Scott Anderson captures US' hubris, Iran's revolution in exceptional detail

Business Standard

3 days ago

For most Americans, the hostage crisis was the revolution's defining event
NYT
KING OF KINGS: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation
By Scott Anderson
Published by Doubleday
481 pages $35
In September 1979, Michael Metrinko, the pugnacious political officer at the US Embassy in Tehran, was back in the US for a brief vacation when he was surprised to receive a summons to a high-level meeting at the State Department.
For the previous several months — indeed, several years — Metrinko had been the Iran mission's black sheep, wholly out of step with the official flow of upbeat information from the country. That flow had been dead wrong. The US diplomats and intelligence officers charged with managing relations with Iran had not just missed the first signs of the Islamic Revolution; they had suppressed reports that it was coming.
By September, the supposedly invincible shah had abdicated. Mobs ruled the streets. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had returned triumphantly from exile in France and installed himself in Qom. Yet the experts at the American Embassy were still playing a hopeful tune.
Metrinko knew better. One of very few fluent Farsi speakers at the Tehran mission, he was better attuned to the depth of Iranian anger toward America. His pointed dispatches had earned him a dressing-down by the clueless ambassador, William Sullivan. Nevertheless, someone at the State Department had decided to give Metrinko his moment.
He arrived at the meeting early, with notes, only to be asked to leave before it began because he lacked the appropriate security clearance. He protested that he had been specifically invited — to no avail.
A little more than a month later, Metrinko became one of 52 American diplomats, embassy staffers, and military personnel, and a handful of civilians, held hostage for 444 days in Iran by a radical Muslim student group. The story of Metrinko's aborted meeting, recounted in Scott Anderson's King of Kings, his masterly new account of the Iranian revolution, illustrates the stubborn American blindness that hastened the shah's demise and helped the mullahs prevail.
For most Americans, the hostage crisis was the revolution's defining event. An unprecedented and prolonged public exercise in humiliation, it riveted the nation for more than a year, dashed Jimmy Carter's bid for a second presidential term and ushered in the Reagan era. But in Iran, as Anderson shows, it was the final act in a much larger and more consequential drama.
The fall of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the slight, pompous, pathetically dithering Shah of Shahs, or King of Kings, 'brought an abrupt end to one of the most important economic and military alliances the United States had established anywhere in the world,' Anderson writes. 'The radically altered Middle Eastern chessboard created by the revolution has led directly to some of America's greatest missteps in the region over the past four decades.'
Propped up by a succession of presidents, the shah was an American creation first and last. His story is another sad chapter in the long history of self-defeating, misguided US meddling in the internal affairs of less powerful nations — Cuba, Nicaragua, and Vietnam already by 1978.
In the case of Iran, US involvement meant toppling a constitutional monarchy (albeit an imperfect one) and supporting an increasingly capricious autocrat. Cold War priorities provided the initial impetus — containing the Soviet Union — but in time that motivation devolved into an ugly greed fest, as the shah, prized for his weakness by his masters and fabulously rich with oil money, developed an irrational appetite for new weapons systems.
The shah had lived his life in a make-believe world, its fantasy enforced by a security apparatus, Savak, that terrorised anyone who refused to play along. With all sensible, independent voices silenced, deliberate misinformation, conspiracy theory, and superstition rushed into the vacuum. The most compelling voice in this haboob was the angry fundamentalist ranting of the exiled Khomeini. His sermons moved hand-to-hand under Savak's nose on cassette tapes, diligently collected by the CIA, most never listened to or transcribed. By early 1979, the storm incited by those sermons blew away the Peacock Throne, American influence and any hope for popular rule.
This is an exceptional book. Scrupulous and enterprising reporting rarely combine with such superb storytelling. Anderson leavens his sweeping and complex chronicle with rich character portraits: Of the Shah and his discerning wife, Farah (whom Anderson interviewed); the harsh, cruel Khomeini; the bullheaded, ignorant Jack Miklos, the deputy US chief of mission and the shah's biggest 'cheerleader'.
Yet the figure who stands out most is Metrinko, who took the trouble to learn Farsi, which enabled him to hear what Iranians said, and he paid attention to what he saw. Asked why he had foreseen what so many of his colleagues missed, he told Anderson, 'Because the guys in the political section of the embassy who were supposed to keep watch for this kind of stuff were lousy at their jobs. Is that overly harsh? I think it's deserved.'