How America let Iran slip into the clutches of fundamentalism

Telegraph

25-07-2025

In 1980 I was invited along with a cohort of historians to attend a conference at Harvard on 'Knowing Your Enemies'. We soon discovered that it was funded by the CIA, who wanted to see if they could learn from history why they had failed entirely to anticipate the fall the previous year, in the Iranian revolution, of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and the succession of a fundamentalist Islamic state. At the end of three days of discussion, a senior CIA official addressed us. They had learnt very little, he claimed, from listening to historians. They were working instead with interesting research on the brains of guerrillas, which seemed much more promising.
It is exactly this question of American failure that Scott Anderson pursues in King of Kings, his excellent narrative account of the two tumultuous years that resulted in the triumph of Ayatollah Khomeini and the creation of an Islamic republic. Though inevitably he does not have access to the records of the Ayatollah and his militant followers, he has done scrupulous research on the final months of the Shah's fading rule.
But it is American policy towards Iran that interests him most, because he sees the American response as a catalogue of missed opportunities, failed communication, and incompetent organisation. The CIA comes in for especial criticism, operating in Iran without a single person who could speak the language, much more concerned about monitoring the Soviet Union to the north of Iran, since the Cold War seemed to be the central pivot of American foreign policy. Anticipating a powerful Islamic revival in the Middle East was not on the books.
One reason for the poor understanding of the country lay in America's confidence in Iran. The Shah was commander of the fifth largest army in the world, armed with American equipment; he deployed an extensive secret security service, and he had access to substantial oil revenues. From the late 1960s, the Shah had embarked on a grandiose programme of modernisation, turning his back on the Islamic traditions of the state, and the simple faith of millions of his subjects.
The turn to the West encouraged widespread corruption among a wealthy and spoilt elite, widening to a dangerous chasm the gap between rich and poor. The principal voice denouncing the westernisation drive was Ayatollah Khomeini, exiled from Iran in 1964, but installed in neighbouring Iraq; tape recordings of his violent and angry sermons were smuggled into Iran. For Khomeini and other Muslim zealots, the West was Satan in a very literal sense, and the Shah Satan's servant.
Anderson is very good on the many American personalities who were on the scene. Very few had any inkling that the Shah was not, as President Jimmy Carter put it in late 1977, 'an island of stability in a troubled region'. And the few who sensed that the great bulk of poor, religiously committed Iranians were not content to follow the Shah's bandwagon to the West were largely ignored.
Chief among them was the junior diplomat, Michael Metrinko, the only American on the government payroll in Iran who could speak Farsi. From his isolated consular post in Tabriz, Metrinko observed the first outbreaks of popular violence were driven by the rural poor – those who migrated to the towns in the 1970s to dead-end jobs, and who were sustained by small local mosques where the clergy encouraged them to reject the Shah. Metrinko sent regular warnings to the embassy in Tehran; these were disregarded. He was told not to rock the boat, so that Washington, as a result, got little intimation of what was in the air in Iran outside the gilded palace.
Anderson reflects on whether the King of Kings, or his wife, Farah Pahlavi, really understood that there was deep resentment at the royal system. Perhaps they both did, she more than he from her regular forays outside the palace walls. But it was easy for them to deny the brittle state of their country's social system when their perspective was restricted chiefly to the vast palace enclosure. Anderson interviews the elderly queen at her home in the United States, who now admits that there were missed opportunities for addressing the people's grievances. There was little she could do at the time – her husband disliked her interference – but it was clear anyway that the royal couple's room for manoeuvre was shrinking rapidly by 1978.
To understand why it was a fundamental Islamic leader who became the chief challenge to the Shah, Anderson has used the westernised pharmacist, Ebrahim Yazdi, as his entry point. Though living and working in America, Yazdi was a devout Muslim hoping to see the end of the Shah's rule, and a spokesman for the large exile Iranian community with links to Ayatollah Khomeini.
It was partly thanks to his efforts at promoting Khomeini that he gained ever-higher profile in Iran, and later in 1978 it was Yazdi who brought him to Paris when he was expelled from Iraq. Here Khomeini was able to establish a court visited by waves of journalists and followers from the Iranian exile communities. His public image of a stern and uncompromising cleric placed him in direct opposition to the Shah and by 1978 he had won millions of new followers among Iran's poor and unprivileged. More moderate clerical leaders in Iran hoped to find some compromise, but Khomeini was the Iranian revolution's Lenin: no half-way house, but a complete revolutionary overthrow.
Throughout 1978 and into the early weeks of 1979, sporadic outbursts of violence and mass protests ought to have warned America to be less sanguine. The change in American perception came very late – too late according to Anderson. Fixated on the Cold War, Washington officials saw the agitation as possibly communist-inspired, which completely blindsided American diplomats and soldiers as they prepared for a possible communist coup. The idea that religious zealotry might usher in a very different kind of regime got little traction until, on February 1 1979, the Ayatollah himself landed in Iran (declaring an Islamic republic two months later). Anxiety among his supporters that he might still be assassinated meant that he arrived wearing a heavy bullet-proof vest, and the elderly cleric struggled to walk down the stairway from the aeroplane.
But there was nothing frail about his politics. Anderson is unsparing in his description of just how rapidly the revolution unfolded, and with what vengeful violence against anyone accused of pro-American or anti-Islamic sentiment. All revolutions produce a hanging judge, and none was more enthusiastic than the Ayatollah's chosen hangman, Sadegh Khalkhali. Since the Ayatollah believed that those contaminated by Satan had no right to live, thousands were killed in the first weeks. American diplomats seized as hostages might have joined the list of the dead, but were released a year or so later. Not surprisingly perhaps, the plebiscite to confirm the new Islamic Republic won 98.2 per cent of the vote. Iran today is still an authoritarian, theocratic state, surviving more than forty years of the West's hostility.
Anderson finds fault in many ways with the American response, but it is worth asking what alternative there was for the Shah and the survival of American interests. Anderson does not really suggest one, though he is intelligently critical of the mistakes. Military intervention so soon after the end in Vietnam would have been unpopular and costly; better understanding about the power of religious belief would only have accelerated the American retreat, since there was little America could offer to a stridently anti-Western movement. The Ayatollah's success transformed the Muslim world in the Middle East with a wave of religious militancy. Now once again Iran is at loggerheads with the West, but this time American super-bombs are dropping on Iranian targets and regime change is seen in Washington as a possibility. The guerrillas, it seems, are finally in control.
★★★★☆
Richard Overy is the author of books including Rain of Ruin. King of Kings is published by Hutchinson Heinemann at £25. To order your copy at £19.99, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books