{"id":197,"date":"2019-05-28T21:41:42","date_gmt":"2019-05-28T21:41:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=podcast&p=197"},"modified":"2021-01-20T21:37:00","modified_gmt":"2021-01-20T21:37:00","slug":"after-empire-britain-the-united-states-and-the-iranian-revolution","status":"publish","type":"podcast","link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast\/after-empire-britain-the-united-states-and-the-iranian-revolution\/","title":{"rendered":"After Empire: Britain, the United States, and the Iranian Revolution"},"content":{"rendered":"

Speaker – Mark Gasiorowski<\/strong><\/p>\n

This lecture will begin with the historic Britain-Iran connection: \u2018If you lift up Khomeini\u2019s beard, you will find \u201cMADE IN BRITAIN\u201d stamped on his chin.\u2019 After Iran\u2019s 1978-1979 revolution, US and British officials sought a cooperative, mutually-beneficial relationship with the country\u2019s new leaders. Contrary to what many believed, the CIA did not undertake covert political operations against the new regime and, in fact, rejected many opportunities to do so. The CIA in fact began an extraordinary intelligence-sharing initiative with the British that culminated in a warning that Iraq was preparing to invade Iran. These efforts ended when radical Islamists seized the US embassy in November 1979. Mark Gasiorowski is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Tulane University. He taught previously at Louisiana State University and has been a Visiting Fellow at St. Antony\u2019s College, Oxford, and a Visiting Professor at Tehran University. He is the author of US Foreign Policy and the Client State and the editor, with Malcolm Byrne, of the acclaimed Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Speaker – Mark Gasiorowski This lecture will begin with the historic Britain-Iran connection: \u2018If you lift up Khomeini\u2019s beard, you will find \u201cMADE IN BRITAIN\u201d stamped on his chin.\u2019 After Iran\u2019s 1978-1979 revolution, US and British officials sought a cooperative, mutually-beneficial relationship with the country\u2019s new leaders. Contrary to what many believed, the CIA did […]","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2019\/05\/After-Empire-Iraninan-Revolution.mp3","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"74.04M","filesize_raw":"77639744","date_recorded":"08-03-2019","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":""},"tags":[191,119,154,40,192,190,187,189,188,120,193],"categories":[],"series":[2],"class_list":{"0":"post-197","1":"podcast","2":"type-podcast","3":"status-publish","5":"tag-1978-1979","6":"tag-austin","7":"tag-britain","8":"tag-british-studies-lecture-series","9":"tag-cia","10":"tag-iran","11":"tag-iranian-revolution","12":"tag-mark-gasiorowski","13":"tag-the-united-states","14":"tag-university-of-texas","15":"tag-us-foreign-policy","16":"series-bsls","17":"entry"},"acf":{"related_episodes":"","hosts":[{"ID":949,"post_author":"10","post_date":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_date_gmt":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_content":"\n

Wm. Roger Louis is head of the British Studies Lecture Series. He is an American historian and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin<\/a>. Louis is the editor-in-chief of The Oxford History of the British Empire<\/a><\/em>, a former president of the American Historical Association<\/a> (AHA), a former chairman of the U.S. Department of State's Historical Advisory Committee, and a founding director of the AHA's National History Center in Washington, D. C.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Wm. Roger Louis","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"wm-roger-louis","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_modified_gmt":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=speaker&p=949","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"guests":[{"ID":842,"post_author":"45","post_date":"2020-06-24 15:45:39","post_date_gmt":"2020-06-24 15:45:39","post_content":"\n

Mark Gasiorowski is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Tulane University. He taught previously at Louisiana State University and has been a Visiting Fellow at St. Antony\u2019s College, Oxford, and a Visiting Professor at Tehran University. He is the author of US Foreign Policy and the Client State and the editor, with Malcolm Byrne, of the acclaimed Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Mark Gasiorowski","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"mark-gasiorowski","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-06-24 15:45:39","post_modified_gmt":"2020-06-24 15:45:39","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=speaker&p=842","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"transcript":"

Mark Gostkowski is a professor of political science at Tulane.<\/p>\n

And today he is going to talk to us about the antecedence and the course<\/p>\n

of the Iranian revolution. This has a direct British<\/p>\n

connection because it was following the British lead in 1953<\/p>\n

that the CIA overthrew the Iranian government.<\/p>\n

The consequences of this and the connection between the<\/p>\n

revolution of 1978 79 is an open question. But you<\/p>\n

can see from the quotation in the announcement that some people at the<\/p>\n

time believed that it was very direct hominy, lift his beard and<\/p>\n

you will see made in England. Now, this is a<\/p>\n

comment that indirectly indicates a phenomenon.<\/p>\n

Albert Hourani in Oxford, the famous historian of the Arabs,<\/p>\n

once said the four conspiracy theories of Iranians win<\/p>\n

the prize, that there is nothing like it. And I remarked at the time that that sounds to me<\/p>\n

something like a national stereotype. And he said, yes, perhaps, but it’s true.<\/p>\n

So perhaps you can also address yourself to conspiracy theories<\/p>\n

in the course of the I will part.<\/p>\n

Well, thank you, Roger, and thanks for inviting me here. As I’ve told a few people as<\/p>\n

my second time at University of Texas, Roger and Jim, Bill very graciously<\/p>\n

invited me here. Thirty something years ago to a wonderful conference they had in nineteen<\/p>\n

eighty five. And it’s nice to be back here. So thanks to Roger and thanks to the British<\/p>\n

studies program for inviting me. I’m not going to be talking about the origins of the revolution.<\/p>\n

What I’m going to talk about here is basically<\/p>\n

U.S. policy. Mostly things CIA was doing, but U.S. policy toward<\/p>\n

Iran in the 10 month period after the revolution culminated.<\/p>\n

So this is the period from February 1979 when the shah<\/p>\n

fled and a new provisional government was established under<\/p>\n

Medhi Bazargan, who I mentioned him a few times today. So I’m going to cover<\/p>\n

from February 1979 until the U.S. embassy was taken in<\/p>\n

early November 1979, beginning the infamous U.S. embassy<\/p>\n

hostage crisis. So this was a key time period. The new<\/p>\n

regime that resulted from the revolution was beginning to establish itself<\/p>\n

and the U.S. was trying to create some kind of a new a new<\/p>\n

relationship with Iran after the previous<\/p>\n

period of 25 years or so from the 1953 coup that Roger mentioned,<\/p>\n

in which the U.S. was very much that sort of hegemonic power in Iran.<\/p>\n

So the title that I gave Roger for this class begins with the expression<\/p>\n

after empire. So this was an after empire, period after the U.S.<\/p>\n

had had this head romantic relationship with Iran. The revolution ended that. And so now<\/p>\n

the U.S. was in a position of trying to establish some kind of different relationship.<\/p>\n

There have been a lot of after empire periods, as Roger mentioned, the British had won in 1953.<\/p>\n

They had been thrown out by Prime Minister Mossadeq. The British embassy closed. Then<\/p>\n

after the 1953 coup, they were allowed to come back into Iran and reopen<\/p>\n

their embassy in December 1953 with a very different posture<\/p>\n

toward Iran, a much more conciliatory, constructive posture. And, of<\/p>\n

course, many other hegemonic powers out there, Britain and many other places, the<\/p>\n

French in Algeria and so many other places. The Soviets also have had<\/p>\n

these after empire experiences. Anyway, I’m<\/p>\n

not going to talk about all of those. And I’m not going to say very much about Britain in 1953.<\/p>\n

Mainly what I’m going to talk about is what were some key things<\/p>\n

that the United States was doing and its policy toward Iran in this time period of February<\/p>\n

through November 1979. And in doing so, I’m going to be summarizing<\/p>\n

two articles that I published about this in Middle East journal and Middle Eastern studies,<\/p>\n

which if you want to see them in there, they’re really good reads. I would say<\/p>\n

you can easily find my Web site. Well, if you can spell my name, you can find my Web site at Tulane<\/p>\n

and download them from there. And I sent copies to Roger as well.<\/p>\n

So. So let me first begin by<\/p>\n

just kind of sketching the background a little bit of this period of February through November<\/p>\n

power, the dominant power, the great power exercising influence in Iran in<\/p>\n

sort of secular nationalist government and created<\/p>\n

a very different era, an era that was a lot more repressive and in which Iran became<\/p>\n

sort of a battleship on the picket line around the Sino Soviet<\/p>\n

periphery. Iran was a key player in the U.S.<\/p>\n

strategy of containment toward the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War.<\/p>\n

And Iran, you know, was very, very useful to the United States<\/p>\n

in this capacity after fifty three through the 60s and<\/p>\n

into the 70s until the Iranian revolution occurred. So the U.S. had been<\/p>\n

the hedge harmonic power before the revolution, much as Britain had been the haeju monarch power in Iran<\/p>\n

prior to 1953.<\/p>\n

During this time of U.S. hegemony in Iran, all kinds of wild<\/p>\n

sort of conspiracy theory scenarios emerged among<\/p>\n

Iranians. So they increasingly, during this 25 years, came to see the U.S.<\/p>\n

as what they still call today, the Great Satan, and partly for good reason. I mean, this was very<\/p>\n

much blown out of proportion and exaggerated by Iranians. But the US<\/p>\n

had done in the 1953 coup and continued to do things that were pretty harmful<\/p>\n

to Iran during this period, especially in propping up the regime of the Shah,<\/p>\n

who was not a hugely brutal dictator, but he was a dictator nonetheless.<\/p>\n

And a lot of Iranians pretty rightly blamed the United States for<\/p>\n

propping him up so that by the time of the Iranian revolution<\/p>\n

in 1978, 1979, there was a great deal of anti-Americanism<\/p>\n

in the United in Iran. And then during the course of the revolution,<\/p>\n

this was greatly magnified. And the revolution was almost as much about<\/p>\n

anti-Americanism as it was about creating an Islamic regime. And of course,<\/p>\n

Iran remains very anti-American today, 40 years later.<\/p>\n

So the this twenty five year or so period of American hegemony was a period<\/p>\n

in which there was a growing antipathy by Iranians toward the United States.<\/p>\n

And then it all came crashing down with the Iranian revolution in 78, 79.<\/p>\n

And then in mid-February, 1979, suddenly the United States was faced with<\/p>\n

a very different situation, a situation where we had<\/p>\n

little capability to do anything in Iran, where our clients and puppets<\/p>\n

had either fled into exile or were, you know, cowering somewhere underground<\/p>\n

inside Iran. And where Iran’s leaders were ranged<\/p>\n

from pretty damn anti-American to extremely anti-American.<\/p>\n

So it’s a very different situation that the US faced in this 10 month period.<\/p>\n

The U.S. had basically three main goals during this period, I’m not going to dwell on this, but let me just quickly<\/p>\n

go through it. First of all, the U.S. wanted to keep Iran, as<\/p>\n

you know, the battleship in this picket picket line around the Sino-US Soviet<\/p>\n

periphery. They knew that Iran was no longer going to be, you know, working<\/p>\n

closely with the U.S. on anything. But they certainly wanted to maintain Iran’s territorial<\/p>\n

integrity, which they were a lot of challenges to during this period. And they did not want<\/p>\n

any further instability. They wanted Iran to be stable<\/p>\n

and to maintain its integrity so that, you know, the Soviet Union couldn’t somehow start<\/p>\n

expanding in the south westerly direction toward the Persian Gulf.<\/p>\n

And so, again, the U.S. very much wanted to maintain Iran’s territorial integrity<\/p>\n

and political stability. Many Iranians thought it was quite the opposite.<\/p>\n

Many Iranians thought the United States was fomenting the political instability and was trying<\/p>\n

to break up Iran in this period. It was quite the opposite. Secondly,<\/p>\n

the U.S. was trying to resolve many outstanding disputes between<\/p>\n

the U.S. and Iran that existed. There were huge numbers of arms sales contracts<\/p>\n

that had not been fulfilled. Billions and billions of dollars. There are many other kinds of commercial<\/p>\n

deals that were sort of languishing unfulfilled. Another very important<\/p>\n

issue, which I’ll briefly come back to a little bit later on. The U.S. had established very important<\/p>\n

listening posts in northeastern Iran that were situated to<\/p>\n

monitor the Soviet missile testing sites. And what I think is now Kazakhstan<\/p>\n

up in Central Asia, and there are not too many places that you can, you know, monitor<\/p>\n

radio traffic and stuff like that. The U.S. had been doing that. The CIA<\/p>\n

had been doing that in Iran since the late 1950s. Those listening<\/p>\n

posts were shut down soon after the revolution. The U.S. was hoping that they could<\/p>\n

be reestablished. And U.S., as I’ll talk later on, was even trying to get the<\/p>\n

Iranians to agree. And, you know, the U.S. would share intelligence. This is especially<\/p>\n

important. This is an era of first assault, one at this time. The salt to agreement.<\/p>\n

These listening posts were vital for monitoring those arms control agreements. And the U.S.<\/p>\n

very much wanted to try to reestablish them. Thirdly, the U.S., of course, wanted to<\/p>\n

encourage moderates. There were plenty of radicals in Iran at this time of all different kinds.<\/p>\n

But there were also moderates. You know, the revolution had been carried out by a coalition of,<\/p>\n

you know, very diverse forces in Iran. The moderates populated<\/p>\n

the provisional government, prime minister, foreign minister, other key positions like<\/p>\n

that. And so the U.S. wanted to help them out and try to strengthen and solidify<\/p>\n

them, although, of course, without appearing overtly to do so, because, you know, any<\/p>\n

hint of U.S. intervention in Iranian domestic politics<\/p>\n

would have made the radicals just see red at this time.<\/p>\n

So, you know, these were the things the U.S. was trying to achieve. U.S. officials fully understood,<\/p>\n

you know, that their time of hegemony in Iran had come to an end. They understood<\/p>\n

that the Iranians were very furious at the United States for various things the U.S. had done.<\/p>\n

The U.S. was trying to make something of the new situation. And after Empire<\/p>\n

situation, what Britain faced in 1953 was, of course, in many<\/p>\n

ways quite different. You know, the leadership in Iran after the 1953<\/p>\n

coup was quite open to the British, and it wasn’t particularly hard for the British<\/p>\n

to work out an arrangement whereby they would reopen their embassy. And they also,<\/p>\n

like the Americans were in 79, pursued a constructive, conciliatory posture.<\/p>\n

And the British managed to come out pretty well after 1953 in the after<\/p>\n

empire situation, of course. That didn’t happen with the United States in 1979.<\/p>\n

Just the whole thing blew up. And today, 40 years later, we’re still having severe tension<\/p>\n

with Iran. So that’s kind of general background. Let me just say a few things<\/p>\n

about what the CIA was doing in Iran at this time, because most of what I’m going to talk about today<\/p>\n

is stuff the CIA was doing.<\/p>\n

You know, for one thing, since the U.S. did not want to foment instability<\/p>\n

in Iran and the U.S. certainly did not want to be found out to be plotting with<\/p>\n

any Iranian factions. The US very strongly for<\/p>\n

Baid, the CIA, from carrying out any kind of covert political operations<\/p>\n

in Iran. That was just not something that Washington was going to tolerate. And I’m going to<\/p>\n

come back to that more. However, this was a situation that desperately, desperately<\/p>\n

needed intelligence. You know, the Iranian revolution, this is a totally<\/p>\n

new phenomenon. There had not been an Islamic revolution. There had not been an Islamic republic<\/p>\n

created anything of that sort. This is entirely, you know, a new game. U.S.<\/p>\n

desperately needed intelligence to figure out what was going in Iran. So, you know, U.S. policy<\/p>\n

could be guided appropriately. And of course, that’s for the CIA to do especially.<\/p>\n

So while Washington did not want CIA to be doing covert operations, covert political<\/p>\n

operations. It certainly wanted CIA to gather intelligence and CIA<\/p>\n

did. As you’ll see, you’ll be amazed at some of the things I’m going to say about that.<\/p>\n

So CIA was in Iran. It had a small presence that had most<\/p>\n

of the time for CIA officers undercover in the U.S. embassy<\/p>\n

in this period from February through early November of 1979.<\/p>\n

What they were doing was gathering intelligence, not carrying out covert<\/p>\n

political activities. There were two main problems that the CIA<\/p>\n

station in Iran labored under in this time period. As you can imagine, first<\/p>\n

of all, intense anti-Americanism. This is a very dangerous time for any American to be in<\/p>\n

Iran now, let alone a CIA officer. It was an extremely<\/p>\n

dangerous situation. It may well be that there’s never been a place where the CIA<\/p>\n

has had a station that has been more difficult to operate, even the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n

I mean, if you get picked up by the KGB and you’re a CIA guy, well, they’ll just deport you.<\/p>\n

In Iran, when CIA people got captured, they weren’t deported. They were kept as hostages and tortured.<\/p>\n

So it was an extremely tense situation for Americans in general<\/p>\n

and especially for the CIA in Iran. And indeed, when<\/p>\n

the U.S. embassy was taken in, 53 Americans were taken hostage. Three<\/p>\n

of them were CIA officers, and they were treated pretty badly, tortured, kept<\/p>\n

in solitary confinement, subject to mock executions and things of that sort.<\/p>\n

So that’s just an illustration of, you know, the difficulties that CIA faced.<\/p>\n

These difficulties made<\/p>\n

it necessary to have some pretty strict restrictions on what CIA was doing.<\/p>\n

They had to do just intense security precautions like, for example, making sure they weren’t being<\/p>\n

monitored. Staying away from any contacts, things of that sort. So very,<\/p>\n

very strict security precautions for most of this time<\/p>\n

period. CIA officers were rotated in and out of Iran on very<\/p>\n

brief assignments, typically three months. As far as I know, only one CIA officer<\/p>\n

stayed longer than three months in this period. He stayed for four months and then was taken hostage.<\/p>\n

No CIA officers with prior experience in Iran could be deployed there because,<\/p>\n

of course, they would be known, which meant no one with any expertise on Iran. No one with Persian<\/p>\n

language capabilities or anything like that. So CIA was laboring under very,<\/p>\n

very severe restrictions in Iran in this 10 month period.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, as you can imagine, with the intense anti-Americanism that existed,<\/p>\n

the many, many contacts at the CIA had previously had in Iran, you know,<\/p>\n

hundreds, probably thousands of people were many of them left Iran.<\/p>\n

Some of them were thrown in prison and executed during this period. Those others<\/p>\n

who survived stayed far, far away from their CIA contacts.<\/p>\n

And so almost all of the contacts the CIA had previously for intelligence gathering<\/p>\n

and things like that had melted away in one way or another. And so the CIA<\/p>\n

people who were there were faced with having to develop a whole new sets of<\/p>\n

intelligence contacts inside Iran. So it’s very, very difficult situation for CIA<\/p>\n

to operate. And in fact, it’s amazing that that they did as much stuff as they did, which I’m going to explain<\/p>\n

in a minute. Given these severe problems. So now<\/p>\n

let me sketch out these two papers that cover US policy toward<\/p>\n

Iran in this period. I’m not going to go into all the<\/p>\n

juicy details, which there are a lot of in these papers, if you like, spy stories. These are good reads. I<\/p>\n

would say so. Let me begin with a paper that I published in Middle Eastern Studies<\/p>\n

in 2014. This paper gives an overview<\/p>\n

of CIA activities in Iran and especially CIA contacts in Iran<\/p>\n

in this period February through early November 1979.<\/p>\n

It’s based on a an incredible resource that Iran people have, but almost<\/p>\n

nobody uses. And that is when the radical Islamist students seized<\/p>\n

the U.S. embassy in November 1979, they seized a huge amount<\/p>\n

of U.S. government documents, including CIA documents that had not yet<\/p>\n

been destroyed. The embassy personnel destroyed some documents, but<\/p>\n

most of it they didn’t because this happened so quickly. So these students who took the embassy<\/p>\n

had just mountains and mountains of U.S. government documents, including<\/p>\n

what in the end were hundreds of pages of CIA cables, many of which had been shredded,<\/p>\n

but shredded in a way that they could be piece back together. So the students who took the embassy,<\/p>\n

they basically got a bunch of Iranians with carpet weaving skills and<\/p>\n

taped together these shredded CIA documents, which you have to be very meticulous to do.<\/p>\n

And there’s this whole treasure trove of this kind of material. This was<\/p>\n

gradually published by the Iranians in the course of the 1980s. They published about 73 volumes<\/p>\n

of U.S. government documents. And it’s fascinating stuff. It was<\/p>\n

pretty hard to get hold up for a long time and was illegal to have. But now it’s on the Internet, of course.<\/p>\n

And so all of it’s out there and it’s been out there for, you know, easily accessible for about 10<\/p>\n

years. And this material just provides incredible detail on especially<\/p>\n

CIA activity. I mean, anybody here ever seen the CIA cable? It’s not something you come across<\/p>\n

every day. But there is just a wealth of this material for Iran in this time<\/p>\n

period. So it’s mainly that that is the basis for this first of the two<\/p>\n

papers going to be talking about. I did, however, supplemented with interviews with various<\/p>\n

people. I interviewed two of the three CIA guys who were taken hostage,<\/p>\n

several other CIA people who were involved in this kind of stuff, and a bunch of the State Department people<\/p>\n

and also actually several of the Iranians who were involved in taking the hostages, one<\/p>\n

of whom was a student of mine when I taught at Tehran University in the late 90s.<\/p>\n

So documents supplemented with interviews is. My<\/p>\n

source for this first paper and pretty much the second paper, too. So let me just<\/p>\n

quickly go through the main brunt of this paper, which is<\/p>\n

I go through five categories of Iranians that the CIA was basically<\/p>\n

spying on gathering intelligence on in this time period of 1979.<\/p>\n

And I’ll just sort of sketch out what they were trying to do and what they were not doing and then kind of<\/p>\n

summarize that very quickly. First category, Iranian government officials.<\/p>\n

The US had a lot of contact with the Bazargan government in this period, February<\/p>\n

through November 1979. Most of all of this was carried<\/p>\n

out not by CIA officers or most of this was not by CIA officers,<\/p>\n

but by the regular embassy diplomats. The ambassador, while they were still the<\/p>\n

U.S. ambassador there and then his replacement and others.<\/p>\n

The main point of contact who soon emerged was a guy named Abbas Amir and<\/p>\n

to. He was deputy prime minister for most of this time period. But then<\/p>\n

in about July or August, he was sent off to be Iran’s ambassador to<\/p>\n

five Scandinavian countries. He was<\/p>\n

a key figure, not actually in what I’m talking about now, but the second paper that I’m going to talk about in a few<\/p>\n

minutes. So I’ll come back to him. There was also a fair amount of contact with Prime Minister Bobb’s Argon<\/p>\n

himself, also very much with the foreign minister during most of this period.<\/p>\n

Ibrahim Yazdi and various other officials,<\/p>\n

the CIA tried to recruit several key Iranians<\/p>\n

as intelligence sources in this period, not the ones I just mentioned. The most important<\/p>\n

person they tried to recruit was a guy named Abdul Hossein Bonny’s Saad, who in 1980<\/p>\n

was elected Iran’s first president. CIA tried very hard<\/p>\n

to recruit him as a paid agent. In the course of 1979<\/p>\n

and unsuccessfully, he wouldn’t really bite on their offers, although he actually<\/p>\n

also did not fully reject them. It’s not even clear that he understood that this was the CIA,<\/p>\n

but they were trying to recruit him. The problem is that<\/p>\n

the documents on this were not destroyed when the embassy was taken. And so the hostage takers<\/p>\n

pretty quickly found all this stuff and used it to discredit Bonny Saad.<\/p>\n

And they quickly published a volume of CIA reports on these efforts<\/p>\n

to recruit him. And it hurt him very much and undermined him. And eventually he was forced to flee<\/p>\n

into exile. CIA also tried to recruit a couple of high ranking<\/p>\n

military officers, one in Hong Kong, another in Italy.<\/p>\n

Both of those also did not pan out. The one Iranian government official<\/p>\n

who they do seem to have recruited was an Iranian Christian woman named Victoria<\/p>\n

Basri, who was in the Iranian foreign ministry. They recruited<\/p>\n

her, put her on the CIA payroll. She, in the end, didn’t really provide<\/p>\n

much information. But unfortunately, the documents on this were found<\/p>\n

by the Iranians who seized the embassy and she was arrested and later<\/p>\n

executed for this. So, you know, going on the CIA payroll<\/p>\n

is something you need to be careful about. And she’s not the only one I’ll be talking about a few more.<\/p>\n

So some efforts to recruit Iranian government officials, nothing really panned out there.<\/p>\n

The second category of Iranians the CIA really tried to recruit were various<\/p>\n

moderate opposition activists inside Iran. And a few minutes, I’ll talk<\/p>\n

about people in exile outside of Iran. As you can imagine, all kinds of Iranians<\/p>\n

who were at all pro-American, you know, approached the U.S. embassy in various<\/p>\n

ways at this time. Many of them had plots that that they were<\/p>\n

undertaking, most of which were just totally pie in the sky. You know, this<\/p>\n

was sometimes even things like a cab driver, you know, coming up to an American saying,<\/p>\n

I can tell you how to overthrow the Khomeini regime. So the<\/p>\n

U.S. embassy was constantly being approached by these kinds of people. You know, most of them were<\/p>\n

not at all serious. Most of them, you know, U.S. was very<\/p>\n

politely rejecting. But there were two important, very important Iranians<\/p>\n

that CIA did very extensively pursue in this period<\/p>\n

in the realm of moderate opposition figures inside Iran.<\/p>\n

The first was people surrounding Granda. Ayatolla Shariatmadari<\/p>\n

Shariatmadari was pretty much the only other Iranian cleric<\/p>\n

of high rank and popularity to match Khomeini’s and Shariatmadari<\/p>\n

and Khamenei were very, very different. Chari that moderate was a moderate,<\/p>\n

believed in separation between church and state, did not want an Islamic republic, all<\/p>\n

of which Khomeini wanted. So we can say that these were two major rivalries at<\/p>\n

the highest levels of the Shia clergy. Anyway, people around Shariatmadari<\/p>\n

began approaching the U.S. embassy in various ways. In this period beginning<\/p>\n

in February 1979 and of course the U.S. government was very<\/p>\n

interested in this, and so they had CIA pursue these various approaches<\/p>\n

and they met with various intermediaries, one of whom was even<\/p>\n

Shariatmadari son about this, to try to find out what Shariatmadari<\/p>\n

was up to. What did he want to do? What kind of capabilities did he have in all these kinds<\/p>\n

of things? As these contacts progressed, Chari out moderates,<\/p>\n

people began asking for U.S. support. You know, basically millions of dollars in support,<\/p>\n

even though Shariatmadari had an awful lot of money. And<\/p>\n

so the CIA station Kable this back to CIA headquarters saying, look, you<\/p>\n

know, the Shariatmadari people are asking us for money and other kinds of assistance. We think<\/p>\n

that this would be a really good opportunity to engage in covert operations, CIA<\/p>\n

headquarters, cable back and said, no, don’t do it. We are not doing covert operations<\/p>\n

in Iran. Just pursue these people for intelligence gathering purposes.<\/p>\n

And so in the end, nothing really came of this. But there is a huge<\/p>\n

paper trail of this kind of stuff which the captors of the embassy found<\/p>\n

and pieced together. This is more than one whole book worth of CIA<\/p>\n

documents on this. So, you know, this was revealed in 1980,<\/p>\n

stripped of his clerical rank, which is roughly equivalent to stripping the pope<\/p>\n

of his rank in the Catholic Church and put under house arrest<\/p>\n

until he died in 1986. So a major CIA effort to<\/p>\n

collect intelligence on the Shariatmadari network.<\/p>\n

Second one that was parallel to this involved<\/p>\n

a guy named Khosro Gosh guy. The goche guy were and still are today,<\/p>\n

a pretty important tribe located in south central Iran and the area around Shiraz.<\/p>\n

They’re Turkic people. They speak a Turkic dialect. The CIA<\/p>\n

had had extensive dealings with him back in the 40s and early 50s, which I’ve written another paper<\/p>\n

about. I won’t even go into it now. So he had been a very close contact for the U.S. government<\/p>\n

in the late 40s and early 50s. He was then driven into exile and spent 25 years<\/p>\n

or so living somewhere in the United States. He came back to Iran when the revolution<\/p>\n

culminated and pretty quickly made contact with the U.S. embassy and began offering<\/p>\n

his services. And he was very much a secular<\/p>\n

nationalist, very appalled at the idea of an Islamic republic in Iran. So he<\/p>\n

basically began plotting against the Islamic regime, working<\/p>\n

especially with another prominent Iranian, a guy named Ahmad Madani,<\/p>\n

who had been an admiral in the Iranian navy, but then was fired for basically anti-Shia activity<\/p>\n

and was a pretty prominent secular nationalist in this era.<\/p>\n

So Gasquet and Madani began plotting and talking to the Americans.<\/p>\n

Gradually, they also began asking for assistance of various kinds. So<\/p>\n

again, the CIA station Tehran cabled CIA headquarters and said, look, we think<\/p>\n

this could be a really good opportunity to do covert operations inside Iran. Again,<\/p>\n

CIA responded and said, we’re not doing that. Just maintain contact<\/p>\n

with these guys for intelligence gathering purposes, see what they’ve got. But do not give them any<\/p>\n

kind of assistance. So two major, major efforts. The CIA<\/p>\n

turned down to deal with relatively powerful<\/p>\n

opposition factions at this time. Madani modernly.<\/p>\n

Well, Hauser gosh, guy, he was thrown in prison once<\/p>\n

after, you know, the embassy was seized. Once the students who took the embassy<\/p>\n

piece together, some of these CIA documents, they used those to incriminate. Him and,<\/p>\n

you know, they are pretty incriminating, frankly. And he was eventually executed.<\/p>\n

Armand mahtani, the Navy guy who was working with him, escaped across<\/p>\n

the Turkish border into exile. The America he quickly went to the American<\/p>\n

embassy in its consulate in Istanbul. The US started giving<\/p>\n

him millions of dollars in 1980, 1981. So he<\/p>\n

was really the first of the Iranian exile groups that the US was supporting.<\/p>\n

After the embassy was seized. But eventually he was too independent and they cut him off.<\/p>\n

And the Iranian government actually tried to poison him twice when he was in exile, but they never managed to kill him.<\/p>\n

He died a few years ago, you know, out in California. So two major efforts<\/p>\n

by the CIA to gather intelligence, but not to carry out<\/p>\n

covert political operations to these two networks. I should just mention one other person<\/p>\n

in this category. There was an Iranian Jewish guy named Simon Farzat, me,<\/p>\n

who apparently had been a longstanding contact of the CIA.<\/p>\n

There were some documents on him. These were also found by the hostage takers<\/p>\n

and they arrested him and had him executed as well.<\/p>\n

The third category, and it gets more and more interesting, there was the radical left.<\/p>\n

There were various different radical leftist factions who were sort of late comers to the<\/p>\n

revolution. But by early 1979, they had seized a lot of weapons. They were rapidly<\/p>\n

recruiting on Iran’s campuses. And during the course of 1979, they became powerful<\/p>\n

actors and real threats to the Islamic regime. So much so that in basically<\/p>\n

in 1981, they launched a counter-revolution against the Islamic regime that failed.<\/p>\n

So there was a rapidly emerging radical leftist opposition in 1979.<\/p>\n

Now, these people hated the United States. Needless to say, and some of them had they killed six Americans<\/p>\n

in the mid 1970s and the United States was totally against these kinds of people.<\/p>\n

Despite what Iranians charged, lots of Iranians believed that the US was backing. These<\/p>\n

kinds of people didn’t make any sense at all. But, you know, these were the kinds of conspiracy theories that Iranians<\/p>\n

had at this time. So the US, you know, was not remotely interested<\/p>\n

in helping these groups. And they probably wouldn’t have taken help from the United States, at least not at this time anyway. But<\/p>\n

the US was very interested in gathering intelligence about them because they were<\/p>\n

rapidly increasing increasingly important actors in Iran.<\/p>\n

And so the embassy documents provide details on three<\/p>\n

sets of three informants that managed to actually gather a lot of intelligence<\/p>\n

about one of these radical leftist groups, the Fedi on a Houk.<\/p>\n

One of them was a PLO guy who was on the CIA payroll, who<\/p>\n

the CIA had evidently recruited him in Lebanon sometime earlier than this. He<\/p>\n

then happened to be the head of a PLO team that was sent to Iran in 1979<\/p>\n

to help train Iranian Revolutionary Guards. And so now he began reporting back to<\/p>\n

his CIA handlers from Iran about, you know, things that he saw<\/p>\n

in this capacity of heading a training mission to the Revolutionary Guards. So that was<\/p>\n

one source. The other two were two Iranians who CIA managed<\/p>\n

to persuade to go and gather intelligence. I’ll talk more about them in a minute.<\/p>\n

So the U.S. had penetrations of the radical left in Iran in this period and actually gathered quite<\/p>\n

a bit of information about them forth and very much in parallel with the radical<\/p>\n

left. There were various ethnically based guerrilla<\/p>\n

groups that were emerging in Iran in this period. Most importantly, Kurds, which Iran has<\/p>\n

a lot of, but also ethnic Arabs in southwestern Iran and<\/p>\n

was a staunch Turkomans in the northeast, Baluch in the southeast.<\/p>\n

And later on, gosh, guys and others. So there was rapidly growing ethnic<\/p>\n

unrest, ethnically based guerrilla movements that were starting to clash with the Iranian<\/p>\n

security forces by April or so of 1979. So the U.S.<\/p>\n

wanted to gather intelligence on these groups.<\/p>\n

And some of these groups, particularly the Kurds, were connected with a radical leftist, as you know,<\/p>\n

longstanding connections there. So the three<\/p>\n

people who the CIA had reporting on the radical left, the PLO guy and<\/p>\n

two others, also reported on the ethnic or relative area of sorts.<\/p>\n

The PLO guy reported information to CIA on the Arab guerrillas<\/p>\n

who are beginning to emerge. And then the other two informants reported on<\/p>\n

Kertz. One of them was even wounded in a clash between Kurds and<\/p>\n

the Revolutionary Guards. In addition to those three informants<\/p>\n

inside Iran. CIA had a lot of good connections in Europe<\/p>\n

that reported mainly on the Kurds, but a little bit on Arabs as well. There<\/p>\n

were several connections that they had in Europe, mostly in Germany<\/p>\n

with Iranian Kurds. And they began to get evidence of these connections<\/p>\n

that Iraq was beginning to help Iranian Kurdish guerrillas against<\/p>\n

Iran. This was about mid-September, 1979. And, of course, this was<\/p>\n

an extremely important issue and very explosive. And also, the CIA saw<\/p>\n

this as, you know, valuable intelligence we can give to the Iranian government, tell them that the Iraqis<\/p>\n

of supporting these Kurdish guerrillas, that will further ingratiate us with the Iranian government,<\/p>\n

on the other hand. CIA also got intelligence, evidently from them, IE6, British intelligence<\/p>\n

service, that Iran was supporting Iraqi Kurds. So this was going<\/p>\n

both ways. Last set of Iranians at CIA<\/p>\n

was cultivating were various exile opposition groups during the course<\/p>\n

of 1979. Lots of pro monarchist or otherwise<\/p>\n

anti Islamist Iranians were escaping the country, mostly<\/p>\n

showing up in Europe. And a lot of them, as soon as they did approach the<\/p>\n

U.S. embassy in country X or country Y, saying that they had all kinds of<\/p>\n

connections back in Iran and they were ready to launch a coup or a guerrilla movement or something like that.<\/p>\n

So the U.S. was increasingly bombarded with requests from these Iranian exiles<\/p>\n

for support for these various opposition movements.<\/p>\n

There got to be so many that at a certain point the State Department sent a cable around<\/p>\n

to the major European embassies, basically telling them, don’t deal with these Iranians. We’re getting<\/p>\n

so many of these requests from these Iranian exiles. Just show them the door.<\/p>\n

So there were a lot of approaches to the U.S., but U.S. basically believed that<\/p>\n

none of these Iranian exile groups had any capability to overthrow the Islamic regime.<\/p>\n

There’s very clear sighted analysis by the US and therefore we should not really<\/p>\n

have any dealings other than, you know, politely talking to them a little bit. We certainly should not support<\/p>\n

them. Of course, after the embassy was taken, the U.S. did begin to support exile opposition<\/p>\n

groups. As I said, first modern day, they gave him several million dollars later on various<\/p>\n

others. And through about 1996, the U.S. was supporting exile<\/p>\n

groups. It never amounted to much of anything, but the U.S. probably spent $20 million or so,<\/p>\n

but not during the period before the hostage crisis that I’m focusing<\/p>\n

on. So anyway, you know, the CIA was busy, as you can see, they were having<\/p>\n

dealings with all different kinds of people. This is dozens and dozens of contacts that I’ve just been<\/p>\n

sketching, all for the purpose of gathering intelligence,<\/p>\n

not supporting opposition to the Islamic regime. Many of these contacts were asking<\/p>\n

the U.S. for support. And in my going through the documents, I identified<\/p>\n

at least 16 occasions on which CIA or State<\/p>\n

Department officials refused or declined to give support<\/p>\n

to Iranian plotters. Some of these were more than<\/p>\n

once for the same guy. But there were at least 11 Iranian plot would be plotters<\/p>\n

who were denied support by the United States on a total of at least 16 occasions, probably<\/p>\n

many more than those 16. So the U.S. had plenty of opportunity in this period<\/p>\n

to foment trouble in Iran. But this was not what the United States wanted to do. And the<\/p>\n

U.S. turned down lots of opportunities to do so anyway. That’s the first paper. Second paper.<\/p>\n

I’ll talk about more quickly because I’m running out of time. The other really interesting<\/p>\n

thing that the United States was doing in this time period in Iran was<\/p>\n

gradually gearing up and intelligence sharing relationship with<\/p>\n

the Bazargan government. So I published an article in the Middle<\/p>\n

East Journal in 2012 that details this. And so I’ll sketch it out now.<\/p>\n

In the early months after the revolution, the Bazargan government,<\/p>\n

they were as desperate for information about what was going on as the U.S. was or anybody<\/p>\n

else. I mean, this was really the fog of revolution. And, you know, it was quite<\/p>\n

unclear what all was happening. And so the beginning, basically, in<\/p>\n

May 1979, Bazargan himself and other key top<\/p>\n

officials in the provisional government began asking U.S.<\/p>\n

embassy officials for intelligence on certain threats<\/p>\n

to the new regime. Initially, they were asking for any intelligence<\/p>\n

the U.S. had on these ethnic uprisings that were occurring, the Kurds, the<\/p>\n

Arabs and others. Iranians didn’t have much information on that. They, of course, assumed that the CIA<\/p>\n

knew everything and that CIA then would be able to give them some stuff.<\/p>\n

And so they began asking for that within a month or so. They also began<\/p>\n

asking for intelligence from the U.S. on Iraq’s intentions toward Iran.<\/p>\n

By this time, Saddam Hussein was in power in Iraq. He was intensely hostile toward<\/p>\n

Iran. He was very much fomenting unrest, especially among Kurds<\/p>\n

and among Iranian Arabs. And, of course, eventually he invaded Iran in September<\/p>\n

embassy and they were not in direct contact with CIA people. These were State Department<\/p>\n

diplomats. They were asking for intelligence on the ethnic uprisings<\/p>\n

and on Iraqi intelligence. So the U.S. began to give them sort<\/p>\n

of small amounts of stuff, sort of small intelligence reports. But as these<\/p>\n

requests persisted, the embassy contacted<\/p>\n

the State Department and said, look, we think this would be a good idea. We think we should really step up<\/p>\n

this intelligence provision stuff that we’re doing now. Give the Iranians some really<\/p>\n

good stuff. They’ll really appreciate it. It will help us, you know, improve our relations with<\/p>\n

them. And so the State Department and agreed. So in July 1979,<\/p>\n

the number two person in the State Department, David Newsome, approved this<\/p>\n

and began working with the CIA to set up a series of<\/p>\n

intelligence briefings by CIA personnel in Tehran<\/p>\n

to top members of the Bazargan government.<\/p>\n

So this was mostly to this was to be done by CIA officers<\/p>\n

and the intelligence was intelligence that the CIA acquired. But the<\/p>\n

State Department was overseeing these briefings. So two briefings occurred. The first<\/p>\n

was in late August when the guy who was at this time,<\/p>\n

the national intelligence officer for the Middle East, his name was Robert Ames. He was later<\/p>\n

killed in one of the terrorist bombings in Beirut. He went to Tehran<\/p>\n

and delivered sort of a broad overview to the Bazargan people.<\/p>\n

This was mainly meant to be sort of a meet and greet initiation<\/p>\n

of what would be. A long term series of briefings. So the first briefing<\/p>\n

was in August, didn’t really amount to very much after this briefing, the US began<\/p>\n

providing additional written reports to the embassy that were passed on to the government,<\/p>\n

particularly about Soviet activity in Afghanistan, which was beginning to ramp up in<\/p>\n

summer and fall of 1979. The second briefing and the last briefing is<\/p>\n

the important one. This occurred in October on October 15th,<\/p>\n

of a familiar name. He was deeply involved in Iran-Contra and various other things. He<\/p>\n

had done a total of nine or 10 years in Iran. He was the CIA operations<\/p>\n

side, kind of foremost expert on Iran, fully fluent in Persian, very,<\/p>\n

very experienced. He was sent to Tehran<\/p>\n

to give a briefing on October 15th. There were four people at this briefing cave<\/p>\n

himself, Foreign Minister Yazdi, Ambassador N2<\/p>\n

zom, who flew back from Scandinavia for this, and the U.S. charg\u00e9<\/p>\n

d’affaires, Bruce Lang at SUPPOR. People were at this briefing and I talked one<\/p>\n

way or another to all four of them and verified the following story.<\/p>\n

So then the main purpose of the briefing was to give a warning to Iran that Iraq<\/p>\n

was making preparations to invade Iran. This was concrete’s<\/p>\n

concrete intelligence that the U.S. had gathered with satellite photographs and things of that sort<\/p>\n

about things like that. The U.S. that Iraq was practicing military exercises<\/p>\n

that could only be for an invasion of Iran. They were pre-positioning<\/p>\n

military equipment in that area. They were carrying out military engineering<\/p>\n

projects like making roads, dirt roads. The tanks could go on through<\/p>\n

the marshes and things of that sort. And they were supporting the Iranian Arab<\/p>\n

rebels inside Iran just across the border from Iraq. So the<\/p>\n

U.S. by October had been acquiring information about<\/p>\n

Iraqi invasion preparations. And this really worried the United States because<\/p>\n

the U.S. wanted to preserve the territorial integrity of Iran. So<\/p>\n

the U.S. gave this briefing to the Iranians. Foreign Minister<\/p>\n

Yazdi didn’t believe it and thought that this was sort of a CIA provocation<\/p>\n

operation or something like that. But Amir antes believed it and actually met again with<\/p>\n

CAVE later on and got additional information. The other thing that CAVE did in<\/p>\n

this briefing was to tell the Iranians who were there about<\/p>\n

an electronic eavesdropping system called IBEX that CIA had partially<\/p>\n

set up by the time of the revolution. This was a series of listening posts and<\/p>\n

also intelligence collection airplanes that the U.S. had been providing<\/p>\n

to Iran before the revolution to enable the Iranians to monitor<\/p>\n

what Iraq was doing across the border. And so it was really perfect for<\/p>\n

enabling the Iranians to monitor these invasion preparations that the<\/p>\n

Iraqis had begun to make. So the U.S. not only warned the Iranians that<\/p>\n

the Iraqis were preparing for an invasion, but told them that they could use<\/p>\n

these electronic listening capabilities to monitor for themselves<\/p>\n

and gather intelligence for themselves about these Iraqi invasion preparations.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, five days later, the U.S. made the decision to admit the shah<\/p>\n

into the United States. The former king for medical treatment,<\/p>\n

that this was then announced a few days later. And this began a period of about 10 days<\/p>\n

of growing tension inside Iran, which culminated on November 4th<\/p>\n

in the seizure of the U.S. embassy by these radical Islamist students<\/p>\n

and taking hostages, including these CIA guys. So there was no follow up<\/p>\n

to this CIA warning of the invasion preparations.<\/p>\n

The events, you know, leading to the hostage crisis precluded it.<\/p>\n

After the embassy was taken, the Bazargan government resigned further,<\/p>\n

making impossible any possibility of follow up on this. Also, the Bazargan people<\/p>\n

did not tell their successors that the U.S. had delivered this warning. So<\/p>\n

fast forward 10 months. September 1980, Iraq indeed does<\/p>\n

invade Iran right in the area where the CIA had been, you know.<\/p>\n

Warning the Iranians about the Iranians. You know, the successor government<\/p>\n

had not gotten information about this. So Iran was entirely unprepared. They didn’t<\/p>\n

even have troops within 50 miles of the border when the Iraqis invaded. So the<\/p>\n

Iraqi invasion initially was quite successful. If the U.S. warning<\/p>\n

had been passed on to Bazargan successors, the Iranians could have prepared extensively<\/p>\n

for it. And Iraq was actually not much straw. It was not really any stronger militarily than<\/p>\n

Iran at this time. So probably if the Iranians had taken appropriate<\/p>\n

precautions as a result of the U.S. warning, the Iraqis wouldn’t even have invaded. They would have<\/p>\n

probably been deterred from invading. Who knows? But, you know, it’s hard to say.<\/p>\n

But this was, you know, a major missed opportunity. The key<\/p>\n

interlocutor, Abbas Amir, antes on soon.<\/p>\n

The students found documents on this whole series of events.<\/p>\n

They saw that Amir and Tooism had played the central role as go between. So they recalled<\/p>\n

him from Sweden and promptly arrested him. And he then served 25<\/p>\n

years in prison. He has been Iran’s foremost political prisoner since<\/p>\n

the revolution 40 years ago. Twenty five years in prison, in which basically he lost his mind.<\/p>\n

So he paid a very high price. He was he was tried in 1981. And in fact,<\/p>\n

at the trial, Bazargan testified that the US had given a warning<\/p>\n

of this sort. And, you know, actually reveals some of the details of this. But of course, by this time, the<\/p>\n

Iraqis had already invaded. So that’s the other really interesting CIA story in this<\/p>\n

period, although also with a very tragic set of consequences to it.<\/p>\n

OK. Let me just say a few quick words of conclusion, because I’ve gone way over.<\/p>\n

You know, what really should be clear from what I’ve been talking about is that the U.S. was actually acting<\/p>\n

with great restraint toward Iran in this time period. The CIA was not at all<\/p>\n

trying to destabilise Iran or help opposition groups, anything like that.<\/p>\n

What it was doing was gathering intelligence and providing some intelligence<\/p>\n

to the Iranians, including what could have been crucially important intelligence about the Iraqi invasion<\/p>\n

preparations if that had been passed on. So the CIA really was not at all<\/p>\n

doing anything dangerous to Iran. And as I said before, the US on at<\/p>\n

least 16 occasions had rejected Iranian requests<\/p>\n

for assistance to plot against the Islamic regime. So entirely the opposite<\/p>\n

of what most Iranians thought at this time. U.S. was actually trying to be<\/p>\n

helpful and not trying to undermine the new Islamic regime.<\/p>\n

What conclusions can we draw about after empire situations? Well, unfortunately, this<\/p>\n

is a very idiosyncratic situation. I wouldn’t really try to draw any conclusions from this.<\/p>\n

I mean, there are plenty of good grad students here. Maybe one of you wants to do like a p._h._d dissertation<\/p>\n

on after empire, you know, sort of comparative after empire studies.<\/p>\n

Is a very interesting topic. Iran could be one of those cases. But just from the Iranian case itself,<\/p>\n

I think they can’t really say very much. You can quickly or I can quickly compare<\/p>\n

this situation with the British after 1953. The main thing is that,<\/p>\n

you know, Iran’s leaders in 1953, 54, when the British came back, were<\/p>\n

much more open and conducive, whereas in 1979, the US was dealing with<\/p>\n

intensely hostile interlocutors on the Iran were not the interlocutors. But, you know,<\/p>\n

intensely hostile radical Islamists who soon overtook everything.<\/p>\n

You know, there may have been opportunities during the revolution or after this time period, particularly,<\/p>\n

say, during the Iran contra era or subsequently, when the US might have been able to<\/p>\n

make the after empire experience in Iran, work a little more effectively<\/p>\n

for whatever set of reasons. We’ve missed those various opportunities. And here we are 40 years later<\/p>\n

with very tense relations with Iran. So that’s my story.<\/p>\n"},"episode_featured_image":false,"episode_player_image":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2017\/09\/british-studies.png","download_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast-download\/197\/after-empire-britain-the-united-states-and-the-iranian-revolution.mp3","player_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast-player\/197\/after-empire-britain-the-united-states-and-the-iranian-revolution.mp3","audio_player":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast-player\/197\/after-empire-britain-the-united-states-and-the-iranian-revolution.mp3<\/a><\/audio>","episode_data":{"playerMode":"dark","subscribeUrls":[],"rssFeedUrl":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/feed\/podcast\/bsls","embedCode":"

After Empire: Britain, the United States, and the Iranian Revolution<\/a><\/blockquote>