tentative relationship with the United States, failed to get the
hostages released. He resigned two days after the embassy
takeover. Bazargan was replaced, unofficially, by Ayatollah
Muhammad Beheshti, secretary of the new Revolutionary
Council and a former student of Khomeini’s.
Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the candidate favored by Khomeini,
easily won election to the presidency in January 1980, becoming
Iran’s first president after the revolution. Bani-Sadr had been
the leader of the Iranian Student Committee in Paris who had
asked Khomeini to move there from Iraq in the autumn of 1978.
However, he hoped for a more moderate Islamic republic
than the one being pressed by Khomeini’s radical supporters.
Bani-Sadr found Khomeini’s position and plans for the country
quite unstable. In the Majlis elections in the spring of 1980,
voters gave majority control of the fundamentalist ulema
to the Islamic Republican Party (IRP). These were rivals of
Bani-Sadr and his liberal supporters. One of the IRP party
leaders, Muhammad Ali Rajai, was named prime minister.
Meanwhile, the upheaval in Iran had created a crisis abroad.
Negotiations to release the American Embassy hostages stalled,
pressuring President Carter to take military action. He approved
a daring rescue mission in April 1980. Six huge transport planes
and eight U.S. Navy helicopters rendezvoused at an isolated
desert landing strip several hundred miles from Tehran. From
there, they planned to launch a night raid. The rescue attempt
turned out to be a tragic, humiliating disaster. In a sandstorm,
a helicopter and plane collided. Three other helicopters were
badly damaged. Eight U.S. soldiers were killed, and the rescue
team returned empty-handed. They had come nowhere near
their objective.
The rescue attempt provoked a new frenzy among Iranian
radicals to purge military and civil officials suspected of being
sympathetic to the deposed shah. Approximately eight thousand
officials were dismissed; some were executed.
An even greater drama was soon to come. In late September
1980, President Saddam Hussein of neighboring Iraq launched
Khomeini in Power 63