REVIEW: ‘King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation’ by Scott Anderson
Since 1979 numerous scholars and journalists have tried to explain why the Iranian people revolted against their monarch. Most books touch on the same themes: A diffident monarch pretending to be a strongman faced an unexpected revolt and wilted. America was too distracted by other crises and too confident in Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to focus on the monarchy’s collapsing ramparts. And yet, the blame game goes on. Who lost Iran has been one of Washington’s favorite blood sports. Jimmy Carter blamed the CIA; the Republicans blamed Carter, and the Iranian exiles blamed everyone but themselves.
Scott Anderson’s King of Kings is an engaging and most welcome account of this sordid affair. With his keen eye for detail and an ability to develop characters, Anderson takes us back to the streets and alleyways of Iran of the 1970s. His method is to tell the story through the prism of four primary characters. Ebrahim Yazdi, a naturalized American citizen who decided to leave his medical research in Texas for the more enthralling task of revolution. Two midlevel officials in Washington: State Department’s Iran desk officer Henry Precht and National Security Council aide Gary Sick. In Iran, he pays much attention to the colorful Foreign Service officer in the provincial city of Tabriz, Michael Metrinko. Other characters fade in and out, but the core four remain a constant.
A revolution is an impossible phenomenon to predict ahead of time. Even as it unfolds, one cannot understand its full dimensions and its destructive potential. The signs of discontent in Iran were all too obvious: class cleavages, massive corruption, and out-of-touch elite. The economy was sputtering at a time when the shah needed resources to sanction his rule. But these things were evident in other societies that did not have a populist revolution. It would require a particular degree of prescience to predict in 1978 that a monarch who had ruled for over three decades would simply whimper and fold.
Anderson can be a bit harsh in his censure of America’s political class for failing to see the coming revolt. The fact is that the CIA routinely chronicled the many problems in Iran. And it is hard to read astute journalistic accounts such as Frances FitzGerald’s “Giving the Shah everything he wants,” in the 1974 edition of Harper’s, without appreciating that not all that glittered in Iran was gold. In both the government and academy, most observers of Iran concluded that the monarch who had survived so many crises could manage the convulsions provoked by a relentless modernization drive. This was not an outrageous conclusion.
And then there was Iran’s own secret service, the SAVAK. Anderson pays less attention to the Iranian side of the ledger. Paradoxically, the Islamic Republic has been generous to historians. It has published a 19-volume collection of SAVAK files pertaining to the revolution and covering the period from October 1977 to February 1979. SAVAK was hardly just a torture chamber, and its vast surveillance network picked up substantial troves of information. Its eyes and ears were everywhere including in the mosques. It knew what was being said and who was saying it. But under the banner of liberalization, the shah allowed for criticism without knowing how to channel it in the right direction. And when things got out of hand, he wandered the halls of his palace asking Western envoys why his people had turned against him.
The process of telling a story through characters makes for good reading but as a work of history is not without its limitations. Ebrahim Yazdi was not an important member of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s inner circle. The cagey ayatollah only trusted his own former seminary students and like-minded clerics. Gary Sick and Henry Precht may have represented the warring NSC and State Department perspectives, but sometimes midlevel officials are just that. And Metrinko was an intrepid Foreign Service officer stuck in the boonies.
The one individual who is curiously missing from this book is Jimmy Carter. Considered to be a detail-oriented president, Carter could manage many crises at the same time. Indeed, by the fall of 1978, Carter and his senior aides were fully engaged on the Iran issue. And yet there is little here on how Carter saw the revolution that would eventually devour his presidency.
To be fair, national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski does come in for his share of criticism for his hawkish perspective, but not so much other officials who managed the file at the highest levels of government. Warren Christopher, deputy secretary of state, was frequently the lead official on Iran at the State Department given that Secretary of State Cyrus Vance preferred less contentious topics. And Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, a firm supporter of the hawkish Brzezinski, is barely mentioned.
Anderson largely agrees with the prevailing view that the Carter administration was a house divided against itself. These divisions presumably led to mixed messages thus compounding the shah’s confusion. But by November, Carter had settled on a firm course of action and repeatedly sent emissaries to Iran urging the monarch to crack down. It was the shah who rejected all these entreaties for restoring order. Too many Americans have unwisely accepted the Pahlavi diaspora’s claims that Carter bears principal responsibility for the collapse of the monarchy. In the end, the shah was too soft-hearted to govern Iran. His clerical successors would display no compunction about shedding blood.
Another figure unfairly treated by Anderson is America’s last ambassador to Iran, William Sullivan. It has long been the conceit of many chroniclers of the revolution that Sullivan was too enamored of his view that the revolutionaries and the armed forces could somehow be reconciled. His “Thinking the Unthinkable” cable outlining these views stands as one of the most famous diplomatic dispatches of our time. It is suggested that Sullivan was too busy pursuing his own plans to pay attention to his superiors in Washington. This was certainly the view of Carter, who often contemplated relieving his envoy. The charge is wrong and unfair.
Sullivan had strong opinions, and he ran a tight ship in Iran. His judgment was certainly not flawless. He was good at diagnosing the Pahlavi elite that he dealt with and understood their limitations. As with most Americans, he could not understand revolutionaries waging a struggle on behalf of God. But whatever his personal perspective may have been, he was never insubordinate. The documentary record indicates that Sullivan discharged his instructions with integrity even when he disagreed with them. Sullivan and CIA’s chief Iran analyst Earnest Oney were the only two officials to get fired because of the revolution. And neither was at fault.
King of Kings is an important and engrossing account of a revolution whose reverberations continue to haunt the Middle East. It will not be the last word, as the argument shall and should go on.
King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation
by Scott Anderson
Doubleday, 512 pp., $35
Ray Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
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