Inside the Revolution

by Joel C. Rosenberg

  And top officials in Washington had not seen it coming.

  “We knew there was some resentment [to the shah],” Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, would later comment. “We knew somewhat of the history of the country, but we were not conscious, nor were we informed, of the intensity of the feelings.”85

  How was that possible? How could the best and brightest minds in the White House, State Department, and Central Intelligence Agency have missed the lead-up to the Islamic Revolution in Iran? And thirty years later, is it possible that Washington could miss the danger rising in Iran once again?

  Seeds of the Revolution

  It was not hard to find evidence of anti-shah sentiment building in Iran in the mid-1970s. Ruhollah Khomeini, the fiery Shia Islamic cleric widely known as “the ayatollah,” had been railing against the shah for decades at that point, often from exile in Turkey, Iraq, or France.

  First and foremost, Khomeini despised the fact that since ascending to the throne in 1941, the shah had sought to turn Iran into a modern, pro-Western society. For several decades the shah appeared to be trying to follow the secular democratic reforms set into motion in Turkey by Mustafa Ataturk, who founded and built the modern Turkish state following the collapse of the Islamic caliphate in Istanbul in the early 1920s. Like Ataturk, the shah banned women from wearing Islamic veils, required men to wear Western clothes in all government offices, permitted women to enroll in classes at Tehran University, and gave women the right to vote.86 In October 1962, the shah did away with the requirements that candidates for political office had to be men and had to be Muslims. Khomeini vehemently protested the shah’s move and worked closely with clerics and their followers around the country to push for the Islamic requirements to be reinstated. 87 Eventually they were, but the tensions between Khomeini and the shah only intensified.

  “The Shah . . . has embarked on the destruction of Islam in Iran,” warned Khomeini. “I will oppose this as long as the blood circulates in my veins.”88

  In nearly every sermon and in almost every book and article that he wrote, Khomeini denounced the shah as a traitor to Islam and a betrayer of the Iranian people, and he found he was touching a nerve. The more forcefully he preached against the shah’s regime, the more Iranians responded to his message and called for change. As the number of Khomeini’s followers increased dramatically in the early 1970s, the shah grew increasingly worried. He feared an Islamist movement that could topple his regime—or at the very least destabilize it—was rising. So he began moving in the opposite direction, rolling back some of his earlier democratic reforms and restricting personal freedoms. In March 1975, for example, the shah ended Iran’s multiparty democracy and imposed a one-party system—his own.89 When students and other dissidents protested, the shah cracked down, using the police to attack crowds with water cannons and tear gas. He used his secret police force, known as SAVAK, to round up, interrogate, and at times torture political opponents.

  The following year, in an attempt to appeal to Persian nationalism and put the Islamic fundamentalists in their place, the shah unilaterally abolished the use of the Islamic (lunar) calendar and instead required Iranians to use the Persian calendar that had been developed under the reign of Persian leader Cyrus the Great.90

  The move backfired. Increasingly, the shah was perceived as a cruel dictator rather than the benevolent monarch that had long been his public persona. Khomeini’s anger, meanwhile, was growing, and more and more Iranians were paying attention. “He is against the Islamic calendar,” railed the ayatollah during a February 1978 speech. “To be against the Islamic calendar is to be against Islam itself. In fact the worst thing that this man has done during his reign is to change the calendar.”91

  Targeting Christians and Jews

  Khomeini and his followers had other grievances beyond the shah’s hostility toward their brand of Radical Islam. They despised, for example, his overt alliance with the United States, the epicenter of modern Christendom in their eyes, and his barely disguised alliance with Israel, the epicenter of Judaism. Israel, after all, was a “Little Satan” in their eyes, while the U.S. was the “Great Satan.” Yet the shah was doing business with both.

  As early as 1951, the shah began permitting Iraqi Jews to emigrate to the newly formed Jewish state through direct—though secret—flights from Tehran to Tel Aviv.92 Iran under the shah sold and shipped oil to Israel. The shah bought fighter jets from Israel. He also allowed Israeli fighter pilots to train jointly with Iranian pilots. What was more, from 1961 to 1978, every Israeli prime minister from David Ben-Gurion to Menachem Begin visited Tehran and met directly with the shah.93

  All this made the Radicals apoplectic. “Our wretched people subsist in conditions of poverty and hunger, while the taxes that the ruling class extorts from them are squandered,” Khomeini bellowed during one speech. “They [the shah and his advisors] buy Phantom jets so that pilots from Israel and its agents can come and train in them in our country. So extensive is the influence of Israel in our country—Israel, which is in a state of war with the Muslims, so that those who support it are likewise in a state of war with the Muslims—and so great is the support the regimes gives it, that Israeli soldiers come to our country for training! Our country has become a base for them!”94

  By October 1964, the alliance between the U.S. and Iran had become so strong and so vital to the Iranian economy and military that the shah gave American military advisors and their families, as well as technical and administrative staff, legal immunity for any and all criminal offenses they might commit in Iranian territory. To Khomeini, this smacked of American imperialism. No longer was Iran a sovereign, strong, respectable country, he argued. It was now subservient to its Washington master.

  “They [the shah and his advisors] have reduced the Iranian people to a level lower than that of an American dog,” cried Khomeini during a speech in Qom, Iran, on October 27, 1964. “If someone runs over a dog belonging to an American, he will be prosecuted. Even if the Shah himself were to run over a dog belonging to an American, he would be prosecuted. But if an American cook runs over the Shah, the head of state, no one will have the right to interfere with him. . . . The government has sold our independence, reduced us to the level of a colony, and made the Muslim nation of Iran appear more backward than savages in the eyes of the world! . . . This is high treason!”95

  And Khomeini was just warming up. “Muslim peoples! Leaders of the Muslim peoples—come to our aid! Are we to be trampled underfoot by the boots of America simply because we are a weak nation and have no dollars? . . . Let the American president know that in the eyes of the Iranian people, he is the most repulsive member of the human race today because of the injustice he has imposed on our Muslim nation. Today the Qur’an has become his enemy, the Iranian nation has become his enemy! . . . All of our troubles today are caused by America and Israel. . . . O God, remedy the affairs of the Moslems! O God, bestow dignity on this sacred religion of Islam! O God, destroy those individuals who are traitors to this land, who are traitors to Islam, who are traitors to the Qur’an.”96

  Khomeini’s words infuriated the shah. Rather than allow the ayatollah to denounce his policies right under his nose, the shah proceeded to have Khomeini arrested and deported from the country.

  Once Khomeini was gone, the shah accelerated and intensified Iran’s ties to the U.S. in the years that followed, culminating in January 1978, when President Carter granted Iran “most favored nation” status to increase U.S.-Iranian trade.97

  To the ayatollah in exile—and his followers inside Iran—the trade deal exemplified the very core of the problem. They did not want to be seen as favored by the infidels in the United States. They had had enough. They desperately wanted a confrontation with the U.S. and the shah, and they were about to get both. “We are fighting against America,” Khomeini said bluntly. “Soon the whole nation will realize that this Shah is an American agent.”98

  The Gathering Stormr />
  On February 18, 1978, antigovernment protests—encouraged by Khomeini and his allies—broke out in the Iranian city of Tabriz. Iranian security forces attacked the protestors, and many were killed and wounded.

  Ten days later, during a speech in the Iraqi Shia capital of Najaf, Khomeini denounced “the criminal massacres and bloodshed that have taken place in Tabriz” and called on Allah and the people to “remove the evil of the oppressors,” noting, “the people of Iran have chosen their path, and they will not rest until they have overthrown these criminals and avenged themselves and their fathers on this bloodthirsty family.”99

  On March 29, anti-shah demonstrations broke out not in one Iranian city but in fifty-five.

  By May 10, violent demonstrations had spread to an additional twenty-four cities. The shah ordered the army to restore order using tanks and tear gas.

  Several senior Shia clerics in Tehran called for people to engage in “peaceful demonstrations” that would not provoke the shah’s forces. Many listened. There was a surge in commercial and educational strikes throughout the country. Merchants sympathetic to the Revolution refused to open their shops for business on days specified by Khomeini’s grassroots leaders, while the Rank-and-File members of the Revolution refused to shop at stores that did open their doors. On certain days, parents were told by Khomeini activists not to send their children to school, while growing legions of university students stopped attending classes, held anti-shah rallies, and handed out anti-shah leaflets throughout their campuses and their cities.

  The ayatollah himself, however, did not approve of the notion of peaceful demonstrations. He wanted a direct confrontation, and he urged his followers to overthrow the “pagan regime.” Ever larger anti-shah demonstrations quickly followed.100

  August 19, 1978, was a turning point. Someone set fire to the Cinema Rex movie theater in the petroleum port city of Abadan. While it was clearly a case of arson, it is not clear to this day who was responsible. But the impact was horrific. Some 377 people were killed, and many suspected the shah’s secret police forces of setting the blaze. News of the fire and conspiracy theories about SAVAK’s involvement spread like wildfire throughout the country. On August 21, Khomeini delivered a speech in which he directly accused “the criminal hand” of the shah’s “tyrannical regime” of setting the fire and murdering those within. “Lighting a ring of fire around the cinema and then having its doors locked by the cinema staff was something only the authorities had the power to do,” Khomeini said in the city of Najaf.101

  Tens of thousands—and then hundreds of thousands—of enraged Iranians soon began pouring into the streets, denouncing the shah and his regime and calling for the immediate return of the ayatollah. As the riots spread from city to city, people began throwing Molotov cocktails at the police, and the police fired back. Over the course of the next few months, an estimated three thousand Iranian protestors were killed by the forces of the shah.102

  Incredibly, however, that same August CIA Director Stansfield Turner’s top Iran experts were telling him that “the Shah would survive another ten years.”103 Worse, the CIA sent a written analysis to President Carter arguing that Iran “is not in a revolutionary or even a prerevolutionary situation.”104

  Gary Sick, a staffer on the Carter National Security Council as the Iranian Revolution began, would later admit that “the notion of a popular [Islamic] revolution leading to the establishment of a theocratic state seemed so unlikely as to be absurd.”105

  Ken Pollack, a Middle East specialist on President Clinton’s National Security Council, would later concede that “virtually all of the Iran experts in Washington . . . believed that the Shah would be able to weather the storm.”106

  New York Times intelligence correspondent Tim Weiner, in his 2007 book, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, concluded after years of research that “the idea that religion would prove to be a compelling political force in the late twentieth century was incomprehensible” to Washington officials at the time and that “few at the CIA believed that an ancient cleric could seize power and proclaim Iran an Islamic republic.”107

  Mark Bowden, the award-winning journalist and author of Black Hawk Down and Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America’s War with Militant Islam, drew a similar, sobering conclusion after years of his own research: “By 1978, the Peacock Throne was teetering. Not that American intelligence and military assessments realized it; it was uniformly predicted that the shah would weather the storm. What the Western intelligence reports missed was the awakening giant of traditional Islam, a grassroots rebellion against the values of the secular, modern world. The rise of Khomeini and the mullahocracy took everyone by surprise.”108

  The Crescendo

  Despite Washington insiders’ unconcern and the CIA’s bizarre take on the situation, on September 7, more than a half million Iranians demonstrated in the streets of Tehran, shouting “Death to the Pahlavis!” and “Khomeini is our leader!” and “We want an Islamic Republic!” and “America out of Iran!”

  The next day, the shah imposed martial law. Iranian security forces attacked a crowd of five thousand in a southern section of Tehran. An estimated two hundred demonstrators were killed, and hundreds more were wounded in this attack and others like it throughout the capital.109

  It is true that such police violence against the protestors only intensified sympathy and support for Khomeini and his followers, dramatically enlarging their base of support. But it is also true that many Iranians read the police’s actions, which could have been far worse, as a sign that the shah did not have the stomach to slaughter his enemies. Many had fully expected the police to massacre everyone in sight. The fact that the response, while aggressive, was not as aggressive as it could have been—and certainly not as aggressive as other Middle Eastern dictators had been against enemies of the regime throughout the centuries—was quickly perceived by Khomeini’s followers as evidence of the shah’s weakness and the beginning of the end for the monarch and the “Peacock Throne.”

  On November 26, more than a million people turned out for a demonstration in Tehran against the shah and his regime. On December 10 and 11, upwards of nine million Iranians—well over a quarter of the population—demonstrated and rioted around the country in what one historian has dubbed “the largest protest event in history.”110

  As the uprising reached its crescendo, the shah could read the handwriting on the wall. His day was over. The day of the Ayatollah Khomeini had begun. The only question now was whether the shah wanted to wait to be captured by Khomeini’s crowds and executed in public or flee the country while there was still time. On January 16, 1979, the shah made his choice. Exactly one year after President Carter declared Iran “an island of stability” and just five months after the CIA’s top Iran analysts had concluded the shah would last another ten years, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, his wife, and their three children fled Iran into exile, traveling first to Egypt and then to Morocco.

  “The Holy One Has Come!”

  On February 1, 1979, the Revolution came home. The chartered Air France 747 touched down in Tehran at Mehrabad International Airport at precisely 9:33 a.m. local time and was immediately greeted by a rapturous welcome. An estimated fifty thousand Iranians had converged on the terminal, tarmac, and grounds, some weeping, some wailing, all desperate to get a glimpse of the man they suspected might, in fact, be the Twelfth Imam they had so long awaited.

  “The holy one has come!” the crowds chanted as the Ayatollah Khomeini, tall and slender with a long gray beard and dark, brooding eyes, draped in black robes and his signature black turban, stepped out into the morning air. Now seventy-eight, he looked somewhat tired at first, even tearful, as he waved a bit feebly to the cheering throngs. But as the roars grew and people screamed, “He is the light of our lives!” the firebrand seemed to draw energy and resolve from the crowd.111 The shah was gone, Khomeini was back, and the country was his for the taking.

  As he descende
d the stairs to the tarmac below, the crowd began to chant, “Khomeini, O Imam! Khomeini, O Imam!” and “Allahu akbar,” or “God is great!”

  “A personality cult was in the making,” the head of the BBC’s Persian broadcasting service would later write. “Khomeini had been transformed into a semi-divine figure. He was no longer a grand ayatollah and deputy of the Imam, one who represents the Hidden Imam, but simply ‘The Imam.’ In Arabic [and Sunni theology and common usage], the term “Imam” is used to describe a leader or prayer leader, but in Shi’i Iran, where the title was reserved for the twelve infallible leaders of the early Shi’a, among ordinary people it carried awe-inspiring connotations. In encouraging its use, some of Khomeini’s supporters clearly wanted to exploit popular religious feelings and to imply that he was the long-awaited Hidden Imam.”112

  And Khomeini certainly did nothing to discourage the people from thinking he was the One.

  “I thank the various classes of the nation for the feelings they have expressed toward me,” Khomeini said in remarks broadcast around the country. “The debt of gratitude I owe to the Iranian people weighs heavily upon my shoulders, and I can in no way repay it.” Then, in an ominous foreshadowing of events still ten months away, Khomeini added, “Our triumph will come when all forms of foreign control have been brought to an end and all roots of the monarchy have been plucked out of the soil of our land. The agents of the foreigners during the recent events have been trying desperately to restore the Shah to power. . . . I say that their efforts are in vain. . . . Unity of purpose is the secret of victory. Let us not lose this secret by permitting demons in human form to create dissension in the ranks.”113

  The massive crowd went wild.

  Iranian security forces had never seen anything like it. But this was only the beginning.

  What really terrified the security people were the quarter of a million Iranians waiting at Khomeini’s next stop, a cemetery for Islamic martyrs, and the estimated five million more frenzied Shia Muslims lining the roads from the airport into the heart of Tehran.114 More than one in seven people living in Iran at the time turned out to catch a glimpse of their new leader. The security officials knew they could not afford to allow the leader of the Revolution to be swallowed up and crushed by the unprecedented crowds. The country had already been through so much.