As the 1970s drew to a close, the forces of sectarian revolution gained a second foothold in the Middle East in the Imperial State of Iran. If the Lebanese Civil War hinted at the coming transformation in Third World politics, the revolution in Iran thundered the arrival of a new era. It was not the sort of revolution that was supposed to happen in the late 1970s. For as long as nearly anyone could remember, revolutionaries had been Marxists, anarchists, or nationalists. They were driven by dreams of overthrowing conservative regimes and leading their nations toward new, quasi-utopian futures. They were, almost without fail, secular. But it had become clear that the revolution unfolding in Iran was not following that script. What began in 1978 as a broad-based movement in opposition to Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi’s monarchical rule had grown into something drastically different. As the world watched, a fearsome new force seized power in Tehran, in the form of a revolutionary theocratic regime led by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. To many in the West, the revolution in Iran seemed like a scene from the fifteenth century rather than the twentieth. As one member of President Jimmy Carter’s national security staff wrote, “the notion of a popular revolution leading to the establishment of a theocratic state seemed so unlikely as to be absurd.”1 But as observers around the world would soon learn, the Iranian Revolution was a thoroughly modern phenomenon. The forces of political Islam, long submerged beneath the currents of secular nationalism and Marxism, were about to surge once again to the surface.
Even more than Lebanon, Iran occupied a central position along the outer frontiers of the Cold War. Along with Saudi Arabia, Iran served as one of Washington’s “twin pillars” in the Middle East, a bastion of pro-Western power in an otherwise troublesome region. Guarding the southern frontier of the Soviet Union, Iran stood as a bulwark against Communist expansion. Since 1953, the Shah had served as a key U.S. security partner. This relationship had grown stronger under the Nixon administration, which began sending top-shelf weapons systems and massive infusions of U.S. economic aid to Tehran. The regime used U.S. security aid to repress domestic opposition and tighten its brutal hold over Iranian society.2 But no amount of American guns or cash could save the Shah from the coming storm. In the thirteen months between January 1978 and February 1979, a popular revolution would sweep the Shah from power and transform Washington’s key partner in the region into one of its bitterest enemies.
THE MAKING OF THE SHAH’S REGIME
Tehran sits on a plain in the north-central part of Iran, beneath a ridge of snow-capped mountains that separate the city from the waters of the Caspian Sea. Designated the capital of Iran by the Qajar dynasty in 1795 and rebuilt by Reza Shah in the 1920s, the city experienced steady growth through the twentieth century. By the 1970s, with Reza Shah’s son Mohammed Reza ruling the country, Tehran had blossomed into a bustling metropolis just coming to terms with wealth from rising oil prices. Dozens of gray high-rises pierced the skyline, their concrete walls sheltering offices and apartments. Automobiles careened through the congested streets below, forcing motorcycles to dodge pedestrians on the crowded sidewalks. The din from the traffic drifted into elegant restaurants serving European cuisine. The city’s elite enjoyed evenings at the opera or the ballet, while the less affluent took in American films at one of Tehran’s cinemas. Such distractions remained out of reach for the residents of the sprawling labyrinth of tenements that ringed the southern edges of the city, however. Thousands of Iranians had abandoned the countryside to crowd into the growing cities. Outside the capital, amid the arid hills, many Iranians lived in houses made of baked clay. A majority of the population remained illiterate and impoverished. Iranian society was changing rapidly, however. Although wealth remained concentrated in the hands of the few, the nation’s oil industry, government reforms and education programs, a ballooning economy, and a large, secular middle class were fast transforming the country.3
Ninety miles to the south, across the dry central plateau, the ancient city of Qom rose out of the desert. After describing its “blue tiled domes and golden minarets twinkling in the light,” a British visitor wrote, “I often thought this was what our own European cities must have looked like in the Middle Ages.” As one drew nearer, however, slums appeared on the outskirts, their streets lined by steel-shuttered shops. The heart of the city was an oasis of green trees, turquoise mosques, seminaries, and public squares. Though only a two-hour trip by car, Qom seemed a world away from the busy streets of the capital. While Iran’s seat of political power lay in Tehran, Qom was the center of Shia religious authority in the nation. Whereas Tehran was the Shah’s city, Qom belonged to the clerics. While few observers foresaw it, the tension between the two cities was about to produce a revolution that would transform international affairs in the coming decades.4
Things might have been very different. In the early 1950s, Iran appeared to be heading away from the Shah’s authoritarianism and toward democracy. Tehran was home to one of the postcolonial world’s brightest luminaries: Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh. For the last several years, Mossadegh had been engaged in a bitter standoff with the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), which controlled the majority of Iran’s oil industry. The prime minister was convinced that, in order to develop Iran’s economy and bring the nation into the modern world, the government needed to establish control over its own natural resources. The revenue from Iran’s oil industry, he concluded, would fund the modernization of the country. The British had no intention of liquidating their assets, however. In the wake of failed negotiations in 1951, Mossadegh nationalized the AIOC. While it proved popular on the streets of Tehran, the prime minister’s move angered British leaders and raised concerns in Washington that Iran might be drifting toward the Soviet orbit. By 1953, tensions had reached a boiling point. The new Eisenhower administration resolved to take decisive action, authorizing CIA agents to launch a coup against the regime in Tehran.
Kermit Roosevelt, a thirty-seven-year-old CIA political officer and grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, took point in the operation aimed at overthrowing Iran’s first democratically elected leader. Working alongside British intelligence, Roosevelt and his fellow CIA officers manufactured a crisis by disseminating false propaganda attacks against religious and opposition leaders in order to give the impression that the regime was cracking down on dissent and by inciting antigovernment protests in the capital. Meanwhile, CIA officers coordinated with conservative officers in the Iranian military to launch a coup against Mossadegh. On August 19, 1953, four days after a failed first attempt, CIA-backed military officers arrested the prime minister. The officers then returned the Shah, who had fled to Baghdad to wait out the results of the coup, to power in Tehran. Having toppled Mossadegh, Washington and London restructured Iran’s oil industry, splitting it up among five American, one British, and one French company. For Roosevelt and his bosses in the Eisenhower administration, the coup seemed almost too good to be true. The United States had removed a troublesome government for the cost of a few million dollars without putting any American lives at risk. It was quite a bargain—or so it seemed at the time.5
Indeed, it appeared that Eisenhower and the CIA had purchased a valuable friend in a heavily contested region. For the next quarter century, the Shah functioned as a pro-American bastion in the Middle East. Under Richard Nixon, Iran emerged alongside Saudi Arabia as one of America’s “twin pillars” in the Middle East: reliable, wealthy, pro-Western allies upon which Washington hoped to build a wider regional policy. During these years, U.S. officials deployed an array of reassuring metaphors for Iran’s lack of domestic turmoil—Iran was an “island,” an “oasis,” and a “pillar” of political stability. While states such as Egypt, Syria, and Iraq leaned toward the Soviet Union and maintained hostile relations with Israel, the Shah’s regime could be counted on to back American power in the region. Perhaps even more important, the Shah, along with the Saudi monarchy, helped guarantee a ready supply of cheap petroleum into the global market. In return, the United States furnished the Shah’s army with some of the world’s most advanced military technology. By the mid-1970s, Washington and Tehran were engaged in arms deals worth an estimated $50 billion. The Nixon and Ford administrations gave the regime access to state-of-the-art military equipment, including F-14 and F-16 fighter planes and Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) electronic surveillance aircraft. Perched atop enormous reserves of crude oil and boasting a formidable army outfitted with advanced American weapons systems, the Shah seemed to be in an almost unassailable position.6
If this was not enough, the regime also held an iron grip on Iran’s domestic political scene. The Shah tolerated no dissent and kept a watchful eye on his citizens. To do this, the regime created a secret police service, Sazman-i Etela’at va Amniyat-i Keshvar, more commonly known as SAVAK, which employed some sixty thousand agents throughout the country. Some observers estimated that, at its height, the service involved one in three Iranian males as either an agent or an informant. Iranian citizens lived in fear of the agency, which was infamous for employing an array of vicious torture techniques. Stories of prisoners being beaten, burned with cigarettes, and electrocuted were only the tamest reports from SAVAK’s interrogation rooms. Inside one police installation, a Western journalist discovered a machine that used a deli meat slicer to shave off prisoners’ hands. In another cell, the reporter found a pile of arms. A third cell contained human remains floating in acid. As the guardians of Washington’s client in the region, some SAVAK agents received training in the United States. SAVAK also maintained extensive ties to the Israeli intelligence service, the Mossad, which included training and joint operations that had taken place since the Iranian organization’s creation in the late 1950s.7
While the Shah’s blanket of political repression fell across the country, there was one center of power that the regime could not afford to crush: the Shia clergy. Based in the holy city of Qom, in the desiccated stretches of north-central Iran, the Shia religious leadership occupied a central place in Iranian society. The rise of the Pahlavi dynasty did little to change this. While the Shah could strike against secular political groups, the elite clergy remained largely untouched. The result was the creation of a sort of dual authority in Iran: one religious in the form of the Shia clergy, and one secular in the form of the Shah’s regime. Beneath the edifice of state power lay a sprawling network of religious authority that extended into every corner of Iranian society. Peasants and tribal groups in the countryside, urban workers, the shop owners of the country’s bazaars, military conscripts—all were linked to the structure of religious power emanating out of Qom. While the majority of Iran’s Islamic leadership came to accept the Shah’s rule, a handful of clerics still resented the Shah’s heavy-handed assertion of secular authority. For the time being, however, the Shah reigned supreme.8
In January 1963, the regime entered its tenth year of iron-fisted rule in Iran. Mossadegh remained under house arrest, SAVAK’s repression had scattered domestic opposition groups, and Tehran’s relationship with the United States was strong. Iron-fisted autocracy was not enough for the Shah, however. He wished to transform his country into a modern, industrialized powerhouse in the Middle East. To this end, he launched an ambitious new development program dubbed the “White Revolution” to modernize Iranian society. At its heart, the program contained a sweeping land reform campaign designed to break up the power of the old aristocracy and redistribute property to Iran’s peasantry. In addition, the Shah proposed industrial reforms, women’s suffrage, and literacy programs. While officials in Washington found much to praise in the White Revolution, a wide variety of groups in Iran objected. Elites opposed land reform that would break up their estates; the clerics opposed giving greater political power to women and the regime’s efforts to interfere with religious schools; and liberals argued that the program did nothing to address the country’s oppressive political atmosphere.9
The most prominent voice of protest against the White Revolution came from one of the country’s clerics, Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini. At sixty years of age, the sharp-eyed religious scholar cut an imposing figure. Known as one of the more radical clerics in Qom, he had become a rising star by the early 1960s. Khomeini feared that, if successful, the Shah’s reforms would weaken the power of the clergy in Iranian society. He warned his fellow clerics that the Shah’s plans were “threatening the foundation of Islam,” and he insisted that the religious leadership was “duty-bound to resist him.” Though it opposed open resistance, the religious establishment chose to boycott the national referendum on the White Revolution, scheduled for January 26, 1963. The regime responded with a public relations blitz. Two days before the referendum, the Shah and a military retinue journeyed to Qom to address a crowd of supporters, many of whom were bused in from Tehran. After extolling the virtues of his land reforms, the Shah looked up from his prepared speech. “Black [i.e., clerical] reaction understands nothing,” he told the crowd; “its brain has not moved for a thousand years.” Conservative clergy who opposed his reforms were “stupid men” who “don’t want to see this country develop.” Two days later, Iranians voted to approve the White Revolution’s measures and the regime declared a triumphal success. But the struggle with the clerics was only just beginning.10
In further protest against the Shah’s reforms, the clergy announced that it would not join in the celebration of Nowruz, the Iranian New Year, on March 21, 1963. The Shah’s “tyrannical regime,” Khomeini thundered, had violated “the sanctity of Islamic laws.” Khomeini now came under close scrutiny by state security forces. The cleric and the Shah were on a collision course. On June 3, Khomeini denounced the Shah in a widely publicized address as a “wretched, miserable man,” and called upon the leader to abandon the White Revolution. Government agents in the crowd recorded the speech and relayed it to the authorities. Two days later, in the predawn hours of June 5, SAVAK agents raided Khomeini’s home. He was absent, but officers were able to trace him to his son’s house, where he surrendered peacefully. As news of the arrest circulated through Qom, thousands of protestors poured onto the streets. The Shah responded by declaring martial law, but it was not enough to quell the violence. The following day, army tanks parked in front of government buildings as thousands of demonstrators assembled throughout the country. Soldiers were ordered to fire on protestors who threatened the regime. A CIA report on the incident noted that the troops “performed well and showed no hesitancy in firing on the mobs when necessary.” While exact figures do not exist, police records indicate no fewer than 380 killed or wounded. Khomeini was imprisoned for ten months before being released in April 1964. Arrest and incarceration had not cowed the cleric, however. Khomeini seized headlines again in October by denouncing the regime’s decision to extend diplomatic immunity to American military personnel working in Iran. “They can no longer call us reactionary,” he told his comrades. “The point is that we are fighting against America. All the world’s freedom-fighters will support us on this issue. We must use it as a weapon to attack the regime so that the whole nation will realise that this Shah is an American agent and this is an American plot.”
It was the last straw. One week later, SAVAK agents arrested Khomeini and drove him directly to Tehran’s airport, where they placed him on a plane to Turkey. He would spend the next fourteen years in exile.11
“THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE”
Having banished Khomeini, the Shah appeared to have regained the upper hand. Though certainly a nuisance, the so-called Black Reactionaries were not considered by the regime to be a serious threat. The Shah, like his patrons in Washington, was convinced that the greater danger came from Communist agents and secular revolutionaries. While SAVAK occupied itself with cracking down on dissent and chasing left-wing guerrillas with ties to the Palestine Liberation Organization, the White Revolution continued with uneven results. The regime’s land reform program sputtered and was eventually terminated in 1971. Traditional elites maintained their opposition to the reforms, while those who benefited from the new polices—primarily wealthy businessmen—felt little loyalty to the regime. Larger transformations were afoot, however. Sparked by the 1973 Arab oil embargo, petroleum prices had skyrocketed. As revenue from Iran’s oil industry soared, cash poured into the country. While this deluge seemed positive, it unleashed dangerous economic instability. Rampant inflation and financial volatility accompanied rising petroleum prices and threw Iran’s economy into turmoil. The rising cost of living coupled with regressive income taxes choked the working class and fueled dangerous resentments among a wide cross-section of Iranian society. By 1975, the nation found itself at the beginning of a mounting economic crisis. While the Shah’s hold on power was still strong, the currents of change were pulling Iran in a new direction.
On the afternoon of January 7, 1978, the Tehran newspaper Ettela’at published an article accusing Khomeini of collusion with British colonialists against the regime. The cleric, it charged, was a paid agent of British oil interests intent on undermining the Shah’s modernization plans. Though hackneyed, the article set off a furor in Qom. During his exile, Khomeini had widened his following through published writings and recorded sermons that were smuggled into Iran. Even as the Shah maintained his grip on power in Tehran, Khomeini’s influence spread through the country. Seminary students interpreted the attack on Khomeini as an attack on the clergy and, more broadly, on Islam. They resolved to stage a series of protests against the article and the regime. Tensions mounted over the next two days, culminating in a riot in which protestors, armed with stones and iron bars, rampaged through the streets of Qom, destroying shops and storming a police station. After their warnings to the crowd went unheeded, police opened fire, killing at least five students. The so-called Qom massacre became a rallying point for opposition forces throughout the country. The massacre cast the regime in a violent struggle against the clergy and the more than nine thousand mosques and religious institutions it controlled. From this massive, nationwide power base, a religious revolution was set to burst forth.12
While Khomeini, living in Paris, praised the protestors, religious leaders inside Iran urged caution and implored the students to observe the Arba’een, the traditional forty-day-period of mourning, in the hope of allowing tempers to cool. The U.S. ambassador in Tehran, William Sullivan, warned that the Shia movement was among the best organized in the country. While officials in the Pahlavi regime dismissed the clerics as ignorant, backward, or “crypto communists,” Sullivan argued that Khomeini’s supporters should not be underestimated. “The Islamic establishment is neither as weak nor as ignorant as the Shah’s [government] and some western observers would portray it,” he wrote. “It has a far better grip on the emotions of the people and on the money of the Bazaar than any other groups.” It was, moreover, resistant to Communist control. Khomeini’s movement would be equally resistant, however, to Western influence.13
Following the end of the mourning period, on February 18, demonstrators again took to the streets in cities across the country. Protests turned violent in Tabriz, where crowds clashed with soldiers and police, who killed thirteen and left hundreds wounded. Observers in the American consulate noted that the demonstrators appeared to be well coordinated. Banks and government buildings were ransacked along with cinemas and the local Pepsi-Cola plant. The “mob,” they reported, “and the whole disaffected class of people from whom the mob spring have once again become a potent weapon to use against the regime.”14 Rather than cooling the protestors’ rage, the mourning periods fueled resentments and gave space for added coordination. At the end of March, protests erupted yet again, with violence in Tehran, Isfahan, and Yazd. Dozens of protestors were killed when police opened fire on the crowds. Following the next Arba’een, clashes returned to Qom, where the Shah’s security forces killed more demonstrators. The clashes subsided in June as tempers cooled and the demonstrators came to recognize that the forty-day cycles had given the regime a tactical advantage in its ability to make preparations. No one could have prepared for what came next, however. On August 19, 1978, flames engulfed the Rex Cinema in Abadan. Three hundred seventy people perished in the inferno. While both the regime and the opposition flung recriminations at one another, investigations later suggested that Islamic militants had locked the emergency exits. For many Iranians, however, the fire was the last straw. In the days following the catastrophe, the ranks of protestors swelled, and the regime was forced to place ten cities under martial law. The opposition had grown from a movement of discontented seminary students to encompass a broad section of Iranian society.15
The Shah scrambled to defuse the mounting demonstrations by calling for greater democratization, granting amnesty to hundreds of political prisoners, and forming a new government. But it was too late to dam the torrent of opposition. The Eid al-Fitr celebrations, in early September, brought tens of thousands onto the streets in cities throughout the country, alongside demonstrators calling for the Shah’s abdication. By September 7, the crowds in Tehran had grown to half a million. In desperation, the Shah placed the capital under martial law. The battle commenced the following morning. Helicopter gunships swooped over the shantytowns in the south while protestors threw up barricades throughout the city. Jaleh Square sat at the epicenter of the clashes as thousands of students, surrounded by government tanks and commandos, staged a sit-down protest. After failed attempts to disperse the crowds, security forces opened fire. Once the smoke cleared, the regime announced eighty-seven killed. Demonstrators claimed that more than four thousand had been slaughtered. In the words of one scholar, September 8, or Black Friday, as it soon came to be known, “placed a sea of blood between the Shah and the people . . . and left the country with two simple choices: a drastic revolution or a military counterrevolution.”16 Iranian journalists warned U.S. officials not to dismiss Khomeini as irrational or a puppet of foreign interests—the Ayatollah had more “influence over the masses than the Shah.” As xenophobia and suspicion of outsiders grew, the United States was in a “no-win situation.” The creation of an Islamic state, Iranian journalists insisted, was now “guaranteed.”17
Another Arba’een followed the Black Friday massacre. While government forces prepared for the worst, opposition leaders turned their attention to a less confrontational form of rebellion: general strikes. The day after the Black Friday killings, workers at the Tehran oil refinery walked out. By the beginning of October, observers counted thirty-six active strikes. By November, businesses and facilities across the country had shut down. Journalists, airline workers, and customs officials struck alongside rail workers and laborers at power plants. Even bankers staged intermittent strikes. From exile, Khomeini cheered the workers on: “From now on, it is time for all of us to close our businesses, not forever but for the short time it will take to overthrow the ruling oppressors! Do not hurry to re-open shops and factories.” On November 4, students battled with police at the gates of Tehran University. Once again, the regime claimed that only a handful were killed while rumors spread through the streets of thousands dead. Protestors responded by torching buildings in the capital. The Shah tried to calm the protests even as he formed a military government and unleashed state security forces on the demonstrators. “I cannot but approve the revolution of the nation of Iran,” he announced in a televised speech. Promising to enact a new constitution, he told viewers, “I have heard the message of your revolution, nation of Iran.”18
On the heels of the clashes at Tehran University, Ambassador Sullivan sent a cable to his superiors titled “Thinking the Unthinkable.” There was a very real possibility, he wrote, that the Shah might not survive—it was time to consider reaching out to Khomeini. The ambassador received no reply. Meanwhile, CIA analysts warned that Khomeini’s influence “is now so strong that neither other clerics nor civilian opposition leaders will take actions he opposes.” The State Department’s intelligence office gave an even bleaker assessment: the regime could not survive in its current form. If the Shah hoped to arrest Iran’s “descent into chaos,” he must either accept the role of constitutional monarch or abdicate. Although short-term repression was inevitable, in the long run, a crackdown “will lead to even greater violence and risks the total collapse of authority and the radicalization of Iranian politics.”19 But what might come next remained a matter of open debate. The CIA warned, “No single group or coalition gives any promise of a genuinely democratic government should it come to power. . . . [I]t would lack the power to impose its will, it would be inexperienced and dependent on the same bureaucracy that has failed the Shah, and it would be a constant target for other ambitious elements, including the military.” In December 1978, the Agency reported that, although they lacked the resources to stage a coup themselves, Iranian Communists “could make rapid gains” if the government collapsed.20
As the Shah’s regime sped toward collapse, a power struggle was under way inside the Carter administration. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance was fighting a losing battle for the administration’s foreign policy against National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. A skilled bureaucratic infighter, Brzezinski, the Democratic Party’s answer to Henry Kissinger, had gained the upper hand. While Vance and the State Department advocated moderation, Brzezinski and the NSC pushed for a hard-line approach. The Shah, Brzezinski was convinced, should unleash the full force of his military upon the protestors and crush the opposition. This analysis ran at odds with reports from observers in Tehran such as Ambassador Sullivan. The Shah himself had expressed doubt that further use of force would prove effective against the demonstrations. “After watching his troops kill over ten thousand of his own people in the streets of Iran’s cities,” scholar James Bill wrote, “the shah determined that violent tactics were doomed to fail.” Brzezinski had no use for such indecision, however. Having been outmaneuvered in Washington, Vance, Sullivan, and the State Department were forced to watch as “Brzezinski and his staff arrogantly shaped a policy that placed America on the losing side in a revolution.”21
Unsatisfied with Sullivan’s reports from Tehran, Brzezinski chose to dispatch his own emissary for a second opinion: air force general Robert “Dutch” Huyser. Not surprisingly, the general’s views conflicted with those of the ambassador. Where Sullivan saw a military on the brink of collapse, Huyser saw a force that was strong enough to restore order. While the ambassador argued that Khomeini enjoyed wide support, the general estimated that only 10 to 20 percent of Iranians backed the Ayatollah. Also, Huyser was more concerned about the potential for the Soviets to take advantage of the situation: “[I]f Iran became an Islamic Republic,” he warned, “it would eventually end up in the Communist camp.” Although Huyser and Sullivan had a cordial working relationship, Huyser’s presence in Iran sent a clear signal that Carter did not fully support his ambassador. “While Sullivan was the best informed American official concerning the Iranian situation,” Iranian dissidents later complained, “his views were ignored in Washington because they were bad news (akhbar-i bad) and therefore unacceptable.” Spending most of his time with the Shah’s military forces, Huyser had not even managed to meet opposition leaders. To many Iranians, the Huyser mission seemed yet another indication of Washington’s unwavering support for the Shah. Carter’s public pronouncements made the situation worse. “We have historic friendships with Iran,” the president announced in late October. “I think they are a great stabilizing force in their part of the world.” As late as December 12, 1978, Carter announced his expectation that the monarch would maintain power in Tehran: “The shah has our support and he also has our confidence.” Behind closed doors, however, U.S. officials warned that he had “only a marginal chance of surviving.”22
As December began, the Shah’s reign entered its final weeks. Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets to commemorate the Shia holy days of Tasu’a and Ashura on December 10–11. While opposition leaders feared that a harsh military crackdown would create a bloodbath, the Shah chose not to unleash the army on the protestors. Scholars disagree as to why he made that choice. James Bill suggests that a massive crackdown would likely have led the army to disintegrate. Historian Said Arjomand, however, argues that the military was probably the stablest institution in Iran. In contrast to military forces in other revolutions, the Shah’s forces did not unravel: they remained intact and loyal to the monarchy until well after the leader’s departure. Surely, Arjomand argues, the military would have moved mercilessly against protestors if so ordered. Historian Charles Kurzman suggests that the answer lies in the person of the Shah himself. Although he built a ruthless regime, the Shah had proved indecisive at key moments in Iranian history, such as with Mossadegh’s challenge in the early 1950s and the Khomeinist revolt in 1963. Added to this, the Shah was well aware that his life was drawing to an end as the growing cancer in his body took its toll. Kurzman also argues that the Shah’s strategy was somewhat more nuanced than often acknowledged. The regime sought to provide both carrots and sticks to protestors. If the demonstrations ceased, dissidents could expect reforms. If they remained on the streets, they could expect more violence of the type routinely seen over the course of 1978. Finally, the Shah would have recognized that repression had its limits: there were simply too many protestors, and too much of the country was in a state of upheaval.23
“A PERSONALITY CULT WAS IN THE MAKING”
Tears formed in the corners of the Shah’s eyes as he delivered his last address in his home country near the imperial pavilion of Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport on January 16, 1979. Clad in a suit and overcoat against the winter cold, the ruler addressed a small group of government officials and military leaders. “I hope the Government will be able to make amends for the past and also succeed in laying the foundation for the future,” he told the group. Two members of the palace guard bent to kiss his shoes before he boarded a plane to Egypt for an “extended vacation.” The news of the Shah’s departure sent a shock wave through Tehran as joyful throngs crowded the streets, weeping and throwing flowers at soldiers. Two weeks later, on the morning of February 1, 1979, the seventy-eight-year-old Khomeini stepped off an Air France jet and onto Iranian territory. “Our final victory will come when all foreigners are out of the country,” he told the cheering crowd in the terminal. “I beg God to cut off the hands of all evil foreigners and all their helpers.” Millions more packed along the streets as the Ayatollah traveled through Tehran. State censors blocked the broadcast of Khomeini’s arrival, airing a picture of the Shah instead.24
“A personality cult was in the making,” Khomeini’s biographer wrote; “overnight Khomeini had been transformed into a semi-divine figure.” Four days later, he appeared for his first public address. “This is not an ordinary government,” he told the audience. “It is a government based on the shari’a. . . . Revolt against God’s government is a revolt against God. Revolt against God is blasphemy.” The Ayatollah’s statement was one of the first clear indications of his intention to create a theocratic state in Iran. But moderates within the revolution (liberals, middle-class professionals, and the left) paid little heed to Khomeini’s words. Instead, the nation focused on the rapid disintegration of the Shah’s regime. Robbed of the monarch, the edifice of government power quickly crumbled. On February 8, a large group of members of the air force declared their allegiance to Khomeini, prompting the Shah’s imperial guard to attack the rebels. The clashes quickly escalated to a general conflict between remaining loyalists in the military and revolutionaries who feared that the military might launch a coup to restore the old regime. In a last-ditch effort to regain control of the situation, Prime Minister Shapour Bakhtiar declared a dusk-to-dawn curfew. In response, Khomeini commanded his followers to challenge the government order and called for a jihad against loyalist military units. The following morning, the military brass decided to stand down “in order to prevent further disorder and bloodshed.” Government troops were ordered back to their bases, and any serious hope of restoring the regime vanished.25
Still rooted in a Cold War mind-set, American officials worried about the potential for Communist forces to benefit from the revolution. In mid-January, the CIA had warned that “radical elements” were increasingly active among the revolutionaries. Although conservative religious forces were dominant, the left could become a greater threat in the future. State Department officers also worried about links between the left-wing Iranian Mujahideen-e-Khalq and Palestinian revolutionaries. Other reports suggested that, given Khomeini’s personal aversion to Marxism, the revolution was not likely to take a leftward turn. Indeed, the revolution was going in a very different direction. Khomeini had ordered the arrest of all senior officials in the Pahlavi regime, and rumors of mass executions began to circulate. For every publicized execution, dozens of other former officials were reportedly rounded up and shot. Meanwhile, Khomeini had ramped up his anti-American rhetoric. “Dissolution, chaos, and violence are hallmarks of today’s politics in Iran,” Sullivan wrote.26
With the institutions of the old regime in ruins, the victorious opposition set about building the new state. But one final obstacle remained to Khomeini’s goal of creating an Islamic state in Iran: his secular allies within the revolution. While the clerics rightfully claimed a central place in the revolutionary regime, moderate, secular elements were well represented, at least initially. In the months following the Shah’s departure, however, Khomeini and his supporters moved steadily to consolidate his hold on the reins of power. While the Interim Government of Iran under Mehdi Bazargan held official power, Khomeini’s Council of the Islamic Revolution functioned as a sort of “parallel” government, passing its own laws, extending control over the courts, and fielding a military force in the Revolutionary Guard. The weak and divided moderate forces within the revolution had little chance against the Khomeinists’ coordinated campaign to seize power.27 All the while, Khomeini continued his insistence that Iran become an Islamic republic. In June, the Ayatollah blasted his secular critics among the intelligentsia. “Those who did not participate in this movement have no right to advance any claims,” he argued. “It was the mosques that created this Revolution, the mosques that brought this movement into being.” Khomeini continued to enjoy overwhelming popular support. A national referendum held in March (which was boycotted by some of its opponents) showed 98 percent of voters in favor of creating an Islamic republic. Bazargan later claimed that the “clergy supplanted us and succeeded in taking over the country.” The secular political parties “went to sleep after the revolution.” The years of repression under the Shah had left Iran’s secular opposition severely weakened. By the end of the Shah’s reign, the clergy represented the only organized voice of opposition strong enough to consolidate control over the new regime.28
The revolution’s religious turn took many by surprise. Analysts in the State Department, the CIA, and academia all failed to foresee the revolution’s turn toward theocracy. Ambassador Sullivan’s “Thinking the Unthinkable” telegram of November 1978 had predicted that Khomeini would play a symbolic, “Gandhi-like” role in revolutionary Iran. The following month, James Bill predicted that Iran’s clergy “would never participate directly in the formal government structure.” While analysts recognized the power of the clergy, the concept of a theocratic revolution in the depths of the Cold War seemed too far-fetched to merit serious consideration. As late as March 1979, CIA director Stansfield Turner worried that “leftists” would use the revolution to seize power in Tehran. But the drama in Iran would prove Khomeini’s doubters wrong. By the spring of 1979, the CIA began to realize that Khomeini was not slipping into a passive role. Rather, it appeared that the Ayatollah would continue to exert considerable, and perhaps even decisive, influence over the state.29 “Lacking any political channels,” former NSC staffer Gary Sick later wrote, “people turned to the only popular institution not totally dominated by the shah’s system—the mosques.” With the collapse of the old regime, the path was virtually open for the ayatollahs to seize control.30 The final blow to the secular elements in the revolution came in the form of an international incident that seized the world’s attention.
HOSTAGE CRISIS
The U.S. embassy in Tehran sat on a sprawling, twenty-seven-acre campus ringed by brick walls separating the compound from the teeming city around it. Shaded by pine trees, the campus contained a chancery, the ambassador’s residence, staff buildings, tennis courts, and a swimming pool. Like many American embassies during the Cold War, it was the local face of American power in the country. For Iranian revolutionaries, the compound was an imperialist salient in the heart of the capital, an enemy stronghold that for decades had supported the Shah’s hated regime. As the revolutionary tide surged, demonstrators sprayed anti-American graffiti on the embassy’s outside walls while sporadic rocks and gunshots forced the staff to put up sandbags and bulletproof plastic panels on the windows. The compound was about to become a pivotal battleground in the ongoing Iranian Revolution. In the last weeks of October 1979, a group of Islamist students devised a plan to seize the embassy: they would do so under the banner of the Ayatollah in a bid to shift power away from Bazargan’s government and toward the clerics. If successful, the seizure would compromise Bazargan’s authority. He could come to the rescue of the American diplomats, but doing so would lend credence to accusations that the prime minister, who had just been photographed shaking hands with Zbigniew Brzezinski, was an imperialist lackey. Conversely, he could do nothing, but inaction would make his government appear weak. For Bazargan, it was a no-win situation.31
On the morning of November 4, 1979, an unusually large crowd of protestors convened in front of the embassy. U.S. embassy officials—which now consisted of a skeleton staff led by chargé d’affaires Bruce Laingen after the departure and retirement of Ambassador Sullivan earlier in the year—were not overly concerned and set about holding meetings, filing memoranda, and conducting their normal daily operations. By late morning, however, the crowd had grown larger, and a number of staffers became concerned. Soon, the first students began scaling the embassy walls. As officials barred their doors and began frantically shredding sensitive documents, the protestors outside shouted through bullhorns. “We do not wish to harm you,” one announced. “We only wish to set-in.” Iranian students with bolt cutters began attacking the locks on the lower windows. Within a matter of hours, the demonstrators controlled the embassy and had taken dozens of its staff hostage. Blindfolded and with their hands bound, the hostages were paraded before photographers. While the students had initially intended a short-term, symbolic occupation of the embassy, they were emboldened by their success and by word that they had gained Khomeini’s support. Just as important, it seemed clear that government forces would not intervene. In exchange for the hostages, the students demanded the return of the Shah (who had been admitted to the United States on October 22 to seek medical treatment), to face trial. The capture of the embassy, the so-called Den of Spies, had turned into a major coup for the Islamist elements of the revolution.32
Officials in the Carter administration scrambled to find some way to address the crisis. As initial hopes for a quick resolution faded, Brzezinski directed members of the NSC staff to devise a range of diplomatic and military responses. It would be necessary, they decided, to open direct communications with Khomeini and the clerical leadership. But the return of the ailing Shah to face trial in a revolutionary court was out of the question. Meanwhile, the aircraft carrier USS Midway, steaming through the Indian Ocean, could be used to launch retaliatory strikes if the hostages were harmed. The holy city of Qom and Iranian oil fields sat at the top of the potential target list. Officials from the PLO also offered to serve as liaisons between Washington and Tehran, in the hope of securing the hostages’ release. For the time being, however, the two sides were in a deadlock: the United States would not extradite the Shah, and the revolutionaries in Iran had no reason to free their prisoners.33 Making matters worse, the students who had seized the compound had captured a large cache of classified State Department documents that embassy staff had not had time to burn. Although many of the documents had been shredded, the Iranians gathered a team of students and disabled war veterans to reassemble these. Over the next six years, the Iranians would compile three thousand pages of documents that they would publish in the eighty-five-volume “Documents from the US Espionage Den” series. In time, some of the most sensitive communiqués on U.S.-Iranian relations would sell on the streets of Tehran for a few coins.34
The American hostages were now pawns in a power struggle within the Iranian Revolution. The capture of the embassy fanned the flames of radicalism and empowered the Khomeinists to cast moderate leaders in the provisional government as U.S. lackeys. Impotent in the face of the crisis and under increasing attack, Prime Minister Bazargan resigned on November 6. During what would become months in captivity, the hostages received stern treatment. Troublemakers were blindfolded, handcuffed, and sometimes kept in solitary confinement. Ranking officials and the handful of CIA officers in the Tehran station were subjected to interrogation and, initially, beatings. On the whole, however, their confinement was not unduly harsh by Iranian standards. Indeed, a number of the hostage-takers who had been prisoners of the American-trained SAVAK had endured far worse. For their part, the American hostages rightfully saw their captivity as an egregious violation of diplomatic norms. As the revolution veered toward greater radicalism, the “guests of the ayatollah” became a potent symbol of resistance against American power.35
The hostage crisis represented an equally powerful symbolic humiliation for the Carter administration. The American news media seized upon the plight of the captives, airing nightly television broadcasts that served as unwelcome reminders of Carter’s inability to secure their release. By early 1980, the more hawkish members of the administration were calling for a rescue operation. Secretary of State Vance opposed any military operation to liberate the hostages, insisting that it was likely to cause significant bloodshed and further strengthen Khomeini’s hand. On April 11, while Vance was on vacation in Florida, Carter met with top officials to consider a rescue mission. Brzezinski argued that it was time “to lance the boil” in Tehran and redeem the nation’s honor. The hawks won the day, and preparations for Operation Eagle Claw began. Learning of the operation, a horrified Vance proffered his letter of resignation. On the evening of April 24, eight Sea Stallion helicopters from the USS Nimitz in the Arabian Sea and six C-130 aircraft met at a remote airstrip 275 miles southeast of Tehran. The helicopters would carry teams of Delta Force commandos to the U.S. embassy in Tehran for an assault on the compound. “When we went into that Embassy,” the commando’s leader explained, “it was our aim to kill all Iranian guards.” If Iranian reinforcements arrived, the rescue team was to radio for C-130s armed with 105-millimeter cannons to “hose down the streets.” It was a risky operation that would most likely have generated heavy casualties on both sides. Before the assault, however, three helicopters broke down and one crashed into a C-130. The ensuing carnage left eight Americans dead and forced the operation’s commanders to abort the mission. The following day, as Iranian forces picked through the wreckage and the regime declared yet another victory over the United States, the hostage-takers moved their captives to more secure locations throughout Tehran, to prevent any further rescue attempts.36
The Eagle Claw disaster was only the most dramatic manifestation of larger changes taking place in Washington’s orientation toward the Middle East. On October 1, 1979, Jimmy Carter had announced the creation of the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force (RDF). Drawing on the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, the 7th Marine Amphibious Brigade, the 24th Mechanized Division, the 6th Cavalry Brigade, Army Ranger and Special Forces units, air force Tactical Fighter Wings, a force of B-52s, and three aircraft carrier battle groups, the RDF fielded an impressive, multiservice combat force designed to give the United States the capacity to stage military interventions in the region to protect access to vital oil supplies.37 In light of the growing range of upheavals in the Middle East, the RDF’s role was soon expanded. In 1981, the Reagan administration would announce its intention to transform the RDF into a theater-level command. Two years later, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) came into being. Focusing on the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia—in short, the heartlands of the Islamic world—CENTCOM would become the most active American military command of the post–Cold War era.
The revolution in Iran was causing problems for leaders in Moscow as well. U.S. analysts warned that, although the resurgence of political Islam created short-term problems for Washington, events such as the Iranian Revolution posed graver long-term dangers for the USSR. Soviet leaders feared that the “virus” of Islamic fundamentalism might spread to their own Muslim population. In response to Khomeini’s criticisms of Moscow, Soviet forces had begun jamming radio signals emanating from Iran. In August, the CIA concluded that relations between Moscow and Tehran were “cool at best” and not likely to improve. Khomeini’s antipathy toward the Soviets, born in part from the Iranian leader’s deep suspicion toward atheist Marxism, frustrated the Kremlin’s efforts to expand its influence in Iran in the wake of the revolution. “While Moscow takes some consolation in the fact that the US has fared no better,” the Agency noted, “the Soviets in recent weeks have probably concluded that neither can they make progress as long as Khomeini and his supporters remain in power.” By September 1979, Soviet leaders had begun issuing open criticism of the “theocratic” regime in Tehran. By “stirring up religious fanaticism and anticommunist hysteria,” argued the Moscow daily Izvestia, mouthpiece of the Soviet government, Tehran was doing nothing to help the Iranian people. Even worse, Soviet leaders worried that the ayatollahs were taking steps to export their revolution to other states in the region.38
In October, the CIA warned that Khomeini and his comrades were “encouraging and in some cases assisting Shia dissidents in neighboring states.” Iraq represented the “most explosive” potential target for Iranian leaders hoping to export their revolution. Fifty-five percent of Iraq’s population was Shia, the country housed the holy shrines in Najaf and Karbala, and the two nations had been rivals for centuries. Iraqi leaders remained highly sensitive to Iranian “meddling with its Shia community.” Iranian statements had also inflamed Shia dissidents in Bahrain and Kuwait. Khomeini’s calls for the Afghans to “take a lesson from Iran” and “kick out” the pro-Soviet government there had raised concerns across the border. Analysts explained that the “tribal insurgency” in Afghanistan had taken cues from the revolution in neighboring Iran. Although Iran was unlikely to “pursue an activist foreign policy,” CIA analysts concluded, the “messianic, Pan-Islamic radicalism of the Iranian clergy will continue to strain relations between Iran and [its neighbors] and to stimulate efforts by Arab states to organize a coordinated response.” Iraq, in particular, was likely to “play the role of protector of the Gulf,” using the Iranian Revolution as a pretext for increasing its regional influence.39
IRAN’S UNTHINKABLE REVOLUTION SHOOK THE FOUNDATIONS of the Cold War in the Third World and set in motion a wave of dislocations that would transform the Middle East. Khomeini would soon join the ranks of Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh as one of the foremost postcolonial revolutionaries of the Cold War age. Like the Chinese and Vietnamese Revolutions before it, the Iranian Revolution helped fuel a series of wars in neighboring states and prompted a buildup of U.S. and Soviet military commitments to a new theater of war along the Cold War borderlands. Tehran would emerge as the focus of the third and last great wave of revolutionary violence in the Cold War era. President Carter’s response to the Iranian Revolution and the events that followed set the stage for a massive increase in the U.S. military presence in the region. But the United States would not be the first superpower to intervene in the great sectarian revolt of the late Cold War. Soviet leaders had already launched their own war in neighboring Afghanistan.