Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey, it's Latif from Radiolab. Our goal with each episode is to make you think, how did I live this long and not know that? Radiolab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Listen wherever you get podcasts. Hey, it's Rand. The current war launched by the United States and Israel against Iran has been decades in the making, and ThruLine has been covering the tension between the U.S.
and Iran for years. So today, we're bringing you an episode from a past series we made. Part one of this series took us inside the CIA-backed overthrow of Iran's democratically elected prime minister in 1953. That episode is called Four Days in August. And if you haven't heard it yet, check it out in our archives. Today, we pick the story back up in 1979. The secular Shah the U.S.
put in place after the coup in 1953 was suddenly facing a major crisis, an Islamic revolution. For the last seven days, Tehran and other cities have seen violent clashes between troops and demonstrators demanding a raise with rocks and homemade petrol bombs. Hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets. Inevitably, the result is massacre.
Chapter 2: What historical events led to the U.S.-Iran conflict?
The Shah was forced to flee Iran, and a new leader, a Muslim cleric named Ayatollah Khomeini, took power. Returns to a country teetering on the brink of civil war. The crowd chanted, Allah Hu Akbar, God is great, and raced along with the motorcade, trying to get a glimpse of the Ayatollah. And this began a new era in U.S.-Iran relations.
In an obvious reference to the United States, he said, foreign advisors have ruined our culture and have taken our oil. And so in the course of months, Iran went from one of America's best allies to one of America's worst adversaries. Not long after the revolution, Iran did something that solidified its new place as an American adversary.
The American embassy in Tehran is in the hands of Muslim students tonight. Spurred on by an anti-American speech by the Ayatollah Khomeini, they stormed the embassy, fought the Marine Guards for three hours, overpowered them, and took dozens of American hostages.
Some 60 Americans, including our fellow citizen whom you just saw bound and blindfolded, are now beginning their sixth day of captivity inside the U.S. embassy in Tehran. It's Friday morning there now. Over the past 40-plus years, this ongoing antagonism between the two countries has led to violent, even deadly results.
In this 2019 episode from our archives, we explored the direct military confrontations, the covert battles, and the 21st century cyber war between Iran and the United States, and the context behind the moment we're in today. Hey, it's Late from Radiolab. Our goal with each episode is to make you think, how did I live this long and not know that?
Radiolab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Listen wherever you get podcasts. Part one, do you copy? Iraq claims to have carried out more than 130 air raids yesterday and to have shot down two Iranian jets. Iraq's Saddam Hussein has been active in honouring his army's field commanders, whose string of recent military triumphs tilted the war decisively in Baghdad's favour.
It was Saddam Hussein who declared, whoever climbs over our fence, we shall climb over his roof. The Iran-Iraq war was one of the bloodiest wars of the second half of the 20th century. When it was over, after eight years, there was over a million casualties, Iranian and Iraqi casualties. Relations between Iran and Iraq worsened when the Ayatollahs took over.
The Iraqis claimed that the Iranians were refusing to implement border agreements, and the first skirmishes broke out. Iraq invaded Iran on land, and they met with some initial success, especially in the southwest, which was the well-producing region of Iran. But very quickly, the war effort bogged down, and by 1982, Iran had succeeded in expelling Iraqi forces out of Iran.
And it looked like momentum was working against Iraq in the long term. Iran has a much larger population, larger territorial base. So there were fears on the Iraqi side that eventually if the war dragged on, they would lose.
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Chapter 3: How did the 1979 Iranian Revolution change U.S.-Iran relations?
So they tried to escalate and expand the war to include economic warfare. So they targeted Iran's oil industry. Iran responded in kind and started attacking ships in the Gulf that were going to pick up oil from other Arab countries that were allied to Iraq and providing financial and other help to Iraq as part of its war effort against Iran.
For both countries, oil is the lifeblood of their economy. And so they're trying to sink one another's oil tankers to weaken one another economically. So they attacked using aircraft, helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, and they also attacked using small boats. The small boats very often would have machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, or small diameter rockets, 107-millimeter rockets.
So they would pull up in front of a ship going through the Gulf. They would set up on a line in front of the ship's line of movement. And as the ship passed them, they would open fire and rake the hull. And sometimes they would shoot at the bridge where the crew was located. An oil tanker runs the gauntlet of air attacks in the Gulf War.
Now the ships, because they are very large tankers and were often double hulled, The damage did not cause these ships to sink, and they were able to continue with their mission, but it imposed costs. It was dangerous for the crews. And that area where Iran and Iraq were fighting, the Strait of Hormuz, is an incredibly crucial geoeconomic chokehold.
Once through the entrance, the Straits of Hormuz, the oil tankers face a problem, regardless of their destination. On any given day, 20 to 40% of the world's oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz. And at its narrowest point, it's about 20 miles wide.
What's happening is that the war on land between Iran and Iraq is spilling over into the sea, with Western tankers being the sitting targets for both sides. The world cared about what was happening with these tanker wars because it was affecting the price of gasoline throughout the world. It was absolutely crucial to the fate of the global economy.
In 1986, 1987, Iran intensified its attacks on Kuwaiti tankers in particular. Kuwait was playing an especially important role in the war as a country that was providing support to Iraq, financial and otherwise, providing loans. They had been asking the United States about the idea of perhaps providing escort for their tankers so that they wouldn't be attacked.
And at first we didn't respond with enthusiasm. So the Kuwaitis went to the Russians and the Russians responded almost immediately that they'd be willing to do so. When we heard about that, our response was, well, we're potentially yielding the playing field in the Gulf to the Russians.
And within the context of great power competition during the Cold War, the relationship was seen as a zero-sum game. So that's when the United States got itself involved. From ABC, this is World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. Good evening. That was an American flag on the back of that ship. And we begin this evening in what is surely the world's most dangerous body of water, the Persian Gulf.
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Chapter 4: What triggered the American embassy hostage crisis in Tehran?
An Iranian civilian aircraft takes off from the airport in the city of Bandar Abbas, which is an airfield in a port city in the south of Iran, en route to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. And what would usually be a 30-minute flight, very easy. And as it turns out, it was flying right over the area in which combat was going on on the surface. And it takes off.
The crew of the Vincennes thought that this civilian jet was actually an Iranian fighter aircraft that was at first gaining altitude, but then diving to attack. They mistook it for an Iranian military aircraft. And they were trying to communicate with it, but they were using military frequency to communicate with this Iranian plane.
And they weren't getting any response because this Iranian plane was a civilian airliner, which wasn't on a military frequency. So after numerous attempts of trying to communicate with it... They shot two surface-to-air missiles. which brought down the Iranian airliner, killing 290 civilians aboard.
There has been a dramatic and sudden escalation of hostilities in the Persian Gulf involving US forces. There is the possibility that US Navy missiles may have accidentally shot down an Iranian civilian airliner, a civilian airliner carrying nearly 300 people.
And so I think the fog of war, coupled with both a miscalculation, itchy trigger fingers and inability to communicate, you know, resulted in this terrible tragedy. Throughout the morning, there have been very confused reports as to what actually happened. To this day, the Iranian government believes there was no way this was an accident.
It was doubtful that the plane that was shot down was an F-14 fighter. Because the plane was clearly marked. Its flight pattern was clearly civilian aircraft headed to Dubai. There's probably dozens of such flights every day between Bandar Abbas and Dubai. But what the U.S. side talks about is the broader context. This U.S.
warship was actually receiving fire from what they thought were Iranian warships. There was constant attacks taking place during that time. And so the United States acknowledged it as a terrible mistake. President Ronald Reagan offered what is known as ex gratia payments, voluntary payments, by the United States government to the families of the victims. For Iran, these things are not mistakes.
Even if America claimed it was a mistake, the message that was taken by the Iranian side was that this was an act of open hostility. One of the things you often hear today is that there's always a worry about miscalculation in dealing with the Iranians. that there's always the potential for inadvertent escalation as a result of a tragic mistake.
On the other hand, I would point out that one of the lessons of this conflict during the latter phases of the Iran-Iraq war is that actually both sides were pretty good at keeping the level of conflict within a certain kind of relatively narrow band, that neither side wanted the conflict to spiral out of control and become an even larger war. And they largely succeeded in that regard.
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Chapter 5: How did the Iran-Iraq War escalate military tensions?
the beginning of the Iraq War, Iran was somewhat cautious the first year or so. But then you started to see Iran ramping up attacks on American troops using proxies, using their Shia militia proxies in Iraq. Iran has essentially tried to franchise the Hezbollah model.
I call it the McDonaldization of Hezbollah, taking that Shia militia franchise in Lebanon and using it in other contexts, whether that's to help fight for your ally Bashar Assad in Syria, Iraqi Shia militias to fight against ISIS and project Iranian power in Iraq, and now in Yemen.
A second day of airstrikes inside Yemen by Saudi jets bombing Iranian-backed Houthi Shia militias, which have taken control of the country. And when we're talking about countries in the region which are experiencing either civil wars or power vacuums, Iran is able to fill those voids much more effectively with these Shia proxies on the ground. The top U.S.
commander for the Middle East worries about what could be Tehran's bid for superpower status. So I think a major asymmetric advantage that Iran has over both the United States and U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia, for example, is that almost all Shia radicals in the region, let's say from India to Lebanon, are willing to go out and kill, if not die, for the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Whereas almost all Sunni radicals in the Middle East are deathly opposed to the United States, and they want to actually overthrow the government of Saudi Arabia. Groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS are Sunni radicals, which are not Saudi Arabia's proxy. They're actually Saudi Arabia's adversary. And so despite the fact that Shia are outnumbered by Sunni by four or five to one in the region,
Iran has a monopoly over Shia radicalism. And increasingly, not only does Iran operate via proxy, but its proxies also have plausible deniability because they're not necessarily doing the fighting themselves. They're using IEDs. They're using drones. They're using mines. So it gives Iran two layers of deniability. Coming up, how one computer virus started a cyber arms race.
This is Giselle from Portland, Oregon, and you're listening to ThruLine on NPR. I only recently discovered the show, but it has quickly become my favorite podcast. In these difficult political times, I'm just so grateful for the show and the context that it gives to really complex contemporary issues. It's a good reminder that nothing exists in a vacuum. So thanks.
From WQXR and Carnegie Hall comes Classical Music Happy Hour, a new podcast hosted by me, Pianist Maniacs. Each episode will speak with a special guest, listen to musical gems, play music-inspired games, and answer questions from our listeners. The first episode drops March 4th. Listen on the NPR app. Part 3. A Digital Weapon
An Iranian facility has been targeted for cyber attack, the second time it's happened in less than a year. The worst cyber attack in history. The race between Iranian officials trying to build their nuclear program and outside forces trying to stop it is getting more intense. This new era of warfare has already begun. We have to go all the way back to around 1996, mid-90s is when the U.S.
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Chapter 6: What role did oil play in the Iran-Iraq War?
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected president of Iran. And shortly after that, Iran announced that it was done with the cessation agreement and it was no longer going to remain at this stasis position. And it was going to go forward with enriching its first batch of uranium hexafluoride gas. And so you can imagine the panic in Israel when that happens.
Jump forward about six months, on January, February 2006 now, Iran announces that they have enriched their first batch of uranium hexafluoride gas in that pilot plant at Natanz. And then they announced that they had perfected the enrichment process and they were going to begin installing the first centrifuges in the actual enrichment plants.
Israel, of course, was focused on trying to bomb the facility. They'd come to the U.S. for permission from President Bush to launch a strike against the Natanz facility. And the U.S. denied that permission and instead had this alternative plan that they wanted to do. So between February 2006 and February 2007, the U.S. is developing and testing Stuxnet. Stuxnet was what we call a worm.
Part of it was a virus, part of it was a worm. A worm is malware that will travel from machine to machine without any human interaction. So the initial release, of course, is done by a human.
But once a worm finds a vulnerable system, it will infect that system and then it will search automatically for any other system connected to that system on an internal network or over the internet and travel to that system and infect that as well. So you've got this Natanz facility that has critical computers that are air-gapped from the internet.
And also the facility itself is physically protected. They had three outer perimeter security walls, anti-aircraft guns. Earthen berms entirely hide the facility from view. Around the facility, they had fences, they had guards, armed guards, all of that.
So the only way that you could get Stuxnet into where you needed to go was to have someone walk it in, deliver it, either wittingly or unwittingly. And we know that the first version of Stuxnet could only be spread via USB sticks. It's quite possible that the first version of Stuxnet, because it didn't have a lot of spreading capabilities in it, was spread by an inside mole.
They probably had close access inside Natanz. So 2007, they unleashed that first version of Stuxnet. It was a partnership between the U.S. and Israel. Their aim wasn't to, it wasn't catastrophic damage. They didn't want to destroy all of the centrifuges. They wanted to simply stop Iran from obtaining enough enriched uranium gas to have a bomb.
Iran had a limited supply of uranium hexafluoride gas that it had purchased from China, and they had a limited supply of materials that they could use to manufacture new centrifuges. And so the goal with Stuxnet was to destroy some of the gas and some of the centrifuges in order to buy time for diplomacy and sanctions to catch up.
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