Until World War II, Iran and the US had cordial but not very close relations. President Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921) received a carpet in which his portrait was woven, and American missionaries and others made their way to Persia, as Iran was then called. When America allied itself with Britain and the USSR against the Nazis, however, large numbers of GI's were sent to Iran to create a supply line to the Soviet Union. Iran was technically neutral but could do little to stop the British, Soviets, and Americans who occupied their country. After the war, the political climate changed fast and dramatically. While the British and Americans withdrew their troops, the Soviets stayed, and the Iranian government naturally turned to the United Nations--and to the United States--for help. Stalin finally pulled out of northwest Iran, but the Communist Tudeh party was encouraged to continue the struggle for a "workers' state." Although Americans enjoyed a certain amount of trust in Iran, the British did not-conflicts going back to the days of Great Britain's rule in India fueled the suspicion along with concessions given to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP) which many Iranians viewed as a sellout to the imperialists. When a nationalist prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, expropriated the Anglo-Iranian venture, his popularity rose and then fell as the economy faltered.

The US government feared that Mossadegh was serious about an alliance with the Tudeh party, and in 1953 President Eisenhower authorized the CIA to help foment a coup d'etat against the prime minister. The Shah of Iran, who had appointed Mossadegh but had then come into conflict with him, went along with the plan (orchestrated by one of his generals). The coup succeeded, and from that point until 1979 the Shah became the dominant political power in Iran. While most people acquiesced, nationalists bitterly remembered the overthrow of Mossadegh--and American involvement therein.

In the twenty five years following the 1953 coup, the connections between Iran and the US grew ever stronger. Despite the overthrow of Mossadegh, the oil company he nationalized did not revert to the British, and Iran's middle class grew as a result of the oil wealth. In the US the Shah got a good press for about twenty years, seeming to be a progressive monarch who sent many students to overseas universities and opened new ones in Iran, who took land from the rich and gave it to the poor, and who defended the Middle East from Soviet ambitions. It did not hurt his reputation at all when he suppressed Islamic militants and exiled a little-known cleric named Khomeini to Iraq.

If it all seemed too good to be true, indeed it was. Stories of murder and torture at the hands of SAVAK, the Shah's secret police, began appearing in American and other Western newspapers, and Amnesty International regularly published reports on human rights abuses in Iran. The land reforms of the 1960's proved catastrophic for many of the peasants who grew poorer and had to abandon their land for the slums of Tehran and other cities. The crony capitalism practiced by the Shah's family became notorious and further alienated the middle class whose children were, to use Graham Greene's phrase, among "the torturable classes."

The pace of modernization also contributed to the general discontent. While the Persian language and culture were never swept aside, movie heroes such as Sean Connery and pop stars such as Tom Jones became idols of the young, who used ever more English words in casual speech (e.g., koolair for air conditioning and disco for the latest dance craze). Food from America and Australia appeared more often on Iranian tables, leading some to believe that the Shah's land reforms were mainly for the benefit of foreigners. Merchants in the bazaars feared the competition from new Western-style businesses, and the lower middle class saw much less of the new wealth than the government's promises had held out. There was, moreover, no shortage of nationalists who remembered the role of the CIA in the 1953 coup. By the mid-1970's students had become extremely vocal, and in the bazaars and slums Islamic militants had a ready audience.

Open revolt did not take place until 1978, but it then proceeded relentlessly. The Shah's forces used live ammunition on crowds, and the commemorations of the resulting deaths led in turn to further demonstrations and further killings. The picture at the top of the page shows Iranian soldiers (with American equipment) entering a circle near the university in Mashhad in October of 1978. Not long after I took the picture, the troops tried to bar students from crossing the circle to attend a demonstration at the university. The crowd of students trying to attend was small and completely peaceful. Nevertheless, a tank moving at full speed (at left) was soon driven into the crowd, who barely had enough time to scatter and avoid being run over.

While memorable for everyone who saw it, the incident was minor in comparison with the rampage that the army went on in December, killing hundreds and firing on a children's hospital. Not surprisingly, the gilded statue of the Shah seen in the top picture was pulled down by militants, and scarcely two months later, the revolutionaries came to power. Despite its different ideology and despite some commendable changes, the new regime has repeated many failures of the Shah, a would-be Peter the Great. Amnesty International continues documenting cases of torture in Iran, and Islamic zealots there have considered themselves entitled to assassinate Salman Rushdie, whose English-language novel The Satanic Verses is considered to be an insult to Islam. So far, the assassins have not found Rushdie (believed to be in hiding in Britain), but they have killed some of those who translated the novel into other languages. Apart from Rushdie's book, much else in the English-speaking world remains suspect for Islamic fundamentalists who continue to have considerable power in Iranian politics.