The fortieth anniversary of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 saw many academic workshops and conferences but fewer volumes of new scholarly work. This is not surprising. Scholarship moves slowly and the work on the revolution is still very much a work in progress, with a new generation of scholars gradually replacing those whose lives had often been closely tied to that monumental event in one way or another. Furthermore, the Islamic Republic that resulted from the Revolution has had a dynamic history, with constant twists and turns that puzzle many an observer and inevitably force historians to reconsider their perspectives. Even basic book-length narrative histories of the revolution are rare. As such, Darioush Bayandor’s well-researched narrative is a welcome contribution.
The author is a retired Swiss-Iranian diplomat previously known for his controversially revisionist account of the 1953 coup, captured in his book Iran and The CIA: The Fall of Mosaddeq Revisited (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) in which he downplayed the role of the CIA in the coup while emphasizing the role of internal Iranian dynamics. With his new book, he once more deals with a seminal event of Iranian history.
This work belongs to the genre of non-specialist historiography. In no way, however, is this intended as an underestimation. There are great many works of history produced by non-historians or non-academics. The author’s concerns are not those of most historians as he mainly tries to give a factual account of the revolution. Accordingly, the book intends to be “apolitical and non-judgmental … [remaining] within the strict confines of hard evidence and archives” while his task is to “produce data and lay out facts but avoid conclusions” whereby “no one is condemned or vindicated” (p. viii). In other words, the author holds to an idea of historical objectivity that most historians now reject as outdated and even delusional, in so far as any presentation of facts inevitably involves judgement and politics.
The book is valuable because it is well-researched and shows meticulous attention to detail as it narrates the history of events that culminated in the revolution. In this regard, it is as good as any written by an investigate journalist, as the noteworthy chapter on the 1978 burning of the Rex Cinema in Abadan shows. The author draws attention to specific facts as opposed to stating generalities, even if sometimes his colorful language gets in the way of empirical observation like his description of June 1963 protesters as “fired-up counter-elite gangs, who torched all vestiges of modern living on their trail” (p. 13). A good example of this attention to detail is his chronicling of the saga of Ayatollah Khomeini moving from Iraq to France, after a failed attempt to get into Kuwait. Bayandor takes us not only to the waiting room at the Iraqi–Kuwait border but he reminds us of the correspondence between the shah’s government and France as the latter allowed Khomeini’s extended stay in Paris.
Like any narrator, the author comes with many interpretations and judgements and a specific standpoint. Some of his interpretations are dubious and ultimately unconvincing, like his claim that “much of the political commotions in Iran in the years prior to the revolution were rooted in the eclectic character of Iran’s 1906–1907 fundamental law” because this blended a Belgian model with roles reserved for clerics (p. 5; this assertion was also crucial to the author’s understanding of the 1953 coup). Others are more thought-provoking, like the import he gives to the Ramsar conference of early August 1974, headed by the shah, where important economic decisions were made. In Bayandor’s narrative of the revolution, the economic decisions taken at this meeting were so ruinous as to lead to the downfall of the regime. In the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and machinations of the newly founded OPEC, oil prices had risen to astronomical levels and the shah’s government was now to use the new income to increase spending, departing from the five-year plan that his technocrats at the Plan Organization had devised. This decision, which quickly led to mushrooming inflation, is seen by the author as the “Ramsar blunder.” He dramatically likens the moment “to an existential crossroads that so often in history has driven autocrats to make ruinous decisions” (pp. 95–6). He even goes on to compare the Ramsar decisions to those of Napoleon and Hitler to invade Russia, respectively in 1912 and 1941, which sealed the fate of their empires.
For Bayandor, the “Ramsar blunder” matters so much, not only because the economic mishaps were catastrophic but because they showed a powerful shah who no longer listened to his technocrats. The resulting economic disaster failed to “[cause] visible alarm in the circles of power,” the author says because the shah was experiencing “vainglory at the limit of megalomania.” He still flew call girls from Paris every week while lavish celebrations for the fiftieth anniversary of the Pahlavi dynasty went ahead and the concept of “Great Civilization” was launched, which “even insiders sniggered at … as delusional” (p. 98).
Bayandor’s choice of the Ramsar conference as a historic moment is unorthodox and worthy of consideration since it focuses on contingent factors as opposed to vaguely defined grand narratives about “Westernization,” which we are used to. But it also reveals something about the author’s account. His narrative is defined by his standpoint as a former technocrat of the shah’s regime. In other words, this is an account of the revolution as seen from the palace, not the streets. It is more interested in “what went wrong” and what blunders of the shah’s government made the revolution possible. There are even facts (such as daily habits of the storied prime minister, Amir-Abbas Hoveyda), which the author cites from his own memories. This is not to say that the author’s account is that of a biased courtier. The author remains a fair narrator of facts and has no qualms about criticizing the imperial regime in the strongest terms. In assessing the failures of the shah’s industrialization program, he speaks of “rampant corruption, undated taxation policies and a heavy degree of geographical concentration [in Tehran and neighboring provinces]” (p. 44). He reminds us of the crucial fact that illiteracy was high at 56 percent and “gender balance was unsatisfactory” (p. 45). While he charts the rise of Iran as a “regional superpower,” he makes clear that the shah’s penchant for expensive western arms “came at the expense of civilian imperatives” (pp. 52–5). Referring to the killing of nine prisoners (veterans of the anti-shah armed struggle, including the legendary communist guerrilla leader Bijan Jazani) on 19 April 1975, Bayandor sees the act as a “lurid crime,” which was never subject to parliamentary or judicial inquests. Finally, writing on the shah’s departure from Iran, the author says that “few shed any tears” for the monarch (p. 326).
The author’s account of the revolutionary movement is also not based on the caricatures popular among some Pahlavi enthusiasts. His narrative on the rise of Islamism is more sophisticated than many standard accounts as he does not stop at names of well-known intellectuals such as Jalāl Āl-e Ahmad and Ali Shariati but includes others such as Fakhreddin Shādmān, whose work he sees as “intellectualization of Islam” and “backlash against cultural alienation,” and Ehsān Narāqi, “who criticized westernization as a social ill” (p. 16). Still, a scholar interested in the dynamics of revolutions is bound to be disappointed in this book. Bayandor shows no interest in scholarly treatments of the intellectual history of Iran and the broader Middle East and his own account of Āl-e Ahmad as someone announcing “the perfection of Islam while denouncing everything that stemmed from the west” (p. 17) is superficial at best.
When Bayandor criticizes the shah, and he does so often, he does so from a disgruntled technocratic perspective. He is much less interested in viewing the events from the perspective of revolutionaries, capturing the dynamics of the revolutionary movement or answering questions about its origins and historical place. This approach is most evident in the final chapter of the book, entitled “the Collapse.” The choice of words often symbolically reveals the standpoint of the author. The capture of Saigon by Vietnamese communists in 1975 is described either as its “conquering” or its “fall” according to the side one takes. The same is true here. What the revolutionaries would see as “victory,” Bayandor sees as “collapse.” The narrative account of the day of the revolution, 11 February 1979, is decidedly from within the palace, giving us memorable accounts from the standpoints of the military’s staff headquarters or Tehran’s Jamshidieh garrison but not those from the streets where the uprising of the people was dealing the final blow to Iran’s centuries-old monarchical form of government.
The book’s strength is in pointing out facts that are often elided in narratives of the revolution. The shah’s relationship with the Soviet Union, which was critical in the development of Iran’s steel industry is one example (p. 42). The author’s approach refreshingly crosses state boundaries where the relevance of facts such as the 1972 Soviet–Iraqi treaty of friendship, the 1978 military coup in Pakistan, or the death of Spain’s General Franco in November 1975, are taken into account. The book ably recounts many little-remembered yet poignant historical moments. The conversation between Iran’s Queen Farah Pahlavi with her flamboyant counterpart in the Philippines, Imelda Marcus, in which the latter recalls US Ambassador William Sullivan as a “snake” is an example (p. 256). Sullivan was posted to Manilla prior to Tehran and the anecdote richly shows the global field of Cold War politics in which Iran was enmeshed and the south–south connections that the field was rife with: Iran and Philippines were both independent countries that sided with the US in the Cold War but they weren’t only connected to Washington DC but to one another. Another example of a poignant historical moment in the book is the conversation that Asadollah Alam, the ailing court minister and ultimate shah loyalist had with the premier Hoveyda as he (Alam) lay sick in bed in 1977, wondering how the revolution could be happening despite all the social good that the shah’s government had provided to the people (p. 147). Another memorable episode is the trip that National Front leader Karim Sanjābi made to Paris in 1978 to see Ayatollah Khomeini. The trip is well-known but its circumstances less so. Sanjābi was on his way to Vancouver to take part in the congress of Socialist International where he could have posed next to some prominent figures of international social democracy such as Willy Brandt, lending their credence to his political party and to the Iranian revolution. The trip was cancelled by Sanjābi, ostensibly to protest at the British Labour Party’s support for the shah or the presence of Israeli socialists. However, it is suggested in the book that Khomeini’s camp had made the cancellation of the trip a condition for Sanjābi’s audience with Khomeini in the Paris suburb of Neauphle-le-Château (p. 236).
As the title of the book shows, Iran–US relations is one of its central foci. The author is especially interested in a question which has long been a concern for defenders of the Pahlavi regime while also making its way into most accounts and mythologies of the revolution: Did the government of Jimmy Carter help bring down the shah as the conspiracy theory goes? Did the US president’s push for democracy and human rights contribute to the shah’s downfall, as many accounts have long claimed?
Whatever one thinks of his conclusions, the author has done valuable work here by offering an account based on empirical research as opposed to conjecture or guesswork. He shows, for instance, that while Carter had campaigned on issues such as limiting arms sales to allies or human rights, he “retreated to a pragmatic approach” in his relations with the shah and showed “no qualms” about working with the CIA (pp. 77, 137). This attitude was shared by both Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinksi, despite all their differences, and it was outlined in Presidential Directive PD-NSC.30 (p. 138).
Furthermore, the author writes against “an array of historians, memorialists and ordinary members of the public” who saw the shah’s “liberalization policy” as a response to Carter by pointing to “more fundamental reasons” (p. 134). For Bayandor, the shah’s fundamental worries about the future of his dynasty were triggered by broader concerns such as the diagnosis of his cancerous disease and reflections on the ferocious power struggle that had followed the death of his ally, General Franco, in Spain. Still, this “unintended synchrony of [the shah’s] new policies with Carter’s human rights discourse” led to the perception that one was a rash response to the other and this undermined the shah. The monarch was aware of this as shown in a meeting in which he summoned the military top brass to Niāvarān Palace to reassure them that “the new policy was entirely voluntary” (p. 137).
Moreover, the book does focus on the role played by certain figures in the Carter administration in the course of events. In the Preface the author speaks of “deliberate manipulation by a faction in the Carter administration” (p. viii), although the body of the book does not quite show evidence for such factional manipulation. Special attention is shown to US Ambassador Sullivan whose well-known doubts about the viability of the shah and his relation with the revolutionaries are documented in the book (pp. 294–6). What the author shows and substantiates is that both Sullivan and his boss, Carter, did think that, as Carter noted in his diary “a genuinely non-aligned Iran need not be viewed as [a] US setback” (cited on p. 309), a remarkable departure from previous US policy and an obvious gain to the opposition. Blocking of the sale of riot equipment to Iran, led by certain human rights officials in Carter’s State Department, also receives due attention from the author, who sees it as critical since it handicapped the shah in dealing with mass protesters, a task for which his massive army was not well-equipped.
While many of the book’s nineteen chapters offer useful illustrations, some chapters deliver less than they promise. For instance, an entire chapter is dedicated to “the USSR and the Iranian Revolution” (chapter 15), but it is a mere six pages and does not go beyond offering the most basic facts. There are also some regrettable mistakes that a good copyeditor could have easily caught, such as the repeated reference to the Israeli–Arab Six Day War of “1966” rather than 1967. Overall, in spite of some of the above-stated shortcomings, the book’s welcome contribution is its empirical and archival-based narrative that portrays several important episodes of Iran’s 1979 Revolution.
