U.S. ‘didn’t have to treat Shah’

Press, 15 May 1981, Page 8

U.S. ‘didn’t have to treat Shah’

NZPA-Reuter New York The “New' York Times” said yesterday that it had not been medically necessary to treat the late Shah of Iran in the United States and the former President, Mr Carter’s decision to allow him entry had been based on “misinformation and misinterpretation.”

The “Times” said Mr Carter had recalled during an extensive interview that he was told in October, 1979, that the Shah was “at the point of death” and required medical treatment available only in New York for the cancer ravaging his body. “In fact jt was not medically necessary to treat the Shah in the United States,” the “Times” said. American officials had boiled down medical details of the Shah’s condition and given them to Mr Carter in a simplified form that reduced

his apparent options, it said.

Mr Carter’s decision to admit the Shah triggered the seizure of the United States Embassy in Teheran on November 4, 1979, by radical students and led to the holding of 52 embassy staff hostage for 444 days. The “Times” story was a summary of a 40,000-word report on an investigation it has made into the Iranian crisis to be published on Sunday in a special issue of the “New York Times Magazine.” The report said Dr Benjamin Kean, the physician who examined the Shah in exile in Mexico, told the “Times” he had advised the State Department that although he recommended taking the Shah to New York the necessary diagnosis and treatment could have been done elsewhere, including Mexico. “Dr Kean also said that he.

told the State Department medical officer that while the Shah should be treated promptly he was not in such iminent danger of death that an American Government physician could not visit Mexico to provide a second opinion.” The “Times” said that option had been declined because of the presumed urgency of the case. “The choice as presented to him, Mr Carter said, was to admit the Shah for medical treatment that was only available in the United States or watch an ally of 37 years die in Mexico for lack of such 'treatment,” the report said. The newspaper described Mr Carter’s decision as "a calculated political gamble” taken after months of argument among Administration officials and influenced by an intensive, lobbying cam-

paign that included the former Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, and the financier, David Rockefeller. The “Times” also said it learned that the Iranian students who seized the United States Embassy staff had planned only a three to fiveday take-over but became caught up in a frenzy of Iranian popular support. The newspaper also concluded that the Shah discovered his cancer when he felt a lump in his abdomen on a ski-ing trip to Switzerland in 1974 and managed to conceal it from American intelligence agencies for six years. The “Times” said its investigation was conducted by reporters in six countries in an inquiry which turned up hundreds of pages of previously unpublished documents and private correspondence among those involved in the decision-making.