The Shah visited Jimmy Carter in November 1977 and had a productive, successful two-day visit. Earlier in the year, the CIA had estimated that the Shah was positioned to control the country for another decade. A year later, opposition overwhelmed the country, and he fled Iran in early 1979. The Iranian Revolution “has been profoundly significant and is one of the most important political developments of the modern age.” In the almost half century since, it has led the West, particularly the U.S., to be at odds with the Muslim world; it has dominated Middle East politics; it contributed to the disastrous 1983 deployment of U.S. Marines to Beirut; encouraged the U.S. embrace of Saddam Hussein; and was a factor in America’s endless wars in the region.
The irony of the revolution is that it was unanticipated, spontaneous, and totally unprepared for. No one, including the revolutionaries, thought that it would succeed. This book focuses on the handful of people whose decisions were decisive: Reza Pahlavi, Jimmy Carter, Ruhollah Khomeini, and the three men’s limited cohorts of advisers.
Pahlavi came to power in 1941. He twice stopped opponents from dethroning him. In 1953, the CIA helped him recover his throne after a coup. A decade later, the imposition of martial law ended Khomeini’s first challenge. When the 1970s began, the Shah’s closest friend and adviser, Asadollah Alam, sensed that the reign was under stress. The disparity of wealth was extreme, corruption endemic, and the conservative clergy opposed to all modernization efforts. Alam frequently, but unsuccessfully, tried to encourage the Shah to engage with and listen to the people, and to provide a limited right to vote.
Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Shah achieved some of his longest-held goals. He managed his relationship with the U.S. to the point where Iran was free to purchase any and all U.S. weapons systems, and he ended six decades of humiliation and exploitation by nationalizing the oil industry. Working with the Saudis in 1973, the Shah managed a quintupling of the price of oil. When the money poured in, he spent it immediately on infrastructure and weapons from the U.S. Iran’s military became the fifth largest in the world and the consumer of half of America’s overseas arms sales. Americans poured in by the thousands to sell products and manage businesses. As more and more posters of the Shah appeared, he became completely isolated, listening to and seeing only a handful of people.
The vast spending program in a pre-industrial society caused massive disruptions to the electrical grid and transport system, soaring housing costs, hyperinflation, and a collapse of the agricultural base. “Hand in hand with all this was colossal corruption and staggering waste.” With the regime extremely repressive, the Shah was ignorant of the turmoil building among the people. In late 1976, the Saudis rejected an OPEC price increase and dramatically increased production. Iran’s economy stalled immediately. An old hand at the visa office noticed that his office was flooded with people looking to leave and who had already sent their money to America. When his report was inadvertently sent to Washington and raised questions, Ambassador Sullivan screamed at him and blackballed his career. The U.S. was so out of touch with Iran’s reality that while making a New Year’s Eve speech on the last day of 1977 at a state dinner in Tehran, Carter said, “Because of the great leadership of the Shah, Iran is an island of stability in one of the most troubled areas of the world.”
On two occasions, the regime threw Khomeini a lifeline without which he could not have succeeded in overthrowing the Shah. The first was in 1964, when he was exiled rather than imprisoned. This allowed him to launch from Iraq and later Paris a consistent series of attacks on the “American Shah.” Although he was not widely followed, he maintained contact with the clergy. In the first week of 1978, the regime’s newspaper published an unnecessary, scurrilous, and slanderous attack on Khomeini that had a butterfly effect. It began with riots in Qom and ended the Shah’s reign. The regime bestowed on Khomeini a prominence he had long sought, and the deaths during the riots provided the “disparate religious opposition a unifying cry.” After the initial riots, the country returned to normal. Only the most insightful American consuls outside Tehran saw massive trouble coming. One ally of both the U.S. and Iran, Israel, said it was already planning for the post-Shah era.
At the end of August, in the oil town of Abadan, arson at a cinema killed 400 people. Although the fire was as swift as it was deadly, the delayed arrival of the fire department and the failure of nearby hydrants incensed the populace. In the following days, the government was silent and no one attended the funerals. History would show that the arsonists were Khomeini’s men, but a whispering campaign against the regime began immediately. A few days later, Khomeini joined the finger-pointing. At this point, the Shah replaced his prime minister with a truly incompetent and corrupt politician.
During nationwide peaceful marches on a Muslim day of mourning, the government became alarmed because the marches were spontaneous, and the Shah declared martial law. The following day, September 8, marchers from the Tehran slums walked toward the city center and were fired upon by the authorities. Hundreds were killed on “Black Friday.” A week later, an earthquake killed 12,000 people in an obscure city far from the capital. A strike by oil workers followed. The hue and cry for revolution grew louder, and neither the Shah nor Khomeini was interested in finding middle ground. By November, the streets of Tehran were a battlefield. The Shah handed the government to the military and appointed a general as prime minister. Khomeini called for a nationwide strike, but his plea was ignored. Nonetheless, in December the people took to the streets peacefully.
In Washington, the few men who understood Iran knew that the Shah could not survive, and slowly the idea caught on. The Ayatollah, in Paris, called for revolution and the abdication of the Shah. In Tehran, the vast American and European expatriate communities began to pull up stakes and leave. In the new year, the Shah announced he would take an extended vacation as he named a moderate prime minister who tried to form a coalition government. On the 16th, he and his wife left Iran forever.
Throughout the crisis, the U.S. showed an appalling, if not woefully ignorant, inability to understand virtually anything about Iran’s culture, history, or religion. Only one person in Tehran and one in Washington spoke Farsi. Iran shared a border with the USSR, compelling Washington to view every issue through the lens of the Cold War. Fear of a communist revolution was always Washington’s top priority. Ironically, everyone in Iran knew that a conservative Muslim population would never partner with atheist Reds. In Washington’s eyes, Iran was also the Pentagon’s largest purchaser, paying cash for half of all U.S. weapons sales abroad. When the first attempt to forge a future in Tehran began, two different parts of the U.S. government approached the same Iranian figures with opposing instructions. It was not America’s finest performance.
The Ayatollah returned to Tehran on February 1. He defiantly announced a new prime minister and rejected the U.S. and the army. A few weeks later, the army declared its neutrality in the “current political dispute.” The U.S. embassy cabled Washington that it had begun destroying classified materials. On February 14, a mob stormed the U.S. embassy and shot up the ambassador’s residence. The new regime began executing leaders of the old government and the army. Sixty-five hundred of the U.S.’s 7,000 residents left for home. When the U.S. Senate criticized the mounting executions, 100,000 people marched around the embassy.
The Shah wandered from Egypt to Morocco to the Bahamas and Mexico in the months following his “vacation.” In the fall, the U.S. was advised of a tightly held five-year-old secret: the Shah was dying of cancer. His U.S. allies, particularly David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger, lobbied to allow him to enter America. As pressure mounted on Carter, he asked his staff, “What are you guys going to advise me to do if they overrun our embassy and take our people hostage?” On October 23, the Shah arrived in New York for treatment. A week later, after the publication of a photo from Algeria showing the Iranian prime minister shaking hands with Zbigniew Brezhnev, the embassy in Tehran was attacked on November 4. Khomeini praised the attackers. Endless negotiations followed until the U.S. attempted a rescue mission that failed so dramatically it worsened matters. The Shah’s death in Cairo in the summer of 1980 changed nothing. The Ayatollah announced that the Great Satan must continue to be confronted. The hostages were freed on January 20, 1981.
Senior members of Reagan’s campaign team met with Iranians that summer, and many believe that, like Nixon’s men in 1968, they told the enemy to wait for a better deal. Unlike 1968, there has been no confirmation of the misdeed. To some extent, the revolution could only have happened in the waning days of the analog era. No one in the U.S. had seen translations of the Ayatollah’s endless and virulent screeds. We simply did not know who we were dealing with. Embassy communications to Washington consisted of brief cables and lengthy typewritten memos sent in diplomatic pouches, often telling State what it wanted to hear. Again, very few in Washington understood what was happening.
The Shah, derided for the brutality of his secret police, was probably responsible for only about 100 executions in his final decade. At least 8,000 were executed in the Ayatollah’s early years. The consequences of the revolution have been nearly 50 years of repression at home, the spewing of hatred abroad, and the ongoing export of the revolution to Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon. Vehement anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli propaganda has harmed Jews and Israelis worldwide. In the end, however, it was primarily the indecisiveness, isolation, insecurity, and delusional beliefs of the King of Kings—the Shahanshah, the Light of the Aryans, the Shadow of God—that condemned himself, his family, his country, and much of the world to the disasters that followed. “The Iranian Revolution helped legitimize a current of religious zealotry and violence that is now likely to bubble up from the earth almost anywhere and at any time.”
