Fall of the Shah of Iran

Iran’s 20 th century history has been marked with turbulence and vertiginous instability. It began auspiciously, however, in 1909 with the British discovery at Masjet Soleiman, Iran, of the first large oil field in the Middle East. Iran today contains greater than 10% of the world’s proven oil reserves, second only to Saudi Arabia, and the world’s second largest natural gas reserves, second only to Russia.

Iran’s Pahlevi Dynasty began with the tall shah on horseback, Reza Khan, an ardent nationalist who ascended from common soldier to King in the early 1920s to modernize his country and eliminate the intrusion of religion into the nation’s public life. Reza Khan held a dim view of the role played in the society by reactionary and often semiliterate Islamic Shiite clerics and removed their judicial and educational responsibilities while developing under state auspices a modern school system with the University of Tehran, opened in the 1930s, at its apex. He also called for the emancipation and education of women, which included forbidding the veiling of women in public.

In August 1941, two months after the German invasion of the USSR and shortly after Reza Khan had dallied with a secret alliance with Nazi Germany, British and Soviet forces occupied Iran, forced the shah into exile, and placed his son, Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlevi, on the Peacock Throne. American troops later handled the delivery of war supplies from Iran to the USSR, which together share 2,640 kilometers of common land and sea borders.

In 1952, the National Front movement, headed by Premier Muhammad Mossadeq and supported by the Iranian Tudeh (Communist) Party, forced the Iranian parliament to nationalize the (mostly British-owned) Anglo-Iranian Oil Company through creation of the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) (see www.nioc.com).* Winston Churchill and other Brits were furious. The administration of President Harry S Truman initially had been sympathetic to Iran’s nationalist aspirations. Under the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, however, the U.S. accepted the British view that no reasonable compromise with Mossadeq was possible and that a probable communist-inspired takeover of Iran was imminent. In June 1953, the Eisenhower administration approved a British proposal for a joint Anglo-American operation, code-named Operation Ajax, to overthrow Mossadeq. Kermit Roosevelt, head of the fledgling U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) Middle East division and grandson of Theodore Roosevelt, traveled secretly to Iran to coordinate plans with the shah and the Iranian military, which was led by General Fazlollah Zahedi.

Photo C: CIA’s Kermit Roosevelt:
source: http://www.flyingfish.org.uk/articles/rushdie/00-06-16tim.htm.

The shah, according to the plan, appointed Zahedi prime minister to replace Mossadeq on August 13, 1953. Mossadeq refused to step down and arrested the shah’s emissary. This triggered the second stage of Operation Ajax, which called for a military coup. The plan initially seemed to have failed, causing the shah to flee to Baghdad and Zahedi to go into hiding. After four days of public rioting, the tide turned. On August 19, 1953, pro-shah army units and street crowds defeated Mossadeq’s forces. The shah returned to the country and the Peacock Throne. Mossadeq served three years in prison and lived the rest of his life under house arrest in his village outside Tehran.

The Consortium Agreement reached in 1954 between the Iranian government and a consortium of foreign oil companies left industry control of the companies virtually intact, but the agreement greatly increased the Iranian government’s share of income from each barrel of oil produced. In addition, the oil crisis of 1954 led to a policy of increased economic and political cooperation between Iran and states outside the Soviet sphere of influence.

The shah managed to hold onto power until Jimmy Carter assumed the presidency in 1977. “Jimmy Carter…inherited a unique relationship with Iran and the shah, one set in place by Richard Nixon,” according to one source.*** “Nixon and the shah had known each other as far back as 1953, when as vice president, Nixon visited the young shah in the wake of the CIA-sponsored coup (Operation Ajax) that returned the shah to the throne. Two decades later when, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, President Nixon sought to reduce American military commitments in far-flung areas…Iran fulfilled a crucial role: protecting American and Western interests in the Persian Gulf. In return, Nixon and the shah agreed in a set of 1972 agreements that Iran would receive US military advisers, technicians and weaponry, including the most sophisticated conventional weapons then in the American arsenal.

“American deference to the shah spread beyond weapons to intelligence. The CIA dismantled many of its own operations in Iran, and it thus became more and more reliant on SAVAK, the shah’s feared secret police, for information about internal events…In these circumstances, the quality of American intelligence—both covert and open—on Iran declined steadily.” (p. 3) President Carter stopped in Tehran in 1977 to reach a verbal understanding with the shah on non-proliferation arrangements to accompany the sale of American nuclear power plants to Iran.

No one predicted that the shah was in imminent danger of falling in spite of increasing unrest spreading across the county. In particular, massive demonstrations on September 4 and 5, 1978 prompted declaration of martial law two days later. When a crowd of 10,000-20,000 the following day met at Tehran’s Jaleh Square and refused to disperse, government troops opened fire, killing 122 and wounding 2,000 to 3,000. The Jaleh Square massacre was considered the turning point between sporadic acts of popular rebellion against the shah to genuine revolution. The shah asked President Carter to reiterate his public support, which Carter did in a statement from the White House reaffirming the close ties between Iran and the U.S. The statement, which was read over the air on Tehran Radio, only served to identify the US with the Jaleh Square massacre.

On January 16, 1979, the shah fled Iran, unlike 1953, not to return. He died in exile in June 1979. The aged Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Khomeini, flew from Paris to Tehran on February 1, 1979, ending fourteen years of exile, to lead religious revolutionaries in the final overthrow of the shah’s government on February 11, 1979. Conservative clerical forces established a theocratic system of government with ultimate political authority vested in the learned religious scholar. The new government nationalized industries and banks and revived Islamic traditions. Western influence and music were banned, women were forced to return to traditional veiled dress, and Westernized elites fled the country.

On November 4, 1979 scores of Iranian students loyal to Khomeini scaled the walls of the US embassy in Tehran and took hostage 54 Americans (the entire US diplomatic mission) thereby setting off a tense fifteen-month standoff between the US and Iran. Khomeini refused all appeals, and agitation increased toward the West with the Carter administration’s economic boycott, the breaking of diplomatic relations, and an unsuccessful hostage rescue attempt in April 1980. The hostage crisis, which lasted 444 days, finally ended on the same day (January 20, 1981) that Ronald Reagan became US president.

Just to keep things interesting, on September 22, 1980, Iraq invaded Iran, commencing an eight-year war involving use of chemical weapons on both sides, primarily over a disputed waterway called Shatt al Arab. The war devastated Iran’s military and oil industry, and resulted in approximately 500,000 casualties. Some of the bombed Iranian oil refineries are only now coming back online. Khomeini called for the overthrow of Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein. In November 1986, US government officials secretly visited Iran to trade arms with the predominantly Shiite Muslim Iranians, in the hopes of securing the release of American hostages being held in Lebanon by Shiite Muslim terrorists. On July 3, 1988, a US Navy warship mistakenly shot down an Iranian civilian aircraft, killing all aboard. That same month, Khomeini agreed to accept a United Nations cease-fire with Iraq, ending the war. Khomeini died in 1989 (87 years old).

In 1995, the administration of President Clinton suspended all trade with Iran, accusing Iran of supporting terrorist groups and attempting to develop nuclear weapons. Currently, Iran has several small nuclear research reactors, in addition to a large-scale nuclear power plant under construction with the aid of Russia at the southern Iranian town of Bushehr. Iran claims that its nuclear power is for peaceful purposes and that it will help free up oil and natural gas resources for export, thus generating additional hard-currency revenues.

In September 2003, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) gave Iran until October 31, 2003 to provide guarantees that its nuclear program was for peaceful purposes and to open the country to snap inspections by the IAEA. In mid-March 2004 (8 months ago), Iran announced that it was barring nuclear inspectors from entering the country for an indefinite period of time after the IAEA passed a resolution rebuking Iran for failure to fully disclose the details of its past nuclear activity. However, Iran shortly reversed course and allowed IAEA inspectors to continue their work. In February 2003, Iran began mining uranium deposits near the central Iranian city of Yazd, and was constructing a uranium enrichment facility at Natanz. Some analysts believe that Yazd and Natanz are part of an Iranian effort to attain self-sufficiency in the entire nuclear fuel cycle. Currently, Iran receives nuclear fuel from Russia and returns spent nuclear fuel rods from Bushehr back to Russia for reprocessing.

Today, the US Department of State describes Iran as risky for travel, particularly along the border with Iraq, where U.S. citizens may be at higher risk of kidnapping. The US government does not currently have diplomatic or consular relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran (the famous US embassy remains closed) and cannot provide protection or routine consular services to American citizens in Iran. The Swiss government, however, serves as “protecting power” for U.S. interests in Iran. US citizens of Iranian origin are considered by Iran to be Iranian citizens and may be detained and harassed by Iranian authorities. Former Muslims who have converted to other religions, as well as persons who encourage Muslims to convert, are subject to arrest and prosecution (see http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/tw/tw_920.html Accessed July 6, 2005.).

Notes:

*The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company later became the British Petroleum Company (BP).

**Kermit Roosevelt: Counter Coup: The Struggle for the Control of Iran, McGraw Hill 1979.

*** Gregory F. Treverton, with the assistance of James Klocke, prepared “The Fall of the Shah of Iran” as part of the Diplomatic Training Initiative sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts for use at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 1988. A copy of the case may be purchased for $5 at: http://www.ksgcase.harvard.edu/.