Transcript of 1979: How the U.S. and Iran Went From Allies to Enemies New

Hey, I'm Tracy Mumford. There is a lot happening right now. The Headlines podcast from The New York Times will catch you up on the latest in 10 minutes or less. We'll take you inside breaking news and big investigations from The Times newsroom, plus bring you the stories that make you go, "Huh, whoa, I didn't know that." Listen to our show, The Headlines, every weekday morning wherever you get your podcasts. From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. At the heart of the current US war against Iran is an inconvenient truth: that the United States is in many ways responsible for bringing about the very regime that it now seeks to topple. Today, my colleague, Times Magazine contributor Scott Anderson, tells us the story of America's outsized role in the Iranian Revolution, and why all these years later, we're still no closer to understanding Iran.

It's Friday, June 12th.

Scott, welcome to The Daily.

Thank you. It's very nice to be here.

It's great to have you here. We are at a moment in this almost 4-month-long conflict between the United States and Iran where the hostility and the distrust on both sides means that the ceasefire is kind of in name only.

Right, kind of a postmodern type of ceasefire.

Exactly. And the peace talks that are supposed to be built atop that postmodern shaky ceasefire are pretty much a mess. And at the heart of this all is a profound decades-old hatred, and I don't think that's too strong a word, between the governments of Iran and the US. And it's a hatred whose origins we've never quite definitively told the story of on this show. And you, not long before the war began, told that story in what turned out to be a very well-timed book called King of Kings. And what your book so powerfully recounts is that this relationship between the US and Iran wasn't always filled with animus. On the contrary, within the past 50 years, the US relationship with Iran went from a deeply intertwined alliance that was respectful and at times even affectionate to this much darker thing that we now know.

Today. That's right. If you go back exactly 50 years ago today, Iran was America's most important ally between Western Europe and Japan. The two economies were inextricably linked. Economically, of course, we were getting Iranian oil. Iran was the biggest— by far the biggest buyer of American arms abroad. Wow. No, planes, missiles, bombs, everything, everything short of nuclear weapons.

Kind of a staggering thing to contemplate today.

It really is. 50,000 Americans were living in Iran, and 50,000 Iranian His students were studying at American universities. The Shah had visited the United States a dozen times over his reign. He'd met 7 different presidents at the White House, and American presidents had come to Tehran to meet with him.

It's like an alternate universe.

Yes, they were incredibly close. And what is ironic in a story full of ironies is that the very closeness of that relationship between the Americans and the Iranians carried the seeds of the revolution that was to come.

And Scott, in your book, you explain that historians still marvel at the improbability of the revolution that you just referred to, this total inferno of a rejection of the West in a country so thoroughly dominated by a partnership with the West.

No, that's right. And how this all just unraveled over the course of a year is just astonishing. And in looking at the dynamics of the revolution, there seemed so many moments when if something had played out just slightly different, if someone had made a decision or not made a decision, that it all could have played out very, very differently or been aborted altogether. You know, it wasn't like going into a house and opening the wrong door. It was like going into a house and opening 43 wrong doors in a row.

That's what happened here.

Yeah.

Well, let's begin our effort to understand how so many wrong doors were opened by first really making sense of how it ever was the case that the United States and Iran became such full intertwined partners. Because as we're making very clear here, that doesn't make much sense given where we are today, but it obviously made all the sense in the world while it was actually happening. So What is the story of how these two countries and militaries, governments, and economies became so interwoven?

So in order to understand this entire story of the US-Iran relationship and how the two countries got so close, you need to understand who the leader of Iran was for a very long stretch of the 20th century. His name was Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and he was known as the Shah, which is Persian for king. The Shah came to power in 1941 after the British and Soviets overthrew his father, who had been the former And they put the young shah, he was 21, on the throne because they saw him as weak and ineffectual. But the shah's trajectory really starts to change once his relationship with the United States started to blossom. And a key moment of that was in 1953. There was a parliamentary crisis in Iran. There was a new prime minister named Mohammad Mosaddegh. He was a populist and a bit of a firebrand, very charismatic. And he was kind of the first time there was a prime minister who really started to assert against the Shah. Not just assert, but start to strip the Shah of his powers.

Hmm.

And one issue that really galvanized his authority and his popularity in the country was his move to nationalize Iran's oil industry.

Take it over from who?

Great Britain. Since the beginning of the century, the British government controlled Iran's oil industry, paying the Iranian government a pittance. So when Mosaddegh came to power, this was the primary issue that he was using to galvanize his support and also to move against the Shah.

And what did the Shah think should be happening to Iran's oil? Should it be nationalized?

The Shah was much more cautious. In public, he would talk about that he was in support of nationalization, but that it should be taken gradually and moderately and responsibly. But behind the scenes, he was telling the British, "I'm your guy." Hmm. So it set up this constitutional crisis between these two men, and it became a question of who is really in charge. Is it the Shah or is it Prime Minister Mossadegh. And so the British, fearing they were going to lose their oil monopoly, they come up with this idea that, well, we'll overthrow Mossadegh and restore the Shah to his full kingly powers. But the British were very smart about this. They didn't want to have their own hands be shown in the coup. So they got the United States to do it for them. They told the Eisenhower administration, "Mossadegh is soft on communism." The communists are just waiting in the wings to take over in Iran. That actually wasn't true at all. Mossadegh was an anti-communist. But of course, this is a time in the Cold War when Americans are terrified of the spread of communism around the world. So the Eisenhower administration says, "All right, we'll take care of this problem for you.

We'll get rid of Mossadegh and restore the Shah to his power.

We'll take on the coup." The British understood the American Cold War mentality, which is, if we have to do a coup in order to stop communism, we'll do the coup.

That's right. It plays right into the American Cold War mentality. So in the summer of 1953, the CIA essentially steered this coup against Mossadegh.

The Shah demanded Mossadegh's resignation. The premier refused, and fresh rioting broke out in the capital city of Tehran.

So this coup goes awry almost immediately, and it takes place over a very complicated and chaotic 4 days in Tehran, where it appears one side is winning and then the other.

In a brazen act of defiance, the statue of the Shah's father is toppled from The Shah leaves.

The Shah leaves Iran.

Fearing for his life, the Shah's advisers advocated his temporary exile to Rome.

When he finds out that the coup has been a success on his part, he's having lunch at the Excelsior Hotel in Rome.

In the quick shift of power, Mossadegh was finally apprehended and awaits trial for treason. The Shah, who had fled to Rome, comes home.

And he comes back, you know, a little bit tail between his legs, 2 or 3 days later to assume the throne.

Now crowds shout pro-Shaw slogans and carry pictures of the troubled ruler of a troubled nation.

So in a sense, he flees his own coup.

Right.

Comes back, discovers he's now in power thanks to the US.

That's right. What is important about the '53 coup is from that moment on, every Iranian knows about the coup, and they know about the American role in it. The Shah becomes, quote, "the American Shah." Even in the eyes of his supporters, he is seen as joined at the hip to the Americans.

Because he owes his power to the Americans.

That's right.

If you're Iranian, Scott, this phrase "American Shah," is that a good thing? Or a bad thing at this moment in history?

It's a combination of good and bad. I think you get to this very complicated national personality of Iran, of Iranians, where for centuries, they've wanted to emulate the West. They're bitter of how they've been mistreated and taken advantage of. So, it's kind of this complicated love-hate relationship.

Emulation and then resentment.

Resentment, yes. And it runs very, very deep. But from the Shah's point of view, this relationship with the United States feels like a golden opportunity. For centuries, Iran had been a kind of pawn on the global stage, yanked back and forth among the great empires of Britain and Russia. And the Shah was looking for an outside ally, what he called a third force, some power strong enough to defend Iran and liberate the country from this long period of being exploited by these external great powers.

Mm-hmm. And he sees the United States as potentially that third force ally.

Exactly. But actually, the Americans really don't see any advantage at this moment to having a long-term relationship with the Shah or with Iran. They're not interested in opening yet another front in the Middle East in the Cold War, and they had no need for Iran's oil. At that time, the US had plenty of oil of its own. So this just wasn't a compelling partnership to them. And if anything, they looked even more askance at the Shah in the wake of the 1953 coup, because who runs away from their own coup?

Right. Doesn't make him seem super sturdy as an ally. So how did that relationship start to change?

It's a slow build, and it goes much slower than the Shah would wish. The Americans are kind of keeping him at arm's length, really, through the rest of the 1950s, even though the Shah, more than almost any other Middle Eastern leader, really embraces Western thinking and Western culture.

And just explain what you mean by that.

Well, the Shah was a great admirer of Western culture. He'd been educated in a Swiss boarding school. He spoke French and English fluently, beautifully. In fact, people at times made fun of his Farsi accent because they had this idea of him as this internationalist who was out of touch with his own people. He was very much an internationalist at heart and quite secular. He put on the trappings of being a devout Muslim, but I don't think most people ever really believed that about him. He was very comfortable in Europe and European society, and his instinct was to be Western and make Iran more Western.

Mm-hmm.

Thinking that he begins to bring into Iran in concrete ways that start to really radically change the country and in many ways create the conditions that are going to bring about his own destruction.

And what do those changes look like?

You know, this was the early 1960s, and this is a time when there was a lot of social movement for economic progress, for emancipation of women.

The revolution is the Shah's own blueprint for transforming a backward, pudal society into the great civilization.

And he wanted Iran to join in that forward movement. So the Shah institutes this series of 19 social and economic reforms that he calls the White Revolution.

Part of the Shah's upheaval gave women the vote for the first time. Another was to appoint a woman as Minister of Education.

And it's everything from reforestation to giving women the right to vote, and really most crucially, agrarian reform.

There is no more A landlord giving orders to, I don't know, scores of peasants. That is finished.

A large majority of the arable land in Iran was under the control of either oligarchic families or the Muslim clergy. And so his agrarian reform program was designed to really break up this feudalistic system and finally give landless peasants land.

If you are unhappy that your country makes progress, If you are unhappy that your country is saying goodbye to a feudalistic system, if you are unhappy that half of the population of your country, the women, are emancipated, well, this I cannot help.

And all these reforms really enraged the right-wing clergy of the country, which was very, very powerful. And in particular, they enraged an influential cleric named Ruhollah Khomeini. Khomeini, far more than almost any other religious opponent to the Shah, was really vituperative in his denunciations of the Shah in the early 1960s. Called him a false shah, kind of unheard of that you would say that in public in Iran. He despised the West in general, but especially Israel and the United States. He saw them as the servants of Satan, and in his writings, he was quite open about that.

So suddenly you have a leading Muslim cleric in the country observing the king of Iran becoming closer and closer to the United States, instituting political reforms that feel awfully Western and secular, and after that '53 coup, owing his very legitimacy to the United States.

That's right.

That's exactly right. That would seem to be very problematic.

Yeah, that's right. So things with Khomeini reach a head in 1963. The Shah moves to arrest Khomeini for some of the incendiary things he's been saying.

Again, the free world is troubled by trouble in Iran.

Khomeini's arrest sets off clerical riots around the country.

One of the causes of the new rioting was the Shah's land reform program instituted—

A number of buildings are burned.

A secondary contributing trouble factor was the Shah's plans for the emancipation of the nation's women. Rioting against this program was led by leaders of a strict Muslim sect opposed to women's suffrage.

So the military comes out of their barracks and kills at least 150 people. The opposition said many more than that were killed. And crucially, Khomeini is arrested. So for the next year, the Shah kept Khomeini in kind of a house arrest. The basic deal was, we can coexist as long as you don't make these incendiary public attacks on me.

Hmm.

But Khomeini continued to make those incendiary attacks. So less than a year later, the Shah finally rearrests Khomeini and sends him into exile. And this is really the moment where the United States finally sits up and takes notice of the Shah. They think, wow, this guy actually does have a backbone. He will stand up to his enemies, and he's maybe worth taking seriously. Hmm. And so this is the first moment you really see the United States begin to embrace this partnership that the Shah has been seeking all these years.

So the American Shah finally begins to win over the Americans.

That's right. And on Khomeini's part, he sees the Americans now as the instrument of his exile. And so as anti-American and anti-West as he was before, it's now exponentially more so. But the Shah seems to have learned virtually nothing from Khomeini's uprising of a few years earlier. He doesn't seem to get that his close relationship with the West is any kind of problem. And in fact, he does something that just cements how totally enamored he is to the West, even at the expense of regular Iranian people. And that happens in October of 1971. The Shah wanted to have a grand party to celebrate the 2,500 years of Iranian imperial dynasty at Persepolis, the ancient capital of Persia. this 3-day extravaganza in the desert where virtually all the guests were foreigners and virtually all the supplies and everything were foreign.

There will be plenty of food, but the only Iranian dish on the menu is caviar, a few hundred pounds of it. All the rest is French.

Maxim's Restaurant in Paris closed down for 2 weeks, and all the waiters of Maxim's came—

Oh, wow.

—to be the waiters at this banquet.

No waiters in Iran. No waiters.

Right. And so it really got to this— this kind of inferiority complex that the West was the best.

And I have to imagine all these rural religious folks watching their leader put on this extravagant, as you said, grotesque banquet on behalf of Western leaders is deeply offensive.

Oh, absolutely. Significantly, it was denounced by the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini, who called it "The Devil's Festival," and says anyone who attends is participating in murder of the people of Iran. Wow. So I think that at that moment, Khomeini starts seeing this opening of the Shah is really— he's having delusions of grandeur. He's losing touch with reality. He's losing touch with the reality of most of the Iranian people.

I feel like I'm starting to hear the sound of those many wrong doors you had mentioned earlier starting to open. And it feels like Westernization is central to that. So what is happening at this moment with the Shah's relationship to the Americans? Presumably, it's just getting even closer and closer, right? That's right.

What's happening is a steady deepening of the relationship. First, we have military ties between the US and Iran. The United States helped set up SAVAK, the Shah's secret police, which will become infamous as the Shah's tool to surveil the population. And and in some cases torture dissidents and disappear people. Wow. The Americans establish a massive CIA station in Tehran. It's one of the biggest in the Middle East, and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger. They have two top-secret CIA listening posts. So you're seeing this just steadily deepening ties developing all the time. And the Shah really starts to feel emboldened by these deepening ties to ask for more and more from the US. He's— for years, he's been obsessed with building a world-class army.— and really since the beginning of his reign— had looked to the United States for help in doing that. And for the first time in 1972, the United States finally said, "Yes, you can have it." The defense of freedom is everybody's business, not just America's business. And it happened because of something called the Nixon Doctrine.

But we shall look to the nation directly threatened to assume the primary responsibility of providing the manpower for its defense.

The Nixon Doctrine is to appoint regional powers that are friendly to the United States as the policemen of the area. In the Middle East, there's the twin pillars of Saudi Arabia and Iran. Saudi Arabia being much more of an economic one. Iran is going to become the military policeman of the region. On behalf of the US. On behalf of the US. So this all culminates in this extensive international trip Nixon took in May of 1972 that included a stopover in Iran.

The trip to Iran was an affirmation of good relations relations between Washington and Tehran, and especially between the Shah of Iran and President Nixon, who get along quite well.

And it was there, this very close relationship between the Shah and Nixon was on full display.

The day ended with a state dinner where the president praised Iran's contribution for maintaining world peace.

And it seemed to be the moment that was really the capstone of what the Shah had been working for, this close alliance with the United States for 31 years. But the really important thing that happened during this visit actually happened the next morning. And it happened behind closed doors. There were only 6 people in the room, and those 6 people included the Shah, Nixon, and Henry Kissinger. And at that meeting, Nixon says, basically, "You can have any weapon system you want short of nuclear weapons. No questions asked. You are not gonna have to deal with the Congress. You're not gonna have to deal with State Department and their, either human rights declarations "Blank check." Blank check. Anything you want. And from what I've been able to find out, no other country had that carte blanche from the Americans ever. Maybe Britain did, but nobody else.

Wow. That's how much the Nixon administration believed that Iran would be its policeman for the entire Middle East and maybe even beyond.

That's right. That's right. So, this is the Shah's dream come true. And there's this amazing moment at that meeting As the meeting was about to end, Nixon turns to the Shah and says, "Protect me." Hmm. And it's just this astonishing moment. Like, what American president has ever turned to another head of state and said, "Protect me"?

Can you just dissect that? Because that is an extraordinary— It's bizarre. —rebalancing of what we think of as a kind of a power balance dynamic in the world. The US president asking a foreign head of state to protect the United States. Is that amazing? It's a rather remarkable journey from the Shah owing his power to the US in '53 to fewer than 20 years later, the Shah recognizing, if he's hearing the same thing I am, that suddenly the United States president derives his protection from Iran.

That's right. There's still so much disagreement on when the Iranian Revolution was actually set into motion. There's a lot of different places you can choose from, but I certainly think that one of them is this moment where Nixon and Kissinger and the Shah met in May of 1972. Why? It set everything in motion. It set the Shah's delusions of grandeur, completely legitimated them. It made the Americans' dependency on the Shah. That much greater. The institutional ignorance of seeing any threat to the Shah started from this time. They're both on a— now a glide path to this ruin that's gonna happen 7 years down the road. Hmm. Where both sides are blinded to what's coming. And blinded in a rather intentional way because the relationship had become so important to both of them. Iran was too big, too powerful to fail.

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Just subscribe to a real news organization with real journalists doing firsthand, fact-based reporting. And if you already do, thank you. Scott, we know that a revolution is coming and that the US and Iran are on what you just described as a glide path to ruin. Because of the decisions being made by these two leaders to join hands so forcefully. So I'm curious, in the aftermath of this meeting between Nixon and the Shah, what the situation looks like across Iran on the ground.

It really depends on which ground you mean. By the early 1970s, Iran was very much a tale of two countries. City life was one thing. You had Western fashions, you had casinos, you had movie theaters, you know, all the accouterments of modern life. In the countryside, people still lived virtually unchanged from centuries earlier. Lived in mud huts with used camel dung or horse dung for fuel. Far more religious. The ruling figure in a village was the mullah, the local cleric, often. So you really had just these two radically different cultures coexisting.

A pretty classic case, it sounds like, of the haves and the have-nots. Is the Shah focused at all on improving life in the countryside where people have so much less? How much is he thinking about that side of Iran?

I don't think he thought about it very much at all. He was all about industrialization, westernization, and that was going to happen in the cities, not in the countryside. In fact, he rarely traveled into the countryside. So he was very intent on propelling his nation into the 20th century, but he was moving at a speed that would quite quickly become something of a disaster for him. Well, just explain that.

What is he doing exactly and how does it become a disaster?

Well, remember I mentioned earlier how oil became a source of revenue for the country, but not a lot. Where that all changed was in the 1970s when the demand of oil around the world was skyrocketing. OPEC became a force unto itself in the early 1970s. And the Shah was instrumental in the beginning of 1974 of leading a quadrupling of oil prices around the world. And so with this quadrupling of oil prices that the Shah engineered, you now, you have this massive amount of money. And then the Shah turns around and pours all that money right back into Iran.

The Shah's great civilization is being built on oil revenues, and it pays well.

This kicked off the glory days of Iran, this time of unprecedented prosperity, massive wealth.

Iran today has the fastest growing economy in the world.

In less than 6 years, the per capita income has doubled.

And what did that look like?

A lot of very conspicuous consumption. Famously, one wealthy family built a staircase out of solid crystal. Wow. They would have garden parties where they would take out the water from water fountains and fill them with champagne. And the cities just become absolute hives of development.

There is so much new construction that Iran has a chronic cement shortage.

And what you also have happening is these tens of thousands of Westerners coming in to oversee the modernization of the Iranian economy.

North Tehran, the Iranian capital, looked a little like Las Vegas at night.

You could see women wearing miniskirts, hot pants. There were discotheques. Bars. And millions of young men, young unemployed, uneducated religious men in the impoverished countryside are coming into the cities. And that collision of the Westerners coming in, in a traditionally xenophobic society to begin with, colliding with these religious people from the countryside really sets off a massive culture clash. And there's always these horror stories going around Iran about Western women going into mosque wearing halter tops, of men driving motorcycles across the entranceways to mosques. And it just increases the anti-Western sentiment that has been building against the Shah for a long time. This idea that he is kind of a toady to the Americans. And this is going to become increasingly a problem for the Shah and for the stability of his regime. And meanwhile, the Shah's decision to pump all that money into the national economy, it backfires in a very big way. He overheats the economy. There's hyperinflation, there's housing shortages all through every Iranian city with this massive influx of people from the countryside. They're living in shantytowns at the periphery of every Iranian city.

So on top of a brewing cultural conflict, we've got a festering economic problem.

Yes, Iran falls into a severe recession and factories are just closing up. All of a sudden, all those young uneducated men living in shantytowns, they're unemployed or underemployed. So now you have this massive underclass in the cities and you have the tinder of what is about to explode.

Right, the ingredients. Yeah. Disaffected people, not working, on the edges of the city whose core is now being overrun by Westerners, and atop it all is a Shah who's very much in the thrall of the United States.

That's right.

And meanwhile, there are all different groups of people who are beginning to imagine a world without the Shah. I think there was an exhaustion And on, in many segments of society, uh, with them, progressives, Western-educated intellectuals who wanted a democratic opening to conservative clergy who were upset at the pace of change in the country.

I'm curious, in its capacity as Iran's increasingly big partner, how much the United States is aware of the degree to which things are beginning to spiral out in Iran? Does the US understand that increasingly this is becoming a place that seems ripe for revolution?

Well, that's an excellent question because by the mid-1970s, the American diplomatic mission in Iran was one of the largest in the world. There were over 300 Americans serving in the embassy in Tehran. On top of that, you had an enormous CIA station, one of the biggest in in the world also. But something very strange happens. I mean, I think this is kind of a component of almost any bureaucracy, that the larger institution becomes, the more insulated it becomes. So even something like, there is a huge, enormous American commissary in Tehran, size of a Walmart. And so the more American diplomats, they're doing their shopping there, the fewer locals they're meeting and going to the local store.

So even though you have thousands of Americans living in Iran, they're not really living in regular Iran. They're inhabiting this diplomatic bubble. That's right.

But a really key component to all this is that from very early on, the Shah would get extremely upset if he found out that Westerners, Western diplomats, were talking to any of his even token opposition figures in Tehran. And in order not to upset the Shah, this kind of unwritten rule was set in place in the American embassy that diplomats were not to talk to even the Shah's moderate opposition. And the more important that the Shah and Iran became to the United States, the more that prescription against talking to opposition, the more it was set in stone. So it reached a point where it was just an echo chamber that everything was just going just fine in, in the Shah's Iran.

So on top of a Shah who is not seeing what's happening in his own country and making it worse. You have the other side of this partnership, the American diplomats, who should be a check on that and who should be detecting it and reporting it back to him, not detecting it.

That's right.

An alliance that's a confederacy of deliberate dunces.

Exactly. In my book, I write about one junior Foreign Service officer, Michael Matrinko, who spoke Farsi unlike virtually everybody else in the American embassy. And what he's seeing in the visa office is just this flood of people trying to get out of Iran, including people in the upper middle class and the wealthy. Everyone's trying to get out of Iran. And because he speaks Farsi, he asks people, "Why are you leaving?" And he finally— one man in particular, an aristocrat, says, "Don't you see? This place is about to explode." Hmm. But when Matryenko tries to take this up the ladder in the embassy, he's actually sent off to, you know, diplomatic Siberia. He's sent off to a provincial city in northwestern Iran Tehran to Breeze. He's punished. He's punished. And it's kind of at this moment that Ayatollah Khomeini re-enters the picture in a very big way.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini spent 15 years in exile from Iran. He condemns the Shah's corruption and dictatorship and attacks the United States for supporting him.

He's the most arch-conservative of the senior clerics in Iran.

Ayatollah, how do you see the present situation in your country? The struggle in Iran against the Shah is now very intense.

In his exile, he has been sending tape cassettes railing against the Shah.

With the will of God, it is now moving towards its climax with the removal of the Shah and the establishment of a new just government.

Calling for his overthrow, calling him an infidel, a servant of the Zionists, Israel, and of the United States. And this message is getting more and more widely spread, disseminated on the underground, and especially in the countryside. Khomeini is finding an increasingly receptive audience. And things finally reached a boiling point in Iran. Tabriz happens to be the first place that really explodes in the Iranian Revolution. The rural men living in the shantytowns come out of the shantytowns and they basically burn the modern city center to the ground. Just a swath of destruction The army finally comes in to restore order. Probably about 150, maybe 200 people are killed. Hmm. And it's by far the biggest civil unrest in Iran in a generation.

And it sounds like, from what you're saying, kind of the opening shots of the revolution.

I think of it as the opening battle of the revolution.

And how caught off guard is the Shah, and for that matter, the Americans?

Well, the Shah was caught totally off guard. In recent months, there'd been a few eruptions. When the Shah had visited Washington, there'd been anti-Shah demonstrations by Iranian students in the streets. The previous month, there'd been a few seminary students killed in a holy city of Iran. But what happened in Tabriz was on just an utterly, totally different scale. But the amazing part was that for as massive as these protests in Tabriz were, the Americans were still not waking up to it at all. So remember that consul, Michael Matrinko, I mentioned earlier, who had been sent to Diplomatic Siberia? I do. Well, it turns out Diplomatic Siberia was Tabriz, the very city where all this went down. And Matrinko was the only foreign diplomat in Tabriz at the time of the riots. About 4 or 5 days after the riots had been put down, he gets a message that the CIA officer is coming up from Tehran to meet with him. And Matrinko goes, "Great. Finally, somebody is coming out in the field to see what's going on." Right. To see how bad things are getting. Yeah. So he goes and meets the CIA officer at the airport, and he's bringing him into town, and he goes into the gutted city center.

And the CIA officer all of a sudden perks up and looks around and goes, "What the hell happened here?" It turned out he was coming to Tabriz to talk to Matryenko on a completely different matter.

Had no idea.

Had no idea. This has been national news in this country for 5 or 6 days on every media outlet going, and a CIA officer based in Tehran, has escaped all knowledge of it.

Has no idea. Yeah. That a revolution is starting in his midst. That's right.

And there is big trouble in Iran now. The week began with riots, trashing, burning by the opposition to the Shah.

No warning went up after Debris for the Americans, and it just escalated from there.

Thousands of Iranians rampaged through the streets of Tehran shouting, "Down with the Shah!" Death to the Shah!

Throughout 1978, these protests spread.

A protest not simply for political freedom, but against low wages and high inflation, against huge military expenditures, against corruption and foreign influence.

And it wasn't just religious people. It was university students. It was secular leftists. It was professionals in the cities. It became more and more across the whole spectrum of population. And these were protests against Westernization of the country, against human rights violations being carried out by SAVAK, the Shah's secret police. They're sick of the surveillance, the lack of political freedom, and maybe even just tired of seeing the Shah's image everywhere. And at this point, it's not like the Americans or the Shah are unaware of these protests. They have to be aware of it. There are hundreds of thousands, at times even millions of people marching, especially through the streets of Tehran, paralyzing the city. But still, the Americans Iranians just did not react to this. And I think underlying all this was this idea that, well, the Shah has this massive military, he has this very sophisticated secret police. If things really are serious, of course the Shah is going to do something. So the fact that he's not doing anything must mean the problem isn't that severe. And again, the Shah just did not do anything. He was like a deer in headlights month after month after month.

Months. Well, what could the Shah have done, and what could the US have prompted him to do? Obviously, this is all 20/20 hindsight, but what at the time were the options?

Well, frankly, the one thing he, he might have done that could have saved him early on was put his military out on the streets in force and order them to shoot to kill. It worked for Saddam Hussein. It worked for the Assads in Syria for a for a very long time. But to his credit as a leader, the Shah was many times quoted during the revolution as saying to different people that, "If saving my throne means slaughtering the youth of my nation en masse, I won't do it." And essentially, he didn't do it. Of course, people were killed. By best estimate, probably 2,500 people. But the Shah never just unleashed his army as the way he might have done. But apart from that, he still had options even very late in the game. Moderate clerics had approached his inner the idea of how they could reach a negotiated compromise, one that would bring about more democratic reform to the country and diminish the Shah's power. And they actually came to something of an agreement, but the Shah played for time. He would not sign off on it. His thinking was, you know, "If this blows over, I don't have to make any concessions at all." So he played for time, and he did not have time.

And finally, it reached a point where the Americans— Everybody recognized he was doomed. Assumed. So he said, "I'm leaving the country for an extended vacation." I think everybody knew that it meant exile, that he was not coming back. And so in mid-January of 1979, he and Shabannou, his wife, get on a plane and fly into exile.

Chaotic celebrations erupted in Tehran when the news broke the Shah had gone. It was like Liberation Day, and roving crowds chanted, "The Shah is defeated, Khomeini has won." It is 10 minutes to 10. Khomeini was being helped down the steps of his chartered Air France jet to set foot on Iranian ground for the first time in 15 years.

And then, uh, 2 weeks later, on February 1st, 1979, Khomeini returns to Tehran. From exile.

The people were in a frenzy to catch just a glimpse of the man they revere like a god.

Probably as many as 3, 4 million people lined the motorcade route.

They clawed and clambered and ran to see and be near him for 15 miles.

It got so crazy that finally he had to be taken out of his car by helicopter because the security guards were worried he was going to be just crushed by by the sheer number of people gathering around the car. So what happens over the next 9 months is there's this whole period of chaos. Gradually, Khomeini and the people right around him, they push the moderates to the side, and it all kind of leads to the hostage crisis in November of 1979.

The American embassy in Tehran is in the hands of Muslim students tonight. Spurred on by an anti-American speech by the Ayatollah Khomeini, they stormed the embassy, fought the Marine guards for 3 hours, overpowered them, and took dozens of American hostages.

This is, of course, the Iranian hostage crisis, which is seared into the memory of a generation of Americans. I'm one of them. Iranians seize the US embassy in Tehran. Iran hold 52 Americans hostage for 444 days, which are counted day after day after day across the United States. That's right.

And one of those hostages was the man who all along had been trying to warn the American government what was happening, Michael Matrinko. Wow.

We started this inquiry, Scott, with the question of why there is so much animus between the two countries, United States and Iran. And the simple answer would seem to be that the United States, out of its own national interest, enters into an alliance with Iran's monarch that in its insularity and all its excesses disregards the will of the Iranian people and animates enough of them to rise up against this partnership between the two countries. That's what I take from your book in this conversation. And it feels self-evident that there is no Islamic Revolution in Iran without the US playing the outsized role that it did in Iran between the end of World War II and 1979. Is that right? I think that's absolutely right.

You know, one force exists as a counterforce to the other. To me, one of the great mysteries of the riddles is is why in the most westernized or to our minds progressive nations in the Middle East, why was that the place where you had this religious counterrevolution? But it's almost a question I think that answers itself in a way. It's not going to happen in a country where they straddle the line between religion and westernization. It's because the Shah had gone so so much, so modern, so, again, progressive. Not when it came to human rights necessarily, but so identified with the West that it was asking for this counterreaction to it.

It would've perhaps, you're saying, be surprising if there were not a major countervailing force reaction blowback. Yeah, yeah. To the kind of change he wanted, the scale of it, the speed of it.

The thing that has always fascinated me by the story and why I wrote the book is that it just seemed it could've ended so many different ways. Many less tragic ways that we would end up with the most extreme, the most hardline option possible. A regime that has funded terrorism networks around the world, that has been instrumental in the kidnapping of American diplomats and journalists, that has funded proxy armies throughout the Middle East and helped destabilize regimes, and not least a regime that this past January in a single weekend killed thousands of its own people in demonstrations.

And now, all these decades later, the United States is now back in Iran seeking the end of this same regime that came to power rejecting the US-Iranian alliance. And judging by President Trump's original stated goals—getting the Iranians to rebel and for there to be regime change—neither of which have occurred It seems once again that the United States, and I'm curious if you think this is correct, does not quite understand Iran.

I think they know less about Iran today than they did in 1978. I think that the— How's that possible? We have no diplomats there. It's very clear in the run-up to the current war going on that there was no American intelligence on the ground coming out. Uh, the Trump administration seemed to rely almost completely on on, on what Israeli intelligence was gathering, and a lot of that was wishful thinking. So what happened in 1979 is, is because of American obliviousness, it lost one of its most important allies in the world, probably the most important ally between Western Europe and Japan. And today a different version of that is happening. Once again, by our ignorance, we've gone into a war with the regime in Iran, the end result of which is going to be that that regime is even stronger. Revolutionary Iran is absolutely going to be a major player in what happens in the Persian Gulf going forward, much more of a determinant than it was prior to the American attack. And I think also the American standing around the world has taken a massive blow because it's very clear to everybody that this war was started on rather spurious, if not nonexistent, reason.

So, you know, once again, the American ignorance has led us to this place where I think it's going to be to the detriment of the United States for decades to come.

Well, Scott, thank you very much. We appreciate it.

Oh, thank you, Michael. Happy to be here.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Thursday, President Trump abandoned his controversial pick for the next director of national intelligence, Bill Pulte, amid a bipartisan revolt over Pulte's lack of qualifications. And his history of attacking Trump's opponents. Instead, Trump said he would nominate the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Jay Clayton, who served as chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission during Trump's first term. This episode was produced by Ricky Nowitzki, Rachael Bonja, Jessica Chung, and Claire Tennisketter, with help from Diana Wynn. It was edited by Devin Taylor and Paige Cowett, with help from Michael Benoit. It was fact-checked by Susan Lee, and contains music by Marian Lozano, Rowaney Misto, Dan Powell, and Alishaba Itube. Our theme music is by Wonderly. This episode was engineered by Rohini Mesto and Chris Wood. Special thanks to Yegena Torbati and Adrian Carter. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you on Sunday.

I'm Gilbert Cruz. This week on the Book Review Podcast, I talk to the author Ryan Holiday about why he nominated Cormac McCarthy's The Road as one of his top books of the 21st century. I think what the great novels do is they grow with you.

Can I quote something else from the book? It's just— Sure. —hitting right on what you're saying. I love this.

The Road captures both the beauty and the horror of being a parent.

Do not get me started on that scene. That's— ugh. Listen to the Book Review wherever you get your podcasts.