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Though the Ayatullah Khomeini's precise role in the embassy affair was not known, it was obvious that the student occupiers looked to him for leadership. Because Khomeini demanded that the British government surrender the Shah's last Prime Minister, Shahpour Bakhtiar, the students on Monday evening briefly occupied the British embassy in Tehran. They left after only six hours, presumably because they had learned what their Imam had not: that Bakhtiar is in exile not in Britain but in France, which also gave asylum to Khomeini before his triumphal return to Iran in February.
Late in the week the student occupiers of the embassy released the contents of two highly sensitive documents that embassy personnel had apparently not had time to destroy. Both seemed to show that the Administration, at least as of last summer, had been considering "the inevitable step" of allowing the Shah to enter the U.S. The first cable, which was sent by Henry Precht, director of the State Department's Office of Iranian Affairs to Laingen in Tehran on Aug. 2, proposed that sometime before January 1980 the U.S. should inform the Iranian government of the "intense pressures for the Shah to come here, pressures which we are resisting despite our traditional open-door policy."
The document noted that it would "help substantially" if the Shah would "renounce his family's claim to the throne." Further, it acknowledged that the admission of the Shah to the U.S. might create security problems for Americans in Tehran, but commented: "We have the impression that the threat to U.S. embassy personnel is less now than it was in the spring." In any case, it continued, the U.S. would make no move toward admitting the Shah until "we have obtained and tested a new and substantially more effective guard force" for the embassy.
The second document, a cable signed by Secretary of State Vance to Laingen last July, also discussed "the Shah's desire to reside in the U.S." It asked Laingen what effect this might have on the safety of Americans in Iran and on U.S. relations with the Iranian government, particularly if the Shah were to renounce the throne and agree to abstain from all political activity while living in the U.S. Vance added: "We understand the key to minimizing the impact of the Shah's mission would be in Bazargan and the [Iranian] government's willingness and ability in such a situation to control and command the security forces guarding our people ..."
On the surface, at least, the documents appeared to confirm the students' fears that Washington was secretly plotting to let the Shah gain sanctuary in the U.S. State Department officials insisted that the cables had been released out of context, and were only two of many informal messages about the problem of the Shah that went back and forth between the embassy and Washington. Last week the White House acknowledged that there had indeed been much correspondence mulling over U.S. policy toward the Shah's sanctuary problem. A top Administration official further conceded to TIME that "Henry Kissinger, [Chase Manhattan Bank Chairman] David Rockefeller and