- The history of American-Iranian relations is complex, sometimes contradictory, and repeatedly violent.

Today's guest explains that history with a special focus on the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the fracture that followed, and its continued relevance today.

He's Scott Anderson, this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(pensive bright music) (pensive bright music continues) Hello, and welcome to "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

And my guest this week is Scott Anderson, an accomplished journalist and author who has reported from around the world, including multiple war zones.

His new book is "King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution.

A Story of Hubris, Delusion, and Catastrophic Miscalculation."

He received the 2025 Kirkus Prize for nonfiction for that work.

Scott, thank you so much for spending some time with us today.

- My pleasure.

Thanks for having me on, Jim.

- You know, the book I mentioned to you, it was an education for me.

And where I had, I think I knew a little bit about the actual, you know, the hostage crisis and some of the dynamics around that, you really go deep into the relationship between the Shah, the American President, the Ayatollah Khomeini.

For the audience who maybe hasn't read it yet, do you want to give us just a quick overview of the book and then we'll get into it in some depth?

- Sure!

Well, the Shah came to power in 1941.

The Allied powers during World War II had overthrown his father, who was the Shah before him.

They put in a 21-year-old who they thought was going to be very pliant, a figurehead.

The Shah tried for many, many years to try to become an ally of the Americans, of the United States, to limited success until, really until the 1960s.

With a combination of Iranian oil and economic ties with the United States, it grew into becoming one of America's most important allies in the world.

Probably the most important ally from a military standpoint, economic, and again, from oil between Europe and Japan.

It was incredibly important to the United States.

In the mid-1970s, the Shah was meeting increased sort of opposition at home, both from the left and from the right.

By this point, the Americans were so embedded with the Shah's regime that they ignored the warning signs, as did the Shah, of this growing opposition growing inside Iran and outside from this exiled religious leader named Ayatollah Khomeini.

Right up until the revolution really kind of started right at the very beginning of 1978, and it lasted over the next year.

And finally, in early mid-January of 1979, the Shah went into exile.

A couple weeks later, the Islamic Revolution happened.

Khomeini became the supreme leader of Iran, and that was kind of, that's this same regime, different leadership of course, 46 years later.

- Yeah!

You know, I don't want to quote Mel Brooks, but I'm going to, right?

"It's good to be the king."

Right?

- [Scott] Yeah.

(chuckles) - Do we have a sense of what kind of popular enthusiasm or embrace the Shah ever had in Iran?

I am going to ask it that way, and then maybe I'll follow up.

- Yeah!

The Shah was an incredibly complex figure.

He was brilliant.

I mean, even his enemies recognized he was a brilliant man, obsessed with creating a world-class army.

By the time he was overthrown, the Iranian military was the fifth most powerful army in the world.

But also surrounded himself with sycophants, with toadies who told him what he wanted to hear.

And as usually happens in this kind of case, that problem grew more and more as time went on, to the point where his own ministers would lie to him about, say, the inflation rate or the unemployment rate, because he would be upset at what the real numbers were.

So he became increasingly isolated from his people.

The other, at the same time, I think what was really crucial and building up to the revolution, the Shah was instrumental in quadrupling oil prices in 1974 at the OPEC meeting.

And this resulted in actually the largest transfer of wealth in human history, from oil-importing nations to oil-producing nations.

And the Shah pumped all that money back into his economy.

He was obsessed with Westernizing the country, modernizing it.

So what you had, you had millions actually, of young men from the countryside, the countryside being far more conservative, far poorer, coming into the cities to look for work.

And then after about a year and a half, the bubble burst, the economic boom collapsed, and now you had, again, millions of young men, religious, conservative, living in shanty towns on the outskirts of every Iranian city.

And that became the fodder for the revolution that came shortly after.

The Shah was never, I don't think he was ever loved by his people.

I mean, even his supporters.

He was a distant man, aloof, arrogant, but also from a foreign standpoint, desperate for affirmation, desperate for affirmation from the Americans at all times.

So this strange insecurity was always working away at him.

- There's a sort of a tragic quality about him, almost Shakespearean, right?

In terms of his flaws as an individual.

How did that manifest itself in his relationship with the Americans?

You already mentioned this sort of favor seeking, but how does it manifest in his relationship with American presidents across multiple administrations?

- Yeah, it's a fascinating evolution because when the Shah first came to power, he was desperate to be embraced by the Americans.

And his first state visit, he met FDR in 1943 in Tehran.

Tehran was the setting for the first meeting of the Big Three, of Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt during World War II.

There was a three-day, four-day summit meeting in Tehran.

The Shah wasn't even invited to the meeting, you know, technically head of state.

Instead, he had to beg for a 10 minute meeting with Roosevelt.

There's a famous picture where he's kind of sitting like a schoolboy at the edge of this couch, sitting next to Roosevelt.

And the American delegation thought the meeting was so insignificant that no one even took notes of the meeting between the two.

And that kind of continued on.

The Shah would always go back, he would always remember that, kind of this humiliating meeting he had with Roosevelt.

But that really kind of continued on for the next really sort of 15, 20 years.

And it was only when America became more of need of oil and, especially under Nixon, was this idea of kind of delegating regional powers as America's, quote, "Policemen in those regions."

And he anointed the Shah as one of the key regional policemen for the Middle East in, you know, for American interests.

And that finally, I think that the Shah felt affirmed.

But again, he was such an insecure man, it needed to be reaffirmed again and again and again.

At the same time, he never really fully trusted the Americans.

He didn't trust Nixon and Kissinger.

And how this played out, it's just bizarre how it played out during the Iranian Revolution.

The Shah was intermittently convinced that the Americans were actually conspiring with Khomeini, the right-wing religious leader, in his overthrow.

But the two men, while holding that belief, the two men he would turn to for advice were the American and British ambassadors.

So it's just this kind of baffling thing that you're actually seeking the advice of people you think are conspiring to undermine you.

But it was his own creation.

He had created an imperial palace surrounded by yes men.

No one would tell him what was really going on.

And, you know, I mean, it's a great metaphor that Tehran had blown up so much in size, and the Shah was living in this palace compound up on the hill above the city, and virtually the only time he left the city was by helicopter.

So he was always kind of looking at his own city, his own people, at this odd distance.

- Well, so one of the things that you describe, and I think remarkable sort of almost chilling detail for me as an old national security hand, is the incredible lack of knowledge, understanding, sophistication about Iran within the US National Security establishment in the 1970s, in those years leading up to the revolution itself.

You know, among other things, they completely missed the fact that the Shah himself had been diagnosed with a kind of blood cancer five years previously.

Why was the US intelligence community, the State Department, the national security community, so, I guess, un-informed about events taking place in Iran?

- You know, there's a tremendous irony in that because the Shah, first of all, hated when Western diplomats would interview even his moderate opposition in the country.

So early on, if a, you know, American ambassador would meet with even, you know, a moderate critic of the Shah, the Shah would be irate.

So as Iran became more and more important to the United States, this irony that the American diplomatic community and intelligence community knew less and less about the country, it was a institutionalized ignorance.

Diplomats who were stationed in Tehran were not to talk to the opposition.

If they did, they were often even blacklisted by the American State Department itself.

The CIA, one of the biggest stations, CIA stations in the Middle East, was in Tehran.

They did absolutely no domestic intelligence gathering at all.

The only domestic intelligence they got was from the Shah's Secret Police.

There was a huge body of American military advisors in Iran, about 600.

They were under strict orders not to do any intelligence gathering.

So what you had was Iran, the Shah's Iran, had become so important in the United States that it just couldn't conceive of problems, and so it deliberately didn't look for any problems.

And the few people who did, ironically, some of the few American diplomats in the country who spoke the local language, Farsi, they saw problems.

If they would, if they tried to raise those problems, raise those issues, they were first ignored and then punished.

So by the time of the revolution, you had just this institutionalized ignorance about the country.

- And it almost seems like it radiates out from the same sort of sycophancy that the Shah enforced inside his palace radiates then into the understanding of the US government about the health of his regime.

You know, one of the things that you... So you mentioned how lavishly the Shah was spending on defense, principally from American defense manufacturers, the fifth largest military in the world by the mid-1970s.

But we see again and again across history that these authoritarian autocratic regimes wind up hollowing themselves out from within.

How did that actually take place in Iran?

- Yeah!

You know, the Shah was so isolated in his palace, and when there started to be this descent happened, well, he was so tied by his own people to the American successive regimes.

And I think this is another key thing to understand about the Iranian Revolution is that on top of this kind of religious counter-revolution, there are also elements of kind of anti-colonial rebellion about it.

The Shah was seen as the American Shah, even his supporters often referred to him as "The American Shah."

So when... You know, the Shah was in some ways rather astute.

He saw the kind of winds of change coming with Carter coming into office and this kind of reformist movement happening.

But when he would try to do, make concessions to the opposition to, "Oh, we're going to hold free parliamentary elections next year," loosening, you know, different laws, he got no credit for it from his own people.

It was always, "Oh, the Americans!

The Americans are telling him to do that."

So really, when the revolution got started, you think, "Okay, you know, if he tried to liberalize, he wasn't getting any credit for it."

If he went, if he, what he referred to as "The Iron Fist," if he turned to the army to restore order and to tone down the demonstrations, that was going to alienate him from the Americans potentially.

I think with the... He was just caught in this place that he just couldn't get out of.

And I think that, you know, speaking to his, you know, his benefit as a human being, he reached a point where he knew that if his only way to survive the throne was to turn to the iron fist.

And as he told a number of people, he said, "You know, if saving my throne means it comes at the cost of killing my nation's youth, I won't do it."

The Shah was not a Saddam Hussein.

He was not Assad father and son in Syria.

He was really, you know, he was a progressive, he was a Westernizer, and he, yes, he had political prisoners, there was human rights abuses in Iran, but a pale slip compared to some of his neighbors.

- Well, and if I remember, and I learned this in your book, I think that the criticism of him on human rights was, by the mid-1970s, much more muted than it had been earlier in his regime.

That in some ways actually the liberalization that he had introduced to the country gave space for the dissidents.

- That's right.

That's absolutely right.

I mean, and that's, you know, in a story riddled with ironies, that is one of them.

And, you know, I read somewhere that the most dangerous moment for an autocratic regime is when they start liberalizing.

- [Jim] Yeah!

- I mean, of course, you know, Mikhail Gorbachev was doing it, the Soviet Union, hoping to save the Soviet Union, but liberalization meant the end of it.

So it's, you know?

And unfortunately, other autocrats have taken that lesson to realize you never reform, you never let up the pressure.

- Yeah!

You know, so I think most American audiences view the Islamic Revolution in Iran through the prism of the hostage crisis and what it meant for the United States.

What do we miss, if that's the full scope understanding of that revolutionary experience?

- Yeah!

You know, the funny thing is that every journalist I know who I think most Americans think that the, you know, the Iranian people hate Americans, that there's this anti-Americanism.

Every journalist I know who's gone to Iran and they see a gringo on the streets, people ask where they're from, they say, "United States," people light up.

I mean, I've heard this from every journalist who's been there in the last 10 years.

So, you know, the hostage crisis was a moment where Khomeini, this was in the midst of the chaos, the post-revolutionary chaos, where these different forces are jockeying for power, and Khomeini saw this.

He took the measure of Carter.

And, by the way, he did not know about the embassy takeover ahead of time.

When he first heard about it, he ordered the students to leave the embassy and for the hostages to be freed.

And then within a few hours, he thought, "Well, wait a minute.

I can play this to my advantage."

At the moment, they were six weeks away from this national referendum that was basically going to give Khomeini absolute power.

He was recognized as the supreme leader, God's representative on Earth, and Khomeini was a wily, very manipulative man.

And he thought, "I can play this to my benefit.

People will rally around the flag if I stay with this issue."

So that really explains so much of why the hostage crisis played out as it did.

Going forward from that, there have been all kinds of odd moments in US-Iranian relations.

The Americans under the Reagan Administration were playing both sides of the street during the Iran-Iraq War.

They were selling weapons to both sides.

America, we had a blockade on Iran, accidentally shot down an Iranian passenger plane, killed 270 people.

And then there have been these moments when it seemed that some sort of rapprochement was in the works.

And probably, you know, certainly closest under the Obama regime.

And as this issue of Iran enriching uranium and the idea that it might be being used to build a nuclear weapon.

And Obama, with intense diplomatic negotiations with other countries, they came to this arrangement of where there would be outside monitors regularly coming into Iran to check on the uranium stockpiles, taking the highly enriched, you know, the weaponable uranium out of the country.

And Iran was obeying this, giving access to the people coming in to find the uranium.

And then Trump tore it all up when he came into office.

He canceled what was called the J-C-P-O-A and that kind of set up this loggerhead again.

It reintroduced the loggerhead between the two countries that has now blown up.

- Well, I want to, we're going to come back to that moment where we are right now.

I want to linger a little bit back in 1979 and 1980, because one of the questions that I think has sort of vexed some observers of American politics is whether or not that 1980 election the Reagan campaign had any off-book conversations with the revolutionary regime in Iran that maybe kept the hostages in captivity a little bit longer.

Where did you ultimately come down on that?

- It's absolutely true.

This had been a rumor, the so-called October Surprise.

- Right!

- It's been rumored for ever since 1980, so for 46 years.

Just a couple years ago it was pretty much proven.

There's a Texas businessman Republican named Ben Barnes who accompanied John Connally, former governor of Texas, on Reagan's election committee, very high ranking on Reagan's election committee.

And Barnes accompanied Connally to visit Middle Eastern capitals all through the region.

This is while the hostages are being held.

And Connally did not meet with the Iranians, he was meeting with these other Arab leaders, and Connally said to these leaders, "Tell the Iranians to hold the hostages for now until after the American election.

They'll get a much better deal from Reagan than they're going to get from Carter."

- [Jim] Wow!

- And this coincided, Connally's tour of the Middle East coincided with this moment that has always baffled the people who were involved in the negotiations, including National Security Council member I interviewed.

That there were very, in about September, August, September of 1980, the two sides seemed very, very close to a settlement of the hostage crisis.

And then all of a sudden, the Iranians wouldn't get on the phone.

They just stopped the negotiations.

They would not meet with the Americans.

And it was just incredibly puzzling.

So that was kind of the first thing that rose question of, you know, "Was there some sort of interference from the outside?"

And now that Barnes has come out, kind of a death-bed confession, he hasn't died, but it's that October Surprise is, you know, established.

They did that.

And, you know, when you think that an American running for president actually asked for innocent American diplomats to be held prisoner for another three months, and, you know, in danger.

I mean, there were mock executions, some of the hostages were tortured.

I mean, it's really kind of abominable that this actually happened.

- You know, there have admittedly been a few things going on in the last few years, but when I read that in your book, and I had completely missed the revelation where it had been confirmed a couple of years ago.

But that's a big deal.

- It's a very big deal!

- Yeah!

- You know?

It's huge!

I mean, I think it's treason.

I mean!

- Sure sounds like it, right?

- Certainly a kind of crime of some sort.

- Yeah!

So let's, you mentioned the conflict that we're currently in today.

What does the history of America's relationship with Iran, and particularly with the Islamic Revolution and the regime that emerges from it, tell us about this moment we find ourselves in now and the new hostilities between the United States and Iran.

- You know, it's funny that you mentioned the subtitle of my book, which is, "Hubris, Delusion, and Catastrophic Miscalculation."

(both laugh) I think you just... I think if you're writing a book today about Iran, about the last three months, you could just slap that on it too.

You know, this is just a massive misreading of Iran and the Iranian people, and of the Iranian regime.

You know, clearly Trump had this idea that it was going to be like overthrowing Maduro in Venezuela, which happened a few months earlier.

That because the regime in Tehran is unpopular with its own people, which it is, it certainly is unpopular, that this thing was, you know, you drop a few bombs, it's going to collapse, there's going to be this popular revolution, and then you can make peace with the reformers who come in.

It's just a fantasy world that was created by, well, it seems increasingly fantasy world created by Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel.

There had been a popular uprising in January in Iran, and in a single weekend, the regime killed between 30,000 and 40,000 people in two days.

- Exactly what the Shah did not do.

- That's exactly right.

And so clearly the regime, the current regime in Iran, realized its back was to the wall.

That if they allowed these demonstrations to continue, that they were going to fall.

But what you have in Iran is this, you have... Say if you compare it to Iraq, to Saddam Hussein, that was very much a pyramid structure of rule.

If you took Saddam Hussein out early, probably everything would just sort of fall apart, because there was very few people kind of vested in that regime remaining.

In Iran, you have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people who are part of the regime and have nowhere else to go.

500,000 revolutionary guards, the Basijis, the vigilantes.

And on top of that, all the people in the government itself.

So this is not, you know, there was not going to be a, you know, a popular uprising again in Iran.

And, you know, I think a basic maxim that all, well, maybe all Americans but all leaders in general, seem to constantly miss, is that nobody likes to be bombed by foreign armies.

I mean, it's just as a general rule, it just does not, you know, inspire confidence or affection.

And so, you know, the idea that this was going to be, that there was going to be a regime change, that there was going to be this kind of, you know, clinical decapitation of the regime, it was just pure fantasy.

And it really, to me, speaks of the fact that the Americans have no intelligence inside Iran.

You know, famously about two weeks into the war, and, you know, and there were not signs of the regime falling, they float, the Trump Administration floated the idea of using the Kurds, the Kurdish ethnic minority, as kind of a liberation vanguard to come down from the mountains.

The Kurds have always been, always wanted independence.

They've always been a restive population within Iran.

The idea that they would be- And even kind of distrusted by mainstream Iranians, even progressive Iranians.

There's always been a question of the ultimate loyalty of Kurds.

So the idea that you're going to use these people as a vanguard for, what, a civil war is just absolutely ludicrous.

And it also speaks, again, it speaks to me that they have nobody inside the country, you know, with even a basic, you know, a world book knowledge of Iran.

This was some CIA officer sitting up in Iraqi Kurdistan an Arab Bill Soleimani, who thought, "Oh, you know, the Kurds, they're, you know, reported to be good fighters, they love us.

So, yeah!

Well, let's have them do it."

- Scott Anderson, the book is "King of Kings."

It's an important and timely read.

Thank you so much for spending some time with us this week.

That is all the time we have.

But if you want to know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media or visit salve.edu/pellcenter, where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

And thank you for spending some time with us this week.

I'm Jim Ludes.

I hope you'll join me again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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