Desert One

One of America’s outstanding documentary filmmakers with a career that stretches back to 1976’s Oscar-winning “Harlan County, USA,” Barbara Kopple is at the top of her game in “Desert One,” a riveting account of President Jimmy Carter’s daring but tragically unsuccessful attempt to rescue 52 Americans held hostage in Iran in 1980. Although the events it chronicles are now four decades in the past, they have a potent, immediate charge in an election year when tensions between and the U.S. and Iran are at another high. And beyond the political implications, this is a terrifically dramatic and very emotional film; understandably, some of the interviewees struggle to maintain composure when recalling their past trials.

“Desert One” actually tells two related stories, which it brilliantly interweaves. One is the story of how the Iranian Revolution, which erupted in late 1978 and led to the flight of the highly unpopular Shah and establishment of a new Islamic government under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in early 1979, also resulted, several months later, in the storming of the U.S. Embassy by student militants, whose hostage-taking provoked a prolonged and torturous stand-off between the U.S and Iran. The second story concerns the rescue mission Carter launched the following spring, in which American soldiers in several military transport planes and helicopters were to use an area in the Iranian desert designated Desert One as a base from which they would swoop into Tehran and extract the hostages. The ill-fated effort, however, ended in that desolate place, with a loss of eight American lives.

Kopple’s powerful telling of these interlocked stories entailed some notable coups. One is that she gained access to previously unreleased White House tapes (recalling the ones that led to Nixon’s downfall) in which Carter and his circle discuss the mission with military commanders minute by minute as it unfolds, and then as tense hopes turn to shock and heartbreak. Another coup was that she landed an interview with Carter (not an easy thing to do: this writer has tried), who is thoughtful and candid in recalling what he says were the worst events of his life, not just his presidency. Additionally, Kopple got interviews in Iran, including with people involved in the hostage-taking, and one who witnessed the fiery catastrophe in the desert.

The film inevitably evokes certain paradoxes of Carter’s presidency. When he was elected in 1976 (a campaign very entertainingly chronicled in the upcoming doc “Jimmy Carter Rock & Roll President”) he promised hope, renewal, and peace to a nation reeling from the Watergate scandal, Nixon’s resignation and America’s ignominious withdrawal from Vietnam. But though he was the first president to put a strong and enduring emphasis on human rights, he did not encourage opposition to the Shah’s brutal dictatorship. (No doubt this was largely due to Iran’s strategic proximity to the Soviet Union.) In one bitterly comic scene here, Carter, the Shah and their entourages on the White House lawn weep from the teargas fired at demonstrators protesting the Shah’s visit on a nearby street.

All feature-length documentaries dealing with subject matter as vast as this one’s have to make hard decisions regarding what to include and leave out, and while I entirely respect the choices made by Kopple and her team, I wish two aspects of the story had been explored in more depth. One is the 1953 coup—mentioned briefly by an Iranian official—in which the CIA and MI6 overthrew Iran’s democratic government and reinstalled the young Shah, who many Iranians would thereafter regard as an American puppet. (This event is well-treated in Taghi Amirani’s “Coup 53,” also opening this week.) The other aspect is the Carter administration’s reluctant late-Oct. 1979 decision—reportedly at the urging of the likes of Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller—to admit the Shah to the U.S. for cancer treatment, which led Iranians to fear that they were in for a repeat of 1953. It was, one Iranian says, “a declaration of political war against the people of Iran.”

Evidently sparked by that event, militant Iranian students invaded the U.S. Embassy on Nov. 4 and took its occupants hostage. Khomeini could have instantly ended the siege, but he had reasons—including the fact that the Shah was still at large—to drag out the crisis, and so began a 444-day ordeal that would not only be grueling for the hostages but would provide Americans with an agonizing nightly television spectacle. The hostages Kopple interviews include Kevin Hermening, then a young Marine guard whose mom hit the national news when she popped over to Tehran to visit him (the Iranians allowed her a brief audience with her son, then induced her to make a statement against Carter), and John Limbert and Michael Metrinko, Farsi-speaking U.S. career diplomats. These men testify to the mistreatment inflicted on them, including at least one mock execution, but there are also lighter moments. One clip from Iranian TV shows Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, now Iran’s Supreme Leader, visiting the hostages and being hilariously regaled by Metrinko, who says that Iranians’ reputation for hospitality is all too true and is now being taken to extremes—they simply won’t let their American guests go!

In the spring of 1980, after months of fruitless diplomacy, Carter set in motion Operation Eagle Claw. It was a risky effort—one participant says he was skeptical from the outset because it had “too many moving parts”—but military leaders including legendary Delta Force creator Col. Charlie Beckwith thought it could succeed. From around the U.S., Special Ops soldiers are called away from their families (Kopple interviews several of the wives) and whisked off on a covert mission that sees them undergo some intensive secret training, then ship out for a base in Egypt. The plan is for the transport planes and eight helicopters—six are essential for completing the mission—to fly across southern Iran at night and land at Desert One, whence the choppers would head into to Tehran and free the hostages.