Roosevelt preyed upon Pahlavi’s vanity and royal presumption by offering him “full” power (Iran would remain, of course, America’s client state). The shah’s support would give an authentic Iranian imprimatur to what was in truth a foreign-backed coup, enabling America to claim it was “rescuing” the government, not overturning it. A more honorable, selfless man would have said no.
Pahlavi said yes. Roosevelt shuttled back and forth to meetings with the shah in 1953, hidden in the backseat of a car under blankets, plotting to dismantle Iran’s elected government and hand full power to him. By then, Mossadeq had been weakened politically by the financial fallout from nationalization; Iran lacked the know- how and resources to profitably operate its oil pumping and refining plants. Its customers found new suppliers, and economic stagnation set in. The affluent upper class that had profited under the old oil arrangements, including military leaders, had grown increasingly impatient with this radical nationalist experiment. Mossadeq turned in vain to the Eisenhower administration for help in brokering a deal with the British that would restart its oil industry under Iranian supervision. Instead, Washington decided to shove the vulnerable old man offstage.
Roosevelt orchestrated street demonstrations and a campaign of false stories in the Iranian press against Mossadeq, and systematically bought off military leaders, who arrested the prime minister on trumped-up charges of treason (he was convicted and after a three-year term in prison remained under house arrest until his death in 1967). During the days of the actual coup, the shah fled to Rome with his wife until it was safe to return—“to avoid bloodshed,” he said, most conspicuously his own—and then assumed the throne offered on a platter by his American friends, adorning himself “Light of the Aryans” and with pomp befitting a position known historically as the “Peacock Throne.” The new regime was offered a far better deal on oil revenues, and the shah promised nothing less than the complete modernization of his country in his lifetime, to make it the financial and cultural equal of Europe. The United States subsidized this Pahlavian fantasy, cynically betraying its democratic principles in the name of containing communism and facilitating the uninterrupted flow of oil. And to some extent it worked, most of all for the United States. The shah’s Iran helped keep the Soviet Bear from Middle East oil supplies and provided a strong guarantee of Western access. Roosevelt’s successful plot became the textbook CIA-engineered coup, and its fame spread well beyond the secret walls of Langley, Virginia. An article by Richard and Gladys Harkness, in the 1954
Eventually the shah did wrest billions in oil profits for his nation and presided over several decades of relative prosperity, empowering women and moving his country away from literal adherence to the Koran. His rule became increasingly strict and self-assured as he became more and more self-deceived, believing that God Almighty was behind the squalid machinations that had placed him in power, and that his state decisions, being divinely inspired, were infallible. “My visions were miracles that saved the country,” he boasted to Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci in a series of interviews two decades after the coup. With American help he had blossomed into an openly arrogant monarch, proud of his unflinching willingness to shoot dissidents, convinced of the inherent inferiority of Western-style democracy. He presided over a military large and modern enough to rival Israel’s but wasted billions on ill-conceived economic schemes. Despite his “expert” personal reconstruction of Iran’s economy and culture, the majority of his people stayed poor, and remained devout. Land reforms improved agricultural production, but not fast enough for Iran’s mushrooming urban population, and by the mid-1970s more than 40 percent of its people were undernourished. Oil wealth fed urban enclaves of educated, Westernized, well- connected citizens, loyal to the regime, but the disparity between this small affluent class and the majority of Iranians was vast and growing. By the twentieth year of his reign, the shah was deeply unpopular, reviled by Iran’s educated class as a tyrant and American puppet and by the multitudes of poor and uneducated for his efforts to dismantle their religious traditions. As discontent grew, the usual cycle of repression and rebellion set in. The shah relied more and more on SAVAK, his secret police, to root out and smash rebellion, which spread discontent and turned it into hatred. Dissident mullahs such as the Ayatollah Khomeini, too popular to imprison or kill, were exiled.
Carter’s natural inclination was to knock the shah down a peg by insisting on democratic reforms in Iran, but the country’s geopolitical importance and the uncertain prospect of what might come after the monarchy counseled a warm outward acceptance of the status quo. In private, the shah was pushed to make his country more tolerant and liberal, and he responded with democratic gestures that had the unintended effect of uncapping decades of suppressed anger. As Iranians tasted new freedom to express themselves, the volume of protest grew and the population was further emboldened. Long-simmering economic problems came to a boil. There were crippling strikes and a mounting series of humiliating and threatening street demonstrations that the shah dared not ruthlessly suppress. No one opposition faction had the power to remove him, but together they were unstoppable. By 1978 the Peacock Throne was teetering. Not that American intelligence and military assessments realized it; it was uniformly predicted that the shah would weather the storm.
What the Western intelligence reports missed was the awakening giant of traditional Islam, a grassroots rebellion against the values of the secular, modern world. The rise of Khomeini and the mullahocracy took everyone by surprise. The turbaned classes were overlooked because they were considered vestiges, representatives of a fading ancient world. But away from the affluent, Westernized neighborhoods where American diplomats and visiting military officers lived and visited, the mullahs had been building a national network of mosques, which waited patiently for the moment Islam would rise up and smite the infidels and their puppet king. The true believers found unlikely allies among the more worldly socialists and nationalists of the middle and upper classes. Support for change grew openly on college campuses, and even among the vast military bureaucracy that maintained the shah’s war machine. In this, Iran’s secular rebels underestimated the mullahs. They saw in the mosque network a useful method of rallying huge public displays and giving their movement muscle, but assumed the ayatollahs would retire to Qom after the revolution and tend to strictly spiritual matters. United in their hatred of the shah, they accomplished the revolution that one State Department official had called “unthinkable.” Sick with cancer, the shah, along with his family, had flown out of Iran in February 1979, never to return.
Nine months later, the crisis seemed to have passed. In Washington, the collapse of the Peacock Throne had been a shock and a blow, but from all appearances the mullahs and other factions involved were feuding too badly to agree on what to do next. And despite the steady stream of anti-American rhetoric from Khomeini and lesser Iranian leaders, there were signs that the practical value of a working relationship with the United States was beginning to offset ideological objections. In the previous month, the country had accepted Bruce Laingen’s appointment as charge d’affaires, resumed importation of spare parts for its American-built jets, and unofficially initiated closer ties—Prime Minister Bazargan’s unscheduled meeting with Brzezinski in Algiers. Carter knew that allowing the shah into America would set back these gains, but despite an immediate outpouring of anger none of the dire predictions had come to pass. By this first week of November, the shah was recovering from surgery in a New York hospital and Iran had become just one of many troubling situations around the world, one that seemed to require observation more than management.
More pressing for Carter and his inner circle was the coming election. Going into that contest, the administration’s foreign policy record was counted a strength. Chief among Carter’s successes had been the hard-won Camp David accords, which had ended years of hostility between Egypt and Israel and placed on more hopeful footing the seemingly implacable Arab-Israeli conflict. There was also the historic new nuclear arms pact with the Soviet Union (the Strategic Arms Limitation Agreement). At its essence, the Cold War was an ideological clash stalled on the doorstep of an annihilating nuclear exchange, and for decades most experts feared the most likely trigger would be war in the Middle East. With its vital oil resources, both the communist and capitalist worlds had a huge stake in the region’s local disputes, so any time there was war in that part of the world there was the overarching fear that it could escalate and engulf the planet. Carter’s efforts had made that prospect less likely.
The frightening potential for an all-out nuclear war, however, is what first occurred to Jordan when he heard the news of the embassy takeover. If it meant the United States would be going to war against Iran, how would Moscow react? Where would that lead? The possibilities were scary, but upon reflection the episode, while an outrage, appeared less portentous. When the embassy had been overrun in February, it had taken only a few hours for the country’s provisional government to chase off the invaders; it had behaved very responsibly. There was every reason to think this would happen again. Ties between the United States and the interim authority had
