transcript

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Speaker 1:
[02:39] This is a great tribute to you, your majesty, and to your leadership and to the respect and the admiration and love which your people give to you. We in the United States have no other nation on earth who is closer to us in planning for our mutual military security. And there is no leader with whom I have a deeper sense of personal gratitude and personal friendship. On behalf of the people of the United States, I would like to offer a toast at this time to the great leaders of Iran, the Shah and the Shabanoo, and to the people of Iran, and to the world peace that we hope together, we can help to bring. Now, people listening to that may think that that is an Englishman who can't do a good impression of someone from Georgia, but it isn't. It was actually, Dominic, President Jimmy Carter, and he was toasting the last Shah of Iran, as Americans call it, or as we in Britain call it correctly, Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his wife, Empress Farah, the Shah Banu, at a banquet in Iran's capital Tehran on New Year's Eve, 1977. And Dominic, it is a moment ripe with irony, is it not?

Speaker 2:
[04:12] It is indeed. It's one of the great ironic moments, not just of the 1970s, but the late 20th century. So this moment when Jimmy Carter is toasting the Shah and the Shah Banu, the friendship between Iran and the United States, and the stability and the security that Iran offers in the Middle East. This comes just days before the outbreak of a violent revolution that sweeps the Shah from power and it kicks off the rule of the Ayatollahs, who still govern Iran today.

Speaker 1:
[04:45] Well, Dominic, you say that. We are recording this in early January. I mean, by the time this goes out, who knows what may have happened.

Speaker 2:
[04:51] That's true because Iran is once again engulfed in street protest demonstrations, violent repression and so on.

Speaker 1:
[04:57] The storm clouds of counterrevolution are gathering.

Speaker 2:
[05:00] There indeed. But to go back to the revolution itself, Jimmy Carter, the man who is standing there giving that toast, he is one of the first and most prominent political victims of this revolution because his presidency, pretty extraordinary and strange presidency, even by American standards, is consumed by the fires of the Iranian Revolution. So it's an extraordinary story.

Speaker 1:
[05:24] One of the things that brings Ronald Reagan to power, and one of the advantages of Reagan is he's much easier to do an impersonation of.

Speaker 2:
[05:29] Yes. So just to give people a little sense of the way The Rest Is History works. I think that was about the 24th take. If you have any question marks about Tom's rendition of Jimmy Carter there, let me just emphasize it was a lot better than the previous 23 takes.

Speaker 1:
[05:47] Which he sounded very like Shane Warne for a lot of the time.

Speaker 2:
[05:50] He did. So what we're going to be telling in this series is the story of the fall of the Shah and the rise of the Ayatollahs, the capture of the US Embassy in Tehran, this extraordinary moment when 66 Americans were held hostage for 444 days, and Jimmy Carter's disastrous attempt, Operation Eagle Claw, to rescue them, which ended in disaster and tragedy.

Speaker 1:
[06:15] And Dominic, again, just to say, we are recording this in the immediate aftermath of the US raid on Caracas, which was in military terms, an incredible success. And I guess what happens in Iran with Carter is the polar opposite. It's an absolute disaster.

Speaker 2:
[06:32] It is. So it's an incredibly dramatic story, but one that has really, really serious repercussions. So first of all, this story, what happens in Iran in the late 1970s completely overturns the diplomatic chessboard of the Middle East. It turns Iran from one of America's closest regional allies into an implacable opponent, an opponent that today is making drones used by the Russians in Ukraine, for example. And secondly, and I know this is something that you find fascinating, Tom, this is the story of the Islamic Revolution. Arguably, I would say the only global revolution comparable with the French and the Russian revolutions in terms of its dramatic cultural and political consequences.

Speaker 1:
[07:13] I would say definitely. I mean, it's the, it fires the starting gun on the kind of the wave of Islamic militancy that has shaken the world since 1979.

Speaker 2:
[07:25] So a lot to talk about. But let's start with those two men in Tehran on New Year's Eve, 1977. So they are in the Niavaran Palace, which is in the northern foothills on the edge of Tehran. And Tehran, to give people a sense, it's the capital of Iran. It's a city that had changed enormously in the 20 years before Jimmy Carter visited. So it had been transformed by billions of dollars in new oil money, new housing blocks, new factories and above all, new people. So in the 1940s, the end of the Second World War, Tehran had half a million people. In 1977, when Carter went, it had almost five million people. And that stratospheric growth, that single fact in some ways lies at the heart of today's episode. The extraordinary change in the kind of social economic makeup of Tehran and indeed of Iran generally.

Speaker 1:
[08:17] I would say that of all the cities I've ever been to, Tehran is the one that seems the least capable of coping, say, with traffic. The traffic there is unbelievable. And you have vast lanes with no traffic lights, no way of crossing it. The whole infrastructure is buckling at the seams. The seams buckle, you know what I mean. And I guess this is a legacy of the kind of the great boom in the 60s and 70s.

Speaker 2:
[08:42] Exactly, which we'll come to. So of all the people in Tehran in 1977, the most celebrated and powerful was the man that Carter was toasting that night, the host. And that's Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who is the king of kings and light of the Aryans, the Shah of Iran. And let's give people a sense of his character. He was born in 1919 to an army officer called Reza Pahlavi in a land that was then called in the West, Persia. Persia, of course, a very ancient country, not so much a nation as a civilization in itself, multi-ethnic, multi-lingual. Of course, the one thing that people get wrong about Persia and Iran is they think that they, I mean, people would often call them Arabs. They're not Arabs. It's the one thing they're absolutely not. It's very important to Iranians. They're not an Arab country. What's also very important, it was the only country in the world that had adopted a particular kind of Islam, Shia or Shiite Islam, as its state religion. And we will come back to this because this question about Shiism or Shia Islam lies at the centre of the Iranian Revolution.

Speaker 1:
[09:50] It absolutely does. And of course people will think of Iran as an Islamic country, which it completely is. But just to emphasize on the ancient roots of the dynamic in Iran in this episode. I mean, it is incredibly ancient. So far see the predominant language in Iran is descended from the language spoken by the first great rulers of Persia, Cyrus and Darius the Great and people like that. And that framework of a monarchy and a priesthood, which you see in 20th century Iran, and which is so fundamental to the dynamics of the Iranian Revolution. I mean, that ultimately reaches back before the coming of Islam, all the way back again to the time of Cyrus and Darius. And the concept of monarchy is at least as fundamental to the historical makeup of Iran as the idea of a kind of a clericy. So the great epic of Iran, Fadousi's Shana-Mei, I mean, it's literally the Book of Kings. So when the Shah stands up there, he is, I think, correctly conscious of himself as the heir of thousands of years of rule by monarchs.

Speaker 2:
[10:59] Right, well, let's talk about monarchs. So let's talk about Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. So in his lifetime, I said he was born in 1919, in his lifetime, indeed that of his father, Persia had fallen prey to a series of rival colonial empires, specifically Russia and Britain. And that was turbocharged in 1908, when the British struck oil. And that was the moment that created the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which we all know much better as BP. So in the First World War, Persia was occupied by the Russians and the British. And after the First World War, it fell into total chaos. So in 1921, Mohammad's father Reza Pahlavi staged a coup with British support and he ends up becoming Reza Shah. He takes the throne himself, which means that Mohammad becomes crown prince at the age of just two years old. Now Reza Shah is a very, very formidable man. His son said he was one of the most frightening men he ever met. And he was definitely not a loving father. So he supposedly thought that if he was too kind to his son, then it would mean that his son became gay. So he tried to, he didn't show him too much affection. And Mohammad grew up as the absolutely classic textbook, anxious, shy, reserved son of an overbearing, terrifying military father. So very, very Alexis and Peter the Great for people who remember that series. And Mohammad was sent off to a Swiss boarding school. He became a massive Francophile at the school, which he remained all his life. And in fact, because he associates Iran with his father and because he goes off to boarding school in the West, he is always something of a moderniser and a westerniser. And indeed a seculariser, which as we will see, is something of a problem.

Speaker 1:
[12:49] Yeah, and he loves very expensive French food, doesn't he? Which will feature later in this show.

Speaker 2:
[12:54] Well, how should I put this? He likes French cortisans, I think is the best way of putting it. So in 1941, Persia, which his father Reza has renamed, or he has basically asked people abroad, stop calling it Persia, please. We don't call it Persia, we call it the land of the Aryans, its ancient name, which is Iran. So Persia or Iran is occupied once again by the British and the Soviets to stop the Nazis getting its oil. And the British thought that Reza Pahlavi was too pro-German and they made him abdicate in favour of his son, who's now 21.

Speaker 1:
[13:33] This kind of meddling by the British in Iranian politics is such a feature of 19th and early 20th century history, isn't it? That even now in the 21st century, the Iranians are still prone to thinking that Britain lurks behind everything wrong.

Speaker 2:
[13:47] They do. It's very flattering for us because whenever anything happens, the Iranians assume that the British are controlling everything.

Speaker 1:
[13:53] So it's notoriety way above our station now.

Speaker 2:
[13:56] Completely. We're punching above our weight in the Iranian imagination. So a 21 years old, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi is the new Shah of Iran. He has a double taint. So first of all, he's the son of a usurper who had seized the throne in a British back coup in 1921. And he only got the throne himself 20 years later because the British basically gave it to him. So there's this impression of being a foreign puppet. And this is confirmed a decade later in one of the most controversial, if not the most controversial moments in Iranian history. So in 1953, Iran had democratically elected prime minister called Mohammed Motadek, who's this very kind of wily old bird, this experienced reformist liberal politician. And he has pledged that he will nationalise this Anglo-Persian oil company BP. And the British, understandably I suppose, they hate this idea because they want to keep all the money for themselves. And they basically persuade the CIA to organise a coup. And there's a coup, about 250 people are killed, Mossadegh is toppled and he's put under house arrest for the rest of his life. Now the Shah, who's the sort of, you know, he's the figurehead of Iran, he knew about this coup, he kind of supported it, he spent most of it hiding in a hotel in Rome, but then coming back to Iran. And a lot of people in the Iranian elite conclude at the end of 1953, you know, the Shah, he's basically a complete coward and a wimp, and he is a western puppet because he did nothing to resist this coup. But then from the late 1950s onwards, with Mostek gone, the Shah starts to assert himself. He becomes more than a figurehead. So like his father, he is a moderniser. So both of them, Reza Pahlavi, a classic kind of military man of the interwar years, who had tried to westernise and modernise Iran, his son is the same. And we'll talk a little bit more in the second half about the political implications of this, but let's just concentrate on Mohammad and his character. By the 1960s, he is developing a personality cult. His courtiers treat him as a demigod. He starts to see himself as the heir to the great kings of the past, people like Cyrus the Great.

Speaker 1:
[16:06] So Cyrus is the founder of the Persian monarchy. I suppose the great advantage that the Shah has over other would-be dictatorial figures in the mid-20th century is that he does have this incredible historical legacy to draw on.

Speaker 2:
[16:19] Exactly. And he does with Gusto. They put up posters everywhere in Tehran. He's got this classic kind of 1950s, 1960s dictator vibe. So he wears a military uniform and enormous sunglasses.

Speaker 1:
[16:30] You see, I think that's a mistake. I think if he'd gone for the full long beard as worn by Darius the Great, he might have cut a better figure.

Speaker 2:
[16:37] I like a dictator in sunglasses, to be honest. I'd wear them myself if I was a dictator, but there you go. The thing is that actually behind the scenes, he's still actually a very shy and sullen man and very reserved and timid, but in the West, he becomes a real celebrity. So Western visitors think he's very polished and very impressive. The gossip columns are full of, he speaks English and French fluently, he goes skiing in St. Moritz, he plays tennis on the French Riviera. He's the kind of person who in alternative universe would have a cameo in an early Pink Panther film or something.

Speaker 1:
[17:10] He would, he's got slight suave good looks of James Mason.

Speaker 2:
[17:14] Yeah, David Niven or somebody.

Speaker 1:
[17:15] David Niven, that kind of vibe, hasn't he?

Speaker 2:
[17:16] That's exactly the vibe for the show. And, you know, as befitting a sort of 1960s celebrity, he has a taste for the finer things in life. So in 1967, he elevates himself to the title of the original Persian kings, King of Kings, Shah and Shah. And he has a new coronation and he has a solid gold scepter and he has a crown with thousands and thousands of diamonds. Then in 1971, one of the most famous parties in history, he throws this incredible kind of blowout to mark the 2,500th anniversary of the foundation of the Persian monarchy. And where does he have this, Tom? Do you want to tell us?

Speaker 1:
[17:58] Well, he has it at Persepolis, which is the great city of the ancient Persian kings, burnt by Alexander the Great, and which is an extraordinary place to visit. But as you visit it, you go past the kind of rusting remains of the tent poles that had provided this amazing kind of jamboree for people, Dominic, who had come from across the world, hadn't they? So he had all kinds of glamorous figures, Cecesco from Romania, Mabutu, Imelda Marcos, and perhaps the most sinister figure of all, Princess Anne.

Speaker 2:
[18:33] Yeah, yeah. I mean, people say, what's your dream historical dinner party? I mean, the Shahs had it, you know, Tito, Imelda Marcos, brilliant.

Speaker 1:
[18:41] And famously, they have the food is flown in from Paris by Maxims.

Speaker 2:
[18:45] Yes, Maxims of Paris and all this sort of Chateau Lafitte, Rothschild and whatnot flown in as well. So incredible. And this is symptomatic of a sort of wider glitz, glamour and corruption of the Shah's court. So by the early 70s, he's got multiple palaces. He's got a country house in England. He's got a country house in Switzerland. He has a palace just for his mistresses, who are either escorts flown in from Paris or Lufthansa air stewardesses. His half sister is taking millions of dollars in kickbacks. The bloke who books his escorts is given the caviar export monopoly. And actually it's sometimes suggested that a lot of this is kind of Islamic revolution propaganda. That basically the Ayatollahs massively exaggerated how corrupt the Shah's court was. But after the Shah's fall, the British Foreign Secretary at the time, David Owen, commissioned an internal report. And this report, British Foreign Office report, basically said it was really corrupt and the Shah himself was taking massive bribes on defence contracts.

Speaker 1:
[19:48] I mean, it's basically it's it's petrodollars, isn't it? And this is the kind of stuff that oil shakes are going to be doing after the oil shock. So I mean, it's completely believable.

Speaker 2:
[19:58] Oh, totally it is. And the oil is obviously a massive part of this story. So the Shah liked having money and in the 70s he gets a lot more of it. Because in autumn 1973, after the OPEC oil shock, in which he was a key player, the price of oil almost quadrupled and Iran was the world's second biggest oil exporter. So this means the Shah has this colossal windfall and now he really can make Iran great again and he can fulfill his dream. So his big sponsors by this point, by the 70s, are not the British, they are the Americans. All through the post-war years, the Americans have backed the Shah as a key ally against Soviet expansion into the Persian Gulf, which is one of their big fears. The CIA has been funding and training his secret police, which is called SAVAK and SAVAK had a pretty grisly reputation for torturing their opponents, for torturing dissidents. So there's a lot of stuff with acid and cattle prods. It's very kind of 1970s Paraguay or something.

Speaker 1:
[21:02] And are they particularly targeting poets, which is the big thing in South America, isn't it?

Speaker 2:
[21:06] Do you know what? They're not, I mean, not as much as you would think actually. I think it's mainly sort of, it's sort of dissident professors and leftists of various kinds. But I know you've got it in for poets, Tom, but actually...

Speaker 1:
[21:19] No, I haven't. I haven't. And that is a plus mark for the Shah and probably reflects the ancient tradition of Persian poetry.

Speaker 2:
[21:27] Yeah, maybe. And the CIA had poets on their books. So the CIA supported American poetry.

Speaker 1:
[21:34] So complicated, isn't it?

Speaker 2:
[21:35] Exactly. I think if you're a Chilean or Argentine poet, I think the 70s are a bad decade.

Speaker 1:
[21:40] Yeah. But if you're an Iranian one, it's better.

Speaker 2:
[21:43] Maybe a bit better, I don't know. So Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, who were in charge of American foreign policy in the early 70s, see Iran as an absolutely central player in their anti-communist alliance system. In 1972, Nixon went to Tehran and he explicitly said to the Shah, you're going to hear a lot of whinging from weedy liberals. Please do not listen to this. You are our man and if you want weapons, we will give you weapons. The Shah said, brilliant, this is what I'm going to spend my own money on. In the next six years, he spent $12 billion on all these jet fighters and destroyers and submarines. It was one of the biggest arms sprees in history. He bought more Chieftain tanks from the British than the British themselves had in their own army. Just this colossal amount. Now, other American regional allies thought this was mad. The Saudi oil minister said to the Americans in 1975, the Shah is a megalomaniac, he's highly unstable, and if you don't recognize this, there must be something wrong with your powers of observation.

Speaker 1:
[22:42] But Dominic, just to say, I mean, the Arabs have always hated and feared the Iranians, and Saddam Hussein, who is in Iraq and a prominent leader there of the Bartists, he had this famous phrase, which was one of his favorites, there are three whom God should not have created, flies, Jews and Persians.

Speaker 2:
[23:02] That's poor from Saddam Hussein, isn't it? Disappointing.

Speaker 1:
[23:05] It has to be said that the Iranians turn that on its head, and they say that there are three things that God should not have created, flies, Jews and Arabs. So it goes two ways.

Speaker 2:
[23:13] Yeah. So the Shah has very much come to believe his own publicity. There was an observer journalist called Gavin Young who went to interview him in the mid-70s. He was shocked how arrogant the Shah had become. The Shah said to him, you know, we're going to be top nation. We're going to be such a great country. In 20 years, we will be ahead of the United States. Now we are the masters with our oil money and our former masters are our slaves.

Speaker 1:
[23:37] Well, the Shah and Shah, King of Kings.

Speaker 2:
[23:39] Yeah, punchy from the Shah. Now, Medjid of the Americans brings us to his guest at that New Year's Eve banquet. And this is the person who you've ventriloquized so magnificently, the 39th President of the United States, James Earl Carter Jr., Jimmy Carter. And Jimmy Carter, what an extraordinary man he is. I think it's even by the standards of today's president, it's hard to exaggerate what an unlikely president Jimmy Carter is. So Carter was born in 1924 to unimprovably, a peanut farmer in Plains, Georgia, in this absolutely sleepy, backward kind of rural hamlet. And Carter was very self-improving. He went to the Naval Academy in Annapolis, and then he got a job as an engineer on the US nuclear submarine program. And Carter had a very, very distinctive personality. So he's incredibly conscientious. He's incredibly hardworking. He's an autodidact. He's not a tremendous laugh. He's a bit of a loner. He's got no close friends. He's very moralistic. He's very competitive. He's very stubborn. He's the kind of person who basically comes home. He's like a sort of character from an improving 19th century manual. He comes home late at night. He probably got up to pray first thing in the morning. They went to the nuclear submarine. Then he comes home and then he learned Spanish in the evening. That is Jimmy Garza's vibe.

Speaker 1:
[25:03] The praying really kicks in a bit later, doesn't it?

Speaker 2:
[25:05] It does. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[25:06] But I imagine right from the beginning, he's a great man for Cardigan.

Speaker 2:
[25:09] Totally he is. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[25:10] I cannot imagine Donald Trump wearing a Cardigan.

Speaker 2:
[25:13] And a plaid shirt. He's very plaid shirt.

Speaker 1:
[25:15] Loves a plaid shirt, yes.

Speaker 2:
[25:16] So Carter's father died in 1953. He came back to Plains and he took over the family peanut farm. And he was very good at peanut farming. And he made a great success of it. He modernized it and he moved into local politics. And he ran for Congress in 1966. And he lost.

Speaker 1:
[25:31] And he's a Democrat, isn't he?

Speaker 2:
[25:33] And he's a Democrat. Like you have to be in the South at this point. You absolutely have to be to get anywhere. And he lost and he had this massive existential crisis. He probably sank into depression after he lost. It was the first time he lost to anything. And he turned to God and was born again. And later on, when he ran for president, everybody basically in north of the Mason-Dixon line laughed at Carter about this. And they wrote all these articles. The Time Magazine had a huge cover calling him a weirdo and stuff. But this was because people in New York and Washington didn't understand that in Georgia, in the Baptist world of rural Georgia, being born again was nothing outlandish. It was absolutely, I wouldn't say it was standard, but it was common. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[26:13] And I mean, in view of what is going to happen in 1979 and through the 80s, actually the last laugh is on them because they haven't recognized that religion is going to become an expression of the modern.

Speaker 2:
[26:24] Quite right. That actually Carter is not a backward looking figure as he was often treated in the 70s. He is a forward looking one. So anyway, he runs again for office in 1970. Again, a very forward looking thing. He runs as a populist. And he ran against a man called Carl Sanders, Democrat establishment figure. And Carter painted him as the sort of puppet of the country club bigwigs. He called him Cufflinks Carl.

Speaker 1:
[26:49] So that is quite Trump.

Speaker 2:
[26:51] Yeah, of course. Jimmy Carter's populism is really, really interesting. His Southern populism is very ahead. It both looks back to a tradition of Southern populism. But the way in which he repackages it for the late 20th century is very forward looking. And he says, look, I'm the champion of the little guy. I'm an ordinary person. I'm not a career politician. I've got my nice plaid shirt, all of this kind of thing. He wins the election. He becomes governor. He's pretty good at it. And by late 1972, he is thinking about running for president. Now, on the face of it, this is a very long shot. There hasn't been a genuine Southern president since Andrew Johnson in the aftermath of the Civil War. And there has never been a president from the deep south, from the really deep south, from the states that had once held millions of slaves from places like Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and so on. There's never been a president from one of these states. And the other thing that against Carter, Carter, and this is the thing that now that everyone thinks that Jimmy Carter is a lovely, kind guy who built houses for poor people and stuff, people forget Carter in the 70s was much more conservative than most democratic activists. So, you know, it's a tough gig for him to try to get the presidency, the presidential nomination. But unexpectedly everything falls into his lap. So first of all, the democratic favorite who is Edward Kennedy has destroyed himself at Chappaquiddick by driving into the, off the bridge, abandoning Mary Jo Kopeckney and then putting on a blazer and walking around on the balcony of his kind of hotel to try and pretend nothing has happened. Meanwhile in Washington, Watergate has erupted. Everybody assumes that all Washington politicians are really corrupt. People are saying, let's have an outsider to drain the swamp or this kind of thing. And so Carter comes through in the democratic primaries. He plays up the fact that he's an outsider. He's a southerner. He's an evangelical Christian. He's a populist. All of this stuff. He has these ads where he's walking around his farm and his lovely checked shirt. He talks about how he likes to teach Sunday school and his promise is his policy prescription is so vague. I mean, it's brilliant. It's all things to all men. He says, people say, well, what will it be like when you're president? He says, I will give you and I'm not going to do the voice because I cannot do a southern accent. He says, do you want to do it, Tom, in your Australian accent?

Speaker 1:
[29:06] No, you do it. You go for it.

Speaker 2:
[29:07] He says, I will promise a government that is as good and honest and decent and competent and compassionate and as filled with love as are the American people.

Speaker 1:
[29:19] God, as filled with love as are the American people. Yeah, there's a recipe for a happy administration.

Speaker 2:
[29:25] Instead of reaching for the sick bucket, people say, isn't that nice? That's what we want. He wins the nomination and then he wins the presidency, he beats Gerald Ford. Now Carter is president and is he good at it? I think you don't even have to be a critic of Jimmy Carter to say, he's actually not really good at it. He doesn't have any contacts on Capitol Hill. He finds it really hard to work with Congress. He's not naturally charming. He doesn't exude warmth. Everybody sort of says this in Capitol Hill. He's stubborn. He doesn't like compromising. He works incredibly hard, but it's the classic story. It's a bit Rishi Sunak or something. He works almost too hard. He thinks if he stays up till 3 o'clock in the morning doing his paperwork, he'll be a better president. And actually, that means he just massively over prepares and over thinks everything. He'll kind of rock up at kind of 9 o'clock in the morning and say, overnight I've dreamt up a 455 point plan to fight inflation or something.

Speaker 1:
[30:20] So he begins, doesn't he? Looking very kind of sunny, full of the optimism of the South and all that. And very rapidly, he comes to look grey and haggard and worn.

Speaker 2:
[30:30] Yeah, because he's not sleeping.

Speaker 1:
[30:32] And in the long run, this isn't going to look good when he goes for a run.

Speaker 2:
[30:35] No, it will not. It will not look good. And actually, the discussion of the optics of being president is so interesting. So it quite often happens, I think, that people will elect somebody. They'll say, we'd like an ordinary person now. We're sick of all these crap.

Speaker 1:
[30:46] They don't want that at all.

Speaker 2:
[30:47] But they don't really want this. It's like when the French elected François Hollande, what they actually always deep down, this one is a statesman. So you mentioned Jimmy Carter's cardigan. He turned up on national television and early national broadcast wearing a cardigan. And he said, I'd like everybody to turn their thermostats down.

Speaker 1:
[31:04] You can't do that, can you? That's not the imperial presidency.

Speaker 2:
[31:07] No, not at all. So there's that. There's the cardigan issue. There's also the issue. He's a massive micromanager and a meddler.

Speaker 1:
[31:13] Oh, yes. Famously, the tennis courts thing, which you love, don't you?

Speaker 2:
[31:17] Yeah, my favourite Jimmy Carter fact is that he handles the tennis court bookings. Dom Johnson. So Dom Johnson, a blast from the past, our former producer, is in on this call and he's immediately come, he's jumped into the chat. Tennis court bookings.

Speaker 1:
[31:32] It's one of two things about Jimmy Carter that we always mention, the tennis court bookings and another thing that involves a swamp, which regular listeners to this podcast will be waiting for with bated breath.

Speaker 2:
[31:45] There are only two facts about Jimmy Carter, without knowing. So this is the man of the helm of the world's most powerful country. And how is he going to run America's foreign policy? Well, he's basically said, no more Vietnam Wars. My ethical foreign policy, he says, will reflect the decency and generosity of the American people. So again, people are wiping away tears at this point.

Speaker 1:
[32:06] We won't nick Greenland, I promise.

Speaker 2:
[32:09] So to be fair to Carter, he has a couple of foreign policy successes. Most famously, the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel, which he mediates in 1978. But he is hidebound by the fact that Vietnam has happened. There's a general sense the US is going backwards in the Cold War. There is Soviet intervention in Africa, in Ethiopia, in Zaire, in Angola and so on. People are talking about what they call at the time the arc of crisis that runs all the way from Southern Africa to Southeast Asia. They say basically Asia and Africa are going to slip out of the Western orbit. Capitalism is in retreat. Soviet imperialism is emboldened. We should stop appeasing them. We should get rid of detente.

Speaker 1:
[32:57] So can I ask you, Dominic, is Carter naturally a dove or does his, say, his evangelical Christianity, give him a bit of an edge that he can draw on when he feels he needs it?

Speaker 2:
[33:08] He is ambiguous. So he starts off a little bit more doveish, largely, I think, because he's never really thought about foreign policy. He's always been, you know, he was governor of Georgia. He didn't really have to think about world affairs when he was governor of Georgia. And actually it was a criticism that people had of him. They said he won't know anything about how to handle world affairs. First, he strikes a more doveish line, but by 1978, he's definitely changed his tune. And he is much harder on the Soviet Union. Does his evangelical Christianity play a massive part in that? I don't think it does play a massive part actually.

Speaker 1:
[33:39] I just ask because that sense of the world being divided into good and evil, which of course Reagan will make great play with. But this is also going to be part of the perspective that the Ayatollahs bring to their understanding of the world.

Speaker 2:
[33:52] Yeah. And Carter definitely has a very moralistic sense of the world. And he's comfortable with the language of good and evil in a way that Reagan is and a way that Margaret Thatcher is in Britain in a similar period. But there may be older politicians of the…

Speaker 1:
[34:07] Slightly wince.

Speaker 2:
[34:08] Yeah, would make the slightly wince. They would think of it as a little bit gauche maybe. Anyway, this context explains, I think, why Carter goes all in on the Shah. So before he became president, I'm guessing that Jimmy Carter had literally never thought about Iran at all. I mean, if you're the governor of Georgia, you never have to worry about Iranian affairs. Here's a US TV fact for you. The US network news in the 1970s typically discussed Iran for five minutes a year. And those five minutes were generally taken up with coverage of the Shah's dinners or him going skiing or his glamorous, you know, his oddly young and glamorous companions.

Speaker 1:
[34:47] The Shah steps out with glamorous centerfold.

Speaker 2:
[34:50] Exactly. That's exactly what it was. Now Carter was aware that the Shah was getting a bit of a kicking from liberals about his human rights record. And he put a little bit of pressure on the Shah to ameliorate this. And actually in 1977, the Shah said, fair enough, we're going to stop torturing people. And I'll let the Red Cross in to have a look at my prisons. And we shall allow poets and writers, here are your poets again for you, Tom, we shall allow them to have meetings and talk about liberal ideas and political reforms and so on and so forth. However, Carter doesn't want to go too far on this. So in June 1977, he appoints a new ambassador to Iran called William Sullivan, who's going to be a big character in this series. William Sullivan is a career diplomat. He's got this white kind of bouffant hair. He's regarded as a loose cannon.

Speaker 1:
[35:38] We love a loose cannon in American diplomatic debacle.

Speaker 2:
[35:42] We definitely do. So he's very outspoken. He's very acerbic. He doesn't suffer fools gladly. They appoint him to the embassy in Tehran. And Carter says to him, look, I want you to treat the Shah as our close friend. He's a really important ally for us. Iran is, and I quote, a guarantee of stability and security in the Persian Gulf, all of this. And Sullivan says, aren't you the human rights guy? Like, is human rights that important to you? And Carter actually says to him, don't overthink this. Don't worry too much about the human rights thing. Iran is so important to us, not least because we have listening posts on the Soviet border with Iran that are massively important to us. So, you know, don't get too carried away with this human rights business. Yeah, we'd like the Shah to stop attacking people with cattle prods, but having him on side is so important. So the Shah comes to Washington, in November 1977, Carter rolls out the red carpet for him, and afterwards Carter says publicly, the Shah is brilliant. I love the Shah. He's more impressive than any other leader, certainly any European leader I've ever met. And what's so hurtful about this, Tom, is the Shah at this point has met James Callahan. So what is he thinking?

Speaker 1:
[36:55] Terrible judge of character. What can we say?

Speaker 2:
[36:57] Terrible judge of character. So this is what sets the scene for this trip that Carter then makes in return to Tehran on New Year's Eve 1977. And again, it's a very gilded scene. So one American reporter said it felt like Versailles in the days of Louis XIV. There's Caviar, there's Dom Perignon, there's Rose Partridge, there's this gigantic ice cream flambé. And Carter gives this speech and he says, I asked my wife Rosalind where she'd like to spend New Year's Eve because we were going to be abroad. And she said, the people I love most are the Shah and Empress Farah. And everybody says, oh, isn't that lovely? And Carter says, I mean, it's unbelievable when you read the speech. He says, I really love human rights. And what's nice for me is I know the Shah. I know you love human rights too. How profoundly impressed I've been, he says, with your wisdom, your judgment, your sensitivity and insight. How moved I was when we drove through Tehran. And I saw literally thousands of Iranian citizens standing beside the street with a friendly attitude, expressing their welcome to me. And he says, and beside them, thousands of American citizens, there are now 50,000 Americans in Iran who stood there welcoming their president in a nation which has taken them to heart and made them feel at home. Well, it never occurs to Carter, Carter who is so inexperienced in world affairs, it never occurs to him when he's saying these words that he has gambled his entire presidency on a doomed regime. But Tom, just eight days later in the city of Gom, the first fires are lit in a revolution that will change things forever. And at the centre of this conflagration is a man who has a very different vision for Iran and its people and that is the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Speaker 1:
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Speaker 1:
[40:47] All our miseries are caused by the imperialists. If they were not protected by the Iranian government, the people would skin them alive. Everything in our treasury is emptied into the pockets of America. And if there is anything left, it goes to the Shah and his gang. They buy themselves foreign villas and stuff their bank accounts with the people's money while the nation starves. So brave sons of Islam, stand up. Talk to the people. Tell the truth to the masses. Rouse the people in the streets and the bazaars. Rouse our students. Rouse our simple-hearted workers and peasants. And let us become holy warriors. So welcome back to The Rest Is History. And what you heard there were the dulcet tones of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. And he was speaking from exile in Iraq in the city of Najaf in February 1978. And Dominic, the Ayatollah is one of the iconic figures of 20th century revolution, isn't he? He's up there with Lenin, with Mao. Everyone recognizes him. His long beard, his bristling eyebrows, his general expression of fun.

Speaker 2:
[42:01] Yes, exactly. And Americans in particular will think of him as one of history's great villains. But as always with people who are regarded as great villains or indeed great heroes, it's always interesting to dig into the kind of the reality behind the iconic image. He was born in the market town of Khomein in central Iran, probably in 1900. And he came from a reasonably well-off family. His father and grandfather had both been clerics. His father was killed in a fight when he was a toddler, and he was raised by his uncle and aunt. He was by all accounts a very clever boy. He began supposedly began reading the Koran when he was six. He was very good at football. Apparently played football. He loved poetry and actually he loves poetry all his life. But he was clearly very serious and reserved. He probably got on well with Jimmy Carter, actually.

Speaker 1:
[42:50] Well, that's the irony, isn't it? I mean, that there are kind of echoes between America and Iran throughout this entire conflict. I mean, just to say about Khomeini's upbringing, that the background to it, you said that his father was killed in a brawl. I mean, this is the period that build up to the First World War and the First World War itself. And it is very violent. Yes. And I think that when he ends up going to a seminary, and I think that that provides him with a kind of refuge from the chaos of life outside, and must be hugely formative in his association of Islam with peace.

Speaker 2:
[43:27] Completely. Completely. So as you say, he goes to the seminary in this place called Qom, which is a holy city because it has the shrine of somebody called Fatima bint Moussa, who is the sister of the eighth Shia imam. And we don't need to massively get into that right now. Anyway, it's a holy city. He's at the seminary. He finds security in Karno, as you say. He does law there. He does philosophy, doesn't he? Greek philosophy.

Speaker 1:
[43:51] He does. But philosophy is his real focus. And it's a particular focus on Greek philosophy. So Aristotle, particularly Plato, and how they have been mediated by the kind of traditions of Islamic and specifically Shia thinking.

Speaker 2:
[44:06] Exactly. So Khomeini is, he's a serious and very clever person. He writes poetry, studies poetry. He's very interested in mysticism. He becomes one of the most respected scholars at the seminary.

Speaker 1:
[44:22] I mean, you know who he actually also reminds me of is Pope John Paul II, also a footballer, a poet, becomes a Titanic religious leader of the 70s and 80s. Certain parallel there.

Speaker 2:
[44:33] Yeah. So by the time he's about 50, people are calling him Ayatollah, which is a term of respect for an especially learned scholar. And everybody acknowledges he's an incredibly charismatic and impressive person. He always wears this black robe, this black turban, he's got his beard, he's perfectly groomed, he has this hypnotic unwavering stare. He always looks implacable and formidable. He never is seen smiling or laughing in public. And this is because he's very conscious of his seriousness and his dignity. And there's a sort of austerity to him, which is reflected in his private life. So he married his wife when she was in her early teens. He's not a big, you know, unlike the shah, he doesn't have dishes flown in from maxims of Paris. He doesn't own much. He spends his time, you know, to relax. He prays, he meditates, he goes for a walk. So maybe we should talk a little bit. I know you want to talk a bit. I've told you Tom about the importance of Shia Islam to our story.

Speaker 1:
[45:36] It's so fundamental.

Speaker 2:
[45:37] Just to give people a sense of what we mean. In the early days of the Islamic conquests, after the death of Mohammed, there was basically a disagreement about who would succeed, wasn't there? And Shiites believe that the Islamic community took a wrong path, that the leadership should have remained in the family of Mohammed's son-in-law, Ali.

Speaker 1:
[45:59] Well, specifically Dominic, the family of the Prophet himself, because Ali is married to the daughter of Mohammed. And so their sons Hassan and Hussein are the grandchildren of the Prophet, but they don't succeed, they end up being killed. And we'll come to that in a minute.

Speaker 2:
[46:16] And over time, their faction basically evolves into its own sect, with its own history and its own traditions and its own rituals.

Speaker 1:
[46:24] Yeah, so they are the Shi'at Ali, the party of Allah. So that's where Shi'a comes from.

Speaker 2:
[46:28] Shi'a or Shi'ites. So they are now in the world today, about 10 to 15% of Muslims. The vast majority of Muslims are Sunni, but the Shi'a or Shi'ites are this minority. And Iran had been a Shi'a or Shi'ite since about the 1500s, when the Safafid dynasty imposed it as the state religion. And it became an really, really important part of Iranian identity, because it distinguished them from the neighbouring Arabic speaking countries, which were Sunni Muslim. So it made Iran feel different. And it had two massive consequences for our story. So one of them is that, I mean, I know you're going to say a little bit more about this, that at the heart of the Shia belief system is this idea that you have, you know, it's a belief system based on the idea of oppression and authority and virtuous, austere martyrs and victims who are being oppressed by overweening state authority or overweening authority of one kind or another.

Speaker 1:
[47:33] And the primal victims and martyrs in this belief system are Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet who had a caliph who had been assassinated, but more particularly, Ali's son, the grandson of the Prophet, we've already mentioned him, Hussein, who was killed in a battle in Iraq, a place called Karbala in 680 by the Ameyads, who the dynasty who then established a kind of imperial rule. And this for the Shia is where everything goes wrong, not just in the context of kind of late antique politics, but on a cosmic scale, because this for them is about the triumph of evil over good, and it's about the derailing of Mohammad's prophetic mission, which is a mission for the whole of humanity, the embodiment of God's plan for the world. And so Hussein's death in this battle at Karbala is seen as the primal catastrophe, and it is commemorated as a kind of great act of self-sacrifice on the part of Hussein. He's laying down his life for the good of all the world. It will strike people that there are slight echoes there of Good Friday, of the death of Christ. I mean, I think that's not coincidental. There are a lot of Christians in this period in Iran and in Iraq, and I think it is channeling those kind of Christian understandings of sacrifice on the part of humanity. And so the day of Hussein's death, Ashura, which is the 10th day of the first month of the Muslim calendar, Muharram, is the great day of morning for the Shia, and it is essentially their kind of Good Friday. Yeah. And this in turn feeds into a strongly apocalyptic perspective on the world, because if things have gone wrong, then at some point God will intervene to ensure that they will go right. And the person who will emerge is this figure called the Mahdi, who is the 12th of the imams. And the imams are people with a kind of cosmic mission to write and order the world. And the first of these imams have been Ali, Hussein had been the third, the 12th imam, the hidden imam, the Mahdi. He will appear. And according to Shiite tradition, he will avenge the blood of Hussein that was spilled at Kabbalah. And this will to quote Abbas Aminat in his brilliant book, Apocalyptic Islam and Iranian Shiism. It will initiate an apocalyptic battle of cosmic proportion that precedes the day of resurrection and the end of time. And people may feel that all this discussion of late antique theology in the context of 1970s politics might seem a bit reshershey, but it absolutely isn't because it is impossible, I think, to understand the Iranian Revolution without an awareness of how important this apocalyptic understanding of the world is to the Ayatollah and to his followers. And it's precisely because the American foreign policy establishment have no comprehension of this at all, that they don't really know how to handle the Ayatollah when he emerges onto the scene.

Speaker 2:
[50:39] Exactly. So for people to keep in their heads, the Ayatollah has this sense of victimhood and suffering. They have this particular day that's massively important, that's grounded in history, Assyria, and they have this apocalyptic sense of the end of days and all of this kind of thing. So that's one thing. And then the other thing to bear in mind about Shia Islam is that local clergy are really, really important in this world. So Baqir Moin, who is Khomeini's biographer, has really, really good sections about this. So the mullahs, the clerics, or priests, I guess, in Shia Islam always had tremendous local clout. So in these small towns and villages in what was then called Persia and later Iran, the cleric was the judge, he was the teacher, he was a kind of storyteller, he was a massively, massively important figure. He could read and write and most people couldn't. The cleric handled all your legal transactions. The cleric acted as a kind of arbiter and a mediator. Often in small local places, he was the main authority figure. And people looked to him, not to the state, and they saw the clerics often as a kind of counterweight to the state, not part of it.

Speaker 1:
[51:53] Yes, and actually also crucial for people to bear in mind is that clerics pointedly did not aspire to control the state. They did not aspire to the leadership, say, of Iran. And this again is rooted in the kind of distinctive character of Shiite theology, because Shiites see legitimate governance, what guardianship, velayat it's called in Persian, as having perished with Ali and Hussein. And therefore, basically throughout history, Shiites have rejected the very notion of a kind of legitimate state. They don't think it exists. And this will only change with the coming of the Mahdi. And again, to quote Aminat, the belief that all temporal powers are considered unjust was carried almost to the point of anarchistic idealism. So this for Shiite clerics opposed to the Shah, it inspires them in their opposition to his rule, but it also leaves them with a problem, which is that who is going to step into the gap? Because there's nothing in the Shiite tradition that would say that clerics would take that step.

Speaker 2:
[53:01] Right. So one last point about these clerics, they often are quite well off because they're authority figures in their local communities and whatnot. And in the towns and the cities, they become very closely connected to the merchant and artisan classes who basically run the bazaars, the marketplaces. And this actually is the social nexus that powers the Iranian Revolution, the alliance of these shopkeepers and artisans in the cities with the clerical elite. Now the cleric's political independence is massively, massively important to them. It's a huge part of their political identity. But all through the Ayatollah Khomeini's life, there's been tension with the state in Tehran. I mentioned in the first half that his father in the 1930s had been a modernizer. He was very much cut from the same cloth as Atatürk in Turkey. So a little bit Peter the Great actually for people who remember that series that we did. So Reza Pahlavi had wanted to electrify, literally electrify Iran to bring in ID cards, to have railways, to have people wear western clothes. He tried to clamp down on people wearing veils and turbans. He even got his military officers to try to shave off clerics' beards. Very Peter the Great. The clerics absolutely hated it. And they said this is a classic example of why the Pahlavi dynasty are western parvenues and puppets and they're just totally legitimate.

Speaker 1:
[54:27] And just to be clear, this is obviously on one level ideological, but it is also seen as an attack on their economic standing.

Speaker 2:
[54:34] Yes, it is exactly even more so in the 1960s. So in the 1960s Reza's son is now Shah and the Shah launches a thing that he calls the White Revolution, which is this big modernisation drive. And he thinks this will make him very popular. He says, let's have public works. Let's have land reform. Let's encourage people to have a literacy drive so people can read and write. Let's give women the vote. Let's give women more rights.

Speaker 1:
[55:02] The chance to wear mini skirts.

Speaker 2:
[55:04] Right, let's expand state education. Why shouldn't you be taught by trained teachers rather than the local cleric? Now the local clerics do not like this at all. For all kinds of reasons. Many of them come from land-owning families. So their estates are the ones that will be broken up and distributed to the poor. The legal reforms, their role, I mentioned before, that they play the part of the lawyer or the judge or the notary. They're going to lose some of that authority. They will also lose control of education if the shah brings in all these educational reforms. And they're like, well, this is not just ripping up our traditions. This is a massive threat to our way of life and our local standing. And it's at this point in the 1960s that Khomeini decides to enter politics. So he steps forward as the guy who's standing up against all this. And he says, he gives a series of sermons in which he says, the Shah is a tyrant, he is a traitor, he is the puppet of the United States and of Israel, which has already become the great enemy in the sort of demonology of the clerics. He says, his father was kicked out and the Shah, this miserable wretched man, he'll be kicked out as well if he doesn't change his ways. The Shah has him arrested, he spends time under house arrest, then he's allowed out and then in 1964, he goes back on the offensive. And this time, very interestingly, and I think this is an important clue to Khomeini's appeal. What Khomeini speaks out about is a deal that will give legal immunity to American military personnel if they get into trouble in Iran. It's a pretty standard agreement that the Americans have in places where they're American bases that, if our GIs behave badly, they won't be tried by your courts, they'll be tried by our military courts. And Khomeini says this is an absolute disgrace. He says the Shah has reduced us to a level of a colony and made the Muslim nation of Iran appear more backward than savages in the eyes of the world. He says this is all a Zionist plot. President Lyndon Johnson, and I quote, the most repulsive member of the human race is a Zionist agent. And I don't doubt that Khomeini genuinely thought this, but there's also an element of calculation here. He tells his friends, he's quoted as having told his friends, that we must use this issue as a weapon so that the people will realize that the Shah is an American agent. And I think this is a really important part of his sort of political repertoire, that he blends what you might see as religious conservatism or traditionalism with a kind of anti-colonial nationalism that is so fashionable and popular in the 1950s and the 1960s across Asia, not just in Iran.

Speaker 1:
[57:46] And so this is why in due course, he can be celebrated by people in the West on the left as a figure to be admired.

Speaker 2:
[57:55] As an anti-imperialist champion and all of this. Anyway, this was too much for the Shah. The Shah had him arrested again and they kicked him out of the country. And he ends up in the holy, another holy city, Najaf, in Iraq, where the great hero of Shiite religion, Ali, is buried. And there, Khomeini and his wife live in this little house with all their followers and their acolytes. And he becomes this sort of symbol of resistance to the Shah. So he will sit there, you know, day after day, praying and reading and teaching and whatnot. And his supporters make tape recordings of his lectures and his sermons and they smuggle them into Iran. Now, maybe there's an alternative universe where he would just have stayed in Najaf and he'd have kind of molded away giving his speeches and no one would have cared. And some listeners may say, well, Iran was getting very rich in the 60s and 70s with all its oil money. It's becoming more urban. It's got its, you know, its nice reforms. It's becoming more literate. Who cares about what some bloke with a beard over the border in Iraq? But the truth is that all of the changes that Iran is undergoing, they actually play into Khomeini's hands. You might say, you know, the Shah has actually been good for Iran. He spent all this money on new railways and stuff. Health care has expanded massively, education. He's invested in Iran's industry. And actually, if you're a woman, or if you're a member of an ethnic minority, I mean, Iran has a lot of minorities, kind of Kurds.

Speaker 1:
[59:23] And religious minorities as well.

Speaker 2:
[59:25] Yeah, religious minorities. They are better off under the Shah than they had ever been before in Iranian history.

Speaker 1:
[59:31] I mean, just on women, there are Islamic dress codes, which the Shah is contemptuous of.

Speaker 2:
[59:38] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[59:39] And so if you are not devoutly Muslim in the traditional sense, as a woman, you can wear what you like. But obviously, that becomes a very obvious visual symbol of what is at stake, both for secularists and for traditional Muslims.

Speaker 2:
[59:56] Well, people would say in the 60s and 70s, they would come to Tehran from the countryside, and they would see huge Western billboards for showing what they regarded as half-naked women, advertising hoardings and so on. And they were shocked by it. They were really shocked.

Speaker 1:
[60:13] But they would see women in miniskirts drinking in bars with men.

Speaker 2:
[60:16] Of course, exactly. And they would see foreign women, by the way, American women and so on, because there are 50,000 Americans, but we'll come to this. The enormous oil boom of the 60s and 70s has proved a very mixed blessing for Iran. It's created a deep sense of inequality. There's a conspicuous gap between rural peasants and the urban poor, on one hand, and then the winners, the metropolitan elite, on the other. Crucially, it's triggered massive inflation. So prices in the 70s are rising about 15% a year. It's very kind of Spain after the conquest of the Americas, the influx of all the silver that basically destroyed the Spanish economy. The oil money is, in many ways, it makes a lot of things worse as well as better. So Iran is a very young country. Amazing the fact that half of the population of Iran in the 1970s was under the age of 16. So that's a lot of ambitious people and if their ambitions aren't met, they will be very quickly frustrated. And we already mentioned the population explosion in Tehran. So you have tens of thousands of people, hundreds of thousands who have moved to Tehran from the countryside in search of work and they are packed into these pretty grim concrete tower blocks on the edge of the city. You mentioned the traffic. The traffic is notorious across the world. You can't get anywhere. The electricity grid cannot cope with all the newcomers. So there are constant blackouts. And the costs, because the inflation are going up all the time. So in some parts of Tehran, rent went up 300% in five years. And there are a lot of poor, unskilled young men who have moved from the countryside who find all this utterly overwhelming and frustrating. They're struggling economically. They are shocked by what you were describing. You know, the social whirl of the people who are well off. You know, the women are revealing dresses, drinking alcohol and whatnot. And they feel totally alienated from the Shah and his court. And they also feel alienated from the tens of thousands of Westerners who now live in Tehran, because they are sort of participating in the boom rather like Westerners who now live in the Middle East in Dubai or somewhere. So, to quote a young woman, Massoumeh Ebtekar, who became very prominent in the early days of the revolution and in the hostage crisis. She wrote later, Most of the Americans who lived in Iran behaved in a way that revealed their sense of self-importance and superiority. They had come to expect extra respect, even deference from all Iranians, from shoeshine boy to Shah. American lifestyles had come to be imposed as an ideal, the ultimate goal. American books, magazines, films had swept over our country like a flood and we found ourselves wondering, is there any room for our own culture? And I think this is very common in the 60s and 70s across the developing world, but it's especially pronounced in Iran, which has been transformed so much by all of this money.

Speaker 1:
[63:11] And which has such an ancient culture and such a distinctive culture.

Speaker 2:
[63:15] Of course. Now, it's no accident, Massimo Ebtekar, the woman who wrote those words, was a student. And thanks to the Shah's modernization project, there are now 200,000 students in Tehran and the other big cities.

Speaker 1:
[63:25] I mean, that's a rookie's error for a dictator, isn't it?

Speaker 2:
[63:28] Yeah, create this class of people, educated people whose ambitions are not being met. Now, some of them turn to socialism or communism, but most don't because if you are feeling alienated and frustrated, given the importance the clerics have always had and the place of Islam in Iran's history, if you are looking for meaning and order and solace and all of those kinds of things, Islam offers you more authentically Iranian answers than socialism and communism do. So something is brewing. Things are brewing in the kind of tower blocks and in the university campuses and things as the 70s continue. But in Washington, people just don't notice this. And one reason they don't notice is if you are American, you are interested in foreign policy in the early 1970s, you are not looking at Iran, you are looking at Vietnam. Southeast Asia or Soviet Union or Eastern Europe or Cuba or something. Even in the US embassy, the staff at the US embassy, they had lots of links to the Shah's court, obviously, but not to opposition groups or to the clerics. So I mentioned William Sullivan, the ambassador. When he arrived in 1977, he wrote this really caustic memoir about his time. He said, I was shocked how few of my colleagues spoke Farsi, how few of them had ever been outside the capital. So in other words, the information that's getting back to Washington, a lot of it is wrong. And when Carter arrives at the palace for that New Year's Eve dinner, he doesn't realize anything is wrong. He thinks the Shah is going to be there for decades and nothing could possibly go wrong. But actually, just a week after Carter leaves, that's when things start to kick off. Because in recent months, these tapes of Khomeini's sermons have been flooding into the markets of Iran and his rhetoric is more and more ferocious. He says the Shah is a Zionist agent, a Jewish agent. He says the Shah is an American serpent. He says people should stop paying tax. They should stop going to school or university or whatever. This drives the Shah mad. As he waits for Carter to leave, and on the 7th of January, he gets one of the biggest papers in Iran, Etel-A'at, to publish a repost. And this article, one of the most incendiary articles in any paper in any country in the world in the 20th century, is a full-blooded attack on Khomeini. It says Khomeini is a tool of red and black imperialism. What it means by that is he's been controlled both by the communists and by the British. This is a fairly standard theme of Iranian invective.

Speaker 1:
[66:03] Well, it's good to see the British still.

Speaker 2:
[66:05] Yeah, it's always the British, right?

Speaker 1:
[66:06] So we're the British black.

Speaker 2:
[66:07] We're the black imperialists in league with the red imperialists in Moscow. That's the Shah's thinking. This article says Khomeini has always been into poetry. That's a bad sign.

Speaker 1:
[66:17] It is a bad sign. I mean, everyone in the CIA knows that.

Speaker 2:
[66:20] It's a really bad sign. It says his ancestry is not even really Iranian. He's actually Indian. So he's a foreigner. And it says he's typical of the class, actually. A lot of these rural clerics are, and I quote, parasites engaged in sodomy usury and they're drunk most of the time. So this is what this article says. And this is an absolutely catastrophic own goal, because within hours of this article, this newspaper reaching the newsstands, there are huge protests in the city of Gom, which is the seminary city where the Ayatollah had been a student and then a teacher. And the seminar is shut down and all the religious students pour out onto the streets to protest about this. There are demonstrations outside the police station. The police end up firing into the crowds. There's a stampede. And then a number of people are shot or trampled to death. So this is all January 1978. Now, how many people were shot or trampled to death? Reports at the time said maybe 30, 40. The historian Michael Axworthy has written a brilliant book on the Iranian Revolution, says actually almost all these reports probably exaggerate and it might have been like five people.

Speaker 1:
[67:29] It doesn't really matter though, does it?

Speaker 2:
[67:30] It doesn't. Exactly. It doesn't matter.

Speaker 1:
[67:32] Because what matters is that this has happened.

Speaker 2:
[67:35] Of course. And now what happens is this strange cycle. After 40 days, there are meant to be memorial services for people who have died. So 40 days after these deaths on the 18th of February, there were these memorial services. And there are more demonstrations at universities across Iran. There's a demonstration, for example, in Tabriz, which is close to the border with Soviet Azerbaijan. There too, the crowd kicks off. There are scuffles. There are attacks on cinemas. There are attacks on banks and the symbols of kind of Western influence. The army is sent in. More people are shot. Again, unclear exactly how many. So 40 days after that, these people have memorial services and you have more riots. So you have this cycle. Every 40 days, there are memorial services for the people who were killed in the last sort of outbreak of rioting. And there's more rioting. And so there'll be more memorial services in 40 days' time. So this continues till mid-May. Now the Shah, contemplating all this, he makes some concessions. He thinks, well, I'll buy the protesters off. He fires the head of the Secret Police. He says, we can have free elections to the Iranian Parliament next year. But he doesn't really get. The Shah is just as detached in many ways as the Americans are. He says, I think this is probably being mastermised by the communists and almost certainly the British. Brilliant.

Speaker 1:
[68:54] So we're still on the scene again.

Speaker 2:
[68:56] Again this mad kind of anglophobia. Now his courtiers are baffled why the Shah is so... The Shah seems very listless during all this. He's kind of slightly disengaged. They can't understand why he hasn't cracked down much harder. And why actually he's absent from public life and he's spending a lot of his time in his palace at the Caspian Sea. And one reason for this is that what a lot of the Shah's advisers don't know is that he is actually desperately ill. Four years earlier he'd been swimming, he'd noticed a swelling in his side. And his doctors had brought in a French specialist who diagnosed leukemia. The Shah had leukemia. But unbelievably the Shah's doctors didn't have the courage to tell him. They told him, oh, you've got a minor blood condition. In 1978, they still haven't really told him. He seems completely depressed, but they've hidden from him the nature of his condition, although they have told his wife, Empress Farrah. Now, there are rumours at this point, spreading through Tehran. There's something wrong with the Shah. He looks really kind of gaunt. He's lost a lot of weight. He seems really miserable and unhappy and in pain and so on. But even after the doctors finally tell the Shah the truth in the summer of 1978, the US Embassy is still reporting to Washington. There are rumours about the Shah's health and I quote, as sources indicate, there's no doubt the Russians are spreading the stories to the best of our knowledge, the Shah is fine. I mean, this is insane that they're still doing this. And what is more, the Pentagon and the CIA are both still telling Carter, yes, there have been a lot of protests in Iran. Yes, there's this business with the students and whatnot. However, the Shah is going to be fine. The regime is fine. His security forces are well capable of handling any disorder.

Speaker 1:
[70:51] And presumably, still at this point, there isn't really any understanding of the potential role that Islam could be playing and might play in the future.

Speaker 2:
[71:03] No, not at all. They regard this as student protests. The big danger is that Iran will go communist. You know, this is the fear whenever the Americans confront any of these kinds of things.

Speaker 1:
[71:13] So they're seeing it through the prism of the left-right axis.

Speaker 2:
[71:17] Of course.

Speaker 1:
[71:18] Rather than of a kind of secularist Islamic axis.

Speaker 2:
[71:22] There are some people, as time goes on, Ambassador Sullivan is one of them. As 1978 wears on who says, you know, I think we should start talking to some of these clerics to find out what they want and who they are. But, you know, famously, the CIA have profiles of all the big people in Iranian politics. They don't have one prepared for the Ayatollah Khomeini because they just don't think he's that bigger a factor. You know, they're much more interested in traditional politicians. So, you know, things are getting worse. Not least because, because of the high inflation, the Shah's government has decided to try to drive down prices and one way they'll do that is they'll slash spending. So that summer, thousands of people are laid off and a lot of these people are young men from Tehran's working class areas. So they're angry, they're economically angry as much as anything. So then in August, you get the key moment arguably of the whole revolution, the 19th of August. And this happens not in Tehran, but in a town called Abadan, which is in southwestern Iran on the border with Iraq. So at 8 o'clock that night, the 19th of August, hundreds of people have packed into the cinema wrecks to see a very, very popular film, one of the most popular films of the 70s in Iran called The Deer. And just after 8.20, so the film has been running for 20 minutes or so, four men barred the doors of the cinema. They poured petrol onto the doors and then they lit the doors with a match. The doors went up, the cinema went up in flames. There was total panic inside, a massive stampede and about 500 people were burned to death in this cinema. Outside Iran, almost all historians now agree this was the work of Islamic militants. So through the 70s there had been a series of Islamic militant attacks on symbols of westernisation, on cinemas, on bars, on banks, on airline offices, things like that. And this is another of them. But in the climate of August 1978, people on the streets said, do you know who did it? The Shah's secret police to try to frame Islamic militants. And that is still the official line on this fire in the Islamic Republic of Iran today. So if you go to Iran today to talk about this fire, people will say the Shah did it.

Speaker 1:
[73:35] So it's kind of the, it's the Iranian equivalent of the thousands locked up in sinister dungeons in the Bastille. Yes. The myth is what matters obviously in a revolution rather than in the case of the French Revolution, the fact that there were barely anyone in the Bastille.

Speaker 2:
[73:49] Exactly. And so within days people have poured onto the streets, hundreds of thousands of people across Iran and they are shouting, the Shah is guilty, burn the Shah. I mean, the Shah had nothing to do with this. But from this point, I think there's no way back for him. So by September, there are constant demonstrations in Tehran. There are crowds chanting for Khomeini and calling for the end of the Pahlavi monarchy. And Friday, the 8th of September, the Shah declares martial law. But there's a great gathering at a place called Jalais Square, which is a working class area in Tehran. The soldiers call on the crowd to disperse. They fire tear gas at them. Then they start firing into the crowd. There was total chaos. And by the time this is all over, about 100 people have been killed. And with that, it really is downhill all the way for the Shah. There are rumours now, there are really exaggerated rumours that he had sent in helicopters and people have been machine gunning the crowds and the helicopters. Madly, people start to say, you know, those troops who fired on the crowds, they were actually Israeli troops. The Shah is bringing in Israeli troops as mercenaries to fire on our own people. It's a bit like, you know, the claims that Charles I was going to use soldiers from Ireland against the London apprentices in 1642 or something.

Speaker 1:
[75:08] And a striking illustration of the role that Israel is already playing in.

Speaker 2:
[75:12] Yes, exactly.

Speaker 1:
[75:13] The demonology of Iranian militants.

Speaker 2:
[75:15] So we are now in the autumn of 1978. There are massive strikes across Iran. The one thing the regime fears most, the strikes have shut down the oil fields on which Iran's exports depend. There are crowds in the streets every day. There are attacks on banks and restaurants every day. And already in some towns in Iran, power has been taken from the legitimate authorities and it's been taken over by revolutionary strike committees. Now, if you're with the revolution, this is very exciting. If you're not with the revolution, it is terrifying. And in his memoirs, Ambassador William Sullivan describes standing at the US embassy and looking out through an upstairs window. And he sees in the distance troops holding back demonstrators. He sees cars burning in the middle of the road. He sees smoke rising from burning buildings. And he thinks something has to change. We have to do something. So on the 9th of November, he sends a secret cable to Washington with the title Thinking the Unthinkable. And he says, The show is finished. It's over. And if we don't act now, Iran, which is so vital to us, will slip out of our hands forever. He says we should ditch the show right now. And it may well be time to do a deal with the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Speaker 1:
[76:35] Goodness. What tension. What drama. So will Jimmy Carter follow that advice? Will he, as it were, get into bed with the Ayatollah? A rather unpleasant image, but Dominic, that's what you've written. And we will find out next time. As the revolution quickens, the Shah flees Iran, Khomeini ends up returning to Tehran in triumph. And we have also had Jimmy Carter's tennis court monitoring. In our next episode, we will be revisiting the other key fact in Carter's presidency. His fishing trip on a swamp. If you'd like to hear that, and you'd like to hear all three of the episodes that are still to come in this series, then you can join our own beleaguered embassy of godless imperialists, The Rest Is History Club at therestishistory.com. But for now, Koda hafez. Koda hafez.

Speaker 2:
[77:41] Hello, Rest Is History fans. It's spy and pigeon aficionado Gordon Carrera here from The Rest Is Classified podcast with a quick message for those of you enjoying Tom and Dominic's Iran series. A little while ago on The Rest Is Classified, we did two episodes on the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953, a coup orchestrated by the CIA and MI6. It's a story full of dirty tricks, boozy spies, Iranian weightlifters and politicians in their pajamas. And it tells you a lot about how the CIA got the taste for regime change. So tune in to episodes one and two of The Rest Is Classified to hear the full story.

Speaker 7:
[78:25] One of the darkest scandals of the modern era.

Speaker 2:
[78:27] A billionaire financier.

Speaker 7:
[78:29] Powerful friends.

Speaker 2:
[78:30] Hidden networks.

Speaker 7:
[78:31] And questions that refuse to go away.

Speaker 2:
[78:33] Was Jeffrey Epstein a spy? I'm Gordon Carrera.

Speaker 7:
[78:38] And I'm David McCloskey.

Speaker 2:
[78:39] And we're the hosts of The Rest Is Classified, the intelligence and national security podcast from Goalhanger.

Speaker 7:
[78:45] And we've just released a gripping new series investigating whether Epstein was linked to any spy agencies.

Speaker 2:
[78:51] And asking what those agencies might have known about him.

Speaker 7:
[78:54] Listen or watch now on Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.