Transcript

The Iranian Revolution: The Fall of the Shah | EP 1

From The Rest Is History · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 1 h 15 min · 13,465 words · 135 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "The Iranian Revolution: The Fall of the Shah | EP 1", an episode of The Rest Is History published January 19, 2026 (1 h 15 min, about 13,465 words). It mentions 20 people, works and ideas, including Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shia Islam, William Sullivan, Operation Eagle Claw, Anglo Persian Oil Company.

What this episode is about

The Iranian Revolution marked a pivotal moment in global history, characterized by the dramatic overthrow of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whose perceived stability in Iran was highlighted in a 1977 toast by President Jimmy Carter. This event ultimately led to the establishment of the Ayatollah Khomeini's regime, reshaping U.S.-Iran relations and altering the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East.

Key takeaways

  • Carter's toast to the Shah in 1977 became the diplomatic equivalent of a ‘last call’ before revolution hit.
  • Iran’s transformation from US ally to adversary illustrates how quickly geopolitical alliances can flip—like a light switch.
  • The 1979 Iranian Revolution reshaped the landscape of Islamic identity, leading to a global wave of militancy.
  • Tehran's explosive population growth in the 70s foreshadowed the chaos to come, highlighting infrastructure’s critical role in stability.
  • Carter's presidency, defined by the Iranian hostage crisis, serves as a cautionary tale for mismanaged foreign relations.

Who speaks in this episode?

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 10:00: Ayatollah, Shia Islam, Operation Eagle Claw, Anglo Persian Oil Company
  2. – 20:00: Anglo Persian Oil Company, OPEC oil shock, David Owen, Ayatollah
  3. – 30:00: Jalani Hussein
  4. – 40:00: Ayatollah, William Sullivan, Camp David Accords
  5. – 50:00: Jalani Hussein, Shia Islam, Ayatollah, Ashura
  6. – 1:10:00: William Sullivan, Abadan, Ayatollah
  7. – 1:14:39: William Sullivan, Ayatollah

Notable quotes from "The Iranian Revolution: The Fall of the Shah | EP 1"

  • Americans call it or as we in Britain call it correctly Iran. Muhammad Raza Palavi and his wife Empress Farah the Shabbanu at a banquet in Iran's capital Thran on New Year's Eve 1977.
    about Farah Pahlavi · at
  • When 66 Americans were held hostage for 444 days and Jimmy Carter's disastrous attempt, Operation Eagle Claw, to rescue them, which ended in disaster and tragedy. And Dominic, we again just to say we are recording this in the.
    about Operation Eagle Claw · at
  • Exactly. Which we'll come to. So, of all the people in Tehran in 1977, the most celebrated and powerful was the man that Carter was toasting that night, the host. And that's Muhammad Razar Palvi who is the king of kings and light of.
    about Mohammad Reza Pahlavi · at
  • What's also very important, it was the only country in the world that had adopted a particular kind of Islam, Shia or Shiite Islam, as its state religion.
    about Shia Islam · at
  • Russia and Britain. And that was turbocharged in 1908 when the British struck oil. And that was the moment that created the Anglo Persian oil company, which we all know much…
    about Anglo Persian Oil Company · at
  • So the sha liked having money and he's and in the 70s he gets a lot more of it because in autumn 1973 after the OPEC oil shock in which he was a key player the price of oil…
    about OPEC oil shock · at
  • Political reforms and so on and so forth. However, Carter doesn't want to go too far in this. So, in June 1977, he appoints a new ambassador to Iran called William Sullivan…
    about William Sullivan · at
  • Westernization on cinemas, on bars, on banks, on airline offices, things like that. And this is another of them. But in the climate of August 1978, people on the streets said…
    about Abadan · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

  • Mohammad Reza Pahlavi — Person · Referenced head of state (Shah of Iran) · 3 mentions
    The episode’s key subject for the pre-revolutionary regime: his modernization, corruption allegations, reliance on U.S. support, and loss of legitimacy set the stage for revolution.
  • William Sullivan — Person · Referenced diplomat (U.S. Ambassador to Iran) · 3 mentions · first at
    Key U.S. on-the-ground figure in 1977–79; portrayed as warning Washington (“Thinking the unthinkable”) that the Shah was finished and urging engagement with Khomeini.
  • Farah Pahlavi — Person · Referenced royal figure (Empress/Queen consort) · 2 mentions
    Appears as part of the Shah’s court and image-making; mentioned in Carter’s toast and in the discussion of elite glamour and palace life.
  • David Owen — Person · Referenced government official (UK Foreign Secretary) · 1 mention · first at
    Cited as commissioning an internal report that corroborated corruption allegations against the Shah’s regime, reinforcing the episode’s depiction of systemic graft.
    Massively exaggerated how corrupt the sha's court was. But after the sha's fall, the British foreign secretary at the time David Owen commissioned an internal report and this…
  • Jalani Hussein — Person · 7 mentions · first at
    But Dominic, just to say, the Arabs have always hated and feared the Iranians. And Saddam Hussein, who is in Iraq and prominent leader there of the Bartists, he had this famous…
  • Pope John Paul II — Person · 1 mention · first at
    You know who he actually also reminds me of is Pope John Paul II. Also a footballer, a poet, becomes a titanic religious leader of the 70s and 80s.
  • Abdullah Ali — Person · 1 mention

Companies & orgs

  • Anglo Persian Oil Company — Company · Case study · 2 mentions · first at
    Historical company central to Iran's economic and political history, leading to nationalization debates.
  • BP — Company · Case study · 1 mention · first at
    Successor to the Anglo Persian Oil Company, illustrating the legacy of colonial economic interests in Iran.
    Struck oil. And that was the moment that created the Anglo Persian oil company, which we all know much better as BP. So in the first world war, Persia was occupied by the…
  • MI6 — Company · 1 mention
  • Saffavid dynasty — Company · 1 mention

Concepts & topics

  • Shia Islam — Concept · Key argument · 3 mentions · first at
    Central to understanding the ideological underpinnings of the revolution and the role of the clergy.
  • Ayatollah — Concept · 10 mentions · first at
    Jimmy Carter, loves wearing a cardigan, loves sorting out tennis court bookings, and the Ayatollah Hmeni.
  • Operation Eagle Claw — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    444 days and Jimmy Carter's disastrous attempt, Operation Eagle Claw, to rescue them, which ended in disaster and tragedy. And Dominic, we again just to say we are recording this in the immediate aftermath of the US raid on.
  • Ashura — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    Particular day that's massively important that's grounded in history, Ashura. And they have this apocalyptic sense of the end of days and all of this kind of thing. So that's…
  • Mardi — Concept · 1 mention

Places & events

  • Operation Eagle Claw — Event · Key argument · 1 mention · first at
    Failed US military operation to rescue hostages, highlighting the crisis's impact on US-Iran relations.
  • OPEC oil shock — Event · Key argument · 1 mention · first at
    Economic event that significantly impacted Iran's economy and contributed to the revolution's conditions.
  • Abadan — Place · Setting · 1 mention · first at
    Site of a pivotal event (cinema fire) that fueled revolutionary sentiment.
  • Camp David Accords — Event · Referenced work · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned as one of Carter's foreign policy successes, contrasting with his failures in Iran.
    So to be fair to Carti, he has a couple of foreign policy successes. Most famously, the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel, which he sort of mediates in 1978. But he…

Full transcript with timestamps

Today on the rest is history, perhaps the most dramatic story in recent global history, the Iranian revolution. And we're looking at the great duel between Jimmy Carter, loves wearing a cardigan, loves sorting out uh tennis court bookings, and the Ayatollah Hmeni.

Iran because of the great leadership of the sha is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world. This is a great tribute to you your majesty and to your leadership and to the respect and the admiration and love which your people give to you. We in the United States have no other nation on earth who is closer to us in planning for our mutual military security. And there is no leader with whom I have a deeper sense of personal gratitude and personal friendship. On behalf of the people of the United States, I would like to offer a toast at this time to the great leaders of Iran, the Sha and the Shabanu, and to the people of Iran, and to the world peace that we hope together we can help to bring. Now, people listening to that may think that that is the Englishman who can't do a good impression of someone from Georgia, but it isn't. It was actually Dominic President Jimmy Carter and he was

toasting the last sha of Iran as Americans call it or as we in Britain call it correctly Iran. Muhammad Raza Palavi and his wife Empress Farah the Shabbanu at a banquet in Iran's capital Thran on New Year's Eve 1977. And Dominic, it is a moment ripe with irony, is it not?

It is indeed. It's one of the great ironic moments not just of the 1970s but the late 20th century. So this moment when Jimmy Carter is toasting the sha and the shanu the friendship between Iran and the United States and the stability and the security that Iran offers in the Middle East. This comes just days before the outbreak of a violent revolution that sweeps the sha from power and it kicks off the rule of the Ayatollah who still govern Iran today.

Well, Dominic, you say that uh we are recording this in early January. I mean, by the time this goes out, who knows what may have happened.

That's true because Iran is once again engulfed in street protest, demonstrations, violent repression, and so on.

The storm clouds of counterrevolution are gathering there indeed. But to go back to the revolution itself, Jimmy Carter, the man who is standing there giving that toast, he is one of the first and most prominent political victims of this revolution because his presidency pretty extraordinary and strange presidency even by American standards is consumed by the fires of the Iranian revolution. So it's an extraordinary story.

One of the things that brings Ronald Reagan to power and one of the advantages of Reagan is he's much easier to do an impersonation of. Yes. So, just to uh give people a little sense of the uh the way the rest is history works, I think that was about the 24th take was it? And and if you think if you have any question marks about Tom's rendition of Jimmy Carter there, let me just emphasize it was a lot better than the previous 23 takes which he sounded very like Shane War for a lot of the time.

He did. So what we're going to be telling in this series is the story of the fall of the sha and the rise of the Ayatollas. The capture of the US embassy in Tehran, this extraordinary moment when 66 Americans were held hostage for 444 days and Jimmy Carter's disastrous attempt, Operation Eagle Claw, to rescue them, which ended in disaster and tragedy. And Dominic, we again just to say we are recording this in the immediate aftermath of the US raid on Caracus, which was in military terms an incredible success. And I guess what happens in Iran with Carter is the polar opposite. It's an absolute disaster.

It is. So it's an incredibly dramatic story, but one that has really, really serious repercussions. So, first of all, this story, what happens in Iran in the late 1970s completely overturns the diplomatic chessboard of the Middle East. It turns Iran from one of America's closest regional allies into an implacable opponent. An opponent that today is making drones used by the Russians in Ukraine, for example. And secondly, and I know this is something that you find fascinating, Tom, this is the story of the Islamic Revolution.

arguably, I would say, the only global revolution comparable with the French and the Russian revolutions in terms of its dramatic cultural and political um consequences.

I would say definitely. I mean, it's the it fires the starting gun on the kind of the wave of Islamic militancy that has shaken the world since 1979.

So, a lot to talk about, but let's start with those two men in uh Thran on New Year's Eve 1977. So they are in the Navaran Palace which is in the northern foothills on the edge of Tehran. And Tehran to give people a sense it's a the capital of Iran. It's a city that had changed enormously in the 20 years before Jimmy Carter visited. So it had been transformed by billions of dollars in new oil money uh new housing blocks, new factories, and above all new people. So in the 1940s, the end of the Second World War, Tehran had half a million people. In 1977 when Carter went, it had almost five million people.

And that stratospheric growth, that single fact in some ways lies at the heart of today's episode. The extraordinary change in the kind of social economic makeup of Thran and indeed of Iran generally. I would say that of all the cities I've ever been to, Thran is the one that seems the least capable of coping, say, with traffic. The traffic there, I mean, unbelievable. and you have vast lanes with no traffic lights, no way of crossing it. The whole infrastructure is buckling at the seams. The seams buckle, you know what I mean? Um, and I guess that this is a legacy of the kind of the great boom in the in the 60s and 70s.

Exactly. Which we'll come to. So, of all the people in Tehran in 1977, the most celebrated and powerful was the man that Carter was toasting that night, the host. And that's Muhammad Razar Palvi who is the king of kings and light of the Aryans, the sha of Iran. And let's give people a sense of his character. He was born in 1919 to an army officer called Razar Palvi in a land that was then called in the west Persia. Persia of course a very ancient country, not so much a nation as a civilization in itself, multithnic, multilingual. Of course, the one thing that people get wrong about Persia and Iran is they think that they I mean, people would often call them Arabs. They're not Arabs. It's the one thing they're absolutely not. It's very important to Iranians. They're not an Arab country.

What's also very important, it was the only country in the world that had adopted a particular kind of Islam, Shia or Shiite Islam, as its state religion. And we will come back to this because this question about Shiism or Shia Islam lies at the center of the Iranian revolution.

It absolutely does. And of course people will think of Iran as as an Islamic country which it completely is. But just to emphasize on the ancient roots of the dynamic in Iran in this episode. I mean it is incredibly ancient. So far, the predominant language in Iran is descended from the language spoken by the the first great rulers of Persia, Cyrus and Das the Great and people like that. And that framework of a monarchy and a priesthood which you see in 20th century Iran and which is so fundamental to the dynamics of the Iranian revolution. I mean that ultimately reaches back before the coming of Islam all the way back again to the time of of of Cyrus and Das. And the concept of monarchy is at least as fundamental to the historical makeup of Iran as the idea of a a kind of a claracy. Um so the great epic of Iran Fedi Shaame I mean it's literally the book of kings. So when the sha stands up there he is I

think correctly conscious of himself as the heir of thousands of years of of rule by monarchs right well let's talk about monarchs. So let's talk about uh Muhammad Razar Palvi. So in his lifetime I said he was born in 1919. in his lifetime, indeed that of his father, Persia had fallen prey to a series of um rival colonial empires, specifically Russia and Britain. And that was turbocharged in 1908 when the British struck oil. And that was the moment that created the Anglo Persian oil company, which we all know much better as BP. So in the first world war, uh Persia was occupied by the Russians and the British. And after the first world war, it fell into total chaos. So in 1921, Muhammad's father Resar Palvi staged a coup with British support and he ends up becoming Razar Sha. He takes the throne himself, which means that Muhammad becomes crown prince at the age of just 2 years old. Now Razar Sha is a very

very formidable man. His son said he was one of the most frightening men he ever met and he was definitely not a loving father. So he supposedly thought that if he was too kind to his son, then it would mean that his son became gay. So he he tried to he didn't show him too much affection. And Muhammad grew up as the absolutely classic textbook anxious, shy, reserved son of an overbearing, terrifying military father. So very very Alexis and Peter the Great for people who remember that that series. And Muhammad was sent off to a a Swiss boarding school. He became a massive franophile at the school which he remained all his life. And in fact, because he associates Iran with his father and because he goes off to boarding school in the west, he is always something of a modernizer and a westernizer and indeed a secularizer, which as we will see is something of a problem.

Yeah. And he loves very expensive French food, doesn't he? Which we'll feature later in this show.

Well, how should I put this? He likes French cortisans I think is I think is the best way of putting it. So in 1941 Persia which his father Razar has renamed or he has basically asked people abroad stop calling it Persia please we don't call it Persia we call it the land of the Aryans its ancient name which is Iran. So Persia or Iran is occupied once again by the British and the Soviets to stop the Nazis getting its oil. And the British thought that Razar Palvy was too pro-German and they made him abdicate in favor of his son who's now 21. This kind of meddling by the British in Iranian politics is such a feature of 19th and early 20th century history, isn't it?

that even now in the 21st century, the Iranians are still prone to thinking that Britain lurks behind everything wrong.

They do. It's very flattering for us because whenever anything happens, the Iranians assume that the British are controlling everything.

So, it's notoriety way above our station now completely. We're punching above our weight in the Iranian imagination. So, at 21 years old, Muhammad Razar Palvi is the new sha of Iran and he has a double taint. So first of all, he's the son of a usurper who' seized the throne in a British back coup in 1921 and he only got the throne himself 20 years later because the British basically gave it to him. So there's this impression of being a foreign puppet and this is confirmed a decade later in one of the most controversial if not the most controversial moments in Iranian history. So in 1953, Iran had democratically elected prime minister called Muhammad Madec who's this very kind of wily old bird. This experienced reformist liberal politician and he has pledged that he will nationalize this Anglo Persian oil company BP. And the British understandably I suppose they hate this idea cuz they want to keep all the money

for themselves. And they basically persuade the CIA to organize a coup. And there's a coup. About 250 people are killed. Mosedc is toppled and he's put under house arrest for the rest of his life. Now the sha who's the sort of you know he's the figurehead of the of Iran. He knew about this coup. He kind of supported it. He spent most of it hiding in a hotel in Rome but and then coming back to Iran. And a lot of people in the Iranian elite conclude at the end of 1953, you know, the sha, he's basically a complete coward and a wimp and he is a western puppet because he did nothing to resist this coup. But then from the late 1950s onwards with Moscet gone, the sha starts to assert himself. He becomes more than a figurehead. So like his father, he is a modernizer. So both of them, Razar Palv, a classic kind of military man of the inter war years who tried to to westernize and modernize Iran. his his son is the same. And we'll

talk a little bit more in the second half about the political implications of this, but let's just concentrate on Muhammad and his character. By the 1960s, he is developing a personality cult. His courtiers treat him as a demigod. He starts to see himself as the heir to the great kings of the past. People like Cyrus the Great. So Cyrus is the founder of the Persian monarchy. I suppose the great advantage that the sha has over other would-be dictatorial figures in the mid- 20th century is that he does have this incredible historical legacy to draw on.

Exactly. And he does with with gusto. They put up posters everywhere in Tehran. He's got this classic kind of 1950s 1960s dictator vibe. So he wears a military uniform and enormous sunglasses.

You see, I think that's a mistake. I think if he'd gone for the full long beard as worn by Dus Great, he might have cut a better figure. I like a dictator in sunglasses to be honest. I'd wear them myself if I was a dictator. But there you go. The thing is that actually behind the scenes he's still actually a very shy and sullen man and very reserved and timid. But in the west in the he becomes a real celebrity. So western visitors think he's very polished and very impressive. The gossip columns are full of you know he speaks English and French fluently. He goes skiing in Samaritz. He plays tennis on the French Riviera. is the kind of person who in Alternative Universe would have a cameo in an early Pink Panther film or something.

He would. He's slight kind of suave good looks of James Mason. Yeah. David Nan or something.

David N. That kind of vibe, hasn't he? That's exactly the vibe for the sh. And you know, as befitting a sort of 1960s celebrity, he has a taste for the finer things in life. So in 1967, he elevates himself to the title of the original Persian kings, king of kings. Sha and Sha and he has a new coronation and he has a solid gold scepter and he has a crown with thousands and thousands of diamonds. Then in 1971, one of the most famous parties in history, he throws this incredible kind of blowout to mark the 2,500th anniversary of the foundation of the Persian monarchy. And where does he have this, Tom? Would you want to tell us?

Well, he has it at Pepilolis, which is um the great city of the the the ancient Persian kings burnt by Alexander the Great and which is extraordinary place to visit. But as you visit it, you go past the kind of rusting remains of the tent poles that had provided this amazing kind of jamboree for people Dominic who had come from across the world, hadn't they? So he had all kinds of glamorous figures. Chesco um from Romania, Mabu, uh Emldda Marcos, and perhaps the most sinister figure of all, Princess Anne.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, people say, "What's your dream historical dinner party?" I mean, the sh's had it. You know, Tito, Alda Marcos. Brilliant.

And famously, they have um the food is flown in from Paris by Maxims. Yes. Maxims of Paris and all this sort of chat lefit Rothschild and whatnot um flown in as well. So, incredible. And this is symptomatic of a sort of wider glitz and glamour and corruption of the sha's court. So by the early 70s he's got multiple palaces. He's got a country house in England. He's got a country house in Switzerland. He has a palace just for his mistresses who are either escorts flown in from Paris or Luanza air stewardesses. Um his half sister is taking millions of dollars in in kickbacks. The bloke who books his escorts is given the caviar export monopoly. And actually it's sometimes suggested that a lot of this is kind of Islamic revolution propaganda that basically the the Ayatollah massively exaggerated how corrupt the sha's court was. But after the sha's fall, the British foreign secretary at the time David Owen commissioned an

internal report and this this report British foreign office report basically said it was really corrupt and the sh himself was taking massive bribes on defense contracts.

I mean it's basically it's it's petro dollars, isn't it? And this is the kind of stuff that uh oil shakes are going to be doing after the oil shock. So I I mean it's completely believable.

Oh, totally it is. And the oil is is obviously a massive part of this story. So the sha liked having money and he's and in the 70s he gets a lot more of it because in autumn 1973 after the OPEC oil shock in which he was a key player the price of oil almost quadrupled and Iran was the world's second biggest oil exporter. So this means the sha has this colossal windfall and now he really can make Iran great again and he can fulfill his dream. So his big sponsors by this point by the 70s are not the British, they are the Americans. All through the post-war years, the Americans have backed the sha as a key ally against Soviet expansion into the Persian Gulf, which is one of their big fears. The CIA has been funding and training his secret police, which is called Savak. And Savak had a pretty grizzly reputation for torturing their um opponents, by torturing dissident. So there's a lot of stuff with acid and cattle prods. It's

very kind of 1970s Paraguay or something. And are they particularly targeting poets, which is the big thing in South America, isn't it? Do

you know what? They're not. I mean, not as much as you would think, actually. I think it's mainly sort of um it's sort of dissident professors and leftists of various kinds, but I know you've got it in for poets, Tom, but actually, no, I haven't. I haven't. And that is that is a plus mark for the sha and probably reflects the the ancient tradition of Persian poetry.

Yeah, maybe. And the CIA, you know, the CIA had poets on their books. So the CIA supported American poetry.

Oh, it's so complicated, isn't it? Exactly. I think if you're a Chilean or Argentine poet, I think the 70s are a bad decade.

Yeah. But but if you're an Iranian one, it's it's better. Maybe a bit better. I don't know. So Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, who were in charge of American foreign policy in the early '7s, see Iran as an absolutely central player in their anti-communist alliance system. In 1972, Nixon went to Thrron and he explicitly said to the sha, "You're going to hear a lot of winging from Wedi liberals. Please do not listen to to this. You are our man and if you want weapons, we will give you weapons." And the sha said, "Brilliant. This is what I'm going to spend my oil money on." And in the next six years, he spent $12 billion on all these jet fighters and destroyers and submarines. It was one of the biggest arms sprees in history. He bought more Chieftton tanks from the British than the British themselves had in their own army. Just this colossal amount. Now, other American regional allies thought

this was mad. The Saudi oil minister said to the um Americans in 1975, "The SH is a megalomaniac. He's highly unstable. And if you don't recognize this, there must be something wrong with your powers of observation.

But Dominic, just to say, I mean, the Arabs have always hated and feared the Iranians. And Saddam Hussein, who is in Iraq and you know, prominent leader there of the Bartists, he had um this famous phrase which he was one of his favorites. There are three whom God should not have created. Flies, Jews, and Persians.

That's poor from Saddam Hussein, isn't it? Disappointing. It has to be said that the Iranians turn that on its head. uh and they say that there are three things that God created flies, Jews and Arabs. So it goes two ways.

Yeah. So the sha has very much come to believe his own publicity. There was an observer journalist called Gavin Young who went to interview him in the mid-70s. He was shocked how arrogant the sha had become. The sha said to him, you know, we're going to be top nation. We're going to be such a great country. In 20 years, we will be ahead of the United States. Now we are the masters with our raw money and our former masters are our slaves.

Well the sha and sha king of kings. Yeah punch you from the sha. Now mention of the Americans brings us to his guest at that New Year's Eve banquet. And this is the person who you ventriloquized so magnificently. The 39th president of the United States, James Earl Carter Jr. Jimmy Carter. And Jimmy Carter, what an extraordinary man he is. I think it's even by the standards of today's president, it's hard to exaggerate what an unlikely President Jimmy Carter is. So Carter was born in 1924 to unimprovably a peanut farmer in Plains, Georgia in this absolutely sleepy backward kind of rural hamlet. And Carter was very self-improving. He went to the Naval Academy in Annapolis and then he got a job as an engineer on the US nuclear submarine program. And Carter had a very very distinctive personality. So he's incredibly conscientious. He's incredibly hardworking. He's an auto died act. He's not a tremendous laugh.

He's a bit of a loner. He's got no close friends. He's very moralistic. He's very competitive. He's very stubborn. He's the kind of person who basically comes home. You He's like a sort of character from an an improving 19th century manual. He comes home late at night. He probably got up to pray first thing in the morning, then went to the nuclear submarine, then he comes home, and then he learns Spanish in the evening. That is Jimmy Carter's vibe.

The praying really kicks in a bit later, doesn't it? It does. Yeah. But I imagine right from the beginning, he's a great man for a cardigan.

Totally. He is. Yeah. You cannot imagine Donald Trump wearing a cardigan and a plaid shirt. He's very plaid shirt.

He loves a plaid shirt. Yes. So Carter's father died in 1953. He came back to planes and he took over the family peanut farm. And he was very good at peanut farming and he was made a great success of it. he modernized it and he moved into local politics and he ran for Congress um in 1966 and he lost and he's a Democrat, isn't he?

And he's a Democrat. Like you have to be in the South at this point. You absolutely have to be to get anywhere. And he lost and he had this massive existential crisis. He probably sank into depression after he lost. It's the first time he lost to anything. And he turned to God and was born again. And later on when he ran for president, everybody basically north of the Mason Dixon line laughed at Carter about this. and they wrote all these articles that Time magazine had a huge cover calling him a weirdo and stuff. But this was because people in New York and Washington didn't understand that in Georgia, in the Baptist world of rural Georgia, being born again was nothing outlandish. It was absolutely, you know, I wouldn't say it was standard, but it was common. Yeah. And I mean in view of what is going to happen in 1979 and through the 80s actually the last laugh is on them because they haven't

recognized that religion is going to become an expression of the modern. Quite right that actually Carter is not a a backwardlooking figure as he was often treated in the 70s. He is a a forward-looking one. So anyway he runs again for office in 1970. Again a very forward-looking thing. He runs as a populist and he he ran against a man called Carl Sanders, Democrat, establishment figure and Carter painted him as the sort of puppet of the country club bigwigs. He called him cufflinks Carl. So that is quite Trump. Yeah, of course. Jimmy Carter's populism is really really interesting. His southern populism is very it's both it both books looks back to a tradition of southern populism but the way in which he repackages it for the late 20th century is very forward-looking. and he says, "Look, I'm the champion of the little guy. I'm an ordinary person. I'm not a career politician. I've got my nice

plaid shirt." All of this kind of thing. He wins the election. He becomes governor. He's pretty good at it. And by late 1972, he is thinking about running for president. Now, on the face of it, this is a very long shot. There hasn't been a genuine southern president since Andrew Johnson in the aftermath of the Civil War. And there has never been a president from the deep south, from the really deep south, from the states that had once held millions of slaves from places like Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and so on. There's never been a president from one of these states. And the other thing that against Carter, Carter, and this is the thing that now that everyone thinks that Jimmy Carter is a lovely, kind guy who built houses for poor people and stuff, people forget Carter in the 70s was much more conservative than most Democratic activists. So, you know, it's a tough gig for him to try to get the presidency

to presidential nomination, but unexpectedly everything falls into his lap. So, first of all, the Democratic favorite who is Edward Kennedy has destroyed himself at Chapa Quidditic by driving into the um off the bridge uh abandoning Mary Joe Capeknney and then putting on a blazer and walking around on the balcony of his kind of hotel to try and pretend nothing has happened. Meanwhile, in Washington, Watergate has erupted. Everybody assumes that all Washington politicians are really corrupt. People are saying, "Let's have an outsider to drain the swamp." All of this kind of thing. And so Carter comes through in the Democratic primaries. He plays up the fact that he's an outsider.

He's a Southerner. He's an evangelical Christian. He's a populist. All of this stuff. He has these ads where he's walking around his farm in his lovely checked shirt. He he talks about how he likes to teach Sunday school. And his promise is, his policy prescription is so vague. I mean, it's brilliant. It's all things to all men. He says, people say, "What will it be like when you're president?" He says, "I will give you and I'm not going to do the voice cuz I cannot do a southern accent." He says, "Do you want to do it, Tom, in your Australian accent?" No, you do it. You go for it. He says, "I will promise a a government that is as good and honest and decent and competent and compassionate and as filled with love as are the American people." God, as filled with love as are the American people.

Yeah. There's a recipe for a happy administration. And instead of reaching for the sick bucket, people say, "Oh, isn't that nice? That's what we want." So, he wins the nomination and then he wins the presidency. Beats Gerald Ford. So, now Carter is president. And is he good at it? I mean, I think you you don't even have to be a critic of Jimmy Carter to say he's actually not really good at it. He doesn't have any contacts on Capitol Hill. He finds it really hard to work with Congress. He's not naturally charming. I mean, he doesn't exude warmth. Everybody sort of says this on in Capitol Hill. He's stubborn. He doesn't like compromising. He works incredibly hard, but it's the classic story. It's a bit rich or something. He works almost too hard. you know, he thinks if he stays up till 3:00 in the morning doing his paperwork, he'll be a better president. And actually, that means he just massively overprepares and

overthinks everything. He'll kind of brock up at kind of 9:00 in the morning and say, "I've overnight I've dreamt up a 455 point plan to fight inflation or something." So, he he he begins, doesn't he, looking very kind of sunny, full of the optimism of the South and all that. And very rapidly, he comes to look gray and haggarded and worn.

Yeah. Cuz he's not sleeping. And in the long run, this isn't going to look good when he goes for a run.

No, it will not. It will not look good. And actually, this discussion of the optics of being president so interesting. So, it quite often happens, I think, that people will elect somebody. They'll say, "We'd like an ordinary person now." They don't want that at all.

But they don't really want that. When the French elected Alond, what they actually always deep down this want is a statesman. So, you mentioned Jimmy Carter's cardigan. He turned up um on national television an early national broadcast wearing a cardigan and he said, "I'd like everybody to turn their thermostats down."

You can't do that, can you? That's not the Imperial presidency. No, not at all. So, there's that. There's the cardigan issue. There's also the issue he's a massive micromanager and a medddler.

Oh, yes. Famously the um the tennis courts thing, which you you love, don't you?

Yeah. My favorite Jimmy Carter fact is that he handled the uh the tennis court bookings. Uh Dom Johnson. So Tom Johnson, a blast from the past. Our former producer um is is in on this call and he's immediately come he's he's jumped into the chat. Tennis court bookings. It's one of two things about Jimmy Carter that we always mention. The tennis court bookings and another thing that involves a swamp which will also be which regular listeners to this podcast will be waiting for with baited breath. There are only two facts about Jimmy Carter worth knowing. So this is the man at the helm of the world's most powerful country. And how is he going to run America's foreign policy? Well, he's basically said, "No more Vietnam wars.

My ethical foreign policy," he says, will reflect the decency and generosity of the American people. So again, people are wiping away tears at this point. We won't nick Greenland. Promise.

So to be fair to Carti, he has a couple of foreign policy successes. Most famously, the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel, which he um sort of mediates in 1978. But he is hidebound by the fact that you know Vietnam has happened. There's a general sense the US is going backwards in the cold war. Um there is Soviet intervention in Africa in Ethiopia in Ze and Angola and so on. People are talking about this what they call at the time the arc of crisis that runs all the way from southern Africa to Southeast Asia. They say basically Asia's going to and Africa are going to slip out of the western orbit.

Capitalism is in retreat. You know, Soviet imperialism is emboldened. We should stop appeasing them. We should get rid of Dayton taunt. So, can I ask you, Dominic, is is Carter naturally a dove or does his say his evangelical Christianity give him a bit of a an edge that he can draw on when he feels he needs it?

He is ambiguous. So, he starts off a little bit more dovish largely, I think, because he's never really thought about foreign policy. He's always been, you know, he was governor of Georgia. he didn't really have to think about world affairs a new governor of Georgia and actually it was a criticism that people had of him they said he won't know anything about how to handle world affairs at first he strikes a more dovish line but by about 1978 he has definitely changed his tune and he is much harder on the Soviet Union does his evangelical Christianity play a massive part in that I don't think it does play a massive part actually I just ask because that sense of of the world being divided into good and evil which of course Reagan will make great play with but this is also going to be part of the perspective that the Ayatollah bring to the to their understanding of the world.

Yeah. And and Carter definitely has a very moralistic sense of the world and he's comfortable with the language of good and evil in a way that that Reagan is and a way that Margaret Thatcher is in Britain in similar period, but that maybe older politicians of the slightly wse yeah would make the slightly w they would think of it as a little bit go maybe. Anyway, this context explains, I think, why Carter goes all in on the sha. So, before he became president, I'm guessing that Jimmy Carter had literally never thought about Iran at all. I mean, if you're the governor of Georgia, you never have to worry about Iranian affairs. Here's a here's a US TV fact for you. Uh the US network news in the 1970s typically discussed Iran for five minutes a year and those five minutes were generally taken up with coverage of the sha's dinners or him going skiing or his glamorous you know his oddly young and glamorous companions.

The sha steps out with glamorous centerfold. Exactly. That's exactly what it was. Now, Carter was aware that the sha was getting um a bit of a kicking from liberals about his human rights record and he put a little bit of pressure on the sha to ameliate this and actually in 1977 the sh said fair enough we're going to stop torturing people and I'll let the red cross in to have a look at my prisons and we shall allow poets and writers here your poets again for you Tom we shall allow them to have meetings and talk about liberal ideas and political reforms and so on and so forth. However, Carter doesn't want to go too far in this. So, in June 1977, he appoints a new ambassador to Iran called William Sullivan, who's going to be a big character in this series. William Sullivan is a career diplomat. He's got this white kind of buffong hair. He's regarded as a loose cannon.

We love a loose cannon in American diplomatic debacle. We definitely do. So, he's very outspoken. He's very asserbic. He doesn't suffer fools gladly. Um they appoint him to to the embassy in Thran and Carter says to him, "Look, I want you to treat the sh as our close friend. He's a really important ally for us. Iran is, and I quote, our guarantee of stability and security in the Persian Gulf, all of this." And Sullivan says, "Aren't you the human rights guy? Like, is human rights that important to you?" And Carter actually says to him, "Don't don't overthink this. Like, don't worry too much about the human rights thing.

Iran is so important to us, not least because we have listening posts on the Soviet border with Iran that are massively important to us. So, you know, don't get too carried away with this human rights business. Yeah, we'd like the SHA to stop attacking people with cattle prods, but you know, having him on side is so important. So, the SHA comes to Washington in uh November 1977. Carter rolls out the red carpet for him. And afterwards, Carter says publicly, "The SHA is brilliant. I love the SHA. He's more impressive than any other leader, certainly any European leader I've ever met." And what's so hurtful about this, Tom, is the show at this point has met James Callahan. So, what is he thinking? Terrible judge of character. What can we say?

Terrible judge of character. So this is what sets the scene for this trip that Carter then makes in return to Thran on New Year's Eve 1977. And again, it's a very gilded scene. So one American reporter said it felt like Versailles in the days of Louis the 14th. There's Caviar, there's Don Perinol, there's Rose Partridge, there's this gigantic ice cream flombe. And Carter gives this speech and he says, "I ask my wife Roselyn where she'd like to spend New Year's Eve cuz we were going to be abroad." And she said, "The people I love most are the Sha and Empress Farah." And everybody says, "Oh, isn't that lovely?" And Carter says, I mean, it's unbelievable when you read the speech. He says, "I really love human rights. And what's nice for me is I know the sha I know you love human rights, too. how profoundly impressed I've been, he says, with your wisdom, your judgment, your sensitivity and insight.

How moved I was when we drove through Tehran and I saw literally thousands of Iranian citizens standing beside the street with a friendly attitude expressing their welcome to me. He says, "And beside them thousands of American citizens, there are now 50,000 Americans in Iran who stood there welcoming their president in a nation which has taken them to heart and made them feel at home." Well, it never occurs to Carter. Carter who is so inexperienced in world affairs, it never occurs to him when he's saying these words that he has gambled his entire presidency on a doomed regime. But Tom, just 8 days later in the city of Gome, the first fires are lit in a revolution that will change things forever. And at the center of this conflation is a man who has a very different vision for Iran and its people. And that is the Ayatollah Ruhalla Kmeni. Thrilling stuff. We will be back after the break to hear from the

Ayatollah. All our miseries are caused by the imperialists. If they were not protected by the Iranian government, the people would skin them alive. Everything in our treasury is emptied into the pockets of America. And if there is anything left, it goes to the sh and his gang. They buy themselves foreign villas and stuff their bank accounts with the people's money while the nation starves. So brave sons of Islam, stand up. Talk to the people. Tell the truth to the masses. Rouse the people in the streets and the bizaars.

Rouse our students. Rouse our simplehearted workers and peasants. And let us become holy warriors. So welcome back to the rest is history. And what you heard there were the duet tones of the Ayatollah Raholla Kmeni. and he was speaking from exile in Iraq uh in the city of Najaf in February 1978. And Dominic the Ayatollah is one of the iconic figures of 20th century revolution, isn't he? He's up there with lenin with mau. Everyone recognizes him. His long beard, his bristling eyebrows, his general expression of fun.

Yes, exactly. And Americans in particular will think of him as one of history's great villains. But as always with people who are regarded, you know, as great villains or indeed great heroes, it's it's always interesting to dig into the kind of the reality behind the iconic image. He was born in the market town of Kain in central Iran probably in 1900. And he came from a reasonably well-off family. His father and grandfather had both been clerics. His father was killed in a fight when he was a toddler. and he was raised by his uncle and aunt. He was by all accounts a very clever boy. He began read supposedly began reading the Quran when he was six. He was very good at football apparently played football. He loved poetry and actually he loves poetry all his life. But he was clearly very serious and reserved. He probably got on well with Jimmy Carter actually. Well, that's the irony, isn't it? I mean that

there are kind of echoes between America and Iran throughout this entire conflict. Um I mean just to say about Kmeni's upbringing that the background to it. You said that his father was was killed in a brawl. I mean this is the the period of the um the buildup to the first world war and the first world war itself and it it is very violent. Yes. Um, and I think that when he he ends up going to a a seminary, um, and I think that that provides him with a kind of refuge from the chaos of life outside and must be a hugely formative in his association of Islam with peace.

Completely. Completely. So, as you say, he goes to the seminary in this place called Kum, which is a holy city because it has the shrine of somebody called Fatima Bint Musa, who is the sister of the eighth Shia imam. We don't need to massively get into that right now. Anyway, it's a holy city. He's at the seminary. He finds security in carnos, as you say. He does law there. He does philosophy, doesn't he? Greek philosophy.

He does, but philosophy is his real focus. And it it's particular focus on Greek philosophy. So, Aristotle and particularly Plato and how they have been mediated by the kind of traditions of Islamic um and specifically Shia thinking.

Exactly. So the so many is he's a serious and very clever person. He's he's writes poetry, studies poetry. He's very interested in mysticism. He becomes one of the most respected scholars at the seminary.

I mean, you know who he actually also reminds me of is Pope John Paul II. Also a footballer, a poet, um becomes a titanic religious leader of the 70s and 80s.

Certain parallel there. Yeah. So by the time he's about 50, people are calling him Ayatollah, which is a term of respect for an especially learned scholar and everybody acknowledges he's an incredibly charismatic and impressive person. He always wears this black robe, this black turban. He's he's got his beard. He's perfectly groomed. He has this hypnotic, unwavering stare. He always looks implacable and formidable. He never is seen smiling or laughing in public. And this is because he's very conscious of his seriousness and his dignity and and there's a sort of austerity to him which is reflected in his private life. So he's he married his wife when she was in her early teens. He's not a big you know unlike the sha he doesn't have dishes flown in from maxims of Paris. He doesn't own much. He spends his time you know to relax. He prays. He meditates.

He goes for a walk. So maybe we should talk a little bit. I know you want to talk a bit, don't you, Tom, about um the importance of Shia Islam to our story.

Well, it's so fundamental. Just to give people a sense of what we mean. In the early days of the Islamic conquest, so after the death of Muhammad, there was basically a disagreement about who would succeed, wasn't there? And Shiites believe that the Islamic community took a wrong path. That the leadership should have remained in the family of Muhammad's son-in-law, Ali. Well, specifically Dominic, the family of the prophet himself because um Ali is married to the daughter of Muhammad. And so their sons Hassan and Hussein are the grandchildren of the prophet, but they don't succeed. They end up being killed. And we'll come to that in a minute.

And over time, their faction basically evolves into its own sect with its own history and its own traditions and its own rituals.

Yeah. So they are the Shiat Ali, the party of Allah. So that's where Shia comes from. Shia or Shiites. So they are now in the world today about 10 to 15% of Muslims. The vast majority of Muslims are Sunny. But the Shia or the Shiites are this minority. And Iran had been a Shia or Shiite since about the 1500s when the Sapphid dynasty imposed it as the state religion and it became an really really important part of Iranian identity because it distinguished them from the neighboring Arabic countries which were sunny Muslim. So it made it made Iran feel different and it had two massive consequences for our story. So one of them is that I mean I know you're going to say a little bit more about this that at the heart of the Shia belief system is this idea that you have you know it's a it's a belief system based on the idea of oppression and authority and virtuous austere martyrs and victims who are being oppressed by

overweening state authority or overweening authority of one kind or another. And the primal victims and martyrs in this belief system are Ali, the son-in-law of the prophet who had a caiff who had been assassinated. But more particularly Ali's son, the grandson of the prophet, we've already mentioned him. Um, Hussein who was killed in a battle in Iraq, a place called Carbala in 680, um, by the the dynasty who then establish a kind of imperial rule. And this for the Shia is where everything goes wrong. not just in the context of kind of late antique politics but on a cosmic scale because this for them is uh about the triumph of evil over good and it's about the derailing of Muhammad's prophetic mission which is a mission for the whole of humanity the embodiment of God's plan for the world and so um Hussein's death in this battle at Carbella is seen as the primal catastrophe um and it is uh commemorated as a kind

of great act of self-sacrifice on the part of Hussein. He's laying down his life for the good of of of all of all the world. It will strike people that there are slight echoes there of Good Friday of the death of Christ. I mean, I think that's not coincidental. There are a lot of Christians in this period in Iran and in Iraq. And I think it is channeling those kind of Christian understandings of of of sacrifice on the part of humanity. And so the day of Hussein's death, Ashur, which is the 10th day of the first month of the Muslim calendar, Muharam, is the great day of morning for the Shia. And it is essentially their kind of Good Friday.

Yeah. And this in turn feeds into a strongly apocalyptic perspective on the world because if things have gone wrong, then at some point God will intervene to ensure that they will go right. And the person who will emerge is this figure called the Mardi who is the 12th of the Imams. And the Imams are people with a kind of cosmic mission to write and order the world. And the first of these imams had been Ali. Hussein had been the third, the 12th Imam, the hidden Imam, the Mai. He will appear and according to Shiite tradition, he will avenge the blood of Hussein that was spilled at Kbala. And this will to quote Abbas Aminat in his brilliant book apocalyptic Islam and Iranian Shiism. It will initiate an apocalyptic battle of cosmic proportion that precedes the day of resurrection and the end of time. And people may feel that all this discussion of um you know late antique theology in the context of 1970s politics might seem

a bit rare but it absolutely isn't because it is impossible I think to understand the Iranian revolution without an awareness of how important this apocalyptic understanding of the world is to the Ayatollah and to you know to to his followers and it's precisely because the American foreign policy establishment have no comprehension of this at all that they don't really know how to handle the Ayatollah when he emerges onto the scene.

Exactly. So for people to keep in their heads, the Ayatollah has this sense of victimhood and suffering. They have this particular day that's massively important that's grounded in history, Ashura. And they have this apocalyptic sense of the end of days and all of this kind of thing. So that's one thing. And then the other thing to bear in mind about um Shia Islam is that local clergy are really really important in this world. So um Baker Moin who is communist biographer has really really good sections about this. So the mullers the clerics or priests I guess in Shia Islam always had tremendous local clout. So in these small towns and villages in what was then called Persia and later Iran, the cleric was the judge. He was the teacher. He was a kind of storyteller.

He was a massively massively important figure. He could read and write and most people couldn't. The cleric handled all your legal transactions. The cleric acted as a kind of arbiter and a mediator often in small local places. He was the main authority figure and people looked to him not to the state and they saw the clerics often as a kind of counterweight to the state not part of it.

Yes. And actually also crucial for people to bear in mind is that clerics pointedly did not aspire to control the state. They did not aspire to the leadership say of Iran. Um and this again is rooted in the kind of distinctive character of Shiite theology because Shiites see um legitimate governance what guardianship um valat it's called in in Persian as having perished with Ali and Hussein and therefore basically throughout history Shiites have rejected the very notion of a kind of legitimate state. They they don't think it exists and this will only change with the coming of the Mardi. And again to quote Ammonat, the belief that all temporal powers are considered unjust was carried almost to the point of anarchistic idealism. So this for Shiite clerics opposed to the sha. It inspires them in their opposition to his rule. But it also lives leaves them with a problem which is that who is going to step into

the gap? Because there's nothing in the Shiite tradition that would say that clerics would take that step.

Right? So one last point about these clerics. They often are quite well off because they're authority figures in their local communities and whatnot. And in the towns and the cities, they become very closely connected to the merchant and artisan classes who basically run the bazaars, the marketplaces. And this actually is the social nexus that powers the Iranian revolution, the alliance of these shopkeepers and artisans in the cities with the clerical elite. Now the cleric's political independence is massively massively important to them.

It's a huge part of their political identity. But all through the Ayatal life there's been tension with the state in Tehran. I mentioned in the first half that his father in the 1930s had been a modernizer. He was very much cut from the same cloth as um Ataturk in Turkey. So a little bit Peter the Great actually for people who remember that series that we did. So Reszar Palvy had wanted to electrify, literally electrify Iran, to bring in ID cards, to have railways, to have people wear western clothes. He he tried to clamp down on people wearing veils and turbons. He even got his military officers to try to shave off clerics beards. Very Peter the Great.

The clerics absolutely hated it and they said this is a classic example of why the Parliament dynasty are western parven and puppets and they're just they're totally illegitimate and just to be clear this is obviously on one level ideological but it is also seen as an attack on their economic standing.

Yes, it is exactly even more so in the 1960s. So in the 1960s, Reszar's son is now Sha and the Sha launches a thing that he calls the white revolution, which is this big modernization drive. And he thinks he wants to he thinks this will make him very popular. He says, "Let's have public works. Let's have land reform. Let's encourage people to have a literacy drive so people can read and write. Let's give women the vote. Let's give women more rights. The chance to wear miniskirts, right? Let's get let's expand state education. Why shouldn't you be taught by trained teachers rather than the local cleric?

Now, the local clerics do not like this at all for all kinds of reasons. Many of them come from landowning families. So, their estates are the ones that will be broken up and distributed to the poor. The legal reforms, their role, I mentioned before that they play the part of the lawyer or the judge or the notary. They're going to lose some of that authority. They will also lose control of education if the SHA brings in all these educational reforms. And they're like, well, this is it's not just ripping up our traditions. This is a massive threat to our way of life and our local standing. And it's at this point in the 1960s that Kmeni decides to enter politics. So he steps forward as the guy who's standing up against all this. And he says he gives a series of sermons in which he says the sha is a tyrant. He is um a traitor. He is the puppet of the United States and of Israel which has already become the

great enemy in the sort of demonology of the of the clerics. He says if you know his father was kicked out and the sha this miserable wretched man he'll be kicked out as well if he doesn't change his ways. The sha has him arrested. He spends time under house arrest. Then he's allowed out in and then in 1964 he goes back on the offensive and this time very interestingly and I think this is an an important clue to Kmeni's appeal. What Hmeny speaks out about is a deal that will give legal immunity to American military personnel if they get into trouble in Iran. It's a pretty standard agreement the Americans have in places where they're American bases that if our GIS behave badly, they won't be tried by your courts, they'll be tried by our military courts. And come says this is an absolute disgrace. He says the sha has reduced us to a level of a colony and made the Muslim nation of Iran appear more backward than savages

in the eyes of the world. He says this is all a Zionist plot. President Lyndon Johnson and I quote, "The most repulsive member of the human race is a Zionist agent." And I I don't doubt that Comey genuinely thought this, but there's also an element of calculation here. He he tells his friends, he's quoted as having told his friends, we must use this issue as a weapon so that the people will realize that the sha is an American agent. And I think this is a really important part of his sort of political repertoire that he blends what you might see as religious conservatism or traditionalism with a kind of anti-colonial nationalism that is so fashionable and popular in the 1950s and the 1960s across Asia, not just in Iran.

And so this is why in due course he can be celebrated by people in the west on the left as as a a figure to be admired as an anti-imperialist champion and all of this. Anyway, this was too much for the sha. The sha had him arrested again and they kicked him out of the country and he ends up in the holy another holy city Najaf in Iraq where the great hero of um Shiite religion Ali is buried. And there hini and his wife live in this little house with all their followers and their acolytes. And he becomes this sort of symbol of resistance to the sha.

So he will sit there you know day after day praying and reading and teaching and whatnot. And his supporters make tape recordings of his lectures and his sermons and they smuggle them into Iran. Now maybe there's an alternative universe where he would just have stayed in the jaff and he'd have kind of molded away giving his speeches and no one would have cared. And some listeners may say, well, Iran was getting very rich in the 60s and 70s with all its oil money. It's becoming more urban. It's got its, you know, nice reforms. It's becoming more literate. Who cares about what some bloke with a beard over the border in Iraq? But the truth is that all of the changes that Iran is undergoing, they actually play into hands.

You might say, you know, the sh's actually been good for Iran. He spent all this money on new railways and stuff. Healthcare has expanded massively, education, he's invested in Iran's industry, and actually if you're a woman or if you're a member of an ethnic minority, I mean, Iran has a lot of minorities, kind of Kurds

and religious minorities as well. Yeah, religious minorities. They are better off under the sha than they had ever been before in Iranian history.

I mean, just on women, there are Islamic dress codes which the sha is contemptuous of. Yes. And so if you are not devoutly Muslim in the traditional sense as a woman you can wear what you like. But obviously if that becomes a very obvious visual symbol of what is at stake both for secularists and for traditional Muslims. Well, people would say in the 60s and 70s they would they would come to Tehran from the countryside and they would see huge western billboards for you know showing what they regarded as half naked women you know advertising hoardings and so on and they were shocked by it. They were they were really shocked

but they would see women in miniskirts drinking in bars with men of course. Exactly. And they would see foreign women by the way you know American women and so on because I mean there are 50,000 Americans but we'll come to this. The enormous oil boom of the 60s and 70s has proved a very mixed blessing for Iran. It's created a deep sense of inequality. There's a conspicuous gap between rural peasants and the urban poor on one hand and then the the winners, the metropolitan elite on the other. Crucially, it's triggered massive inflation. So prices in the 70s are rising about 15% a year. It's very kind of Spain after the conquest of the Americas, the influx of all the silver that basically destroyed the Spanish economy. The, you know, the oil money is, you know, in many ways it makes a lot of things worse as well as better.

So Iran is a very young country. Amazing. The fact this half of the population of Iran in the 1970s was under the age of 16. So that's a lot of ambitious people and if their ambitions aren't met, they will be very quickly frustrated. And we already mentioned the population explosion in Thran. So you have tens of thousands of people, hundreds of thousands who have moved to Tehran from the countryside in search of work and they are packed into these pretty grim concrete tower blocks on the edge of the city. You mentioned the traffic. The traffic is notorious across the world. You know, you can't get anywhere. The electricity grid cannot cope with all the newcomers. So there are constant blackouts and the costs because of the inflation are going up all the time. So in some parts of Tehran, rent went up 300% in 5 years.

And there are a lot of poor, unskilled young men who have moved from the countryside who find all this utterly overwhelming and frustrating. They're struggling economically. They are shocked by what you were describing, you know, the the social world of the people who are well off, you know, the women in revealing dresses, drinking alcohol and whatnot. And they feel totally alienated from the sha and his court. And they also feel alienated from the tens of thousands of westerners who now live in Thran because they have you know they are sort of participating in the boom rather like westerners who now live in the Middle East in Dubai or somewhere.

So to quote a young woman Masume Etekar who became very prominent in the early days of the revolution and in the hostage crisis. She wrote later, "Most of the Americans who lived in Iran behaved in a way that revealed their sense of self-importance and superiority. They had come to expect extra respect, even deference from all Iranians. From shoe shine boy to Sha, American lifestyles had come to be imposed as an ideal, the ultimate goal. American books, magazines, films had swept over our country like a flood. And we found ourselves wondering, is there any room for our own culture?" And I think they this is very common in the 60s and 70s across the developing world, but it's especially pronounced in Iran, which has been transformed so much by all of this money and which has such an ancient culture and such a distinctive culture.

Of course, now it's no accident Masimo Etekar, the woman who wrote those words, was a student. And thanks to the sh's modernization project, there are now 200,000 students in Tehran and the other big cities. I mean, that's a rookie's error for a dictator, isn't it?

Yeah. create this class of people, educated people whose ambitions are not being met. Now, some of them turn to socialism or communism, but most don't. Because if you are feeling alienated and frustrated given the importance the clerics have always had and the place of Islam in Iran's history, if you are looking for meaning and order and solace and all of those kinds of things, Islam offers you more authentically Iranian answers than socialism and communism do. So something is brewing. You know, things are brewing in the kind of tower blocks and in the university campuses and things as the 70s continue. But in Washington, people just don't notice this. And one reason they don't notice is if you're American, you know, you're interested in foreign policy in the early 1970s, you're not looking at Iran.

You're looking at Vietnam and Southeast Asia or Soviet Union or Eastern Europe or Cuba or something. Even in the US embassy, the staff at the US embassy, they had lots of links to the sha's court obviously, but not to opposition groups or to the clerics. So I mentioned William Sullivan, the ambassador when he arrived in 1977. I mean, he wrote this really kind of costic memoir about his time. He said, "I was shocked how few of my colleagues spoke fary, how few of them had ever been outside the capital." So in other words, the information that's getting back to Washington, a lot of it is wrong. And when Carter arrives, you know, at the palace for that New Year's Eve dinner, he doesn't realize anything is wrong. He thinks the sha's going to be there for decades and nothing could possibly go wrong. But actually, just a week after Carter leaves, that's when things start to kick off. Because in recent months, these

tapes of communist sermons have been flooding into the markets of Iran. And his rhetoric is more and more ferocious. He says the sha is a Zionist agent, a Jewish agent. He says the sha is an American serpent. He says people should stop paying tax. They should stop going to school or university or whatever. This drives the sha mad. So he waits for Carter to leave. And on the 7th of January he gets one of the biggest papers in Iran to publish a repost. And this article, one of the most incendurary articles in any paper in any country in the world in the 20th century is a full-blooded attack on commun. It says commun is a is a is a tool of red and black imperialism. What it means by that is he's he's been controlled both by the communists and by the British. And this is a fairly standard kind of theme of um Iranian effective. Well, it's good to see the British still.

Yeah, it's always the British, right? So, the British black with the black imperialists in league with the red imperialists in Moscow. That's the sh's thinking. This article says uh Hini has always been into poetry. That's a bad sign.

It is a bad sign. I mean, every everyone in the CIA knows that it's a really bad sign. It says his ancestry, he's not even really Iranian. He's actually Indian. Um, so he's he's a foreigner. And it says he's typical of the class. Actually, a lot of these rural clerics are, and I quote, parasites engaged in sodomy, usery, and they're drunk most of the time. So, this is what this article says. And this is an absolutely catastrophic own goal because within hours of this article, this newspaper reaching the news stands, there are huge protests in the city of Gum, which is the seminary city where um the Ayatollah had had been a student and then a teacher and the seminary shut down. All the religious students pour out onto the streets to sort of protest about this.

There are demonstrations outside the police station. The police end up firing into the crowds. there's a stampede and then a number of people are either shot or trampled to death. So this is all um January 1978. Now how many people were shot or trampled to death? Reports at the time said maybe 30 40. The historian Michael Axworthy has written a brilliant book on the Iranian revolution says actually almost all these reports probably exaggerated. It might have been like five people. Doesn't really matter though, does it?

It doesn't. Exactly. It doesn't matter because what matters is that this this has happened of course and now what happens is this strange cycle after 40 days there are meant to be memorial services for people who've died. So 40 days after these deaths on the 18th of February there were these memorial services and there are more demonstrations at uh universities across Iran. There's a demonstration for example in Tabres which is close to the border with Soviet Azaba. There too the crowd kicks off. There are scuffles. There are attacks on cinemas.

There are attacks on banks and the symbols of kind of western influence. The army is sent in. More people are shot. Again, unclear exactly how many. So 40 days after that, these people have memorial services and you have more riots. And so you have this cycle. Every 40 days there are memorial services for the people who were killed in the last sort of outbreak of rioting. And there's more rioting. And so there'll be more memorial services in 40 days time. So this continues till miday. Now the sha contemplating all this he makes some concessions. He thinks well I'll buy the protesters off. He fires the head of the secret police. He says we can have free elections to the Iranian parliament next year. But he doesn't really get the sh is just as detached in many ways as the Americans are. Heath says I think this is probably been masterminded by the communists and almost certainly the British. Brilliant. So we're still on

the scene again. Again this mad kind of anglophobia. Now his courtiers are baffled why the sha is so um the sha seems very listless during all this. He's kind of he's kind of slightly disengaged. They can't understand why he hasn't cracked down much harder and why actually he's absent from public life and he's spending a lot of his time in his palace at the Caspian Sea. And one reason for this is that what a lot of Zashar's advisers don't know is that he is actually desperately ill. Four years earlier, he'd been swimming. He'd noticed a a swelling in his side. And his doctors had brought in a French specialist who diagnosed leukemia. The shark had leukemia. But unbelievably, the sha's doctors didn't have the courage to tell him. They told him, "Oh, it's a it's a you've got a minor blood condition." in 1978.

They still haven't really told him. He seems completely depressed, but they've hidden from him the nature of his condition, although they have told his wife, Empress Farah. Now, there are rumors at this point spreading through Tehran. There's something wrong with the sha. He looks really kind of gaunt. He's lost a lot of weight. He seems really miserable and unhappy and in pain and so on. But even after the doctors finally tell the sha the truth in the summer of 1978, the US embassy is still reporting to Washington. There are rumors about the SHA's health. And I quote, "Our sources indicate there's no doubt. The Russians are spreading the stories. To the best of our knowledge, the SHA is fine. I mean, this is insane that they're still doing this." And what is more, the Pentagon and the CIA are both still telling Carter, "Yes, there have been a lot of protests in Iran. Yes, there's this business with the students

and whatnot. However, the sh is going to be fine. The regime is fine. His security forces are well capable of handling any disorder.

And presumably, still at this point, there isn't really any understanding of the potential role that Islam could be playing and might play in the future.

No, not at all. They regard this as student protests. The big danger is that Iran would go communist. You know, this is the fear whenever the Americans confront any of these kinds of things.

So, they're seeing it through the prism of the leftright axis, of course, rather than of a kind of secularist Islamic axis. There are some people as time goes on, Ambassador Sullivan is one of them as 1978 wears on who says, you know, I think we should start talking to some of these clerics to find out what they want and who they are. But you know famously they the CIA have profiles of all the big people in Iranian politics. They don't have one prepared for the Ayatala because they just don't think he's that big a factor.

You know they're much more interested in traditional politicians. So you know things are getting worse not least because because of the high inflation the sh government has decided to try to drive down prices and one way they'll do that is they'll slash spending. So that summer, thousands of people are laid off and a lot of these people are young men from Tehran's workingass areas. So they're angry. They're economically angry as much as anything. So then in August, you get the key moment arguably of the whole revolution, the 19th of August. And this happens not in Tehran, but in a town called Abadan, which is in southwestern Iran on the border with Iraq. So 8:00 that night, the 19th of August, hundreds of people have packed into the cinema Rex to see a very, very popular uh film, one of the most popular films of the 70s in Iran called The Deer. And just after 8:20, so the film has been running for 20 minutes or so.

Four men barred the doors of the cinema. They poured petrol onto the doors and then they lit the doors with a match. The doors went up, you know, the cinema went up in flames. There was total panic inside, a massive stampede and about 500 people were burned to death in this cinema. Outside Iran, almost all historians now agree this was the work of Islamic militants. So through the 70s, there had been a series of Islamic militant attacks on symbols of westernization on cinemas, on bars, on banks, on airline offices, things like that. And this is another of them. But in the climate of August 1978, people on the streets said, "Do you know who did it? The sha secret police to try to frame Islamic militants." And that is still the official line on this fire in the Islamic Republic of Iran today. So if you go to Iran today to talk about this fire, people will say the Sha did it. So it's kind of the it's it's the

Iranian equivalent of of the thousands locked up in sinister dungeons in the Bastile.

Yes. that the myth is what matters obviously in a revolution rather than in the case of French revolution the fact that there were barely anyone in the bastile

exactly and so within days people have poured onto the streets hundreds of thousands of people across Iran and they are shouting the sha is guilty burn the sha I mean the sha had nothing to do with this but from this point I think there's no way back for him so by September there are constant demonstrations in tan there are crowds chanting for kmeni and calling for the end of the Parl vi monarchy in Friday the 8th of September the sha declares martial law but there's a great gathering at a place called Jalis square which is a working-class area in tan the soldiers call on the crowd to disperse they fire tear gas at them then they start firing into the crowd there is total chaos and by the time this is all over about 100 people have been killed and with that it really is downhill all the way for the sh there are rumors now there are really exaggerated rumors that he had sent in helicopters and people

had been machine guning the crowds from the helicopters. Madly, people start to say, you know, those troops who fired on the crowds, they were actually Israeli troops. The sh is bringing in Israeli troops as mercenaries to fire on our own people. It's a bit like, you know, the claims that Charles I was going to use soldiers from Ireland against the the the London apprentices in 1642 or something. and a striking illustration of the role that Israel is already playing in

yes exactly the demonology of Iranian militants. So we are now in the autumn of 1978. There are massive strikes across Iran. The one thing the regime fears most, the strikes have shut down the oil fields on which Iran's exports depend. There are crowds in the streets every day. There are attacks on banks and restaurants every day. And already in some towns in Iran, power has been taken from the legitimate authorities and it's been taken over by revolutionary strike committees. Now, if you're with the revolution, this is very exciting. If you're not with the revolution, it is terrifying.

And in his memoirs, Ambassador William Sullivan describes standing at the US embassy and looking out through an upstairs window and he sees in the distance troops holding back demonstrators. He sees cars burning in the middle of the road. He sees smoke rising from burning buildings and he thinks something has to change. You know, we have to do something. So on the 9th of November, he sends a secret cable to Washington with the title thinking the unthinkable. And he says the sha is finished. It's over. And if we don't act now, Iran, which is so vital to us, will slip out of our hands forever. He says we should ditch the sha right now. And it may well be time to do a deal with the Ayatollah Ruhala Kmeni. Goodness, what tension, what drama. So, will Jimmy Carter follow that advice? Will he, as it were, get into bed with the Ayatollah, a rather unpleasant image, but Dominic, that's what you've written.

And we will find out next time. As the revolution quickens, uh, the sha le flees Iran, hommini ends up returning to Thran in triumph. And we have also had Jimmy Carter's tennis court monitoring. In our next episode, we will be revisiting the other key fact in Carter's presidency, his uh fishing trip on a swamp. If you'd like to hear that and you'd like to hear um all three of the episodes that are still to come in this series, then you can join our own belleaguered embassy of godless imperialists, the restis club at the restistory.com.

But for now, kodz kodz. Hello, Rest is History fans. It's spy and pigeon aficionardo Gordon Carrera here from the Rest is classified podcast with a quick message for those of you enjoying Tom and Dominic's Iran series. A little while ago on the rest is classified, we did two episodes on the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Muhammad Mosedc in 1953, a coup orchestrated by the CIA and MI6. It's a story full of dirty tricks, boozy spies, Iranian weightlifters, and politicians in their pajamas. And it tells you a lot about how the CIA got the taste for regime change. So tune in to episodes one and two of the rest is classified to hear the full

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "The Iranian Revolution: The Fall of the Shah | EP 1"?

Tom Holland (Host), Dominic Sandbrook (Host).

What is "The Iranian Revolution: The Fall of the Shah | EP 1" about?

The Iranian Revolution marked a pivotal moment in global history, characterized by the dramatic overthrow of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whose perceived stability in Iran was highlighted in a 1977 toast by President Jimmy Carter. This event ultimately led to the establishment of the Ayatollah Khomeini's regime, reshaping U.S.-Iran relations and altering the geopolitical landscape of the Middle…

What is mentioned in this The Rest Is History episode?

20 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shia Islam, William Sullivan, Operation Eagle Claw, Anglo Persian Oil Company, Farah Pahlavi. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "The Iranian Revolution: The Fall of the Shah | EP 1"?

The episode runs 1 h 15 min; the transcript is about 13,465 words in 135 timestamped sections.

More from The Rest Is History

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated January 24, 2026.