The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran Read Online Free Page B

suburbs. There, unshackled by the Iraqi Baath Party’s authoritarian restraints, he found a more free-flowing outlet in the sympathetic Western press for his revolutionary rhetoric. In the first few months, Ayatollah Khomeini conducted more than 450 interviews with the press as part of a sophisticated media campaign against the shah. 24
     
    The protests expanded. Supporters smuggled cassette tapes of Khomeini’s talks back inside Iran. Technocrats, democratic reformers, communists,and disgruntled merchants all joined in the growing protests. Oil workers went on strike, and the violence reached a crescendo in early December, when hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets. Meanwhile, Khomeini approved sending small teams of supporters to Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon to begin training as guerrilla fighters for the long insurgency he expected to wage against his rival for control over Iran. 25
     
    T he shah’s troubles took official Washington by surprise. Initially, the American government did not even consider the religious aspect of the opposition. “There had never been an Islamic revolution before,” observed the State Department desk officer for Iran at the time, Henry Precht. 26 Despite the fact that the American embassy in Tehran was the fifth largest in the world, few American diplomats had any sense of the sentiments in the streets. The shah effectively controlled the information available to the diplomats, and the State Department did not encourage Foreign Service officers to get out and talk to dissenters, especially religious leaders. As one political officer recalled, “I doubt if anybody in the embassy ever knew a mullah.” 27
    The CIA devoted considerable resources to monitoring the Soviet Union and to tracking communists inside Iran. But the agency’s intelligence-gathering effort had not been focused on recruiting spies within Iran. “After all,” as one retired CIA operative sardonically observed, “we had the shah’s secret police, Savak, to tell us what was going on.” 28 The two intelligence agencies did cooperate on tracking down the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK), or People’s Mujahideen of Iran, a leftist-Islamist hybrid sect which had conducted a series of terrorist killings of Americans in Iran, including the serious wounding of U.S. Air Force Brigadier General Harold Price in one of the first uses of an improvised explosive device in the Middle East. The CIA had developed biographical studies on key Iranian military and civilian leaders. 29 But for the most part, the CIA devoted its efforts to countering Soviet influence in the region. 30 In a self-assessment of its efforts in 1976, the spy agency reported that “generally speaking, reporting from the mission on most topics is very satisfactory.” 31
     
    The American intelligence community committed one enormous oversight in not studying the shah himself. In 1974 Jean Bernard, a renowned French hematologist, secretly flew to Tehran to examine the Iranian monarch, who was suffering from an enlarged spleen. Dr. Bernard diagnosed theproblem as a serious case of chronic lymphocytic leukemia and Waldenstrom’s macroglobulinemia, a blood condition. 32 However, fearing that news of his ailment would leak, the shah steadfastly refused either to undergo additional tests or to begin cancer treatment. His ailment remained unknown to Washington, though rumors of the shah’s ill health were commonplace in Tehran. The cancer left the shah increasingly listless and withdrawn. Meanwhile, Washington continued to support him, blissfully unaware that the man upon whom America relied to safeguard Persian Gulf oil was dying.
     
    T he troubles in Iran divided the Carter administration along familiar lines. Brzezinski wanted the shah to use force to crush the resistance. He believed the United States needed to express its unqualified support for the monarch, and he advocated dispatching an aircraft carrier to the Gulf of Oman as a show of support.