DAVE DAVIES, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies. For decades, Iran has been a major preoccupation of U.S. policymakers for its nuclear program, its threats to Israel and its backing of armed extremist groups in the Middle East. But go back a half a century, and Iran was a very different place. Our guest today, journalist Scott Anderson, has taken a close look at the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the violent upheaval that transformed the country from one of America's closest allies into the Islamic republic that regards the United States as the Great Satan. Before that, the country was governed by the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a monarch who ruled with political repression while seeking to modernize his nation's economy and social relations.
In a new book, Anderson writes that the Iranian Revolution had far-reaching effects, contributing to the rise of Islamic extremism. He says it marked the modern world's first successful religious counter revolution against the forces of secularism and was in some ways as significant as the American, French and Russian revolutions. His gripping account of the conflict suggests that the outcome was far from inevitable and that many factors, including the shah's personal failings and the inattention and poor decisions of American policymakers, contributed to the victory of Ayatollah Khomeini.
DAVIES: Scott Anderson is a veteran war correspondent who has reported from Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, Northern Ireland, Chechnya, Sudan, Bosnia and other countries. He's the author of seven previous books. His latest is "King Of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story Of Hubris, Delusion And Catastrophic Miscalculation." I spoke to Scott Anderson last week.
Well, Scott Anderson, welcome back to FRESH AIR
SCOTT ANDERSON: Thank you, Dave. It's good to be back.
DAVIES: I have to congratulate you on this book. It really is just a terrific gripping read. There is so much fascinating detail here. I just want to let the audience know there's more than we can get to, but there's plenty there. You know a lot about the Middle East. I mean, you traveled through it with your dad, who was - worked for the State...
ANDERSON: Yes.
DAVIES: ...Department when you were a kid. And you opened this book with a scene from Washington, D.C., in late 1977, when the Shah of Iran, on the throne for decades, came to America's capital for his first visit with the new president, Jimmy Carter. You happened to be there because you were a low-level treasury department, and you witnessed some events outside the White House. You want to just share this little scene with us?
ANDERSON: Sure. Yeah. So it was mid-November 1977, the shah came on a state visit, and some 4,000 anti-shah demonstrators, mostly Iranian students studying in the United States, arrived in Washington to protest his visit. And meanwhile, the Iranian government had shipped in pro-shah demonstrators to kind of face off with them. And so when the shah arrived and he had just reached the White House, all of a sudden, there was a pitch battle on the Ellipse, the Ellipse being this great lawn just below the White House. And I happened to be there. I was kind of wandering around. I was stationed at the treasury headquarters, which is right next door to the White House. And I had just wandered over, and I was kind of in no man's land between these two groups - the anti-shah and the pro-shah demonstrators. And all of a sudden, the two sides broke through the snow fencing that was keeping them back and charged each other.
And I happened to be at ground zero. I got knocked to the ground. Well, a lot of people got knocked to the ground. It turned out to be the most violent day of civil unrest in Washington you'd seen in almost a decade. And the thing about this day was, unfortunately, for the shah, it was being shown on live TV back in Iran. And the way a lot of people interpreted this event - and there was tear gas, the shah and President Carter were tear gassed on the South Lawn. A lot of Iranians saw this as a move by the Americans to distance themselves from the shah because why else would they let the shah be humiliated in the American capital?
DAVIES: Right. In their country, if something like that happened, surely the shah would have organized it. So they assumed Jimmy Carter was sending a message here.
ANDERSON: That's right.
DAVIES: In fact, he was quite humiliated to have this tear gas flowing into his event.
ANDERSON: Yeah, absolutely.
DAVIES: So, running the country in Iran in the 1970s was the shah, who had been in power since 1941, installed by the British and the Soviets, who were active then. This was during World War II. Give us a sense, you know, by the 1970s, of what his style was like, how he ruled the country, kind of what powers he exercised, and what the country's economy and social norms were.
ANDERSON: So he spent a long time early in his reign from '41 to probably the mid '60s. First of all, really trying to cozy up to the Americans. He saw the Americans, the superpower that would protect him from the encroachment of the Soviet Union on his northern border, and he was always afraid of communists within Iran. He tried to do something very difficult, which was to be socially and economically progressive. He gave women the right to vote. He went on this very ambitious land reform program. But at the same time, became more and more politically in control of the entire country. There was a parliament. It was a rubber stamp. It was really the shah and his generals who ran the country.
But I think it's important to note that the shah's Iran was never as repressive or as brutal as, say, Saddam Hussein's Iraq or Assad father-and-son Syria. He tended to buy people off. So there was - within Iran, there was a political opposition. Occasionally, some would be arrested, occasionally, some would be exiled. There was - certainly the clerics didn't like him because they saw him secularizing the society. But a lot of them were on sinecures from the state also. So it was kind of a regime where if you had a certain amount of power, a certain amount of clout, you were more likely to be bought off than thrown in prison.
DAVIES: Right. And, of course, there was a lot of oil money. I guess, starting in the '60s and '70s, they nationalized the oil production. So that had a lot of effects - major changes, you know, dramatic contrasts, I guess, in wealth and poverty.
ANDERSON: Oh, yes, absolutely. I was in - as you mentioned, I was traveling with my father through Iran in 1974. And what I remember from being in Tehran and in the countryside, in Tehran, it was a, you know, modern, smoggy city, you saw women in miniskirts, clogged with traffic, and literally 10 miles outside of Tehran, people were living in mud huts and using cow - drying cow dung to use as fuel. So there was a tremendous disparity between the haves and have-nots. And what would also happen with this huge influx of money in the early '70s, oil money, you had this huge movement of poor from the countryside moving into the city, mostly young men, largely uneducated. And if they could find work, they were working at these, you know, really menial jobs. But more significantly, they came from very religious backgrounds, and they were - I think a lot of them were just kind of stunned at what they saw as the cosmopolitan nature of Tehran and other Iranian cities.
DAVIES: You write about a guy, a minor character in the book, who was a religious missionary from the United States, George Braswell, but he revealed something really meaningful about the society.
ANDERSON: Yes. George Braswell is fascinating. He went to Iran with his family - wife and three kids - in 1968 as an evangelist. And he was the first Southern Baptist evangelist to go back into Iran after about 50 or 60 years. He quickly realized that the government was not going to let him proslytize, and he was really kind of at a loss of what to do until he met the dean of the school of religion at Tehran University. And the dean hired him on to teach comparative religion at the University of Tehran. Everybody else on the faculty of religion were Muslim. George was the only Christian, but he's a very friendly guy, very affable, very curious about Iranian society. So people really opened up to him.
And in particular, after he'd been there for a while, one of his graduate students said, you know, would you like to see a special kind of service? And George didn't know what that meant, but he said, well, sure, yeah. You know, I'm fascinated by Islam. So the graduate student took him in the middle of the night to this hut out in the southern suburbs. And it was all these, you know, younger clerics, mullahs, gathered around a tape cassette player. And they played this tape where the person on the tape was saying, we have to start organizing for the revolution. And that voice was Ayatollah Khomeini from - sending the tape in from exile in Iraq.
George Braswell had never heard of Khomeini before. This was in 1968, and it would be another about seven years before he would even be mentioned in any State Department cables from Tehran, you know, back to the States. He was utterly invisible to the Americans. Braswell just assumed that the CIA, which had a very large station in Tehran - that they knew all about Khomeini - and certainly people at the State Department. He tried to meet with people at the State Department, and they just ignored him.
DAVIES: Right. So there was this churning force among the poor of Iran that a lot of them - that a lot of people just didn't know about, but it was you know, led by Khomeini. The shah faced a critical confrontation in 1963 with Khomeini, which was an important moment. Tell us about this.
ANDERSON: Yeah. This - so in 1963, the shah initiated what he called his White Revolution, and it was a total of 19 reforms in his mind. And it was to sort of propel Iran into the 20th century. It was a real grab bag of things - everything from a reforestation to collectivization to giving landless peasants, of which - a majority of Iran's rural population did not own their land, to break up the big landholdings in Iran and also to give women the right to vote, to empower women. And this immediately caused a backlash among the conservative clergy in Iran, especially led by one of the most vehemently arch conservative, Ayatollah Khomeini.
The shah made the mistake of arresting Khomeini and that sparked riots throughout Iran. The shah's prime minister then decided to declare martial law. There was shooting in the streets of a number of Iranian cities. Probably about 150 people were killed. They arrested - they, again, grabbed Khomeini. And Khomeini then was quiet for a little while, and he started up again with his agitation. And so the second time, the shah sent him into exile. He first went to Turkey and then ended up in Iraq in the Shiite holy city of Najaf in southern Iraq.
DAVIES: Right. So for the next decade, a couple of decades, Khomeini was active but outside the country, sending cassette tapes of his sermons and still a force.
ANDERSON: That's right. And I think one of the things I understand about Khomeini's power over - once the revolution started, you know, again, a lot of people had never heard of Khomeini within Iran, when the revolution started in '78. He'd been airbrushed out of history by the shah's regime. But once the revolution got started in earnest, he became this sort of symbol of incorruptibility. He was a man who could not be bought. Well, he was in exile. So there's no way to buy him anyway. And so even though there was a lot of other ayatollahs, who were in opposition to the shah, none of them had quite the moral authority that Khomeini did because, you know, they - over the years, a lot of them had been on stipends from the regime. So Khomeini had this image of the pure, uncorrupted religious leader. And that, I think, it was really the source of a lot of his power.
DAVIES: We need to take a break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Scott Anderson. He's a veteran journalist. His new book is "King Of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story Of Hubris, Delusion And Catastrophic Miscalculation." We'll continue our conversation after this short break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with veteran journalist and author Scott Anderson. He has a new book about the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which ushered in the Islamic Republic. The book is called "King Of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story Of Hubris, Delusion And Catastrophic Miscalculation."
So you know, back in the '70s, I mean, Iran was a critical ally for the United States. They had provided him with great weaponry. And thus, it had a fairly large staff in its embassy in Tehran, as well as a significant CIA station. But you write that these - both the State Department and the intelligence community's knowledge of the country was shockingly shallow. How was this evident in your research?
ANDERSON: Oh, I'll tell a great story about that. When the first major riots happened, the anti-shah riots happened, and it was in February of 1978, and it was in a provincial city called Tabriz in northwestern Iran. And there was an American consul there, a man named Mike Metrinko. This was - they gutted the city center. There was a path of destruction, about 8 miles long and about 5 miles wide. They just completely gutted the new kind of commercial center of Tabriz, which is a major city.
This was such big news, by far, the biggest you know, civil disturbance in decades that even if the regime had tried to downplay it, it was impossible. So it was the Tabriz riots in which probably over a hundred people were killed. They were the headlines on every Iranian newspaper for days. It was, of course, the lead story on national news, the television news.
And so Metrinko was - had been the only American there. He reported back what was happening to the embassy, and about four or five days after the riots, he hears that a CIA officer is coming up to - and wants to meet with him. He's coming up to Tabriz. And Metrinko's was, wow, great, finally. You know, the CIA has done such a horrible job, you know, reporting on this country. But, you know, now, finally, somebody is coming to take a look on the ground of what's really happening. So the CIA officer arrives, Metrinko picks him up at the airport and they start driving into the city center. And all of a sudden, the CIA officer kind of sits up and looks out at the destruction and goes, what the hell happened here? He was coming to see Metrinko on a completely different matter.
So even though the riots were - he was stationed at the - he was in the CIA station in Tehran. Even though it was the lead story on national news for four or five days, he hadn't even heard of it. You know, and that to me just personifies what the CIA was doing there. They were under - what their whole focus was, the CIA, in Iran was spying on the Soviet Union, southern Soviet Union. So they had listening posts along the Iranian border. They never were doing any sort of domestic intelligence gathering.
Even more remarkably, anything they were getting from domestically was handed to them by the shah's secret police, SAVAK. And, you know, SAVAK said everything's going great, you know (laughter)? So there was no intelligence gathering. And this was, as you said, this was one of the United States' most important allies anywhere in the world, and nobody was paying any attention to what was happening internally.
DAVIES: Yeah, it's really remarkable how this mandated group think - that this is our ally and everything's great, and he's got it under control - reigned. This guy that you mentioned, Michael Metrinko, is a fascinating character. And there are two other cases in the book where you point out that he gave reports about stuff that should have been very troubling signs of the shah's weakness. In one case, a lot of people that he knew were, like, cashing in their life savings and leaving the country because things were bad. In another case, there was kind of a mutiny happening among some air force pilots.
ANDERSON: Right.
DAVIES: And when he sends this, and it in some cases actually gets passed along to the State Department headquarters, what's the reaction of his superiors?
ANDERSON: The reaction of his superiors is not only to ignore it but to reprimand him for it, that, you know, he's seeing problems where problems don't exist. He's the hysteric out in the provinces and just roundly ignored. Significantly, Metrinko was one of the only people at the embassy who actually spoke Farsi, who could understand what was happening locally. Virtually everybody else did not speak Farsi. And he had a very wide, you know, social circle, a very gregarious guy.
And so he saw disaster coming long before anybody else. He had served in Iran in the early '70s. He came back in 1977 when the revolution was just starting to kind of perk up a little bit. And this is when he saw people just bailing out of the country, including the wealthy class, and people saying this place is going down the tubes. And when he tried to tell people that, he was completely ignored.
Most incredibly with Metrinko - after the revolution, Khomeini came to power in February of 1979. And so for the next year or nine months, the Carter administration tried to make nice with the Khomeini regime, tried to repair this anti-American feeling. And the people at the embassy were kind of replicating what they had said with the shah. They said, yeah, everything's going good. You know, they're not really anti-American. They know they have to be allies with us because all their weaponry is American. And again Metrinko was the one person who was saying, no, this place is about to blow up.
And so in September of '79, this is about six weeks before the American hostages are taken, Metrinko takes a brief home vacation. He comes back to the States. And somebody at the State Department hears he's in town and says, look, Mike, you know, I've been reading your reports from the field, and they're different from what everybody else is saying, you know? And, you know, you're really painting a very grim picture of what's happening. Will you come in and talk to, like, the senior policy people in the State Department about what you see? And so Metrinko agrees to do that.
They take over a conference room on the seventh floor of the State Department the next afternoon. Metrinko arrives a bit early and is going over his notes. And a State Department security officer comes into the conference room, kind of taps him on the shoulder and leads him outside and says, yeah, you know, this meeting has been given a security classification higher than your clearance to attend. (Laughter) And Metrinko says, do you realize that this meeting is being held because of what I've been reporting in the field? And the guy says, yeah, doesn't matter. So the meeting doesn't take place. Metrinko goes back to Iran a couple of weeks later. And a month after that, he and everybody else in the embassy are taken hostage.
DAVIES: Let's take another break here. We are speaking with Scott Anderson. His new book is "King Of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story Of Hubris, Delusion And Catastrophic Miscalculation." We'll hear more of our conversation after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF ALLISON MILLER AND JENNY SCHEINMAN'S "HUDSON")
DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies. We are listening to my interview with veteran journalist and author Scott Anderson. His new book is a gripping account of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which deposed the long-reigning Shah of Iran and transformed the country from an American ally to an Islamic republic and bitter enemy of the United States. Anderson's account details blunders by U.S. policymakers that likely contributed to the victory of Ayatollah Khomeini over more moderate rivals. Anderson's book is "King Of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story Of Hubris, Delusion And Catastrophic Miscalculation." We spoke last week.
As 1978 unfolded, there was increasing chaos in the country - riots, strikes and such, a lot of it supported by Khomeini. There were a group of men around Khomeini, and one of them was a pharmacology professor living in Texas.
ANDERSON: Right, right, right.
DAVIES: But an Iranian fella who had spent a lot of years in the opposition movement. His name was Ebrahim Yazdi, right?
ANDERSON: That's right.
DAVIES: He realized that it was important for Khomeini to convince the United States that his ascent to leadership in Iran should be welcomed and not feared. How did he do this?
ANDERSON: One thing that really surprised me when I started looking at this story was how much of the focus of even the Carter administration was still on the Cold War, was still about the Soviet Union. And so, you know, the mindset of the Cold War was that everything was a zero-sum game. If we lose, then the Soviets win and vice versa. So at first, when the revolution started, of course, the Americans were kind of panicking.
But what Yazdi managed to figure out was what - their biggest fear wasn't losing the shah but was losing Iran to the Soviets. And, of course, that was kind of absurd when you look at Khomeini because of, you know, he was a rabid anti-communist. At the same time, he kind of moderated Khomeini's speeches and what he would say in press conferences. Well, first of all, he was instrumental in moving Khomeini from Iraq to Paris in October of '78. So all of a sudden, Khomeini is available to the entire world's media. And again, because very few journalists speak Farsi, Yazdi was acting as his interpreter, and he would modify and moderate what Khomeini was saying to make him sound, like, more reasonable.
And at the same time this was going on, Yazdi was sending out the message that you have nothing to fear about a communist takeover if Khomeini comes to power. It's anathema to Khomeini, communism. So what you start seeing about October, November within the Carter administration is, of course, they want the shah to stay on. But all of a sudden, they're looking at Khomeini and going, well, you know, if he comes in, that's not the worst thing. The worst thing would be if the reds take over. And really by about November of '79, about two months before the shah went into exile, the Americans were kind of already distancing themselves from him because it wasn't - you know, Khomeini wasn't going to be the worst thing.
DAVIES: What's fascinating about it, is this guy Yazdi is there translating Khomeini's words to Western journalists, but he's deliberately getting them wrong. I mean, didn't some people around them realize that say, hey, wait a minute. Do you know what this guy's saying?
ANDERSON: You know, it goes back to this thing about, you know, the level of communications at the time. Even some of the people who were in Khomeini's camp, some of the kind of Westerners who rallied around and were congregating around him in Paris, a few journalists who did speak Farsi were translating stuff, and they would show things that Khomeini had written back in the '50s and '60s, that all governments in the world are illegitimate except the ones, you know, appointed by God. And when they saw these writings, they assumed that they were SAVAK forgeries. They said, no, no one can actually believe this. These are forgeries.
And that happened even in Paris. There was a couple of journalists who said, you know, what he's saying is really incendiary, and he's talking about, you know, rivers of blood to flow. And people like Yazdi around him going, no, no, no, he didn't say that. That's not what that means. You know, this is SAVAK disinformation.
DAVIES: And what is striking about this - I mean, I remember this moment in the book where this - representative Yazdi would say, no, no, he never said torrents of blood.
ANDERSON: Right.
DAVIES: It turns out the State Department had all of - countless cassettes of Khomeini's...
ANDERSON: Yeah.
DAVIES: ...Sermons in their possession, which were filled with rhetoric that would have cast him in a very different light. But they somehow never listened to them?
ANDERSON: That's right. That's right. When the embassy was taken over by the hostage takers in November of '79, they were going all - you know, they were rifling all through the embassy safes and file cabinets looking for incriminating information. And they just found stacks and stacks and stacks of cassettes of Khomeini's sermons. They had been collected both by the CIA and by the State Department. Nobody had listened to them. Nobody who spoke Farsi had listened to them. Nobody transcribed them. So you're absolutely right. It was a roadmap to what Khomeini was going to do if he took over, and they never listened to him. They didn't even have, you know, one of the local workers at the embassy listen to them.
DAVIES: Yeah. So they were kind of flying blind...
ANDERSON: Completely.
DAVIES: ...In terms of what was going to happen. You know, there's a fascinating period as the end approached and it was clear that the shah was in deep trouble, and at this point, I mean, the State Department had dispensed with this idea that, you know, the shah is in control and everything's fine. But you say that they pursued - the Carter administration pursued a dual track approach to the crisis whose incoherence and guaranteed futility had few parallels in modern diplomatic history.
ANDERSON: (Laughter) Right.
DAVIES: This is quite something. So what were these two approaches carried out by different people?
ANDERSON: So one idea was that we should continue to support the shah or at least, you know, his caretaker regime behind it. And then the second was to make overtures to Khomeini and the people around him. Where it really became quite bizarre was in the very last days when the shah was there, they sent an American general to Iran to meet with the shah's generals. And at this point, the shah's generals were about - they wanted to bail out of the country, you know, right along with the shah. This general convinced them to stay. But they had this very complicated...
DAVIES: The American general convinced them to stay.
ANDERSON: I'm sorry. The American general - yeah - convinced them to stay. But they had this very complicated, you know, program that they were supposed to follow. No. 1, they were supposed to stay loyal to the interim government, the caretaker government that the shah was leaving behind. And two, if that proved impossible, they were to stage a military coup. The military was supposed to take over. The problem was that you were dealing with a group of generals who had never worked with each other. The general worked with four generals and one admiral in the Iranian armed forces. Those were the five who were supposed to be in control of everything.
Some of those men and never met each other because the shah was so paranoid of losing power that he met with his generals individually. He never met with them as a group. He didn't want one to know the other. And so he would send different, you know, messages, different orders to different people. So these generals had spent a whole career - their careers, just following orders and not having an original thought of their own. So the idea that these men were going to somehow organize a coup, you know, Mike Metrinko famously said, you know, he knew a lot of these generals. He said, these guys couldn't maneuver their way through a grocery checkout line, you know...
(LAUGHTER)
ANDERSON: ...Let alone stage a coup. And, of course, they didn't. And they - by staying behind, most of them were executed by the Khomeini regime.
DAVIES: We are speaking with Scott Anderson. He's a veteran journalist. His new book is "King Of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story Of Hubris, Delusion And Catastrophic Miscalculation." We'll continue our conversation after this short break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're listening to the interview I recorded with veteran journalist and author Scott Anderson. He has a new book which is a detailed account of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which deposed the shah who had ruled for decades and transformed the country into an Islamic republic. The book is called "King Of Kings."
So in the end, the country's military declares its neutrality. You know, discipline falls apart. A lot of soldiers desert. Militants break into bases. They get weapons. And the country is taken over by these semi-organized forces loyal to the ayatollah. President Carter immediately recognizes the Islamic republic - right? - hoping for a friendly relationship and some moderation. But as it all takes shape, there are hundreds, thousands of executions, eventually, without trials. A new constitution gives the ayatollah complete control, affirming that the supreme leader's views and actions are guided by God. And, of course, hostages are eventually taken from the U.S. Embassy and held for over 400 days. Death to the U.S. becomes the mantra of the regime - exactly what the U.S. had hoped to avoid, wasn't it?
ANDERSON: Right. Yeah, and I - there's another little detail to this that I think is really remarkable. So in the run-up to the hostages being taken, what really precipitated - the catalyst for the hostages being taken was when the Carter administration allowed the shah to come to the United States for medical treatment. And he'd been trying to get into States for months and months, ever since he'd gone into exile. David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger were lobbying on his behalf and, you know, telling Carter, you have to do this. It's a matter of national honor.
Then all of a sudden, the shah becomes deathly ill, and doctors around him saying, oh, he can only be treated in the United States. And the Carter administration's first reaction is, you know, what convenient timing, you know (laughter)? He's been trying to get here forever, and now all of a sudden, he has a - it's a life or death thing. But it looked like he was - he was very seriously ill.
And famously, in late October, Carter convened all his closest foreign policy advisors in the Oval Office - Vice President Mondale, national security advisor, secretary of state. And as Carter often did, he went around the room and asked each person in the room what they should do? Should they let the shah in? And everybody in the room said, yeah, we have to let him in. It's a matter of national honor. We have to stand by a former ally. And Carter looked at them and said, what are you guys going to tell me to do when they attack our embassy and take our people there hostage? And nobody said a thing. And then Carter said, yeah, that's what I thought you were going to say. So he saw it coming, and he was just kind of powerless to stop it.
DAVIES: That is quite a moment. And I think the officials at the embassy in Tehran had warned them, look, if you let the shah into the country, they're going to send us back in boxes.
ANDERSON: That's right. They warned him again and again. And Carter had listened to them up through until October of '79. And that - then when all of a sudden, it looked like the shah was close to death and needed to be seen by American doctors, that's when he finally relented and, you know, disaster unfolded.
DAVIES: You say that this revolution led directly to some of America's greatest missteps in the region. Which one? And what's the connection?
ANDERSON: So, I mean, starting kind of right off the bat, with the Khomeini regime, they immediately started to militarize their allies throughout the region, famously Hezbollah and Amal in Lebanon. So when Lebanon blew up again in '82, '83, it was Hezbollah units that blew up the American Embassy and then blew up the American Marine compound in 1983, started taking Americans hostage. And then going forward from that, I mean, if you look at the invasion of Iraq, who benefited from that were the Iranians because in the power vacuum that that created, they now have enormous influence over - certainly over southern Iraq, which the - the Shiite heartland.
And throughout the region, these groups that have been kind of squashed in the last year or so by the Israelis, these were all the regime's you know, kind of mischief makers out in the region. And, I mean, ISIS was Sunni, but by Iran supporting Bashar al-Assad in Syria, an absolutely murderous regime, if you look at what was happening in the Middle East four, five, six years ago, you would have to say that the Iranians had far more influence than the Americans had. They were, you know - the Americans had, as they're want to do, they had involved themselves in a region, you know, come in. They were going to be the peacekeepers, the liberators, and then things went south and they jumped out. And that has only changed very recently.
DAVIES: You raised the question in the book that, you know, this was not inevitable, that there were a lot of missteps that made this come out the way it did. And you say, you know - some officials say that if the shah were just more decisive, if he had failed - hadn't failed to act at critical junctures, he could have survived. And I think a lot of people would say, you know - then and probably now - that's not exactly a desirable outcome to have this absolute monarch there. I mean, what do you - what about that?
ANDERSON: No, I think that's true. I think that people always say, you know, he would be hard for a while, then he'd go soft and back and forth. He had to oscillate. But, in fact, he did even worse than that. He did both simultaneously. So he declares martial law, but then tells the generals that, you know, only under the most dire circumstances are soldiers to fire live ammunition. So he kind of tries to do both things at the same time. I think if the shah had - if he had taken a Saddam Hussein or an Assad approach, if he hadn't just machine gunned his people in the streets, he might've lasted a bit longer. Conversely, I think that there was a time when if he had pushed for reform and agreed to lose a lot of his power and to have more of a parliamentary democracy where he had very limited power, I think he might've survived. But I think by trying to do both at the same time, it was kind of impossible.
And, you know, it's curious. Now his son, crown prince Reza, amidst, you know, the disturbance or the bombings lately, you know, he's gone around to the media and kind of presented himself as the alternative. And supposedly there's this royalist resurgence in restoring the monarchy. And (laughter) I just find it a bit laughable. You know, 80% of Iranians now have been born after the revolution, so there's very little memory of the shah's time. What memory there is, is probably quite hostile under the education system of the Islamic Republic. I don't think that there's any chance that the monarchy is reinstated.
DAVIES: You know, I noticed from the acknowledgment section of the book that you spoke to people who are still in Iran, as part of your research.
ANDERSON: Yeah.
DAVIES: The current regime is, I think, known to be unpopular. Do you see prospects for change?
ANDERSON: You know, that's a great question. And I actually, since the Israeli and American bombing of Iran, I've talked to several of the people I know in Iran. Most of them, frankly, are not fans of the regime. But what they've all said is that the bombings gave the regime just a new lease on life. It's produced this rallying around the flag effect inside Iran. You know, as a general rule, people don't like being bombed by foreign armies. And they feel the idea of this regime getting toppled or reformed in a significant way has just been pushed off a lot by the actions of the Israelis and the Americans at this point.
I think something else to keep in mind about Iran. Yes, it's a brutal regime. It's a repressive regime. But there's certain openings in it. There's an element of freedom. There's elections, and sometimes the elections are honest (laughter). You're allowed a certain degree of dissent. You know, not all women now, you know, wear veils. And I think they've been quite clever in giving people just enough so that things don't blow up.
It kind of reminds me of, say, you know, late-day Soviet Union or late-day East Germany. That, you know, certainly they weren't as repressive as they had been 20 years before. But again, it's the question of when you start opening a little bit, you know, how can you control? How do you keep the lid just slightly ajar and keep it from coming off completely? But I think thus far, one of the reasons is the regime is very selective of who they crush. And they do allow sort of a degree of freedom that creates a hope that maybe some more will come.
DAVIES: Well, Scott Anderson, it's an interesting book. Thank you so much for speaking with us.
ANDERSON: Thank you, Dave. I really appreciate it.
DAVIES: Scott Anderson is a veteran war correspondent. His new book is "King Of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story Of Hubris, Delusion And Catastrophic Miscalculation." Coming up, David Bianculli reviews the new two-part HBO documentary "Billy Joel: And So It Goes." This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BENNIE MAUPIN QUARTET'S "THE BENNIE MAUPIN QUARTET") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.