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

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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 outside role in the Iranian Revolution and why all these years later were 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 four 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. I can't have 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 U.S.

And it's a hatred whose origins we've never quite definitively pulled the story of on this show.

And you, not long before the war began, pulled 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 U.S. and Iran wasn't always filled with animus. On the contrary, within the past 50 years, the U.S. 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.”

That 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, these missiles bomb 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 students were studying at American universities. The Shah had visited the United States a dozen times over his reign. He had met seven different presidents at the White House and American presidents had come to turn on 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 explained that historians still marvel at the improbability of the revolution that you just refer 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 seems so many moments when if something had played out just slightly different. If someone had made a decision or not made a decision, it all could have played out very, very differently or been aborted all together. 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.

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

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 U.S. 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 Mohammed Reza Palavi and he was known as the Shah, just Persian for King. The Shah came to power in 1941 after the British and Soviets overthrew his father who had been the former Shah. 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 the key moment of that was in 1953.

There was a parliamentary crisis in Iran. There was a new Prime Minister named Mohammed Mosadek, he was a populist and 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.

And not just assert, but start to strip the Shah of his powers. And one issue that really galvanized his authority and his popularity in the country was as moved to nationalized 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 pitence. So when Mosadek 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. And public key 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." 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 Mosadek? And so the British fearing they were going to lose their oil monopoly, they come up with this idea that, well, we'll overthrow Mosadek 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, Mosadek is soft on communism. The communists are just waiting the wings to take over in Iran. That actually wasn't true at all, Mosadek was an anti-communist, but of course this is a time in the Cold War when the 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 before you will get rid of Mosadek 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 in the American Cold War mentality. So in the summer of 1953, the CIA essentially stirred this coup against Mosadek. The Shah demanded Mosadek'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 very complicated and chaotic four days, and Tehran, where it appears one side is winning and then the other.

In a brazen act of the appliance, the statue of the Shah's father is toppled from its pedestal. The Shah leaves the Shah leaves Iran. Fearing for his life, the Shah's advisors advocated his temporary exile to Rome. When he finds out that the coup has been a success on his part, he is having lunch at the Excelsior Hotel in Rome.

In the quick shift of power, Mosadek was finally apprehended and awaits trial for treason.

The Shah who had fled to Rome comes home. And he comes back a little bit, tailed between his legs two or three days later, to assume the throne. Now crowd shall pro-shaw slogans and carry pictures of the trouble ruler of a troubled nation. So in a sense, he flees his own coup, comes back, discovers he's now in power thanks to the U.S.

“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 to the hip to the Americans. Because he owes his power to any of that's right. If you're Iranian, God, this phrase, American Shah, is that a good thing or a bad thing?

It's a combination of good and bad. I think you get to this very complicated national personality of Iran, 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 relation. Emulation, and then... 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.

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. 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 against 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-billed, and it goes much slower than the Shah would wish. The Americans were 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 in English fluently, beautifully. In fact, people at times made fun of his farce 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 believe that about him.

And he was very comfortable in Europe and European society, and his instinct was to be Western and make Iran more Western. And it's this Western 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. This is a time when there was a lot of social movement for economic progress for emancipation of women.

The revolution is a show's own blueprint for transforming a backward feudal society into the great civilization. And he wanted to run to join in that forward movement. So the show institutes the series of 19 social and economic reforms that he calls the white revolution.

“How did the show as that people gave women the vote for the first time?”

Another ever 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 melando 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 as 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, the enraged and influential cleric named Ruhala Homeni. Nemi Tavanat in Mellatikir as Homeni. Homeni, far more than almost any other religious opponent to the show, was really if I took it. And his denunciations of the Shah. And the early 1960s called Mephal Shah, kind of unheard of.

You would say that in public in Iran. He despised the West in general, but especially Israel and the United States. And 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.

And after that 53 coup, owing his very legitimacy to the United States.

That's right. That would seem to be very problematic. Yeah, that's right.

“So things with Homeni reach ahead in 1963.”

The Shah moves to arrest Homeni for some of the incendiary things he's been saying. Again, the free world is troubled by trouble in Iran. Homeni's arrest sets off clerical rights around the country. One of the causes of the new rioting was the Shah's land reform program institute. A number of buildings are burned.

A secondary contributing trouble factor was the Shah's plans for the emancipation of the nation's winner. Riding 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 Homeni has arrested. So for the next year, the Shah kept Homeni 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.”

But Homeni continues to make those incendiary attacks.

So less than a year later, the Shah finally re-arrest Homeni and sense 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. 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 Homeni'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 Homeni'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 siments how totally enamored he is to the West, that 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 Perceplet, the ancient capital of Persia.

And after the Jam Sheed, the Shah Gohishah. This three-day extravagance 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. Maxime's restaurant in Paris closed down for two weeks, and all the waiters of Maxime's, oh wow, to be the waiters at this banquet.

No waiters in Iran, no waiters. Right. And so it really got to 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 say, grotesque banquet on behalf of Western leaders is deeply offensive. Oh, absolutely.

Significantly it was denounced by the exiled Ayatollah Hormani, who called it the Devil's Festival, and says anyone who attends is participating in murder of the people of Iran.

“So I think that at that moment Hormani 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 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 Savok, the Shah's secret police, which will become infamous as the Shah's tool to surveil the population. And in some cases torture, dissidents and disappear people. The Americans establish a massive CIA station in terror, and it's one of the biggest in the Middle East, and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

And the Shah really starts to feel emboldened by these deepening ties to ask for more and more from the US. 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 helping 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 towards defense. The Nixon doctrine is to appoint regional powers that are friendly to the United States as the policeman 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. So it's 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 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 center where the President praised Iran's contribution for maintaining rural 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 had happened during this visit actually happened the next morning.”

And it happened behind closed doors. There are only six people in the room and those six 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're not going to have to deal with the Congress. You're not going to have to deal with state department. And they're human rights, declarations, blackjack, blank check, anything you want. And from what I've been able to find out, no other country had that cart blanche from the Americans ever. Maybe Britain had did, but nobody else.

Wow.

“That's how much the next administration believed that Iran would be its policeman for the entire Middle East and maybe 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. And it's just this astonishing moment, like what American president has ever turned to another head of state. It's it protect me. Can you just dissect that? Because that is an extraordinary, it's being balancing of what we think of as a kind of a power balance.

Total 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 derides 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 1992. It's set everything in motion.

It's set the Shah's delusions of grand your 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 glide path to this ruin that's going to happen seven years down the road.

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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That's it. Not asking you to click on any link. 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.”

So the life was one thing.

You had Western fashions. You had casinos. You had movie theaters. You know, all the accouturements of modern life in the countryside people still lived virtually unchanged from centuries earlier. Lived in mud huts with used camel dung or stung for fuel.

Far more religious. The ruling figure in a village was the Mola, the local cleric often. So you really had just these two radically different cultures coexist. A pretty classic case it sounds like of the haves and the have knots 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. She was all about industrialization, westernization. And that was going to happen in the city. It's not in the countryside. In fact, he really traveled into the countryside.

So he was very intent on propelling his nation into the 20th century. But he was moving at speed that would quite quickly become something of a disaster for him. We'll 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 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. And less than six years, the per capita income has doubled. And what do that look like? A lot of very conspicuous consumption famously won 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 city has just become absolute hives of development. There is so much new construction that Iran has a chronic sea match shortage. And what you also have happening is these tens of thousands of westerners coming into oversee the modernization of the Iranian economy. North Tehran, the Iranian capital looked a little like Las Vegas at night.

And millions of young men, young unemployed, uneducated religious men in the impoverished countryside are coming into the cities. And that coalition 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 class.

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 toti to the Americans. And this is going to become increasingly a problem for the Shah and for this stability of his regime. And meanwhile, the Shah's decision to pump all that money into the national economy.

There's hyperinflation, there's housing shortages all through Iranian city with this massive influx of people from the countryside.

And they're living in Chani towns 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 Chani towns, they're unemployed or unemployed.

So now you have this massive underclass in the cities.

And you have the tinder of what is about to explode. Right, the ingredients. Disaffected people, not working. On the edges of the city, who's core is now being overrun by Westerners. And a top at 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 shock.

“I think there was an exhaustion on many segments of society with them.”

Progressives, Western educated intellectuals who wanted a democratic opening to conservative clergy who are 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 right 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 American serving in the embassy in Tehran. On top of that, you had an enormous CIA station, one of the biggest 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 and Tehran, size of a Walmart. And so if the more American diplomats they're doing they're 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 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 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.

An alliance that's a confederacy of deliberate dances. Exactly. In my book, I write about one junior foreign service officer, Michael Matrinko, who spoke farcee, unlike virtually everybody else in the American embassy. And what he's seeing in the visa office is 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 you just speak farcee, he asks people, why are you leaving? And he finally won man in particular, an aristocrat says, don't you see this place is about to explode.

But when Matrinko 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 to breathe. He's punished. He's punished. And it's kind of at this moment that Ayatula Khomei re-inners the picture in a very big way. 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.

“Ayatula, how do you see the President's situation in your country?”

There's struggle in Iran against the Shah. He's now very intense.

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 Zionist Israel and of the United States.”

And this message is getting more and more widely spread to disseminated on the underground. And especially in the countryside, Homeini is finding it increasingly receptive audience.

And things finally reach to boiling point in Iran.

To breathe happens to be the first place that really explodes in the Iranian Revolution. The rural men living in the shayne towns come out of the shayne towns and they basically burn the modern city center to the ground. Just the swath of destruction, the army finally comes in to restore order, probably about 150, maybe 200 people are killed. And it's by far the biggest civil unrest in Iran and in generation. And it sounds like from what you're saying kind of the opening shots of the revolution.

I think it is the opening battle of the revolution. And how caught off guard is the shot and for that matter, the Americans? Well, the shot was totally off guard. In recent months there had been a few eruptions when the shot had visited Washington and there had been anti-shaw demonstrations by Iranian students in the streets, the previous month there had been a few seminary students killed in a holy city of Iran.

But what happened in Tarees was on just an utterly totally different scale.

But the amazing part was that for as massive as these protests in Tarees were the Americans,

we're still not waking up to it at all. Hmm.

“So remember that council, Michael Metrenko, I mentioned earlier, who had been sent to diplomatic Siberia?”

Well, it turns out, diplomatic Siberia was to brief, the very city where all this went down. And Metrenko was the only foreign diplomat in Tarees at the time of the riots. About four or five days after the riots had been put down, he gets message to the CIA officers coming up from Tare on to meet with him. And Metrenko 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 is bringing him into town.

And he goes into the gutted city center.

And the CIA officer, I was in perks up and looks around and goes, what the hell happened here? It turned out he was coming to Teresa, talking to Metrenko on a completely different map. Had no idea. Had no idea. This has been national news in this country for five or six days on every media outlet going.

And a CIA officer based in Tareon has escaped all knowledge. Has no idea 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 Tareon shouting down with the Shah. Death to the Shah. 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 a university student.

It was secular, leftist. It was professionals in this city. 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 this 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 likely Americans are the Shah or unaware of these protests. They have to be aware. There are hundreds of thousands of times even millions of people marching,

especially through the streets of Tareon, paralyzing the city. But still, the Americans just did not react to this.

“And I think that 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, months after months, after months. Well, what could the Shah have done?

Obviously, this is all 2020 hindsight, but what at the time were the options?

“Well, frankly, the one thing he might have done that could have saved him early on”

to put his military out on the streets in force. And in order them to shoot the kill, it worked for Saddam Hussein. It worked for the Assad's and Syria for a very long time. But to his credit is a leader. The Shah was many times as close to it during the revolution as saying to different people

that if saving my throne means slaughtering the youth of my nation on mass, I won't do it. And essentially, he didn't do it. Of course, people were killed by best estimate of probably 2,500 people.

But the Shah never just unleashed his army as the way he might have done.

But apart from that, he'd still had options, even very late in the game. The moderate clerics had approached his intermediaries with the idea of how they could reach an 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.

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.

So he said, I'm leaving the country for an extended vacation.

“I think everybody knew that it meant exiled. He was not coming back.”

And so in mid-January of 1979, he and the Shah Benu, his wife, get on a plane and fly into exile. Teyotic celebrations erupted in Teyron when the news broke the Shah had gone. It was like liberation day. And roading clogs, Chetta, the Shah is defeated.

Dominion has won. That minute to set, Dominion was being held down the set for his Shah to death from Chetta. The set fought on Iranian grounds for the first time in 15 years. And then two weeks later, on February 1st, 1979, how many returns to Teyron from exile?

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

Probably as many as three, four million people lined the motorcade route.

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 the sheer number of people gathering around the car. So what happens over the next nine months is there's this whole period of chaos, gradually homini and the people right around him. They push the moderates to decide. And it all kind of leads to the hostage crisis in November of 1979.

The American embassy in Teyron is in the hands of Muslim students tonight. Spread on by an ally American speech by the eye of Tolahomani. They stormed the embassy, fought from a marine guards for three 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 seized the US embassy in Teyron, 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. We started this inquiry, Scott with the question of why there is so much animus between the two countries and the United States and Iran.

And the simple answer would seem to be that the United States out of its own national interest enters in an alliance with Iran's monarch. That in its insolarity 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 1970. Is that right? I think it's absolutely right. You know, one force exists as a counter force to the other. To me, one of the great mysteries that are riddles is why in the most westernized or, you know, tar mines, progressive nations in the Middle East.

But it's almost a question I think that answers itself in a way.

“I think that, you know, it's not going to happen in the country where they straddle the line between religion and westernization.”

It's because the Shah had gone so much, so modern, so again, progressive, not not when it came to human rights necessarily. But so identified with the West that it was asking for this counter-reaction to it. It would have perhaps, you're saying, be surprising if there were not a major counter-revailing 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 have ended so many different ways.

And so many less tragic ways that we would end up with, you know, the most extreme, the most hard-line option possible. You know, 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 that least 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 U.S. 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 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. The Trump administration seemed to rely almost completely on what Israeli intelligence was gathering. And a lot of that was wishful thinking.

So what happened in 1979 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. And 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. Reluciary 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. 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 rather spurious if not non-existent reason.

So 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. What's got, thank you very much for your pressure. 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 Polty, amid a bipartisan revolt over Polty'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.

Today's episode was produced by Ricky Nevetsky, where Shell Bonsha, Jessica Chang, and Claire Tenisketter, with help from Diana Win. It was edited by Devon Taylor and Paige Coward, with help from Michael Benwong. It was fact checked by Susan Lee, and contains music by Mary Elizano, Rhoini Mistel, Dan Powell, and Alicia Buttitube.

special thanks to Yagena Torbadi and Adrian Carter.

“That's it for the day, I'm Michael Barrow. See you on Sunday.”

This week on the Wirecutter Show, we're going to have a new noise canceling earbud pick.

It has a fantastic noise canceling microphone, like magical.

“We're taking your questions about headphones, ear buds, over ear, Bluetooth, bone connection,”

Lauren Dragon, longtime headphones writer for Wirecutter, answers it all with her expert recommendations.

Find it wherever you like to listen.