Dominic Sandbrook

The CIA has been funding and training his secret police, which is called SAVAK.

And SAVAK had a pretty grisly reputation for torturing their opponents, for torturing dissidents.

So there's a lot of stuff with acid and cattle prods.

It's very kind of 1970s Paraguay or something.

They're not.

I mean, not as much as you would think, actually.

I think it's mainly sort of it's sort of dissident professors and leftists of various kinds.

But I know you've got it in for poets, Tom.

But actually, no, I haven't.

Yeah, maybe.

And the CIA, you know, the CIA had poets on their books.

So the CIA supported American poetry.

Oh, it's so complicated, isn't it?

Exactly.

I think if you're a Chilean or Argentine poet, I think the 70s were a bad decade.

Yeah.

But if you're an Iranian one, it's better.

Maybe a bit better.

I don't know.

So Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, who were in charge of American foreign policy in the early 70s, see Iran as an absolutely central player in their anti-communist alliance system.