 The
Iranian Revolution
An oral history with then US State Department
desk officer Henry
Precht
February 11, 2004
iranian.com
From Middle East Journal (Winter 2004). Henry
Precht, Country Director for Iran in the State Department, 1978-80,
held
a key position during the Iranian Revolution. Previously, he
had served in
Embassy Tehran, 1972-76, as political-military officer. Here
follow relevant
excerpts from his interview with Charles Stuart Kennedy, Oral
Historian of the
Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training >>> Full
text here Q. Henry,
you took over the Iran desk in June 1978. Will you explain the
situation you found at that time?
PRECHT: Iran's troubles (we didn't
call it a revolution until it was over) had
started in January when the Shah's people and
newspapers insulted Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini, and religious students demonstrated in Qum at the seminary.
A number
were shot, touching off a series of mourning demonstrations. They
began in January
and at intervals of three or forty days there would be mourning
marches, in Tehran,
Tabriz, and other cities. Each time the troops would crack down
and there would be
more commemorations for those who were killed. The country was
getting out of
hand, and the Shah was getting nervous. He began promising a more
liberalized regime.
Unfortunately, people weren't buying that.
I had been concerned about what was happening in
Iran. The Embassy indicated
some worry, but the press, which was not represented in Tehran
by American reporters,
downplayed the incidents. US papers had stringers who we always
thought had
dual employment, the other employer being SAVAK, the secret police.
So, the level
of concern was muted at best. In June when I came on board, things
had, in fact,
quieted down. The mourning ceremonies had come to an end. There
was tension but
not recurring violence.
Q: At that time was it the perception that you were
getting from other people
and your own view that the problem was that the Shah either had
to liberalize or
become more conservative and religious?
PRECHT: Basically, Washington didn't
believe the Shah, who had been through
a lot of trouble at different times since 1941, was in any real
danger. Some people
thought liberalization was the answer. That is, to lighten up.
No one suggested that
he join the church or start contributing to the building fund,
because religious people
weren't so prominent in American thinking at
that stage.
Q: Was it also because we couldn't talk to mullahs,
and also Americans, particularly
in those days, didn't think in terms of Islam
or church in any place? We are
secular people and have secular solutions.
PRECHT: Don't forget
we are looking at this in retrospect. There had never
been an Islamic revolution. There had been political demonstrations
led by clerics, the
last one 25 years earlier led by Khomeini, at which time he was
jailed and sent off in
exile in Turkey, then Iraq. The religious aspect wasn't
the main focus in the spring of
1978; it was a popular uprising. It wasn't even
viewed as being a long-term thing. After all, the Shah had a pretty
tough secret police apparatus and an army deemed to
be loyal.
The presumption was that it might be messy and might
take a little while, but
they could do the job. I recall a cable coming in from the
Embassy in May 1978 which
identified Khomeini, who figured in the troubles but wasn't
revered yet as leader of
the stature he later acquired. That the Embassy had to identify
him in a cable to the
Washington audience tells you something about how much we knew
about Iranian
internal politics and Khomeini's role in it. One
of my first visitors on the desk was the Israeli Embassy
officer who handled
the Middle East. He had been born in Iran. He told me, "We
are already in the post-
Shah era." I had not heard that before. He
felt the Shah was in deep trouble. The
officer was basing that view, I guess, on what he knew of Iran
and was getting from
the unofficial Israeli Embassy in Tehran.
Another incident occurred just shortly after I came
on board. I was told that
Henry Kissinger [former Secretary of State] had just returned
from Iran and gotten in
touch with the State Department to report on his conversation
with the Shah. The
Shah told him he didn't see how it was possible
for a bunch of ignorant mullahs to
lead demonstrations so precisely organized and so effective.
There must be some
other force leading them. He concluded that the CIA must
be behind them. He asked
why the CIA would do this to him. Why would they turn on
him? He suggested two
answers: Perhaps the Americans felt that, with his dealings
with the Soviets for nonlethal
military equipment, a steel mill and such, he was too cozy
with the Soviet Union.
If Americans thought he was soft, maybe the religious
people would be more staunchly
anti-Communist and stronger in supporting the containment
policy. His other theory
was that the Americans and the Russians, as the British and
the Russians in the beginning
of the century, had decided to divide Iran into spheres of
influence. We would
take the south, which had most of the oil, and the Soviets
could run the north, as they
had in the past >>> Full text here
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The
Iranian Revolution