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• The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War - 2021 Vintage, New York, NY
• Fractured Lands: How the Arab World Came Apart - 2017 Anchor, New York, NY

• New York Times - https://www.nytimes.com/by/scott-anderson

  Scott Anderson
  Recent and archived work by Scott Anderson for The New York Times

• Wikipedia -

  Scott Anderson (writer)

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  This article possibly contains original research. The only sources for much of the Career section are Anderson's own writing. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding inline citations. Statements consisting only of original research should be removed. (July 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
  Scott Anderson
  Born 1959 (age 65–66)
  Occupation
  Authorinvestigative journalistwar correspondent
  Nationality American
  Education University of Iowa
  Genre
  Non-fictionFiction
  Spouse Nanette Burstein
  Scott Anderson (born 1959) is an American writer, novelist, non-fiction author, and war correspondent. He has authored non-fiction books including Lawrence in Arabia, The Man Who Tried to Save the World, and War Zones, as well as the novels Triage and Moonlight Hotel. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine, GQ, Esquire, Men's Journal, Vanity Fair and other publications.

  Early life and education
  Anderson was born in Sebastopol, California and he has a brother and three sister. His brother is the author Jon Lee Anderson, and his sister Michelle is also a writer. He grew up in East Asia, primarily in Taiwan and Korea, where his father was an agricultural advisor for the American government.[1] When asked about his father's experience and how this relates to his own career, in a 2006 interview with New York magazine, Anderson said "I saw his frustrations with projects that were often just boondoggles mandated by the government."[2] After spending a year traveling from Europe to India with his father, Anderson went to high school in Gainesville, Florida.[3] He received an M.F.A in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop.[4]

  Career
  Anderson pursued a writing career at the age of nineteen. He was working in a governmental job in Washington and thinking about the possibility of attending college when, he describes, one weekend having an idea to write a novel. The next week he quit his job, ended his engagement to his then fiancée, and set out to become a writer.[5] Anderson would do menial jobs like fruit-picking and bartending, to support himself financially until he gained success with his writing.

  Books
  Non-fiction
  Anderson has co-authored two non-fiction books with his brother Jon Lee Anderson. Inside the League was published in 1986 by Dodd Mead. The book tells the story of how Nazi leaders, and other leaders of other fascist organisations, switched allegiances to join the political World Anti-Communist League. Anderson and Anderson write that the organisation, founded in 1952, developed warfare methods including "assassinations, death squads, and sabotage throughout the world" which were, they argue, adopted from the Nazis.[6] Scott Anderson's second book, co-authored with Jon Lee Anderson, called War Zones was published in 1988 also by Dodd Mead. The authors provide anecdotal evidence, observations and protestations from those experiencing violent conflicts in El Salvador, Northern Ireland, Uganda, Sri Lanka, and Israel.[7]

  Scott Anderson's first solo published book was The 4 O'clock Murders: The True Story of a Mormon Family's Vengeance in 1994 by Doubleday. In this book, Anderson tells the true story of four murders carried out in 1988 in Texas by a self-proclaimed Mormon prophet, Heber LeBaron of the Church of the Firstborn.[8] Anderson's next book concerned the disappearance of Fred Cuny, entitled The Man Who Tried to Save the World: The Dangerous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Fred Cuny, first published in 1999 by Doubleday.[9] Anderson's next book was Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East first published in 2013 by Doubleday. It tells the story of the Arab Revolt against the Turks in the First World War, and the role T. E. Lawrence played, a British archaeologist, who became head of the Arab enemy and battled the imperialist ambitions of his nation-state.[10] In 2017, Anderson published the book Fractured Lands: How the Arab World Came Apart giving an account of the Arab Spring, and Anderson argues, the origins of which can be traced back to America's invasion of Iraq in 2003.[11] The Quiet Americans, first published in 2020 by Doubleday, explores the roles of four American spies (Michael Burke, Frank Wisner, Peter Sichel and Edward Lansdale) during the Cold War.[12] In 2025, Penguin Random House published Anderson's King of Kings, which chronicled the history of the Iranian Revolution.[13] The book won the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction in 2025.[14]

  Fiction
  Scott Anderson has published two fiction novels. The first is 1998 novel Triage telling the story of a war photographer Mark and the psychological effects of his work.[15] His second novel Moonlight Hotel, published in 2006, is about mid-level diplomat David Richards based in the Middle Eastern kingdom of Kutar in 1983. When civil war breaks out, Richards, along with fellow expatriates, holds up in Moonlight Hotel to survive the conflict.[16]

  War correspondence
  Scott Anderson initially wanted to be an author of fiction, and his first pursuit into war reporting occurred in 1983. Anderson had been travelling around Europe and had heard about stringers and wished to find out more, he was suggested by someone in an Associated Press office in Greece, to travel to Beirut.[5] The Mountain War, as part of the ongoing Lebanese Civil War, had broken out in the Summer of 1983 just before Anderson left for Beirut to report on events.

  Anderson's career as a published war correspondent began in 1994 with an article in the New York Times about violence as a result of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. For the article, Anderson travelled to Northern Ireland regularly for years before publication to gain a glimpse into "the Belfast underworld" and meet members of the Provisional IRA, for instance.[17] Anderson would go on to write another article for The New York Times and Harper's Magazine in 1994 about the situation in Northern Ireland.[18][19] During the 1990s, Anderson reported on Fred Cuny, an American humanitarian working in conflict and disaster zones who disappeared in 1995, as well as the Bosnian War, and situation in Albania as a result of war in Kosovo in 1999.[20][21][22]

  In 2001, Anderson travelled to Turkey to report on the Turkish hunger strike in prisons which occurred within the backdrop of the Turkish economic crisis, for The New York Times Magazine.[23] During the 2000s, Anderson repeatedly reported on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.[24][25][26][27] He also covered tensions in the Middle East, including War in Darfur and the disarmament of Libya.[28][29] In 2011, Anderson published an article for Esquire, detailing his experience (alongside Sebastian Junger and John Faulk) in Bosnia when the CIA were hunting for Ratko Mladic, a former Bosnian military officer and convicted war criminal.[30]

  In a 2017 interview, Anderson describes becoming a parent as having affected his decision to limit active war reporting, saying he has a "moral responsibility" to stay safe for his child.[5]

  Journalism
  Anderson's investigative journalism has also covered other socio-economic, cultural and political issues, outside of war and conflict. This focal shift is most notable in Anderson's published articles from the late 2000s onwards. Anderson continued to cover international issues, for instance, in 2007 he wrote about the experience of those living on the Panamanian island of Coiba with high murder rates and gangs.[31] In 2008, Anderson discussed the issue of suicide and poor mental health in America,[32] and a 2012 article featured his interview with Greg Ousley, who murdered his parents at the age of fourteen in 1993, and explored the debate around long prison sentences for juveniles.[33]

  Anderson's journalism has covered the topics of national security, central intelligence (particularly the CIA's involvement in the Middle East), law enforcement and migrant crossings.[34][35][36][37]

  Bar
  Since 2000, Anderson co-owned bar-restaurant The Half King, in New York City, with wife Nanette Burstein and fellow journalist Sebastian Junger until it closed in January 2019. The Half King was known for hosting readings, screenings and photography exhibits to encourage people interested in writing, publishing and filmmaking.[38][39]

  Reception
  In a review of Inside the League, Larry Ceplair for Los Angeles Times criticised the authors saying that they did not give the subject matter "the treatment it merits."[40] In his negative review, Ceplair opined "the title is misleading, the subtitle naïve, and the narrative structure dubious. Their [Anderson and Anderson] disconnected, anecdotal, and largely undocumented indictment of the World Anti-Communist League does not support their claim."[40]

  Publishers Weekly described Anderson as providing "a riveting, dark history [...] in copious, sometimes numbing detail, but always with a tart tongue" in The 4 O'clock Murders.[41]

  Reviews for The Man Who Tried to Save the World: The Dangerous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Fred Cuny were mainly positive. Publishers Weekly said that "Anderson does an admirable job of searching for the truth in a land that truth forgot" and whilst the review remarked that "not even Anderson's intrepid reporting and formidable storytelling skills can bring clarity to the case of Fred Cuny" it says "this is the fault of circumstances rather than of the author."[42] The New York Times Book Review said it was "a mystery story, straight out of a plot from John LeCarré."[43] The New York Observer wrote "One of the most important books to be published since the fall of the Berlin Wall...A great, epic mystery of our day."[9]

  Anderson's novel Triage received positive critical reception. Christopher Dickey The New York Times described it as "haunting" with "Hemingwayesque" landscapes and characters with consciences "straight out of Graham Greene", but Dickey adds "I wish Anderson's design for this novel were a little less schematic."[44] Susan Salter Reynolds, for the Los Angeles Times, said the novel is "thrilling" but found the main character Mark irritating, "one of those cowboys addicted to war zones" and found some of plot "a romantic idea, found only in books."[45] The Washington Post, in a review by David Nicholson, said this is "a serious book about a serious subject" and that Anderson "understands the seriousness of love and life" in the novel.[46]

  Moonlight Hotel was described by Alan Furst, in a review for The New York Times, as a "sharp and finely observed political novel" and Furst opines "dire authenticity in every tactical move in this novel — Anderson knows exactly what he's talking about."[47] Publishers Weekly said "Though Anderson demonstrates more skill with plot and geopolitical analysis than characterization, he has produced a smart, polished, proto-Syriana page-turner."[48] A review by The Washington Post Book World said it is "A tour de force, variously satire, allegory, romance, [and] war novel. . . . Elegantly written, ferociously imagined."[16]

  Lawrence in Arabia was a national bestseller and met with positive critical reception. Alex von Tunzelmann, writing for The New York Times, said that Anderson "gives Lawrence's story a new spin by contextualising him in a group biography."[49] Tunzelmann also writes "a fine storyteller, Anderson does his best to drum up a narrative for his American character but is ultimately defeated by the modesty of the man's achievements." Christopher de Bellaigue wrote for The Guardian that "Anderson is a bleak but fair-minded historian, alive to the cynicism and prejudice that decided actions on all sides."[50] Bellaigue ends his review stating "In his well-constructed demolition of Britain's "amateurs", Anderson neglects the paradox that Lawrence, an archaeologist who never received a day's military training, a scholar and an aesthete amid the blood and guts, was the greatest amateur of them all." In a review Ian Thomson for The Observer said "Scott Anderson's account of the Arab revolt and the life of TE Lawrence is both scholarly and highly readable."[51] Mahon Murphy, historian and research fellow, in a review for the London School of Economics and Political Science, said it is a "vivid attempt" to understand the conflict in the Middle East but questions Anderson's choice to focus on Lawrence.[52] The New York Times, in a review by Janet Maslin, described the book as "richly detailed" and said it is "a fascinating book, the best work of military history in recent memory and an illuminating analysis of issues that still loom large today."[53] Michael Dirda, for The Washington Post, said it "Cuts through legend and speculation to offer perhaps the clearest account of Lawrence's often puzzling actions and personality."[54]

  The Quiet Americans was met with mostly positive reviews. Kevin Peraino, for The New York Times, described it as "enthralling" and said concludes "Anderson's narrative is certainly entertaining, but he is no confectioner, and the dark, poignant tale he tells is far the better for it."[55] In a review for The Washington Post, Beverly Gage described Anderson as a "sympathetic" narrator and said it tells "a story at once sweeping in its scope and fascinating in its particulars."[56]

  Film adaptations
  The 2009 drama film Triage starring Colin Farrell, Paz Vega and Sir Christopher Lee, is based on his novel.[57] The 2007 movie The Hunting Party starring Richard Gere and Terrence Howard, is partially based on his work in Bosnia.[58][20]

  Controversy
  In a September 2009 issue of GQ, Anderson wrote an article supporting the theory of Putin's role in the Russian apartment bombings, based in part on his interviews with Mikhail Trepashkin.[59] The journal owner, Condé Nast, then took extreme measures to prevent an article by Anderson from appearing in the Russian media, both physically and in translation.[60] According to the NPR, Anderson was asked not to syndicate the article to any Russian publications, but told GQ he would refuse the request.

  Personal life
  His brother is Jon Lee Anderson, an author and journalist, and they have co-authored two books.[61] Anderson is married to American film and television director Nanette Burstein. They currently live in Brooklyn, New York with their daughter.

  Awards and recognition
  2013 National Book Critics Circle Award (Biography) shortlist for Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East[62][63]
  2025 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction for King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation[14]
  Bibliography
  Non-fiction
  Inside the League: The Shocking Exposé of How Terrorists, Nazis, and Latin American Death Squads have Infiltrated the World Anti-Communist League. With Jon Lee Anderson. Dodd Mead, New York 1986, ISBN 0-396-08517-2.
  War Zones: Voices from the World's Killing Grounds. With Jon Lee Anderson. Dodd Mead, New York 1988, ISBN 0-396-08915-1.
  The 4 O'Clock Murders: The True Story of a Mormon Family's Vengeance. Doubleday, New York 1992, ISBN 0-385-41904-X.
  The Man who Tried to Save the World: The Dangerous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Fred Cuny. Doubleday, New York 1999, ISBN 0-385-48665-0.
  Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East. Doubleday, New York 2013, ISBN 978-0-385-53292-1.
  Fractured Lands: How the Arab World Came Apart. Signal (McClelland & Stewart, Penguin Random House Canada), 2017, ISBN 978-0-7710-0773-6.
  The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War – A Tragedy in Three Acts. Knopf Doubleday, New York 2020, ISBN 978-0-385-54046-9.
  King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation. Doubleday, New York 2025, ISBN 978-0-385-54807-6.
  Fiction
  Triage. Scribner, New York 1999, ISBN 0-684-85653-0.
  Moonlight Hotel. Doubleday, New York 2006, ISBN 0-385-51556-1.

• From Publisher -

  Scott Anderson is a veteran war correspondent who has reported from Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, Northern Ireland, Chechnya, Sudan, Bosnia, El Salvador and many other strife-torn countries. A contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, his work has also appeared in Vanity Fair, Esquire, Harper’s and Outside. He is the author of two novels and six works of nonfiction, including Lawrence in Arabia, an international bestseller, and most recently King of Kings, the story of the 1978-79 Iranian Revolution, and winner of the 2025 Kirkus Prize for nonfiction.

• The New Yorker - https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/08/11/king-of-kings-the-iranian-revolution-scott-anderson-book-review

  The Iranian Revolution Almost Didn’t Happen
  From a dying adviser to a clumsy editorial, the Revolution was a cascade of accidents and oversights.
  By Daniel Immerwahr
  August 4, 2025
  A political leader salutes a crowd.
  In the summer of 1979, Ruhollah Khomeini saluted fellow-revolutionaries at a rally in Qom. His own image looms above him, while a portrait of his dead son, Mostafa, overlooks the crowd.Photograph by Abbas / Magnum

  Strange to think, but there was a time when the United States’ most steadfast ally in the Middle East was Iran. In 1953, the C.I.A. had backed a coup that ousted Mohammad Mossadegh, the popular Prime Minister, and restored power to the monarchy of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah. For a quarter of a century thereafter, Washington watched in satisfaction as the Shah kept the peace while a U.S.-dominated consortium sold off Iran’s oil.

  There was rather a lot of oil, making the Shah one of the world’s wealthiest men. For his forty-eighth birthday, in 1967, he staged a glitzy coronation for himself. Standing before a golden throne, he steadied onto his head a crown rimed with 3,380 diamonds. His third wife, Empress Farah, processed in a bejewelled, mink-edged Christian Dior cloak that took eight attendants to carry. After the ceremony, the royal couple waved stiffly to the crowds from a horse-drawn gilded carriage that had been crafted in Vienna by one of Europe’s last remaining coach-makers. Planes dropped 17,532 roses, one for each glorious day of the Shah’s glorious life.

  Iran’s display of floral ballistics hinted at another beneficiary of its oil revenues: the military. In 1972, President Richard Nixon gave the Shah carte blanche to buy any arms he desired short of nuclear bombs. The Shah amassed the world’s fifth-largest military, his toy chest brimming with supersonic jets, laser-guided bombs, and helicopter gunships. Reportedly, he relaxed by reading arms catalogues.

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  A fair assessment would have conceded that not all Iranians shared the Shah’s purring contentment. Liberals sought rights, Communists sought revolution, and clerics wanted a restoration of their power. One ayatollah in particular, Ruhollah Khomeini, needled the Shah incessantly. In 1967, he condemned the coronation. In 1971, when the Shah staged an even more expensive celebration to honor twenty-five hundred years of monarchy in Iran, Khomeini declared that to attend the “abominable festival” would be “to participate in the murder of the oppressed people of Iran.”

  This was more annoying than intimidating, though. Khomeini, by then an old man, inveighed against the Shah from Najaf, Iraq, because he hadn’t been allowed in Iran since 1964. Iran’s secret police force, SAVAK, known for its use of torture, had effectively cleared the country of the most vocal dissidents. By the seventies, opposition leaders were generally behind bars or in exile, with few replacements stepping forth.

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  If anything, the Shah’s grip appeared to be strengthening. In 1975, he abolished Iran’s two permitted political parties and established a single one in their place, which every adult was required to join. All public buildings and many homes displayed the Shah’s portrait. You couldn’t throw a stone without hitting one, the joke went—though you’d be arrested if you did.

  At a New Year’s Eve celebration in Tehran in 1977, President Jimmy Carter made a toast. “There is no other head of state with whom I feel on friendlier terms,” Carter said. In a troublesome region, Iran was an “island of stability.”

  Predictably, Khomeini fulminated about Carter’s visit. Iran’s leading afternoon newspaper, Etalaat, struck back with an accusatory editorial, prepared by the government and likely at the Shah’s behest. Khomeini was simultaneously the agent of Communists and of reactionaries, the editorial charged. He had ties to India, and possibly to British imperialists. Or perhaps, the paper insinuated, he was a sensitive soul who’d written love poetry in his youth. (Perhaps he was. After Khomeini’s death, his followers were dumbfounded by the publication of “The Wine of Love,” a collection of his mystical poems. “Release me from these countless pains,” one goes, “from a heart cut in pieces and a breast pierced like a kebab.”)

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  The Shah had attacked from a position of apparent strength. “My power, both under law and due to the special spiritual link that I have with my people, is at its highest peak,” he boasted in the month that the editorial was published. The peak, and also the precipice. After the editorial appeared, on January 7, 1978, seminarians incensed by the slander of Khomeini staged large demonstrations in Qom. The police opened fire, killing some. It didn’t seem like a huge deal. Yet somehow the unrest continued, increased, and in thirteen months brought the Shah’s regime crashing down. A Khomeini-led Islamic state rose in its stead.

  In a timely new book, “King of Kings” (Doubleday), the reporter Scott Anderson discusses Etalaat’s editorial in a chapter titled “The Butterfly Effect.” Like the fabled butterfly wing flap that causes a hurricane, it split the heavens and loosed a revolutionary deluge that transformed the Middle East. If “events had played out just a little differently,” Anderson asks, might the Iranian Revolution have never happened?

  Tiny causes with huge effects have long been intriguing. The seventeenth-century mathematician Blaise Pascal offered the example of Cleopatra’s nose. Had it been a different size, the Roman general Mark Antony might not have loved Cleopatra, sided with her, lost the Battle of Actium, and inadvertently caused Rome’s transformation from republic to empire. (Interestingly, in Pascal’s “unattractive Cleopatra” scenario, her nose was too small, Pascal apparently having been something of a nose man.) Change Cleopatra’s face and you change the face of history.

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  What-if scenarios seize the imagination when immense power is held by a single person. In the early nineteenth century, no figure held so much as Napoleon Bonaparte. After his defeat, his adopted son Louis-Napoleon Geoffroy wrote a book imagining a world in which Napoleon’s Russian invasion hadn’t failed. Napoleon would have taken Asia, Africa, and the Americas, Geoffroy hypothesized, uniting the world under one ruler. Geoffroy’s book was the “first recognizable full-length, speculative, alternative history,” the historian Richard J. Evans observes. It started a long fascination with counterfactuals: what if Adolf Hitler hadn’t been born, J.F.K. hadn’t been killed, or, as “Saturday Night Live” once asked, Napoleon had had a B-52?

  Such thought experiments delight in the notion that certain individuals can dramatically reroute history. The less fun notion is that they can’t, and that major events have major causes. The modern discipline of history cut its teeth on the Napoleon question. On the one hand, he represented a modernization process that clearly transcended any single person. On the other, the fate of that process seemed to hang on Napoleon, a changeable man who was nearly assassinated several times.

  Hegel sought to square this circle. History progresses according to a grand logic, he proposed, but “world-historical individuals” channel that logic as the agents of destiny. In 1806, when Hegel was living in Jena and putting the final touches on his masterwork, “The Phenomenology of Spirit,” Napoleon arrived with his troops. “I saw the Emperor—this world-soul,” Hegel breathlessly wrote. It was a “wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.” The next day, Napoleon decimated the Prussian military, ending any hope of restoring the Holy Roman Empire. Although Napoleon’s troops ransacked Hegel’s home and burned his neighbors’ houses, Hegel couldn’t help but admire the spirit of history and his horse.

  A ceremony.
  In 1971, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, right, staged an expensive celebration to honor twenty-five hundred years of monarchy in Iran. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini condemned the “abominable festival,” saying that to attend would be “to participate in the murder of the oppressed people of Iran.”Photograph by Jack Garofalo / Getty
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  In “War and Peace” (1869), Leo Tolstoy dismissed the great-man theory of the Napoleonic Wars. He argued in an epilogue that to ascribe historical agency to figures like Napoleon was akin to seeing a herd of cattle and concluding that the cow in front must be in charge. Social forces, not men on horseback, decide the fate of nations, Tolstoy felt. The conservative writer Niall Ferguson credits his decision to become a historian to reading Tolstoy’s epilogue. “I remember thinking that can’t be right,” he has said. “There is and must be a role for individual agency, for Napoleon, for Hitler.”

  Ferguson, who has published a collection of counterfactual histories, is an outlier among academics. Perhaps their leftward leanings lead them, like Tolstoy, to downplay the ability of individuals to alter their own fates. (The Marxist historian E. P. Thompson dismissed what-if speculations as “Geschichtenscheissenschlopff, unhistorical shit.”) Either way, the scholarly tendency has been to devalue choice and chance as historical factors. Wars and revolutions might feel chaotic, but they happen for reasons rooted in economics, ideology, geography, and climate. The doings of generals, in this view, are froth on the waves.

  Yet, even for those skilled at finding deeper causes behind events, Iran is a hard case. Any sense that history trends in a general direction—toward freedom, perhaps, or toward rights, markets, secularism, or science—is confounded by a large, prosperous country becoming a hard-line semi-theocracy. The philosopher Michel Foucault relished the Iranian Revolution’s perversity: it was “perhaps the greatest ever insurrection against global systems, the most insane and the most modern form of revolt.”

  But why Iran? In Russia, the Bolshevik Revolution had been preceded by two smaller revolutions. Mao Zedong, before his own revolution prevailed, described China as dry tinder awaiting a spark. Few observers saw Iran that way. The factors that in hindsight might explain the country’s abrupt upheaval—its swift economic growth followed by a downturn, its rapid urbanization, its authoritarianism, its corruption—were fairly normal. Even as a large Muslim autocracy in the Middle East weathering the boom and bust of the oil market, Iran wasn’t unique. Why did a revolution occur there but not in Iraq or Saudi Arabia?

  “The closer one examines it,” Anderson writes, “the more mysterious and implausible it all seems.” One of the best books on the topic, “The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran” (2004), by the sociologist Charles Kurzman, considers various explanations but rejects them all in favor of an “anti-explanation,” dwelling on the Revolution’s anomalousness. Gary Sick, who oversaw Iranian affairs at the National Security Council under Carter, sees it similarly. “I’ve studied this thing for the past forty years,” he told Anderson, “and it still doesn’t fully make sense to me.” Could one of the most consequential events of the twentieth century have simply been an accident?

  One reason to think so, Anderson argues, is the “remarkably small number of principal actors involved”: the Shah, Ruhollah Khomeini, and Jimmy Carter. All had considerable blind spots, and none took counsel from more than a few advisers. Their actions were idiosyncratic, often improvised.

  Carter was the least informed. As is typical for U.S. Presidents, he faced a situation over which he held great power but to which he gave little attention. Carter took five months to select an Ambassador to Iran and another two to get him confirmed. For a surprisingly long time, Carter’s Iran policy functioned on autopilot, which meant selling weapons and declining to ask questions. It wasn’t until November, 1978, the eleventh month of the uprisings, that Carter began holding high-level meetings on Iran.

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  Carter had campaigned on human rights, which he described as “the soul of our foreign policy.” We now know that he didn’t want to pressure Iran about rights, but the Shah, engaging in preëmptive compliance, loosened political restrictions anyway. The Shah’s opponents took Carter’s speeches as reassurance that they’d be protected. As a leading reformer, the engineering professor Mehdi Bazargan, explained, “All the built-up pressure exploded.” For a pre-revolutionary season in 1977, liberals signed letters and staged poetry readings that criticized the government in increasingly frank terms.

  In late 1977, when it was clear that Carter wouldn’t press the issue of human rights, the Shah reversed course and cracked down again. Still, there had been a noticeable wobble in his legitimacy. Without realizing, Carter might have kicked a rock that, months later, caused an avalanche.

  People holding up portraits.
  By the time Iran’s revolution was over, it had drawn in two million people, a greater proportion of the population than any previous twentieth-century revolution saw.Photograph by Michel Setboun / Getty
  The Shah could have shored things up. Anderson notes that his closest confidant, Asadollah Alam, had a firm grasp on popular grievances and the need to address them. But Alam was dying of cancer and resigned before the unrest began. That left the Shah to rely for advice on his wife, Farah, whose knowledge of the situation wasn’t extensive. In May, 1978, long after the first unrest in Qom, Farah seemed not to have even heard of the ayatollah who was fomenting rebellion from Iraq. “For heaven’s sake,” she reportedly asked, “who is this Khomeini?”

  Getting advice was one problem— taking it another. Unbeknownst to nearly everyone, the Shah also had cancer. (He would die in 1980.) This could explain why he seemed chronically overwhelmed, unsure whether to suppress dissent or to allow it. His haphazard directives combined the worst of both options: soldiers often let demonstrators march but occasionally shot up crowds, supplying fresh outrages that fuelled more protest.

  Onlookers urged firmness. “Shoot the first man in front,” the former governor of California, Ronald Reagan, advised. “The rest will fall into line.” In a wonderfully rich account of the Pahlavi regime’s collapse, “The Fall of Heaven” (2016), Andrew Scott Cooper describes a telephone call that Iraq’s President, Saddam Hussein, placed to the Shah in August, 1978. “This mullah, Khomeini, is causing problems for you, and for me, and for all of us,” Saddam reportedly said. Would it be O.K. to kill him? Saddam stayed on the line while the Shah consulted the Prime Minister and the SAVAK director, who lobbed the decision back to him. The Shah told Saddam to stand down.

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  Anderson’s third principal, Khomeini, was an unlikely leader. He was a scholar of Islamic law in his late seventies who hadn’t set foot in Iran for nearly fifteen years. His relevance had been waning until October, 1977, when his son Mostafa suddenly died. The causes were likely natural, Anderson suggests, but Iranians blamed SAVAK. Mostafa’s death returned the exiled ayatollah to the public eye; Khomeini called it “God’s hidden providence.”

  One might see Khomeini as a Hegelian agent of destiny through whom historical forces acted. If so, though, he wasn’t a witting one. Khomeini had sharp instincts, but his comprehension of politics was warped by paranoid fantasies about Jews, Baha’is, Freemasons, and the “satanic superpowers.” His fellow opposition leader, the liberal Mehdi Bazargan, expressed astonishment at Khomeini’s “heedlessness of the obvious problems of politics and administration.” Khomeini had launched his anti-Shah campaign “without any plan,” Bazargan observed. “I even wonder if he had any inkling that he was starting a revolution.”

  Rebellion crescendoed throughout 1978, prompting the Shah to institute martial law in twelve cities on September 8th. That day, now known as Black Friday, soldiers fired on a large demonstration, killing two or three hundred people. Perhaps, had things gone differently, this could have been avoided—if Carter’s Iran policy had been more considered, if the Shah and his most perceptive adviser hadn’t both been dying of cancer, if a son’s death hadn’t made Khomeini a resistance icon, if Saddam had killed Khomeini in August. But by autumn Iran was slipping from the Shah’s grasp. “For fifteen years everything I picked up turned to gold,” he reflected. “Now every time I pick up gold it turns to shit.”

  The Shah, looking exhausted, gave a perplexing speech on television on November 6th. “I cannot but approve of your revolution,” he said. “In these moments of rising against foreign domination, tyranny, and corruption, I stand by your side.” It was an awkward attempt to co-opt the uprising, and it failed pitifully. Afterward, the U.S. Ambassador to Iran finally broached the topic of the Shah’s potential downfall in a long telegram titled “Thinking the Unthinkable.”

  “King of Kings” is a lively tale of palace intrigue. Using almost exclusively English-language sources plus interviews (including with Empress Farah, who is still living), Anderson reconstructs the bumblings that upended Iran. But a revolution, unlike a coup, isn’t the work of individuals alone. It requires mass support. And, by the time it was over, Iran’s had drawn in two million people, a greater proportion of the population than any twentieth-century revolution theretofore.

  It was a shock to see so many Iranians who had previously minded their own business—merchants, professionals, clerics, students, housewives—clash violently with police. The economist Timur Kuran explains this change as the consequence of “preference falsification.” Years of SAVAK surveillance had taught Iranians to conceal their grievances. Yet when a minor provocation—the publication of an editorial—shook things up, the discontent poured out. The more that people were exposed to their compatriots’ views, the more they shared their own, touching off a chain reaction of disclosure. Khomeini can be seen here as a catalyst. His exile, rather than marginalizing him, gave him the rare platform from which to speak forthrightly.

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  Two men raising glasses toward each other.
  At a New Year’s Eve celebration in Tehran in 1977, President Jimmy Carter, pictured here with the Shah, made a toast. “There is no other head of state with whom I feel on friendlier terms,” Carter said.Photograph from HUM Images / Getty
  Preference falsification explains how a revolution could be both inevitable and unforeseeable. Subterranean pressures mount, unnoticed, until they erupt. If it hadn’t been Etalaat’s editorial, some other jostle would have released that stored political energy. The fact that the Revolution was unexpected—even by the revolutionaries themselves—doesn’t mean it was contingent.

  Yet Kuran’s model of revolution as revelation presumes that people have stable preferences to reveal. Do they? Revolutions are unsettling affairs, Kurzman, the sociologist, notes. People don’t know how to act, so they take cues from their neighbors or react to their opponents. With everyone predicating their behavior on everyone else’s, norms shift rapidly, and complicated feedback effects ensue. Rebels aren’t surprised only by one another’s revealed desires, Kurzman maintains; they’re surprised by their own.

  In “The Loneliest Revolution” (2023), the Iranian sociologist Ali Mirsepassi recounts, during his student days, standing nervously with his friend Hamid as a chanting crowd approached. Even being near a protest could mean prison. “I looked to Hamid and the rest of our group, our eyes scanning the others’ for an answer to what to do: run or join ranks,” he writes. Hamid suddenly shouted, “Free all political prisoners!,” and everyone followed. That was Mirsepassi’s first protest. By late 1978, he recalled, “the revolutionary crowd had attained a single will or soul.”

  The crowd’s will mattered because the Revolution had no overarching organization. Rebellion spread more through graffiti, chants, and songs than through top-down orders. Wild rumors swirled about Baha’is poisoning the water, Israeli troops entering the country in disguise, and the Shah personally gunning down protesters from his helicopter. Khomeini tried to shape these unpredictable fluid dynamics, but his directives were often ignored. He was less a commander than an icon, an Islamic Che Guevara.

  Khomeini sought to replace the monarchy with a religious state ruled by an Islamic jurist. He knew to soft-pedal that aim in interviews, though, since relatively few rebels initially shared it. (Even his fellow-ayatollahs didn’t all want a theocracy.) The streets belonged as much to students, feminists, merchants, liberals, and industrial workers as to clerics. One could find, among the opposition, hippies and Jews.

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  Khomeini’s vagueness was central to his leadership. Many who would have found his spelled-out vision repellent nevertheless accepted him as a figurehead. Probably they didn’t imagine an elderly theologian actually seizing the state. Either way, the Revolution found Communists and liberals following fundamentalists. “It seemed in no way a contradiction for me—an educated, professional woman—to back an opposition that cloaked its fight against real-life grievances under the mantle of religion,” the judge (and later the Nobel-winning democracy advocate) Shirin Ebadi recalled. “Who did I have more in common with, in the end: an opposition led by mullahs who spoke in the tones familiar to ordinary Iranians or the gilded court of the shah, whose officials cavorted with American starlets at parties soaked in expensive French champagne?”

  Could those discordant elements cohere? In late 1978, Ali Mirsepassi spoke in favor of prolonging a university strike. Khomeini opposed this, Mirsepassi acknowledged, but who put Khomeini in charge? Mirsepassi won over his cheering audience, though he worried that he’d got “carried away” and been “excessively harsh” regarding the ayatollah. While leaving the event, he was stabbed twenty-one times. If there was contingency here, it was less the caprice of leaders than the volatility of crowds.

  By 1979, as those crowds clamored for his death, the Shah prepared to flee. “Don’t pack too much,” he advised his valet. “It is just for a short period of time.” He appointed a new Prime Minister, placed him in charge, and took off for Egypt on January 16, 1979.

  Khomeini returned from exile and announced a provisional government “based on the Sharia,” though with the liberal Mehdi Bazargan as Prime Minister. “Through the guardianship that I have from the holy lawgiver I hereby pronounce Bazargan as the Ruler,” Khomeini explained. “Since I have appointed him, he must be obeyed.”

  A crowd. One person holds a portrait of a man.
  Ayatollah Khomeini, appearing here on an image held aloft by protesters, was a scholar of Islamic law in his late seventies who hadn’t set foot in Iran for nearly fifteen years. Somehow, he became the symbol of an unlikely revolution.Photograph from Bettmann / Getty
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  If Khomeini’s announced government had the support of God, Iran’s still intact government had the world’s fifth-largest military. But the contagion of rebellion was spreading there, too. Desertions became so rampant that officers hesitated to have soldiers police crowds for fear that the soldiers would join the protesters. The Army fought for a few days, then abruptly gave up. Millions of Iranians, to their own shock, had caused the region’s most powerful regime to simply melt away. “Do you think we actually planned to have a revolution?” one of Khomeini’s confidants asked. “We were just as surprised as anyone.”

  “Death to the Shah” had been the Revolution’s call, yet that said nothing about what would come next. The post-Shah state was a mishmash of neckties and turbans, with Bazargan as Prime Minister and Khomeini hovering somewhere above. “You often don’t even know who’s directing traffic,” Bazargan complained.

  Khomeini exploited this uncertainty. He moved like “a bulldozer crushing rocks, roots, and stones in his path,” Bazargan felt. A military organization created by Khomeini, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and cleric-controlled “committees” patrolled the streets, making arrests, confiscating property, and executing suspected enemies of the Revolution. In this feverish climate, Khomeini acquired a momentum that his non-clerical comrades hadn’t foreseen and couldn’t match.

  In October, 1979, Jimmy Carter reluctantly allowed the ailing Shah to enter the United States for medical care. A week later, Bazargan was photographed shaking hands with Carter’s national-security adviser at an event they were both attending in Algeria. These events suggested to some a Shah-Carter-Bazargan axis of imperialism. Militants stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took hostages. Khomeini initially disapproved and directed Iran’s foreign minister, Ebrahim Yazdi, to “go and kick them out.” But—in another of Anderson’s consequential contingencies—Yazdi, rather than communicating that command to Tehran, travelled there himself. By the time he arrived, Khomeini had changed his mind and publicly embraced the hostage-takers. Unable to control the situation, Bazargan resigned. Crowds took up a new chant: “Death to Bazargan.”

  And death to liberal Iran. A new constitution placed the country under the supreme leadership of an Islamic legal scholar, and Article 107 stipulated that this be Khomeini. Women were purged from positions of power and forced to wear hijabs. Universities were closed, for years. Khomeini, meeting with state-radio employees, insisted that there was “no difference between music and opium” and demanded that they “eliminate music completely”—his opposition drove most music underground.

  Firmly in control, Khomeini turned on his former allies, particularly those on the left. They weren’t a “real left,” he maintained, but an “artificial” one created by Washington “to sabotage and destroy us.” In one execution spree, in 1988, Khomeini’s government put to death thousands of political prisoners—Human Rights Watch reports “between 2,800 and 5,000,” which appears to far exceed the number of political prisoners that were killed in the nearly forty years that the Shah was on the throne. The prisons and torture chambers filled with Communists, liberals, feminists, gays, Baha’is, and monarchists.

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  One might imagine such cruelties destabilizing the Islamic Republic. They have not done so. Since 1979, Iran has been ruled continuously by just two men: Ruhollah Khomeini and, after his death, in 1989, his former disciple Ali Khamenei. Today, Khamenei ranks among the world’s oldest and longest-serving heads of state. He’s been Supreme Leader for every one of Taylor Swift’s eras, indeed for her entire life.

  There was talk that the recent attacks by Israel and the United States might end Khamenei’s thirty-six-year reign. “All it takes now is a nationwide uprising to put an end to this nightmare,” the Shah’s son, Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, thirstily suggested. He should know. But Tehran has faced war before without toppling. An eight-year conflict with Iraq in the eighties killed hundreds of thousands yet only strengthened Khomeini’s position. As Israel has seen in Gaza, it’s hard to persuade people to change their government by bombing them.

  The larger instability today seems to be in the United States, not Iran. Norms here are shifting wildly, with the chaos centering on a single figure, our Napoleon on a golf cart. The usual questions arise: Is Donald Trump an accident or an inevitability? An erratic blunderer or the spray-tanned spirit of history? It may not ultimately matter. As Anderson’s book suggests, an event that is improbable can still be irreversible. A switch is thrown, the train hurtles down an alternate track, and it goes that way for a very long time. ♦

  Published in the print edition of the August 11, 2025, issue, with the headline “Death to the Shah.”

• Fresh Air - https://www.npr.org/2025/08/04/nx-s1-5489730/from-allies-to-enemies-how-the-1979-revolution-transformed-u-s-iranian-relations

  From allies to enemies: How the 1979 revolution transformed U.S.-Iranian relations
  August 4, 20259:47 AM ET
  Heard on Fresh Air
  By

  Dave Davies

  36-Minute Listen
  Transcript
  In his new book, King of Kings, Scott Anderson chronicles the upheaval that deposed Iran's reigning monarch — and the blunders by American policymakers that played a key role in the outcome.

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  DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

  This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies. For decades, Iran has been a major preoccupation of U.S. policymakers for its nuclear program, its threats to Israel and its backing of armed extremist groups in the Middle East. But go back a half a century, and Iran was a very different place. Our guest today, journalist Scott Anderson, has taken a close look at the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the violent upheaval that transformed the country from one of America's closest allies into the Islamic republic that regards the United States as the Great Satan. Before that, the country was governed by the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a monarch who ruled with political repression while seeking to modernize his nation's economy and social relations.

  In a new book, Anderson writes that the Iranian Revolution had far-reaching effects, contributing to the rise of Islamic extremism. He says it marked the modern world's first successful religious counter revolution against the forces of secularism and was in some ways as significant as the American, French and Russian revolutions. His gripping account of the conflict suggests that the outcome was far from inevitable and that many factors, including the shah's personal failings and the inattention and poor decisions of American policymakers, contributed to the victory of Ayatollah Khomeini.

  DAVIES: Scott Anderson is a veteran war correspondent who has reported from Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, Northern Ireland, Chechnya, Sudan, Bosnia and other countries. He's the author of seven previous books. His latest is "King Of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story Of Hubris, Delusion And Catastrophic Miscalculation." I spoke to Scott Anderson last week.

  Well, Scott Anderson, welcome back to FRESH AIR

  SCOTT ANDERSON: Thank you, Dave. It's good to be back.

  DAVIES: I have to congratulate you on this book. It really is just a terrific gripping read. There is so much fascinating detail here. I just want to let the audience know there's more than we can get to, but there's plenty there. You know a lot about the Middle East. I mean, you traveled through it with your dad, who was - worked for the State...

  ANDERSON: Yes.

  DAVIES: ...Department when you were a kid. And you opened this book with a scene from Washington, D.C., in late 1977, when the Shah of Iran, on the throne for decades, came to America's capital for his first visit with the new president, Jimmy Carter. You happened to be there because you were a low-level treasury department, and you witnessed some events outside the White House. You want to just share this little scene with us?

  ANDERSON: Sure. Yeah. So it was mid-November 1977, the shah came on a state visit, and some 4,000 anti-shah demonstrators, mostly Iranian students studying in the United States, arrived in Washington to protest his visit. And meanwhile, the Iranian government had shipped in pro-shah demonstrators to kind of face off with them. And so when the shah arrived and he had just reached the White House, all of a sudden, there was a pitch battle on the Ellipse, the Ellipse being this great lawn just below the White House. And I happened to be there. I was kind of wandering around. I was stationed at the treasury headquarters, which is right next door to the White House. And I had just wandered over, and I was kind of in no man's land between these two groups - the anti-shah and the pro-shah demonstrators. And all of a sudden, the two sides broke through the snow fencing that was keeping them back and charged each other.

  And I happened to be at ground zero. I got knocked to the ground. Well, a lot of people got knocked to the ground. It turned out to be the most violent day of civil unrest in Washington you'd seen in almost a decade. And the thing about this day was, unfortunately, for the shah, it was being shown on live TV back in Iran. And the way a lot of people interpreted this event - and there was tear gas, the shah and President Carter were tear gassed on the South Lawn. A lot of Iranians saw this as a move by the Americans to distance themselves from the shah because why else would they let the shah be humiliated in the American capital?

  DAVIES: Right. In their country, if something like that happened, surely the shah would have organized it. So they assumed Jimmy Carter was sending a message here.

  ANDERSON: That's right.

  DAVIES: In fact, he was quite humiliated to have this tear gas flowing into his event.

  ANDERSON: Yeah, absolutely.

  DAVIES: So, running the country in Iran in the 1970s was the shah, who had been in power since 1941, installed by the British and the Soviets, who were active then. This was during World War II. Give us a sense, you know, by the 1970s, of what his style was like, how he ruled the country, kind of what powers he exercised, and what the country's economy and social norms were.

  ANDERSON: So he spent a long time early in his reign from '41 to probably the mid '60s. First of all, really trying to cozy up to the Americans. He saw the Americans, the superpower that would protect him from the encroachment of the Soviet Union on his northern border, and he was always afraid of communists within Iran. He tried to do something very difficult, which was to be socially and economically progressive. He gave women the right to vote. He went on this very ambitious land reform program. But at the same time, became more and more politically in control of the entire country. There was a parliament. It was a rubber stamp. It was really the shah and his generals who ran the country.

  But I think it's important to note that the shah's Iran was never as repressive or as brutal as, say, Saddam Hussein's Iraq or Assad father-and-son Syria. He tended to buy people off. So there was - within Iran, there was a political opposition. Occasionally, some would be arrested, occasionally, some would be exiled. There was - certainly the clerics didn't like him because they saw him secularizing the society. But a lot of them were on sinecures from the state also. So it was kind of a regime where if you had a certain amount of power, a certain amount of clout, you were more likely to be bought off than thrown in prison.

  DAVIES: Right. And, of course, there was a lot of oil money. I guess, starting in the '60s and '70s, they nationalized the oil production. So that had a lot of effects - major changes, you know, dramatic contrasts, I guess, in wealth and poverty.

  ANDERSON: Oh, yes, absolutely. I was in - as you mentioned, I was traveling with my father through Iran in 1974. And what I remember from being in Tehran and in the countryside, in Tehran, it was a, you know, modern, smoggy city, you saw women in miniskirts, clogged with traffic, and literally 10 miles outside of Tehran, people were living in mud huts and using cow - drying cow dung to use as fuel. So there was a tremendous disparity between the haves and have-nots. And what would also happen with this huge influx of money in the early '70s, oil money, you had this huge movement of poor from the countryside moving into the city, mostly young men, largely uneducated. And if they could find work, they were working at these, you know, really menial jobs. But more significantly, they came from very religious backgrounds, and they were - I think a lot of them were just kind of stunned at what they saw as the cosmopolitan nature of Tehran and other Iranian cities.

  DAVIES: You write about a guy, a minor character in the book, who was a religious missionary from the United States, George Braswell, but he revealed something really meaningful about the society.

  ANDERSON: Yes. George Braswell is fascinating. He went to Iran with his family - wife and three kids - in 1968 as an evangelist. And he was the first Southern Baptist evangelist to go back into Iran after about 50 or 60 years. He quickly realized that the government was not going to let him proslytize, and he was really kind of at a loss of what to do until he met the dean of the school of religion at Tehran University. And the dean hired him on to teach comparative religion at the University of Tehran. Everybody else on the faculty of religion were Muslim. George was the only Christian, but he's a very friendly guy, very affable, very curious about Iranian society. So people really opened up to him.

  And in particular, after he'd been there for a while, one of his graduate students said, you know, would you like to see a special kind of service? And George didn't know what that meant, but he said, well, sure, yeah. You know, I'm fascinated by Islam. So the graduate student took him in the middle of the night to this hut out in the southern suburbs. And it was all these, you know, younger clerics, mullahs, gathered around a tape cassette player. And they played this tape where the person on the tape was saying, we have to start organizing for the revolution. And that voice was Ayatollah Khomeini from - sending the tape in from exile in Iraq.

  George Braswell had never heard of Khomeini before. This was in 1968, and it would be another about seven years before he would even be mentioned in any State Department cables from Tehran, you know, back to the States. He was utterly invisible to the Americans. Braswell just assumed that the CIA, which had a very large station in Tehran - that they knew all about Khomeini - and certainly people at the State Department. He tried to meet with people at the State Department, and they just ignored him.

  DAVIES: Right. So there was this churning force among the poor of Iran that a lot of them - that a lot of people just didn't know about, but it was you know, led by Khomeini. The shah faced a critical confrontation in 1963 with Khomeini, which was an important moment. Tell us about this.

  ANDERSON: Yeah. This - so in 1963, the shah initiated what he called his White Revolution, and it was a total of 19 reforms in his mind. And it was to sort of propel Iran into the 20th century. It was a real grab bag of things - everything from a reforestation to collectivization to giving landless peasants, of which - a majority of Iran's rural population did not own their land, to break up the big landholdings in Iran and also to give women the right to vote, to empower women. And this immediately caused a backlash among the conservative clergy in Iran, especially led by one of the most vehemently arch conservative, Ayatollah Khomeini.

  The shah made the mistake of arresting Khomeini and that sparked riots throughout Iran. The shah's prime minister then decided to declare martial law. There was shooting in the streets of a number of Iranian cities. Probably about 150 people were killed. They arrested - they, again, grabbed Khomeini. And Khomeini then was quiet for a little while, and he started up again with his agitation. And so the second time, the shah sent him into exile. He first went to Turkey and then ended up in Iraq in the Shiite holy city of Najaf in southern Iraq.

  DAVIES: Right. So for the next decade, a couple of decades, Khomeini was active but outside the country, sending cassette tapes of his sermons and still a force.

  ANDERSON: That's right. And I think one of the things I understand about Khomeini's power over - once the revolution started, you know, again, a lot of people had never heard of Khomeini within Iran, when the revolution started in '78. He'd been airbrushed out of history by the shah's regime. But once the revolution got started in earnest, he became this sort of symbol of incorruptibility. He was a man who could not be bought. Well, he was in exile. So there's no way to buy him anyway. And so even though there was a lot of other ayatollahs, who were in opposition to the shah, none of them had quite the moral authority that Khomeini did because, you know, they - over the years, a lot of them had been on stipends from the regime. So Khomeini had this image of the pure, uncorrupted religious leader. And that, I think, it was really the source of a lot of his power.

  DAVIES: We need to take a break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Scott Anderson. He's a veteran journalist. His new book is "King Of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story Of Hubris, Delusion And Catastrophic Miscalculation." We'll continue our conversation after this short break. This is FRESH AIR.

  (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

  DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with veteran journalist and author Scott Anderson. He has a new book about the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which ushered in the Islamic Republic. The book is called "King Of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story Of Hubris, Delusion And Catastrophic Miscalculation."

  So you know, back in the '70s, I mean, Iran was a critical ally for the United States. They had provided him with great weaponry. And thus, it had a fairly large staff in its embassy in Tehran, as well as a significant CIA station. But you write that these - both the State Department and the intelligence community's knowledge of the country was shockingly shallow. How was this evident in your research?

  ANDERSON: Oh, I'll tell a great story about that. When the first major riots happened, the anti-shah riots happened, and it was in February of 1978, and it was in a provincial city called Tabriz in northwestern Iran. And there was an American consul there, a man named Mike Metrinko. This was - they gutted the city center. There was a path of destruction, about 8 miles long and about 5 miles wide. They just completely gutted the new kind of commercial center of Tabriz, which is a major city.

  This was such big news, by far, the biggest you know, civil disturbance in decades that even if the regime had tried to downplay it, it was impossible. So it was the Tabriz riots in which probably over a hundred people were killed. They were the headlines on every Iranian newspaper for days. It was, of course, the lead story on national news, the television news.

  And so Metrinko was - had been the only American there. He reported back what was happening to the embassy, and about four or five days after the riots, he hears that a CIA officer is coming up to - and wants to meet with him. He's coming up to Tabriz. And Metrinko's was, wow, great, finally. You know, the CIA has done such a horrible job, you know, reporting on this country. But, you know, now, finally, somebody is coming to take a look on the ground of what's really happening. So the CIA officer arrives, Metrinko picks him up at the airport and they start driving into the city center. And all of a sudden, the CIA officer kind of sits up and looks out at the destruction and goes, what the hell happened here? He was coming to see Metrinko on a completely different matter.

  So even though the riots were - he was stationed at the - he was in the CIA station in Tehran. Even though it was the lead story on national news for four or five days, he hadn't even heard of it. You know, and that to me just personifies what the CIA was doing there. They were under - what their whole focus was, the CIA, in Iran was spying on the Soviet Union, southern Soviet Union. So they had listening posts along the Iranian border. They never were doing any sort of domestic intelligence gathering.

  Even more remarkably, anything they were getting from domestically was handed to them by the shah's secret police, SAVAK. And, you know, SAVAK said everything's going great, you know (laughter)? So there was no intelligence gathering. And this was, as you said, this was one of the United States' most important allies anywhere in the world, and nobody was paying any attention to what was happening internally.

  DAVIES: Yeah, it's really remarkable how this mandated group think - that this is our ally and everything's great, and he's got it under control - reigned. This guy that you mentioned, Michael Metrinko, is a fascinating character. And there are two other cases in the book where you point out that he gave reports about stuff that should have been very troubling signs of the shah's weakness. In one case, a lot of people that he knew were, like, cashing in their life savings and leaving the country because things were bad. In another case, there was kind of a mutiny happening among some air force pilots.

  ANDERSON: Right.

  DAVIES: And when he sends this, and it in some cases actually gets passed along to the State Department headquarters, what's the reaction of his superiors?

  ANDERSON: The reaction of his superiors is not only to ignore it but to reprimand him for it, that, you know, he's seeing problems where problems don't exist. He's the hysteric out in the provinces and just roundly ignored. Significantly, Metrinko was one of the only people at the embassy who actually spoke Farsi, who could understand what was happening locally. Virtually everybody else did not speak Farsi. And he had a very wide, you know, social circle, a very gregarious guy.

  And so he saw disaster coming long before anybody else. He had served in Iran in the early '70s. He came back in 1977 when the revolution was just starting to kind of perk up a little bit. And this is when he saw people just bailing out of the country, including the wealthy class, and people saying this place is going down the tubes. And when he tried to tell people that, he was completely ignored.

  Most incredibly with Metrinko - after the revolution, Khomeini came to power in February of 1979. And so for the next year or nine months, the Carter administration tried to make nice with the Khomeini regime, tried to repair this anti-American feeling. And the people at the embassy were kind of replicating what they had said with the shah. They said, yeah, everything's going good. You know, they're not really anti-American. They know they have to be allies with us because all their weaponry is American. And again Metrinko was the one person who was saying, no, this place is about to blow up.

  And so in September of '79, this is about six weeks before the American hostages are taken, Metrinko takes a brief home vacation. He comes back to the States. And somebody at the State Department hears he's in town and says, look, Mike, you know, I've been reading your reports from the field, and they're different from what everybody else is saying, you know? And, you know, you're really painting a very grim picture of what's happening. Will you come in and talk to, like, the senior policy people in the State Department about what you see? And so Metrinko agrees to do that.

  They take over a conference room on the seventh floor of the State Department the next afternoon. Metrinko arrives a bit early and is going over his notes. And a State Department security officer comes into the conference room, kind of taps him on the shoulder and leads him outside and says, yeah, you know, this meeting has been given a security classification higher than your clearance to attend. (Laughter) And Metrinko says, do you realize that this meeting is being held because of what I've been reporting in the field? And the guy says, yeah, doesn't matter. So the meeting doesn't take place. Metrinko goes back to Iran a couple of weeks later. And a month after that, he and everybody else in the embassy are taken hostage.

  DAVIES: Let's take another break here. We are speaking with Scott Anderson. His new book is "King Of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story Of Hubris, Delusion And Catastrophic Miscalculation." We'll hear more of our conversation after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.

  (SOUNDBITE OF ALLISON MILLER AND JENNY SCHEINMAN'S "HUDSON")

  DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies. We are listening to my interview with veteran journalist and author Scott Anderson. His new book is a gripping account of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which deposed the long-reigning Shah of Iran and transformed the country from an American ally to an Islamic republic and bitter enemy of the United States. Anderson's account details blunders by U.S. policymakers that likely contributed to the victory of Ayatollah Khomeini over more moderate rivals. Anderson's book is "King Of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story Of Hubris, Delusion And Catastrophic Miscalculation." We spoke last week.

  As 1978 unfolded, there was increasing chaos in the country - riots, strikes and such, a lot of it supported by Khomeini. There were a group of men around Khomeini, and one of them was a pharmacology professor living in Texas.

  ANDERSON: Right, right, right.

  DAVIES: But an Iranian fella who had spent a lot of years in the opposition movement. His name was Ebrahim Yazdi, right?

  ANDERSON: That's right.

  DAVIES: He realized that it was important for Khomeini to convince the United States that his ascent to leadership in Iran should be welcomed and not feared. How did he do this?

  ANDERSON: One thing that really surprised me when I started looking at this story was how much of the focus of even the Carter administration was still on the Cold War, was still about the Soviet Union. And so, you know, the mindset of the Cold War was that everything was a zero-sum game. If we lose, then the Soviets win and vice versa. So at first, when the revolution started, of course, the Americans were kind of panicking.

  But what Yazdi managed to figure out was what - their biggest fear wasn't losing the shah but was losing Iran to the Soviets. And, of course, that was kind of absurd when you look at Khomeini because of, you know, he was a rabid anti-communist. At the same time, he kind of moderated Khomeini's speeches and what he would say in press conferences. Well, first of all, he was instrumental in moving Khomeini from Iraq to Paris in October of '78. So all of a sudden, Khomeini is available to the entire world's media. And again, because very few journalists speak Farsi, Yazdi was acting as his interpreter, and he would modify and moderate what Khomeini was saying to make him sound, like, more reasonable.

  And at the same time this was going on, Yazdi was sending out the message that you have nothing to fear about a communist takeover if Khomeini comes to power. It's anathema to Khomeini, communism. So what you start seeing about October, November within the Carter administration is, of course, they want the shah to stay on. But all of a sudden, they're looking at Khomeini and going, well, you know, if he comes in, that's not the worst thing. The worst thing would be if the reds take over. And really by about November of '79, about two months before the shah went into exile, the Americans were kind of already distancing themselves from him because it wasn't - you know, Khomeini wasn't going to be the worst thing.

  DAVIES: What's fascinating about it, is this guy Yazdi is there translating Khomeini's words to Western journalists, but he's deliberately getting them wrong. I mean, didn't some people around them realize that say, hey, wait a minute. Do you know what this guy's saying?

  ANDERSON: You know, it goes back to this thing about, you know, the level of communications at the time. Even some of the people who were in Khomeini's camp, some of the kind of Westerners who rallied around and were congregating around him in Paris, a few journalists who did speak Farsi were translating stuff, and they would show things that Khomeini had written back in the '50s and '60s, that all governments in the world are illegitimate except the ones, you know, appointed by God. And when they saw these writings, they assumed that they were SAVAK forgeries. They said, no, no one can actually believe this. These are forgeries.

  And that happened even in Paris. There was a couple of journalists who said, you know, what he's saying is really incendiary, and he's talking about, you know, rivers of blood to flow. And people like Yazdi around him going, no, no, no, he didn't say that. That's not what that means. You know, this is SAVAK disinformation.

  DAVIES: And what is striking about this - I mean, I remember this moment in the book where this - representative Yazdi would say, no, no, he never said torrents of blood.

  ANDERSON: Right.

  DAVIES: It turns out the State Department had all of - countless cassettes of Khomeini's...

  ANDERSON: Yeah.

  DAVIES: ...Sermons in their possession, which were filled with rhetoric that would have cast him in a very different light. But they somehow never listened to them?

  ANDERSON: That's right. That's right. When the embassy was taken over by the hostage takers in November of '79, they were going all - you know, they were rifling all through the embassy safes and file cabinets looking for incriminating information. And they just found stacks and stacks and stacks of cassettes of Khomeini's sermons. They had been collected both by the CIA and by the State Department. Nobody had listened to them. Nobody who spoke Farsi had listened to them. Nobody transcribed them. So you're absolutely right. It was a roadmap to what Khomeini was going to do if he took over, and they never listened to him. They didn't even have, you know, one of the local workers at the embassy listen to them.

  DAVIES: Yeah. So they were kind of flying blind...

  ANDERSON: Completely.

  DAVIES: ...In terms of what was going to happen. You know, there's a fascinating period as the end approached and it was clear that the shah was in deep trouble, and at this point, I mean, the State Department had dispensed with this idea that, you know, the shah is in control and everything's fine. But you say that they pursued - the Carter administration pursued a dual track approach to the crisis whose incoherence and guaranteed futility had few parallels in modern diplomatic history.

  ANDERSON: (Laughter) Right.

  DAVIES: This is quite something. So what were these two approaches carried out by different people?

  ANDERSON: So one idea was that we should continue to support the shah or at least, you know, his caretaker regime behind it. And then the second was to make overtures to Khomeini and the people around him. Where it really became quite bizarre was in the very last days when the shah was there, they sent an American general to Iran to meet with the shah's generals. And at this point, the shah's generals were about - they wanted to bail out of the country, you know, right along with the shah. This general convinced them to stay. But they had this very complicated...

  DAVIES: The American general convinced them to stay.

  ANDERSON: I'm sorry. The American general - yeah - convinced them to stay. But they had this very complicated, you know, program that they were supposed to follow. No. 1, they were supposed to stay loyal to the interim government, the caretaker government that the shah was leaving behind. And two, if that proved impossible, they were to stage a military coup. The military was supposed to take over. The problem was that you were dealing with a group of generals who had never worked with each other. The general worked with four generals and one admiral in the Iranian armed forces. Those were the five who were supposed to be in control of everything.

  Some of those men and never met each other because the shah was so paranoid of losing power that he met with his generals individually. He never met with them as a group. He didn't want one to know the other. And so he would send different, you know, messages, different orders to different people. So these generals had spent a whole career - their careers, just following orders and not having an original thought of their own. So the idea that these men were going to somehow organize a coup, you know, Mike Metrinko famously said, you know, he knew a lot of these generals. He said, these guys couldn't maneuver their way through a grocery checkout line, you know...

  (LAUGHTER)

  ANDERSON: ...Let alone stage a coup. And, of course, they didn't. And they - by staying behind, most of them were executed by the Khomeini regime.

  DAVIES: We are speaking with Scott Anderson. He's a veteran journalist. His new book is "King Of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story Of Hubris, Delusion And Catastrophic Miscalculation." We'll continue our conversation after this short break. This is FRESH AIR.

  (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

  DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're listening to the interview I recorded with veteran journalist and author Scott Anderson. He has a new book which is a detailed account of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which deposed the shah who had ruled for decades and transformed the country into an Islamic republic. The book is called "King Of Kings."

  So in the end, the country's military declares its neutrality. You know, discipline falls apart. A lot of soldiers desert. Militants break into bases. They get weapons. And the country is taken over by these semi-organized forces loyal to the ayatollah. President Carter immediately recognizes the Islamic republic - right? - hoping for a friendly relationship and some moderation. But as it all takes shape, there are hundreds, thousands of executions, eventually, without trials. A new constitution gives the ayatollah complete control, affirming that the supreme leader's views and actions are guided by God. And, of course, hostages are eventually taken from the U.S. Embassy and held for over 400 days. Death to the U.S. becomes the mantra of the regime - exactly what the U.S. had hoped to avoid, wasn't it?

  ANDERSON: Right. Yeah, and I - there's another little detail to this that I think is really remarkable. So in the run-up to the hostages being taken, what really precipitated - the catalyst for the hostages being taken was when the Carter administration allowed the shah to come to the United States for medical treatment. And he'd been trying to get into States for months and months, ever since he'd gone into exile. David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger were lobbying on his behalf and, you know, telling Carter, you have to do this. It's a matter of national honor.

  Then all of a sudden, the shah becomes deathly ill, and doctors around him saying, oh, he can only be treated in the United States. And the Carter administration's first reaction is, you know, what convenient timing, you know (laughter)? He's been trying to get here forever, and now all of a sudden, he has a - it's a life or death thing. But it looked like he was - he was very seriously ill.

  And famously, in late October, Carter convened all his closest foreign policy advisors in the Oval Office - Vice President Mondale, national security advisor, secretary of state. And as Carter often did, he went around the room and asked each person in the room what they should do? Should they let the shah in? And everybody in the room said, yeah, we have to let him in. It's a matter of national honor. We have to stand by a former ally. And Carter looked at them and said, what are you guys going to tell me to do when they attack our embassy and take our people there hostage? And nobody said a thing. And then Carter said, yeah, that's what I thought you were going to say. So he saw it coming, and he was just kind of powerless to stop it.

  DAVIES: That is quite a moment. And I think the officials at the embassy in Tehran had warned them, look, if you let the shah into the country, they're going to send us back in boxes.

  ANDERSON: That's right. They warned him again and again. And Carter had listened to them up through until October of '79. And that - then when all of a sudden, it looked like the shah was close to death and needed to be seen by American doctors, that's when he finally relented and, you know, disaster unfolded.

  DAVIES: You say that this revolution led directly to some of America's greatest missteps in the region. Which one? And what's the connection?

  ANDERSON: So, I mean, starting kind of right off the bat, with the Khomeini regime, they immediately started to militarize their allies throughout the region, famously Hezbollah and Amal in Lebanon. So when Lebanon blew up again in '82, '83, it was Hezbollah units that blew up the American Embassy and then blew up the American Marine compound in 1983, started taking Americans hostage. And then going forward from that, I mean, if you look at the invasion of Iraq, who benefited from that were the Iranians because in the power vacuum that that created, they now have enormous influence over - certainly over southern Iraq, which the - the Shiite heartland.

  And throughout the region, these groups that have been kind of squashed in the last year or so by the Israelis, these were all the regime's you know, kind of mischief makers out in the region. And, I mean, ISIS was Sunni, but by Iran supporting Bashar al-Assad in Syria, an absolutely murderous regime, if you look at what was happening in the Middle East four, five, six years ago, you would have to say that the Iranians had far more influence than the Americans had. They were, you know - the Americans had, as they're want to do, they had involved themselves in a region, you know, come in. They were going to be the peacekeepers, the liberators, and then things went south and they jumped out. And that has only changed very recently.

  DAVIES: You raised the question in the book that, you know, this was not inevitable, that there were a lot of missteps that made this come out the way it did. And you say, you know - some officials say that if the shah were just more decisive, if he had failed - hadn't failed to act at critical junctures, he could have survived. And I think a lot of people would say, you know - then and probably now - that's not exactly a desirable outcome to have this absolute monarch there. I mean, what do you - what about that?

  ANDERSON: No, I think that's true. I think that people always say, you know, he would be hard for a while, then he'd go soft and back and forth. He had to oscillate. But, in fact, he did even worse than that. He did both simultaneously. So he declares martial law, but then tells the generals that, you know, only under the most dire circumstances are soldiers to fire live ammunition. So he kind of tries to do both things at the same time. I think if the shah had - if he had taken a Saddam Hussein or an Assad approach, if he hadn't just machine gunned his people in the streets, he might've lasted a bit longer. Conversely, I think that there was a time when if he had pushed for reform and agreed to lose a lot of his power and to have more of a parliamentary democracy where he had very limited power, I think he might've survived. But I think by trying to do both at the same time, it was kind of impossible.

  And, you know, it's curious. Now his son, crown prince Reza, amidst, you know, the disturbance or the bombings lately, you know, he's gone around to the media and kind of presented himself as the alternative. And supposedly there's this royalist resurgence in restoring the monarchy. And (laughter) I just find it a bit laughable. You know, 80% of Iranians now have been born after the revolution, so there's very little memory of the shah's time. What memory there is, is probably quite hostile under the education system of the Islamic Republic. I don't think that there's any chance that the monarchy is reinstated.

  DAVIES: You know, I noticed from the acknowledgment section of the book that you spoke to people who are still in Iran, as part of your research.

  ANDERSON: Yeah.

  DAVIES: The current regime is, I think, known to be unpopular. Do you see prospects for change?

  ANDERSON: You know, that's a great question. And I actually, since the Israeli and American bombing of Iran, I've talked to several of the people I know in Iran. Most of them, frankly, are not fans of the regime. But what they've all said is that the bombings gave the regime just a new lease on life. It's produced this rallying around the flag effect inside Iran. You know, as a general rule, people don't like being bombed by foreign armies. And they feel the idea of this regime getting toppled or reformed in a significant way has just been pushed off a lot by the actions of the Israelis and the Americans at this point.

  I think something else to keep in mind about Iran. Yes, it's a brutal regime. It's a repressive regime. But there's certain openings in it. There's an element of freedom. There's elections, and sometimes the elections are honest (laughter). You're allowed a certain degree of dissent. You know, not all women now, you know, wear veils. And I think they've been quite clever in giving people just enough so that things don't blow up.

  It kind of reminds me of, say, you know, late-day Soviet Union or late-day East Germany. That, you know, certainly they weren't as repressive as they had been 20 years before. But again, it's the question of when you start opening a little bit, you know, how can you control? How do you keep the lid just slightly ajar and keep it from coming off completely? But I think thus far, one of the reasons is the regime is very selective of who they crush. And they do allow sort of a degree of freedom that creates a hope that maybe some more will come.

  DAVIES: Well, Scott Anderson, it's an interesting book. Thank you so much for speaking with us.

  ANDERSON: Thank you, Dave. I really appreciate it.

  DAVIES: Scott Anderson is a veteran war correspondent. His new book is "King Of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story Of Hubris, Delusion And Catastrophic Miscalculation." Coming up, David Bianculli reviews the new two-part HBO documentary "Billy Joel: And So It Goes." This is FRESH AIR.

  (SOUNDBITE OF THE BENNIE MAUPIN QUARTET'S "THE BENNIE MAUPIN QUARTET")

King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion, and Catastrophic Miscalculation. By Scott Anderson. Aug. 2025. 512p. illus. Doubleday, $35 (9780385548076); e-book (9780385548083). 955.05.

Perhaps lost in the mists of history, under the shah of Iran's 38-year reign (1941-79), as veteran journalist Anderson explains, per capita income in that country increased twentyfold, the literacy rate quintupled, the average lifespan increased from 27 to 56 years, freedoms for women surpassed those found elsewhere in the Islamic world, protections were granted to the country's minorities, and the country emerged as an economic and military powerhouse. Yet as Anderson lays out with meticulous reporting and consummate storytelling, many of Iran's spectacular gains--and along with them, its once-inviolable alliance with the U.S.--came undone with the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the ascent of Ayatollah Khomeini. Delusional might best describe both sides before the denouement: the shah for his obscenely lavish lifestyle and willful distancing from the lives of everyday Iranians, and the U.S. for the paltry effort it made, given its massive financial and military investment, to maintain its ties to the Iranian people. For example, as late as 1978, the State Department's DC-based Iran desk comprised just two secretaries and an intern, the author reports. Though the Iranian Revolution unfolded more than 45 years ago, the now-fraught U.S.-Iran relationship remains front and center, and there are still hard-won lessons to glean about the costs of inattention.--Alan Moores

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 American Library Association
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Moores, Alan. "King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion, and Catastrophic Miscalculation." Booklist, vol. 121, no. 19-20, June 2025, p. 20. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A847197873/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=201ebad0. Accessed 19 Dec. 2025.

King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion, and Catastrophic Miscalculation

Scott Anderson. Doubleday, $35 (512p)

ISBN 978-0-385-54807-6

*| Chaos is strewn by foolhardy leaders acting on bad information in this riveting history of the Iranian revolution from journalist Anderson (The Quiet Americans). The book centers on Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, who presented himself as the grand successor of conquering Persian emperors of the past. In fact, he was a stiff political naif (Anderson describes him in his youth as a "tense, taut little boy") and Eurocentric dilettante who squandered Iran's "gold rush" of oil revenues on wasteful military hardware and corruptionriddled public projects, and who was eager to prove himself to the U.S., which had used the CIA to overthrow his nationalist rival Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. By the late 1970s, economic malaise had compounded the simmering resentments of both leftist intellectuals and Islamic extremists led by exiled Shiite cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, all of whom saw the Shah as a cat's paw for America. Anderson's story builds a rushing momentum as one miscalculation after another hurtles the country toward the 1979 "revolution few saw coming and no one knew how to stop." The result is an illuminating, operatic depiction of the revolution as a farcical cavalcade of arrogant mistakes with dire consequences. (Aug.)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 PWxyz, LLC
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"King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion, and Catastrophic." Publishers Weekly, vol. 272, no. 24, 16 June 2025, p. 79. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A844949931/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=83310245. Accessed 19 Dec. 2025.

In a new book, the journalist Scott Anderson argues that America's failure to predict and understand the 1979 revolution has hamstrung foreign policy ever since.

KING OF KINGS: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation, by Scott Anderson

In September 1979, Michael Metrinko, the pugnacious political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, was back in the United States for a brief vacation when he was surprised to receive a summons to a high-level meeting at the State Department in Washington.

For the previous several months -- indeed, several years -- Metrinko had been the Iran mission's black sheep, wholly out of step with the official flow of upbeat information from the country. That flow had been dead wrong. The U.S. diplomats and intelligence officers charged with managing relations with Iran had not just missed the first signs of the Islamic Revolution, now in full swing; they had suppressed reports that it was coming.

By September, the supposedly invincible shah had abdicated. Mobs ruled the streets. The country was up for grabs. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had returned triumphantly from exile in France and installed himself in Qom. Yet the experts at the American Embassy were still playing a hopeful tune. A new moderate, pro-Western government would emerge, they insisted, and the friendly and lucrative relationship the United States had enjoyed with Iran would continue.

Metrinko knew better. One of very few fluent Farsi speakers at the Tehran mission, he was better attuned to the depth of Iranian anger toward America. The mullahs were ascendant. His pointed dispatches had earned him a dressing-down by the clueless ambassador, William Sullivan. Nevertheless, someone at the State Department had decided to give Metrinko his moment.

He arrived at the meeting early, with notes, only to be asked to leave before it began because he lacked the appropriate security clearance. He protested that he had been specifically invited, that the meeting was about his reporting -- to no avail.

A little more than a month later, Metrinko became one of 52 American diplomats, embassy staffers and military personnel, along with a handful of civilians, held hostage for 444 days in Iran by a radical Muslim student group. The story of Metrinko's aborted meeting, recounted in Scott Anderson's ''King of Kings,'' his masterly new account of the Iranian revolution, illustrates the stubborn American blindness that hastened the shah's demise and helped the mullahs prevail. It was an ''obliviousness'' that ''became willful, an ignorance to be maintained and defended,'' Anderson writes.

I got to know and admire Metrinko when I wrote about the Iran hostage crisis almost 20 years ago, and reading this book I came to admire him even more. For most Americans, the hostage crisis was the revolution's defining event. An unprecedented and prolonged public exercise in humiliation, it riveted the nation for more than a year, dashed Jimmy Carter's bid for a second presidential term and ushered in the Reagan era. But in Iran, as Anderson shows, it was the final act in a much larger and more consequential drama.

The fall of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the slight, pompous, pathetically dithering Shah of Shahs, or King of Kings, ''brought an abrupt end to one of the most important economic and military alliances the United States had established anywhere in the world,'' Anderson writes. ''The radically altered Middle Eastern chessboard created by the revolution has led directly to some of America's greatest missteps in the region over the past four decades.''

Propped up by a succession of presidents, given unlimited license to purchase American arms by Richard Nixon, feted in both Washington and Tehran by Carter, the shah was an American creation first and last. His story is another sad chapter in the long history of self-defeating, misguided U.S. meddling in the internal affairs of less powerful nations -- Cuba, Nicaragua and Vietnam already by 1978, and Iraq and Afghanistan still to come. Foreign victims paid the heaviest price, but the wounds to America have been lasting and deep.

In the case of Iran, U.S. involvement meant toppling a constitutional monarchy (albeit an imperfect one) and supporting an increasingly capricious autocrat. Cold War priorities provided the initial impetus -- containing the Soviet Union -- but in time that motivation devolved into an ugly greed fest, as the shah, prized for his weakness by his masters and fabulously rich with oil money, developed an irrational appetite for new weapons systems. The rush by American military officers and contractors to fatten themselves on this largess became what Anderson calls a ''stampede.''

The courting was so aggressive that the State Department tried to slow it down, banning the Pentagon from making sales pitches to Tehran. It didn't work. When a State Department official asked an admiral to halt sales pitches for aircraft Iran didn't need -- it lacked pilots to fly them and mechanics to maintain them -- the admiral replied, ''Well, that may be the embassy's policy, but it is not the U.S. Navy's policy. The Navy's policy is to sell these planes.''

Created and sustained by myths of royal legitimacy, the shah's story also affords a timely lesson in the dangers of unmooring a society from reality, of rewriting its history and ignoring its laws. Pahlavi enjoyed the wealth, pomp and flattery of his position, but was incapable of making hard decisions. Even at the end, as the revolution loomed, he delayed, seemingly waiting for the Americans to tell him what to do.

He had lived his life in a make-believe world, its fantasy enforced by a security apparatus, Savak, that terrorized anyone who refused to play along. The regime built what Anderson describes as a fortress of ''stupidity'': ''A default mode of profound, even impregnable passivity that grows more acute the closer one gets to the locus of power. This passivity is also rooted in fear, of course, the worry of losing one's standing within the power structure.''

At the top, the shah heard only good news, while at the bottom, functionaries learned to swallow injustice and idiocy as a matter of routine. Many would pay for it with their lives. ''Put simply, Iran had been ruled by one man for 37 years, and over the course of those years no other Iranian man or woman had been so influential as to make an independent decision of any major significance to the nation,'' Anderson writes.

With all sensible, independent voices silenced, deliberate misinformation, conspiracy theory and superstition rushed into the vacuum. The most compelling voice in this haboob was the angry fundamentalist ranting of the exiled Khomeini. His sermons moved hand-to-hand under Savak's nose on cassette tapes, diligently collected by the C.I.A., most never listened to or transcribed. By early 1979, the storm incited by those sermons blew away the Peacock Throne, American influence and any hope for popular rule. Instead, it would shape the repressive and bloody theocratic regime that still rules today.

This is an exceptional and important book. Scrupulous and enterprising reporting rarely combine with such superb storytelling. Anderson leavens his sweeping and complex chronicle with rich character portraits: of the shah and his discerning wife, Farah (whom Anderson interviewed); the harsh, cruel Khomeini; the bullheaded, ignorant Jack Miklos, the deputy U.S. chief of mission and the shah's biggest ''cheerleader''; the charming, Zelig-like Ebrahim Yazdi, a Houston pharmacist who dreamed of a democratic Iran, befriended Khomeini in exile and convinced his American admirers that the revolution would end well, only to spend his later years in and out of the ayatollah's prisons.

Yet the figure who stands out most is Metrinko, who deserves a statue in Foggy Bottom. Not just because he was courageous and right, or smarter and more prescient than his peers, but because he worked. He took the trouble to learn Farsi, which enabled him to hear what Iranians said, and he paid attention to what he saw. Handling a flood of applications from high-level Iranians looking for a way out of the country in the months before the shah fell, Metrinko was approached by C.I.A. officers who wanted valuable assets moved to the head of the line.

''Excuse me, Mr. Intelligence Officer,'' Metrinko recalls thinking, ''but what does it tell you when your most important sources are trying to get the hell out of the country?''

Asked why he had foreseen what so many of his colleagues missed, he told Anderson, ''Because the guys in the political section of the embassy who were supposed to keep watch for this kind of stuff were lousy at their jobs. Is that overly harsh? I think it's deserved.''

KING OF KINGS: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation | By Scott Anderson | Doubleday | 481 pp. | $35

Mark Bowden is the author of ''Guests of the Ayatollah,'' among many other books.

CAPTION(S):

PHOTO: A Tehran billboard in 1979 featuring Ayatollah Khomeini. (PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID BURNETT/CONTACT PRESS IMAGES) This article appeared in print on page BR7.

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Bowden, Mark. "Missteps in the Middle East." The New York Times Book Review, 3 Aug. 2025, p. 7. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A850229141/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=81217f35. Accessed 19 Dec. 2025.

Moores, Alan. "King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion, and Catastrophic Miscalculation." Booklist, vol. 121, no. 19-20, June 2025, p. 20. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A847197873/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=201ebad0. Accessed 19 Dec. 2025. "King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion, and Catastrophic." Publishers Weekly, vol. 272, no. 24, 16 June 2025, p. 79. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A844949931/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=83310245. Accessed 19 Dec. 2025. Bowden, Mark. "Missteps in the Middle East." The New York Times Book Review, 3 Aug. 2025, p. 7. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A850229141/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=81217f35. Accessed 19 Dec. 2025.

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