The CIA obtained a confidential email to Congress

[MinM]

58. Right

1975 and to a certain extent Jimmy Carter and Stansfield Turner in the late 70s (in the wake of the Church Committee findings). They predictably met great resistance.

One example was in the form of former Warren Commission member (John McCloy):

...McCloy asked President Carter to allow the Shah to live in the United States. Carter refused because he had told by his diplomats in Iran that such a decision might encourage the embassy being stormed by mobs. As a result McCloy made preparations for the Shah to stay in the Bahamas. David Rockefeller arranged for his personal assistant at Chase Manhattan, Joseph V. Reed, to manage the Shah's finances.

Rockefeller also established the highly secret, Project Alpha. The main objective was to persuade Carter to provide a safe haven for Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (code-named "Eagle&quot . McCloy, Rockefeller and Kissinger were referred to as the "Triumvirate". Rockefeller used money from Chase Manhattan Bank to pay employees of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy who worked on the project. Some of this money was used to persuade academics to write articles defending the record of Pahlavi. For example, George Lenczowski, professor emeritus at the University of California, was paid $40,000 to write a book with the "intention to answer the shah's critics".

Kissinger telephoned Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to Carter, on 7th April, 1979, and berated the president for his emphasis on human rights, which he considered to be "amateurish" and "naive". Brzezinski suggested he talked directly to Jimmy Carter. Kissinger called Carter and arranged for him to meet David Rockefeller, two days later. Gerald Ford also contacted Carter and urged him to "stand by our friends".

McCloy, Rockefeller and Kissinger arranged for conservative journalists to mount an attack on Carter over this issue. On 19th April, George F. Will wrote about Carter and the Shah and said; "It is sad that an Administration that knows so much about morality has so little dignity."

On 19th April, Rosalynn Carter wrote in her diary: "We can't get away from Iran. Many people - Kissinger, David Rockefeller, Howard Baker, John McCloy, Gerald Ford - all are after Jimmy to bring the shah to the United States, but Jimmy says it's been too long, and anti-American and anti-shah sentiments have escalated so that he doesn't want to. Jimmy said he explained to all of them that the Iranians might kidnap our Americans who are still there."

McCloy had meetings with President Carter in the White House on 16th May and 12th June where he outlined his reasons for providing Mohammad Reza Pahlavi with sanctuary. Carter listened politely to his arguments but refused to change his mind.

During the summer of 1979 McCloy contacted Zbigniew Brzezinski, Cyrus Vance, Walter Mondale and Dean Rusk about the Shah being allowed to live in the United States. McCloy told them that Carter's refusal to provide sanctuary to an old U.S. ally was "ungentlemanly" and dismissed the idea that lives in Iran might be jeopardized. Vance later recalled that: "John (McCloy) is a very prolific letter writer. The morning mail often contained something from him about the Shah".

In July 1979, Mondale and Brzezinski told Jimmy Carter that they had changed their minds and now supported asylum for the Shah. Carter replied: "F*** the Shah. I'm not going to welcome him here when he has other places to go where he'll be safe." He added that despite the fact that "Kissinger, Rockefeller and McCloy had been waging a constant campaign on the subject" he did not want the Shah "here playing tennis while Americans in Teheran were being kidnapped or even killed."

McCloy then tried another tactic in order to destabilize Carter's administration. In September, a story was leaked that the CIA had "discovered" a Soviet combat brigade in Cuba. It was claimed that this violated the agreement reached during the Cuban Missile Crisis. McCloy, who had negotiated the agreement with Adlai Stevenson and the Soviets in 1962, knew this was not true. The agreement said that only those Soviet troops associated with the missiles had to leave the island. There was never a complete ban on all Soviet troops in Cuba. Therefore the presence of Soviet combat troops in Cuba was not a violation of the 1962 agreement.

In October, 1979, David Rockefeller's assistant, Joseph V. Reed, called the State Department and claimed that the Shah had cancer and needed immediate treatment in a U.S. medical facility. Cyrus Vance now told Carter that the Shah should be allowed in as a matter of "common decency". Carter's chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan, argued that if the Shah died outside the United States, Kissinger and his friends would say "that first you caused the Shah's downfall and now you've killed him." Carter replied: "What are you guys going to advise me to do if they overrun our embassy and take our people hostage?"

Faced with the now unanimous opposition of his closest advisers, the president reluctantly agreed to admit the Shah. He arrived at New York Hospital on 22nd October, 1979. Joseph V. Reed circulated a memo to McCloy and other members of Project Alpha: "Our mission impossible is completed. My applause is like thunder." Less than two weeks later, Iranian militants stormed the U.S. Embassy in Teheran and took hostage 66 Americans. Thus beginning the Iranian Hostage Crisis...

http://spartacus-educational.com/USAmccloyJ.htm