided; the Soviets were keeping an eye on an Eastern Europe that was growing evermore restless and had narrowly avoided going to war in Afghanistan some years prior. Towards the end of the 1980s, unrest began taking place in the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe as many millions of people sought to overthrow their oppressors and join the free world. The regime of Premier Gorbachev in the USSR was one that favoured liberalisation despite what the hardliners in the military and the KGB said. One-by-one, the proverbial dominos fell as East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and many others turned away from the Soviets. People took to the streets in their thousands in all of those countries and despite attempts at harsh crackdowns, the revolutions were successful and the Iron Curtain collapsed in 1990. The Soviet Union wasn’t to be brought down by this strife on its borders. It was to change though. In January 1991, Gorbachev and other Soviet leaders signed the proposed ‘New Union Treaty’, forming a replacement of the Soviet Union that controlled Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus but allowed Georgia, Azerbaijan and the three Baltic States to go.