Pod Insights The Rest Is History 636. Revolution in Iran: Fall of the Shah (Part 1) About this episode Why did the Iranian Revolution erupt in 1979? What was the nature of the relationship between President Carter and the ostentatious Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi? And, who was the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a man whose militant vision for Iran would see it drastically remade?
Join Dominic and Tom, as they launch into one of the most dramatic stories of all time, with such far reaching consequences, that they still reverberate across the Middle East today: the Islamic Revolution. As they delve into the events that set this cataclysmic event in motion, they will bring to life the three men at the heart of it all.
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Transcript 14,251 words · 5 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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2:30 Tom Holland? Iran, because of the great leadership of the Shah, is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world. 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
3:14 Tom Holland? 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 Shahbanu, 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 the Englishman who can't do a good impression of someone from Georgia, but it isn't.
3:58 Tom Holland? 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 Shahbanu, at a banquet in Iran's capital Tehran on New Year's Eve 1990. Seventy seven and Dominic, it is a moment ripe with irony, is it not?
4:26 Dominic Sandbrook? It is indeed. It's one of the great ironic moments, not just of the nineteen seventies, but the late twentieth 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.
4:59 Tom Holland? 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.
5:06 Dominic Sandbrook? That's true, because Iran is once again engulfed in street protests, demonstrations, violent repression and so on.
5:12 Tom Holland? The storm clouds of counter-revolution are gathering.
5:14 Dominic Sandbrook? They're 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.
5:38 Tom Holland? 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.
5:43 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes. So just to give people a little sense of the way the rest of this history works, I think that was about the twenty fourth take.
5:51 Tom Holland? Was it?
5:52 Dominic Sandbrook? And if you think, 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 twenty three takes.
6:01 Tom Holland? Which he sounded very like Shane Warne for a lot of the time.
6:04 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 sixty six Americans were held hostage for four hundred and forty four days, and Jimmy Carter's disastrous attempt, Operation Eagle Claw, to rescue them, which ended in disaster and tragedy.
6:30 Tom Holland? We 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.
6:46 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
7:27 Tom Holland? 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.
7:39 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Naivran 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 5 million people. And that stratospheric growth, that single fact, in some ways, lies at the heart of today's episode,
8:25 Dominic Sandbrook? the extraordinary change in the kind of social and economic makeup of Tehran and indeed of Iran generally.
8:31 Tom Holland? 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, I mean, 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 that this is a legacy of the kind of the great boom in the 60s and 70s.
8:56 Dominic Sandbrook? 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, multilingual. Of course, the one thing that people get wrong about Persia and Iran is they think that
9:38 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
10:04 Tom Holland? It absolutely does. And of course, people will think of Iran as as an Islamic country, which it completely is. But just to emphasise on the ancient roots of the dynamic in Iran in this episode. I mean, it is incredibly ancient. So Farsi, 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
10:43 Tom Holland? 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 make up of Iran as the idea of a kind of a clarity. So the great epic of Iran, Fadasi's Shahnamei, 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 of rule by monarchs.
11:13 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 1921, Mohammed's father, Reza Pahlavi, staged a coup with British support, and he ends up becoming Reza Shah.
11:56 Dominic Sandbrook? He takes the throne himself, which means that Mohammed 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 Mohammed 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,
12:38 Dominic Sandbrook? for people who remember that, that series. And Mohammed 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 modernizer and a westernizer, and indeed a secularizer, which as we will see, is something of a problem. Yeah, and he loves very expensive French food, doesn't he? Which will feature later in this show. Well, how should I put this? He likes French courtesans, I think is, I think is the best way of putting it. So in 1941, Persia, which his father Reza has renamed, or he has basically asked
13:21 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
13:47 Tom Holland? 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.
14:01 Dominic Sandbrook? They do. It's very flattering for us, because whenever anything happens, the Iranians assume that the British are controlling everything.
14:07 Tom Holland? So it's notoriety way above our station now.
14:10 Dominic Sandbrook? Completely. We're punching above our weight in the Iranian imagination. So at 21 years old, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi is the new Shah of Iran. And he has a double taint. So first of all, he's the son of a usurper who seized the throne in a British-backed 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 Mohammad Motadegh, who's this very kind of wily old bird, this
14:51 Dominic Sandbrook? 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, Motadegh 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,
15:32 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Moshtekh on, the Shah starts to assert himself, he becomes more than a figurehead. So like his father, he is a modernizer. So both of them, Reza Pahlavi, a classic kind of military man of the interwar years, who had tried to to to westernize and modernize Iran, his 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 Mohammed and his character. By the 1960s, he is developing a personality cult.
16:14 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
16:20 Tom Holland? 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.
16:33 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly, and he does with 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.
16:44 Tom Holland? You see, I think that's a mistake. I think if he'd gone for the full long beard, as worn by Dras, great. He might have cut a better figure.
16:51 Dominic Sandbrook? 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, and then he becomes a real celebrity. So Western visitors think he's very polished and very impressive. The gossip columns are full of, you know, he speaks English and French fluently, he goes skiing in Saint-Maurice, he plays tennis on the French Riviera. He's the kind of person who in an alternative universe would have a cameo in an early Pink Panther film or something.
17:24 Tom Holland? He would. He's got such kind of suave good looks of James Mason.
17:28 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, David Niven or somebody.
17:29 Tom Holland? David Niven, that kind of vibe, hasn't he?
17:31 Dominic Sandbrook? That's exactly the vibe for the Shah. And
17:35 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 sceptre, 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?
18:12 Tom Holland? 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. Cececo from Romania, Mabutu, Imelda Marcos, and perhaps the most sinister figure of all, Princess Anne.
18:47 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, yeah. I mean, people say, what's your dream historical dinner party? I mean, the Shah's had it, you know, Tito, Imelda Marcos, brilliant.
18:55 Tom Holland? And famously, they have, the food is flown in from Paris by Maxims.
18:59 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, Maxims of Paris, and all this sort of Chateau Lafitte, Rothschilds 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 caveat export monopoly. And actually, it's sometimes suggested that a lot of this is kind of Islamic revolution propaganda, that basically the Ayatollahs...
19:44 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 this report, British Foreign Office report, basically said it was really corrupt and the Shah himself was taking massive bribes on defence contracts.
20:03 Tom Holland? 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.
20:12 Dominic Sandbrook? Oh, totally, it is. And the oil is is obviously a massive part of this story. So the Shah liked having money and he's and in the seventies, he gets a lot more of it. Because in autumn nineteen seventy three, 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 seventies, are not the British, they are the Americans.
20:48 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 nineteen seventies Paraguay or something.
21:16 Tom Holland? And are they particularly targeting poets, which is the big thing in South America, isn't it?
21:20 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
21:33 Tom Holland? No, I haven't. I haven't. And that is that is a plus mark for the Shah and probably reflects the the ancient tradition of Persian poetry.
21:41 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, maybe. And the CIA, you know, the CIA had poets on their books. So the CIA supported American poetry.
21:48 Tom Holland? Oh, it's so complicated, isn't it?
21:49 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. I think if you're a Chilean or Argentine poet, I think the seventies are a bad decade.
21:54 Tom Holland? Yeah, but but if you're an Iranian one, it's it's better.
21:57 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 seventies, see Iran as an absolutely central player in their anti-communist alliance system. In nineteen seventy two, 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. And the Shah said, brilliant, this is what I'm going to spend my oil money on. And in the next six years, he spent twelve billion dollars 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.
22:40 Dominic Sandbrook? Now, other American regional allies thought this was mad. The Saudi oil minister said to the Americans in nineteen seventy five, the Shah is a megalomaniac, he's highly unstable, and if you don't recognise this, there must be something wrong with your powers of observation.
22:56 Tom Holland? But Dominic, just to say, I mean, the Arabs have always hated and feared the Iranians. And Saddam Hussein, who is in Iraq and, you know, prominent leader there of the Ba'athists, he had this famous phrase, which was one of his favourites. There are three whom God should not have created, flies, Jews and Persians.
23:16 Dominic Sandbrook? That's poor from Saddam Hussein, isn't it disappointing?
23:19 Tom Holland? 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.
23:28 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 seventies. 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 twenty 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.
23:51 Tom Holland? Well, the Shah and Shah, King of Kings.
23:53 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, punchy from the Shah. Now, mention of the Americans brings us to his guest at that New Year's Eve banquet. And this is the person who you ventriloquised so magnificently, the thirty ninth president of the United States, James Earl Carter Junior, 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.
24:21 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
25:02 Dominic Sandbrook? 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, then went to the nuclear submarine. Then he comes home and then he learns Spanish in the evening. That is Jimmy Carter's vibe.
25:17 Tom Holland? The praying really kicks in a bit later, doesn't it?
25:20 Dominic Sandbrook? It does, yeah.
25:20 Tom Holland? But I would imagine right from the beginning, he's a great man for a cardigan.
25:23 Dominic Sandbrook? Totally, he is, yeah.
25:25 Tom Holland? Cannot imagine Donald Trump wearing a cardigan.
25:27 Dominic Sandbrook? And a plaid shirt. He's very plaid shirt.
25:29 Tom Holland? Loves a plaid shirt, yes.
25:30 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 was 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.
25:46 Tom Holland? And he's a Democrat, isn't he?
25:47 Dominic Sandbrook? 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'd lost at anything. And he turned to God and was born again. And later on, when he ran for president, everybody basically 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, you know, I wouldn't say it was standard, but it was common.
26:27 Tom Holland? Yeah. And I mean, in view of what is going to happen in 1979 and through the eighties, actually, the last laugh is on them because they haven't recognized that religion is going to become an expression of the modern.
26:38 Dominic Sandbrook? Quite right, that actually Carter is not a backward looking figure as he was often treated in the seventies. 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. So that is quite Trump. Yeah, of course. Jimmy Carter's populism is really, really interesting. His southern populism is very, it's both books 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
27:22 Dominic Sandbrook? 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's 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 seventies was much more
28:07 Dominic Sandbrook? conservative than most democratic activists. So, you know, it's a tough gig for him to try to get the presidency, 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 Kopecky, 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, all of 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
28:51 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 in his lovely check shirt. He talks about how he likes to teach Sunday school and his promise is his policy prescription is so vague. And 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?
29:20 Tom Holland? No, you do it. You go for it.
29:22 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
29:33 Tom Holland? God, as filled with love as are the American people.
29:36 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
29:36 Tom Holland? That's a recipe for a happy administration.
29:39 Dominic Sandbrook? And instead of reaching for the sick bucket, people say, oh, isn't that nice? That's what we want. So he wins the nomination and then he wins the presidency. He beats Gerald Ford. So now Carter was president and is he good at it? I mean, I think you 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. I mean, he doesn't exude warmth. Everybody sort of says this on 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. You know, he thinks if he stays up till three o'clock in the morning doing
30:21 Dominic Sandbrook? his paperwork, he'll be a better president. And actually, that means he just massively over prepares and overthinks everything. He'll kind of rock up at kind of nine o'clock in the morning and say, I've overnight, I've dreamt up a 455 point plan to fight inflation or something.
30:34 Tom Holland? So he he begins, doesn't he, looking very kind of sunny, full of the optimism of the South and all that.
30:40 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
30:40 Tom Holland? And very rapidly, he comes to look grey and haggard and worn.
30:44 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, because he's not sleeping.
30:46 Tom Holland? And in the long run, this isn't going to look good when he goes for a run.
30:48 Dominic Sandbrook? No, it will not. It will not look good. And actually, this discussion of the optics of being president, 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 this crap.
31:00 Tom Holland? They don't want that at all.
31:02 Dominic Sandbrook? But they don't really want that. It's like when the French elected Francois 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, an early national broadcast, wearing a cardigan. And he said, I'd like everybody to turn their thermostat down.
31:18 Tom Holland? You can't do that, can you? That's not the imperial presidency.
31:21 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
31:27 Tom Holland? Oh, yes. Famously, the tennis courts thing, which you love, don't you?
31:32 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
31:46 Tom Holland? 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 will also be, which regular listeners to this podcast will be waiting for with bated breath.
31:59 Dominic Sandbrook? There are only two facts about Jimmy Carter worth knowing. So this is the man at 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 my tears at this point.
32:20 Tom Holland? We won't nick Greenland, I promise.
32:23 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 sort of 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, Africa and Ethiopia and Zaire and Angola and so on. People are talking about this, 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's going to, and Africa are going to slip out of the Western orbit. Capitalism is in retreat. You know, Soviet imperialism is emboldened.
33:08 Dominic Sandbrook? We should stop appeasing them. We should get rid of détente.
33:12 Tom Holland? 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.
33:22 Dominic Sandbrook? He is ambiguous. So he starts off a little bit more dovish, largely, I think, because he's never really thought about foreign policy. He's always been, you know, he's governor of Georgia. He didn't really have to think about world affairs, a new 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. At first, he strikes a more dovish line, but by about nineteen seventy eight, 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.
33:53 Tom Holland? I just ask because that sense of 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 the to their understanding of the world.
34:06 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, and 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 similar period. But there may be older politicians of them.
34:21 Tom Holland? Slightly wince.
34:22 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 here's a US TV fact for you. The US network news in the nineteen seventies 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.
35:01 Tom Holland? The Shah steps out with glamorous centrefold.
35:05 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 nineteen seventy seven, 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 nineteen seventy seven, 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.
35:50 Dominic Sandbrook? He's regarded as a loose cannon. We love a loose cannon in American diplomatic debacle. We definitely do. So he's very outspoken. He's very assertive. He doesn't suffer fools gladly. They point 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, "our 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. Like, 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.
36:36 Dominic Sandbrook? 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, you know, 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 Callaghan. So what is he thinking? Terrible judge of character. 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.
37:22 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Pérignon, 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.
38:05 Dominic Sandbrook? 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
38:50 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
39:03 Tom Holland? Thrilling stuff. We will be back after the break to hear from the Ayatollah.
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39:51 Dominic Sandbrook? This episode is brought to you by TikTok. We obviously love history here. It's always a treat to make a new discovery, especially in unexpected ways.
40:01 Tom Holland? Which is exactly what happens on TikTok. Like, you know coffee? You make it, add milk, drink it. Nothing more, except...
40:12 Dominic Sandbrook? Except when you hop on TikTok, you don't just learn how to make an authentic cappuccino. You can also discover videos about how in the 1700s, people would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it.
40:27 Tom Holland? And suddenly, you're imagining how people lived, drank, socialised. Makes you wonder what will baffle historians about us? And that's the joy of TikTok. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different.
40:42 Dominic Sandbrook? Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok.
40:46 Tom Holland? Visit tiktok.com/discovermore.
40:54 Tom Holland? This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Now, history's biggest leaps started as hard questions that people didn't want asked.
41:06 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, there's a classic example of that at the end of the 15th century. And the hard question in particular was, what is out there beyond the Atlantic Ocean to the west? And as you will know, the man who found the answer to that question was the explorer Christopher Columbus. And he realises, or rather, everybody else realises, that there is a vast continent out there. And it is, of course, the Americas. So Anthropic knows the importance of questions. And it's why Anthropic is founded on one hard question above all. How can we ensure that the AI revolution really goes well for ordinary people?
41:36 Tom Holland? So they asked over 100,000 people, and what came back wasn't just fear. There was hope as well. People wanted to know, will cancer ever be cured? Can kids have a better future? It turns out that there is hope in hard questions.
41:51 Dominic Sandbrook? Ask yours at claude.ai/restishistory and keep thinking.
42:00 Tom Holland? 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.
42:43 Tom Holland? 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.
43:14 Dominic Sandbrook? 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, you know, 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 have 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 Quran when he was six. He was very good at football, apparently, played football. He loved poetry and actually he loves poetry all his life.
43:58 Dominic Sandbrook? But he was clearly very serious and reserved. He probably got on well with Jimmy Carter, actually.
44:03 Tom Holland? Well, that's the irony, isn't it? I mean, 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 was killed in a brawl. I mean, this is the period of the that build up to the First World War and the First World War itself. And it is very violent.
44:24 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes.
44:25 Tom Holland? 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.
44:39 Dominic Sandbrook? Completely, completely. So as you say, he goes to the seminary in this place called Comm, which is a holy city because it has the shrine of somebody called Fatima Bint Musa, 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 Khanos, you say. He does law there. He does philosophy, doesn't he? Greek philosophy.
45:04 Tom Holland? He does, but philosophy is his real focus. And it's particular focus on Greek philosophy. So Aristotle, and particularly Plato, and how they have been mediated by the kind of traditions of Islamic and specifically Shia thinking.
45:19 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. So Chomini 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.
45:35 Tom Holland? 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.
45:44 Dominic Sandbrook? Hmm.
45:44 Tom Holland? Certain parallel there.
45:45 Dominic Sandbrook? 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's, he married
46:26 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Maxim's 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.
46:49 Tom Holland? It's so fundamental.
46:50 Dominic Sandbrook? Just to give people a sense of what we mean.
46:54 Dominic Sandbrook? In the early days of the Islamic conquests, after the death of Muhammad, there was basically a disagreement about who would succeed, wasn't there? And Shiites believe that the Islamic community took a wrong path. The leadership should have remained in the family of Muhammad's son-in-law, Ali.
47:12 Tom Holland? Well, specifically, Dominic, the family of the Prophet himself, because Ali is married to the daughter of Muhammad. And so their sons, Hassan and Hussain, 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.
47:29 Dominic Sandbrook? And over time, their faction basically evolves into its own sect, with its own history and its own traditions and its own rituals.
47:37 Tom Holland? Yes, so they are the Shiite Ali, the party of Allah. So that's where Shia comes from.
47:41 Dominic Sandbrook? Shia or Shiites. So they are now in the world today, about 10 to 15% of Muslims. The vast majority of Muslims are Sunni, but the Shia or Shiites are this minority. And Iran had been a Shia or Shiite since about the 1500s, when the Safafid dynasty imposed it as the state religion. And it became a 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,
48:25 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
48:46 Tom Holland? 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, Hussain, who was Killed in a battle in Iraq, a place called Karbala in six eighty by the Amads, 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.
49:25 Tom Holland? And it's about the derailing of Mohammed'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 of all 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 of of sacrifice on the part of humanity.
50:10 Tom Holland? 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 mourning 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.
50:54 Tom Holland? He will appear and according to Shiite tradition.
50:59 Tom Holland? He will avenge the blood of Hussein that was spilled at Kabul 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 reshare, 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.
51:41 Tom Holland? 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.
51:51 Dominic Sandbrook? 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, Ashura, 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 Bakir Mohin, who is Khamenei'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,
52:34 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
53:06 Tom Holland? Yes, and actually also crucial for people to bear in mind is that
53:12 Tom Holland? 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, veleat 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."
53:58 Tom Holland? 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.
54:14 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
54:58 Dominic Sandbrook? He was very much cut from the same cloth as Ataturk in Turkey. So a little bit Peter the Great, actually, for people who remember that series that we did. So Rezaar 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 parvenus and puppets, and they're just, they're totally illegitimate.
55:40 Tom Holland? And just to be clear, this is obviously on one level ideological, but it is also seen as an attack on their economic standing.
55:47 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, it is exactly, even more so in the 1960s. So in the 1960s, Rezaar'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, he wants, 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.
56:15 Tom Holland? The chance to wear miniskirts.
56:17 Dominic Sandbrook? Right, let's get, 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 landowning 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, it's not just ripping up our traditions. This is a massive threat to our way of life and our local standing.
56:59 Dominic Sandbrook? And it's at this point in the 1960s that Khomeini decides to enter politics.
57:05 Dominic Sandbrook? 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, you know, 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.
57:46 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 there are 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.
58:31 Dominic Sandbrook? He tells his friends, he's quoted as having told his friends, "We must use this issue as a weapon so that the people will realise 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.
58:59 Tom Holland? 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.
59:08 Dominic Sandbrook? 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
59:53 Dominic Sandbrook? and he'd have kind of mulled 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 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's actually been good for Iran. He's spent all this money on new railways and stuff. Healthcare 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.
1:00:36 Tom Holland? And religious minorities as well.
1:00:38 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, religious minorities. They are better off under the Shah than they had ever been before in Iranian history.
1:00:44 Tom Holland? I mean, just on women, there are Islamic dress codes which the Shah is contemptuous of.
1:00:51 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes.
1:00:52 Tom Holland? 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.
1:01:09 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, people would say in the 60s and 70s, they would, they would come to Tehran from the countryside. And they would see huge Western billboards for, you know, showing what they regarded as half naked women. You know, advertising, hoardings and so on. And they were shocked by it. They were, they were really shocked. But they would see women in miniskirts drinking in bars with men. Of course, exactly. And they would see foreign women, by the way, you know, American women and so on, because I mean, there are fifty thousand Americans, but we'll come to this. The enormous oil boom of the sixties and seventies 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,
1:01:48 Dominic Sandbrook? and then the, the winners, the metropolitan elite on the other. Crucially, it's triggered massive inflation. So prices in the seventies are rising about fifteen percent 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, you know, the oil money is, you know, 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 this half of the population of Iran in the nineteen seventies was under the age of sixteen. 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.
1:02:30 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 know, you can't get anywhere. The electricity grid cannot cope with all the newcomers, so there are constant blackouts. And the costs are because the inflation are going up all the time. So in some parts of Tehran, rent went up three hundred percent 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.
1:03:11 Dominic Sandbrook? They are shocked by what you were describing, you know, the, the work, the social whirl of the people who are well off. You know, the women in 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 have, you know, 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, Massumé Ebtikar, 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.
1:03:55 Dominic Sandbrook? They had come to expect extra respect, even deference, from all Iranians, from shoe-shined 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.
1:04:24 Tom Holland? And which has such an ancient culture and such a distinctive culture.
1:04:27 Dominic Sandbrook? Of course. Now, it's no accident, Massumé Ebtikar, the woman who wrote those words, was a student. And thanks to the Shah's modernisation project, there are now 200,000 students in Tehran and the other big cities.
1:04:38 Tom Holland? I mean, that's a rookie's era for a dictator, isn't it?
1:04:40 Dominic Sandbrook? 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, you know, things are brewing in the kind of tower blocks and in the university campuses and things as the 70s continue.
1:05:22 Dominic Sandbrook? But in Washington, people just don't notice this. And one reason they don't notice is if you're American, you know, you're interested in foreign policy in the early 1970s, you're not looking at Iran, you're 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, I mean, he wrote this really kind of 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
1:06:07 Dominic Sandbrook? wrong. And when Carter arrives, you know, the palace for that New Year's Eve dinner, he doesn't realise 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 Chomini'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. So he waits for Carter to leave, and on the 7th of January, he gets one of the biggest papers in Iran, Et al-A't, to
1:06:52 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Chomini. It says Chomini 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 kind of theme of Iranian evective. Well, it's good to see the British still. Yeah, it's always the British, right? So are the British black? We're the black imperialists, in league with the red imperialists in Moscow. That's the Shah's thinking. This article says Chomini's always been into poetry, that's a bad sign. It is a bad sign. I mean, everyone in the CIA knows that. It's a really bad sign. It says his ancestry, he's not even really Iranian, he's actually
1:07:37 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 seminary is shut down, and all the religious students pour out onto the streets to protest about this. There were demonstrations outside the police station. The police end up firing into the crowds. There's a stampede.
1:08:21 Dominic Sandbrook? And then a number of people are either 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 are probably exaggerated. It might have been like five people. Doesn't really matter though, does it? It doesn't, exactly, it doesn't matter. Because what matters is that this, this has happened. Of course. And now what happens is this strange cycle. After 40 days, there are meant to be memorial services for people who've 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.
1:09:06 Dominic Sandbrook? 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. And 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.
1:09:51 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 masterminded by the communists and almost certainly the British. Brilliant, so we're still on the scene again. Again, this mad kind of Anglophobia. Now, his courtiers are baffled why the Shah is so, um.
1:10:16 Dominic Sandbrook? The Shah seems very listless during all this. He's kind of, 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 leukaemia. The Shah had leukaemia. But unbelievably, the Shah's doctors didn't have the courage to tell him. They told him, oh, it's a, you've got a minor blood condition.
1:11:01 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Farah. 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, "Our 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.
1:11:46 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
1:12:04 Tom Holland? 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.
1:12:16 Dominic Sandbrook? No, not at all. They regard this as student protests. The big danger is that Iran would go communist. You know, this is the fear whenever the Americans confront any of these kinds of things.
1:12:26 Tom Holland? So they're seeing it through the prism of the left-right axis.
1:12:29 Dominic Sandbrook? Of course.
1:12:30 Tom Holland? Rather than of a kind of secularist Islamic axis.
1:12:35 Dominic Sandbrook? 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. And but, you know, famously, they, 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 big 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
1:13:16 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 eight o'clock that night, the 19th of August, hundreds of people have packed into the cinema Rex to see a very, very popular film, one of the most popular films of the seventies in Iran called The Deer. And just after eight twenty, so the film's 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.
1:13:58 Dominic Sandbrook? The doors went up, you know, 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 seventies, there'd 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.
1:14:38 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
1:14:47 Tom Holland? So it's kind of the, it's the Iranian equivalent of the thousands locked up in sinister dungeons in the Bastille.
1:14:54 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes.
1:14:55 Tom Holland? That the myth is what matters, obviously, in a revolution, rather than in the case of French Revolution, the fact that there were barely anyone in the Bastille.
1:15:01 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. And so within days, people 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 Parle V monarchy. And Friday the 8th of September, the Shah declares martial law. But there's a great gathering at a place called Jaleh 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.
1:15:43 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 had been machine gunning the crowds in 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.
1:16:21 Tom Holland? And a striking illustration of the role that Israel is already playing in.
1:16:25 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, exactly.
1:16:26 Tom Holland? The demonology of Iranian militants.
1:16:28 Dominic Sandbrook? 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
1:17:10 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Shah 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 Shah right now. And it may well be time to do a deal with the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
1:17:48 Tom Holland? 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
1:18:30 Tom Holland? 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 Hafiz.
1:18:42 Dominic Sandbrook? Koda Hafiz.
1:18:54 Speaker 02 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 Mohammad Mosaddegh 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 pyjamas. 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.
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