The Hostage Crisis and Lasting Legacy

Mortgage refinancing might sound complicated. SFI makes it easier. With refinancing options designed to fit your goals, you can explore lowering your mortgage rate, accessing cash from your home's equity with your cash out refi, or shortening your lo term. Whatever your next move, SopFI can help you find the right fit. Ready to explore refi? Visit SopFi dot com slash powerower Mortgages originated by SFi Bank in A member FDIC, NMLS six nine six eight nine one Terms and conditions apply. equal housing lender New York Tim I'm likeable borr. This is the Daily partart of the current U.S. war against Irq inconvenient truth. that the United States is in many ways responsible for bringing about the very regime that it now seeks to topple Tod my colleague Times magazine contributor Scott Anderson tellells us the story of America's outsized role in the Iranian Revolution. And why all these years later 're still no closer Understanding Iran. It's Friday June twelfth 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 O Right, K of a post modern type of ceasefire. Exactly. And the peace talks that are supposed to be built atop that post modern 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 told the story of on this show and You, not long before the war began, told that story in what turned out to be a very well timed. called King of Kings And why 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 fifty 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 fifty years ago today Iran was America's most important ally between Western Europe and Japan. The two economies were inextricably linked Economically, of course, we were getting Iranian oil. Iran was the biggest, by far, the biggest buyer of American arms abroad. Wow. No these missiles bomb. E Everything short of nuclear weapons. Kind of a staggering thing to contemplate today It really is. fifty thousand Americans were living in Iran and fifty thousand Iranian students were studying at American universities. Shaw had visited the United States a dozen times over his reign. He'd met seven different presidents at the White House and American presidents had come to Tehron to meet with him. It's like an alternate universe. Yes. They were incredibly close And what is ironic in a story full of ironies is that the very closeness of that relationship between the Americans and the Iranians carried the seeds of the revolution that was to come And Scott, in your book, you explain that Historians still marvel at the improbability of the revolution that you just referred to, this total inferno of a rejection of the West in a country so thoroughly dominated by a partnership with the West No, that's right. And how this all just unraveled over the course of a year is just astonishing. And in looking at the dynamics of the revolution There seem so many moments when if something had played out just slightly different, if someone had made a decision or not made a decision that it all could have played out very, very differently or been aborted alltogether You know, it wasn't like going into a house and opening the wrong door. It was like going into a house and opening forty three wrong doors in a row. That's what happened here. Yeah Let's begin our effort to understand how so many wrong doors were opened by first really making sense of how it ever was the case that the United States and Iran became such full intertwined partners, because As we're making very clear here. doesn't make much sense given where we are today, but it obviously made all the sense in the world while it was actually happening. So what is the story of how these two countries and militaries, governments, and economies became so interwoven? So in order to understand this entire story of the US Iran relationship and how the two countries got so close You need to understand who the leader of Iran was for a very long stretch of the twentieth century His name was Mohammed Reza Palavi, and he was known as the Shah. ious Persian for king The Shaah came to power in nineteen forty one after the British and Soviets overthrew his father, who had been the former Shaah young Shaw he was twenty one on the throne because they saw him as weak and ineffectual. But the Shw's trajectory really starts to change once his relationship with the United States started to blossom And a key moment of that was in nineteen fifty three There was a parliamentary crisis in Iran. There was a new prime mininister named Mohammed Mossadeg. He was a populist and a bit of a fire brand, very charismatic. And he was kind of the first time there was a prime minister who really started to assert against the shhah Not just assert, but start to strip the shhaw of his powers And one issue that really galvanized his authority and his popularity in the country was his move to nationalize Iran's oil industry takeake it over from Britain. Since the beginning of the century, the British government controlled Iran's oil industry, paying the Iranian government pittence. So when Mosadeig came to power, this was the primary issue that he was using to galvanize his support and also to move against the shock What did the sha think should be happening to Iran's oil? Should it be nationalized The Shah was much more cautious. In public, he would talk about that he was in support of nationalization, but that it should be taken gradually and moderately and responsibly. But behind the scenes, he was telling the British, I'm your guy. So it set up this constitutional crisis between these two men. it became a question of who is really in charge? Is it the Shaah Or is it Prime Minister Mosad British, fearing they were going to lose their oil monopoly, they come up with this idea that, well, we'll overthrow Mosidig and restore the Shah to his full kingly powers 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 Eisenh our administration, Musadeg is soft on communism. The commommunists are just waiting in the wings to take over in Iran. It actually wasn't true at all. Most of Dig was an anti communist. But of course, this is a time in the Cold War when Americans are terrified of the spread of communism around the world So the Eisenhower administration says, all right, we'll take care of this problem for you. We'll get rid of Mosad Deg and restore the shad of his power. will take on the coup. The British understood the American Cold War mentality, which is If we have to do a coup in order to stop communism, we'll do the coup. That's right. It plays right into the American Cold War mentalities So in the summer of nineteen fifty three, the CIA essentially stirered this coup against Mosadek. M shah demanded Mossedadek's resignation. The premier refused, and fresh rioting bro out in the capital city of Terrraor So this coup goes awry almost immediately and it takes place over a very complicated and chaotic four days in Tehran, where it appears one side is winning and then the other In a brazen act of defiance, the statue of the Shaw's father is toppled from its pedestal The Sad leaves, the Shad leaves Iran Fearing for his life, the Shah's advisors advocated his temporary exile to Rome he finds out that the coup has been a successful on his part. He's having lunch at the Excelsier Hotel in Rome. In the quick shift of power, Mosadeek was finally apprehended and awaits trial for treason. The shhah who had fled to Rome comes home And he comes back, you know a little bit tail between his legs two or three days later to assume the throne crowds shout pro sha slogans and carry pictures of the troubled ruler of a troubled nation So in a sense He flees his own coup, right, comes back, discovers He's now in power Thanks to the U. S. That's right. What iss important about the fifty three coup is from that moment on Every Iranian knows about the coup and they know about the American role in it. The Shaw becomes, quote the American Shaw. evenven in the eyes of his supporters. He is seen as joined to the hip to the Americans becausecause he owes his power to the. That's right If you're a Iranian, Soty This phrase American shop Good thing or a bad thing at this moment in history It's a combination of good and bad. I think you get to this very complicated national personality of Iran, of Iranians where For centuries, they've wanted to emulate the West They're bitter of how they've been mistreated and taken advantage of So it's kind of this complicated love hate ations Emulation and then resist sentent? Yes. and it runs very, very deep But from the Shan'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, Yank back and forth among the great empires of Britain and Russia. And Ashah 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 withith the Shah or with Iran. They're not interested in opening yet another front in the Middle East in the Cold War And they had no need for Iran's oil. At that time, the U.S. had plenty of oil of its own So this just wasn't a compelling partnership to them And if anything, they looked even more ascant at the shab in the wake of the nineteen fifty three coup Because who runs away from their own coup Right doesn't make him seem super sturdy as an ally. So how did that relationship start to change? It's a slow build and it goes much slower than the Shaw would wish. The Americans were kind of keeping them at arm's length, really through the rest of the nineteen fifties. Even though 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, Nao was a great admirer of Western culture. He'd been educated in a Swiss boarding school. He spoke French and English fluently, beautifully In fact, people at times made fun of his Farsi accent because they had this idea of him as this internationalist who is 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 M 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 nineteen sixties. and this is a time when there was a lot of social movement for economic progress emancipation of women. The revolution is Ashaw's own blueprint for're transforming a backward feudal society into the Grape civilization. And he wanted to run to join in that forward movement. So the Shah institutes a series of nineteen social and economic reforms that he calls the White Revolution. Part of the Shah's upheaval gave women the vote for the first time Another was to appoint a woman as mininister 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 The landlord giving orders to I don't know scores of peeasants That is finished. A large majority of the Arabble land in Iran was under the control of either oligarchic families or the Muslim clergy. And so his agarian 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 arere unhappy that your country is sayaying goodbye to a feudalistic system If you are unhappy that Half of the population of your country, the women are emancipated this I cannot help And all of these reforms really enraged the right wing clergy of the country, which was very, very powerful And in particular, they enraged an influential cleric named Rhola Hommani Name itab or not in Latic as Ham Jab onun Shadas. Homani, far more than almost any other religious opponent to the Shah, was really vituperative in his denunciations of the Shah. in the early nineteen sixties, called Mfal shhah, 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 clerk in the country observing the King of Iran beccoming closer and closer to the United States inststituting political reforms that feel awfully Western and secular And after that fifty three coup, owing his very legitimacy to the United States. That's right That's exact. That would seem to be very problematic. Yeah. that's right So things with Homani reach ahe in nineteen sixty three. The Sah moves to arrest Homani for some of the incendiary things he's been saying A, the free world is troubled by trouble in Iran P many arrest sets off of clerical riots around the country. One of the causes of the new rioting was the ChXa's Land reform Pgram Institute. number builduildings are burned A secondary contributing trouble factor Was the Sah's plans for the emancipation of the nation's women Rrioting against this program was led by leaders of a strict Muslim sect oppose to women's suffrage. So the military comes out of their barracks and kills at least one hundred and fifty people The opposition said many more than that were killed. and crucially, Homania is arrested So for the next year, the shock kept Homanian 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 How many continue to make those incendiary attacks So less than a year later, the Shaw finally rearrests Homanian and sends him into exile And this is really the moment where the United States finally sits up and takes notice of the shaw 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 Shaah has been seeking all these years. So the American Sah finally begins to win over the Americans That's right. And on Homini'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 ' now exponentially more so But the Shaah seems have learned virtually nothing from Homeini's uprising of a few years earlier He doesn't seem to get that his close relationship with the West is any kind of problem. And in fact, he does something that just cements how totally enamored he is to the West, even at the expense of regular Iranian people And that happens in October of nineteen seventy one Jose Bazorg Horish Iran The Shaw wanted to have a grand party to celebrate the twenty five hundred years of Iranian imperial dynasty at Prersepolis, the ancient capital of Persia. Aamsid This three day extravaganza in the desert where virtually all the guests were foreigners and virtually all the supplies and everything were foreigned. 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. Maxine's restaurant in Paris closed down for two weeks and all the waiters of Meaxiims wow to be the waiters at this banquet. No waiters in Ir on. No waiters. R And so it really got to this This kind of inferiority complex that the West was the best And I have to imagine all these rural religious watching their leader put on this extravagant, as you said, grotesque banquet on behalf of Western leaders Deply offensive Oh, absolutely. Significantly, it was denounced by the exiled Ayatollla Homeni, who called it the Devil's Festival. and says anyone who attends is participating in murder of the people of Iran. W. So I think that at that moment Colmani starts seeing this opening of the shhw is really He's having delusions of grandeur. He's losing touch with reality. He's losing tch with the reality of most of the Iranian people. I feel like I'm starting to hear the sound of those many wrong doors you had mentioned earlier starting to open And it feels like Westernization is central that. So what is happening At this moment with the Sw'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. firstirst we have the military ties between the U. S. and Iran The United States help set up Sabak, the Shah's secret police, which will become infamous as the Shah's tool to surveill the population and in some cases, torture dissidents and disappear people. when The Americans establish a massive CIA station in Tehan. It's one of the biggest in the Middle East and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger. They have two top secret CIA listening posts So you're seeing this just steadily deepening ties developing all the time. And the Shah really starts to feel emboldened by these deepening ties to ask for more and more from the U.S.s For years, he's been obsessed with building a world class army. And really since the beginning of his reign, had looked to the United States for help in doing that And for the first time in nineteen seventy two The United States finally said Yes, you can have it The defense of freedom everybody's business. notot just America's business And it happened because of something called the Nixon Doctrine. But we shall look to the nation directly threatened to assume the primary responsibility of providing the manpower for its defense. The Nixon doctrine is to point regional powers that are friendly of the United States as the policemen of the area In the Middle East, there's the twin pillars of Saudi Arabia and Iran. Saudi Arabia being much more of an economic one, Iran is going to become the military policeman of the region. On behalf of the US. On behalf of the U.S. So this all culminates in this extensive international trip Nixon took in May of nineteen seventy two 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. It was there. this very close relationship between the Shaw and Nixon was on full display. The day ended with a state dinner where the president praised Iran's contribution for maintaining world peace. And it seemed to be the moment that was really the capstone of what the Saw had been working for, this close alliance with the United States for thirty one years But the really important thing that happened during this visit actually happened the next morning and it happened behind closed doors There were only 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 are not going to have to deal with the Congress. You're not going to have to deal with the State Department and their human rights declarations. Blank check, blank check, anything you want And from what I've been able to find out, no other country had blanch from the Americans ever. Maybe Britain did. But nobody else. Well That's how much The next administration believe that Iran be its's policeman for the entire Middle East and maybe even beyond. That's right. That's right So this is the Shaw's dream come true. And there's this amazing moment at that meeting. As the meeting was about to end, Nixon turns to the Saw and says, prrotect me. And it's just this astonishing moment. L what American president has ever turned to another head of state and said, prrotect me Can you just dissect that because That is an extraordinary. It's beenbalancing of what we think of as a kind of a power balance toe dynamic in the world. the U. S. president asking a foreign head of state to protect the United States. Is that amazing It's a rather remarkable journey from the Sah owing his power to the U S in fifty three to fewer than twenty years later the Sah recognizing if he's hearing the same thing I am that suddenly The United States President derivise 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 Shaw Madin May of nineteen ninety two It set everything in motion. It set the Shaah's delusions of grandeur completely legitimated them. It made the Americans dependency on the Shw That much greater, the institutional ignorance of seeing any threat to the Shah started from this time. B both on now a glide path to this ruin that's going to happen seven years down the road Both sides are blinded to what's coming blinded in a rather intentional way because the relationship had becomome so important to both of them. Iran is too big, too powerful to fail We'll be right back The Funny thing about your mortgage, it kind of runs on autopilot. Same payment, same rate month after month, but SOFI can help make it work harder for you. Explore refinancing options like lowering your monthly payment or tapping into your home equity for cash, so your mortgage is a better fit for your lifestyle. Take your mortgage off autopilot today. Visit soOFi dot com slash powerower moveove Mortgages originated by SopFi Bank in a member FDIC, N MLS six nine six eight nine one. Terms and conditions apply. Equal housing lender Tell me if any of this sounds familiar Eating meat is the key to good health Nicotine can boost brain function GLPNs are a miracle drug I'm Danny Blum. I'm a health reporter at the New York Times We're bombarded pretty much constantly with claims about how to live better and feel better, and it's really hard to separate fact from fiction That's what really differentiates my reporting and the Tes is that I am scouring the science, I am speaking with leading experts. I am making sure that everything I write is rigorously researched, reported, and that I can back it up And when the science isn't clear, sometimes that is the story that we don't know the answers yet. And that's a level of nuance and depth you're not going to get just floating around the internet That's what you get when you subscribe to the New York Times. If you already subscribe, thanks If you'd like to, go to mIimes d. com slash subscribe Scott we know that a revolution is coming and at the U. S and Iran are on what you just described as a glide path to ruin because of the decisions being made by these to leaders join hands so forcefully. So I'm curious in the aftermath of this Meeting between Nixon and the Sah, what the situation looks like across Iran on the ground. It really depends on which ground you mean. By the early nineteen seventies, Iran was very much a tale of two countries City life was one thing. You had Western fashions, you had casinos, you had movie theaters, you know all the accououtrements of modern life In the countryside, people still lived virtually unchanged from centuries earlier lived in mud huts with used camel dung or hse 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 coexisting a pretty classic case, it sounds like of the haves and the have nots Is the Sa focused at all on improving life in The countryside where people have so much less How much is he thinking about that side of Iran I don't think he thought about it very much at all. He was all about industrialization, Westernization. and that was going to happen in the cities, not in the countryside. In fact, he really traveled into the countryside So he was very intent on propelling his nation into the twentieth century But he was moving at a 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 become a disaster Well, remember I mentioned earlier how oil became a source of revenue for the country, but not a lot. Wh that all changed was in the nineteen seventies when the demand of oil around the world was skyrocketing. PC became a force unto itself in the early nineteen seventies, and the Shah was instrumental in the beginning of nineteen seventy four of leading a quadrupling of oil prices around the world And so with this quadrupling of oil prices that D Shaw engineered, now you have this massive amount of money And then the Shah turns around and pours all that money right back into Iran. The Shah's great civilization is being built on oil revenues, and it pays well. This kicked off the glory days of Iran, this time of unprecedented prosperity, massive wealth. Iran today has the fastest growing economy in the world in less than six years Capita income has doubled What do that look like A lot of very conspicuous consumption famously one wealthy family built a staircase out of solid crystal. Wow. They would have garden parties where they would take out the water from water fountains and fill them with champagne The cities just become absolute hives of development. There is so much new construction that Iran has a chronic cement shortage. And what you also have happening is these tens of thousands of Westerners coming in to oversee the modernization of the Iranian economy. North Tehran, the Iranian capital, looked a little like Las Vegas at night As you can see women wearing miniscus hot pants, their disco texts, their bars millions of young men, young, unemployed, uneducated, religious men in the impoverished countryside are coming into the cities. and that collisition of the Westerners coming in in a traditionally xenophobic society to begin with, colliding with these religious people from the countryside really sets off a massive culture clash. And there's always these horror stories going around Iran about Western women going into mosque wearing halter tops of men driving motorcycles across the entranceways to mosques And it just increases the anti Western sentiment that has been building against the shhaw for a long time, this idea that he is kindind of a tooty to the Americans And this is going to become increasingly a problem for the Shah and for the stability of his regime And meanwhile, theeshah's decision to pump all that money into the national economy, it backfires in a very big way. He overheats the economy. There's hyperinflation, there's housing shortages all through every Iranian city with this massive influx of people from the countryside. They're living in shanny towns at the periphery of every Iranian city So on top of a brewing cultural conflict, we've got a festering economic problems Yes Iran falls into a severe recession and factories are just closing up All of a sudden all those young uneducated men living in shiny towns, they're unemployed or undereemployed So now you have this massive underclass in the cities and you have the tinder of what is about to explode Right, the ingredients. Yeah. disisaffected people Not working on the edges of the city whose core is now being overrun by Westerners and at topop it all is a shah who's very much in the thrall of the United States. That's right. And meanwhile, there are all different groups of people who are beginning to imagine a world without the shop I think there was an exhaustion in many segments of society with them. Progressives, Western educated intellectuals who wanted a democratic opening to conservative clergy who were upset at the pace of change in the country I'm curious in its capacity as Iran's increasingly C' know. how much the United States is aware of the degree to which things are beginning to spiral out in Iran. Do the U. S understand Increasingly, this is becoming a place that seems ripe for revolution Well, that's an excellent question because by the mid nineteen seventies The American diplomatic mission in Iran was one of the largest in the world. There were over three hundred Americans serving in the embassy in Tehran. On top of that, you had an enormous CIA station, one of the biggest in the world also somethingomet 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 know even something like there is a huge, enormous American commissary in Tehran, size of a Walmart And so the more American diplomats they're doing, 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 N That's right But a really key component to all this is that from very early on the Shah would get extremely upset if you found out that westerners, Western diplomats were're 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 emmbassy that diplomats were not to talk to even the Shah's moderate opposition And the more important that the Sah 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 Sah iran So on top of a shw who is not teeam What's happening in his own country and making it worse you have The other side of this partnership, the American diplomats, who should be a check on that And who should be detecting it and reporting it back to him? not detecting it. That's right. An alliance that's a Confederacy of Delliberate Dunces. Exactly In my book, I write about one junior foreign Service officer, Michael Matrinkko, who spoke FarsSi, unlike virtually everybody else in the American emmbassy And what he's seeing in the Visa office is just this flood of people trying to get out of Iran includluding people in the upper middle class and the wealthy. everyone's trying to get out of Iran and because he speaks Farsi. he asks people, why are you leaving And finally, one 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 Breeze. He's punished. He's punished And it's kind of at this moment that Ayatollla Komini re enters the picture in a very big way. Ayatolla Rohola Komini teen years in exile from Iran He condemns the Shah's corruption and dictatorship and attacks the United States for supporting him. He's the most arch conservative of the senior clerics in Iran her how do you see the present situation in your country? ? The struggle in Iran against the Shah is now very intense. In his exile, he has been sending tape cassettes railing against the Shah withith 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. callalling 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 disseminated on the underground. And especially in the countryside, Homenia is finding an increasingly receptive audience. No it might beizar And things finally reached a boiling point in Iran Tibrz happens to be the first place that really explodes in the Irian Revolution Rural men living in the Shiny towns come out of the Shiny towns and they basically burn the modern city center to the ground. Just a swath of destruction. The army finally comes in to restore order, probably about one hundred and fifty, maybe two hundred people are killed And it's by far the biggest civil unrest in Iran in a generation. And it sounds like from what you're saying, kind of the opening shots of the revolution I think of it as the opening battle of the Revolution. And how caught off guard is the shot and for that matter The Americans Well, the shw was caught totally off guard In recent months, there' been a few eruptions when the Shah had visited Washington, and there had been anti Shah 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 Tibes was on just an utterly, totally different scale. But the amazing part was that for as massive as these protests in Tibes were, the Americans were still not waking up to it at all Hm. Remember that consul Michael Matrinkko I mentioned earlier, who had been sent to diplomatic Siberia? I do. Well, it turns out, Diplomatic Siberia was Tibreez, the very city where all this went down And Matrinkko was the only foreign diplomat in T Breez at the time of the riots. M Aout four or five days after the after the riots have been put down He gets a message to the CIA officers coming up from Tehron to meet with him and Matrinkko goes, great. finally, somebody Thiss 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 CI officer at the air, B he's bringing him into town and he goes into the gutted city center And the CI officer all of a sudden know perks up and looks around and goes What the hell happened here? It turned out he was coming to Tibisa to talk to Matrinkov on a completely different matter. hadad 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 CI officer based in Tehran has escaped all knowledge of H has no idea. Yeah that a revolution is starting in his midst. That's right. trouble in Iran now. began with riots, trashing burn by the opposition to the Shah. No warning went up after debris for the Americans, and it just escalated from there. Thousands of Iranians rampaged through the streets of Tehran, shouting down with the shhah. Death to the shah.ash Throughout nineteen seventy eight, these protests spread A protest not simply for political freedom, but against low wages and high inflation against huge military expenditures against corruption and foreign influence And it wasn't just religious people, it was university students, it was secular leftists, it was professionals in the cities. It became more and more across the whole spectrum of population. And these were protests against westernization of the country, against human rights violations being carried out by Sabakh the Shah's secret police, They're sick of the surveillance, the lack of political freedom And maybe even just tired of seeing the Shaw's image everywhere And at this point, it's not like the Americans or the Shah are unaware of these protests. They have to be aware of. There are hundreds of thousands at times, even millions of people marching, especially through the streets of Tehran, paralyzing the city. But still the Americans just did not react to this. And I think underlying all this was this idea that, well, the Shah has this massive military. He has this very sophisticated secret police If things really are serious, of course the shw 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 Shaw just did not do anything. He was like a deer in headlights month after month after month Well, what could the shop And what could the US prompted him to do. Obviously, this is all twenty Hindsight, but what time wereere the options Well, frankly, the one thing he might have done that could have saved him early on was put his military out on the streets in force and ordder them to shoot to kill him. It worked for Saddam Hussein, It worked for the Assads in Syria for a very long time. to his credit as a leader. The Shah was many times as coted during the Revolution saying to different people that if saving my throne means slaughtering the youth of my nation en masse, I won't do it And essentially it didn't do it. Of course people were killed by best estimate of probably twenty five hundred people The Shan never just unleashed his army as the way he might have done But apart from that, he still had options, even very late in the game. The Moderate Clerics had approached his intermediaries with the idea of how they could reach a negotiated compromise, one that would bring about more democratic reform to the country and diminish the Shaw's power And they actually came to something of an agreement, but the Shaah played for time. He would not sign off on it. His thinking was, you know, if this blows over, I don't have to make any concessions at all. So he played for time and he did not have time And finally it reached a point where the Americans, everybody recognized he was doomed So he said, I'm leaving the country for an extended vacation I think everybody knew that it meant exileed that he was not coming back. And so in mid January of nineteen seventy nine, he and Chabanu, his wife get on a plane and fly into exile Chaotic celebrations erupted in Tehran when the news broke the Sah had gone It was like Liberation Day And roving crowds chanted Ashah is defeated, Komani has won. Comani was being held down the steps Chartered Airfront jet ca on Iranian ground for the first time And then two weeks later, on february first, nineteen seventy nine, Homini returns to Tehran from exile The people were in a frenzy to catch just a glimpse of the man they revere like a god Probably as many as three, four million people lined the motorcade route. They clawed and clambered and ran to see and be near him. 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. Theense swell of support for Homei makes Israel fully understand his plans for an Islamic Republic it in simple terms as a permanent end to the shock and a return to some ancient idea of justice So what happens over the next nine months is there's this whole period of chaos. Gadually, Homini and the people right around him, they push the moderates to the side. And it all kind of leads to the hostage crisis in November of nineteen seventy nine. The American emmbassy in Tehran is in the hands of Muslim students tonight on by ani American speech by the Ay Atollah Homani. They stormed the embassy, fought the 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 And one of them. Iranians seize the U. S. emmbassy in Tehran, hold fifty two Americans hostage for four hundred and forty four 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, United States and Iran And the simple answer would seem to be that the United States out of its own national interest enters into an alliance with Iran's monarch that in its insularity and all its excesses disregards the will of the Iranian people 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 in nineteen seventy nine, is that right? I think it's absolutely right You know, one force exists as a counterfce to the other To me, one of the great mysteries of the riddles is Why in the most westernized or to our minds, progressive nations in the Middle East. Why was that the place where you had this religious counter evvolution But it's almost a question, I think that answers itself in a way. that you know it's not going to happen in a country where they straddle the line between religion and westernization. because the shhah had gone so much, so modern, so againg, progressive, not when it came to human rights necessarily 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 countervailing force reaction blowback. Yeah. Yeah to the kind of change he wanted The sccale of with 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 tragicays that we would end up with you know the most extreme, the most hardline 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 that has funded proxy armies throughout the Middle East and help destabiliz regimes And not least, a regime that this past January, in a single weekend killed thousands of its own people in demonstrations And now all these decades later The United States is now back in Iraq seeking the end of this same regime that came to power rejecting the U. S Iranian alliance, 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. an I think they know less about Iran today than they did in nineteen seventy eight. I think 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 nineteen seventy nine is because of American obliviousness It lost one of its most important allies in the world, probablyb the most important ally between Western Europe and Japan and Today, a different version of that is happening. once again, by our ignorance, we've gone into a war with the regime in Iran The end result of which is going to be that that regime is even stronger Revolutionary Iran is absolutely going be a major player in what happens in the Persian Gulf going forward much more of a determinant than it was prior to the American attack. And I think also the American standing around the world has taken a massive blow because it's very clear to everybody that this war was started on rather spurious if not non existent reasons So you know once again, the American ignorance has led us to this place where