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

Review by Tunku Varadarajan

The Wall Street Journal

In August 1977, five months before the start of the Iranian Revolution, the CIA put out a secret report on Iran. It offered the assessment that the American-allied shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, “will be an active participant in Iranian life well into the 1980s.” There would be, it further declared, “no radical change in Iranian political behavior in the near future.”

Talk about clueless. On Jan. 16, 1979, the shah and his family fled by plane for Egypt, abandoning Iran to the medieval-minded Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, supreme religious leader of an Islamist revolution that endures to this day—somewhat the worse for wear, no doubt, but just as malevolent toward the West as it was in the startling days of its birth.

Scott Anderson cites this blithe CIA report on the very first page of “King of Kings,” a book whose title is the English rendition of the Farsi word shahanshah, as Pahlavi called himself. (He was also Light of the Aryans, and Shadow of God on Earth.) Mr. Anderson is a first-rate writer of histories, best known for “Lawrence in Arabia” (2013), about the fabled military adventurer who fought alongside the Arabs against the Ottomans in World War I, and “The Quiet Americans” (2020), on a quartet of American spies who defined the shape and nature of espionage at the dawn of the Cold War.

“King of Kings” is a sweeping, gripping book, one that makes past times and dead people (often weird, complex and evil) spring to life with its narrative verve and attention to detail. It seeks to tell “a new version of an old tale”—that of the shah’s eclipse and Khomeini’s violent triumph—and to “answer some of the riddles of why the Iranian Revolution played out as it did.” It’s an event that ranks among the most seminal in history. If we were to make a list, writes Mr. Anderson, of “that small handful of revolutions that spurred change on a truly global scale in the modern era, that caused a paradigm shift in the way the world works,” we’d place the Iranian Revolution alongside the American, French and Russian ones.

At the time of his flight from Iran, and before the full import of the Khomeinist horrors had become apparent, the shah was a man who’d been demonized in the Western liberal imagination. Mr. Anderson points out that Americans were in a state of “moral indignation and deep cynicism” in the second half of the 1970s, disillusioned by the Vietnam War and Watergate and tired of “the offenses of American-allied dictatorships around the globe.” These included Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Augusto Pinochet in Chile and, inevitably, the shah in Iran, all of whom, Mr. Anderson says, received more negative coverage in the U.S. media than Cambodia’s Pol Pot or Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

The shah did himself no favors. A virtually absolute monarch, he hired and fired ministers at will and tolerated little dissent. Lost in the negative narrative, however, was the fact that he transformed Iran materially and culturally: Per capita income, Mr. Anderson tells us, increased 20-fold during his reign; the literacy rate quintupled; the average lifespan jumped to 56 from 27; half a million Iranians obtained college degrees abroad; women were dramatically emancipated (in contrast to their equally dramatic regression and repression after the Iranian Revolution). Even in a reckoning of brutality, says Mr. Anderson, the shah was outdone by the revolution: By reliable estimates, the number of political dissidents killed by the shah’s secret service, the Savak, in the decade leading up to his exit stands at less than 100. By contrast, “as many as 8,000 Iranians were executed in the first four years of Islamic rule, with as many as 5,000 more killed in a single week” in July 1988 during a purge of “leftists.”

Mr. Anderson’s book attempts to answer questions that have tormented historians and American policymakers since the collapse of the shah’s rule in January 1979. If he were as much of an autocrat as he was thought be, and if the Savak was so oppressive, why did he fall, and why was his fall so swift? Or, as Mr. Anderson puts it, “why did the shah so utterly fail to act to save himself as the walls closed in?” One counterintuitive answer, the author suggests, is that the shah “simply lacked the easy brutality, the unswerving killer instinct” of other despots in the region such as Saddam Hussein. Mr. Anderson tells us that in early 1978, Saddam even “offered to liquidate” Khomeini—then in exile in Iraq—as “a personal favor to the shah,” only to have the latter demur.

A more jarring question—which survives to this day as a source of acute American embarrassment—was why the all-powerful U.S. did not “see the danger to one of its most vital allies until it was too late?” Mr. Anderson’s answer, in effect, was that the shah was “so profoundly important to the United States that it couldn’t conceive of life without him—and so it did not.” Instead, the author writes, successive administrations “happily bought into his fictions, both of himself and of his nation”—fictions that were scripted in a royal echo chamber in which no discordant voice or fact was admitted.

The most riveting quality of Mr. Anderson’s book derives from its reliance on interviews with three important players in what he describes in his subtitle as “a story of hubris, delusion and catastrophic miscalculation.” These are Gary Sick (now 90), who was the principal White House aide for Persian Gulf affairs from 1976 to 1981; Michael Metrinko (now 78), a young State Department official who headed the U.S. consulate in the northwestern Iranian city of Tabriz; and Farah Pahlavi, the shahbanou, or queen—the shah’s widow.

Now 86, Farah Pahlavi divides her time between an apartment in Paris and a house in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. The relative stability of her life these past decades has been in sharp contrast to her first 1½ years in exile, when she and the shah—unwanted visitors everywhere—were buffeted from Egypt to Morocco to the Bahamas and Mexico before being permitted to enter the U.S. for the shah’s medical treatment. Their next stop was Panama, where, Mr. Anderson tells us, the queen had to ward off the unwelcome sexual attentions of the country’s strongman, Omar Torrijos, as well as those of his sidekick, Manuel Noriega. (The shah died in Cairo in July 1980.) >>>