KING OF KINGS: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation, by Scott Anderson
In September 1979, Michael Metrinko, the pugnacious political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, was back in the United States for a brief vacation when he was surprised to receive a summons to a high-level meeting at the State Department in Washington.
For the previous several months — indeed, several years — Metrinko had been the Iran mission’s black sheep, wholly out of step with the official flow of upbeat information from the country. That flow had been dead wrong. The U.S. diplomats and intelligence officers charged with managing relations with Iran had not just missed the first signs of the Islamic Revolution, now in full swing; they had suppressed reports that it was coming.
By September, the supposedly invincible shah had abdicated. Mobs ruled the streets. The country was up for grabs. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had returned triumphantly from exile in France and installed himself in Qom. Yet the experts at the American Embassy were still playing a hopeful tune. A new moderate, pro-Western government would emerge, they insisted, and the friendly and lucrative relationship the United States had enjoyed with Iran would continue.
Metrinko knew better. One of very few fluent Farsi speakers at the Tehran mission, he was better attuned to the depth of Iranian anger toward America. The mullahs were ascendant. His pointed dispatches had earned him a dressing-down by the clueless ambassador, William Sullivan. Nevertheless, someone at the State Department had decided to give Metrinko his moment.
He arrived at the meeting early, with notes, only to be asked to leave before it began because he lacked the appropriate security clearance. He protested that he had been specifically invited, that the meeting was about his reporting — to no avail.
A little more than a month later, Metrinko became one of 52 American diplomats, embassy staffers and military personnel, along with a handful of civilians, held hostage for 444 days in Iran by a radical Muslim student group. The story of Metrinko’s aborted meeting, recounted in Scott Anderson’s “King of Kings,” his masterly new account of the Iranian revolution, illustrates the stubborn American blindness that hastened the shah’s demise and helped the mullahs prevail. It was an “obliviousness” that “became willful, an ignorance to be maintained and defended,” Anderson writes.
I got to know and admire Metrinko when I wrote about the Iran hostage crisis almost 20 years ago, and reading this book I came to admire him even more. For most Americans, the hostage crisis was the revolution’s defining event. An unprecedented and prolonged public exercise in humiliation, it riveted the nation for more than a year, dashed Jimmy Carter’s bid for a second presidential term and ushered in the Reagan era. But in Iran, as Anderson shows, it was the final act in a much larger and more consequential drama.
The fall of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the slight, pompous, pathetically dithering Shah of Shahs, or King of Kings, “brought an abrupt end to one of the most important economic and military alliances the United States had established anywhere in the world,” Anderson writes. “The radically altered Middle Eastern chessboard created by the revolution has led directly to some of America’s greatest missteps in the region over the past four decades.”
Propped up by a succession of presidents, given unlimited license to purchase American arms by Richard Nixon, feted in both Washington and Tehran by Carter, the shah was an American creation first and last. His story is another sad chapter in the long history of self-defeating, misguided U.S. meddling in the internal affairs of less powerful nations — Cuba, Nicaragua and Vietnam already by 1978, and Iraq and Afghanistan still to come. Foreign victims paid the heaviest price, but the wounds to America have been lasting and deep.
In the case of Iran, U.S. involvement meant toppling a constitutional monarchy (albeit an imperfect one) and supporting an increasingly capricious autocrat. Cold War priorities provided the initial impetus — containing the Soviet Union — but in time that motivation devolved into an ugly greed fest, as the shah, prized for his weakness by his masters and fabulously rich with oil money, developed an irrational appetite for new weapons systems. The rush by American military officers and contractors to fatten themselves on this largess became what Anderson calls a “stampede.”
The courting was so aggressive that the State Department tried to slow it down, banning the Pentagon from making sales pitches to Tehran. It didn’t work. When a State Department official asked an admiral to halt sales pitches for aircraft Iran didn’t need — it lacked pilots to fly them and mechanics to maintain them — the admiral replied, “Well, that may be the embassy’s policy, but it is not the U.S. Navy’s policy. The Navy’s policy is to sell these planes.”
Created and sustained by myths of royal legitimacy, the shah’s story also affords a timely lesson in the dangers of unmooring a society from reality, of rewriting its history and ignoring its laws. Pahlavi enjoyed the wealth, pomp and flattery of his position, but was incapable of making hard decisions. Even at the end, as the revolution loomed, he delayed, seemingly waiting for the Americans to tell him what to do.
He had lived his life in a make-believe world, its fantasy enforced by a security apparatus, Savak, that terrorized anyone who refused to play along. The regime built what Anderson describes as a fortress of “stupidity”: “A default mode of profound, even impregnable passivity that grows more acute the closer one gets to the locus of power. This passivity is also rooted in fear, of course, the worry of losing one’s standing within the power structure.”
At the top, the shah heard only good news, while at the bottom, functionaries learned to swallow injustice and idiocy as a matter of routine. Many would pay for it with their lives. “Put simply, Iran had been ruled by one man for 37 years, and over the course of those years no other Iranian man or woman had been so influential as to make an independent decision of any major significance to the nation,” Anderson writes.
With all sensible, independent voices silenced, deliberate misinformation, conspiracy theory and superstition rushed into the vacuum. The most compelling voice in this haboob was the angry fundamentalist ranting of the exiled Khomeini. His sermons moved hand-to-hand under Savak’s nose on cassette tapes, diligently collected by the C.I.A., most never listened to or transcribed. By early 1979, the storm incited by those sermons blew away the Peacock Throne, American influence and any hope for popular rule. Instead, it would shape the repressive and bloody theocratic regime that still rules today.
This is an exceptional and important book. Scrupulous and enterprising reporting rarely combine with such superb storytelling. Anderson leavens his sweeping and complex chronicle with rich character portraits: of the shah and his discerning wife, Farah (whom Anderson interviewed); the harsh, cruel Khomeini; the bullheaded, ignorant Jack Miklos, the deputy U.S. chief of mission and the shah’s biggest “cheerleader”; the charming, Zelig-like Ebrahim Yazdi, a Houston pharmacist who dreamed of a democratic Iran, befriended Khomeini in exile and convinced his American admirers that the revolution would end well, only to spend his later years in and out of the ayatollah’s prisons.
Yet the figure who stands out most is Metrinko, who deserves a statue in Foggy Bottom. Not just because he was courageous and right, or smarter and more prescient than his peers, but because he worked. He took the trouble to learn Farsi, which enabled him to hear what Iranians said, and he paid attention to what he saw. Handling a flood of applications from high-level Iranians looking for a way out of the country in the months before the shah fell, Metrinko was approached by C.I.A. officers who wanted valuable assets moved to the head of the line.
“Excuse me, Mr. Intelligence Officer,” Metrinko recalls thinking, “but what does it tell you when your most important sources are trying to get the hell out of the country?”
Asked why he had foreseen what so many of his colleagues missed, he told Anderson, “Because the guys in the political section of the embassy who were supposed to keep watch for this kind of stuff were lousy at their jobs. Is that overly harsh? I think it’s deserved.”
KING OF KINGS: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation | By Scott Anderson | Doubleday | 481 pp. | $35
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