Also, I remembered a story recounted to my CT class in the early days of our training by Don Gregg, a senior Agency officer.12 In the course of making several points, Gregg told us what things had been like after he joined the Agency during the Korean War. While in training, his class was asked if they would be willing to parachute into North Korea and undertake secret missions. Gregg told us that he and his classmates responded in the affirmative without bothering to mull it over, even for a minute. Why? Because if that is what your country and your Agency asked you to do, you did it. There was nothing to think over. That’s what the business was about and that’s what you did when you made your living serving your country.
When the day came to depart for Tehran, I made the standard courtesy call on DC/NE. He ushered me into his office, chatted a minute or two about my itinerary, and wished me well. Then he walked me to the door, shook my hand, looked me in the eye, and sagely advised, “Don’t fuck up.” It was a heartwarming send-off.
I arrived in Tehran on 12 September 1979 and began the first of what turned out to be only fifty-three days of freedom. I worked at least eight hours a day as the political-military affairs officer and found that I enjoyed that assignment almost as much as my “real” job—which I was doing in the evenings and on weekends. It made for long days, but it was all interesting and fun. I also discovered that if I knew little about Iran, I knew even less about Iranians.
My entire exposure to Iranian history and culture, beyond the evening television news, came from a three-week area studies course at the State Department and what I had picked up during five weeks on the desk reading operational files and intelligence reports. Virtually all my insights into the Persian mind and personality came from a lengthy memo written by John Stempel, the recently reassigned political counselor, that described in detail (the accuracy of which I would have ample time to confirm) how Iranians viewed the world and why and how they thought and believed as they did. It did not take much effort to discern that even friendly and pro-Western Iranians could at times be difficult for an American to deal with or comprehend.
The thrust of Stempel’s memo was neatly summed up by U.S. Navy captain Gary Sick, the Iran action officer on the National Security Council (NSC) staff under President Carter, in the book he wrote about the hostage crisis: “Iranians assume that a simple forthright explanation of events is merely camouflage concealing the devious intricacies of ‘reality.’ Thus, to Iranians, any significant political, economic, or social upheaval in Iran must be traceable to the manipulation of external powers. As such, events are perceived as neither random nor aimless; rather, they must be understood as purposeful and integral to some grand scheme or strategy, however difficult it is to fathom.”13
My first encounter with the Iranian elite several weeks after my arrival served as a memorable introduction to this cultural phenomenon. I was meeting with an Iranian woman who, with her husband, owned a successful construction company. This couple was wealthy and highly educated, well traveled and experienced in foreign cultures. This background notwithstanding, the woman insisted that the Iranian government was directly controlled by the CIA—a common perception in Iran ever since the 1953 coup. She was positive the chief of the Iranian desk at CIA headquarters talked every day to the shah by telephone to give him his instructions for that particular day. She asserted that the U.S. government had made a deliberate decision to rid Iran of the shah for some unknown reason. Since the U.S. government had not, in her scenario, decided who should replace the shah as ruler, Khomeini had been installed as the temporary puppet until the CIA could select a new shah. Once the Agency had made that decision, it would manipulate events to place the lucky man on the Peacock Throne. She held no edifying insights into what the CIA’s plans were for Khomeini once his utility to the American government had been exhausted.
I was both fascinated and stupefied by this exposition. The woman’s unshakable theory did not encompass an explanation of why the United States would have permitted the bloody street riots in 1977 and 1978. Nor did it explain why, if the U.S. government (or the CIA) wanted the shah to leave as early as 1977, he was not just ordered to go, thereby avoiding the enormous problems visited on revolutionary Iran. To an American it was just plain nuts; to an Iranian it made perfect sense.14
My initial weeks in Tehran passed quickly. The chargé d’affaires ad interim, a courtly and highly respected career Foreign Service officer named L. Bruce Laingen, was both gracious and enormously helpful in seeing that I was included in high-level meetings with Iranian officials, as was air force major general Phillip Gast, head of MAAG.15 Both of these exceptional gentlemen generously ensured that I participated in substantive meetings at the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Defense, and at the Iranian General Staffs headquarters. I worked essentially full-time during the day on my cover duties, which were much more interesting than onerous and dealt with issues of genuine import; in the evenings, I reverted to my “true” persona as a CIA case officer. I was thirty-two years old and at the top of my form, physically and, especially, mentally, and during those fifty-three days on the streets of Tehran I reveled in it all. On 21 October, however, I realized that my euphoria would probably be short-lived.
RETROSPECTIVE: A HISTORY LESSON
America and Iran were never natural allies. For much of its modern history the country once known as Persia was like a fish between two cats, the object of unwanted attention from rival imperialistic powers Great Britain and Russia. Each of the two powers attempted to acquire or control, and then exploit, Persian resources and territories, just as other invaders had done for centuries before. Throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, America remained aloof from this competition while the Persians maintained their independence by playing each of the rivals against the other.1 Only with the onset of the Cold War did Iran, as it was renamed in 1935, come to sustain the concentrated attention of the U.S. government. And as a result, the United States eventually moved, in Iranians’ view, from a likable and benevolent friend to just another foreign oppressor: “The protector [became] the exploiter” as one Iran scholar states it.2 But this occurred neither quickly nor—as is popularly now claimed in Iran—because of the role played by the United States in the 1953 coup that restored the shah to power.3
From the 1830s, when Americans were first known to have set foot in Iran, until the late 1940s, the United States was content to leave Iran (and all of Southwest Asia, for that matter) to the British, in whose area of influence that region lay. U.S. policymakers studiously ignored periodic importuning from Iranian leaders for closer ties or material assistance, particularly military equipment. When World War II made it necessary for the United States to send troops to Iran in support of the occupation by Great Britain and the Soviet Union, it did so only minimally and withdrew them within six months after the end of the war. What was it about the Cold War that placed Iran “at the vortex of history,” as Henry Kissinger has it, and what combination of events finally pushed Iran and the United States into a relationship that created intensely hostile anti-Americanism in Iran?4 Conventional wisdom holds simply that it was oil, but that is not correct. While oil was indeed a small part of the American calculus, the far better answer is: geography.5
Situated between the communist Soviet Union and the warm waters of the Indian Ocean, its southwestern border the oil-rich Persian Gulf, Iran could not fail to become strategically vital to both sides in the Cold War. In the period immediately following World War II, Iranian oil fueled Western Europe’s economic recovery; likewise, Iranian oil exports to the West would certainly be consequential in any large-scale conflict with the USSR.6 Until 1954 that oil was lifted jointly by the British and Iranians, with no American