"...believe it or not, it wasn't Panama that made Turner the odd man out - it was Iran. When the protests started in 1977 nobody thought much of it, but once things really started to escalate early in '78, then we were suddenly embroiled in Panama and we had the giant price shock and inflation spiked back up into the double digits, there was no way the administration was going to tolerate another supply shock on top of the turmoil that the Canal being shut down had already caused. "I will not be a Hoover!" Jerry shouted at Bill Simon at a meeting and he debated firing Art Burns, or at least not nominating him to another term. Turner not having foreseen the issues in Panama, then claiming with a straight face in a principals meeting of the NSC that "there is no revolutionary environment in Iran" sent Jerry through the roof. Don, Rumsfeld that is, he'd never wanted Turner at CIA to begin with, he'd had the knives out for him since the day he was sworn in, so this was already a big win for Don. We got together later - me, Jerry, and George. We sat down and talked about Stan Turner and Jerry turned to George, who lets just say was under a lot of fire for what was going on in Panama, and asked what he thought. George just shrugged and said, "One mistake is too many. Two is..." and never finished his sentence, just letting it sit out there. When you'd lost George's confidence, that was really that. It told Jerry everything he needed to know, and gave George a good scapegoat to take the heat off him internally, too. Turner resigned the next day and his deputy, Frank Carlucci, took over both on an acting and then permanent basis. Carlucci went back to the Eisenhower days and got along with everyone on the foreign policy team - I liked him, George liked him, and most importantly, Don down in Arlington wasn't trying to get him fired..."
- National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft
"...the Shah was receiving the worst advice in the world from [Ardeshir] Zahedi [1], and the new "regime" at Langley and the Pentagon made sure that Washington's "line" if you will was coming from reliable sources. By this point, the word was simple - the Shah was a liability and in over his head, especially as he debated firing much of the SAVAK. Tear gas and rubber bullets flowed like water over a cliff to Iran within weeks of Carlucci taking over, and CIA advisors were on the ground in Tehran, trying to learn our ways. It was plain how much the Americans had ignored or misunderstood our part of the world, the idiosyncrasies they could not begin to understand. But the message was clear - we put the Shah in power with Ajax... well, to a point, but nevertheless. They had made Mohammad Reza Shah, and they could and would unmake him. Tensions were not meant to rise. One way or another, they were relying on their friends here in Iran to put a stop to the street protests, to the agitation of the most radical clerics... we were being asked to solve the problem for them, the Iranian way..."
- General Nader Jahanbani, former head of Iranian National Supreme Council, 1998
[1] Iran's ambassador in Washington at the time
