WITNESS-Iranian road trip, 1977: Clues to a debacle
30 Jul 2009 13:03:29 GMT Source: Reuters
By William Maclean LONDON, July 30 (Reuters) - Shaking with rage, a man strode up to me at a bus stop in the Iranian city of Qom in the oven-like heat of a summer afternoon in August 1977. More than a year before the Iranian revolution, the thin, clean-shaven figure spat out a diatribe against the country's ruler, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, then seen by the West as a strong leader and pillar of regional stability. Huddling with him amid a swirl of dust and diesel fumes, I quickly dismissed my acquaintance as a lone malcontent, my reaction unwittingly echoing the response of Western diplomats to similar signs of opposition then starting to emerge. We now know how deeply flawed this response was. But the West's intelligence failure in Iran is not merely about frontline misreporting, it is also about "group think", a failing of policy establishments to this day. Some observers say such a failure to challenge pre-conceived notions lay behind Britain joining the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, a thesis likely to be tested by a new inquiry into the war that will ask former Prime Minister Tony Blair to testify. The Shah fled into exile in January 1979 after more than a year of mounting opposition to his authoritarian rule. The next month, exiled cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Iran in triumph, heralding the dawn of the Islamic republic. At the time I was on a break from a job hunt, spending my savings on a bus trip in Iran with a friend to see the glories of ancient Persia and try to forget my lingering unemployment. Politics was the furthest thing from my sun-addled mind. That priority began to change as our bus stopped off for lunch in Qom's outskirts on its way from Tehran to Shiraz. A crowd gathered around my informant. A bystander translated his detailed allegations of wrongdoing against Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Some people nodded in approval. Most were impassive. The man's eyes burrowed into mine with a message: I was a Western visitor who must now go home and correct the mistaken impression the West had of its friend and business partner. BRAZEN MESSAGE OF OPPOSITION The bus horn honked. I reboarded. The man melted away into the crowd. As I took my seat, the significance of the encounter slowly began to dawn: He had been extremely brazen. Iran was a police state and the SAVAK security service had an iron grip, even if their style could be cartoonish at times. Days earlier by the shores of the Caspian, I had stared in astonishment as a scowling SAVAK man, dressed in a heavy 1940s-style trenchcoat, emerged from nowhere and trudged hundreds of metres down the beach towards me in baking heat. I suppressed a grin as the bulky figure, every inch the pulp fiction Los Angeles detective, checked my papers with elaborate slowness and glared at some youths I'd been playing soccer with. For Iranians, SAVAK was no joke. And if opponents of the Shah were losing their fear of speaking out, could Western governments really be unaware? And if they knew, were they doing anything to head off impending conflict and guard the West's investment in "its" man, who was restored to the throne in a 1953 Western-sponsored coup. Other Iranians I had met voiced reservations about the Shah, although less angrily and always in private. Roger Cooper, a British scholar and journalist living in Tehran at the time, says many expatriates including diplomats were well aware of the depth of popular dissent in mid-1977. However, diplomatic analysis, and perhaps also reporting, was constrained by embassies having at the same time to follow and promote the pro-Shah line of their governments, he says. (Cooper was later tried by an Islamic court on charges of espionage and served five years in jail. He was freed in 1991). ISLAND OF STABILITY In other words, policy tended to guide reporting. A 2004 study by the Georgetown University in Washington found that the administration of then U.S. President Jimmy Carter first received warnings in 1977 that a domestic crisis threatened the longevity of the Shah's regime. But cabinet infighting and a general predisposition to see the Shah as the indispensable U.S. partner meant officials did not want to hear this message. The result was policy paralysis. The quality and content of reports varied sharply. The subject of "Religious and Intellectual Opposition to the Shah" was described in a July 1977 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, as well as in a lengthy August 1977 CIA report. But neither report made dire predictions for stability. Even when the tempo of negative reporting picked up in 1978, it did nothing to sway the intelligence community assessments, one of which said that Iran "is not in a revolutionary state". "The strategic assumption that the Shah's regime had to endure indefinitely because there was nothing with which to replace him created a self-fulfilling prophesy," said the study, available at http://isd.georgetown.edu/Iran_WG_Report.pdf. Back in 1977, media commentary in the West tut-tutted over the Shah's heavy handed security. But the received wisdom overall was that the Shah was a moderniser whose reforms were welcomed by a grateful population desperate to escape poverty. Making the most superficial comparisons on my way back to Europe, I lazily re-adopted this rosy view, shrugging off my Qom encounter. Iran's smart main roads, new cars and urban building boom were an undeniable contrast to the poverty of eastern Turkey and the underdevelopment I had glimpsed in Yugoslavia. In the chill of late autumn in London, as the first militant demonstrations against the Shah were getting under way, I finally visited the pharmacy to get my holiday photo prints. I admired my mid-summer images of Persepolis and Isfahan. It all looked so beautiful, prosperous and promising. Nothing very dramatic is going to happen, I thought. (Editing by Janet McBride)
Exiled Iranians shout slogans in front of the U.S. embassy near the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, July 29, 2009, demanding the international community take action after Iraqi forces took control of ...
