Chapter 1: What led to the Iranian Revolution in 1979?
Iran, because of the great leadership of the Shah, is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world. This is a great tribute to you, Your Majesty, and to your leadership and to the respect and the admiration and love which your people give to you. We in the United States have no other nation on earth who is closer to us in planning for our mutual military security.
And there is no leader with whom I have a deeper sense of personal gratitude and personal friendship. On behalf of the people of the United States, I would like to offer a toast at this time to the great leaders of Iran, the Shah and the Shabanu, and to the people of Iran, and to the world peace that we hope together we can help to bring.
Now, people listening to that may think that that is an Englishman who can't do a good impression of someone from Georgia, but it isn't. It was actually, Dominic, President Jimmy Carter, and he was toasting the last Shah of Iran, as Americans call it, or as we in Britain call it correctly, Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his wife, Empress Farah, the Shah Banu,
at a banquet in Iran's capital, Tehran, on New Year's Eve 1977. And Dominic, it is a moment ripe with irony, is it not?
It is indeed.
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Chapter 2: What was the relationship between President Carter and the Shah of Iran?
It's one of the great ironic moments, not just of the 1970s, but the late 20th century. So this moment when Jimmy Carter is toasting the Shah and the Shah Banu, the friendship between Iran and the United States,
And the stability and the security that Iran offers in the Middle East, this comes just days before the outbreak of a violent revolution that sweeps the Shah from power and it kicks off the rule of the Ayatollahs, who still govern Iran today.
Well, Dominic, you say that. We are recording this in early January. I mean, by the time this goes out, who knows what may have happened.
That's true, because Iran is once again engulfed in street protests, demonstrations, violent repression, and so on. The storm clouds of counter-revolution are gathering. They are indeed. But to go back to the revolution itself, Jimmy Carter, the man who's standing there giving that toast, he is one of the first and most prominent political victims of this revolution.
Because his presidency, pretty extraordinary and strange presidency, even by American standards, is consumed... by the fires of the Iranian revolution.
So it's an extraordinary story. One of the things that brings Ronald Reagan to power, and one of the advantages of Reagan is he's much easier to do an impersonation of.
He is. So just to give people a little sense of the way the rest of history works, I think that was about the 24th take, was it? And if you have any question marks about Tom's rendition of Jimmy Carter there, let me just emphasise, it was a lot better than the previous 23 takes.
Which he sounded very like Shane Warne for a lot of the time.
He did. So what we're going to be telling in this series is the story of the fall of the Shah and the rise of the Ayatollahs, the capture of the US embassy in Tehran, this extraordinary moment when 66 Americans were held hostage for 444 days, and Jimmy Carter's disastrous attempt, Operation Eagle Claw, to rescue them, which ended in disaster and tragedy.
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Chapter 3: How did the Shah's modernization efforts impact Iranian society?
And Dominic, again, just to say, we are recording this in the immediate aftermath of the US raid on Caracas, which was, in military terms, an incredible success. And I guess what happens in Iran with Carter is the polar opposite.
Absolute disaster. It is. So it's an incredibly dramatic story, but one that has really, really serious repercussions. So first of all, this story, what happens in Iran in the late 1970s, completely overturns the diplomatic chessboard of the Middle East.
It turns Iran from one of America's closest regional allies into an implacable opponent, an opponent that today is making drones used by the Russians in Ukraine, for example. And secondly, and I know this is something that you find fascinating, Tom, this is the story of the Islamic Revolution.
Arguably, I would say the only global revolution comparable with the French and the Russian revolutions in terms of its dramatic cultural and political consequences. I would say definitely.
I mean, it fires the starting gun on the kind of the wave of Islamic militancy that has shaken the world since 1979.
So a lot to talk about. But let's start with those two men in Tehran on New Year's Eve 1977. So they are in the Niavaran Palace, which is in the northern foothills on the edge of Tehran. And Tehran, to give people a sense, it's the capital of Iran. It's a city that had changed enormously in the 20 years before Jimmy Carter visited.
So it had been transformed by billions of dollars in new oil money, new housing blocks, new factories, and above all, new people. So in the 1940s, the end of the Second World War, Tehran had half a million people. In 1977, when Carter went, it had almost five million people.
And that stratospheric growth, that single fact, in some ways lies at the heart of today's episode, the extraordinary change in the kind of social and economic makeup of Tehran and indeed of Iran generally.
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Chapter 4: Who was Ayatollah Khomeini and what was his role in the revolution?
I would say that of all the cities I've ever been to, Tehran is the one that seems the least capable of coping, say, with traffic. The traffic there, I mean, unbelievable. And you have vast lanes with no traffic lights, no way of crossing it. The whole infrastructure is... It's buckling at the seams. The seams buckle, you know what I mean.
And I guess that this is a legacy of the kind of the great boom in the 60s and 70s.
Exactly, which we'll come to. So of all the people in Tehran in 1977, the most celebrated and powerful was the man that Carter was toasting that night, the host. And that's Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who is the king of kings and light of the Aryans, the Shah of Iran. And let's give people a sense of his character.
He was born in 1919 to an army officer called Rizar Pahlavi in a land that was then called in the West, Persia. Persia, of course, a very ancient country, not so much a nation as a civilization in itself, multi-ethnic, multilingual. Of course, the one thing that people get wrong about Persia and Iran is they think that they, I mean, people would often call them Arabs. They're not Arabs.
It's the one thing they're absolutely not. It's very important to Iranians. They're not an Arab country. What's also very important, it was the only country in the world that had adopted a particular kind of Islam, Shia or Shiite Islam, as its state religion. And we will come back to this because this question about Shiism or Shia Islam lies at the centre of the Iranian revolution.
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Chapter 5: What were the socio-economic conditions in Iran during the 1970s?
It absolutely does. And of course, people will think of Iran as an Islamic country, which it completely is. But just to emphasise on the ancient roots of the dynamic in Iran in this episode. I mean, it is incredibly ancient. So Farsi, the predominant language in Iran, is descended from the language spoken by the first great rulers of Persia, Cyrus and Darius the Great and people like that.
And that framework of a monarchy and a priesthood, which you see in 20th century Iran and which is so fundamental to the dynamics of the Iranian revolution. I mean that ultimately reaches back before the coming of Islam all the way back again to the time of Cyrus and Darius. And the concept of monarchy is at least as fundamental to the historical makeup of Iran as the idea of a kind of a clerisy.
So the great epic of Iran, Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, I mean, it's literally the book of kings. So when the Shah stands up there, he is, I think, correctly conscious of himself as the heir of thousands of years of rule by monarchs.
Right, well let's talk about monarchs. So let's talk about Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. So in his lifetime, I said he was born in 1919, in his lifetime, indeed that of his father, Persia had fallen prey to a series of rival colonial empires, specifically Russia and Britain. And that was turbocharged in 1908 when the British struck oil.
And that was the moment that created the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which we all know much better as BP. So in the First World War, Persia was occupied by the Russians and the British. And after the First World War, it fell into total chaos. So in 1921, Muhammad's father, Reza Pahlavi, staged a coup with British support, and he ends up becoming Reza Shah.
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Chapter 6: How did the U.S. perceive the political situation in Iran?
He takes the throne himself, which means that Muhammad becomes crown prince at the age of just two years old. Now, Raza Shah is a very, very formidable man. His son said he was one of the most frightening men he ever met. And he was definitely not a loving father. So he supposedly thought that if he was too kind to his son, then it would mean that his son became gay.
So he tried to, he didn't show him too much affection. And Muhammad grew up as the absolutely classic textbook, anxious, shy, reserved son of an overbearing, terrifying military father. So very, very Alexis and Peter the Great for people who remember that series. And Mohammed was sent off to a Swiss boarding school. He became a massive Francophile at the school, which he remained all his life.
And in fact, because he associates Iran with his father and because he goes off to boarding school in the West, he is always something of a moderniser and a westerniser and indeed a seculariser, which, as we will see, is something of a problem.
Yeah, and he loves very expensive French food, doesn't he?
Which we'll feature later in this show. Well, how should I put this? He likes French courtesans. I think it's the best way of putting it. So in 1941, Persia, which his father Reza has renamed, or he has basically asked people abroad, stop calling it Persia, please. We don't call it Persia. We call it the land of the Aryans, its ancient name, which is Iran. So Persia, or Iran...
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Chapter 7: What events escalated the protests against the Shah in 1978?
is occupied once again by the British and the Soviets to stop the Nazis getting its oil. And the British thought that Reza Pahlavi was too pro-German and they made him abdicate in favour of his son, who's now 21.
This kind of meddling by the British in Iranian politics is such a feature of 19th and early 20th century history, isn't it? That even now in the 21st century, the Iranians are still prone to thinking that Britain lurks behind everything wrong.
They do. It's very flattering for us because whenever anything happens, the Iranians assume that the British are controlling everything. So it's notoriety way above our station now. Completely. We're punching above our weight in the Iranian imagination. So at 21 years old, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi is the new Shah of Iran. He has a double taint.
So first of all, he's the son of a usurper who seized the throne in a British-backed coup in 1921. And he only got the throne himself 20 years later because the British basically gave it to him. So there's this impression of being a foreign puppet, and this is confirmed a decade later in one of the most controversial, if not the most controversial, moments in Iranian history.
So in 1953, Iran had a democratically elected prime minister called Mohammad Mosaddegh, who's this very kind of wily old bird, this experienced reformist... Liberal politician. And he has pledged that he will nationalise this Anglo-Persian oil company, BP. And the British, understandably, I suppose, they hate this idea because they want to keep all the money for themselves.
And they basically persuade the CIA to organise a coup. And there's a coup.
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Chapter 8: What were the consequences of the revolution for Iran and the U.S.?
About 250 people are killed. Mossadegh is toppled and he's put under house arrest for the rest of his life. Now, the Shah, who's the sort of, you know, he's the figurehead of Iran, he knew about this coup. He kind of supported it. He spent most of it hiding in a hotel in Rome and then coming back to Iran.
And a lot of people in the Iranian elite conclude at the end of 1953, you know, the Shah, he's basically a complete coward and a wimp. And he is a Western puppet because he did nothing to resist this coup. But then from the late 1950s onwards, with Mossadegh gone, the Shah starts to assert himself. He becomes more than a figurehead. So like his father, he is a moderniser.
So both of them, Reza Pahlavi, a classic kind of military man of the interwar years who tried to westernise and modernise Iran, his son is the same. And we'll talk a little bit more in the second half about the political implications of this, but let's just concentrate on Mohammed and his character. By the 1960s, he is developing a personality cult. His courtiers treat him as a demigod.
He starts to see himself as the heir to the great kings of the past, people like Cyrus the Great.
So Cyrus is the founder of the Persian monarchy. I suppose the great advantage that the Shah has over other would-be dictatorial figures in the mid-20th century is that he does have this incredible historical legacy to draw on.
Exactly. And he does with gusto. They put up posters everywhere in Tehran. He's got this classic kind of 1950s, 1960s dictator vibe. So he wears a military uniform and enormous sunglasses.
You see, I think that's a mistake. I think if he'd gone for the full long beard as worn by Duras, great. He might have cut a better figure.
I like a dictator in sunglasses, to be honest. I'd wear them myself if I was a dictator, but there you go. The thing is that actually behind the scenes, he's still actually a very shy and sullen man and very reserved and timid. But in the West, he becomes a real celebrity. So Western visitors think he's very polished and very impressive.
The gossip columns are full of, you know, he speaks English and French fluently. He goes skiing in St. Moritz. He plays tennis on the French Riviera. He's the kind of person who in an alternative universe would have a cameo in an early Pink Panther film or something. He would.
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