Transcript of 636. Revolution in Iran: Fall of the Shah (Part 1)

Iran, because of the great leadership of the Shah, is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world. This is a great tribute to you, your Majesty, and to your leadership, and to the respect and the admiration and love which your people give to you. We in the United States have no other nation on Earth who is closer to us in planning for our mutual military security. And there is no leader with whom I have a deeper sense of personal gratitude and personal friendship. On behalf of the people of the United States, I would like to offer a toast at this time to the great leaders of Iran, the Shah and the Shahbanu, and to the people of Iran, and to the world peace that we hope together we can help to bring. Now, people listening to that may think that that is an Englishman who can't do a good impression of someone from Georgia, but it isn't. It was actually Dominic President Jimmy Carter. He was toasting the last Shah of Iran, as Americans call it, or as we in Britain call it correctly, Iran, Mohamed Reza Palavi and his wife, Emprice Farah, the Shah Banu, at a banquet in Iran's capital, Tehran, on New Year's Eve, 1977.

Dominic, it is a moment ripe with irony, is it not?

It is indeed. It's one of the great ironic moments, not just of the 1970s, but the late 20th century. This moment when Jimmy Carter is toasting the Shah and the Shah Banu, the friendship between Iran and the United States, and the stability and the security that Iran offers in the Middle East, this comes just days before the outbreak of a violent revolution that sweeps the Shah from power, and it kicks off the rule of the Ayatollahs who still govern Iran today.

Well, Dominic, you say that. We are recording this in early January. I mean, by the time this goes out, who knows what may have happened.

That's true, because Iran is once again engulfed in street protests, demonstrations, violent repression, and so on.

The storm clouds of counter revolution are gathering.

There indeed. But to go back to the revolution itself, Jimmy Carter, the man who is standing there giving that toast, he is one of the first and most prominent political victims of this Revolution because his presidency, pretty extraordinary and strange presidency, even by American standards, is consumed by the fires of the Iranian Revolution. So it's an extraordinary story.

One of the things that brings Ronald Reagan to power, and one of the advantages of Reagan is he's much easier to do an impersonation of.

Yes. So just to give people a little sense of the way the rest of his history works. I think that was about the 24th take. If you have any question marks about Tom's rendition of Jimmy Carter there, let me just emphasize, it was a lot better than the previous 23 takes.

Which he sounded very like Shane Warne for a lot of the time.

He did. What we're going to be telling in this series is the story of the fall of the Shah and the rise of the Ayatollars, the capture of the US Embassy in Tehran, this extraordinary moment when 66 Americans were held hostage for 444 days, and Jimmy Carter's disastrous attempt, Operation Eagle Claw, to rescue them, which ended in disaster and tragedy.

Dominic, again, just to say, we are recording this in the immediate aftermath of the US raid on Caracas, which was, in military terms, an incredible success. I guess what happens in Iran with Qatar is the polar opposite. It's an absolute disaster.

It is. It's an incredibly dramatic story, but one that has really, really serious repercussions. First of all, this story, what happens in Iran in the late 1970s, completely overturns the diplomatic chess board of the Middle East. It turns Iran from one America's closest regional allies into an implacable opponent, an opponent that today is making drones used by the Russians in Ukraine, for example. Secondly, and I know this is something that you find fascinating, Tom, this is the story of the Islamic Revolution. Arguably, I would say the only global revolution comparable with the French and the Russian revolutions in terms of its dramatic cultural and political consequences.

I would say definitely. I mean, it fires a starting gun on the wave of Islamic militancy that has shaken the world since 1979.

A lot to talk about. But let's start with those two men in Tehran on New Year's Eve, 1977. They are in the Niavaran Palace, which is in the northern foothills on the edge of Tehran. Tehran, to give people a sense, it's the capital of Iran. It's a city that had changed enormously in the 20 years before Jimmy Carter visited. It had been transformed by billions of dollars in new oil money, new housing blocks, new factories, and above all, new people. In the 1940s, the end of the Second World War, Tehran had half a million people. In 1977, when Carter went, it had almost 5 million people. That stratosphoric growth, that single fact, in some ways, lies at the heart of today's episode, the extraordinary change in the social-economic makeup of Tehran and indeed of Iran, generally.

I would say that of all the cities I've ever been to, Tehran is the one that seems the least capable of coping, say, with traffic. The traffic there, I mean, unbelievable. You have vast lanes with no traffic lights, no way of crossing it. The whole infrastructure is buckling at the seams. The seams buckle, you know what I mean. I guess that this is a legacy of the great boom in the '60s and '70s.

Exactly, which we'll come to. Of all the people in Tehran in 1977, the most celebrated and powerful was the man that Carter was toasting that night, the host. That's Mohamed Reza Palavi, who is the King of Kings and light of the Arians, the Shah of Iran. Let's give people a sense of his character. He was born in 1919 to an army officer called Reza Palavi in a land that was then called in the West, Persia. Persia, of course, a very ancient country, not so much a nation as a civilization in itself, multi-ethnic, multilingual. Of course, the one thing that people get wrong about Persia and Iran is they think that they... People would often call them Arabs. They're not Arabs. It's the one thing they're absolutely not. It's very important to Iranians, they're not an Arab country. What's also very important, it was the only country in the world that had adopted a particular Islam, Shia or Shia-ite Islam, as its state religion. We will come back to this because this question about Shiaism, or Shia Islam, lies at the center of the Iranian revolution.

It absolutely does. Of course, people will think of Iran as an Islamic country, which it completely is. But just to emphasize on the ancient roots of the dynamic in Iran in this episode. I mean, it is incredibly ancient. Farsi, the predominant language in Iran, is descended from the language spoken by the first great rulers of Persha, Cyrus, and Darius, the Great, and people like that. That framework of a monarchy and a priesthood, which you see in 20th century Iran, and which is so fundamental to the dynamics of the Iranian Revolution, that ultimately reaches back before the coming of Islam, all the way back, again, to the time of Cyrus and Darius. The concept of monarchy is at least as fundamental to the historical makeup of Iran as the idea of a a a claracy. It's a great epic of Iran for Dauci's Shah Nameh. I mean, it's literally the Book of Kings. When the Shah stands up there, he is, I think, correctly conscious of himself as the heir of thousands of years of rule by monarchs.

Right. Well, let's talk about monarchs. Let's talk about Mohamed Rezaa Palavi. In his lifetime, I said he was born in 1919. In his lifetime, indeed, that of his father, Persia had fallen prey to a series of rival colonial empires, specifically Russia and Britain. That was turbo-charged in 1908 when the British struck oil. That was the moment that created the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which we all know much better as BP. In the first World War, Persia was occupied by the Russians and the British. After the First World War, it fell into total chaos. In 1921, Muhammad's father, Reza Palavi, staged a coup with British support, and he ends up becoming Reza Shah. He takes the throne himself, which means that Muhammad becomes Crown Prince at the age of just two years old. Now, Reza Shah is a very formidable man. His son said he was one of the most frightening men he ever met, and he was definitely not a loving father. He supposes he thought that if he was too kind to his son, then it would mean that his son became gay. So he didn't show him too much affection. Muhammad grew up as the absolutely classic textbook, anxious, shy, reserved son of an overbearing, terrifying military father.

So very, very Alexis and Peter the Great, for people who remember that series. And Muhammad was sent off to a Swiss boarding school. He became a massive francophile at the school which he remained all his life. And in fact, because he associates Iran with his father and because he goes off to boarding school in the West, he use always something of a moderniser and a westerniser, and indeed a seculariser, which, as we will see, is something of a problem.

Yeah, and he loves very expensive French food, doesn't he? Which we'll feature later in this show.

Well, how should I put this? He likes French courtesans. I think it's the best way of putting it. So in 1941, Persha, which his father, Reza, has renamed or he has basically asked people abroad, Stop calling it Persha, please. We don't call it Persha. We call it the land of the Arians, its ancient name, which is Iran. So Persia or Iran is occupied once again by the British and the Soviets to stop the Nazis getting its oil. The British thought that Reza Palavi was too pro-German, and they made him abdicate in favor of his son, who's now 21.

This meddling by the British in Iranian politics is such a feature of 19th and early 20th century history, isn't it? That even now in the 21st century, the Iranians are still prone to thinking that Britain lurks behind mind everything wrong.

They do. It's very flattering for us because whenever anything happens, the Iranians assume that the British are controlling everything.

It's notoriety way above our station now.

Completely. We're punching above our weight in the Iranian imagination. At 21 years old, Mohamed Reza Palavi is the new Shah of Iran, and he has a double taint. First of all, he's the son of a usurper who seised the throne in a British-back coup in 1921. He only got the throne himself 20 years later because the British basically gave it to him. There's this impression of being a foreign puppet, and this is confirmed a decade later in one of the most controversial, if not the most controversial moments in Iranian history. In 1953, Iran had democratically elected Prime Minister called Mohamed Mosadeq, who's this very wily old bird, this experienced reformist liberal politician. He has pledged that he will nationalize this Anglo-Persian oil company BP. The British, understandably, I suppose, they hate this idea because they want to keep all the money for themselves. They basically persuade the CIA to organize a coup. There's a coup, about 250 people are killed, Mossadeq is toppled, and he's put under house arrest for the rest of his life. Now, the Shah, who's the figurehead of Iran, he knew about this coup. He supported it. He spent most of it hiding in a hotel in Rome, and then coming back to Iran.

A lot of people in the Iranian elite conclude at the end of 1953, the Shah, he's basically a complete coward and a wimp, and he is a Western puppet because he did nothing to resist this coup. But then From the late 1950s onwards, with Mostek on, the Shah starts to assert himself. He becomes more than a figurehead. Like his father, he is a moderniser. Both of them, Rizápáh Lavi, a classic military man of the interwar years who had tried to westernize and modernize Iran. His son is the same. We'll talk a little bit more in the second half about the political implications of this, but let's just concentrate on Muhammad and his character. By the 1960s, he is developing a personality cult. His courteous treat him as a demigod. He starts to see himself as the heir to the great kings of the past, people like Cyrus the Great.

Cyrus is the founder of the Persian monarchy. I suppose the great advantage that the Shah has over other would be dictatorial figures in the mid-20th century is that he does have this incredible historical legacy to draw on.

Exactly. And he does with gusto. They put up posters everywhere in Tehran. He's got this classic 1950s, 1960s dictator vibe. So he wears a military uniform and enormous sunglasses.

You see, I think that's a mistake. I think if he'd gone for the full long beard as worn by Dreyas's great, he might have cut a better figure.

I like a dictator in sunglasses, to be honest. I'd wear them myself if I was a dictator, but there you go. The thing is that actually, behind the scenes, he's still actually a very shy and sullen man and very reserved and timid. But in the West, he becomes a real celebrity. So Western visitors think he's very polished and very impressive. The gossip columns are full of... He speaks English and French fluently. He goes skiing in Saint He plays tennis on the French Riviera. He's the person who in an alternative universe would have a cameo in an early Pink Panther film or something.

He would. He's got a slight swath of good looks of James Mason.

Yeah, David Niven or somebody.

David Niven, that vibe, hasn't he?

That's exactly the vibe for the Shah. As befitting a 1960s celebrity, he has a taste for the finer things in life. In 1967, he elevates himself to the title of the original Persian King's, King of Kings, Shah and Shah. He has a new coronation, and he has a solid gold scepter, and he has a crown with thousands and thousands of diamonds. Then in 1971, one of the most famous parties in history, he throws this incredible blowout to mark the 2,500th anniversary of the foundation of the Persian monarchy. Where does he have this, Tom? Do you want to tell us?

Well, he has it at Persepolis, which is the great city of the ancient Persian Kings burnt by Alexander the Great, and which is extraordinary place to visit. But as you visit it, you go past the rusting remains of the tent poles that had provided this this amazing jambourie for people, Dominic, who had come from across the world, hadn't they? So he had all kinds of glamorous figures. Csárdsko from Romania, Mobutu, Imelda Marcos, and perhaps the most sinister figure of all, Princess Anne. Yeah.

People say, What's your dream historical dinner party? The chars had it. Tito, Imelda Marcos, brilliant.

Famously, the food is flown in from Paris by maxims.

Yes, maxims Paris, and all this Chateau Lafitte, Rothschild and whatnot, flown in as well. So incredible. This is symptomatic of a wider glitz, glamor, and corruption of the chars caught. By the early '70s, he's got multiple palaces. He's got a country house in England. He's got a country house in Switzerland. He has a palace just for his mistresses who are either escorts, phone in from Paris or Lufthansa Air Stewardesses. His half sister is taking millions of dollars in kickbacks. The bloke who books his escorts is given the caviar export monopoly. Actually, it's sometimes suggested that a lot of this is Islamic Revolution propaganda. That basically the Ayatollah is massively exaggerated how corrupt the Shah's court was. But after the Shah's fall, the British Foreign Secretary at the time, David Owen, commissioned an internal report. And this report, British Foreign Office report, basically said it was really corrupt, and the Shah himself was taking massive bribes on defense contracts.

Basically, it's petrodollars, isn't it? And this is the stuff that oil shakes are going to be doing after the oil shock. So it's completely believable.

Oh, totally it is. And the oil is obviously a massive part of this story. The Shah liked having money, and in the '70s, he gets a lot more of it. Because in autumn 1973, after the opaque oil shock in which he was a key player, the price of oil almost quadrupled. Iran was the world's second biggest oil exporter. This means the Shah has this colossal windfall, and now he really can make Iran great again, and he can fulfill his dream. His big sponsors by this point, by the '70s, are not the British, they are the Americans. All through the postwar years, the Americans have backed the Shah as a key ally against Soviet expansion into the Persian Gulf, which is one of their big fears. The CIA has been He's funding and training his secret police, which is called SAVAK. Savak had a pretty grizzly reputation for torturing their opponents, for torturing dissidents. There's a lot of stuff with acid and cattle prods. It's very 1970s Paraguay or something.

Are they particularly targeting poets, which is the big thing in South America, isn't it? Do you know what?

They're not as much as you would think, actually. I think it's mainly dissident professors and leftists of various kinds. But I know you've got it in for poets, Tom. But actually-No, I haven't.

I haven't. That is a plus mark for the Shah and probably reflects the ancient tradition of Persian poetry.

Yeah, maybe. The CIA had poets on their books. So the CIA supported American poetry.

It's so complicated, isn't it?

Exactly. I think if you're a Chilean or Argentine poet, I think the '70s were a bad decade.

Yeah, but if you're an Iranian one, it's better.

Maybe a bit better, I don't know. So Henry Kissinger Richard Nixon, who were in charge of American foreign policy in the early '70s, see Iran as an absolutely central player in their anticommunist alliance system. In 1972, Nixon went to Tehran, and he explicitly said to the Shah, You're going to hear a lot of whingeing from weedy liberals. Please do not listen to this. You are our man, and if you want weapons, we will give you weapons. The Shah said, Brilliant. This is what I'm going to spend my all money on. In the next six years, he spent $12 billion on all these jet fighters and destroyers and submarines. It was one of the biggest arms sprees in history. He bought more chieftan tanks from the British than the British themselves had in their own army. Just this colossal amount. Other American regional allies thought this was mad. The Saudi oil minister said to the Americans in 1975, The Shah is a megalomaniac. He's highly unstable. If you don't recognize this, there must be something wrong with your powers of observation.

But Dominic, just to say, the Arabs have always hated and feared the Iranians. Saddam Hussein, who is in Iraq and prominent leader there of the Bartis, he had this famous phrase, which was one of his favorites, There are three whom God should not have created: Flies, Jews, and Persians.

God, that's poor from Saddam Hussein, isn't that disappointing?

It has to be said that the Iranians term that on its head, and they say that there are three things that God should not have created, flies, Jews, and Arabs. It goes two ways.

The Shah has very much come to believe his own publicity. There was an observer journalist called Gavin Young who went to interview him in the mid '70s. He was shocked how arrogant the Shah had become. The Shah said to him, We're going to be top nation. We're going to be such a great country. In 20 years, we will be ahead of the United States. Now, we are the masters with our own money, and our former masters are our slaves.

Well, the Shah and Shah, King of Kings.

Yeah, punchy from the Shah. Now, a mention of the Americans brings us to his guest at that New Year's Eve banquet. This is the person who you've ventriloquized so magnificently, the 39th President of the United States, James Earle Carter Jr. Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter, what an extraordinary man he is. I think it's even by the standards of today's President, It's hard to exaggerate what an unlikely President Jimmy Carter is. Carter was born in 1924 to unimproveably a peanut farmer in Plains, Georgia, in this absolutely sleepy, backward rural Hamlet. Carter was very self-improving. He went to the Naval Academy in Annapolis, and then he got a job as an engineer on the US nuclear submarine program. Carter had a very, very distinctive personality. He's incredibly conscientious. He's incredibly hardworking. He's an autodidact. He's not a tremendous laugh. He's a bit of a loner. He's got no close friends. He's very moralistic. He's very competitive. He's very stubborn. He's the Find a person who basically comes home. He's like a character from an improving 19th century manual. He comes home late at night. He probably got up to pray first thing in the morning, then went to the nuclear submarine, then he comes home, and then he learns Spanish in the evening.

That is Jimmy Garner's vibe.

The praying really kicks in a bit later, doesn't it?

It does, yeah.

But I would imagine right from the beginning, he's a great man for a cardigan.

Totally, he is. Yeah.

I cannot imagine Donald Trump wearing a cardigan.

And a plaid shirt. He's very plaid shirt. He loves a plaid shirt, yes. So Carter's father died in 1953. He came back to Plains and he took over the family peanut farm. And he was very good at peanut farming, and he made a great success of it. He modernized it and he moved into local politics and he ran for Congress in 1966, and he lost.

He's a Democrat, isn't he?

He's a Democrat. You have to be in the South at this point. You absolutely have to be to get anywhere. He lost, and he had this massive existential crisis. He probably sank into depression after he lost. It was the first time he'd lost anything. He turned to God was born again. And later on, when he ran for President, everybody basically north of the Mason-Dixon Line, laughed at Carter about this. And they wrote all these articles. The Time magazine had a huge cover calling him a weirdo and stuff. But this was because people in New York and Washington didn't understand that in Georgia, in the Baptist world of rural Georgia, being born again was nothing outlandish. It was absolutely, I wouldn't say it was standard, but it was common.

Yeah. And I mean, in view of what is going to happen in 1979 and through the '80s, actually, the last laugh is on them because they haven't recognized that religion is going to become an expression of the modern.

Quite right. That actually, Carter is not a backward-looking figure, as he was often treated in the '70s. He is a forward-looking one. Anyway, he runs again for office in 1970. Again, a very forward-looking thing. He runs as a populist. He ran against a man called Carl Sanders, Democrat establishment figure. Carter painted him as the of the country club Big Wigs. He called him Cufflinks Carl.

So that is quite Trump.

Yeah, of course. Jimmy Carter's populism is really interesting. His Southern populism. It's very ahead. It both looks back to a tradition of Southern populism, but the way in which he repackages it for the late 20th century is very forward-looking. He says, Look, I'm the champion of the little guy. I'm an ordinary person. I'm not a career politician. I've got my nice plaid shirt, all of this thing. He wins the election. He becomes governor. He's pretty good at it. By late 1972, he is thinking about running for president. Now, on the face of it, this is a very long shot. There hasn't been a genuine Southern President since Andrew Johnson in the aftermath of the Civil War, and there has never been a president from the deep south, from the really deep South, from the states that had once held millions of slaves from places like Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and so on. There's never been a president from one of these states. The other thing that is against Carter, and this is the thing that Now that everyone thinks that Jimmy Carter is a lovely, kind guy who built houses for poor people and stuff, people forget.

Carter in the '70s was much more conservative than most democratic activists. It's a tough gig for him to try to get the presidential nomination. But unexpectedly, everything falls into his lap. First of all, the democratic favorite, who is Edward Kennedy, has destroyed himself at Chappaquitic by driving off the bridge, abandoning Mary Joe Kopechny, and then on a blazer and walking around on the balcony of his hotel to try and pretend nothing has happened. Meanwhile, in Washington, Watergate has erupted. Everybody assumes that all Washington politicians are really corrupt. People are saying, Let's have an outsider to drain the swamp, all of this And so Carter comes through in the Democratic primaries. He plays up the fact that he's an outsider, he's a Southerner, he's an evangelical Christian, he's a populist, all of this stuff. He has these ads where he's walking around his farm in his lovely check shirt. He He talks about how he likes to teach Sunday school. And his policy prescription is so vague. It's brilliant. It's all things to all men. People say, What will it be like when you're present? He says, I will give you, and I'm not going to do the voice because I cannot do a Southern accent.

He says, Do you want to do it, Tom, in your Australian accent? No, you do it. You go for it. He says, I will promise a government that is as good and honest and decent and competent and compassionate and as filled with love as are the American people.

God, as filled with love as are the American people. That's a recipe for a happy administration.

Instead of reaching for the sick bucket, people say, Oh, isn't that nice? That's what we want. So he wins the nomination, and then he wins the present. He beats Jerold Ford. So now Carter is President, and is he good at it? I mean, I think you don't even have to be a critic of Jimmy Carter to say he's actually not really good at it. He doesn't have any contacts on Capitol Hill. He finds it really hard to work with Congress. He's not naturally charming. I mean, he doesn't exude warmth. Everybody says this in Capitol Hill. He's stubborn. He doesn't like compromising. He works incredibly hard, but it's the classic story. It's a bit Richie Sunak or something. He works almost too hard. He thinks if he stays up till three o'clock in the morning doing his paperwork, he'll be a better president. Actually, that means he just massively overprepairs and overthink everything. He'll rock up at nine o'clock in the morning and say, overnight, I've dreamt up a 455 point plan to fight inflation or something.

So he begins, doesn't he? Looking very sunny, full of the optimism of the south and all that. And very rapidly, he comes to look gray and haggard and worn.

Yeah, because he's not sleeping.

And in the long run, this isn't going to look good when he goes for a run.

No, it will not. It will not look good. Actually, this discussion of the optics of being President, so interesting. So it quite often happens, I think, that people will elect somebody. They'll say, We'd like an ordinary person now. We're sick of all these crap. They don't want that at all. But they don't really want that. When the French elected François Hollande, what they actually always deep down this want is a statesman. You mentioned Jimmy Carter's cardigan. He turned up on national television, an early national broadcast, wearing a cardigan, and he said, I'd like everybody to turn their thermostats down.

You can't do that, can you? That's not the Imperial presidency.

No, not at all. So there's that. There's the cardigan issue. There's also the issue he's a massive micromanager and a meddler. Oh, yes.

Famously, the tennis courts Bookings, which you love, don't you? Yeah.

My favorite Jimmy Carter. Fact is that he handles the tennis court bookings. Dom Johnson. So Dom Johnson, a blast from the past, our former producer, is in on this call, and he's immediately jumped into the chat. Tennis court bookings.

It's one of two things about Jimmy Carter that we always mention, the Tennis Court Bookings, and another thing that involves a swamp, which regular listeners to this podcast will be waiting for with baited breath.

There are only two facts That's what I'm talking about, Jimmy Carter worth knowing. This is the man at the helm of the world's most powerful country. How is he going to run America's foreign policy? Well, he's basically said, no more Vietnam Wars. My ethical foreign policy, he says, will reflect the decency in The generosity of the American people. Again, people are wiping my tears at this point. We won't nick Greenland. I promise. To be fair to Carter, he has a couple of foreign policy successes, most famously the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel, which he he mediates in 1978. But he is hidebound by the fact that Vietnam has happened. There's a general sense the US is going backwards in the Cold War. There is Soviet intervention in Africa, in Ethiopia, in Zair, in Angola, and so on. People are talking about what they call at the time the Ark of Crisis that runs all the way from Southern Africa to Southeast Asia. They say basically Asia and Africa are going to slip out of the Western orbit. Capitalism is in retreat. Soviet imperialism is emboldened. We should stop appeasing them. We should get rid of detente.

Can I ask you, Dominic, is Carter naturally a dove? Or does, say, his evangelical Christianity give him a bit of an edge that he can draw on when he feels he needs it?

He is ambiguous. He starts off a little bit more dovish, largely, I think, because he's never really thought about foreign policy. He's always been, he's governor of Georgia. You didn't really have to think about world affairs, a new governor of Georgia. Actually, it was a criticism that people had of him. They said he won't know anything about how to handle world affairs. At first, he strikes a more dovish line, but by about 1978, he's definitely changed his tune, and he is much harder on the Soviet Union. Does his evangelical Christianity play a massive part in that? I don't think it does play a massive part, actually.

I just ask because that sense of the world being divided into good and evil, which, of course, Reagan will make great play with, but this is also going to be the heart of the perspective that the Iatollars bring to their understanding of the world. Yeah.

Carter definitely has a very moralistic sense of the world, and he's comfortable with the language of good and evil in a way that that Reagan is, in a way that Margaret Thatcher is in Britain in a similar period, but there may be older politicians of them.

Slightly wince.

Yeah, it would make them slightly wince. They would think of it as a little bit gauche, maybe. Anyway, this context explains, I think, why Carter goes all in on the Shah. Before he became President, I'm guessing that Jimmy Carter had literally never thought about Iran at all. I mean, if you're the governor of Georgia, you never have to worry about Iranian affairs. Here's a US TV fact for you. The US network news in the 1970s typically discussed Iran for five minutes a year. Those five minutes were generally taken up with coverage of the Shah's dinners or him going skiing or his glamorous, his oddly young and glamorous companions.

The Shah steps out with glamorous centerfold.

Exactly. That's exactly what it was. Now, Carter was aware that the Shah was getting a bit of a kicking from liberals about his human rights record. He put a little bit of pressure on the Shah to ameliorate this. Actually, in 1977, the Shah said, Fair enough, we're going to stop torturing people, and I'll let the Red Cross in to have a look at my prisons, and we shall allow poets and writers. Here are your poets again for you, Tom. We shall allow them to have meetings and talk about liberal ideas and political reforms and so on and so forth. However, Carter doesn't want to go too far in this. In June 1977, he appoints a new ambassador to Iran called William Sullivan, who's going to be a big character in this series. William Sullivan is a career diplomat. He's got this white bouffon hair. He's regarded as a loose cannon.

We love a loose cannon in American diplomatic debacles.

We definitely do. He's very outspoken. He's very acerbic. He doesn't suffer falls gladly. They point him to the embassy in Tehran. Carter says to him, Look, I want you to treat the Shah as our close friend. He's a really important ally for us. Iran is, and I quote, our guarantee of stability and security in the Persian Gulf. Off all of this. Sullivan says, Aren't you the human rights guy? Is human rights that important to you? Carter actually says to him, Don't overthink this. Don't worry too much about the human rights thing. Iran is so important to us, not least because we have listening posts on the Soviet border with Iran that are massively important to us. So don't get too carried away with this human rights business. Yeah, we'd like the Shah to stop attacking people with cattle prods, but having him on side is so important. So the Shah comes to Washington in November 1977. Carter rolls out the red carpet for him. And afterwards, Carter says publicly, The Shah is brilliant. I love the Shah. He's more impressive than any other leader, certainly any European leader I've ever met. And what's so hurtful about this, Tom, is the show at this point has met James Callahan.

So what is he thinking? Terrible judge of character.

What can we say?

Terrible judge of character. So this is what sets the scene for this trip that Carter then makes in return to Tehran on New Year's Eve, 1977. Again, it's a very gilded scene. One American reporter said it felt like Versailles in the days of Louis XIV. There's caviar, there's Dom Perignon, there's Rose Partridge, there's this gigantic ice cream flambe. Carter gives this speech and he says, I ask my wife, Rosaline, where she'd like to spend New Year's Eve, because we were going to be abroad. She said, The people I love most are the Shah and empress Farah. Everybody says, Oh, isn't that lovely? Carter says, I mean, it's unbelievable when you read the speech. He says, I really love human rights. What's nice for me is I know the Shah. I know you love human rights, too. How profound How profoundly impressed I've been, he says, with your wisdom, your judgment, your sensitivity and insight. How moved I was when we drove through Tehran and I saw literally thousands of Iranian citizens standing beside the street with a friendly attitude expressing their welcome to me, he says. And beside them, thousands of American citizens. There are now 50,000 Americans in Iran who stood there welcoming their President in a nation which has taken them to heart and made them feel at home.

Well, it never occurs to Carter. Carter, who is so inexperienced in world affairs, it never occurs to him when he's saying these words that he has gambled his entire presidency on a doomed regime. But Tom, just eight days later in the city of Gomme, the first fires are lit in a revolution that will change things forever. At the center of this confluxation is a man who has a very different vision for Iran and its people, and that is the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeni.

Thrilling stuff. We will be back after the break to hear from the Ayatollah.

Wow.

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Nice. Manchmal merkt man sofort, dass es passt.

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If they were not protected by the Iranian government, the people would skin them alive. Everything in our treasury is emptied into the pockets of America. If there is anything left, it goes to the Shah and his gang. They buy themselves foreign villas and stuff their bank accounts with the people's money while the nation starves. So brave sons of Islam, stand up. Talk to the people. Tell the truth to the masses. Rouse the people in the streets and the bizarres. Rouse our students. Rouse our simple-hearted workers and peasants, and let us become holy warriors. So welcome back to the Rest is History. And what you heard there were the dulcet tones of the Ayatollah Reholah Khomenei. And he was speaking from exile in Iraq, in the city of Najaf in February 1978. Dominic, the Ayatollah is one of the iconic figures of 20th century revolution, isn't he? He's up there with Lenin, with Mao. Everyone recognizes him. His long beard, his bristling eyebrows, his general expression of fun.

Yes, exactly. Americans, in particular, will think of him as one of history's great villains. But as always with people who are regarded as great villains or indeed great heroes. It's always interesting to dig into the reality behind the iconic image. He was born in the market town of Khomein in central Iran, probably in 1900. He came from a reasonably well-off family. His father and grandfather had both been clerks. His father was killed in a fight when he was a toddler, and he was raised by his uncle and aunt. He was, by all accounts, a very clever boy. He supposedly began reading the Quran when he was six. He was very good at football, apparently. He played football. He loved poetry, and actually, he loves poetry all his life. But he was clearly very serious and reserved. He probably got on well with Jimmy Carter, actually.

Well, that's the irony, isn't it? I mean, there are echoes between America and Iran throughout this entire conflict. Just to say about Khamini's upbringing, that the background to it, you said that his father was killed in a brawl. I mean, this is the period that build up to the First World War and the First World War itself, and it is very violent. I think that when he ends up going to a seminary, and I think that that provides him with a refuge from the chaos of life outside and must be a hugely formative in his association of Islam with peace.

Completely. As you say, he goes to the seminary in this place called Qom, which is a holy city because it has the shrine of somebody called Fatima Bint Musa, who is the sister of the eighth Shia Imam. We We don't need to get into that right now. Anyway, it's a holy city. He's at the seminary. He finds security in Khan, as you say. He does law there. He does philosophy, doesn't he? Greek philosophy.

He does, but philosophy is his real focus. It's particular focus on Greek philosophy, so Aristotle, and particularly Plato, and how they have been mediated by the traditions of Islamic and specifically Shia thinking.

Exactly. Khomini, he's a serious and very clever person. He writes poetry, studies poetry. He's very interested in mysticism. He becomes one of the most respected scholars at the seminary.

You know who he actually also reminds me of is Pope John Paul II, also a footballer, a poet, becomes a Titanic religious leader of the '70s and '80s. Certain parallel there.

Yeah. By the time he's about 50, people are calling him Ayatollah, which is a term of respect for an especially learned scholar. And everybody acknowledges he's an incredibly charismatic and impressive person. He always wears this black robe, this black turban. He's got his beard, he's perfectly groomed. He has this hypnotic, unware wavering stare. He always looks implacable and formidable. He never is seen smiling or laughing in public. This is because he's very conscious of his seriousness and his dignity. There's a of austerity to him, which is reflected in his private life. He married his wife when she was in her early teens. He's not a big... Unlike the Shah, he doesn't have dishes flown in from maxims of Paris. He doesn't own much. He spends his time to relax. He goes to relax, he prays, he meditates, he goes for a walk. So maybe we should talk a little bit. I know you want to talk a bit, Tom, about the importance of Shia Islam to our story.

It's so fundamental.

Just to give people a sense of what we mean. In the early days of the Islamic Conquests, after the death of Muhammad, there was basically a disagreement about who would succeed, wasn't there? Shiaites believe that the Islamic community took a wrong path. The leadership should have remained in the family of Muhammad's son-in-law, Ali.

Well, specifically, Dominic, the family of the prophet himself, because Ali is married to the daughter of Muhammad. Their sons, Hassan and Hussein, are are the grandchildren of the Prophet, but they don't succeed. They end up being killed. We'll come to that in a minute.

Over time, their faction basically evolves into its own sect with its own history and its own traditions and its own rituals.

Yes. They are the Shiaat Ali, the party of Allah. That's where Shia comes from.

Shia or Shiaites. They are now in the world today, about 10% to 15% of Muslims. The vast majority of Muslims are sunny, but the Shia or the Shiaites are this minority. Iran Iran had been a Shia or Shiaite since about the 1500s, when the Saffafid dynasty imposed it as the state religion. It became a really, really important part of Iranian identity because it distinguished them from the neighboring Arabic-speaking countries which were sunny Muslim. So it made Iran feel different. And it had two massive consequences for our story. So one of them is that I know you're going to say a little bit more about this. At the heart of the sheer belief system is this idea that you have… It's a belief system based on the idea of oppression and authority and virtuous, austere martyrs and victims who are being oppressed by overweening state authority or overweening authority of one kind or another.

The primal victims and martyrs in this belief system are Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet, a caliph who had been assassinated. But more particularly, Ali's son, the grandson of the Prophet, we've already mentioned him, Hussein, who was killed in a battle in Iraq, a place called Kabbalah in 680. By the Imads, who are the dynasty, who then establish a imperial rule. This, for the Shia, is where everything goes wrong, not just in the context of late antique politics, but on a cosmic scale, because this, for them, is about the triumph of evil over good, and it's about the derailing of Muhammad's prophetic mission, which is a mission for the whole of humanity, the embodiment of God's plan for the world. Hussein's death in this battle at Kabbalah is seen as the primal catastrophe, and it is commemorated as a great act of self-sacrifice on the part of Hussein. He's laying down his life for the good of all the It will strike people that there are slight echoes there of Good Friday, of the death of Christ. I think that's not coincidental. There are a lot of Christians in this period in Iran and in Iraq, and I think it is channeling those Christian understandings of sacrifice on the part of humanity.

The day of Hussein's death, Asshurah, which is the 10th day of the first month of the Muslim calendar, Muharram, is the great day of morning for the Shia, and it is essentially their good Friday. This in turn feeds into a strongly apocalyptic perspective on the world, because if things have gone wrong, then at some point God will intervene to ensure that they will go right. The person who will emerge is this figure called the Mahdi, who is the 12th of the Imams. The Imams are people with a cosmic mission to write and order the world. The first of these Imams had been Ali, Hussein had been the third, the 12th Imam, the hidden Imam, the Mahdi. He will appear. According to Shia tradition, he will avenge the blood of Hussein that was spilled at Kabbalah. This will, to quote Abbas Ammonat in his brilliant book, Apocalyptic Islam and Iranian Shiaism, it will initiate an apocalyptic battle of cosmic proportion that proceeds the day of resurrection and the end of time. People may feel that all this discussion of late antique theology in the context of 1970s politics might seem a bit recherché, but it absolutely isn't, because it is impossible, I think, to understand the Iranian Revolution without an awareness of how important this apocalyptic understanding of the world is to the the Iatollah and to his followers.

It's precisely because the American foreign policy establishment have no comprehension of this at all, that they don't really know how to handle the Iatollah when he emerges onto the scene.

Exactly. For They're able to keep in their heads, the Iatollah has this sense of victimhood and suffering. They have this particular day that's massively important, that's grounded in history, Asshira, and they have this apocalyptic sense of the end of days and all of this thing. That's one thing. Then the other thing to bear in mind about Shia Islam is that local clergy are really, really important in this world. So Baqair Mohin, who is Khomini's biographer, has really, really good sections about this. So the mullers, the clerks or priests, I guess, in Shia Islam, always had tremendous local clout. So in these small towns and villages, in what was then called Persia and later Iran, the cleric was the judge, he was the teacher, he was a storyteller. He was a massively, massively important figure. He could read and write, and most people couldn't. The cleric handled all your legal transactions. The cleric acted as a arbiter and a mediator. Often in small local places. He was the main authority figure. People looked to him, not to the state. They saw the cleric often as a counterweight to the state, not part of it. Yes.

Actually, also crucial for people to bear in mind is that clerks pointedly did not aspire to control the state. They did not aspire to the leadership, say, of Iran. This, again, is rooted in the distinctive character of Shia theology, because Shia see legitimate governance, guardianship, velayat, it's called in Persian, as having perished with Ali and Hussein. Therefore, basically throughout history, Shia have rejected the very notion of a legitimate state. They don't think it exists. This will only change with the coming of the Mahdi. Again, to quote Amunat, The belief that all temporal powers are considered unjust was carried almost to the point of anarchistic idealism. This, for Shiaite clerks opposed to the Shah, it inspires them in their opposition to his rule, but it also leaves them with a problem, which is that who is going to step into the gap? Because there's nothing in the Shia tradition that would say that clerks would take that step. Right.

One last point about these clerks. They often are quite well off because they're authority figures in their local communities and whatnot. In the towns and the cities, they become very closely connected to the merchant and artisan classes who basically run the bazars, the marketplaces. This actually is the social nexus that powers the Iranian Revolution, the alliance of these shop keepers and artisans in the cities with the clerical elite. Now, the cleric's political independence is massively, massively important to them. It's a huge part of their political identity. But all through the Ayatollah Khomini's life, there has been tension with the state in Iran. I mentioned in the first half that his father, in the 1930s, had been a moderniser. He was very much cut from the same cloth as Atatürk in Turkey. A little bit Peter the Great, actually, for people who remember that series that we did. Reza Palavi had wanted to electrify, literally electrify Iran, to bring in ID cards, to have railways, to have people wear Western clothes. He tried to clamp down on people wearing veils and turbans. He even got his military officers to try to shave off Cleric's beards. Very Peter the Great.

The Clerics absolutely hated it. They said this is a classic example of why the Palavi dynasty, our Western parvenus and puppet, and they're just totally illegitimate.

Just to be clear, this is obviously on one level ideological, but it is also seen as an attack on their economic standing.

Yes, it is exactly, even more so in the 1960s. In the 1960s, Reza The Sun is now Shah, and the Shah launches a thing that she calls the White Revolution, which is this big modernisation drive. He thinks this will make him very popular. He says, Let's have public works. Let's have land reform. Let's encourage people to have a literacy drive so people can read and write. Let's give women the vote. Let's give women more rights.

The chance to wear mini-skirts.

Right. Let's expand state education. Why shouldn't you be taught by trained teachers rather than the local clerk? Now, the local clerks do not like this at all for all kinds of reasons. Many of them come from landowning families, so their estates are the ones that will be broken up and distributed to the poor. The legal reforms, Their role, I mentioned before that they play the part of the lawyer or the judge or the notary. They're going to lose some of that authority. They will also lose control of education if the Shah brings in all these educational reforms. They're like, Well, it's not just Just ripping up our traditions. This is a massive threat to our way of life and our local standing. It's at this point in the 1960s that Khomenei decides to enter politics. He steps forward as the guy who's standing up against all this. He gives a series of sermons in which he says, The Shah is a tyrant. He is a traitor. He is the puppet of the United States and of Israel, which has already become the great enemy in the demonology of the clerics. He says, His father was kicked out, and the Shah, this miserable, wretched man, he'll be kicked out as well if he doesn't change his ways.

The Shah has him arrested. He spends time under house arrest. Then he's allowed out. Then in 1964, he goes back on the offensive, and this time, very interestingly, and I think this is an important clue to Khomenei's appeal, what Khomini speaks out about is a deal that will give legal immunity to American military personnel if they get into trouble in Iran. It's a pretty standard agreement that the Americans have in places where there are American bases that if our GIs behave badly, they won't be tried by your courts, they'll be tried by our military courts. Khomini says, this is an absolute disgrace. He says, The Shah has reduced us to a level of a colony and made the Muslim nation of Iran appear more backward than savages in the eyes of the world. He says, This is all a Zionist plot. President Lyndon Johnson, and I quote, The most repulsive member of the human Race is a Zionist agent. I don't doubt that Khomini genuinely thought this, but there's also an element of calculation here. He tells his friends, he's quoted as having told his friends, We must use this issue as a weapon so that the people will realize that the Shah is an American agent.

I think this is a really important part of his political repertoire, that he blends what you might see as religious conservatism or traditionalism with a anticolonial nationalism that is so fashionable and popular in the 1950s and the 1960s across Asia, not just in Iran.

This is why in due course, he can be celebrated by people in the West, on the left as a figure to be admired.

As an anti-imperialist champion in all of this. Anyway, this was too much for the Shah. The Shah had him arrested again, and they kicked him out of the country. He ends up in another holy city, Najaf in Iraq, where the great hero of Shia religion, Ali, is buried. There, Khomini and his wife live in this little house with all their followers and their acolytes. He becomes this symbol of resistance to the Shah. He will sit there day after day, praying and reading and teaching and whatnot. His supporters make tape recordings of his lectures and his sermons, and they smuggle them into Iran. Now, maybe there's an alternative universe where he would just have stayed in the Japanese to molded away giving his speeches and no one would have cared. Some listeners may say, well, Iran was getting very rich in the '60s and '70s with all its oil money. It's becoming more urban. It's got its nice reforms. It's becoming more literate. Who cares about some bloke with a beard over the border in Iraq. But the truth is that all of the changes that Iran is undergoing, they actually play into Khomini's hands. You might say the Shah has actually been good for Iran.

He spent all this money on new railways and stuff. Health care has expanded massively. Education. He's invested in Iran's industry. Actually, if you're a woman or if you're a member of an ethnic minority, I mean, Iran has a lot of minorities, Kurds.

And religious minorities.

As well. Yeah, religious minorities. They are better off under the Shah than they had ever been before in Iranian history.

I mean, just on women, there are Islamic dress codes which the Shah is contempluous of. Yes. If If you are not devoutly Muslim in the traditional sense, as a woman, you can wear what you like. But obviously, that becomes a very obvious visual symbol of what is at stake, both for secularists and for traditional Muslims.

People would say in the '60s and '70s, they would come to Tehran from the countryside, and they would see huge Western billboards for showing what they regarded as half-naked women, advertising hoardings and so on. And they were shocked by it. They were really shocked.

But they would see women in mini-skirts drinking in bars with men.

Of course, exactly. And they would see foreign women, by the way, American women and so on, because some of them are 50,000 Americans. But we'll come to this. The enormous oil boom of the '60s and '70s has proved a very mixed blessing for Iran. It's created a deep sense of inequality. There's a conspicuous gap between rural peasants and the urban poor on one hand, and then the winners, the Metropolitan elite on the other. Crucially, it's triggered massive inflation. Prices in the '70s are rising about 15% a year. It's very Spain after the conquest of the Americas, the influx of all the silver that basically destroyed the Spanish economy. The oil money is, in many ways, it makes a lot of things worse as well as better. Iran is a very young country. Amazing, the fact of this, half the population of Iran in the 1970s was under the age of 16. That's a lot of ambitious people. If their ambitions aren't met, they will be very quickly frustrated. We already mentioned the population explosion in Tehran. You have tens of thousands of people, hundreds of thousands who have moved to Tehran from the countryside in search of work, and they are packed into these pretty grim concrete tower blocks on the edge of the city.

You mentioned the traffic. The traffic is notorious across the world. You can't get anywhere. The electricity grid cannot cope with all the newcomers, so there are constant blackouts. The costs, because the inflation are going up all the time. In some parts of Tehran, rent went up 300% in five years. There are a lot of poor unskilled young men who have moved from the countryside who find all this utterly overwhelming and frustrating. They're struggling economically. They are shocked by what you were describing, the social world of the people who are well off, the women in revealing dresses, drinking alcohol and whatnot. They feel totally alienated from the Shah and his court. They also feel alienated from the tens of thousands of Westerners who now live in Tehran because they are participating in the boom rather like Western who now live in the Middle East, in Dubai or somewhere. To quote a young woman, Massumei Ebtekar, who became very prominent in the early days of the revolution and in the hostage crisis, she wrote later, Most of the Americans who lived in Iran behaved in a way that revealed a sense of self-importance and superiority. They had come to expect extra respect, even deference from all Iranians, from Shusha and Boy to Shah.

American lifestyles had come to be imposed as an ideal, the ultimate goal. American books, magazines, films had swept over our country like a flood, and we found ourselves wondering, is there any room for our own culture? I think this is very common in the '60s and '70s across the developing world, but it's especially pronounced in Iran, which is being transformed so much. By all of this money.

Which has such an ancient culture and such a distinctive culture.

Of course. Now, it's no accident, Massimo Ebticar, the woman who wrote those words, was a student. And thanks to the Shah's modernization project, there are now 200,000 students in Tehran and the other big cities.

I mean, that's a rookie's era for a dictator, isn't it?

Yeah. Create this class of people, educated people, whose ambitions are not being met. Now, some of them turn to socialism or communism, but most don't because If you are feeling alienated and frustrated, given the importance the clerks have always had and the place of Islam in Iran's history, if you are looking for meaning and order and solace and all of those kinds of things, Islam offers you more authentically Iranian answers than socialism and communism do. So something is brewing. Things are brewing in the tower blocks and in the university campuses and things as the '70s continue. But in Washington, people just don't notice this. One reason they don't notice is if you're interested in foreign policy in the early 1970s, you're not looking at Iran. You're looking at Vietnam, Southeast Asia, or Soviet Union, or Eastern Europe, or Cuba or something. Even in the US Embassy, the staff at the US Embassy, they had lots of links to the Shah's court, obviously, but not to opposition groups or to the clerks. I mentioned William Sullivan, the ambassador. When he arrived in 1977, he He wrote this really caustic memoir about his time. He said, I was shocked how few of my colleagues spoke Farsi, how few of them had ever been outside the capital.

In other words, the information that's getting back to Washington, a lot of it is wrong. When Carter arrives at the palace for that New Year's Eve dinner, he doesn't realize anything is wrong. He thinks the Shah is going to be there for decades and nothing could possibly go wrong. But actually, just a week after Carter leaves, that's when things start to kick off. Because in recent months, these tapes of Communi's sermons have been flooding into the markets of Iran, and his rhetoric is more and more ferocious. He says the Shah is a Zionist agent, a Jewish agent. He says the Shah is an American serpent. He says people should stop paying tax. They should stop going to school or university or whatever. This drives the Shah mad. He waits for Carter to leave, and on the seventh of January, he gets one of the biggest papers in Iran, Eta la'at, to publish a ripost. This article, one of the most incendiary articles in any paper in any country in the world in the 20th century, is a full-blooded attack on Khomini. It says Khomini is a tool of red and black imperialism. What it means by that is he's been controlled both by the communists and by the British.

This is a fairly standard theme of Iranian effective.

It's good to see the British still.

Yeah, it's always the British, right? So the British Black. We're the Black Imperialists in League with the Red Imperialist in Moscow. That's the Shah's thinking. This article says, Khomini has always been into poetry. That's a bad sign.

It is a bad sign. I mean, everyone in the CIA knows that.

It's a really bad sign. It says his ancestry is not even really Iranian. He's actually Indian. He's a foreigner. It says he's typical of the class, actually. A lot of these rural clerks are, and I quote, Parasites engaged in sodomy, usury, and they're drunk most of the time. This is what this article says. This is an absolute Absolutely catastrophic own goal. Because within hours of this article, this newspaper reaching the newsstands, there are huge protests in the city of Gomme, which is the seminary city where the Ayatollah had been a student and then a teacher. The seminar is shut down and all the religious students pour out onto the streets to protest about this. There are demonstrations outside the police station. The police end up firing into the crowds. There's a stampede. Then a number of people are either shot or trampled to death. So this is all January 1978. Now, how many people were shot or trampled to death? Reports at the time said maybe 30, 40. The historian Michael Axworthy has written a brilliant book on the Iranian Revolution, says actually, almost all these reports are probably exaggerated, and it might have been five people.

It doesn't really matter, though, does it?

Exactly. It doesn't matter.

Because what matters is that this has happened.

Of course. And now what happens is this strange cycle. After 40 days, There are meant to be memorial services for people who've died. So 40 days after these deaths, on the 18th of February, there were these memorial services. There are more demonstrations at universities across Iran. There's a demonstration, for example, in Tabriz, which is close to the border with Soviet Azerbaijan. There, too, the crowd kicks off. There are scuffles, there are attacks on cinemas. There are attacks on banks and the symbols of Western influence. The army is sent in. More people are shot. Again, unclear exactly how many. So 40 days after that, these people have memorial services and you have more riots. So you have this cycle. Every 40 days, there are memorial services for the people who were killed in the last outbreak of rioting, and there's more rioting, and there's more rioting, and so there'll be more memorial services in 40 days time. So this continues till mid-May. Now, the Shah contemplating all this, he makes some concessions. He thinks, Well, I'll buy the protesters off. He fires the head of the secret police. He says, We can have free elections to the Iranian Parliament next year.

But he doesn't really get. The Shah is just as detached in many ways as the Americans are. He says, I think this is probably being masterminded by the communists and almost certainly the British.

Brilliant. So we're still on the scene again.

Again, this mad anglophobia. Now, his courtiers are baffled why the Shah is so... The Shah seems very listless during all this. He's slightly disengaged. They can't understand why he hasn't cracked down much harder and why actually he's absent from public life and he's spending a lot of his time in his palace at the Caspian Sea. One reason for this is that what a lot of the Shah's advisors don't know is that he is actually desperately ill. Four years earlier, he'd been swimming. He'd noticed a swelling in his side. His doctors had brought in a French specialist who diagnosed leukemia. The Shah had leukemia. But unbelievably, the Shah's doctors didn't have the courage to tell him. They told him, Oh, you've got a minor blood condition. In 1978, they still haven't really told him. He seems completely depressed, but they've hidden from him the nature of his condition, although they have told his wife, Emprice Farah. Now, there are rumors at this point spreading through Tehran. There's something wrong with the Shah. He looks really gaunt. He's lost a lot of weight. He seems really miserable and unhappy and in pain and so on. But even after the doctors finally tell the Shah the truth in the summer of 1978, the US Embassy is still reporting to Washington.

There are rumors about the Shah's health, and I quote, Our sources indicate there's no doubt the Russians are spreading the stories. To the best of our knowledge, the Shah is fine. I mean, this is insane that they're still doing this. What is more, the Pentagon and the CIA are both still telling Carter, Yes, there have been a lot of protests Iran. Yes, there's this business with the students and whatnot. However, the Shah is going to be fine. The regime is fine. His security forces are well capable of handling any disorder.

Presumably, still at this point, there isn't really any understanding of the potential role that Islam could be playing and might play in the future.

No, not at all. They regard this as student protests. The big danger is that Iran would go Communist. This is the fear whenever the Americans confront any of these kinds of things.

They're seeing it through the prism of the left-right axis.

Of course.

Rather than of a secularist Islamic axis.

There are some people, as time goes on, Ambassador Sullivan is one of them, as 1978, wears on, who says, I think we should start talking to some of these clerks to find out what they want and who they are. But, famously, the CIA have profiles of all the big people in Iranian politics. They don't have one prepared for the Ayatollah Khomini because they just don't think he's that big a factor. They're much more interested in traditional politicians. Things are getting worse, not least because, because of the high inflation, the Shah's government has decided to try to drive down prices. One way they'll do that is they'll slash spending. That summer, thousands of people are laid off, and a lot of these people are young men from Tehran's working class areas. They're angry. They're economically angry as much as anything. Then in August, you get the key moment, arguably, of the whole revolution, the 19th of August. This happens not in Tehran, but in a town called Abadan, which is in southwestern Iran on the border with Iraq. 8: 00 that night, the 19th of August, hundreds of people have packed into the cinema wrecks to see a very, very popular film, one of the most popular films of the '70s in Iran, called The Deer.

Just after 8: 20, the film has been running for 20 minutes or so, four men barred the doors of the cinema. They poured petrol onto the doors, and then they lit the doors with a match. The doors went up. The cinema went up in flames. There was total panic inside, a massive stampede, and about 500 people were burned to death in this cinema. Outside Iran, almost all historians now agree this was the work of Islamic militants. Through the '70s, there had been a series of Islamic militant attacks on symbols of Westernization, on cinemas, on bars, on on banks, on airline offices, things like that. This is another of them. But in the climate of August 1978, people on the streets said, Do you know who did it? The Shah's secret police to try to frame Islamic militants. That is still the official line on this fire in the Islamic Republic of Iran today. If you go to Iran today to talk about this fire, people will say, The Shah did it.

It's the Iranian equivalent of the thousands locked up in the Dungeons in the Bastille. Yes. The myth is what matters, obviously, in a revolution, rather than in the case of the French Revolution, the fact that there weren't barely anyone in the Bastille.

Exactly. Within days, people have poured onto the streets, hundreds of thousands of people across Iran, and they are shouting, The Shah is guilty, burn the Shah. I mean, the Shah had nothing to do with this. But from this point, I think there's no way back for him. By September, there are constant demonstrations in Tehran. There are crowds chanting for Khomenei and calling for the end of the Pahlavi monarchy. On Friday, the eighth of September, the Shah declares martial law. But there's a great gathering at a place called Jale Square. It is a working class area in Tehram. The soldiers call on the crowd to disperse. They fire tear gas at them. Then they start firing into the crowd. There is total chaos. And by the time this is all over, about 100 people have been killed. And with that, it really is downhill all the way for the Shah. There There are rumors now. There are really exaggerated rumors that he had sent in helicopters and people have been machine gunning the crowds from the helicopters. Madly, people start to say, You know those troops who fired on the crowds, they were actually Israeli troops.

The Shah is bringing in Israeli troops as mercenaries to fire on our own people. It's a bit like the claims that Charles I was going to use soldiers from Ireland against the London apprentices in 1642 or something.

A striking illustration of role that Israel is already playing in- Yes, exactly. The demonology of Iranian militants.

We are now in the autumn of 1978. There are massive strikes across Iran. The one thing the regime fears most, the strikes have shut down the oil fields on which Iran's exports depend. There are crowds in the streets every day. There are attacks on banks and restaurants every day. And already in some towns in Iran, power has been taken from the legitimate authorities, and it's been taken over by revolutionary strike committees. Now, if you're with the revolution, this is very exciting. If you're not with the revolution, it is terrifying. In his memoirs, ambassador William Sullivan describes standing at the US Embassy and looking out through an upstairs window. And he sees in the distance, troops holding back demonstrators. He sees cars burning in the middle of the road. He sees smoke rising from burning buildings. And he thinks, something has to change. We to do something. So on the ninth of November, he sends a secret cable to Washington with the title, Thinking the Unthinkable. And he says, The Shah is finished. It's over. And if we don't act now, Iran, which is so vital to us, will slip out of our hands forever. He says, We should ditch the Shah right now, and it may well be time to do a deal with the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomini.

Goodness. What tension. What drama. Will Jimmy Carter follow that advice? Will he, as it were, get into bed with the Ayatollah, a rather unpleasant image? But Dominic, that's what you've written. And we will find out next time as the revolution quickens, the Shah flees Iran Tehran Khomini ends up returning to Tehran in triumph. And we have also had Jimmy Carter's Tennis Court monitoring. In our next episode, we will be revisiting the other key fact in Carter's presidency, his fishing trip on a swamp. If you'd like to hear that and you'd like to hear all three of the episodes that are still to come in this series, then you can join our own beleaguered embassy of Godless Imperialists, The Rest is History Club at therestishistory. Com. But for now, co de hafes.

Co de hafes. Hello, Restes History fans. It's spy and pigeon aficionado, Gordon Carrera here from the Restes Classified podcast, with a quick message for those of you enjoying Tom and Dominic's Iran series. A little while ago on the Restes Classified, we did two episodes on the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister, Mohamed Mosadeq in 1953, a coup orchestrated by the CIA and MI6. It's a story full of dirty tricks, boozy spies, Iranian weightlifters, and politicians in their pajamas. It tells you a lot about how the CIA got the taste for regime change. Tune in to episodes one and two of The Rest is Classified to hear the full story. One of the darkest scandals of the modern era. A billionaire financier. Powerful friends. Hidden networks. And questions that refuse to go away. Was Jeffrey Epstein a spy? I'm Gordon Carrera. And I'm David McClusky. We're the hosts of The Rest is Classified, the intelligence and national security podcast from Goalhanger.

We've just released a gripping new series investigating whether Epstein was linked to any spy agencies.

And asking what those agencies might have known about him. Listen or watch now on Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.