King of Kings

In August 1977, a secret Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) report concluded that Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Iran's king, would remain firmly in power "well into the 1980s." Within eighteen months, the shah was cast into exile, his regime destroyed by a revolution almost no one in the West saw coming. Journalist Scott Anderson traces this collapse through the small cast of people who witnessed the inner circles of power in Tehran, Washington, and Paris, arguing that the revolution stemmed from hubris, willful ignorance, and catastrophic miscalculation among three principal actors: the shah, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a senior Shiite Muslim cleric in exile, and President Jimmy Carter.

Anderson opens with the shah's November 1977 state visit to Washington, where violent clashes between pro- and anti-shah Iranian demonstrators left over a hundred injured and tear gas enveloped the South Lawn welcoming ceremony. The visit was deemed a success, and Carter's reciprocal trip to Tehran on New Year's Eve produced the infamous toast praising Iran as "an island of stability." Within days, the first significant anti-shah protests in over a decade erupted inside Iran.

The opening chapters trace the revolution's roots through characters who observed Iran's fault lines. George Braswell, a Southern Baptist missionary teaching at the University of Tehran in 1968, discovered underground cells listening to smuggled cassettes of Khomeini calling for the shah's overthrow, yet Khomeini's name had scarcely appeared in embassy or CIA correspondence since his 1964 exile. Anderson introduces Asadollah Alam, the shah's court minister and closest confidant, who played a decisive hidden role in the 1963 crisis, ordering martial law while the shah froze. By 1970, Alam grew alarmed by corruption and the shah's remoteness, urging the king to hold free elections; the shah refused. Queen Farah, the shah's third wife and first shahbanou (empress), was Alam's sole ally, but her warnings were also brushed aside.

Anderson traces centuries of foreign exploitation, the British discovery of oil in 1908, and the shah's father, Reza Khan, who seized power in 1925 before being deposed by a British-Soviet invasion in 1941. Placed on the throne at twenty-one as a figurehead, the shah spent decades courting American favor. The CIA-sponsored coup of 1953, which overthrew nationalist Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and restored the shah, began an entanglement from which neither nation could exit. At a landmark 1972 meeting, President Nixon lifted all restrictions on Iran's purchase of American weaponry, granting carte blanche to buy anything short of nuclear weapons.

The 1973-74 oil crisis, which the shah helped engineer, quadrupled prices and sent Iran's annual oil receipts from $1.2 billion to $21.4 billion. The wealth fueled inflation, gutted agriculture, and deepened corruption. The American embassy operated as a "citadel of fatuousness," with short diplomatic tours, few Farsi speakers, and local staff vetted by SAVAK, the shah's secret police. The boom collapsed in late 1976 when Saudi Arabia, working with the Ford administration, undercut the shah's oil prices. In January 1977, Alam wrote a warning letter; the shah tore it up. Alam died of leukemia in April 1978, depriving the king of his most trustworthy advisor.

The revolution's spark came on January 7, 1978, when an editorial in Etalaat attacked Khomeini. Protests erupted in the holy city of Qom, where police killed at least four demonstrators. The Shiite mourning tradition of Arbaeen, which marks the fortieth day after a death, linked this violence to far larger riots in Tabriz on February 18. Michael Metrinko, a former Peace Corps volunteer serving as the sole American diplomat in northwest Iran, watched as rioters targeted banks, government offices, and cinemas while leaving surrounding buildings untouched. His analysis warning that "religious and social forces long ignored by Tehran" were "now far too powerful to be easily placated" was watered down by the embassy before reaching Washington.

Through the spring and summer, the shah veered between defiance and depression, squandering secret talks with the moderate cleric Ayatollah Kazem Shariatmadari through procrastination. Anderson introduces Ebrahim Yazdi, a pharmacology professor from Houston who had moved to the United States in 1960, as the crucial figure who marketed Khomeini to the West. Yazdi had forged a bond with Khomeini in 1965 and served as his representative to the North American émigré community.

The Cinema Rex arson in Abadan on August 19, which killed an estimated 377 to 470 people, became a devastating propaganda weapon; the true perpetrators, revealed years later, were Khomeini followers. The imposition of martial law on September 8, following massive processions for the Muslim holiday of Eid, led to the Jaleh Square massacre, known as Black Friday, when soldiers fired into unarmed protesters, killing an estimated 200 to 300. Carter, immersed in Arab-Israeli peace talks at Camp David, called the shah for six minutes; the shah released the transcript, reinforcing his image as an American puppet.

After being expelled from Iraq, Khomeini settled near Paris, where Yazdi orchestrated his image for Western media. When a tentative compromise was brought to Khomeini, he flatly rejected it. Within the Carter administration, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser, advocated a military crackdown, while the State Department favored negotiation with moderates. The shah heard a muddled message and sank into paralysis. His secret diagnosis of chronic lymphocytic leukemia, maintained since 1974 with the help of French doctors, further complicated matters; even Queen Farah was not informed until 1977.

On January 16, 1979, the shah departed from the Niavaran palace compound, piloting the royal 707 himself. The ground crew had refused to supply provisions; the King of Kings ate his first meal in exile off a paper plate. The administration dispatched General Robert Huyser to keep Iran's generals in line, with a secret rider authorizing a coup. Khomeini returned on February 1 to delirious crowds. Ten days later, a clash at the Doshan Tappeh air base sparked insurrection, and the military's senior commanders declared neutrality. Shapour Bakhtiar, whom the shah had named as his last prime minister, fled. The last cable from the embassy read: "Army surrenders; Khomeini wins. Destroying all classified."

The revolution's aftermath brought executions of former officials, attacks on the American embassy, and the marginalization of moderates. When Carter admitted the gravely ill shah to a New York hospital in October 1979, student militants overran the embassy on November 4, beginning the 444-day hostage crisis. Metrinko, identified as a Farsi speaker, was confined to a windowless closet and routinely beaten. The shah died in Cairo on July 27, 1980. The hostages were released on January 20, 1981, at the moment Ronald Reagan took office.

Anderson closes by tracing the fates of the principal figures. Yazdi, repeatedly imprisoned by the regime he helped create, died in 2017, calling his alliance with Khomeini "my life's greatest regret." Bakhtiar was murdered with butcher knives in his Paris home in 1991. The shahbanou, eighty-six, divides her time between Paris and Washington, having outlived two of her four children, both lost to suicide. The shah, Anderson reflects, was "a hare pretending to roar like a lion." The United States could not conceive of life without him because he was too vital, "and so it did not." The revolution marked the first successful religious counterrevolution against secular modernity.