What exactly did the West think it was getting?
That was the question I left you with last week, and it turns out to be harder than the question of what happened to Mohammad Mosaddegh.
For 1953 we have a plan. Names. Money. Propaganda. Intelligence services. Political and military assets. A numbered CIA document whose first assumption is “Mossadeq must go.”
We can call it a coup because the people running it called it one. 1979 is different.
There is no equivalent document saying put Ruhollah Khomeini in power. At least I have not found one, and I looked.
What the documents show instead is a government that spent twenty-six years tying American strategy to one man, failed to notice how badly his position had rotted, discovered far too late that millions of Iranians wanted him gone, and then went looking for a survivable relationship with whatever came next.
Somewhere in that scramble, Washington began talking to the people around Khomeini. And — this is the part almost nobody knows — Khomeini began talking back.
Nobody Saw It Coming
Start with the intelligence.
In August 1977, a CIA study of Iran looking toward the 1980s concluded there would be no radical change in Iranian political behavior in the near future, and that the Shah would be an active participant in Iranian life well into the 1980s.
A year later, with Iran already convulsing, American intelligence was still reporting that Iran was not in a revolutionary or even a pre-revolutionary situation. The following month the Defense Intelligence Agency estimated the Shah would probably remain in power for another ten years.
He had about four months left.
A later congressional investigation found the relationship itself had distorted the process. American officials had limited contact with opposition groups partly because they didn’t want to antagonize the Iranian
government, and Washington’s highest intelligence priorities inside Iran were pointed at the Soviet Union rather than at Iranian society.
America had military advisers, diplomats, intelligence officers, weapons programs, economic relationships and personal friendships throughout the Iranian government — and knew almost nothing about the
movement about to overthrow it.
That is not a shortage of information. It’s a system finding what it trained itself to look for.
Washington was not the only capital with this problem. Israel had an ambassador in Tehran, Uri Lubrani, who had been there since 1974, and Iran had spent two decades as the most important pillar of Israeli
regional strategy — the oil supplier, the non-Arab partner, the counterweight. Jerusalem was about to lose all of it inside a fortnight.
The Shah was America’s partner. So Washington understood Iran through the Shah. Then Iran stopped cooperating with the model.
The Book Nobody Read
Here is the fact that reframes this entire installment.
Khomeini had already published exactly what he intended to build. Nine years earlier.
He delivered a series of lectures in Najaf between January 21 and February 8, 1970. That autumn the texts were edited, printed in Beirut, secretly shipped into Iran, and simultaneously distributed to sympathizers in Europe, the United States, Pakistan and Afghanistan. In 1977 the book was published inside Iran.
Its title was Hokumat-e Islami: Velayat-e Faqih — Islamic Government: Guardianship of the Jurist.
Its argument was that both monarchy and democracy are wrong according to Islam, and that since no one knows Islam better than the clergy, it is natural to let them rule as guardians of the state until the return of the Hidden Imam.
Not a coded manifesto. Not a private letter. A published book, in circulation in the United States, for most of a decade.
Now hold that against what he was saying in public as the revolution built. In September 1978 he said the
intention was not that religious leaders should themselves administer the state, but that they should guide the people in determining the demands of Islam. In late October he said the clerics would not hold power but would supervise those who governed. In early November he said neither his age nor his position would allow him to occupy a post in the new government.
Two Khomeinis, both on the record, saying opposite things.
And as Kim Ghattas notes in Black Wave, the CIA was apparently unaware of the thesis about Islamic government at all — it was preoccupied with a possible communist takeover.
So one answer to “what did the West think it was getting” is simply this: the blueprint had been in print since 1970, available in the West, and the agency reading Iran for Soviet penetration never picked it up.
Same failure mode as the last section. You find what you’re looking for.
The Revolution Wasn’t Khomeini
Before we go further, get this right.
The Iranian Revolution was not originally Khomeini versus the Shah. It was much larger and much less coherent than that.
Liberals, constitutionalists, nationalists, Marxists, Islamic Marxists, bazaar merchants, students, clergy, workers, secular intellectuals, old Mosaddegh supporters, religious conservatives. People furious about repression. People furious about Western influence. People displaced by modernization. People who thought the Shah had modernized too slowly, and people who thought he’d done it too fast.
They agreed on almost nothing except that he had to go.
That was enough to win. It was not enough to govern, and it did not last.
What Actually Happened in Iran
Washington’s cables are only half the story, and you can’t judge the misreading without the thing being misread.
In August 1978 a fire at the Cinema Rex in Abadan killed roughly four hundred people. The opposition blamed SAVAK. The regime blamed Islamists. The truth took years and by then it didn’t matter — the funeral processions became protests.
On September 8, 1978, troops fired on demonstrators at Jaleh Square in Tehran. It became known as Black Friday. The casualty figures were fiercely disputed at the time and remain so, but the political effect was not: after Black Friday, compromise with the monarchy became very difficult for anyone in the opposition to
advocate.
Then, in the autumn, the oil workers struck.
That is what actually broke the regime. Not the sermons. Production collapsed, exports collapsed, and the government lost the revenue that funded the army, the bureaucracy and the security services all at once. A state that cannot pay itself has a limited number of moves left.
By December, during Muharram, the marches in Tehran were measured in the millions.
None of that was invisible. American diplomats reported much of it. It simply did not fit the model Washington had been running for a quarter century.
Paris
Khomeini had opposed the Shah since the early 1960s — the White Revolution, Western influence, measures he considered un-Islamic and subordinating. He was arrested, then exiled, and settled in Najaf, in Iraq.
Which produced an irony Saddam Hussein would eventually regret: for over a decade, Khomeini preached against the Iranian monarchy from Iraqi soil.
In 1978, with the Shah desperate, Tehran leaned on Baghdad. Iraq tightened the restrictions. Khomeini left.
Kuwait refused him entry. And in October 1978 he arrived in France, settling at Neauphle-le-Château outside Paris.
This changed everything, though not for the reason usually claimed.
A cleric who had been operating out of Iraqi seminaries suddenly had Western European communications. Journalists came to him. Telephones worked. Cassettes, statements and interviews moved freely. Television carried his face worldwide and his words flowed back into Iran faster than the Shah’s censors could work.
There’s a temptation here — strongest among defenders of the monarchy — to jump to France made Khomeini.
The evidence doesn’t get there. President Giscard d’Estaing later explained that keeping him in France was preferable to letting him operate somewhere with fewer constraints. There’s no good evidence France invited him as part of a plan to replace the Shah.
But consequence matters even when intention differs. Whatever Paris intended, the move from Najaf to a village outside Paris handed Khomeini an infinitely better platform.
That mattered enormously.
Thinking the Unthinkable
By November 1978, America’s ambassador in Tehran had reached a conclusion Washington had treated as nearly impossible.
The Shah might lose.
On November 9, William Sullivan sent Secretary of State Cyrus Vance a cable titled “Thinking the
Unthinkable.” He described Iranian politics as resting on two pillars — the monarchy and Shi’a religion — and observed that the religious pillar was rising as the monarchy collapsed. He suggested getting the Shah and his most senior generals out of the country and constructing an accommodation between junior
Here’s the fascinating part. Sullivan was not predicting the Islamic Republic. He was predicting something reassuring.
Both the younger officers and Khomeini’s followers were strongly anti-communist. The Iranian military was tied to the West. Iran’s economy would keep it tied to Western markets. Khomeini might supply religious
authority while administration passed to moderates — Sullivan named Mehdi Bazargan specifically. If elections produced a constituent assembly, moderate and non-fanatical elements might carry substantial influence.
American relations with the new Iran, he thought, might remain essentially satisfactory.
That is not a man saying we want a theocracy. It’s a man saying maybe we can live with this.
Very different. Also catastrophically optimistic.
Worth noting how it landed: the cable is described as somewhat scrambled and circuitous, the President was exasperated by Sullivan’s apparent sudden change of thinking, and it is nonetheless credited with
significantly influencing U.S. policy.
Washington Was Fighting Itself
Sullivan didn’t speak for everyone.
Zbigniew Brzezinski at the National Security Council was far more reluctant to abandon the Shah and far more interested in whether the Iranian military could hold the line. Vance and Sullivan wanted political
accommodation. Carter got competing advice from inside his own administration and never fully resolved it.
People talk about “the Carter administration” as if one mind decided things. It didn’t. State had one view, the NSC another, the Pentagon another, and the embassy a fourth because it was watching the collapse from inside Tehran. The CIA’s model had already failed.
This is not evidence of an all-powerful machine. It’s nearly the opposite. The most powerful government on earth was improvising.
The Channel Ran Both Ways
Now the part that changes the story.
Sullivan wanted direct contact with Khomeini’s camp. In January 1979, Washington considered sending an intermediary to Paris, then cancelled it.
Sullivan was livid. In an eyes-only telegram to Vance on January 10, he accused the President of a “gross and perhaps irretrievable mistake” in failing to dispatch the intermediary, as Sullivan noted had previously been agreed.
His reasoning was simple. Khomeini was going to matter whether Washington liked it or not, and refusing to talk to the movement about to inherit the country meant walking into post-Shah Iran blind.
That’s diplomacy. It can also become accommodation, and the line gets thin when one government is dying and another force is preparing to replace it.
Contact happened anyway. Declassified documents obtained by BBC Persian in 2016 show the secret channel opening on January 15, 1979, with the first meeting at Neauphle-le-Château between Warren
Zimmermann, a political officer at the American embassy in Paris, and Ebrahim Yazdi, Khomeini’s chief of staff in France.
On January 18, two days after the Shah left, Washington told Khomeini’s camp there was flexibility in the American position — that the United States had never said Iran must remain a kingdom forever.
And then the message that answers this installment’s title question better than any analysis I could write.
On January 27, 1979, Khomeini told the Americans it was advisable that they recommend the army not follow Bakhtiar. They would see, he said, that his movement had no particular animosity toward the Americans. And there should be no fear about oil — it was not true that Iran wouldn’t sell to the United States.
Read that as an American policymaker in January 1979.
No hostility. The oil keeps flowing. Just don’t let the army fight us.
He was telling them precisely what they most wanted to hear, in the two currencies they cared about most. And he was doing it while the book explaining what he actually intended sat on library shelves in the United States.
Now the honest part, because this evidence is contested and you should know how.
Yazdi rejected the BBC account, saying it was Carter who sent the first message rather than Khomeini, and that the report was a fragmentary summary of the last of five exchanged messages which misquoted the
animosity line. Gary Sick, who was on Carter’s NSC staff at the time, said the report contained factual errors. Tehran called the documents fake.
That last objection is the interesting one. The official narrative of the Islamic Republic requires Khomeini to have triumphed against American efforts to stop him. Documents showing a working channel are
inconvenient in Tehran for exactly the reasons they’re inconvenient in Washington.
What survives all the disputes is this: the two sides were in contact, before the return, and each was trying to use the other.
Guadeloupe and the General
Two more events that attracted enormous mythology.
In early January, Carter met the leaders of Britain, France and West Germany at Guadeloupe. Monarchist accounts describe this as the moment the West decided to dispose of the Shah and install Khomeini.
The record shows something more humiliating than a conspiracy. By Guadeloupe, America’s allies largely believed the Shah was already finished. Carter found little appetite for saving him. France defended letting Khomeini stay. They weren’t designing a revolution. They were discussing one that was already winning.
Then Washington sent a four-star general. Robert Huyser arrived secretly in early January to assess the Iranian military, hold its leadership together, support Bakhtiar, and discourage an uncontrolled move.
Everyone read his presence through their own fears. Khomeini’s people suspected he was preparing a coup. The Shah’s supporters later concluded the opposite — that he’d come to neutralize the army and clear
Khomeini’s path.
The internal record supports neither clean version. Washington was trying to do several incompatible things at once. But the effect isn’t in doubt: keeping the high command from moving inevitably shaped the
outcome.
Effect is not intention. It still counts.
February
The Shah left on January 16, 1979, calling it a vacation. Nobody believed him. The monarch whose restoration the CIA had helped arrange in 1953 was gone for the second time in his life, and this time no one was waiting in Tehran to put him back.
Khomeini returned February 1. Millions came into the streets.
Then he did something that briefly looked like Sullivan had been right. He named Bazargan — an engineer, a longtime activist, a Mosaddegh-era nationalist, a religious liberal. A man American diplomats could talk to.
Khomeini above. Moderates governing. Bureaucracy continuing. Military preserved.
On February 11 the military declared neutrality. Bakhtiar’s government collapsed. The monarchy was finished.
Six days later the Israeli mission in Tehran closed. Arafat arrived at the head of a fifty-eight-member
delegation. Bazargan hosted the official welcome, the keys to the former Israeli embassy were handed to the PLO, and the street outside was renamed Palestine Street. Twenty-six years of quiet partnership ended with a flag change and a new address.
But look at what happened in the room, because it complicates the picture that ceremony was designed to project. Khomeini did not welcome Arafat warmly. In their two-hour meeting on February 18 he criticized the PLO for its nationalist and pan-Arab agenda and pressed Arafat to remodel the organization on the principles of the Islamic revolution.
Even the moment that looked like pure solidarity was a negotiation about who would define the revolution. Which raises the question: which revolution had won?
The liberals wanted constitutional government. The left wanted its own revolution. Nationalists wanted
sovereignty. Minorities wanted autonomy. Bazargan wanted institutions. Khomeini wanted an Islamic order.
And the clerical networks had what none of the others did: mosques, committees, revolutionary legitimacy, and a leader millions regarded as the embodiment of victory.
The Revolution Eats the Revolution
Khomeini did not step off an Air France jet and become dictator. It took months.
Revolutionary committees appeared. Revolutionary courts began trying officials of the old government. Executions followed — officers, officials, SAVAK men. Bazargan and the moderates found themselves trying to restrain institutions they didn’t control.
When American diplomats complained about summary trials, Yazdi acknowledged the problem and
described an environment in which men who had been tortured wanted revenge on the people who tortured them, while insisting Bazargan’s circle was pushing for restraint.
Understanding why revolutionary violence happens does not make it justice. SAVAK’s victims did not
thereby acquire the right to build another arbitrary state, and the Islamic Republic became extremely capable of repression in its own right.
Then the constitution.
Khomeini proclaimed the Islamic Republic on April 1 following a referendum. But the draft constitution put before voters did not explicitly mention velayat-e faqih; Khomeini retracted his support for the original
secular draft afterward, and the assembly that rewrote it built guardianship of the jurist into the architecture of the state.
Iranians voted for one thing and received another. The 1970 book had won.
So Did the West Put Khomeini in Power?
Let me lay out the possibilities plainly rather than gesture at a conclusion, because there are five and they are not the same claim.
Creation. Did Britain and America install Khomeini the way they helped remove Mosaddegh? No. There is no plan, no operation, no funding, no assets, no equivalent of TPAJAX. The evidence isn’t thin — it’s absent, and I’d have told you if I’d found it.
Preference. Did Washington prefer Khomeini to the alternatives? Not to the Shah, no. But some officials clearly preferred an anti-communist religious movement to a leftist one, and that preference shaped what they were willing to tolerate.
Facilitation. This is the one that’s genuinely arguable, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. France gave him a platform. Washington declined to encourage a military crackdown. Huyser’s mission helped keep the army from moving. The Americans told his camp there was flexibility about the monarchy. Each decision is defensible on its own. Together they cleared a path.
Accommodation. Yes, plainly. Washington opened a channel, tried to establish terms, and looked for a version of the revolution it could live with.
Catastrophic miscalculation. Also yes. Sullivan’s scenario was wrong in almost every particular.
The two that fail are creation and preference. The two that hold are accommodation and miscalculation. Facilitation sits in between, and honest people can read it either way.
But notice what the miscalculation actually consisted of. Washington was not simply fooled by its own optimism. It was told what it wanted to hear by a man who had published the opposite, and it lacked the curiosity to check.
Some American officials looked at Khomeini and saw an Islamist. Some saw an anti-communist. Some saw a religious figure who would retire to Qom. Some saw a threat. Some saw an unavoidable fact.
They were looking at the same man and not seeing the same thing.
And he was under no obligation to become the version any of them imagined.
The Last Miscalculation
For months after the revolution, the United States tried to build a working relationship with the new government. Diplomats dealt with Bazargan and Yazdi. Relations had not been severed.
Then the Shah got sick. Cancer. He wanted treatment in the United States.
The administration understood the danger. Iranian officials warned that admitting him would cause enormous problems.
Think about how that looked from Tehran. The Shah had fled once before. America had helped put him back. Now he was outside Iran again, and Washington was considering letting him in.
American officials could insist the reason was humanitarian. They did, and it was true. Iranians could remember August 1953. That was also true.
Both facts existed at once, and only one of them was operating in the streets. On October 22, 1979, the Shah entered the United States.
Thirteen days later, students went over the wall of the American embassy in Tehran. They said they believed another coup was coming.
Inside were American diplomats. Outside were revolutionaries who had grown up in the shadow of 1953. Above them all was the Ayatollah.
What happened next permanently fixed how Americans see Iran. Because this is where our movie normally begins.
November 4, 1979.
Next Thursday: Part IV — Death to America.