Losing Hearts and Minds: American-Iranian Relations and International Education during the Cold War 9781501709708

Citation preview

LOSING HEARTS AND MINDS

LOSING HEARTS AND MINDS American-­Iranian Relations and International Education during the Cold War Matthew K. Shannon

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS  ITHACA AND LONDON

Copyright © 2017 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2017 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Shannon, Matthew K., 1983–­author. Title: Losing hearts and minds : American-­Iranian relations and international education during the Cold War / Matthew K. Shannon. Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017012368 (print) | LCCN 2017012981 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501712340 (epub/mobi) | ISBN 9781501709708 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501713132 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Ira­nian students—­United States—­History—20th ­century. | Educational exchanges—­Iran—­History—20th ­century. | Educational Exchanges—­United States—­History—20th ­century. | United States—­ Relations—­Iran. | Iran—­Relations—­United States. Classification: LCC LB2376.5.I7 (ebook) | LCC LB2376.5.I7 S53 2017 (print) | DDC 371.8299155073—­dc23 LC rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2017012368 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent pos­si­ble in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-­based, low-­VOC inks and acid-­free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-­free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at cornellpress​.­cornell​.­edu.

Jacket photographs: (front) Iranian students demonstrate in Washington, D.C., in 1980. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. (back) Mohammad Reza Pahlavi with University of Pennsylvania president Gaylord P. Harnwell, in 1962. From the Collections of the University Archives, University of Pennsylvania Archives.

For Samantha

Contents

Acknowl­edgments Introduction: Education between Iran and the West 1.

ix 1

The Foundation: Education, Development, and the Tenuous Path of the 1950s

17

The Win­dow: Negotiating Modernization and Rights during the Kennedy Era

43

The Youth: Student Internationalism during the Global 1960s

69

4.

The Boom: Amer­i­ca’s Iran in the 1970s

93

5.

The Reckoning: ­Human Rights, Iran, and the World

2. 3.

117

Conclusion: The Internationalisms of the Ira­nian Revolution

141

Epilogue

157

Notes Bibliography Index

165 211 233

Acknowl­e dgments

This book, as with any decade-­long proj­ect, owes so much to so many. It began at ­Temple University, where I was fortunate to have a broad support network. The anchor was Richard Immerman, and he provided feedback on all chapters in their crudest forms. I usually received that feedback so quickly that I had barely reflected on my arguments before he compelled me to consider new ones. He was a model critic who pushed me to explore new questions and frameworks without losing sight of the fundamental question of power in the international system. Conversations with Petra Goedde also generated new research questions, and it was with her that I first began to think about the question of ­human rights in American-­Iranian relations. She helped me understand how to connect histories of ideas and nonstate actors with the diplomacy of nations. David Farber has an uncanny ability to cut to the heart of any research proj­ect, and his influence kept this book conversant with postwar American narratives. I am grateful to all three for helping me learn how to write history that focuses on the diplomatic, transnational, and domestic aspects of the con­temporary past. During my time in Philadelphia, ­there was a vibrant history department on the ninth floor of Gladfelter Hall. I learned a lot about the profession from Beth Bailey, Arthur Schmidt, and William Hitchcock. It was a plea­sure to be part of a ­great cohort, too. Thanks are due to Ben Brandenberg, Carly Goodman, David Guba, Drew McKevitt, Tom Reinstein, Tim Sayle, Kelly Shannon, Matt Unangst, and Silke Zoller. For most of us, the Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy was a second home. CENFAD enriched the already dynamic environment in Philadelphia and provided me with generous support on multiple occasions. I was especially fortunate to serve as the Thomas Davis Fellow during the 2010–11 academic year and to be part of the three-­year Hertog Program in ­Grand Strategy. Outside of the foreign policy world, it was a thrill to close out my time at ­Temple as a fellow with the Center for the Humanities, a pleasant home to a lively group of scholars whose diverse methodologies kept my mind fresh when I thought that I had ­things figured out. The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations has been a constant source of support and inspiration. I thank my fellow panelists from the 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2015 meetings for giving me a con­ve­nient excuse to pres­ent early drafts of this book’s chapters and to think about American-­Iranian relations in dif­fer­ent contexts. As any member of SHAFR knows, the list of friends ix

x

Acknowl­e dgments

runs long, but I greatly appreciate the friendship of Matt D. Jacobs and Doug Snyder for their always-­thoughtful conversations. Thanks, too, to the small group of Iran specialists that over the years has included Roham Alvandi, Claudia Castiglioni, Vittorio Felci, Richard Garlitz, Roland Popp, and ­others whose archival revelations routinely challenge old assumptions. Outside of SHAFR, I thank my fellow participants at the h ­ uman rights workshops hosted by Howard University and the University of California, Davis, in 2010 and 2011 respectively, and the German Historical Institute and the Center for Advanced Studies of the Ludwig-­Maximilians-­Universität for sponsoring conferences on student migration and international education in 2011. ­Others also warrant a special acknowl­edgment. Jim Goode has been nothing but supportive. His scholarship has repeatedly pushed bound­aries, and I welcome ­every opportunity to talk with him about Iran. The same is true for W. Taylor Fain. He, along with ­others in the history department at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, inspired me to study history and has since provided expert advice at all the right moments. I also thank Michael McGandy of Cornell University Press for patiently working with me throughout this pro­cess. He and two anonymous readers asked the tough questions and helped me understand that a historical monograph is very dif­fer­ent from any other form of academic writing. While any misstatements are entirely my own, all of t­ hese individuals helped me think in dif­fer­ent ways about the long-­term narrative of historical change over time in American-­Iranian relations. Rather than drill into a par­tic­u­lar episode or de­cade of the binational relationship, this book looks at the entirety of the U.S. relationship with the last shah’s Iran. All historical frames must be clearly defined, though, and the narrative thread that weaves through this book follows a par­tic­u­lar “connector,” namely, international education and the resulting stream of Ira­nian student migration to the United States. I tell this story from the perspective of “Amer­i­ca and the world.” This historical subfield is not diplomatic or military history in a new guise; nor is it an entirely new subfield that discards old insights for what can be fleeting methodological trends. It is both a “history from above” that, in this case, considers the opinions of presidents, diplomats, policymakers, and politicians, and a “history from below” that takes the pulse of student life in the United States and analyzes ideas, culture, and cir­cuits of movement and exchange. The history of Amer­ic­ a and the world is the history of the nation, its ­peoples, and ­people from all over the globe operating within a web of po­liti­cal, military, economic, and cultural relations. In other words, my narrative places the question of power within the American-­Iranian relationship before the 1979 revolution within its broader international and transnational contexts.



Acknowl­e dgments

xi

This book’s narrative is driven by that fuel of historical research: archival documents, more specifically, English-­language documents that reconstruct the points of connection between Ira­nian students and a range of official and un­ official Americans. Researching a pro­cess with many stakeholders that evolved over four de­cades took me to a wide variety of government and nongovernmental archives. I owe more than I could ever express to the countless archivists from California eastward to ­Great Britain who guided me through their collections. I tracked down the documents of the American Friends of the M ­ iddle East from vari­ous repositories, did targeted research at the Rocke­fel­ler Archive Center and universities such as the Mas­sa­chu­setts Institute of Technology, and combed through the papers of vari­ous social change movements at the Swarthmore College Peace Collection. Still, government documents remain essential to any researcher of U.S. foreign relations. This book is informed by material from the John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Car­ter Presidential Libraries. It is also informed by a host of rec­ord groups at National ­Archives II in College Park, Mary­land, especially ­those of the Department of State, the U.S. Information Agency, and the vari­ous military and aid missions that operated in Iran. Any researcher of international education knows too well that the rec­ords of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs are not with their kin in College Park but at the University of Arkansas; I am indebted to the archivists t­ here for getting a large box of paper to me in such a timely manner. Documents from the National Archives of the United Kingdom also contextualize key moments in this book, and a trip to Kew is worthwhile to any student of international affairs. I have recovered Ira­nian voices from a number of sources. The Ford Foundation grant files provide insight into the inner workings of the Ira­nian bureaucracy. The papers of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas at the Library of Congress contain letters to and from Ira­nian student leaders in the United States, along with oppositionist publications that w ­ ere circulated widely, including in the Supreme Court. The rec­ords of the International Commission of the U.S. National Student Association h ­ ouse a wealth of material and indicate that young American activists from the United States and Iran conversed regularly about international politics. I have also accumulated from vari­ous archives from Palo Alto to Manhattan, and with the indefatigable support of interlibrary loan librarians at three institutions, my own collection of English-­language Ira­nian student publications. The history that emerges from t­hese documents is of Amer­i­ca’s relationship with Iran during the de­cades between the Second World War and the Ira­nian Revolution. But the extent to which Ira­ni­ans had an impact on the United States, individual Americans, and global discourses on modernization and ­human rights is quite remarkable.

xii

Acknowl­e dgments

Beyond documents, a major source of this book’s Ira­nian inspiration comes from an individual and an experience. The individual was Jerry Dekker, who spent countless hours with me on the telephone discussing all t­hings Persian over a few years’ time. A scholar of the M ­ iddle East and tireless promoter of citizen diplomacy between the United States and Iran whose heart was closer to poetry than politics, Jerry was instrumental in arranging my first experience in Iran. The three weeks that I spent in Iran in mid-2015 transformed the way that I thought about the country, its warm p ­ eople, and rich cultures. It is difficult to explain how volleyball in a park in Kermanshah, a conversation outside a mosque in Isfahan, or a cool walk in Hamadan’s hills affects the way one approaches the study of the past—­but it does. I am grateful to Mozaffar, Maliheh, and Phillip for helping to make my time in Iran so enjoyable and rewarding. I would be remiss not to thank Emory and Henry College, a small liberal arts college in southwest ­Virginia that has been my intellectual home for the past four years. My colleagues have been ­great com­pany and a wealth of methodological inspiration. Tom ­Little and Jack Wells are fine historians, and they keep the department ­running smoothly. Alise Coen and Mark Finney are wonderful friends, Celeste Gaia an international educator par excellence, and Ed Davis and Shelley Koch a constant delight. I am grateful for the Melon grants that I received from Emory and Henry in the summers of 2014 and 2015 to support inter­ national travel and research on this book. The most impor­tant part of the past four years in Emory has been the ways in which teaching the liberal arts in small classrooms (an increasing rarity ­these days) feeds into my research in unexpected ways. A special thanks goes to the students who have taken my se­nior seminar on Iran and the West. Their curious comments and relentless questioning have forced me to think more thoroughly and comprehensively about the ties between the United States and Iran. The most impor­tant base of support throughout this pro­cess, and in life in general, has been my ­family. My parents have always assisted me in ­every way imaginable. Conversations with my m ­ other combined with rounds of golf and baseball outings with my f­ ather to provide much needed respite from work during gradu­ate school. My b ­ rother is always g­ reat fun, w ­ hether in Munich or Austin. My grand­mother, Pearl Shannon, was always encouraging. I’m sure that she is somewhere smiling with a twinkle in her eye. The therapeutic walks on which my dog, Bonzo, took me provided the best endings to long days of writing. Fi­ nally, I thank Samantha. A historian herself, she edited and commented on the drafts of the manuscript. Most inspiring, it was her love that for so long provided me with the energy to meet each day’s challenge.

LOSING HEARTS AND MINDS

Introduction

EDUCATION BETWEEN IRAN AND THE WEST

It was November 1977 and Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (r. 1941–79) was in Washington, D.C., for his twelfth and final state visit to the United States. During his nearly four de­cades in power, Iran’s last shah knew eight U.S. presidents and manipulated the court of public opinion to establish an image of a benevolent and modernizing monarch despite the illiberal nature of Ira­nian politics during the Pahlavi era. On the eve of the Ira­nian Revolution, however, Ira­ni­ans at home and abroad w ­ ere no longer willing to sacrifice personal rights for national development. This was true in 1977 for the tens of thousands of Ira­nian students in the United States, many of whom criticized the Pahlavi state and U.S. support for it through the language of h ­ uman rights. Ira­nian students had a history of confronting the shah during state visits. Over the years they petitioned presidents and members of Congress, or­ga­nized with like-­minded Americans, published pamphlets, wrote articles, and picketed with signs to express their opinions, often using masks to conceal their identity. But the 1977 protest was dif­fer­ent. The tension between the shah’s U.S.-­backed approach to modernization and the opposition’s demands for civil and po­liti­cal rights exploded on November 11. As Jimmy and Rosalynn Car­ter greeted the shah and his empress on the south lawn of the White House, some seventeen hundred anti-­shah students and nineteen hundred of the shah’s supporters (many hired by the Ira­nian government) rehearsed for an imminent revolution. When police responded, shifting winds took the tear gas they sprayed at the protesters t­ oward the White House, forcing a teary-­eyed president and his guests to reach for their handkerchiefs. Students in Tehran staged simultaneous demonstrations and ­those in the United States 1

2 Introduction

FIGURE 1.  The effects of tear gas and revolutionary student politics on the American and Ira­nian heads of state in November 1977. Note the students’ use of “­human rights” and “torture” to criticize the Car­ter administration’s Iran policy and the shah’s international reputation. ISAUS, Re­sis­tance, December 1977, 1, ISAP. Courtesy of the Swarthmore College Peace Collection.

touted their “victory in Washington” (see Figure 1). Car­ter ­later described the embarrassing scene as “an augury” of t­ hings to come.1 Why w ­ ere so many Ira­nian students in the United States, and what accounted for such an astounding manifestation of diaspora politics in Washington on the eve of the Ira­nian Revolution? The answer is a cold war story. During the cold war, the threat of nuclear war forced the superpowers to wage war by other means and to compete to win the “hearts and minds” of ­people around the world. Hard power—­particularly wars along the periphery of the Eurasian core and economic might at home and among allies—­was central to American and Soviet cold war strategies. But “soft power,” defined as “the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion,” became an essential tactic of the larger U.S. strategy of containment.2 ­Education, a form of soft power with the ability to transform nations and, perhaps, to win hearts and minds, became a means by which the United States could cultivate friendly relations with nations at risk of falling ­under Soviet influence.

Education between Iran and the West

3

In this sense, international education was the “fourth dimension” of U.S. strategy, alongside military, economic, and po­liti­cal affairs.3 The arrival of Americans in Iran to provide technical, military, and educational assistance was one side of the coin; student migration to the United States was the other.4 As the superpowers moved “from total war to total diplomacy,” ­there ­were few countries outside of Eu­rope where the United States waged “total cold war” with more intensity than Iran.5 In strictly geostrategic terms, Iran was significant to U.S. policymakers. It shared a sixteen hundred-­mile border with the Soviet Union to the north, ­adjoined the Persian Gulf to the south, and sat atop 10 ­percent of the world’s petroleum deposits. The shah and his American supporters wanted to keep Iran anticommunist and integrated into the global economy. Together, they established a relationship that gave the United States a toehold in the Persian Gulf, created a bulwark against Soviet expansion along the northern tier of the M ­ iddle East, guaranteed the outward flow of Ira­nian oil, and strengthened the shah’s repressive security state. The classic narrative of U.S.-­Iran relations during the shah’s reign centers on t­hese geostrategic considerations and consists of state-­ centered histories that pay l­ittle attention to transnational ideas and actors.6 The best of the recent scholarship focuses ­either on par­tic­u­lar episodes in U.S.-­Iran relations or fleshes out the classic narrative of diplomacy and arms deals.7 This book reinterprets American-­Iranian relations through the lens of international education. Although the official American entrance into Ira­nian life ­occurred during the Second World War, 1950 gave birth to the first sustained exchange programs as Iranian Fulbright scholars began to arrive in the United States and education became the centerpiece to U.S. technical and military assistance programs in Iran. The start of the Iran Hostage Crisis in November 1979 and the severance of official diplomatic relations in April 1980 marked the end of the educational proj­ect that began during the early years of the cold war and the beginning of a new, chillier era of U.S.-­Iran relations. The interpretation that follows ­favors the epochal over the episodic, and it foregrounds the remarkable number of individuals inside and outside of government who ­shaped the contours of the binational relationship. It demonstrates that ­there was nothing inevitable about thirty-­seven years of U.S. support for the Shah of Iran. Losing Hearts and Minds argues that international education served a dual function in the American-­Iranian relationship. The volume of Ira­nian student ­migration to the United States was evidence of an intercultural dialogue exceptional in the history of Amer­i­ca’s relationship with the world. The Ira­nian student population grew from a mere five hundred in 1950 to upward of fifty thousand in the late 1970s to become the largest national group of students in the United States by the onset of the Ira­nian Revolution. U.S. policymakers, diplomats, aid officials, philanthropists, and educationalists created a vast array

4 Introduction

of government-­sponsored and nongovernmental educational programs to lay a cultural foundation for the Washington-­Tehran alliance and to supply the shah with trained manpower to administer his modernization program, known as the White Revolution. Ira­nian alumni of American universities ­were elected to the Ira­nian parliament (majlis), entered the shah’s bureaucracy, staffed the Plan Organ­ization and the National Ira­nian Oil Com­pany, worked in the financial ­sector, served in the armed forces, joined university faculties, and assumed the premiership. During their time abroad, Ira­nian students mingled with their American friends, shared ideas, and w ­ ere the most impor­tant “linkage figures” between the two countries from the Second World War to the Ira­nian Revolution.8 International education was not simply a means ­toward a strategic end that was defined by the U.S. and Ira­nian governments, however. It also provided a means of re­sis­tance. Ira­nian students abroad produced one of the most impressive oppositional movements of the cold war era, and their movement expanded in size and diversified in composition over the years as the shah refused to include po­liti­cal liberalization as part of his modernization program. B ­ ecause the Pahlavi state did not tolerate opposition within its borders, dissent became part of the educational networks that connected the United States and Iran. Although Washington supported the shah in the name of security and development, most anti-­shah students distinguished between the U.S. government and the American ­people. That distinction made it pos­si­ble for Ira­nian students to serve as unofficial ambassadors and form an alternate alliance with progressive Americans critical of the shah’s authoritarianism.9 Ira­nian students and their American allies a­ dopted worldviews that transcended traditional calculations of national interest, served as an alternative power center to national governments, and engaged in an evolving ­human rights discourse to delegitimize the shah’s claim to be a benevolent and modernizing monarch. Their evolving rights-­based critique of the Pahlavi state reached the halls of power in Washington and Tehran, reshaped the international community, and contributed to the Ira­nian Revolution of 1979 that replaced the shah’s Iran with Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini’s Islamic Republic.

Iran, Education, and the Modern World International education was a defining feature of Iran’s and the broader ­Middle East’s modern encounter with the West. Ira­nian culture has always valued education, an emphasis found in texts ranging from Zoroastrian scriptures to Saadi’s poems.10 But two developments precipitated the establishment of educational contacts between Iran and the West as the modern world system took shape in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. First, the nation-­building proj­ect in Iran

Education between Iran and the West

5

that began during the nineteenth ­century depended on a well-­educated cadre of military officers and civil servants to protect Iran’s sovereignty and administer nationalizing reforms. What began as a defensive response to Eu­ro­pean imperialism evolved ­until the 1970s when Iran, an oil-­rich U.S. ally, was able to dictate the terms of its own development. Second, Eu­ro­pe­ans and Americans saw education as a means to remake Iran in their own post-­Enlightenment image. Before the Second World War, Presbyterian missionaries ­were the face of American soft power and the “chosen instruments” that introduced new ideas to Iran.11 Nongovernmental organ­izations remained active ­after the war, but the U.S. government assumed greater responsibility for directing Ira­nian student migration as part of a broader cold war strategy. While the ties between Iran and the United States w ­ ere as strong as ever during the reign of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the tension between development and rights was never resolved. From the Napoleonic Wars (1798–1815) through the First World War (1914– 18), education was the centerpiece of the “defensive development” efforts of Egypt and the Ottoman Empire.12 The “gunpowder empires” of the ­Middle East enjoyed military superiority during the early modern era, but Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 shifted the balance of power in Eu­rope’s f­avor. Military setbacks compelled reform-­minded Egyptian khedives and Ottoman sultans to create new militaries that w ­ ere centrally administered, filled with conscripts, and staffed by salaried officers versed in Eu­ro­pean ways of war. Egypt’s Mohammad Ali (r. 1805– 48) led the way when he staffed his new officer school in Aswan with Eu­ro­pean teachers and sent teams of Egyptians to France to study war. Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II (r. 1808–39) followed suit. He opened the Imperial War College, brought in British, French, and Prus­sian officers to train his army and navy, and sent military men to Eu­rope. Leaders in Cairo and Istanbul also broke the religious establishment’s hold on land, law, and public life, established new schools that emphasized Eu­ro­pean languages, and sent young elites and civil servants to study in Eu­ro­pean capitals. As the Egyptian and Ottoman states grew, they needed technocrats, or “French knowers,” to guide the bureaucratic reforms. By the mid-­ nineteenth c­ entury, “the path to state employment passed through Paris,” and the road to nationalism passed through the new militaries, bureaucracies, and secular education systems.13 A similar pro­cess unfolded in Iran during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Qajar Dynasty (1785–1925) established the first links between national development and international education.14 In 1811 the modernizing crown prince, Abbas Mirza, arranged for two Persians to study medicine in ­England. Five ­others left in 1815 to study engineering and military sciences. The Qajars expected their young subjects to acquire skills in Eu­rope and, upon return, help ward off ­Great Britain and Rus­sia, two empires that competed for influence in Southwest

6 Introduction

Asia during the G ­ reat Game of the nineteenth c­ entury. In 1845, a­ fter suffering two crushing military defeats at the hands of Imperial Rus­sia, Naser ad-­Din Shah financed a “self-­strengthening” mission of five Persians to study military tactics and strategy in France. The establishment in 1851 of a polytechnic in Tehran, the Dar al-­Fonun, opened up valuable training to many more Ira­ni­ans but did l­ittle to curtail Iran’s reliance on Eu­ro­pean education. Realizing its importance, the Qajars renewed their commitment to international education in 1911 by designating thirty government scholarships for study abroad. When the First World War came to a close in 1918, approximately five hundred Persians ­were enrolled in Eu­ro­pean universities, two hundred of whom resided in France. Iran’s educational connections with the world accelerated ­under the Pahlavi Dynasty (1925–79). A ­ fter toppling the last Qajar shah, a former Cossack Brigade commander named Reza Khan assumed the title Reza Pahlavi, pulling his dynastic name from a pre-­Islamic Persian script. He centralized state authority by undercutting the influence of the clergy (ulama) in the schools and courts, an approach that signaled his determination to put secular education and Eu­ro­pean ideas to the ser­v ice of the state. In 1928 he signed a law that paid for 640 students to go to Eu­rope, and in 1934 he opened Tehran University, an institution based on the French educational model that remains Iran’s first and most prestigious institution of higher learning. When Tehran University’s doors opened, only 16 of the 1,175 Ira­nian students abroad w ­ ere in the United States.15 In fact, only 130 Ira­ni­ ans went to the United States between the mid-­nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.16 It was not ­until the cold war that the tide of Ira­nian student migration shifted away from Eu­rope and ­toward the United States. While few Ira­ni­ans studied in the United States before the cold war, many Ira­ ni­ans received an American education from Presbyterian missionaries. Harrison Gray Otis and Eli Smith arrived in Iran in 1830 to determine if the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions should open a post ­there. They concluded it should, and in 1835 five missionaries began work in Iran’s northwest. While the greatest legacy of the missionary presence in the M ­ iddle East is the American University of Beirut, the Ira­nian equivalent was Alborz College. Founded in 1873 as a primary school for Armenian and Jewish boys, it became a college in 1925 that enrolled young ­women and men and educated Muslims alongside Christians and Jews. In large part ­because of the school’s staffing needs, the American proselytizers in Iran outnumbered ­those from all other countries combined by the 1880s when the United States and Iran established official diplomatic relations. The most influential and respected of the Presbyterian missionaries was Samuel Martin Jordan, a Pennsylvanian and alumnus of Lafayette College who arrived in the country in 1898. Jordan strengthened the relationship between his alma mater and Alborz College, and by the 1920s Lafayette considered the school its

Education between Iran and the West

7

“special interest abroad.” ­Until its nationalization in 1940, Alborz College marked the first attempt by Americans to win the hearts and minds of young Ira­ni­ans.17

International Students in the United States Part and parcel of the rise of American globalism was the push from American universities to, for the first time, enroll a sizable number of international students. “China’s first hundred” exited the United States as nativist sentiment reached a fevered pitch in the 1880s, but a new generation of Chinese students returned in the early twentieth ­century as part of the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program.18 At the same time, Filipino students migrated to their colonial metropole as part of the pensionado program.19 While education was an instrument of state power as the United States burst onto the world stage in the early twentieth c­ entury, the educators and philanthropists who founded the Committee on Friendly Relations among Foreign Students, the Institute of International Education, and the International House Movement considered the exchange of p ­ eople part of an interna20 tionalist proj­ect. Yet the nationalist fervor that smoldered during the global ­depression of the 1930s meant that international education was once again “frankly envisaged as an instrument of official policy.”21 In 1936 U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull traveled to Buenos Aires to announce the creation of a government-­ funded scholarship program, directed by the new Office of Inter-­American Relations, designed to stave off fascism in the Western Hemi­sphere. Two years ­later, the Department of State established the Division for Cultural Relations, which presaged the further integration of education into the national security state.22 For American strategists, attracting students to the United States from all corners of the world was a cold war imperative. U.S. officials worried that, as communism superseded the fascist threat, the Soviets w ­ ere beating the United States to the punch in the educational sphere. George Kennan, the architect of the strategy of containment, expressed concern in his “Long Tele­gram” of February 1946 that the Soviet Union schemed to infiltrate international youth organ­izations.23 As the devaluation of Eu­ro­pean currencies cut in half the number of students ­capable of seeking respite from the war-­torn continent during the immediate postwar years, many youths enrolled in tuition-­free, “sovietized” universities in Eastern Eu­rope.24 To c­ounter Soviet maneuvers, President Harry Truman worked to “find more opportunities for foreign students to study in our schools and universities” so that they might “learn h ­ ere the skills and techniques needed in their own countries. . . . ​[and] see at first hand the rights and duties of citizens in our land of demo­cratic institutions.”25 To stabilize Eu­rope, the Truman

8 Introduction

a­ dministration unveiled the Marshall Plan for its economic reconstruction and the North Atlantic Treaty Organ­ization for its military protection. The administration also pi­loted cultural and informational programs to “sell the American way” to global publics.26 To t­ hose ends, Truman allocated money from the sale of surplus war material to globalize American education when he signed the Fulbright Act into law in 1946. Two years ­later, the Smith-­Mundt Act bolstered the Fulbright Program by authorizing two-­way exchanges financed by congressionally appropriated dollars, not from the sale of war junk.27 Iran signed a Fulbright agreement with the United States on September 1, 1949; it was the first ­Middle Eastern nation to do so and its impact was profound.28 Commenting on the relationship between economic aid and international education, one Ira­nian professor stated, “The United States has provided two g­ reat ­things for the world: the Marshall Plan and the Fulbright Program.”29

Modernization and International Education While the Marshall Plan was the first U.S.-­directed aid effort overseas and the Fulbright Program the gold standard for educational exchange, academics linked development and education within the framework of “modernization theory.” A theory of social, cultural, po­liti­cal, and economic change over time, modernization was a product of the cold war acad­emy. During the superpower conflict, the United States sought an ideology to match its material wealth and power.30 Walt Whitman Rostow, an economist, modernization theorist, and presidential adviser during the 1960s, outlined a “non-­communist manifesto” to blunt the appeal of Marxist-­Leninist doctrines as the race for influence in the third world began. Like Marxist-­Leninists, Rostow argued that all nations passed through stages of development as part of the larger pro­cess of modernization. But Rostow saw a dif­ fer­ent end point, insisting that “traditional” socie­ties ­were destined to reach an American-­style of “modernity.” Rostow and other theorists such as Daniel Lerner bolstered, then, a much older liberal teleology with the authority of social science. The telos they envisioned for third world nations was, on paper, defined by meritocracy, technical efficiency, mass production and consumption, mobility and urbanization, and demo­cratic governance.31 In par­tic­u­lar cases such as Iran’s, however, policymakers slighted demo­cratic governance ­because of security and economic interests.32 More generally, modernization theory was deeply flawed ­because it erroneously assumed a universal and transferable American way of life. Nonetheless, it was the dominant global paradigm at midcentury, and it was a theory that required educated global elites to implement. As David Menashri, the leading scholar of Ira­nian education, writes, a consensus existed during the first

Education between Iran and the West

9

two postwar de­cades that “education is the key that unlocks the door to modernization.”33 The Ira­nian Revolution of 1979 erased the final traces of that midcentury consensus, but the early twenty-­first ­century saw scholars historicize modernization theory and argue for its centrality in the history of U.S. foreign relations.34 In the modernization lit­er­at­ure, the shah’s Iran is but one example of many to which authors briefly point to demonstrate that U.S. policymakers, particularly during the presidency of John F. Kennedy, erred in waging cold war by employing modernization as a means to guide the pro­cesses of revolutionary change that unfolded in the postcolonial world.35 While scholars of Iran, most notably Fred Halliday and Ali Mirsepassi, provide comprehensive treatments of the Pahlavi state’s modernization proj­ect, American historians have been slow to analyze the relationship between that proj­ect and the United States. The centrality of international education to the successes and failures of the shah’s modernization program is also conspicuously absent from the lit­er­at­ ure.36 Nevertheless, international education was the staple ingredient to Ira­nian modernization ­because of the long-­ term educational connections between Iran and the West, vari­ous push and pull ­factors that made the United States the preferred destination for Ira­nian students during the cold war, and the worldviews of postwar American internationalists and Ira­nian leaders. During the cold war, the volume of Ira­nian student migration increased rapidly and the United States became the largest host country for Ira­nian students abroad. One “push” f­ actor that drove Ira­nian students overseas related to the structural limitations of Iran’s system of higher education. While the shah opened five new schools between 1949 and 1955, Iran’s population continued to outpace seats available at the nation’s universities.37 ­There ­were also “pull” ­factors that made American universities appealing to young Ira­ni­ans. The United States had a wealth of technical knowledge to share with the world, and Truman’s Point Four Program and ­later efforts by the U.S. Agency for International Development signaled Amer­i­ca’s commitment to sharing that knowledge. Overseas Con­sul­tants, Inc., one of the most influential of the shah’s American advisers, recognized as much when it reported that overseas training was “highly desirable” ­because it “assures the latest and best technical training and provides valuable contacts with foreign socie­ties as well as with foreign equipment and methods.”38 The assumption that only a superpower could properly educate Ira­nian modernizers owed a lot to older ste­reo­types and prejudices that emerged out of nineteenth-­century imperialism. One group of American officials expressed candidly their impression that Ira­nian universities w ­ ere “not geared to produce an expanded leadership cadre emotionally and intellectually equipped to act along lines favorable to American interests.”39 Postwar social scientists and aid workers

10 Introduction

concurred, theorizing that the “change agents” had to be local actors who, ­after they studied abroad or received training from foreign advisers, would initiate societal transformation.40 The po­liti­cal scientist Leonard B ­ inder articulated the prejudicial worldview of many postwar Americans when he wrote that modernization required “both a rejection of the existing system and a denial that beneficial change can grow out of it naturally.” For modernization to occur, B ­ inder continued, target groups needed to be “separately educated” to become capable of operating “in­de­pen­dent of their social and cultural environment.”41 Despite power imbalances that grew out of nineteenth-­century imperialism and carried into the cold war, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was committed to accelerating student migration and cultural exchange. Himself a product of Switzerland’s Le Rosey boarding school, the shah was ­eager to realize his ­father’s vision of a modern Iran through an approach to nation building that resembled “a military campaign.” Recognizing that he came to “largely rely . . . ​upon the young men whom we send abroad” to “transplant Western technology effectively to a country like Persia,” the shah viewed “Westernization” as a “welcome ordeal.” While the monarch wanted the West’s military prowess, technological capacities, infrastructural achievements, and consumer economy, he did not want po­liti­cal ideals from the United States and Eu­rope to interfere with his tightly controlled modernization program. The second Pahlavi shah, like his ­father, firmly believed that “education must first of all serve to create the patriotic devotion to Iran.”42

Student Migration and ­H uman Rights Despite the shah’s vision, rights advocates negotiated and contested the par­ameters of modernization in Iran, w ­ hether the defensive development efforts of the Qajars or the Pahlavis’ more sustained reforms. Since the nineteenth ­century, ­Middle Eastern leaders aspired to harness the technical knowledge and secularizing influences of the West to build nations and to erode traditional forms of authority. ­Those same leaders often worked to keep out other Eu­ro­pean influences, namely liberalism and democracy, but that proved a difficult task. As the historian Roy Mottahedeh writes, Ira­ni­ans who went to Eu­rope in the nineteenth ­century “learned more from their French-­speaking instructors than the calculation of cannonball trajectories and double-­entry bookkeeping.”43 The same can be said for the Ira­ni­ans who went to the United States during the cold war and became rights advocates. While nation building and modernization efforts compelled states to invest in educational programs, the postwar networks of globalized education provided unpre­ce­dented opportunities for individual students to pursue their own academic interests and establish relationships with Americans

Education between Iran and the West

11

who saw rights—­rather than development—as the most impor­tant priority for the international community. Similar to the modernization lit­er­at­ure, though, the growing historiography on ­human rights has left Iran on the sidelines.44 By and large, the ­human rights rec­ord of the Islamic Republic attracts more scholarly attention than ­those of the Pahlavi era. Ervand Abrahamian’s excellent investigation of torture in Iran, which includes chapters on the two Pahlavi shahs, is the exception to the rule.45 While this book offers a corrective to the temporal lopsidedness of the Iran lit­er­a­ture, it refocuses the U.S.-­centered lit­er­at­ ure that other­wise remains blinded to the importance of American-­Iranian transnational advocacy during the 1960s and 1970s ­because of a preoccupation with Jimmy Car­ter’s ­human rights policies.46 The cir­ cuits of migration and the cosmopolitanism of the Ira­nian student community created sites of exchange with po­liti­cally active Americans that facilitated the rise of a global h ­ uman rights discourse. H ­ uman rights ultimately recalibrated the international community and inserted the question of demo­cratic governance into American-­Iranian relations before the revolution of 1979.47 Global interconnectedness, more specifically the relationship between student migration and rights advocacy, helped to produce two revolutions in Iran during the twentieth ­century: the second was the Ira­nian Revolution of 1979 and the first was the Constitutional Revolution of 1906–11.48 To be sure, developments unique to Iran contributed to the historic drafting of a constitution and opening of the majlis, as power­ful mullahs and traditional merchants (bazaaris) ­were essential to the constitutional co­ali­tion. But the professional ­middle class, new to Iran at the turn of the twentieth ­century, provided the movement’s intellectual foundation as culturally significant writers, teachers, activists, professionals, and bureaucrats adapted philosophies from abroad to Ira­nian realities.49 Despite its vast empire, British parliamentarianism influenced Ira­nian reformers. The first Persian to study at Oxford University, Mirza Mohammad Saleh, described ­Great Britain in his memoirs as a “country of freedom,” and it was the British legation that provided shelter to Iran’s revolutionaries as they faced retaliation from their government in summer 1906.50 Moreover, Mansour Bonakdarian’s scholarship has demonstrated that ­Great Britain was a base from which Ira­nian students and ­expatriates or­ga­nized with like-­minded Britons to support the Constitutional Revolution as it unfolded at home.51 If educational migration galvanized the constitutional movement, it also created a transnational space in which the po­ liti­cal opponents of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi or­ga­nized during the mid-­ twentieth ­century. Anti-­shah students ­were therefore part of the broader effort at home and abroad to reconcile the contradictory legacies of the Constitutional Revolution and balance the relationship between monarchical authoritarianism and constitutional rule in Iran.52

12 Introduction

The inherently transnational nature of student migration and the rights discourse that grew out of this space produced unintended consequences that ran ­counter to the strategic objectives of U.S. and Ira­nian leaders. That it did was not the result of any fault in the binational educational proj­ect or the ­free flow of individuals between the United States and Iran, but rather the incongruity of national leaders promoting inherently liberal ideas—­the freedom of movement and global education—­while supporting the illiberal Pahlavi government. Although some Ira­ni­ans arrived in the United States with deeply held po­liti­cal views rooted in Iran’s past, o ­ thers ­were relatively apo­liti­cal before stepping onto American campuses during the tumultuous 1960s. What­ever their formative experiences, Ira­nian students enjoyed the relatively ­free environment in the United States and asked why their experiences abroad contrasted so sharply with the shah’s iron-­fisted rule in Iran. As the leading anti-­shah Ira­nian student organ­ization described its mission and that of other oppositionist groups in the diaspora, “­These organisations working in the relatively ­free atmosphere of Western Eu­rope and Amer­i­ca, rightly take advantage of their position in serving as forums for f­ ree expression of opinion and especially of discontent with the state of affairs in their c­ ountry.”53 Despite the ubiquity of Ira­nian student organ­izing at the time, the historiography of this significant phenomenon is sparse. Only one English-­language study, by Afshin Matin-­Asgari, focuses on the student movement abroad. Drawing on Persian-­language material and interviews with former leaders, he concentrates exclusively on the Confederation of Ira­nian Students National Union (CISNU).54 By contrast, this book expands on and adds texture to Matin-­Asgari’s pioneering study, both by incorporating a broader spectrum of actors and placing Ira­nian student migration within the context of U.S. international history. Jeremi Suri was the first historian to establish connections between student activism and foreign policy, and the narrative h ­ ere builds on Suri’s exploration of the ways in which the “global revolutions” of the 1960s contributed to the realignment and reimagining of the international system.55 More broadly, the pages that follow respond to Paul Kramer’s assertion that “the history of foreign student migration ­ought to be explored as U.S. international history, that is, as related to the question of U.S. power in its transnational and global extensions,” in order to “bring to the fore intersections between ‘student exchange’ and geopolitics.”56 The Ira­nian student movement bloomed during the years of preponderant American influence in Iran. The event that sparked the rights discourse was the Anglo-­American coup that overthrew demo­cratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq in 1953. The subsequent crackdown on the opposition and the shah’s U.S.-­supported program of authoritarian development meant that, if the concept of rights was to acquire any real meaning in Iran, an extended “intellectual field,” or “transnational public sphere,” would be the site of discursive negotia-

Education between Iran and the West

13

tion.57 Indeed, the rights discourse was never static and had multiple sources of inspiration. The Ira­nian student opposition abroad was ideologically, po­liti­cally, and socioeco­nom­ically diverse during the shah’s most repressive years, as Matin-­ Asgari’s dissection of the internal workings of the CISNU reveals. Many w ­ ere inspired by the revolutionaries of the early twentieth ­century and objected to the ways in which the shah rendered their pre­de­ces­sors’ two major achievements—­the constitution and the majlis—­irrelevant as he consolidated all authority within the confines of the Royal Court. Liberal nationalists inspired by the Constitutional Revolution and l­ater Mosaddeq’s National Front guided the Ira­nian student movement during the 1950s and early 1960s. The latter part of the de­cade saw supporters of Maoist revolution emerge as the most power­ful ­faction in student circles overseas. By the 1970s, two new ideas—­Islamism and universal ­human rights—­entered the student diaspora at a time when the shah’s government began to teeter on the brink of collapse.58 Despite the fact that the shah’s opponents w ­ ere influenced to varying degrees by constitutionalism, liberal nationalism, strands of Marxism-­ Leninism, Islamism, and universal ­human rights, their core objectives remained consistent. Peyman Vahabzadeh makes this point in his study of Iran’s guerrilla movement. He argues that Iran’s young secular-­Left fighters ­were, despite the inherently violent nature of guerrilla warfare, “obliquely enlivened by a demo­cratic impulse that was cloaked ­under the revolutionary discursive mantle of the time.”59 The “demo­cratic impulse” became manifest in the United States as the Ira­nian student movement embraced the language of rights during the 1960s and 1970s. That language resonated with a wide range of Americans who received information from Ira­nian students but often had their own reasons for opposing U.S. support for the shah. Progressive Americans and Ira­ni­ans rejected the idea that freedom and authority, democracy and modernization, ­were mutually exclusive in the Ira­nian context. They opposed the official alliance between Washington and Tehran that was predicated on the premise that anticommunist statism, a less vibrant po­liti­cal milieu, and a more forceful role for the military and security forces would ensure the continued flow of Ira­nian oil and keep Iran firmly ­entrenched in the Western camp. To the frustration of the shah and U.S. policymakers, po­liti­ cally active Ira­nian youths forged relationships with empathetic Americans who shared with them a po­liti­cally progressive internationalism that rejected the shah’s authoritarian model of development, challenged the American assumptions that propelled U.S. ascendance in the Persian Gulf region, and called for the realization of civil and po­liti­cal rights in Iran.

The five chapters that follow collectively reconstruct the American-­Iranian relationship during the cold war through the lens of international education. They

14 Introduction

demonstrate that the fundamental tension in the binational relationship derived from the incompatibility between U.S. support for the shah’s modernization program and the collective American and Ira­nian calls for greater access to rights in Iran. The tone is critical and rejects the notion that U.S. policy treaded a road that was “paved with good intentions,” instead marching lockstep with the shah to promote “dictatorship and development” at the crossroads of domestic stability and regional security.60 Consequently, contradictions emerged between the vari­ous “tracks” of American diplomacy in Iran. High-­level diplomacy between heads of state was committed to the shah’s military buildup and program of authoritarian development that did not allow Iran’s educated citizenry to participate meaningfully in the po­liti­cal pro­cess. By contrast, people-­to-­people exchanges ­were more participatory and provided opportunities for Americans and Ira­ni­ ans to rethink the nature of development in Iran, the importance of rights in the international community, and the relationship between their countries.61 Chapter 1 locates the origins of American-­Iranian educational cooperation in the 1950s and tracks the evolution of the U.S. approach ­toward international education from Harry Truman’s presidency to that of Dwight Eisenhower. While the national security state partly co-­opted international education during the cold war, student exchange was the product of public-­private cooperation.62 On the one hand ­were the government-­directed security assistance programs, Point Four technical aid, and the State Department’s International Educational Exchange Program. On the other w ­ ere two impor­tant but nominally private organ­izations: the Ford Foundation and the American Friends of the M ­ iddle East (AFME). While the number of organ­izations dedicated to strengthening educational ties between the United States and Iran proliferated throughout the de­cade, the contradictions between encouraging student migration and supporting the shah as an agent of modernization and anticommunism remained unresolved. Chapter 2 shows how ­those contradictions became vis­i­ble during the early 1960s as Ira­nian student activists in the United States contributed to debates on modernization and rights during the Kennedy administration. In 1961 and 1962, Supreme Court Justice William Douglas and Attorney General Robert Kennedy corresponded regularly with a cohort of Ira­nian students in New York and Washington, D.C. They lobbied Kennedy administration officials to make po­liti­cal liberalization part of a policy that was allegedly designed to promote comprehensive development in Iran. This transnational community of “­free speech modernists” put forth the first rights-­based critique of the Pahlavi state. Its members argued that modern socie­ties must necessarily welcome freedom of expression and accept constitutional restraints on centralized leadership. But their narrow focus on the po­liti­cal aspects of modernity pitted them against the Iran analysts in the State Department and the National Security Council who regained a grip

Education between Iran and the West

15

over the formulation of policy once the shah launched his White Revolution in 1963. Despite the protestations of Ira­nian students and their expanding network of American supporters, official Washington came to see calls for po­liti­cal liberalization as an unnecessary complication that threatened U.S. security interests in the Persian Gulf region. Chapter 3 moves away from policymaking to analyze how Ira­nian and Western students reshaped the international community. As it became clear that po­liti­cal liberalization was not coming to Iran, the U.S. National Student Association (USNSA), and l­ater New Leftists, joined their Ira­nian counter­parts in placing the Pahlavi regime at the center of a global culture of student protest that highlighted the abuses of state power. The sharing of space, ideas, and resources made it pos­si­ble for the “student internationalists” of the 1960s to advance the second rights-­based critique of the Pahlavi state. They broadened the constitutionalist critique to one that delegitimized the very notion of authoritarianism and the inclusion of undemo­cratic states in the so-­called ­free world. The anti-­authoritarian critique that blossomed during the “global sixties” fundamentally restructured the international community. It weakened the cold war order, challenged traditional notions of sovereignty, drew greater attention to rights violations, and closed an era that heralded national governments and their leaders as being capable of ushering in a peaceful and just world.63 The student internationalists took one step ­toward the universalism that ­human rights workers embraced during the subsequent de­cade Chapter 4 explores the educational initiatives of the 1970s, a de­cade that saw the Ira­nian student population in the United States qua­dru­ple in size. In one of history’s unfortunate turn of events, the explosion of travel between the two countries and the initiation of what would ­later be called a “dialogue of civilizations” coincided with the shah’s most repressive years.64 In addition to facilitating cultural exchange, colleges and universities in the United States bolstered American and Ira­nian security interests in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean by training members of the Imperial Ira­nian Navy. Perhaps most significant over the long term was the special program in nuclear engineering that the Mas­sa­chu­setts Institute of Technology devised for Ira­nian students to support the shah’s nuclear ambitions. ­These initiatives ­were supposed to realize the military, technological, and cultural dimensions of the shah’s vision of modernity. They brought the educational relationship that began in 1950 full circle by providing the illusion that the Pahlavi state had successfully harnessed international education to its modernization program. The final chapter places Iran at the center of the “­human rights revolution.”65 During the 1970s, as the Pahlavi regime’s repression reached unpre­ce­dented heights, anti-­shah Ira­nian students abroad, a new class of elected officials on Capitol Hill, and organ­izations such as Amnesty International and the International

16 Introduction

Commission of Jurists employed the universalist language of ­human rights to challenge Amer­i­ca’s Iran strategy. Theirs was the third and most power­ful rights-­ based critique of the Pahlavi state. Together, they overturned the consensus on development that held that citizens of the third world needed to sacrifice po­liti­ cal and civil rights to repressive states in the name of economic growth and national development. This shift eliminated the international legitimacy that had sustained the shah’s leadership for de­cades, while pressuring the monarch to make his first tepid moves ­toward po­liti­cal liberalization. The reluctant nod ­toward liberalization during the shah’s final years emboldened his opponents, altered the dynamic between state and society, and set in motion a series of events that culminated with the revolution in 1979. In the end, the wide academic bridge and robust educational network that connected the United States and Iran during the cold war produced technocrats, revolutionaries, and every­thing in between. Significantly, the 1970s ended with revolutionary upheaval in Iran, a pro­cess that was, during its first year, guided by a group of Western-­educated Ira­ni­ans who ­were intermediaries between Khomeini’s camp, the secular opposition, and the wider world.

1 THE FOUNDATION Education, Development, and the Tenuous Path of the 1950s We are Western educated, we get our ideas from the West, we want the West to help develop our oil and we want to do our business with the West. But we ­don’t want military alliances with anybody, we want to be neutrals, not Communists. If you ­don’t hamper the nationalists by supporting the ­people who try to repress nationalism I ­don’t think the Communists have much chance ­here. —­An “Educated Ira­nian” (1959)

The Second World War precipitated a sea change in American influence in Iran. Before the war, U.S. policymakers did “not consider Persia an area of ­great advantage to American interests.”1 Washington’s calculus changed ­after British and Soviet troops invaded Iran in August 1941, secured Ira­nian oil for the Allies, deposed Reza Shah and subdued his army, and installed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as his ­father’s successor. President Franklin Roo­se­velt declared the young shah’s government eligible for Lend-­Lease aid in March 1942, and thirty thousand U.S. troops arrived with the Persian Gulf Ser­vice Command to shut­tle supplies to their Soviet ally through the “Persian Corridor.” While the Red Army’s “bridge to victory” crossed over the Ira­nian plateau, Iran’s f­ uture would be determined by the subsequent peace.2 Iran was the first hot spot of the cold war outside of Eu­rope. Franklin Roo­se­velt, Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill agreed in the Tehran Declaration of 1943 to withdraw their occupying forces from Iran six months a­fter war’s end. When March 1946 arrived, however, Stalin balked and instead established two p ­ eople’s republics in Iran’s northwest. Iran petitioned the United Nations, Prime Minister Ahmad Qavam engaged in tactful diplomacy, and the United States mobilized combat divisions. In response to international pressure, the Red Army withdrew in May 1946. Iran retained its territorial integrity and the superpowers avoided a shooting war, but Iran entered the crosshairs of the superpower conflict, where it would remain.3

17

18 CHAPTER 1

With Soviet expansion contained, the official U.S. presence in Iran remained. Most noticeable ­were the five advisory missions that Roo­se­velt deployed in 1942. General Clarence Ridley directed the first mission to resuscitate the demoralized Ira­nian army, and American advisers carried on Ridley’s mission ­until 1978. The second and most successful was Norman Schwarzkopf Sr.’s team of two dozen law enforcement officials that retrained the Gendarmerie (rural police). While Schwarzkopf left in 1948, his advisory mission stayed in Iran through the 1970s. A third American mission worked with the Ministry of Finance to stabilize the economy and streamline the bureaucracy. Arthur Millspaugh was tasked with the same assignment in the 1920s, and he failed for a second time in the 1940s, largely ­because of his own insolence. Two other missions worked with the Ministry of Food and Supply and the National Police; the former was a war­time necessity and the latter mattered more in the 1950s. As the historian Mark Lytle has explained, some saw the missions as b ­ earers of a “New Deal” for an Iran that would “begin a transformation from an impoverished, semifeudal, traditional rural society into a progressive nation.” Ultimately, however, the Second World War made modernization through training and education “instruments of an emerging containment policy.”4 The U.S. strategy of containment evolved within the context of Iran’s “liberal moment.” It was a period of experimentation that blossomed around the world ­after the war broke the conservative limitations of the prewar order, but before the interests of traditional elites and American power aligned to stifle homegrown demo­cratic movements.5 The National Front, which coalesced as a po­liti­cal force in October 1949 ­under Mohammad Mosaddeq’s leadership, was Iran’s liberal moment incarnate. Born in 1882, Mosaddeq studied law in Switzerland and held vari­ous government posts in Qajar Iran. He chafed ­under the Pahlavi dictatorship, but Reza Shah’s exile allowed him to reenter the po­liti­cal arena as the leading populist nationalist. A link between the masses and elites and Iran and the West, the National Front’s core consisted of liberals and radicals educated abroad, mainly France. It was ­these men—­Hosein Fatemi, Karim Sanjabi, and Ali Shayegan—to whom Mosaddeq looked to fill cabinet posts when he was elected prime minister in April 1951.6 The durability of Iran’s liberal moment was put to the test during the era of National Front governance from 1951 to 1953. During his premiership, Mosaddeq fought a two-­front ­battle. Domestically, the shah was unwilling to relinquish power to a po­liti­cal co­ali­tion working to ­revive the republican princi­ples of the constitutional era. Internationally, Mosaddeq had to contend with British oil interests. In 1901 the British received a concession for the rights to Ira­nian oil, and in 1909 what became the Anglo-­Iranian Oil Com­pany discovered black gold in the Khuzestan province. By the end of the Second World War, the British-­owned refinery in Abadan was the largest in the world. The British reaped the profits from Iran’s vast energy deposits as the Ira­nian

The Foundation

19

government received a small and often underpaid percentage in royalties. That is why, on March 15, 1951, and at Mosaddeq’s urging, the majlis voted to nationalize the Anglo-­Iranian Oil Com­pany. The British responded by imposing a blockade in an attempt to use economic pressure to ­settle the diplomatic dispute.7 The time had come for the United States to choose sides, yet Harry Truman’s response was a mixed bag. On the one hand, his efforts to keep global oil markets stable buttressed the blockade, and covert efforts to discredit the communist Tudeh Party weakened the National Front, too. On the other hand, the administration rejected British plans to forcibly reestablish their position in Abadan, provided Mosaddeq with foreign aid to keep the economy afloat, and crafted a compromise whereby the British and Ira­ni­ans would split the oil profits. Prime Minister Churchill rejected the deal in 1951 before he accepted the fifty-­fifty profit-­sharing agreement one year ­later. By 1952, however, Mosaddeq was in no mood to compromise. Both sides had hardened their positions by the start of Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency in January 1953.8 The confluence of cold war geopolitics, the desire to make inroads into Iran’s oil market, and cultural misunderstandings led Eisenhower to conclude that the old man from Ahmadabad needed to go. Concerned that the Tudeh might capitalize on the economic and po­liti­cal unrest, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and British Secret Intelligence Ser­v ice (MI6) fomented a coup, known as Operation TP-­AJAX, that removed Mosaddeq from power on August 19, 1953. The shah, who fled to Italy as the plot unfolded, returned and placed Mosaddeq ­under ­house arrest.9 In the end, neither Mosaddeq nor the British could claim victory. The demise of the Anglo-­Iranian Oil Com­pany and the establishment in 1954 of an international oil consortium, within which American companies held a 40 ­percent share, marked the end of ­Great Britain’s privileged standing and the beginning of the American “ascendance” in Iran.10 The Eisenhower administration used its ascendant power to strengthen the monarch and military at the expense of the liberal, ­middle class nationalists of the National Front. While U.S. officials misunderstood many aspects of Ira­nian life, a sympathetic White House knew that the shah was “clearly determined to use authoritarian means if necessary to maintain stability and carry forward ­desirable economic and po­liti­cal programs.”11 To ­those ends, the shah instated martial law for three years ­after the coup, restricted the freedoms of speech and assembly, scattered the National Front into disarray, destroyed the Tudeh, and disrupted the ulama. He then established two compliant po­liti­cal parties—­ the Mardom (­People’s) and Melliyun (Nationalist) Parties—to regain his grip on the majlis.12 In exchange for foreign aid and security guarantees, the shah aligned Iran with the West in the cold war. In 1955 Iran became a founding member of the Baghdad Pact (renamed the Central Treaty Organ­ization, or CENTO, a­ fter 1958),

20 CHAPTER 1

and in 1959 the two countries signed a defense agreement that pledged the United States to defend Iran.13 The shah’s policies, combined with the fallout from the Suez Crisis of 1956 and Iraqi Revolution of 1958, made Iran appear to be a stable non-­Arab ally and an indispensable safeguard against the rising appeal of Arab Nationalism and the Soviet model of development.14 While the two most impor­tant U.S. objectives in Iran ­were to guarantee ­regional security and access to oil, American and Ira­nian leaders saw a comprehensive program of development as a prerequisite for all e­ lse. The shah’s development program, known as the White Revolution by the 1960s, had its origins in the 1950s. It was an undemo­cratic modernization scheme that did not include widespread citizen participation and relied on Western-­educated elites to guide a controlled pro­cess of socioeconomic transformation. The prob­lem was that the undemo­cratic and elitist nature of Ira­nian development required the Pahlavi state to become autonomous from Ira­nian society, an ends to which American educational programs contributed.15 While Truman initiated the first sustained, government-­led military training and technical assistance initiatives, the Eisenhower administration gave focus to t­hose programs and utilized nongovernmental organ­izations as part of its postcoup Iran strategy. Without the emphasis on manpower training during the 1950s, t­ here could have been no White Revolution the following de­cade. Both administrations framed international training and education within an evolving approach to aid that called for foreign nationals, rather than American advisers, to guide national development. As early as 1950, the Truman administration recognized that ­there was “a growing body in Iran of competent young men, especially engineers, trained abroad,” qualified for public ser­v ice. Given Iran’s energy reserves, “­There seems ­little doubt but that with proper management Iran is capable of supporting considerable economic development.”16 During the 1950s, as U.S. policymakers, development officials, military advisers, educationalists, and philanthropists aimed for the “maximum utilization of Ira­nian leadership,” international education became the foundation for Iran’s development and a pillar of the U.S.-­Iran relationship.17 But that pillar had unstable foundations, as the shah’s consolidation of power following the 1953 coup ended Iran’s liberal moment and compromised the objectives of the educational enterprise. Consequently, Ira­ni­ans who studied and received training in the United States ­were enmeshed in a transnational web of conflicting interests, torn between their concerns about Iran’s vanishing democracy and the economic development of their country. For their part, American proponents of international education ­were caught between an intensifying Ira­nian nationalism and Washington’s security interests in the Persian Gulf region. The Truman and Eisenhower administrations set U.S. policy down a tenuous path during the 1950s.

The Foundation

21

Militar y Assistance and Point Four Come to Iran With the Soviet machinations of 1946 fresh on his mind and poverty plaguing much of Iran’s countryside, Harry Truman came to see the Persian Gulf as a cold war battleground. Although the Ira­nian military could never deter Soviet aggression, Truman reluctantly initiated a security relationship that strengthened the Pahlavi state and eventually made Iran a power­ful regional actor. To improve the quality of life of the Ira­nian ­people and dampen the appeal of the communist model of development, Truman pi­loted the first U.S. government aid program for the extra-­European world: Point Four. Both the military and technical assistance programs required training, and they marked the first time that the U.S. government made international education part of its Iran strategy. While an assortment of British, French, German, Ottoman, and Rus­sian ­advisers trained previous generations of Ira­nian military men, the U.S. military mission that Ridley established introduced a new generation of Ira­ni­ans to American equipment and know-­how.18 The U.S. and Ira­nian governments agreed in October 1947 to make Ridley’s war­time mission the more permanent and better coordinated U.S. Military Mission to the Ira­nian Army (ARMISH). The mission professionalized military administration and trained the ranks in how to use the U.S.-­made equipment that began to arrive u ­ nder the 1948 Surplus Arms Credit Agreement and the 1949 Mutual Defense Assistance Program.19 The mission also started a training program that sent a small but impor­tant group of Ira­nian officers to U.S. military schools. During its first year, the military mission distributed 119 training grants equally between Iran’s army and air force.20 Advisers with the mission identified a dearth of instructors qualified to teach at Iran’s military schools, and some returnees filled the void. In fall 1951 two Ira­ni­ans who studied at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, accepted assignments to teach artillery, and a gradu­ate of the officer’s training course at Fort Knox, Kentucky, became the commandant of Iran’s Armored School.21 Most trainees remained in the United States from two months to one year, which provided ample time to adjust to a new environment without losing touch with realities in Iran. One group of Ira­nian col­o­nels studied for nearly a year in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, while other Ira­ni­ans scattered the country to receive air training and study engineering, finance, and medicine.22 Some of ­these Ira­ni­ans ­later climbed the ranks of the shah’s military establishment. By the mid-1960s, no less than ten of the most high-­ranking officers in the Imperial Ira­nian Army ­were Leavenworth alums, known collectively as the “Dream Team.”23 Hassan ­Toufanian, “the face” of Iran’s massive arms procurement program in the 1970s, completed his two years of training in the United States in 1952.24 This aid

22 CHAPTER 1

notwithstanding, the shah was disappointed that the training grants ­were not part of a larger, more ambitious military assistance program. The Truman administration preferred to devote its resources in Iran to the Point Four Program, a more sustainable and less financially burdensome program of material support. Building on the pre­ce­dents set by Truman Doctrine aid to Greece and Turkey and the more extensive Marshall Plan for Western Eu­rope, Truman proclaimed in his 1949 inaugural address that his administration’s fourth objective, hence the program’s name, was to “embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial pro­gress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas.”25 Announced one year ­after communists seized power in Czecho­slo­va­kia and as American planes flew supplies into West Berlin over the Soviet blockade, Point Four committed the United States “to prepare its defenses and to send out its soldiers in a campaign on fields where peace must be won or lost in the hearts of ­people.”26 As Iran entered the 1950s, the State Department’s Iran hands concluded that “stability can be maintained only through material assistance from the U.S.”27 In other words, the Truman administration used the means of development to accomplish the ends of security in areas of the world that traditionally fell outside of the American sphere of influence but ­were now susceptible to communist subversion. Negotiations over the type of development-­related training best suited for Iran took place in early 1950 between Iran’s economic planners, American con­sul­tant Max Thornburg, and Haldore Hanson, whose experience in China during the 1930s won him the directorship of the Point Four Program in Asia. The group was divided between ­those who favored in-­country training and ­others who worried about the potential po­liti­cal fallout of flooding Iran with American advisers. Hanson suggested that, ­because the Ira­nian government set aside “considerable money” for overseas education, Point Four should devote the bulk of its funds to sending Ira­ni­ans to the United States. Thornburg demurred, asserting that Point Four should send American technicians to Iran to conduct “demonstrations” and supervise the implementation of development proj­ects.28 Although Thornburg’s emphasis on field training formed the core of Point Four, overseas training was vital to its mission. When discussing Iran, Truman ­later stated that educating students in the United States and sending them home to “put into practice what they had learned” was “the ­simple inexpensive idea we built on when we launched our [P]oint 4 program.”29 On October 19, 1950, representatives of the U.S. and Ira­nian governments inked the first Point Four agreement of the cold war. As authorized u ­ nder the ­Foreign Economic Assistance Act of 1950, the State Department’s Technical Cooperation Administration (TCA) was the first of many government agencies to administer the program from Washington. In Iran, a group of Ira­ni­ans and

The Foundation

23

Americans that included the ambassador oversaw its implementation. William Warne, a former official in the Department of Interior, was Iran’s Point Four country director. During the first half of the 1950s, the United States sent $90 million to Iran in the form of technical aid to build w ­ ater and sewage systems in Tehran, eradicate malaria, improve the stock of Iran’s mules and chickens, and reform Iran’s educational system.30 Following Thornburg’s recommendations, educators from Brigham Young University directed “demonstration schools” to introduce liberal arts pedagogies to a country whose French educational system gave priority to rote memorization, while technicians from Utah State University taught agricultural development.31 Point Four’s signature initiatives in Iran, then, tackled education, rural development, and public health. Some of the first Ira­nian alumni of American schools led the pi­lot program in Isfahanak. Point Four officials charged an Ira­nian who studied construction at an American agricultural college with repurposing an old building into the village’s first school. He dug a fresh-­water well, assembled desks for classrooms, and other­w ise applied his skills to ensure the school’s pupils a healthy learning environment. A second member of the Ira­nian staff in Isfahanak, a U.S.-­trained horticulturalist, ran the school’s garden proj­ect and taught the ­students modern agricultural techniques.32 Nowhere was U.S. training more valuable than in the field of public health, an area that American aid workers considered the most “formidable barrier to social and economic development.”33 The eight doctors, sanitation experts, and technicians who received one-­year scholarships for medical training w ­ ere among the first Ira­ni­ans to travel to the United States on Point Four funds. Other Ira­ni­ans received shorter, three-­month travel grants to survey medical facilities in the United States.34 The program’s f­ uture became temporarily uncertain in spring 1951 with the election of Mohammad Mosaddeq as prime minister, the nationalization of the oil industry, and the subsequent financial crisis. Although Mosaddeq condemned military aid, American officials w ­ ere pleasantly surprised that he was a fan of Point Four. Mosaddeq actually wanted the United States to make greater financial commitments to Iran’s development.35 Rather than any intransigence on the prime minister’s part, the real danger to the ­future of educational cooperation was the lack of rials (Iran’s currency) in the Point Four commission’s trea­sury. By fall 1951, Iran’s economy was reeling from the British embargo, leading Point Four officials in Iran to warn that “the coffers are ­going dry—­and fast.” Without sufficient rials, American dollars would have to carry the aid program through the oil crisis. To withhold the needed dollars “would shatter this program beyond repair” and convince the Ira­ni­ans that Americans ­were nothing more than “fair weather friends.”36 Adding to the predicament was that Iran’s foreign exchange was set to run dry in March 1952.37 In spite of financial challenges, the Truman administration saw

24 CHAPTER 1

Point Four through the oil crisis. In April 1952 the U.S. government assured Point Four’s survival in Iran by infusing it with more than $23 million.38 The Point Four agreements of spring 1952 renewed both nations’ commitment to educational cooperation and earmarked three pots of money for Ira­nian ­students abroad. The first was “the largest and most elaborate of all the Point 4 training programs,” and it sent Ira­ni­ans to the United States for “topping-­off study.” Rather than enroll in degree programs, approximately one hundred Ira­ nian specialists went to the United States each year for field training. The second grant sent approximately forty Ira­ni­ans per year to the American University in Beirut to study nursing, engineering, and agriculture. The third and most creative component was the Emergency Student Aid Program. As part of this program, the United States set aside one million dollars for students already overseas who, b ­ ecause of dollar-­to-­rial exchange restrictions, needed “to be rescued or drop out.” ­Under the terms of the Emergency Student Aid Program, in effect to 1955, Ira­nian parents deposited rials with the Point Four commission in Tehran to fund its programs while the Near East Foundation in New York distributed the equivalent amount of dollars to their c­ hildren. ­These dollars ­were available to any student enrolled in at least one technical course who pledged to return to Iran ­after graduation. Warne, who remembered the emergency program as one of his most “outstanding contributions,” thought that aid seemed to “offer good ­will at lowest rate.”39 Although Iran did not feel the socioeconomic impact of Point Four trainees ­until the 1960s, the po­liti­cal value of Ira­ni­ans who received U.S.-­financed military training grants became immediately clear in 1953 as the coup against Mosaddeq neared. In February, as vio­lence flared in Khuzestan and riots erupted in Tehran, American advisers reported that the Ira­nian army “prevented any mob leadership from developing.” At this time, some of the 314 officers who trained at U.S. ser­v ice schools between 1950 and 1952 went public with their opposition to Mosaddeq and steadfast support for the monarchy. By March, the pro-­shah officers consolidated their power and began to distribute anti-­Mosaddeq handbills to military units throughout Tehran. Their American advisers quietly speculated that the U.S.-­trained officers ­were “planning active participation in any ­future demonstrations.”40 Abbas Farzanegan was the most impor­tant of the U.S.-­trained generals. He was an intelligence asset, trained at Fort Leavenworth, and the link between the CIA station in Tehran and the Ira­nian military as coup planning got ­under way.41 Commenting on the po­liti­cal impact of such trainees, the director of the U.S. Army’s Office of Military Assistance ­later testified before Congress that the officer training program helped to swing the momentum away from Mosaddeq and ­toward the shah at the critical moment in August 1953. A ­ fter the coup removed Mosaddeq, that same U.S. official identified “the results we have gotten

The Foundation

25

and are getting out of training officers of the Ira­nian armed forces in the United States” as “one of the most effective ­factors” in strengthening the “loyal armed forces who sustained the Shah, and remained loyal to him.”42

Eisenhower’s “Total Cold War” in Iran The lessons of the Mosaddeq era showed Dwight Eisenhower that targeted educational programs, coupled with military and economic aid, ­were instrumental in waging “total cold war” in Iran.43 Indeed, John Foster Dulles’s State Department determined that Western-­educated Ira­ni­ans ­were “impor­tant to U.S. policy objectives.”44 The U.S. Information Agency (USIA), which Eisenhower created in summer 1953, agreed that U.S.-­educated Ira­ni­ans formed “the raw material of ­future leadership” and was “the most impor­tant single source of American-­ oriented influence.”45 To shore up that source of influence, the Eisenhower administration ­adopted a three-­tier approach to international education. The first two tiers strengthened what social scientists at the time called the “machinery of rationalization”—­the security forces and the state bureaucracy.46 The third tier promoted cultural exchange on a scale that overshadowed Truman-­era initiatives. Together, the educational programs of the Eisenhower years ­were, the U.S. embassy in Tehran determined, “an effective means of improving our relations with Iran through mutual understanding and of reinforcing ­those ele­ments of its society which ­will create a favorable climate for our foreign policy.”47 The backbone of the Pahlavi state and the Eisenhower administration’s first and most impor­tant target group was the security establishment. By the end of the 1950s, the security establishment included the military, the rural and urban police forces, and the National Intelligence and Security Organ­ization (known by the Persian acronym SAVAK).48 From 1953 to 1961, Washington sent $500 million in military aid to Iran, and Tehran’s defense expenditures grew nearly six times over. This aid allowed the shah to expand the size of his armed forces from 120,000 to 200,000 troops. By 1956 the largest U.S. military aid mission in the world was in Iran.49 “U.S. military aid,” Eisenhower’s National Security Council (NSC) concluded, “serves to improve Army morale, cement Army loyalty to the Shah, and thus consolidate the pres­ent regime and provide some assurance that Iran’s current orientation ­toward the West ­will be perpetuated.”50 The United States devoted considerable resources to the Ira­nian army. The Pahlavi regime had, since the founding of a national army in the 1920s, been dependent on the military to centralize power.51 However, the humiliating defeat in 1941 indicated that the Ira­nian army was l­ ittle more than a paper tiger, something that needed to change for Iran to be an effective cold war ally. Although the

26 CHAPTER 1

overseas training program began ­under Truman, Eisenhower brought nearly three thousand Ira­nian officers to the United States during his presidency. The annual numbers ­rose dramatically between 1957 and 1960 as Washington revised its strategy and bolstered its regional defenses in the aftermath of the Suez Crisis and Iraqi Revolution. Nearly one thousand Ira­nian officers trained in the United States in 1959 alone.52 Strengthening the Ira­nian police forces was another means of preventing Iran from becoming the next Soviet-­backed revolutionary republic in the M ­ iddle East ­after Egypt and Iraq. To assist the shah with this task, the United States sent J. J. Leonard, a Chicago police captain and counterintelligence officer, to train Taimur Bakhtiar, then the military governor of Tehran, in domestic countersubversion.53 While Bakhtiar was trained in Iran, many of his lieutenants studied in the United States. In fall 1954 members of the Ira­nian Gendarmerie received Point Four grants to study the techniques of the New Jersey State Police, whose former chief, Norman Schwarzkopf Sr., worked with that same rural police force in the 1940s.54 At nearby New York University, the ­legal adviser to the Ira­nian National Police, an instructor at the Ira­nian Police College, and a Tehran Police Department captain took classes in administration, interrogation, and penology. They also took a detective course at the New York Police Acad­emy and toured local prisons.55 ­These police officers w ­ ere part of “a carefully selected group” of approximately 218 Ira­ni­ans who, over the next two de­cades, received training in the United States on subjects ranging from prison management to civil disturbance control. In 1957, when an American aid worker went to Iran to remodel Iran’s National ­Police Acad­emy, five U.S.-­trained officers ­were among the first to join the new faculty. That same year, U.S. officials reported that their efforts “contributed significantly to improved internal security in Iran.”56 Then ­there was SAVAK. Established in 1957, the notorious organ­ization was charged with “the maintenance of national security.” It consisted of nine departments, with the Second and Third Departments responsible for collecting foreign intelligence and maintaining internal security. Since its inception, SAVAK had the ­legal authority to h ­ andle all po­liti­cal crimes against the state in closed military tribunals. The shah appointed SAVAK’s chiefs and gave them the title of deputy prime minister. Housing SAVAK in the prime minister’s office gave the shah a kind of plausible deniability when it came to the question of torture. However, as one writer noted, “SAVAK was entirely its own master, answerable only to the Shah,” serving as his eyes, ears, and hammer. Over the years, SAVAK earned a reputation at home and abroad for its zealous inclination for torturing po­liti­cal prisoners.57 SAVAK epitomized Eisenhower’s use of overseas training to “modernize repression.” To help SAVAK get off the ground, the CIA turned to someone who al-

The Foundation

27

ready had the training—­Taimur Bakhtiar—to head the new security organ­ization. To guarantee that he was up for the job, Bakhtiar went to the United States to receive additional training from the CIA.58 He was not alone, as many first-­ generation SAVAK officers went to the United States, G ­ reat Britain, France, and West Germany to study surveillance, interrogation, and communications techniques.59 The time that ­these trainees spent in the West and the fact that many ­were “smooth, well-­educated young men who dressed . . . ​in designer suits with wide ties and heavy gold cufflinks” did not make them liberal demo­crats.60 One scholar who researched in Iran during the shah’s reign observed that “the Western-­ educated professionals ­were the most ruthless members of SAVAK.”61 When SAVAK came ­under fire in the 1970s for torturing po­liti­cal opponents, the shah wryly told international reporters, “We have learned sophisticated methods of torture from you.”62 In a reversal from the Truman era, most American aid to Iran went to the military during the Eisenhower years, but the technical assistance program broadly known as Point Four continued through the 1950s. Eisenhower espoused a ­fundamentally dif­fer­ent philosophy on foreign assistance from his Demo­cratic pre­de­ces­sor, yet the president’s emphasis on “trade not aid” did not translate to Iran. His administration gave to Iran generously from the beginning to combat communism and dilute the potency of Mosaddeq-­style nationalism.63 Iran received tens of millions of dollars, the bulk of the aid money that Congress allotted for the entire Near East in 1954.64 According to one American congressman, “our program in Iran was the showpiece for our w ­ hole foreign-­aid operation.”65 From 1953 to 1955, the new Foreign Operations Administration (FOA) coordinated Point Four from Washington, and the U.S. Operations Mission worked in Tehran to concentrate aid resources on the “technical fields” or “subjects which are most urgently needed in the development of Iran’s economy.”66 Public administration was one of t­ hose fields and Eisenhower’s second target group. The chaos of the Mosaddeq era led American officials and educationalists to see administrative training as a stabilizing ­factor and a bulwark of containment. “Without stability in the public administration,” went the logic of the Americans who surveyed Iran’s bureaucracy, “chaos is inevitable.” Public administration was thus “a weapon against Red infiltration.” Four months ­after the coup, in January 1954, representatives of Tehran University and the “large and active” Public Administration Division of the U.S. Operations Mission in Tehran deci­ded to contract out to an American university to help Iran establish its own school of public administration.67 An ideal candidate for the contract was the School of Public Administration at the University of Southern California (USC), one of the first of its kind when it opened in 1929. In June 1954, the Foreign Operations Administration awarded

28 CHAPTER 1

USC a contract to send a team of American professors to Iran to help establish the Institute for Public and Business Administration. It was h ­ oused in Tehran University and began taking students in late 1955. But the writers of the contract had grander visions. Since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American reformers applied scientific princi­ples to improve government and to develop the economy, but more impor­tant, to transform society. The intended effects of the Iran contract ­were no less sweeping. The hope was for Ira­nian alumni of USC to “contribute to re-­examination of all educational attitudes and institutions in their home country.”68 A group of thirty Ira­ni­ans received scholarships to study public administration at USC. A ­ fter completing their degrees, they ­were to return home and teach at the Institute for Public and Business Administration or enter into the state bureaucracy. To ensure that their training was top-­notch and their experience in the United States pleas­ur­able, USC devised a “total program” for the Ira­nian grantees. In the classroom, the Ira­ni­ans studied “a broad synthesis of the social sciences” to acquire skills applicable to any public proj­ect and relevant to any area of national development. Outside the classroom, the group toured the western United States, went to the state capitals, observed reclamation proj­ects, and conducted research. Reports on the USC-­trained Ira­ni­ans ­were generally favorable, noting that “this corps of scholars w ­ ill be one of the most significant pillars of strength in the ­future of public administration in Iran.”69 By the 1960s and 1970s, veterans of the USC program held impor­tant posts in Iran’s educational system and state bureaucracy. The third tier of Eisenhower’s educational strategy in Iran was cultural programming. The State Department’s International Educational Exchange Program facilitated migration to the United States by awarding grants to foreign leaders, scholars, and students, and its Bureau of Public Affairs administered t­ hose grants ­until Eisenhower created the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs in 1959. The Fulbright Program was the most prestigious exchange program. It was directed by a president-­appointed Board of Foreign Scholarships in Washington with a secretariat in Foggy Bottom, run locally by binational commissions in participating countries, and given direction by the Institute of International Education.70 In September 1949 Iran became the first ­Middle Eastern country to sign a Fulbright agreement. But Fulbright exchanges ­were suspended between 1952 and 1957 ­because of financial prob­lems in Tehran. Despite ­these hardships, the State Department “saved a situation that might have had serious consequences” and ensured that its larger bundle of exchanges with Iran survived.71 ­Because of the importance that Eisenhower attached to cultural affairs, the State Department’s non-­Fulbright exchanges with Iran experienced a “new vitality” during the mid1950s.72 This was especially true for the Foreign Leader Program. By the late 1960s,

The Foundation

29

the State Department reported that “in a few countries, of which Iran is perhaps the best example, it can be said that we are ‘scraping the bottom of the barrel’ ­because most of the meaningful leaders . . . ​have already been given grants ­under this program.”73 Despite its origins in the Truman era, Eisenhower’s three-­tier educational offensive marked the first concerted effort to, as cultural diplomats in Tehran described, win the hearts and minds of the “young, vigorous, potential leaders in fields of po­liti­cal and economic importance to the development of Iran.”74

The Ford Foundation and the Plan Organ­i zation ­ fter the 1953 coup, the shah began to insulate himself from Ira­nian society and A formulate policies based on a personal vision and the objectives of his American patrons.75 During the 1950s, the link between the Pahlavi and American conceptions of modernity was a group of Western-­educated technocratic elites who devised state-­directed “plans” to impose a “high modernist” vision of an ordered society on Iran. In his book on the subject, James Scott put the shah in the “pantheon” of leaders with faith in “the unrestrained use of the power of the modern state” to rule over “a weakened or prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist ­these plans.” But who ­were the planners, and how did the United States promote “authoritarian high modernism” in Iran?76 The answer lies in the relationship between the Ford Foundation and Iran’s Plan Organ­ization. The Ford Foundation worked closely with the U.S. foreign policy establishment in the 1950s. It was established in 1936 but did not become the largest philanthropy in the United States ­until Henry Ford’s death in the late 1940s. It ­operated semi-­independently of official channels, but the foundation’s personnel often moved between philanthropies, governmental aid agencies, and universities. Paul Hoffman, for example, went from directing the Marshall Plan to leading the Ford Foundation in the early 1950s. ­Later in the de­cade, ­under the leadership of former university president Henry Heald, the Ford Foundation pumped considerable sums of money into the third world to ameliorate ­human suffering and promote economic growth in the name of anticommunism.77 The Ford Foundation arranged to train young Indonesian and Chilean economists in the United States, combatted hunger across the Asian continent, and funded rural development programs in countries such as India and Iran.78 The Ford Foundation also issued two grants to Iran’s Plan Organ­ization in the late 1950s. The first sent two economists to Iran from the Stanford Research Institute, a consulting firm that ­later assisted with the Alliance for Pro­gress.79 The second grant groomed a ­cohort of Western-­trained economists in the Plan Organ­ization and paid for an

30 CHAPTER 1

advisory team from Harvard University to help the Ira­ni­ans master comprehensive economic planning.80 While many of Amer­i­ca’s cold war allies had free-­market economies, the majority of developing nations took a page out of the Soviet Union’s playbook and placed their faith in the plan. The ­free market had proven exploitative and, in Iran, bureaucrats realized in the late 1930s that Reza Shah’s haphazard, project-­ by-­project method of development was insufficient. A ­ fter the Second World War, Mohammad Reza Shah invited two American companies (Morrison Knudsen and Overseas Con­sul­tants) to write Iran’s First Development Plan. The shah established the Plan Organ­ization in 1949 to oversee the implementation of the First Plan, but the oil crisis derailed the effort.81 As the Ira­nian economy turned around, so did the fortunes of the Plan Organ­ization, which became a “government within a government” during Abolhasan Ebtehaj’s tenure as managing director from 1954 to 1959.82 Iran’s “first technocrat” had previously directed the National Bank, served as ambassador to France, and worked with the International Monetary Fund.83 As managing director of the Plan Organ­ization, the no-­nonsense Ebtehaj presided over the implementation of much of the Second Development Plan (1956–62) and secured funding from oil revenues, U.S. aid agencies, and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (now the World Bank) for ­future plans.84 Most significant was Ebtehaj’s decision in 1958 to establish an Economic Bureau within the Plan Organ­ization. The Economic Bureau’s charge was to study the structure of Iran’s economy, identify national needs, and devise comprehensive plans accordingly; in other words, to rationalize state-­directed planning. On a cultural level, Ebtehaj saw the Economic Bureau as a means of transforming the Plan Organ­ization into an “island of enlightenment and modernity” in the m ­ iddle of what he considered an other­wise inefficient and corrupt government bureaucracy.85 He and his Western-­educated protégés also hoped to use planning to set Iran down the road to self-­sufficiency, but in a way that was more gradual than groups such as the National Front preferred. U ­ ntil the establishment of the Economic Bureau, the Ira­nian government “made only limited use of professional economists,” and most w ­ ere foreign.86 Ebtehaj wanted to change that. A ­ fter he approached the Ford Foundation for assistance in 1954, the Ira­ni­ans and their international advisers spent the next few years attempting to unravel what they considered to be the “knotty question . . . ​at the essence of the ­whole proj­ect”: how to attract Ira­nian economists who had studied at the finest Western institutions back to Iran to staff the Economic Bureau and ween Iran off of foreign advisers.87 Khodadad “Joe” Farmanfarmaian fit the profile. He was the managing director of the Plan Organ­ization during the early 1970s, but he got his start as head of the Economic Bureau in 1958. Farmanfarmaian was born into one of Iran’s

The Foundation

31

old, landed families in the ancient Median capital of Hamadan, and he left Iran as a teenager to attend the Preparatory School of the American University of Beirut. ­After a stint in London, he moved in 1947 to Greeley, Colorado, before settling at Stanford where he received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees. He earned a PhD in 1956 from the University of Colorado at Boulder a­ fter completing a dissertation on oil-­ generated economic development, and he was teaching at Prince­ton University in 1957 when an official with the World Bank recruited him for work with the Plan Organ­ization.88 When Farmanfarmaian began work as deputy director of the Economic Bureau in 1958, interviewing U.S.-­educated Ira­ni­ans was “the first ­thing Joe wants to do.”89 Farmanfarmaian was drawn to U.S.-­educated Ira­nian economists who ­were “fluent in the jargon of technocracy.” He attributed his proclivity to look to the United States to “a natu­ral tendency on the part of the American-­educated Management of the Bureau to seek the type of qualities common with their own.” Having spent half of his life outside of Iran, it is not surprising that Farmanfarmaian felt a connection with other worldly Ira­ni­ans. He also preferred U.S.-­trained economists ­because of their grounding in economic theory. On a more practical level, Farmanfarmaian expected his economists to read and write En­glish well enough to communicate with their American advisers. As one scholar has noted about Farmanfarmaian’s team, “mastering the language of social science, or knowing French or En­glish, was the true badge of honor.” Farmanfarmaian liked the fresh outlook of young, U.S.-­ trained technocrats. By contrast, he did not think that the bureaucrats who came of age during the reign of the first Pahlavi shah possessed “the type of mentality which was needed for breaking away from the ways and practices of the past and creating new policies, practices and institutions suitable for a changing society and a growing economy in the second half of the Twentieth C ­ entury.”90 It did not take long for Farmanfarmaian to round out his “corps d’elite” with gradu­ates of American universities.91 One of the first to sign up was Reza Moghadam, who was just “the type of man” he needed.92 The son of a merchant, Moghadam did his undergraduate studies at a small liberal arts college in New Jersey before g­ oing to Stanford to write a dissertation on exchange policies and national development. It was at Stanford where Moghadam met Farmanfarmaian, who ­later recalled that his colleague was “a brilliant student” and “a top economist by any Western standards.”93 While personal connections helped the recruitment pro­cess, the Ford Foundation’s Overseas Development Program also identified potential hires. With Ford’s assistance, Farmanfarmaian hired two Ira­ni­ans from New York University and the University of Minnesota, along with a postdoctoral fellow from the University of Chicago.94 The Ford Foundation’s main focus in Iran during the late 1950s and early 1960s was to ensure Farmanfarmaian’s team a smooth start.95 First, the Ford Foundation

32 CHAPTER 1

bankrolled the Harvard Advisory Group to help or­ga­nize the Economic Bureau, provide on-­the-­spot training, and finalize the Third Development Plan (1962–67). The Harvard group’s field supervisor was Kenneth Hansen, a thirty-­four-­year-­old veteran of the Economic Cooperation Administration in Austria who ­later served in the Bureau of the Bud­get during the Kennedy administration. He spent his time in Iran transforming Farmanfarmaian from a promising theoretical economist with ­little practical experience into a bold planner and effective administrator.96 Second, Ford money supplemented the salaries of Iran’s economists who had more earning potential in the West. Fourteen members of the Economic Bureau received the supplements; nine w ­ ere U.S.-­educated and the five ­others had studied economics in Paris, Geneva, Lausanne, and Bombay.97 Third, the Ford Foundation grant to the Economic Bureau apportioned three fellowships per year to employees to study economic planning and development abroad. By the time the Harvard Advisory Group departed Iran in 1962, 50 ­percent of the members of the Economic Bureau had again gone abroad from nine months to a year, almost half of whom did so with Ford Foundation grant money.98 Despite many frustrations, the Harvard advisers w ­ ere impressed that, in such a short period of time, Ebtehaj and Farmanfarmaian “managed to acquire and train a planning staff of considerable competence.”99 The product of Farmanfarmaian’s cadre—­the Third Plan—­provided the structural backdrop for the White Revolution and was a relative success during its implementation in the mid-1960s. Much of that success resulted from Farmanfarmaian’s appeal to the internationally educated professionals who drafted the Third Plan.100 During their time with the Economic Bureau, Iran’s young ­technocrats developed a plan that helped produce a growth rate of 9 ­percent per year. Oil revenues, which increased from the 1950s but had not yet reached the unwieldy levels of the 1970s, certainly helped. But ­there ­were drawbacks. The Third Plan favored heavy industry over agricultural development, the prob­lems with which became apparent ­after the shah’s post-1963 land reform. Even more problematic was the Third Plan’s overabundance of “prestige-­giving proj­ects.” For example, 80 ­percent of the irrigation bud­get went to massive infrastructural proj­ects such as the three dams modeled on the Dez Dam. By the plan’s end in 1967, nevertheless, the United States declared Iran a “developed” nation.101 By 1970, when Farmanfarmaian took over the position that Ebtehaj occupied years earlier, it appeared that comprehensive planning had stimulated Iran’s “big push” ­toward modernity.102 Ebtehaj and Farmanfarmaian put Iran on a path ­toward self-­sufficient growth, but the shah’s cult of personality prevented rational planning from displacing the whims of the monarch when it came to the scale and scope of state planning.

The Foundation

33

­Under Ebtehaj’s leadership, the Plan Organ­ization was one of the few obstacles that stood in the shah’s way as he consolidated control over the country. Iran’s most power­ful technocrat, Ebtehaj, failed to comprehend the po­liti­cal climate within which he worked. His brashness offended the government ministries and, more impor­tant, the shah. The conflict between the two came to a head when Ebtehaj charged the shah with funneling a disproportionate amount of oil revenues into the military and away from development proj­ects. While Ebtehaj was an “in­de­pen­dent nationalist” who did not identify with Mosaddeq’s movement and was willing to work for the regime, the shah thought that he was growing too power­ful and the Plan Organ­ization too autonomous. In February 1959 the majlis eliminated that autonomy by transferring authority over the Plan Organ­ ization to the prime minister, a position over which the shah exercised unchallenged control. Ebtehaj stepped down the same month.103 Abolhasan Ebtehaj continued to make waves ­after his resignation. In September 1961, in a speech in San Francisco on planning and development, Ebtehaj criticized the Ira­nian government for corruption and the United States for providing aid without demanding po­liti­cal reform.104 In Tehran, “The speech was considered a direct challenge to the shah.” The personal feud boiled over one month a­ fter the San Francisco speech when Ira­nian authorities arrested Ebtehaj on unfounded corruption charges. An expert on the Ira­nian po­liti­cal elite determined that “the ­causes for his arrest must be sought in po­liti­cal affairs.”105 By 1965, as evidenced by a discussion with a State Department official, Ebtehaj’s attacks on the shah became more pointed. He said that the shah was “hated almost universally” and described his government as “tyrannical, inefficient, corrupt, and dictatorial.” His State Department liaison noted that Ebtehaj ended the conversation on a grim note: “Americans had lost almost completely the esteem they once enjoyed,” and the United States “would ‘lose every­thing’ in Iran when the regime met its inevitable fate.”106 Other Plan Organ­ization employees turned away from government ser­vice for explic­itly po­liti­cal reasons. As U.S. embassy officials in Tehran noted in 1970, “Ira­ ni­ans educated in the U.S. or Western Eu­rope in the 1950s or early 1960s yearn for and believe Iran’s development would be better served by the greater po­liti­cal and intellectual freedom they experienced or witnessed while abroad.”107 No one personified the tenuous path of the 1950s more than Hosein Mahdavi, who Farmanfarmaian recalled was “representative of the tragedy of . . . ​the National Front.” This son of a leader of the Constitutional Revolution leapfrogged between the world’s most elite universities. He studied economics at Oxford University and the Sorbonne during the mid-1950s and was offered a Ford-­ supplemented salary to join the Economic Bureau. He specialized in industrial

34 CHAPTER 1

development and eventually became Farmanfarmaian’s assistant director. Farmanfarmaian recalled that Mahdavi, ­after taking a ten-­month leave to study ­economics at Prince­ton on a Ford Foundation grant, returned to Iran “disenchanted.” Mahdavi resigned from the Plan Organ­ization in 1964 to continue his studies abroad, this time at Harvard University.108 From Cambridge, Mahdavi coordinated his opposition to the shah’s regime with the Ira­nian Student Association in the United States (ISAUS), which another philanthropic organ­ization—­the American Friends of the ­Middle East (AFME)—­established in 1953.

The American Friends of the ­M iddle East The American Friends of the ­Middle East found instrumental and intrinsic value in international education.109 AFME, like so many other organ­izations active in the cultural cold war, worked to harness education to national needs. It gave priority to students whose studies informed the question of development and worked closely with the most gifted students to place them in the best American universities. Yet AFME’s mission went beyond development work, as the organ­ ization nurtured connections between the United States and Iran to promote mutual understanding. The group also thought more than did most educational organ­izations about the experiences that Ira­nian students had in the United States. That consideration compelled the philanthropy to establish an infrastructure to diminish the likelihood of students feeling lonely and marginalized overseas so that they did not develop negative impressions of the United States. Although its mandate was broad, AFME’s primary legacy within the context of the American-­ Iranian relationship was the founding of the Ira­nian Student Association in the United States. Who ­were the men and ­women of AFME and what was their relationship to the U.S. government? In May 1951 some two dozen academics, writers, clergy, ­lawyers, and former diplomats congregated at the ­house of syndicated columnist Dorothy Thompson. The eclectic group that founded AFME believed that “peace can be waged” by fostering “­human relations” between the ­peoples of the United States and ­Middle East.110 By late 1953 AFME established a high-­traffic post in Tehran whose mission was to place students in “proper Protestant colleges and universities in the USA.”111 Unknown to many before the New Left magazine Ramparts broke the story in 1967, AFME was a front organ­ization for the CIA. The covert relationship began during AFME’s planning stages and was built around a network of power­ful individuals that included Allen Dulles, then CIA director of plans; Cornelius Van Engert, a diplomat and f­uture AFME officer; and Kermit Roo­se­velt Jr., the architect of TP-­AJAX who l­ater joined AFME’s

The Foundation

35

ranks. Over the years, AFME received generous subsidies from the CIA’s International Organ­izations Division and through the Dearborn Foundation. With such support, AFME’s operating bud­get swelled from $75,000 during its first year to $1 million by the close of the 1950s.112 So long as CIA involvement remained covert, it was assumed that target audiences would not view the organ­ization as an instrument of American power. Yet most Ira­ni­ans who studied in the United States ­were privy to AFME’s sources of funding years before the Ramparts exposé. In 1964 a leader of the ISAUS stated explic­itly and correctly that AFME had ties to the intelligence community.113 AFME could not have made the impact in Iran that it did without building on educational networks that predated the cold war. B ­ ecause Lafayette College was affiliated with the Presbyterian Church, the small liberal arts college in Easton, Pennsylvania, produced many of Amer­i­ca’s first missionary representatives in Iran. In the 1930s Lafayette boasted that it was “creating leaders for Persia” by educating young Ira­ni­ans. Despite their efforts, Reza Shah forced all foreign educators out of the country before abdicating. But with the war­time advisory missions paving the way for greater American involvement in Iran, Lafayette was ­eager to get back into the country. “This educational job in Iran,” one Lafayette alumnus wrote in 1945, “may prove to be Lafayette’s opportunity to assume its share in Christian post-­war reconstruction.”114 Charles Hulac entered the fray ­after the Second World War. He went to Iran for five years on behalf of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions before returning to Lafayette in 1950 as the school’s foreign student adviser.115 Hulac’s knowledge of Iran was in high demand during the early 1950s when the financial prob­lems that confronted Iran’s overseas students put them on the radar of American educationalists and policymakers. At the height of the oil crisis, the National Association for Foreign Student Affairs (NAFSA) realized that “[Ira­nian] nationalism is a fact but we know very l­ittle about [the] ways in which it may [be] directed ­toward positive channels.” The association’s leadership asked Hulac to survey a sample of Ira­ni­ans studying in California and Utah to “nail down the facts” about the student population in the United States.116 AFME then selected Hulac in 1952 to be its man in Tehran. A ­ fter studying the effectiveness of existing exchange programs, Hulac concluded that only an organ­ization like AFME could ensure that international education benefited U.S. interests and Iran’s development.117 It was at this time that Hulac developed a relationship with U.S. government officials who wanted “to have the kind of detailed information which we hope to be able to gather from the ‘grass-­roots.’ ”118 By the time that Hulac opened AFME’s field office in Tehran in August 1953, he was at once a seasoned Iran watcher, cultural diplomat, and, as the historian Hugh Wilford’s research has confirmed, an undercover agent with the CIA.119 ­Under Hulac’s leadership, AFME representatives helped to craft a

36 CHAPTER 1

plan of action to limit the appeal of the Tudeh Youth Organ­ization and increase national loyalty to the shah among the younger generation.120 For the remainder of the de­cade, AFME labored to create a controlled environment for U.S.-­bound Ira­ni­ans. AFME devoted its resources to placement ser­v ices, counseling, and orientation; it did not provide financial assistance. Academic advisers in Tehran initially helped undergraduates, but they eventually limited their ser­vices to students who sought specialized training or advanced degrees. The goal of the screening pro­cess, which Hulac tested in Tehran before AFME ­stations throughout the region a­ dopted his methods, was to grow a small cohort of modernizers without creating a generation of “over-­educated and under-­employed ­Middle Easterners.” This was a particularly pressing concern in Iran b ­ ecause half of the student inquiries and approximately two-­thirds of all AFME’s student placements originated t­ here. During the 1954–55 academic year, nearly seven thousand Ira­ni­ans inquired about studying abroad. Hulac and his staff assisted 395 of them with their applications, 315 of which w ­ ere accepted. Four years l­ater the Tehran office recorded 694 ac­cep­tances.121 AFME was careful to place students in respected American institutions that offered programs suited for Iran’s developmental needs. For example, the majority of the students who AFME placed in the University of Oklahoma earned bachelor’s degrees in petroleum engineering.122 ­Because AFME believed that Ira­nian students ­were “ambassadors of good ­will,” it also worked tirelessly to enhance the quality of the experience that they had in the United States. Central to this proj­ect was AFME’s four student organ­izations: the Organ­ization of Arab Students and national organ­izations for students from Pakistan, Af­ghan­i­stan, and Iran.123 The first Ira­nian student association in the United States was based on the Lafa­yette campus, and Hulac was its supervisor before he departed for his second educational mission to Iran. Established during the oil crisis, it was a binational organ­ization whose American and Ira­nian officers had ties to the old missionary networks in Iran. The trea­surer was Clifford Gurney, an American gradu­ate student at Columbia University who was born in Tehran to a missionary ­family. Hushang Piranazar, a former student at Alborz College and a f­uture member of the Economic Bureau of the Plan Organ­ization, sat on the board of officers.124 An Ira­nian pastor at a Presbyterian church in Easton was general secretary.125 The officers worked in coordination with AFME to establish a national organ­ization exclusively for Ira­nian students. By 1953 an executive committee of Ira­nian students, working out of AFME’s “­Middle East House” on East 57th Street in Manhattan, was laying the groundwork for the founding of the Ira­nian Student Association in the United States.126 The ISAUS was founded in September 1953, less than two weeks ­after Mosaddeq’s ouster, at a four-­day conference at Denver University (see Figure 2).

The Foundation

37

FIGURE 2.  The first meeting of the ISAUS in Denver, 1953. Note the ways in which the group is outwardly “Westernized,” along with the inclusion of a small but impor­tant number of w ­ omen and a few of the group’s American patrons. “Reports of the Study Groups, First Ira­nian Students’ Convention,” Denver, CO, September 1953, USNSA box 282, folder: Ira­ni­an. Courtesy of the Hoover Institution Archives.

AFME’s Department of Student Affairs sponsored the meeting that eighty-­five Ira­nian students attended alongside an array of American and Ira­nian officials.127 By the late 1950s, the ISAUS had approximately twelve hundred members. As AFME ­expected, the membership rolls included f­uture players in the shah’s modernization drive. Cyrus Samii, the first president of the ISAUS, earned a PhD in po­liti­cal science from the University of Kansas where he specialized in bud­geting and administration before he returned to join the Plan Organ­ization. Javad Vafa, Samii’s second-­in-­command in the ISAUS, also obtained employment with the Plan Organ­ization. During this era, the ISAUS maintained its national headquarters in New York, established local chapters in cities with sizable Ira­nian student populations, and received most of its operating bud­get from AFME in the form of an annual grant.128 Notwithstanding ­these developments, the tension between the politics of students from an authoritarian state and the objectives of their increasingly pro-­shah patrons was apparent as early as the 1953 Denver conference. The conference was or­ga­nized around five “study groups.” The first four debated the effects of modernization on the nation’s social structure, industrial sector, agricultural economy, and educational system. The fifth explored how Americans and Ira­ni­ans could attain mutual understanding. It was the participants in the fifth study group who highlighted the conflicting ele­ments of U.S. foreign policy when they concluded that Iran “desperately needs economic and social development . . . ​and the

38 CHAPTER 1

e­ stablishment of a ‘government of the ­people, by the ­people and for the ­people.’ ” The ISAUS showed no sympathy for the Soviet Union, applauded the U.S. commitment to containing communist expansion, and proclaimed support for Iran’s proj­ect of national development. The study group even expressed optimism for the f­uture of American-­Iranian cooperation and shared a “common feeling . . . ​that the interests and ideals of the two p ­ eoples are not only not incompatible, but to a surprisingly ­great extent similar and identical.”129 But the demo­cratic ethos and pro-­Mosaddeq sentiment that pervaded the Denver conference led the attendees to question the commitment of American and Ira­nian leaders to fostering a binational relationship founded on such ideals. The students criticized the United States for toppling the Mosaddeq government and for subsequently strengthening the shah and the military. T ­ hose decisions, according to study group number five, warped the ideals that the United States held out to the world de­cades earlier “when the spirit of Wilsonian democracy was at its height.” The coup led many of Iran’s students to conclude that the cold war had crushed that spirit, and they knew that the shah was not faithful to the princi­ples of demo­cratic governance. “One cannot fight an idea with machine guns alone,” the students asserted as they speculated about how the shah might ­handle his po­liti­cal foes. Tellingly, the students argued that the emphasis of U.S. policy “should be put on butter rather than guns.” Reaffirming their anticommunism, the students argued that the best way for Iran to check Soviet ambitions was to establish “a demo­cratic regime in Iran which allows ­free and constructive criticism by the ­people of the acts of the government.” The ISAUS concluded their assessment of U.S.-­Iran relations with a not-­so-­subtle message: “May the governments of arms and oppression be banished from the face of the earth.”130 ­There is no evidence that AFME sufficiently appreciated the implications of the fifth study group’s report or the po­liti­cal context within which it was written.131 The anti-­shah sentiment that bubbled over at the first ISAUS convention became more pronounced as the 1950s progressed. At the second ISAUS convention in 1954, many of the 140 students who gathered at Berkeley’s International House expressed frustration with the repression that came in the coup’s wake. AFME now noticed signs of po­liti­cal discontent, reporting that the students at Berkeley “made it quite clear that the . . . ​development of their country could be achieved only in an atmosphere of stability and freedom, and pledged themselves to work t­ oward ­these goals for Iran.”132 In 1959 AFME lamented that the emergence of rival factions within the ISAUS contributed to the group’s “orga­nizational difficulties” and charged the elected officers with allowing politics to interfere with the group’s business.133 Before the end of the de­cade, the politicization of the ISAUS caused a prob­lem for AFME. Although AFME spoke in 1960 of maintaining

The Foundation

39

“close liaison” with the Arab, Pakistan, and Afghan student associations, any mention of the ISAUS was conspicuously absent.134 Contrary to AFME’s original intent, the ISAUS served as the foundation for Ira­nian student organ­izing in the United States. First-­generation members established networks of communication and created a po­liti­cal culture of dissent that empowered the ISAUS during the 1960s and 1970s to or­ga­nize a transnational ­human rights movement against the abuses of the Pahlavi regime.

International education transformed the American-­Iranian relationship during the 1950s. The Ira­nian military, national police, and SAVAK benefited from U.S. training, which in turn enhanced the coercive capacities of the Pahlavi state. Overseas training was part of the American aid program in Iran, whose mandate was broad and focused on rural development, educational reform, and public administration, while the Ford Foundation cooperated with the Plan Organ­ization during one of Iran’s most dynamic periods of state-­directed planning. The State Department’s International Educational Exchange Program and AFME brought Ira­nian students and leaders to the United States in pursuit of ­national objectives and to promote understanding between the two countries. More impor­ tant, AFME established the ISAUS, an organ­ization whose path ­deviated from its patron’s expectations. The educational offensive that began during the Truman years and escalated u ­ nder Eisenhower was one component of a larger strategy that allowed the United States to outmaneuver the Soviet Union along the northern tier of the ­Middle East. That strategy altered the migration patterns of Ira­nian students that had been in place for more than a c­ entury. Beginning in the early nineteenth c­ entury, ­Eu­rope was the destination for young Ira­ni­ans who sought international degrees. The 1953 coup, in addition to altering the contours of Ira­nian politics, reconfigured global power relationships in such a way that the United States became the most power­ful external actor in the Persian Gulf and, eventually, the first choice for the growing number of Ira­ni­ans who turned abroad for their education. Indeed, the coup and the demise of the Anglo-­Iranian Oil Com­pany marked the end of ­Great Britain’s unrivaled position in Iran. Previously, the five “northern universities” in Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, and Nottingham made special arrangements for Ira­nian trainees in the oil industry. But a dwindling availability of seats at British universities, a diminished financial imperative for oil companies to foot the bill, and lingering animosity from the oil crisis dulled John Bull’s luster.135 Four years ­after the coup, the British ambassador in Tehran recognized that “the opportunities for earning goodwill for

40 CHAPTER 1

Britain are vastly less, while ­those for applying American influence are correspondingly increased.”136 At the time of that observation, Eisenhower’s educational offensive had propelled the United States ahead of the West Eu­ro­pean nations as the host country with the largest number of “official” Ira­nian students (possessors of an F-1 student visa). The U.S. Office of Education reported that 2,818 Ira­ni­ans ­were studying overseas during the 1955–56 academic year. Of that number, 1,011 ­were in the United States. West Germany was a close second with 957 Ira­nian students. “Official” estimates are typically low and skewed ­because many youths went abroad with tourist visas and other paperwork. Still, the statistics are telling. ­Although West Germany and France offered reduced tuitions and a discounted exchange rate for Ira­nian students, the time period that coincided with Eisenhower’s presidency witnessed the birth of new migration trends between Iran and the rest of the world that favored the United States.137 While the U.S. educational influence increased decidedly during the 1950s, the Soviet Union’s cultural presence in Iran was kept at bay. By the end of the 1950s, it was significantly easier to travel from Iran to the United States than it was to leave Iran for the Soviet Union. ­Until the Soviet-­Iran rapprochement of the mid1960s, Ira­ni­ans had no direct path to take to Soviet universities. In 1967 a mere twelve “official” Ira­nian students w ­ ere studying in the Soviet Union, while roughly three dozen additional “unofficial” students enrolled in Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba University ­after applying for scholarships through Soviet diplomatic offices in Eu­rope.138 International education combined with bilateral security agreements, regional defense pacts, and other forms of cooperation to strengthen the Washington-­Tehran alliance and keep the flow of students between Iran and the Soviet Union to a minimum. However, international education produced mixed results. While American aid officials constantly complained in the early 1950s about “a paucity of trained ­people” capable of promoting modernization, their reporting changed tone by mid-­decade. They now boasted that foreign training grants and educational exchanges “had assisted both in stimulating increased economic activity and in training many Ira­ni­ans in the vari­ous skills required in the continued operation of t­ hese proj­ects” well into the 1960s and 1970s.139 Still, the fact that the shah had ­little support outside of his inner circle meant that his effort to promote modernization from above was controversial and contested for years to come. The shah remained at odds with the m ­ iddle classes that called for po­liti­cal liberalization, religious leaders who decried secularization, traditional economic elites who suffered as Iran integrated into the global economy, the tribes and ethnic groups that resisted centralization, and nationalists who resented Amer­ic­ a’s growing influence in their country.

The Foundation

41

Ira­nian student migration to the United States therefore did l­ittle to improve the American image in Iran, not b ­ ecause of any inherent prob­lem with the educational programs but ­because Washington’s policies ­were firmly hitched to the shah. By the end of the 1950s, U.S. support for the Pahlavi regime began to ­discredit many other­wise worthy educational initiatives in the minds of young Ira­ni­ans. One U.S.-­educated Ira­nian pointedly asked an American journalist in 1959, “Why ­don’t you work with the ­people who believe in Western democracy as we have studied it in ­England, France and Amer­i­ca?” The American journalist described his interviewee as “a young force and a proud force and one whose presence in the ­Middle East the West may sooner or ­later have to recognize—or reckon with.”140 He was right.

2 THE WIN­D OW Negotiating Modernization and Rights during the Kennedy Era He thinks that the State Department had firmly committed itself to supporting the Shah . . . ​, and that in the ­battle between State, which supports the Shah, and Bobby Kennedy, who supports the [National] Front, State has won. —­Ronald Story, USNSA International Commission (1963)

American support for the Pahlavi regime wavered as Dwight Eisenhower’s New Look strategy gave way to John F. Kennedy’s more flexible and ambitious New Frontier. Kennedy was convinced that leaders of developing nations needed to initiate reform from above to prevent revolution from below, and he entered office unsure ­whether or how to push the shah to reform. Kennedy’s apprehension came from a conversation between po­liti­cal commentator Walter Lipp­mann and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. A ­ fter Khrushchev asserted that “Iran is the most immediate example” of an American ally susceptible to revolutionary socialism, the young president and his advisers reassessed the nature of the U.S.-­ Iran relationship.1 The most impor­tant adviser was Robert Komer, who oversaw day-­to-­day policymaking on Iran as a se­nior member of McGeorge Bundy’s National Security Council. He wanted reform for Iran, yet his top priority was to not let Khrushchev “make good on his boast that Iran ­will fall like a ripe plum into his lap.”2 Kennedy’s Iran policy was representative of his administration’s strategic pivot from Eu­rope to the third world. ­After the Bandung Conference of nonaligned nations in 1955 and amid the decolonization of Africa and Asia, the third world emerged as a potential alternative to the two superpower blocs. With the “shadow of Mosaddeq” looming over American decision making during the 1950s, Eisenhower established a military, economic, and educational relationship with Iran to keep it out of the neutralist and communist camps. But the Kennedys believed that Eisenhower erred in unconditionally supporting the shah. In the 1960 election, Kennedy criticized Richard Nixon, Eisenhower’s vice president and the 43

44 CHAPTER 2

Republican nominee, for propping up unpop­u­lar regimes and failing to creatively promote American interests in the developing world. ­After winning the election, President Kennedy established the U.S. Agency for International Development, Alliance for Pro­gress, and Peace Corps to reclaim the offensive in the third world. If the New Look in Iran took the form of regime building, the New Frontier’s focus was on nation building.3 Kennedy was acutely aware that Iran’s flagging economy and turbulent ­politics risked pushing the country ­toward the revolutionary situation that Khrushchev predicted. Eco­nom­ically, Ira­ni­ans did not feel the effects of Abolhasan Ebtehaj’s planning ­until the mid-1960s. In the meantime, the steady growth of the 1950s was unsustainable, and trade imbalances and foreign exchange deficits forced Iran to begin the 1960s by taking a loan from the International Monetary Fund.4 As the economy reeled, a state of uncertainty gripped all levels of Ira­nian politics. The Shia ulama entered a period of transition in 1961 with the death of Mohammad Hosein Borujerdi, Iran’s ­grand ayatollah and a “quietist” who supported the shah.5 While Ayatollah Khomeini fused religion and politics to mobilize the opposition to the shah’s White Revolution ­toward the end of Kennedy’s presidency, a more immediate concern was the antagonism between the National Front and the crown. In summer 1960, with Mohammad Mosaddeq ­under ­house arrest, his former confidants Mehdi Bazargan, Khalil Maleki, Allahyar Saleh, and Karim Sanjabi formed the Second National Front. A pair of fraudulent elections in 1960 and 1961 failed to produce a legitimate government. In May 1961, the confluence of economic and po­liti­cal unrest crested with a deadly teacher strike in Tehran. In response, the shah dissolved the majlis and kept it closed for the next twenty-­eight months.6 This volatility, positioned amid a series of other cold war hotspots, led Robert Komer to tell President Kennedy that “Iran could result in as ­great a setback as in South Vietnam.”7 To avoid such a setback, the Kennedy administration urged the shah to embark on a modernizing program of nation building “to strengthen the fabric of Ira­nian society.” To stress his point to the reluctant monarch, Kennedy suspended aid to Iran and assembled the interdepartmental Iran Task Force to reassess U.S. policy. The president assigned Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Phillips Talbot to preside over the task force and deliver a report to the White House in mid-­May. The report called for “promoting orderly po­liti­cal, economic and social evolution in Iran,” which translated to scaling back military assistance in exchange for greater economic aid.8 When aid to Iran resumed in late 1961, military support was nearly cut in half. American advisers to SAVAK left Iran, and the size of Iran’s armed forces shrunk from just more than 200,000 men at the start of the 1960s to 185,000 by mid-­decade.9

The Win­d ow

45

The United States gained leverage over the pro­cess of Ira­nian development by supporting Prime Minister Ali Amini. Although unelected, Washington ­interpreted his appointment as a sign that the shah heard Kennedy’s calls for reform. Amini was a Qajar aristocrat and a French-­educated economist. He was ambivalent about Mosaddeq, negotiated the controversial oil consortium agreement, and served as Iran’s ambassador to the United States during the mid-1950s. As prime minister in 1961 and 1962, Amini showed his receptivity to change by appointing reformists to his cabinet. Nevertheless, the National Front did not support Amini’s government, and the shah resented him for being Amer­i­ca’s “own man.” While Kennedy worked to “actively encourage the Shah to move ­toward a more constitutional role” by strengthening the prime minister, Amini’s ­bitter resignation in July 1962, which proceeded in a manner similar to Abolhasan Ebtehaj’s a few years earlier, made it clear who held real power in Iran.10 The shah used that power to dilute and repackage Amini-­era reforms as the White Revolution. Passed unanimously through a tightly controlled national ­referendum in January 1963, the six-­point program included land reform, a literacy corps, w ­ omen’s suffrage, the nationalization of forests, privatization of state-­owned factories, and profit sharing for industrial workers. The White Revolution enabled the shah to stabilize Ira­nian economic and po­liti­cal life and offer the Kennedy administration its “right kind of revolution.” But like all revolutions, this one came with a price. The shah undermined Iran’s landed elite without ­going far enough to substantially improve the lot of small landholders. The ulama objected to land reforms and the entrance of ­women into po­liti­cal life. And the shah offered no po­liti­cal liberalization for the urban ­middle class, intelligent­sia, and students. The White Revolution ultimately secured one-­ man rule and ended Iran’s “interlude of reform.” In the words of another historian, “The White Revolution had coopted the New Frontier.”11 However, it was unclear in 1961 and 1962 that the Kennedy administration’s push for reform would lead Iran down the path to monarchical absolutism. In fact, the debate on how to approach Iran during the early 1960s divided the administration into three groups.12 The most well-­known groups, first identified by the historian James Goode, ­were the “traditionalists” in the Departments of State and Defense and the “modernizers” in the White House and the Bureau of the Bud­get. On the one side ­were traditionalists such as John Bowling, the State Department’s Iran desk officer ­during the Kennedy years, and his boss in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, Phillips Talbot. They sought stability in Iran by continuing arms sales and strengthening Eisenhower-­era defense pacts. They worried that pressuring the shah would only push him t­ oward nonalignment, or worse, destabilize the country to the benefit of the Soviets. On the other side ­were the modernizers who

46 CHAPTER 2

initially did not identify a risk in pressuring the shah to reform. They ­were concentrated in the White House and wanted the shah to accept the merits of economic development and a smaller, more mobile army. Kenneth Hansen was one of the most committed modernizers. He left the Ford Foundation-­financed Harvard Advisory Group to serve as assistant director of the Bureau of the Bud­get and remained close to the Plan Organ­ization’s “Ford Mafia” ­after relocating to Washington. Robert Komer, however, was the most influential modernizer.13 In part ­because of Komer’s “blow torch” approach to bureaucratic politics, tensions emerged between the dif­fer­ent camps. At one point, the State Department instructed the White House “to keep its cotton-­picking hands off this prob­lem.” At another, Komer complained about his inability to penetrate “the stonewall of State.”14 Yet the traditionalists and modernizers had more in common than they initially realized: neither made po­liti­cal liberalization a priority. ­Those who did coalesced around the precepts of “­free speech modernism” to form a third camp. ­These individuals ­were located outside of traditional foreign policymaking communities and are largely absent from studies of U.S.-­Iran relations.15 President Kennedy’s decentralized style of leadership created channels for individuals outside of Washington’s official foreign policy bureaucracies to reach the president’s most trusted advisers.16 And Ira­nian students in the United States took advantage of the opportunity. They became some of the most influential members of the anti-­shah movement by establishing contacts with power­ful individuals in Washington, the most consequential of which w ­ ere Supreme Court Justice William Douglas and Attorney General Robert Kennedy. The co­ali­tion of American and Ira­nian ­free speech modernists embraced a transnational understanding of constitutionalism—­rooted in the U.S. Bill of Rights and the 1906 Ira­nian Constitution—­and insisted that freedom of expression accompany national development. The suspension of parliamentary governance in Iran from May 1961 to ­September 1963 opened a win­dow through which free-­speech modernists contributed to debates about the proper balance between modernization and rights during the 1960s. An interpretation of modernity that focused primarily on the po­liti­cal sphere frustrated American traditionalists and modernizers, as well as the shah and his representatives abroad. Still, the constitutionalist emphasis of ­free speech modernism and the Kennedy administration’s advising and decision-­ making style allowed Ira­nian students and their American allies to become influential diplomatic actors. The influence of American and Ira­nian free-­speech modernists rivaled that of the traditionalists and modernizers through late 1962 as the Kennedy administration reevaluated its Iran policy.

The Win­d ow

47

Free-­S peech Modernism The emergence of a transnational community of free-­speech modernists heightened the shah’s mistrust of Kennedy and the other “Harvard boys” in his administration.17 Beyond his personal dislike of the New Frontiersmen, the shah was “bitterly disappointed” with Washington’s new emphasis on economic over military affairs.18 The shah also feared that the U.S. government might support a faction of the opposition and advocate for po­liti­cal change in Iran, a fear so real that he remembered the early 1960s as a time that “coincided with the advent of the Kennedy administration and increased U.S. intrigue against our country.”19 The free-­speech modernists therefore had the ability to affect U.S.-­Iran relations on two levels. Domestically, they could influence the policy of an administration already skeptical of the shah. Internationally, their public dissent and private lobbying could drive a wedge between the two allies by intensifying mutual suspicions. Supreme Court Justice William Douglas was the leading American free-­speech modernist. Franklin Roo­se­velt appointed Douglas in 1939 to the Supreme Court, and for the next thirty-­six years “Wild Bill” carried on the legacy of the New Deal at home and abroad. At home, he protected the “fundamental rights” of all ­Americans and was a First Amendment absolutist, meaning he argued uncompromisingly that “no law” could infringe on the freedoms of speech, press, assembly, petition, and religion. Abroad, Douglas was a seasoned traveler and committed internationalist who identified a symbiotic relationship between Amer­ic­ a’s domestic and foreign affairs. He wrote of the “rights of man without force,” and argued in his many books that “liberty at home means nothing in this nuclear age if liberty is no more than a mirage to t­ hose in other lands.”20 Douglas knew that “­things are g­ oing from bad to worse in Iran,” and his re­ spect for the country’s constitutional tradition gave him credibility in the White House and the re­spect of Ira­nian nationalists.21 A friend of the Kennedys, Douglas “talked to Jack frequently about conditions in Iran.”22 Although Douglas’s solutions appeared radical to many cold warriors, one Ira­nian praised him for understanding Iran “far better than any single man in your Dept. of State.”23 His knowledge of Iran stemmed from de­cades of traveling and his contacts with a wide spectrum of Ira­ni­ans, especially students.24 As he told the Ira­nian Student Association in 1958, “Iran has some wonderful students ­here and it always does my heart good to meet and talk with them.”25 At the height of the cold war, Douglas was a rarity; he was an American in a position of authority who thought that constitutionalist princi­ples should guide the foreign policy of a superpower. For that, Ali Shayegan, Mosaddeq’s minister of education and a National Front or­ga­ nizer abroad, praised Douglas for his “high ideals, integrity and liberalism.”26

48 CHAPTER 2

FIGURE 3.  William Douglas and Mohammad Mosaddeq conversing during a tour of the Supreme Court on November 5, 1951. Photo­graph 66-8018, Department of State. Courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library.

Douglas supported Mosaddeq and other Ira­ni­ans who strug­gled to uphold the constitution as the shah consolidated power in the 1950s. The charismatic Mosaddeq made an impression on Douglas when they met in fall 1951 during the prime minister’s U.S. visit (see Figure 3). Douglas came to consider Mosaddeq “a personal friend” for whom he had “­great admiration.”27 Mosaddeq was visibly thrilled when Douglas gave him a personal tour of the U.S. Supreme Court.28 Admiration for Mosaddeq and support for the National Front led Douglas to agonize as Hosein Fatemi’s life hung in the balance in Tehran. Fatemi was Mosaddeq’s young foreign minister who at vari­ous times decried the shah as “shameless,” a “traitor,” and a “criminal.”29 He returned to Iran ­after studying journalism and law in France in the late 1940s to advocate for the dissolution of the monarchy and the creation of a republican government, a position more radical than Mosaddeq’s. Fatemi’s republicanism was reflected in the editorial position of Bakhtar (West), his newspaper that helped mobilize the National Front. On August 19, 1953, a CIA-­supported mob burned down the offices of Bakhtar and, when the shah reclaimed the Peacock Throne ­later that day, he charged Fatemi

The Win­d ow

49

with treason.30 In November 1954 Douglas cabled the shah to argue for Fatemi’s ­pardon. The shah rebuffed Douglas and Hosein Fatemi was executed.31 Hosein Fatemi’s relatives formed the core of Iran’s free-­speech modernists in the United States. Nasrollah Saifpour Fatemi was Hosein’s ­brother. He earned gradu­ate degrees from Columbia University and the New School for Social Research and was Iran’s delegate to the United Nations during the early 1950s. ­After his ­brother’s execution, Nasrollah Fatemi moved to the United States to begin an illustrious ­career as a professor of international affairs at Fairleigh Dickinson University. His son, Fariborz, graduated from Pennsylvania’s Muhlenberg College and earned a master’s degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. In the early 1960s Fariborz was a gradu­ate student in international law at the Maxwell School of Public Administration at Syracuse University and a congressional fellow with Congressman James Roo­se­velt (D-­CA) and the anti-­shah Senator Frank Church (D-­ID).32 Fariborz and his cousin Ali Fatemi ­were vocal opponents of the shah. Ali left Iran in 1953 immediately ­after the coup, and his ­uncle, Hosein, was supposed to go with him. The security forces picked up Hosein, but Ali made a harrowing escape. In 1956, two years a­ fter Hosein’s execution, Ali graduated from Fairleigh Dickinson and then worked at the United Nations in New York through 1960. In the early 1960s he was a doctoral student in economics at the New School. He was also a three-­term ISAUS president and “the ramrod of virtually every­thing ISA has managed to get done.”33 That he was can be attributed to his own skillful reading of international politics and the Fatemi ­family’s tradition of critical journalism that became manifest in the United States a­ fter the coup. Next to Ali Fatemi, Sadeq Qotbzadeh was the most impor­tant Ira­nian student leader in the United States. He was born into a relatively well-­to-do and pious Tehran bazaar f­amily whose f­ather supported Mosaddeq. In 1956 Qotbzadeh spent two weeks with the old constitutionalist at his Ahmadabad home. Shortly thereafter the young Sadeq began to study the teachings of Mehdi Bazargan and Ayatollah Mahmud Taleqani, cofound­ers of the Liberation Movement of Iran (LMI), a group of Islamic modernists affiliated with the Second National Front with which Qotbzadeh would ­later associate. In the near term, his politicization caught the attention of SAVAK, and in 1958 Sadeq’s f­ather sent him to the United States where he enrolled in the School of Foreign Ser­vice at Georgetown University.34 While Qotbzadeh and the Fatemis w ­ ere Iran’s most prominent free-­speech modernists in the United States, Robert Kennedy joined William Douglas in calling for democ­ratization in Iran. Robert Kennedy became familiar with Iran in 1955 when he joined Douglas during one of his trips through the country. Back in the United States, Douglas recalled that “Bobby spent hours listening to t­ hese student-­refugees and caught their spirit of in­de­pen­dence and felt their longing

50 CHAPTER 2

for justice ­under law.”35 Carole Jerome, a Canadian journalist and confidant of Qotbzadeh, offered a similar recollection. According to Jerome, “The attorney general had taken a liking to Sadegh and the students from Georgetown University in Washington, and they, in turn, kept him informed on events in Iran.”36 Iran’s students knew that the president’s ­brother was an impor­tant person to keep informed about their country. That Robert Kennedy was not “bound by a canned message” meant that he was open to ideas that careerists in the national security establishment w ­ ere not. He was also “the most impor­tant channel” that some Kennedy-­era officials used if, as one diplomat recalled, “I ­really had something that I just had to get to the President.”37 While Robert Kennedy’s back-­channel negotiating during the Cuban Missile Crisis is his most well-­known diplomatic foray, his interest in Iran—­which Ira­nian students kindled—­had the potential to reshape the troubled U.S.-­Iran relationship during the early 1960s. Although Ira­nian and American free-­speech modernists reached similar conclusions from dif­fer­ent perspectives, they all agreed that Pahlavi rule infringed on the constitutional rights of Ira­nian citizens. They and oppositionists in Iran hoped that the “climate of liberty” that Kennedy’s calls for po­liti­cal reform created “could be used to wrest a true democ­ratization from the regime.”38 ­Little more than one month ­after Kennedy’s inauguration, Douglas attempted to convince the new administration that Iran’s nationalist exiles collectively could inform policymaking and help break down traditional biases and ste­reo­types that many American policymakers harbored about Iran and its ­people. As Douglas declared in a February 1961 letter to the president, “All the Jack Kennedys of Iran are in hiding or in exile as a result of the American policy.”39

Ira­n ian Students Or­g a­n ize Iran’s population was young in the early 1960s, with more than half of its 22 million citizens ­under the age of twenty and the number of college students exploding from 9,430 to 22,849 between 1953 and 1961. B ­ ecause po­liti­cal considerations and structural limitations kept more than half of the applicants out of Ira­nian universities, approximately 15,000 students went abroad. As many as 5,000 w ­ ere in the United States, and while a small percentage received assistance from the U.S. and Ira­nian governments, more than two-­thirds ­were financially self-­ supporting. The combination of po­liti­cal repression and rising unemployment rates among recent college gradu­ates created what a diplomat in Tehran described as “a tinder box of youth in Iran.”40 A former CIA operative found that “it is impossible to determine what percentage of the Ira­nian students abroad hold views hostile to the government, but it is certain that no voices are raised in praise of the

The Win­d ow

51

ruler or the regime.”41 With more than half of Iran’s college students overseas and a deteriorating po­liti­cal situation back home, opposition to the Pahlavi state became a transnational phenomenon in the early 1960s. The ISAUS, which AFME established in 1953, was the primary vehicle for Ira­ nian student activism in the United States. ­After years of internal divisions and orga­nizational setbacks, oppositional politics provided the ISAUS with newfound cohesion in 1960. Nearly 170 Ira­ni­ans studying in American universities in twenty-­ five states attended the Eighth Annual ISAUS Convention at Eastern Michigan University in late summer 1960. The students who gathered in Ypsilanti resolved to establish more chapters to facilitate local organ­izing and promote camaraderie among students residing in similar metropolitan centers. Equally impor­tant was the delegates’ election of a new board of directors. Ali Fatemi assumed the presidency, and Sadeq Qotbzadeh and Majid Tehranian rounded out the New York–­based board. The new ISAUS constitution articulated the tenets of free-­ speech modernism, demanding the “establishment of a national government based on democracy” and that “individual freedoms for patriots and freedom of national associations be recognized in practice.”42 The politicization of the ISAUS at Ypsilanti transformed its relationship with AFME and the Ira­nian government. AFME representatives attended Ira­nian student conventions a­ fter 1960, but the organ­ization terminated its annual grant to the ISAUS.43 The break between the ISAUS and the Ira­nian government was more acrimonious and Ambassador Ardeshir Zahedi, the shah’s son-­in-­law and a gradu­ ate of Utah State University, found himself at the center of the drama. While Zahedi was one of the most esteemed diplomats in the 1970s when he returned to Mas­sa­chu­setts Ave­nue, his first stint as ambassador was rocky. Zahedi was in Ypsilanti when oppositionists gained control of the ISAUS. In front of a live microphone, he instructed an assistant, “­Don’t give ­these sons of bitches anything.”44 A few months ­later Zahedi had another encounter with the ISAUS leadership, this time at the Ira­nian embassy’s No Ruz cele­bration at the Statler Hilton in Washington, D.C. With Zahedi on stage, Qotbzadeh grabbed the microphone and denounced the shah and his ambassador. A cohort of anti-­shah students gave Qotbzadeh a standing ovation, but ­others flung food, chairs, and dishes ­toward him before police escorted the student leader out of the ballroom.45 Zahedi was the shah’s official representative in the United States, but ISAUS believed it was more capable, though not officially licensed, to inform the U.S. government and American ­people about the post-­Mosaddeq po­liti­cal realities in Iran.46 The No Ruz spectacle triggered a war of words between pro-­and anti-­shah students on the pages of major American newspapers. In the Washington Post, one pro-­shah student from the capital area labeled Qotbzadeh and his friends “agitators” and claimed, despite evidence to the contrary, that individuals of all po­liti­cal

52 CHAPTER 2

persuasions enjoyed a voice in Iran’s “representative government.”47 Qotbzadeh responded by defending his “­every right” to confront the shah’s representatives and expressed pride that he and his “fellow students openly showed their resentment for this suppression of liberty of speech.” Qotbzadeh concluded his letter to the editor by offering to “pledge our blood to seek freedom and liberty.”48 Ali Fatemi followed, writing in the New York Times that the Pahlavi regime was “antithetical to what the Western democracies stand for” and “ineffectual and short-­ sighted as a deterrent to Communist expansion in Iran.”49 In the Los Angeles Times, Ira­nian students in California alarmingly predicted that the constitutional crisis in Iran could turn the cold war hot if U.S. policymakers did not move quickly to “prevent such a catastrophe.”50 The rising opposition bothered Ira­nian officials so much that, in a conversation with U.S. diplomats, Iran’s foreign minister “launched into a long disor­ga­nized discourse on the prob­lems the Ira­nian Government was having with its students, particularly t­ hose overseas.”51 In an attempt to silence student dissent, the Ira­nian government refused to allow for the renewal of the visas of leading oppositionists, Ali Fatemi and Sadeq Qotbzadeh foremost among them. If the students did not moderate their politics, Tehran threatened to go one step further and revoke their passports altogether.52 It was hoped that the Ira­nian government’s “threats to withdraw passports would be enough to frighten students into good behaviour.”53 The transnational connections between Ira­nian students at home and abroad ensured that the Ira­nian government’s strategy backfired. In May 1961, the National Front attracted eighty thousand p ­ eople to a public meeting in Tehran, and in July, a cele­bration of Mosaddeq’s premiership turned into a bloody clash with security forces.54 That summer, Ira­nian students around the world protested the undemo­cratic princi­ples by which the shah governed. A group of eleven Ira­nian students occupied their consul general’s office in New York to, as Fariborz Fatemi described, participate in “the American tradition of the sit-in” one year ­after that method of civil disobedience became a hallmark of the civil rights movement. Five days ­later, many of the same students traveled to Washington to demand that the embassy change its position on the students’ visas. At Tehran University, thousands of pro-­Mosaddeq students marched in solidarity with their counter­parts in the United States, and smaller groups in London staged protests against government repression at home and intimidation abroad. American and British officials “saw some significance in the fact that the students are apparently able to or­ga­nize simultaneous demonstrations in the three capitals.”55 But the students’ ultimate goal was to sway President Kennedy. To that end, on July 25, 1961, approximately forty Ira­nian students demonstrated in front of the White House to convince the administration that the shah was not an ally worth supporting. To proj­ect their opinions from the streets into the White House,

The Win­d ow

53

one student handed a letter to Kennedy’s press secretary and urged him to pass it along to the president.56 The letter lamented the absence of fair elections and criticized excessive military spending. The students pleaded with the president “to use the prestige of your office and ­every moral force at your command to make it clear, that if Amer­i­ca’s support . . . ​of the pres­ent Ira­nian regime is to continue, then the regime must . . . ​allow the p ­ eople their basic freedoms given to them by the Ira­nian Constitution.” They wrote of the “freedom of man” and invoked President Kennedy’s rhe­toric when they vowed to “sustain any burden and endure any hardships” to improve the welfare of a nation that was “po­liti­cally bankrupt and on the brink of a bloody revolution.”57 In his response to the Washington chapter of the ISAUS, Vice President Lyndon Johnson expressed “­great interest” in “the petition, authored by young Ira­nian students expressing concern about the well-­being and ­future of their country and p ­ eople.”58 One month ­later, Fariborz Fatemi wrote a letter to William Douglas. His letter reveals the ways in which the ideals of Iran’s student activists aligned with the princi­ples for which American liberals in the early 1960s claimed to stand. As Fatemi saw it, the shah wanted to silence students ­because they “exercised their natu­ral, constitutional and universal rights of freedom of expression.” To demonstrate his commitment to republicanism, Fatemi referred to individuals such as Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Henry David Thoreau, and Abraham Lincoln as “po­liti­cal ­giants.” Similar to Ho Chi Minh when he famously quoted the U.S. Declaration of In­de­pen­dence, Fatemi hoped that his own reference to the 1776 document would spur Douglas into action.59 By the end of summer 1961, the perspective of the ISAUS penetrated the White House, and President Kennedy informed Douglas that he was “following the Ira­nian m ­ atter as carefully as pos­si­ble with your advice in mind.”60 Outside of its connections in Washington, the ISAUS merged with the Europeanbased Confederation of Ira­nian Students to form the Confederation of Ira­ nian Students National Union in early 1962. In Paris, where representatives of the vari­ous loci of Ira­nian student activism abroad met to draft a constitution, the CISNU officially a­ dopted National Front princi­ples as its own. While the CISNU was an umbrella organ­ization for the student diaspora, it included the Organ­ization of Tehran University Students, too. The CISNU i­nitially determined that its secretariat would alternate annually between the United States and Eu­rope. The first secretariat was in New York and resembled the Ypsilanti leadership, with Hasan Lebaschi and Farajallah Ardalan joining Fatemi, Qotbzadeh, and Tehranian.61 The movement now had the leadership and orga­ nizational cohesion to exploit the politics of international travel (see Figures 4 and 5).

54 CHAPTER 2

FIGURE 4.  Ira­nian students demonstrate during the shah’s 1962 visit to the United States. Note the image of Mosaddeq in the center, an indication of the student movement’s liberal nationalism during the early 1960s. The students’ signs speak to the tenets of free-­speech modernism, with charges that the “shah has v­ iolated Iran’s constitution” and demands that the monarch “open Iran’s parliament” and hold “elections now.” USNSA, box 220, folder: Iran 1963–1966. Courtesy of the Hoover Institution Archives.

The Politics of International Travel Two developments in early 1962 that w ­ ere supposed to create goodwill between the ­houses of Kennedy and Pahlavi further destabilized U.S.-­Iran relations: Robert Kennedy’s goodwill tour and the shah’s state visit to the United States. Iran was one of fourteen nations that Robert Kennedy was to visit during his month-­long goodwill tour of February 1962.62 As Kennedy prepared for departure, U.S. Ambassador Julius Holmes urged the administration to invite the shah to the United States. The visit, as Holmes saw it from Tehran, would allow the president to personally stress the need to balance economic and military modernization.63 The two trips—­one that never materialized and the other plagued with protest—­produced results c­ ounter to their planners’ original expectations.

FIGURE 5.  The juxtaposition of the shah leisurely sitting on a pile of skulls and the Kennedy-­esque language that the Ira­nian student movement embraced as its own sent a power­ful message to the Americans for whom the publication was intended. USNSA, box 220, folder: Iran 1963–1966. Courtesy of the Hoover Institution Archives.

56 CHAPTER 2

The robust and circulatory nature of the Ira­nian student movement’s print culture—­and its engagement with the national media in the United States—­ helped convince Robert Kennedy to remove Iran from his itinerary. Before leaving, the attorney general’s office received a widely circulated “white paper” that was critical of the shah and sympathetic to the nationalist opposition. Fariborz Fatemi prepared the paper for Congressman James Roo­se­velt, for whom he was an aide, to refute claims that Ira­nian students exaggerated the degree to which they faced threats of “torture and exile.”64 Edwin Guthman, the attorney general’s press secretary, collected a variety of other dissident publications, including Iran Nameh, a New York-­based news bulletin that the Fatemi cousins ran. Similar to the white paper, Iran Nameh featured the testimony of an ISAUS member who sought asylum in the United States. Deserving special attention was the student’s explanation for seeking asylum: “If my application for po­liti­cal asylum is accepted by United States authorities, then it w ­ ill mean they realize how bad the situation is back ­there [in Iran]. If it is not accepted, then it shows the United States is indifferent to the humanitarian demands of the Ira­nian ­people.”65 Po­liti­cal vio­lence in Iran and a string of protests across the United States and Eu­rope on the eve of Kennedy’s trip also led him to second-­guess the wisdom of stopping in Tehran. The student protests abroad ­were triggered by the Ira­nian government’s violent response to a demonstration at Tehran University. In January 1962, when a demonstration swelled to numbers that security forces deemed a threat, they “went beserk” on up to half of the student body and “desecrated the institution.”66 In the long term, the attack scarred the minds of many intellectuals. In the short term, it set off a series of student protests overseas. Approximately two dozen National Front students picketed peacefully in front of the United Nations in New York City, more than forty ISAUS members or­ga­nized a sit-in at the Ira­nian embassy in Washington, and nearly two hundred Ira­nian students in Austria followed suit.67 The most decisive f­actor that led Robert Kennedy to snub the shah was the ­attorney general’s relationship with Ali Fatemi. That relationship began on ­January 19, 1962, when Fatemi wrote a letter on behalf of the ISAUS to Robert Kennedy. Fatemi informed Kennedy about the recent establishment of the CISNU and the fact that the Ira­nian government prevented representatives from Tehran University from attending the founding meeting in Paris. He then asked Kennedy to visit Tehran University and meet its student leaders in order to help his compatriots back home and keep the question of po­liti­cal liberalization at the forefront of the Kennedy administration’s policy deliberations. Fatemi emphasized the shared ideals of the New Frontier and the National Front. “We find ­great similarities between [the] goals and ideals expressed by the President,” Fatemi concluded, “and ­those which we are struggling for.”68 Impressed with the

The Win­d ow

57

letter, and just days before the start of his goodwill tour, Robert Kennedy invited sixty young Ira­ni­ans to his office. Ali Fatemi did much of the talking. He discussed the lack of ­free speech, press censorship, and SAVAK. The students argued that, given the recent crackdown at Tehran University, a stop in Iran was an implicit show of support for the regime. Much to the State Department’s dismay, Kennedy left the meeting persuaded. He demanded to meet with the jailed students whose names he obtained from the ISAUS. Robert Kennedy ­later recalled the dispute with Foggy Bottom: “I wanted to visit the university and visit students. They said I ­couldn’t visit students. So I said I ­wouldn’t go to Iran. That caused a major fuss in the State Department.”69 The meeting in the attorney general’s office made a lasting impression on student organizers and Ira­nian government officials. Fatemi described Kennedy as “most kind,” and Qotbzadeh’s fondness for Robert Kennedy “bordered on hero-­ worship.”70 Ardeshir Zahedi offered a dif­fer­ent assessment. In June 1971, nearly a de­cade a­ fter the meeting, Zahedi recalled his “unpleasant experience when Attorney General Robert Kennedy not only received [a] group of radical Ira­nian students that had been attacking [the] shah but had actively encouraged them.”71 Zahedi’s lingering resentment speaks volumes to the impact of Robert Kennedy’s actions. On February 15, just two weeks ­after the meeting in Kennedy’s office, the shah put an abrupt end to Zahedi’s ambassadorship. Zahedi’s transference to the Court of Saint James was a move that the students “joyfully welcome[d].”72 While Robert Kennedy never went to Iran, the shah went to the United States in April 1962. During the lead-up to the trip, vari­ous student groups petitioned the Kennedy White House. Members of the CISNU wrote a letter to the president to say that they, not the Ira­nian government, “believe in demo­cratic institutions and desire social and economic development.” Their message to President Kennedy was explicit in its clarity: “You have extended your invitation to a man who has failed to carry out his oath as a constitutional monarch and who has smeared his hands with many innocent ­people’s blood.”73 The Fatemi cousins published their own “open letter” to the president. In it, they contended that U.S. foreign policy during the cold war failed to be “constructive and in line with the ­great demo­cratic and revolutionary traditions and ideals of Lincoln and Jefferson.” They compared Mosaddeq to the American found­ers and, to show that they ­were not alone in ­these beliefs, proposed creating a commission to “travel in the U.S. and Eu­rope and or­ga­nize a sort of [G]allup poll amongst the thousands of Persian students who form the Persia of tomorrow.”74 The rising tide of oppositional activity in the United States stoked the shah’s suspicion that the Kennedy administration was conspiring against him. On one level, the shah was dumbfounded. To a monarch who resolutely stamped out the domestic opposition, it was unfathomable that the U.S. government could tolerate

58 CHAPTER 2

opposition ­toward its foreign policy. If t­here was opposition, the shah assumed that it was orchestrated at the highest levels. On another level, the shah suspected that he understood the administration all too well. He interpreted Robert Kennedy’s cancellation of the Ira­nian leg of his goodwill tour as an indication that the Kennedys might withdraw American support for the monarchy at the crucial hour. Aware of the shah’s concerns, the president’s advisers dedicated time to the “special prob­lem” of Ira­nian students in the United States. The president’s briefings warned him that the shah was especially “irritated by the fact that t­ hese groups have received the sympathy of some well-­known American liberals.” ­Because U.S. officials worried that protests would curtail Washington’s influence in Tehran, they urged the president to make clear that the government did not condone the “vociferous campaign of anti-­Shah propaganda in the United States.”75 The most vis­i­ble and violent confrontation between Ira­nian students and the shah’s entourage took place outside of the Waldorf Astoria h ­ otel in New York City. When the shah exited the h ­ otel ­after a press conference, as many as forty students charged the police barricade. “They fell upon us,” SAVAK’s chief operative in the United States recalled, “raining blows on us with their fists and the sticks that held their posters” as competing Ira­nian po­liti­cal factions ­were “ ‘ironing out’ their difficulties on a Manhattan street.”76 A few blocks east, Ira­nian students chanted pro-­Mosaddeq slogans as the shah and his wife dined at the United Nations.77 On the West Coast, the Southern California chapter of the Ira­nian Student Association picketed outside of the royal party’s ­hotel.78 The trip ended as it began with thirty young nationalists seeing the shah off at the San Francisco airport.79 ­Behind closed doors, the meeting between the president and the shah was friendly enough, but tensions simmered beneath the surface of diplomatic formalities. Sometimes t­ hose tensions boiled over, such as when the shah made the case for more military aid by charging that “Amer­i­ca treats Turkey as a wife, and Iran as a concubine.” ­Either way, William Douglas recalled that “Jack concluded that the Shah was corrupt and not a person we could trust.”80 The shah reached a similar conclusion. Five months l­ater, he signed a treaty with the Soviet Union that prohibited foreign nations, including the United States, from staging missiles in Iran.81 While the shah was driven by a range of security concerns and his long-­standing desire to chart an in­de­pen­dent foreign policy, his poor relationship with the Kennedys and Ira­nian student activism affected the course of the binational relationship. The CIA reported that the shah, ­after his return from the United States, “expressed annoyance at Ira­nian students in the United States and was particularly ­bitter about a small demonstration of Ira­nian students in Washington.”82 The United States and Iran ­were still cold war allies, but Iran’s student leaders ­were correct to hail their organ­izing as a temporary success in the Iran Nameh headline: “Shah’s Visit Fails: Students Use Opportunity to Expose His Regime.”83

The Win­d ow

59

Depor tation and Geopolitics The six months between May and October 1962 marked one of the most consequential periods in the history of American-­Iranian relations before the revolution of 1979. It was a period marked by conflict on two levels. At the international level, ­there was conflict between the Kennedy administration and the Ira­nian government. The shah was so unhappy with the protests that marred his visit that he pressed the U.S. government to deport nearly thirty students, including Ali Fatemi and Sadeq Qotbzadeh. The Justice Department’s decision to issue the students discretionary visas rather than send them back to Iran only inflamed the wounds in the binational relationship. At the domestic level, the question of ­whether to deport the students or grant them safe haven generated conflict between traditionalists in the State Department who wanted the students gone and free-­speech modernists in the Justice Department who gave priority to civil liberties.84 As the deportation debate carried into larger strategic questions, the rifts within the administration reached their maximum width. Then, in July 1962, Prime Minister Ali Amini, the linchpin to Kennedy’s reform strategy, resigned. His resignation increased the potential influence of the Ira­nian student lobby, as the ISAUS had opposed Amini’s premiership.85 With Amini gone and Washington’s position vis-­à-­v is reform uncertain, the free-­speech modernists and traditionalists competed to influence Robert Komer, the leading modernizer on the ­National Security Council and “gatekeeper” of the administration’s Iran policy.86 ­There was no love lost between the State Department and Robert Kennedy. Generally, the State Department resented the intrusion of the president’s b ­ rother into foreign policy. With regard to Iran, representatives of each department offered competing interpretations of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act. The State Department noted that students no longer qualified for the F-1 visa once the Ira­nian government revoked their passports. The Justice Department pointed to Section 243(h) of the act, which granted it the power to provide safe haven to foreign nationals in danger of persecution at home. The interdepartmental dispute also derived from varying degrees of concern over the diplomatic ramifications of student organ­izing. The State Department asserted continuously that “the continued presence of the two Ira­nian students in the United States is . . . ​ detrimental to our relations with Iran.”87 ­These concerns weighed less heavi­ly on Robert Kennedy, who used his jurisdiction over immigration law to infuse the policy discourse in Washington with the tenets of free-­speech modernism. To discredit the student movement, traditionalists in the State Department resorted to personal attacks on Ali Fatemi and Sadeq Qotbzadeh and portrayed them as communist propagandists. Phillips Talbot asserted that although he had

60 CHAPTER 2

“no reason to believe” that the ISAUS was a communist organ­ization, its message “runs almost exactly parallel to the massive subversive radio propaganda directed against Iran by the Soviet Union.”88 Talbot’s assessment mirrored that of Iran desk officer John Bowling, who described Qotbzadeh thus: “He may not be a communist, but to me he looks like a communist, he acts like a communist, and he talks like a communist. He even smells like a communist to me.”89 In sum, the traditionalist line coming out of Foggy Bottom was that the organ­izing of “hard core” ­Ira­nian students in the United States reinforced the shah’s suspicions about the Kennedys and that their “lurid” propaganda “threatens the maintenance of good relations with the Government of Iran, and particularly with the Shah, at a critical period.”90 In the interagency dispute, State’s l­ egal advisers ­were correct to foresee “a likely clash over civil liberties policy with the Attorney General.”91 Civil liberties temporarily trumped geopolitics when the Justice Department investigated the students and determined that “no action w ­ ill be taken to interrupt their studies.”92 William Douglas, to whom Robert Kennedy turned for advice during the investigation, recalled the reasons for allowing the students to stay in the United States in characteristically candid terms. Douglas warned the attorney general that “the Shah was making up lists for the firing squad when they got back.” Despite the shah’s concerns, the students’ politics ­were not radical enough to elicit concern from Kennedy, who told the secretary of state “to go chase himself” a­ fter discovering that “not a bloody one of t­ hese kids is a Communist.”93 The State Department was angry and maintained that the actions of Justice Department officials “can only be described as evasive.”94 According to Fariborz Fatemi, however, the Justice Department “rendered g­ reat ser­v ice to the cause of dissident Ira­nian students in the U.S. through its sympathy and understanding of their grievances against the pres­ent regime in Iran.”95 As the gulf between the Departments of State and Justice grew deeper, Robert Kennedy and Ali Fatemi grew closer. In August 1962 they attended a conference at the Aspen Institute on “Foreign Youth and the American Image Abroad.” At the conference, Fatemi argued in front of a wide range of prominent Americans that Washington’s support for dictatorial governments was the primary f­ actor that damaged the American image in the eyes of international youths. According to Fatemi, a crippling aversion to risk led Washington to pursue “short cuts” that entrusted U.S. security interests to undemo­cratic rulers instead of a “government by consent.”96 Fatemi’s arguments impressed the attorney general, and Robert Kennedy’s responsiveness to international students impressed Fatemi. One American student activist recalled two years ­later that “Fatemi said that he and Kennedy had become friends . . . ​in Aspen.”97

The Win­d ow

61

Any major change to the administration’s policy would have to pass through Robert Komer, the “one man” on the National Security Council with whom Iran watchers regularly discussed the unfolding events.98 A Harvard gradu­ate and life-­long national security official, Komer advocated for an “indirect strategy” of waging cold war that avoided direct competition with the Soviet Union in exchange for mea­sured gains along the periphery.99 In 1961 and 1962, Komer occupied the center between the State Department, on the one hand, and the free-­speech modernists, on the other. The strategic lens through which he saw the world was dif­fer­ent from that of the State Department’s Near East hands, and the mountains of memoranda that he produced on Iran during the early 1960s indicates that he viewed himself as a “heretic” for pushing for economic reform and renouncing sizable arms sales to Iran.100 Komer was a New Frontiersman who scorned the State Department’s “do-­nothingism” and was willing to give alternative policy recommendations a “fair run” to improve U.S. relations with the third world.101 Though Komer was no civil libertarian, in the pivotal month of August 1962 Robert Kennedy convinced Komer to meet with the leading American and Ira­nian free-­speech modernists: William Douglas and Ali Fatemi. According to Komer, Douglas’s message was clear: “The US ­can’t afford to underwrite absolute monarchies ­these days.” Douglas offered a radical suggestion. He recommended abandoning the shah and establishing a regency ruling on behalf of the shah’s son. That was not feasible, but the Douglas-­Komer correspondence underscored the ambiguity of the administration’s Iran policy. The two men agreed that the Pahlavi regime was unlikely to remain stable over the long term. Moreover, Komer maintained that “most of us share Justice Douglas’ concerns about . . . ​lack of democracy in Iran.” But while Douglas lobbied for po­liti­cal reform in Iran, Komer grew increasingly content with promoting economic modernization and lending lip ser­vice to democ­ratization.102 Within five days of his meeting with Douglas, Komer met with Ali Fatemi. Fatemi expressed his plea­sure that he “had access” to such high-­ranking Americans, joking that before he met Robert Kennedy “the highest US official that he had seen . . . ​was an immigration inspector.” He emphasized to Komer that while he and other nationalist students ­were not in the least anti-­American, they objected to U.S. support for the shah, Iran’s membership in CENTO, and the consortium of Western oil companies that profited from Iran’s natu­ral resources. When asked about politics, Fatemi pointed to the longtime secular liberals Allahyar Saleh and Karim Sanjabi, along with Ali Shayegan, as the most prominent leaders of the nationalist opposition. Komer recalled that Fatemi labeled the shah “the chief opponent of all the US stood for.”103

62 CHAPTER 2

Komer was unmoved by their arguments. He was wary of Douglas’s idealism and disregarded what he considered a “one-­sided slant by a number of disgruntled, anti-­regime Ira­ni­ans.”104 In addition, Komer and his boss, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, read the transcript from the Aspen conference and found Robert Kennedy’s critical comments alarming. “This document is one of the most shocking ­things I have ever read,” Bundy assessed, and one that, in the wrong hands, “could wreck CENTO.”105 M. Gordon Tiger, who succeeded Bowling at the Iran desk, remembered the Aspen conference as “a source of considerable embarrassment.”106 On October 20, 1962, Komer prepared a paper on Iran, but with the Cuban Missile Crisis taking priority, he waited ­until early November to send it to Bundy. “One course would be to ­ride with anti-­Shah forces and perhaps encourage them,” Komer suggested. He concluded that he saw “no contender worth considering” as an alternative to the shah, but added that the administration was “keeping [its] eyes peeled.” Still, Komer patronized the National Front as “minor league politicians.” ­Because Komer was “leery of such radical solutions” as lending support to the National Front, he concluded that ­there was only one logical conclusion: “We stick with realpolitik.” Komer sent a copy of his paper to Robert Kennedy “to c­ ounter the flak he’s getting from the Douglasites.”107 The win­dow for reform in Iran closed with the convergence of two foreign-­ policy communities and the divergence of two o ­ thers. Traditionalists and modernizers differed on the means of Washington’s Iran strategy but agreed on the ends. When other cold war crises began to overshadow Iran, the traditionalists in the State Department and the modernizers in the White House came to see the shah as a source of stability. By October 1962 the traditionalists and modernizers converged in the vital center of American politics. The divergence between the two groups of reformers—­the modernizers and free-­speech modernists—­was the result of contrasting interpretations of power in the international arena. Douglas was an idealist who envisioned a “radically dif­fer­ent design” for U.S. foreign policy based on constitutionalist princi­ples. A ­ fter learning of the Kennedy administration’s decision to r­ ide it out with the shah, Douglas had Komer “eaten for breakfast” and declared his intention to “go to Teheran and give a few lectures and start the revolution.” Komer, despite offering strident calls for economic development, viewed U.S.-­Iran relations through the prism of power politics. The Ira­nian opposition at home and abroad, according to Komer, “­don’t add up to enough power or platform for us to support.”108 To Komer’s mind, if the Kennedy administration ­were to offer support to the Ira­nian opposition or encourage the shah to liberalize the po­liti­cal system, it would only irritate an American ally who was about to launch his own reform initiative.

The Win­d ow

63

The White Revolution In Washington, the White Revolution offered the Kennedy administration its ­reform program. The shah’s revolution was “white,” so the monarch argued, ­because it was not stained with blood and b ­ ecause it excluded the “red” (communist) revolutionaries and the “black” (religious) reactionaries. Many in the West hailed the White Revolution as a model of “progressive” change for other third world leaders to follow. In a dif­fer­ent po­liti­cal context, that could have been the case. But the majlis was still suspended, and the vote on January 26, 1963, to ratify the shah’s six-­point reform program was rigged, with a reported 99 ­percent of the electorate casting a “yes” ballot.109 The White Revolution put the Ira­nian student movement on the defensive as the shah’s emerging image as a progressive leader erased the sense of urgency that empowered free-­speech modernists during 1961 and 1962. While the National Front rejected the politics b ­ ehind the White Revolution, it was not, in princi­ple, against all aspects of the reform program. The Organ­ization of Tehran University Students interpreted the mea­sures as “propaganda stunts” aimed “to mask its [the shah’s] oppressive regime with a reformist new look.” Still, the idea that any opponents of the White Revolution ­were ­either elites angry with land reform or religious zealots who opposed the entrance of w ­ omen into public life put the National Front on the defensive as it attempted to block the shah’s consolidation of power. To position themselves as republicans committed to i­ ssues such as ­free speech, the students in Tehran focused their criticism on the shah’s failure to address “the thorny question of freedom and democracy and the safeguarding of the constitution.”110 In the United States, a group of Ira­nian students in Southern California highlighted the White Revolution’s contradictions. They asserted that the “enfranchisement of ­women (and we certainly support their freedom to vote) was . . . ​a ridicu­lous gesture in a country where elections are consistently rigged and even the men’s votes d ­ on’t count.”111 In winter 1963, Ira­nian students abroad mobilized to prevent the White Revolution from gaining ac­cep­tance in the international community. In West Germany, approximately two hundred students staged one of the largest anti-­White Revolution demonstrations of the winter, and protests continued throughout the year. In Austria, another two hundred students passed on a resolution to their ambassador in Vienna asking why the government did not allow overseas students to vote in the referendum.112 While Ira­nian students in the United States had for two years communicated through vari­ous channels with the Kennedy administration, Ira­nian students from West Germany, Austria, and ­Great Britain now asked the president to support Iran’s “true leaders” and “the abolition” of the shah’s government.113 The anti–­White Revolution demonstrations support

64 CHAPTER 2

Richard Cottam’s claim that, by February 1963, “The Nationalists inside Iran ­were effectively controlled, but the Ira­nian student organ­ization . . . ​in the United States and Eu­rope, always hostile to the Shah, moved into vigorous opposition.”114 But the administration was done listening to Iran’s students. The State Department told McGeorge Bundy that the tele­grams from Eu­rope “grossly exaggerate the situation” that the National Front faced, despite the imprisonment of many of its leaders. Komer advised the administration to avoid direct contacts with the Ira­ nian opposition and support whole-­heartedly the shah’s reform initiative. “We ­don’t want to annoy him [the shah] by responding to ­these pop ­bottles from the bleachers,” Komer wrote.115 Komer’s analogy is telling. In the minds of U.S. officials, oppositionist Ira­nian students abroad w ­ ere sidelined while foreign policy professionals and heads of states acted in the arena to define the contours of the U.S.-­Iran relationship. According to the growing consensus in Washington, the shah was “our boy.”116 As winter gave way to spring, the ISAUS came to the “realization that they could not count on the U.S. Government to help them.”117 With Iran’s nationalists silenced at home and ignored abroad, Iran’s religious establishment, u ­ nder the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini, became the most power­ful domestic source of opposition to the Pahlavi government. During the early 1960s, Khomeini was one of the three leading members of the Shia ulama. He was, at the time, teaching in the holy city of Qom at the Faiziyeh, the center of religious learning in the country, and he made his official entrance into Ira­nian politics in June 1963. In Iran, it was the holy month of Muharram when devout Shias commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Hosein at the seventh-­century ­Battle of Karbala. On Ashura, the anniversary of Hosein’s death, Khomeini delivered a caustic speech against the White Revolution in which he denounced the “scandalous referendum” that was “conducted at bayonet-­point” by “a gang of hooligans and ruffians.” The speech led to Khomeini’s arrest, but not before he inspired a mass demonstration against the shah and the White Revolution. The regime responded by killing hundreds. The shah had declared war on the ulama.118 While the Ashura demonstration elevated the ulama’s status in the ranks of the opposition, it also transformed the way that the student movement thought about its relationship to the Pahlavi state. Ervand Abrahamian has noted that “the June 1963 Uprising had brought into being a new ‘po­liti­cal generation.’ ”119 Ira­ nian students l­ater pointed to that month’s events as marking “the beginning of the New Wave of strug­gle.” “The b ­ itter defeat of 1963,” the ISAUS declared, “taught our p ­ eople that the path of Iran’s revolution must cross the ruins of the Shah’s regime.”120 But the shah remained in power for fifteen more years, and in September 1963 he called an election to end the twenty-­eight-­month period of martial law that

The Win­d ow

65

began in May 1961 and set in motion the crisis in U.S.-­Iran relations. Yet as a group of Tehran University students noted, the election, like the referendum on the White Revolution, took place u ­ nder martial law and was not open to all Ira­ ni­ans. National Front leaders w ­ ere in jail, and the Ira­nian government determined which candidates ­were eligible to run for office. Ali Fatemi published an English-­ language newsletter for the sole purpose of informing Americans that Iran remained an undemo­cratic state despite the outward appearance of demo­cratic pro­cesses. He also published an article in M.S. Arnoni’s Minority of One that criticized the shah’s government and the American media for holding up the 1963 Ira­nian elections as a model of democracy.121 To underscore Fatemi’s points, members of the New York chapter of the Ira­nian Student Association or­ga­nized a sit-in at the office of Iran’s delegate to the United Nations.122 The sit-­inners called for the government to drop all charges against the nationalist and religious ­leaders who faced trial in military courts, f­ ree Mosaddeq from ­house arrest, ease press censorship, allow public gatherings, and hold a new round of elections.123 The September 23 protest caught the attention of American and Ira­nian ­diplomats, whose feelings about the student opposition ­were moving from frustration to anger.124 Ira­nian Foreign Minister Abbas Aram encouraged the State Department to revive its pressure on the Justice Department to deport Iran’s student leaders. He reminded Secretary of State Dean Rusk that ISAUS activities in the United States w ­ ere “receiving the personal attention of the Shah.”125 On two separate occasions in less than a week, Aram told State Department officials that more protests would have “an increasingly deleterious effect on United States-­ Iran relations.”126 As Aram made the rounds in Washington, Talbot produced a paper titled “Agitational Activities of Anti-­Shah Ira­nian Students in the United States.” Convinced that the po­liti­cal views of Fatemi and Qotbzadeh ­were “much more extreme” than o ­ thers in the nationalist opposition, Talbot argued that the students ­were “embarrassing our relations with Iran at a time when it is in our interest to indicate in ­every way pos­si­ble our support for the fundamental reform program which the Shah has undertaken.” Talbot argued that decisive action by immigration officials “would go a long way ­toward ameliorating Ira­nian bitterness and allaying the Shah’s suspicions of our motives.”127 Yet Robert Kennedy remained steadfast in his determination not to deport the students. “The only ­thing the State Department was ever able to do,” Tiger l­ater recalled, was force Kennedy’s Justice Department to issue Ali Fatemi and Sadeq Qotbzadeh a stern warning.128 The warning was issued on December 24, 1963, one month ­after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The government officials with whom Fatemi and Qotbzadeh met told them that the Justice ­Department had been “lenient,” but only “at the Attorney General’s behest.” With a new administration making policy, the attorney general’s authority had

66 CHAPTER 2

diminished and the students’ situations became uncertain.129 The State Department boasted in a tele­gram to Ambassador Holmes that Fatemi and Qotbzadeh “probed hard for signs of differences between State and Justice positions, but received no evidence thereof.”130 With no further prospects of influencing U.S. policy, Qotbzadeh and Fatemi went their separate ways. Qotbzadeh left within months of the Justice Department warning.131 In October 1964, one month a­ fter Robert Kennedy stepped down as head of the Justice Department, the Immigration and Naturalization Ser­v ice ordered Fatemi to leave the country b ­ ecause of 132 his “disorderly be­hav­ior” and the “troublesome activities.” ­After winning an appeal, Fatemi completed his dissertation at the New School and took a position teaching economics in the United States.133

The win­dow for reform in Iran that opened in 1961 and 1962 closed in 1963. In the end, the Kennedy administration did not consider the level of repression in Iran sufficient to integrate the concerns of the Ira­nian opposition generally, and the Ira­nian student movement in the United States in par­tic­u­lar, into its strategic framework. A ­ fter selling the Kennedy administration on the White Revolution, the shah was able to set the par­ameters of reform in Iran. The United States considered the implementation of modernization schemes like the shah’s the most effective way to promote a “controlled revolution.”134 It was not a bourgeois revolution in the tradition of Mohammad Mosaddeq, even though the Second National Front was a v­ iable and demo­cratic alternative to Pahlavi rule. Nor was it a communist revolution led by the communists, as the Tudeh Party ceased to be a player in Ira­nian politics a­ fter 1953. And it was not an Islamic revolution, as few could imagine in the early 1960s a scenario in which Iran’s ulama would seize control of the state. The shah’s White Revolution was based on the premise of elite-­driven modernization. This was a point of continuity with the 1950s, as technocrats such as ­those with the Plan Organ­ization administered the modernization drive. While the shah embraced the role of modernizer, the historian Roland Popp is correct to question ­whether Kennedy’s Iran policy was “an application of modernization theory.” Popp has argued that modernization theory did not, in the end, inform Kennedy’s policy. The administration’s ac­cep­tance of the White Revolution undercut the urban ­middle class, the most impor­tant modernizing force in society according to liberal modernization theorists. When Kennedy turned away from the segment of society that the ISAUS represented, he chose not to apply a strict interpretation of modernization theory to Iran.135 However, developmentalist thinking set policy objectives in Washington and informed perceptions of Ira­nian politics. Development gave the Kennedy team the language to reassess

The Win­d ow

67

the relationship between the cold war core and peripheries, differentiate its “flexible response” from Eisenhower’s “new look,” and attempt to manage the pro­ cess of change over time in the third world. Many midcentury liberals saw a connection between the transformation of material realities and the strug­gle for hearts and minds, but they also displayed exceptionalist and racialized thinking in equating underdevelopment with po­liti­cal immaturity.136 In this sense, developmentalist thinking explains why Kennedy-­era liberals supported the shah’s White Revolution, even though it was defined in opposition to the free-­speech modernism of American and Iranian constitutionalists. Moreover, ­there was no single theory or approach to modernization that American academics or heads of state universally accepted. Debates from the 1950s about the merits of low-­level public works programs versus large-­scale industrial proj­ects continued into the 1960s, as did conversations about the relationship between economic development and po­liti­cal liberalization. Walt Rostow’s five-­ step model focused too narrowly on economics, and the New Frontiersmen knew it. “We may wake up at the end of the De­cade of Development and find . . . ​that we lost out po­liti­cally,” one of Komer’s deputies worried.137 While Kennedy pushed for comprehensive reform but settled for a narrow application of developmentalist thinking in Iran, scholars such as Samuel Huntington and Manfred Halpern contended that their liberal pre­de­ces­sors erroneously presupposed the universality of the American experience, arguing instead that guided leadership with military backing could manage the “dislocations” that, they argued, inevitably gripped transitioning nations.138 Iran was a model case, and even though the title shahanshah, or king of kings, was the antithesis of modernity, social scientists began to consider the shah the quin­tes­sen­tial “modernizing monarch,” a concept that Huntington pop­u­lar­ized in the 1960s to reconcile the seeming contradiction between modernity and monarchical institutions. To Huntington, leaders like the shah ­were best suited to be “protagonists of the royal revolution from above.”139 As ideas about modernizing monarchs replaced calls for constitutionalism, the most power­ful proponents of a revised Iran strategy lost f­ avor in Lyndon Johnson’s White House. The president’s acrimonious relationship with Robert Kennedy and William Douglas’s early and unsolicited dissent against the Vietnam War assured that neither influenced the administration when the time came to make tough decisions.140 The ISAUS predicted in September 1964 that Robert Kennedy’s departure from the Justice Department would usher in “the begining [sic] of a new tide” against anti-­shah students in the United States.141 Rather than a potentially impor­tant source of information, the State Department and the White House viewed dissident Ira­nian students as a threat to the administration’s relationship with the shah. Iran desk officer M. Gordon Tiger and other traditionalists in the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs aimed at “restoring

68 CHAPTER 2

Ira­nian confidence in United States intentions and, hopefully, dampening the ardor of other agitators.”142 For his part, Robert Komer remained the top Iran analyst on the National Security Council through early 1966 before he moved on to serve as interim national security adviser and coordinator of the “other war” in South Vietnam.143 While Komer was adamant that the shah needed to balance his military ambitions with economic priorities, po­liti­cal liberalization remained outside of his strategic calculus. In a 1965 memorandum to President Johnson, Komer hammered home his belief that “good economics is good politics, and that modernizing their countries was the way for monarchs to keep their thrones.”144 While the White Revolution had supporters in Washington, it created new enemies for the shah in Iran and the diaspora. It alienated secular liberals such as Ali Fatemi and liberal Islamists such as Sadeq Qotbzadeh. By the mid-1970s the White Revolution became a rallying point for the opposition. “The ‘White Revolution’ was,” the ISAUS charged in 1974, “as much a ‘cure’ for the ills of the economy, as two asprins [sic] would be to a patient suffering from terminal cancer.” The ISAUS used terms such as “underhanded” and “hoodwink” to describe vari­ous aspects of the reform program, which ultimately allowed the shah to consolidate his own power at home and proj­ect a favorable image overseas.145 The Ira­nian student lobby’s ability to proj­ect its critiques of authoritarian development into the halls of power in Washington did not translate to meaningful po­liti­cal reform in Iran.

3 THE YOUTH Student Internationalism during the Global 1960s Let it be said that I, during four years of my studies in the United States of Amer­i­ca, have found the American p ­ eople to be freedom-­ loving, liberty-­conscious, and helpful. My friends, in par­tic­u­lar, have been stimulating, and the true American showcase of global brotherhood. —­Sadeq Qotbzadeh (1963)

Two dif­fer­ent “alliances” of Americans and Ira­ni­ans took shape ­after the win­dow for reform closed in late 1962. One was the state-­to-­state alliance. The White Revolution ended discussions in Washington about po­liti­cal liberalization. The Washington-­Tehran alliance evolved considerably over the years, but the formula of economic development, military expansion, domestic repression, and strong personal ties between heads of state was set. To borrow from the historian M ­ artin Klimke, the “other alliance” was between Ira­nian students and their American supporters.1 They embraced the language of “rights” to articulate a critique of the shah’s White Revolution and U.S. foreign policy. President Lyndon Johnson pledged U.S. support for the shah ­after he assumed the presidency in November 1963. Five days ­after Johnson took the oath of office, his top White House aides commented that, in contrast to Kennedy, “LBJ liked the Shah.”2 The four visits that the shah made to the United States during Johnson’s presidency ­were representative of that friendliness. As the lid slowly came off the Kennedy-­era limit on arms transfers to Iran, the Johnson administration shipped hundreds of millions of dollars in armaments to its ally in Tehran. The administration appreciated the shah for his role in the global economy, hostility ­toward Arab nationalism, cooperation with Israel, and support for the U.S. war in Vietnam.3 ­Because Iran was a strategically valuable ally, the Johnson administration was s­ ilent when the shah ordered the mass arrests of his po­liti­cal opponents between 1964 and 1966 to set the stage for his coronation in 1967.4 While Johnson “prize[d] the fullest pos­si­ble exchange of culture and ideas” between the two countries, his refusal to consider the question of freedom in Iran 69

70 CHAPTER 3

limited the effectiveness of American soft power and contributed to Ira­nian dissidents having to go underground or out of the country.5 The most controversial Johnson-­era initiative was the 1964 status-­of-­forces agreement that gave diplomatic immunity to all U.S. ser­v icemen and their families in Iran. It was a blatant violation of Ira­nian sovereignty that fanned the flames of discontent over this most recent “capitulations agreement.”6 Overseas, the Ira­ nian student movement repeatedly called for the abrogation of the agreement and pointed out how it damaged the American image in Iran.7 But the most significant critic was Ayatollah Khomeini. Speaking from Qom a l­ittle more than one year ­after his arrest in June 1963, Khomeini told his listeners that “the government has sold our in­de­pen­dence” and “reduced the Ira­nian ­people to a level lower than that of an American dog.” His message was that “the dignity of Iran has been destroyed” and that Ira­ni­ans w ­ ere “slaves of Britain one day, and Amer­ i­ca the next.” Shortly a­ fter the speech, the Ira­nian government sent Khomeini into exile, where he remained for the next fifteen years.8 While the shah saw exile as a solution to his Khomeini prob­lem, he considered international education a safety valve for his youth prob­lem. Most university ­students w ­ ere, the U.S. embassy in Tehran reported, “disaffected from the system” and did “not identify with the regime and the development effort.”9 For ­those reasons, the shah blocked the expansion of Iran’s public university system between 1960 and 1974.10 Tehran University was the nation’s “intellectual center,” but “police control” meant that its “po­liti­cal autonomy” was “decisively broken.” Security forces and SAVAK in­for­mants aimed to “contain the level of student po­liti­cal activity” and drafted students who caused “trou­ble” into the army. In short, ­there was “no ­free play of ideas.” As one professor at Tehran University criticized the university surveillance that accompanied the White Revolution: “What use is t­ here to sow a harvest when the atmosphere is too cold for t­ hings to grow?”11 The Ira­nian student population grew considerably during the 1960s. Approximately 33 ­percent of the Ira­nian population in the late 1960s was between the ages of fifteen and thirty, and Iran’s student population at home and abroad grew from 52,943 in 1966 to 437,089 in 1976.12 In 1964 t­ here ­were 24,459 students at Iran’s ten universities and 19,500 Ira­ni­ans working t­ oward degrees in twenty-­three other countries.13 While the United States hosted more “official” Ira­nian students than any other country by the late 1950s, it surpassed West Germany in the mid1960s as the largest host nation to young Ira­ni­ans, regardless of the paperwork they possessed. By the end of the de­cade, 41 ­percent (approximately 12,000 students) of the Ira­nian student population overseas was in the United States, with 28 ­percent in West Germany, 12 ­percent in ­Great Britain, 8 ­percent in Austria, and 7 ­percent in France.14 Iran remained, through the 1960s, one of the top five

The Youth

71

exporters of students to the United States, b ­ ehind only Canada, India, Taiwan, and eventually Hong Kong.15 The Confederation of Ira­nian Students National Union led the anti-­shah movement outside of Iran during the 1960s. For two years ­after the confederation’s founding in 1962, the five members of the ISAUS leadership served concurrently in New York as the CISNU Secretariat. In 1964 the CISNU Secretariat moved to West Germany, where it remained. By the mid-1960s, with the formerly dominant National Front divided, the Maoist-­influenced Revolutionary Organ­ization of the Tudeh Party and the religiously oriented Liberation Movement vied for influence in student circles. In 1965, when the CISNU met in West Germany, three seats on the Secretariat went to the National Front, a fourth to the Revolutionary Organ­ization, and a fifth to Abolhasan Banisadr, a representative of the Liberation Movement who went on to become the first president of the Islamic Republic. Although the mid-1960s was a period of transition for the movement, by the end of the de­cade ­there was “greater communist activity  .  .  . ​amongst Ira­ni­ans abroad now than ­there has been since the heyday of the Tudeh party.” Few Ira­ nian youths abroad adhered to the Soviet-­inspired ideology that appealed to previous generations, but many began to accept the preaching of Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Chairman Mao Zedong as gospel. The historian Afshin Matin-­Asgari has described 1969 as “the year of Maoist hegemony” in the CISNU, and Maoists gained control of the ISAUS the following year.16 In the United States, the civil rights and antiwar movements, along with omnipresent campus activism, presented young p ­ eople with new views of the pos­si­ ble. The ISAUS praised the “heroic strug­gle” of black civil rights activists. “Your strug­gle is in a profound sense ours,” one Ira­nian proclaimed from Mas­sa­chu­ setts, and “Your victory, too, s­ hall be ours.” Local ISAUS chapters exhibited a transnational understanding of student activism as the free-­speech and antiwar movements joined civil rights in the push for social and po­liti­cal change in the United States. When discussing a group of Ira­nian po­liti­cal prisoners, the Southern California chapter stated, “They w ­ eren’t members of Berkeley’s FSM [­Free Speech Movement], though they would like to have been. They ­weren’t demonstrating in Selma or attending teach-­ins in Washington, although they would have had they been ­here.”17 Outside of the United States, decolonization helped students around the world imagine new liberatory possibilities. The CISNU saw a “worldwide revolutionary upsurge” and acknowledged that it “provided the movement in Iran with a fresh source of energy from which it could draw strength.”18 Such proclamations proved correct the CIA’s assertion in its controversial 1968 report on “Restless Youth” (which included a section on Ira­nian students) that students, regardless of nationality, “communicate effectively with

72 CHAPTER 3

each other outside of any institutional framework” and saw themselves as constituting a “community of interests.”19 During the 1960s, Ira­ni­ans in the United States and Western Eu­rope ­were part of a transnational community of students that offered a comprehensive critique of the world’s authoritarian states. In the pro­cess, Ira­nian and Western youths together articulated the second rights-­based critique of the Pahlavi state and deconstructed the edifice of the “­free world” on which American understandings of the cold war and its web of alliances w ­ ere constructed.20 Young Ira­ni­ans joined youths around the world to decry American militarism in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic and declare solidarity with students fighting authoritarian regimes in the free-­world states of Spain, Greece, and Mexico.21 The CISNU also supported Palestinian self-­determination, opposed white supremacy in southern Africa, and challenged the division of the world into cold war blocs by supporting the admission of China to the United Nations. All of this was done in the name of an anti-­authoritarianism rooted in a commitment to broadly defined rights such as “­human freedom and justice” and more narrowly construed ones such as the “freedom of assembly, press and association.”22 Direct contact between “foreign fronts” of students abroad and their Western hosts, and a mutual embrace of a common “language of dissent,” made students who questioned Iran’s place in the international system consequential global actors during the 1960s.23 In the early part of the de­cade, the liberal anticommunist U.S. National Student Association joined the ISAUS in calling for a balance ­between freedom and development in Iran. Their cooperation crested in 1964 before sinking in a sea of distrust, but the critique of the Pahlavi state that they developed was part of a liberal student internationalism that is lost in the lit­er­a­ ture with the usual focus on the radical Left and Right.24 ­After the center of international student politics fractured in the mid-1960s, New Leftists abandoned the liberal critique and drew attention to the widening chasm between the worldviews of young radicals and their respective governments. Both the liberal and New Left students went beyond single issues to situate the Shah of Iran alongside other authoritarian leaders throughout the so-­called ­free world in their collective critique, not just of a single state, but of the cold war order that legitimized them. This chapter speaks to an unresolved historiographic question of major import: Why, despite the proliferation of student protest during the 1960s, did national governments pursue policies that ran ­counter to the wishes of the de­cade’s most vocal students? The most provocative answer, offered by the historian Jeremi Suri, is that the “revolutions” of 1968 so challenged the cold war order that the world’s ­great powers moved ­toward a counterrevolutionary détente to consolidate their own standing.25 The analy­sis ­here is narrower, and the answer dif­fer­ ent. The strengthening of the U.S.-­Iran alliance during the Johnson years was not a

The Youth

73

product of “reaction” to the student internationalism of the 1960s; the administration opted to back the shah despite Ira­nian student organ­izing, not in spite of it. The postwar generation was not monolithic, and U.S. officials w ­ ere reassured of the wisdom of their policies when they saw that a small but impor­tant group of Western-­educated Iranians—­the technocratic ­silent generation—­supported the shah’s White Revolution. In turn, American diplomats routinely referred to ­anti-­shah Ira­nian students—­the louder sixties generation—as “agitators” and “troublemakers” who would e­ ither come to accept Pahlavi rule or dis­appear into obscurity.26 Following that logic, Lyndon Johnson concluded that t­here was no reason to second-­guess the U.S. trajectory in Iran.

Liberal Internationalism During the first half of the 1960s, liberal student internationalists from Iran and the United States attempted to undermine the fragile consensus that legitimized the shah’s proj­ect of authoritarian development. Iran’s liberals w ­ ere members of the ISAUS, with Ali Fatemi at the center. Amer­i­ca’s most influential liberal students w ­ ere members of the U.S. National Student Association. The growing physical presence of Ira­nian students in the United States and their direct contact with idealistic young Americans forced the USNSA to confront the contradictions between their faith in cold war liberalism and their government’s support for Iran’s undemo­cratic leadership.27 In the United States, Iran’s expatriate students informed the young generation of Americans at a time when it was growing in size and beginning to think seriously about the implications of U.S. global power. Collectively, they introduced the Pahlavi state into an emerging rights-­ based critique of authoritarian rule. The USNSA—­the official national ­union of American students—­formed in 1947 and has, since Ramparts revealed in early 1967 that it received CIA funds, remained one of the more controversial “front” organ­izations of the cold war era.28 While “pass-­throughs” such as the American Friends of the ­Middle East, the Asia Foundation, and the Catherwood Foundation funneled money to the USNSA, it received the bulk of its financial support from the Foundation for Youth and Student Affairs. Most funding went to the USNSA International Commission, which in 1960 moved from Cambridge, Mas­sa­chu­setts, to join the national office in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The CIA hoped that the behind-­the-­scenes bankrolling of the USNSA and other educational programs would help the United States rebound from the immediate postwar edge that the Soviet Union gained in the competition for the hearts and minds of global youths. Karen Paget, a former member of the USNSA, has written on the organ­ization’s participation in

74 CHAPTER 3

the covert “crusade against communism,” as has the historian Hugh Wilford. He has shown that front organ­izations often exercised considerable autonomy from their patrons in Langley.29 The USNSA did not always act as a “front” for U.S. government interests. In its relationship with Iran’s student activists, the USNSA spurned ­those interests. Cooperation during the first half of the 1960s between the ISAUS and USNSA exposed both the power and the limitations of Washington’s covert cold war. The USNSA’s relationship with the Ira­nian student diaspora was torn between its liberal anticommunism and a devotion to demo­cratic governance. Both ­were part of the USNSA’s worldview. To be sure, many of the American students who interacted with their Ira­nian counter­parts w ­ ere “witting,” meaning that they w ­ ere intelligence assets who did not tip off their unwitting colleagues in the USNSA or their international interlocutors. The Americans ­were often clumsy when ­approaching Iran’s student activists, and their aim was to strengthen anticommunist liberals at the expense of New Leftists in Ira­nian organ­izations.30 Yet an overemphasis on the USNSA’s anticommunism misses the fact that even the most witting students sought an alternative to Pahlavi rule. One member of the USNSA well-­connected enough to get a meeting in the State Department wrote in an internal report that the group should put “po­liti­cal pressure on sensitive parts of the Department of State and other ­people who still want to maintain our friendship with the Shah at all costs.”31 In contrast to most cold warriors, the USNSA’s distaste for the shah and their anticommunism w ­ ere not mutually exclusive. As one witting student explained, the USNSA’s goal was “to shore up National Front ele­ments among Ira­nian students and convince them that they have friends in the West and thereby help to insure that if the Shah is ever overthrown his place w ­ ill be taken by demo­cratic rather than Communist revolutionaries.”32 Despite its ties to the intelligence community, opposition to the shah took root in the USNSA’s institutional culture. The USNSA’s opposition to the shah stemmed from its commitment to academic freedom, an issue well suited for a student organ­ization whose bylaws prohibited it from engaging in “po­liti­cal” activities and confined it to “campus” concerns. Academic freedom was a campus concern on which students could claim authority, but it had po­liti­cal implications. By the 1960s the USNSA’s subtle shift from being a group of “students as students” with a focus on academic freedom to one of “students as activists” with a broader set of concerns crystalized in the organ­ization’s opposition to the Pahlavi regime.33 To the USNSA International Commission, its support for Iran’s nationalist opposition was “one in which we believe deeply, b ­ ecause it involves a fundamental 34 question of ­human freedom.” To young American liberals, “­human freedom” extended from the malls of campuses to the halls of power. It meant not only victory over Amer­i­ca’s communist adversaries; it also meant the disassociation

The Youth

75

of the United States from anticommunist third-­world dictators. In its correspondences with Iran’s student leaders, the USNSA unambiguously stated that it “would continue to place high priority on the mobilization of international student opinion and action” against governments such as Iran’s “to transform ­these near-­totalitarian states into nations worthy of the category ‘­free world.’ ”35 Below the institutional level, the internationalization of student life during the 1960s led many young Americans to develop empathy for Ira­nian rights activists. Consider the case of Norman Uphoff, who graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1963 before ­going to gradu­ate school at Prince­ton. Uphoff was a pacifist and early critic of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, but he was witting and eventually ran the USNSA International Commission.36 Still, in an internal memorandum, Uphoff reported that one Ira­nian student leader “knew me and my general sympathy for the Ira­nian student cause” when they w ­ ere classmates in 37 Minnesota. Uphoff also defended Ali Fatemi during his immigration trou­bles by writing to U.S. government officials to describe the ISAUS president as “one of the most capable leaders among the young generation of Ira­ni­ans” who “has championed the rights of the Ira­nian p ­ eople for a constitutional government with demo­cratic elections.” To Uphoff ’s mind, Fatemi was guilty only if it was a crime to “put forward his criticism of the current Ira­nian government with courage, but in a manner consistent with the tradition of demo­cratic opposition.”38 Cooperation between liberal American and Ira­nian student internationalists began during the 1960–61 academic year. In August 1960—­the same month that Ali Fatemi and Sadeq Qotbzadeh w ­ ere elected to the ISAUS Secretariat—­the Minnesota chapter of the Ira­nian Student Association sent a representative to the USNSA meeting in Minneapolis. The following winter, ­after a series of discussions with the new ISAUS leadership, the USNSA began to systematically monitor po­liti­cal developments in Iran. Shortly thereafter, an officer with the USNSA International Commission concluded that the situation at Tehran University was “against all the princi­ples of Academic Freedom” and that the ISAUS “seems to be fighting a true ­battle.”39 Opposition to the shah became part of the USNSA’s institutional culture in summer 1961 as students prepared for the annual meeting in Madison. Harvey Flad was the association’s point man for Ira­nian affairs, and Sadeq Qotbzadeh thanked him “for your documented, ­great interest that you have taken in our cause.”40 Flad corresponded more frequently with Ali Fatemi and received from him the latest Ira­nian student publications.41 Flad told Fatemi that his attendance at the Madison meeting was “an excellent way to continue the good relationships between the two organ­izations” and that “the delegates would enjoy the personal insights that you ­will be able to offer.”42 A testament to Fatemi’s influence came in the form of a unan­i­mous vote by the USNSA’s National Executive Committee

76 CHAPTER 3

to adopt a resolution titled “Suppression of Ira­nian Students” that denounced the absence of “academic and po­liti­cal rights” and “university autonomy” in Iran. ­After demanding that the shah release a group of imprisoned students, the ­resolution affirmed that young ­people around the world possessed “the right of students to demonstrate peacefully without fear of government reprisals.” The Madison resolutions also empowered the International Commission to assist Ira­nian students in the United States “by all pos­si­ble means.”43 Ali Fatemi printed a text of the USNSA resolution in the autumn 1961 edition of Iran Nameh to make sure that as many Ira­ni­ans as pos­si­ble knew that they had a new ally.44 The Madison resolution authorized local USNSA affiliates to call for academic freedom in Iran, and the effects w ­ ere felt immediately at schools with sizable Ira­ nian student populations. At Fairleigh Dickinson University, the home of Professor Nasrollah Fatemi, the campus newspaper reported that the circulation of a petition for “the academic right of self-­expression” in Iran broadened the horizons of American students and got them “interested in more than just campus politics.” Soon, “Enthusiasm and even zeal have crept over this once-­apathetic campus.”45 The University of Minnesota also felt the effects of the Madison ­resolution. “I’m certain,” the president of the college’s student association proclaimed, that the campus community “­will support ­these students in Iran at the first opportunity.” Ali Barzegar, a f­uture ISAUS vice president, wrote a piece in the college newspaper to underscore the relationship between global student consciousness and the alteration of cold war discourse: “I hope the students in this country would realize that the freedoms they enjoy h ­ ere are not realized by ­people in many other parts of the [world].”46 Liberal student internationalism became manifest on a global scale in 1961, in large part b ­ ecause of the relationship that Ira­nian students established with the International Student Conference (ISC). The ISC’s headquarters in the Netherlands provided a meeting place for national ­unions of students from throughout the world since its founding in 1950. By sharing with the USNSA many of the same covert benefactors, the ISC served as an anticommunist counterweight to the Moscow-­influenced and Prague-­based International Union of Students.47 The CISNU first attended a meeting of the International Student Conference in Quebec in June 1962. The confederation was offered membership, but the National Fronters on the CISNU’s Secretariat disagreed with the ISC’s ideological line b ­ ecause it amounted to choosing sides in the cold war. Nevertheless, they leaned t­ oward the ISC b ­ ecause it recognized the CISNU—­which spoke for students at home and abroad—as the sole representative of Ira­nian students. The International Union of Students, by contrast, recognized the Tudeh Party’s Tehran University Students Organ­ization. The CISNU immediately made its mark on the ISC when the conferees in Quebec produced a document far more radical

The Youth

77

than the recent USNSA proclamations. The ISC accused the shah of being “unquestionably dictatorial” for violating “the Ira­nian Constitution, h ­ uman rights, the princi­ples of university autonomy and academic freedom, and the right of students to ­free travel.” The ISC then called for “the destruction of the pres­ent dictatorship” and the implementation of “a demo­cratic form of government.”48 Ira­nian influence in the ISC was evident to readers of the organ­ization’s publications. In 1961 and 1962, the ISC’s research wing investigated a range of issues from racial discrimination in the United States to the lack of democracy in all cold war blocs.49 Nearly half of the thirty-­two-­page Iran report focused on educational issues. Reflecting the input of nationalist Ira­nian students, the report contrasted the “vital, effective, and productive student activity” of the Mosaddeq era with the “suppression and stagnation” that followed.50 The ISC also opened the pages of its official organ—­The Student—to Ira­nian contributors. A former USNSA official who left the International Commission for a leadership role in the ISC hoped that the articles, available in five languages, would contribute “to the ­enlightenment of ­those national ­unions of students who are interested in developments in Iran, particularly concerning the true nature of the Shah’s ‘reforms.’ ” By June 1963, when the shah responded violently to Khomeini’s denunciation of the White Revolution, the ISC was giving the CISNU “more frequent mention and publicity” in ISC publications “than practically any other National Union of Students in the Conference.”51 Liberal student internationalism peaked in 1964.52 That it did was in large part thanks to Majid Tehranian, a gradu­ate student in po­liti­cal science at Harvard who, while in Cambridge, ran the ISAUS International Bureau. He ensured that knowledge of Iran and the anti-­shah movement spread beyond Ira­nian students to Americans. At one moment he helped Peace Corps volunteers at Georgetown University prepare for their time in Iran, and at the next he flew to Los Angeles to speak on the White Revolution.53 As editor of Daneshjoo (Student), he printed bilingual editions in Persian and En­glish.54 Tehranian described the purpose of the English-­language portion of Daneshjoo as twofold. First, it was “a medium of information about Iran for the English-­speaking ­people.” Second, the new format gave “better coverage to the American students’ strug­gle for peace and racial equality” and encouraged Ira­ni­ans “to participate actively in the common strug­ gle waged on this front.”55 In sum, Tehranian worked “to strengthen the bonds of friendship and understanding between our two nations.”56 The breakthroughs of 1964 ­were heralded as major achievements at the USNSA and ISAUS meetings late that summer. The delegates to the USNSA’s Seventeenth Annual Meeting produced their most comprehensive critique of the Pahlavi state and pledged to lobby the Johnson administration to reevaluate its relationship with the shah.57 The USNSA also resolved to continue its effort to “raise

FIGURE 6.  Ira­nian students in California protest UCLA’s decision to award the shah an honorary degree in spring 1964. The image originally appeared on a resolution that the USNSA passed to condemn the shah’s authoritarian method of governance. Note how the students emphasized the relationship between U.S. aid and the lack of academic freedom in Iran. “Resolution on Iran Passed at the Seventeenth USNSA Congress,” USNSA box 220, folder: Iran 1963–66. Courtesy of the Hoover Institution Archives.

The Youth

79

American student sympathy for the cause of the Ira­nian student”58 (see Figure 6). A few weeks ­later, when the ISAUS held its annual meeting at the University of Illinois, the international affairs vice president proclaimed that the USNSA’s position was “admirable and befitting the dynamism and the moral conviction in social justice and ­human worth demanded of our generation.”59

The White Revolution and Its Discontents in the Golden State In June 1964 the shah came to the United States to sell his White Revolution to the American ­people. The shah met with President Johnson, but he spent most of his time on college campuses receiving honorary degrees, including one from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).60 With the official U.S.-­Iran alliance healing from the Kennedy-­era wounds, the alliance of Ira­nian and ­American students aimed to dispel the myths about the White Revolution and modernizing monarchy that accompanied the shift in U.S. policy. The increasing vitality of the transnational anti-­shah movement owed a lot to the fusion of academic freedom and anti-­authoritarianism during protests against UCLA’s decision to award the shah an honorary degree. The shah’s visit to California coincided with a shift in the orga­nizational power center of the ISAUS from the Northeast to the West Coast. From 1960 to 1963, students such as Ali Fatemi and Sadeq Qotbzadeh dominated day-­to-­day operations. To be sure, East Coast cities remained a hub of student organ­izing and the site of Tehranian’s International Bureau. From 1963 to 1965, however, Hasan Lebaschi was the ISAUS president, and he was a gradu­ate student in po­liti­cal science at the University of California at Berkeley.61 He hailed from “the famous pro-­ Mosaddeq Lebaschi f­ amily in Iran.”62 Outside of the ISAUS, more Ira­ni­ans lived in Los Angeles than any other American metropolitan center by the mid-1960s.63 Lebaschi raised eyebrows in Washington when, in April 1964, he sent the White House a tele­gram that quoted Johnson’s claim to defend “the rights of men, all men of e­ very color in our own land and around the world.” Lebaschi claimed that the “hard facts of life” in Iran proved that t­ hose rights ­were not enjoyed. Although the executive secretary of the Department of State prevented the letter from reaching the president, Lebaschi explained the contradictions inherent in the shah’s claim to be a modernizing monarch and U.S. support for his government. Lebaschi knew that the purpose of the shah’s 1964 visit to the United States was “to put up a show of a ‘king who has turned revolutionary.’ ” Yet this was the same king, the ISAUS charged, who was “responsible for mass-­killings, torture and shocking violations of the most basic rights of our ­people.” Lebaschi ended his

80 CHAPTER 3

letter by warning the president that “it is high time for the U.S. government to understand that the shah’s days in Iran are numbered.”64 With the ISAUS president in Berkeley, the shah became a rallying point for an emerging culture of opposition on the campus a semester before the ­Free Speech Movement made the seat of the University of California system synonymous with student activism. American students objected to their school’s association with the shah on the pages of the Daily Californian in April 1964.65 One American gradu­ate student criticized U.S. military aid policies and his own university for choosing to “help the government perpetuate this hoax” of the shah as a benevolent leader. Ira­nian students in Berkeley offered a similar pronouncement four days ­later in the same publication, asserting that they “learned with ­great shock” that the university chose to honor “a man whose hostility ­towards the academic world and the basic rights of man is well known to any observer of the Ira­nian scene.”66 The senate of the Associated Students of the University of California agreed. On May 12 the student government passed a motion by a vote of 13–2 in ­favor of rescinding UCLA’s invitation to the shah, but the regents disregarded the vote.67 American and Ira­nian student internationalists w ­ ere active in Southern California, too. USNSA President Gregory Gallo and James Fowler of the International Commission explained to Franklin Murphy, the chancellor of UCLA, that the USNSA’s continued opposition to the shah was based on his “long rec­ord of disregard for the princi­ples of academic and personal freedom” and the “harassment and intimidation” of Ira­nian students abroad. UCLA’s decision to bestow an honorary degree to the shah, they continued, “undercut the efforts of students and professors to win recognition of academic freedom in Iran by giving them the impression that the American academic community is indifferent to their plight.”68 As was the case in Berkeley, the ISAUS worked alongside American students, distributed lit­er­at­ure, and published in the UCLA campus newspaper. The ISAUS ensured supporters of their “desire [for] social and economic development” and “freedom for our ­people.”69 The ISAUS also released a statement to reveal the unfortunate irony that the month of the shah’s commencement address “coincides with the anniversary of his most manifest act of inhumanity”: the June 1963 massacre.70 ­These arguments resonated with the editors of the Daily Bruin, who gave a full page to the president of the Southern California branch of the ISAUS to condemn UCLA’s relationship with the shah. UCLA administrators and State Department officials interpreted t­ hese “ominous developments” as evidence that “the recent series of civil rights disturbances had pop­u­lar­ized the idea of demonstrations in this country.”71 Despite ­these concerns, Clark Kerr, the president of the University of California system, insisted on keeping the engagement.72 On June 12 the shah stood outdoors before a crowd of 12,600 and delivered the keynote address at UCLA’s commencement. Some gradu­ates walked out of

The Youth

81

the ceremony as Kerr introduced the shah, but the monarch brushed off the rustling in the crowd and proceeded to hail the merits of his White Revolution. He described himself as one of the world’s “progressive and demo­cratic leaders” who would usher in the “construction of a new society in which all the citizens . . . ​ would enjoy equality, freedom, and social justice.” As the shah spoke of upholding “democracy and ­human dignity,” law enforcement officials paced ner­vously through the aisles. In one instance, they removed a group of students that attempted to display an anti-­shah banner. Overhead, a police he­li­cop­ter engaged in a “dogfight” with a small, student-­rented airplane towing a banner that read, “Need a Fix—­See the Shah,” referring to heroin production in Iran. As many as two hundred protesters just outside of the venue added chants of “shah is a murderer” to the sound of propellers thundering overhead.73 Two meetings in the aftermath of the UCLA incident serve as evidence that the two alliances of Americans and Ira­ni­ans ­were working t­ oward competing ends during the mid-1960s. The first took place immediately ­after the shah’s speech. When the shah flew back to the East Coast to discuss the modernization of Iran’s military forces with the Pentagon, he “appeared tired and somewhat melancholy.” One U.S. official “had the impression that the demonstrations in Los Angeles had depressed him.” The shah cheered up when he secured a new shipment of military equipment and an extension of U.S. Military Assistance Program grants. The agreement was made official on, of all days, July 4, 1964, when the United States and Iran signed a memorandum of understanding that effectively removed the possibility that ­future military grants, credits, and sales would be contingent on po­liti­cal reforms. According to one observer, the shah “spoke with manifest irritation” about the events that unfolded at UCLA, but ­after seeing the difference between Johnson and Kennedy, he “was manifestly pleased.”74 The second meeting took place four days ­after the shah’s address in Los Angeles when the State Department’s Iran desk officer sat down for a one-­hour conversation in Washington with Gregory Gallo and James Fowler of the USNSA. According to M. Gordon Tiger, Gallo and Fowler wanted to exchange information about the most recent wave of student demonstrations. “The ‘exchange’ of information,” Tiger derided, “turned out to be entirely one-­sided.” He lamented that Gallo and Fowler “had virtually no information about ISA activities during the Shah’s visit . . . ​and no information whatsoever on their activities prior to this summer.” Tiger contended that topics such as the National Front and the ISAUS ­were “evidently quite new to them.” His assessment runs c­ ounter to the information contained in the private memoranda and public statements that the USNSA produced on ­these aspects of the anti-­shah movement between 1960 and 1964. In fact, Fowler failed to convince Tiger that “they had enjoyed the benefit of some first-­class research.”75 The apparent unwillingness of Gallo and Fowler

82 CHAPTER 3

to exchange their most sensitive information suggests that witting USNSA leaders remained sincere in their opposition to the shah and their commitment to student internationalism through 1964. However, their relationship with the ISAUS fell apart in 1965 as Ira­nian student activists found a new home in the New Left.

The Global New Left As 1960s progressed, an increasing number of Ira­nian students abroad expressed their opposition to U.S. foreign policy and the White Revolution through the explic­itly po­liti­cal language of the New Left. Generally, the “old” Left appealed to the industrial proletariat; adherents took their lead from Moscow and would not act ­until ­there was a revolutionary situation. The New Left, by contrast, saw revolutionary potential in students, not workers; adherents disregarded Moscow as the center of international communism and aimed to create revolutionary situations rather than wait for them to develop. Many Ira­ni­ans who studied in the United States in the late 1960s recall their former attraction to the New Left. Abbas Milani, recollecting his life as an undergraduate in Berkeley, writes that “in the sixties . . . ​ it was the West that caught the contagious fever of revolution and Marxist theory. Many of us, disgruntled as we ­were with the po­liti­cal realities of Iran, ­were also consumed by that fever.”76 The author Azar Nafisi, who protested the shah’s dictatorship while studying at the University of Oklahoma, remembers that as the movement grew more militant, she began “turning the teachings of Che Guevara, Mao, Lenin, and Stalin into romantic dreams of revolution.”77 Taking their cue from Ira­ nian students, New Leftists in the United States and Western Eu­rope articulated an anti-­authoritarian critique of the cold war order during the “high sixties.”78 The New Left student movement in the United States began on a less radical note in the early 1960s. It emerged from dissatisfaction with cold war liberalism and a conviction that democracy needed direct action. One historian has noted that the “eroding consensus” of student politics during the de­cade owed a lot to “the action-­oriented critiques of both Left and Right.” On the Left, that critique came from individuals such as Tom Hayden, who criticized the “elite” USNSA and formed Students for a Demo­cratic Society (SDS), the most impor­tant organ­ ization for American New Leftists during the 1960s.79 SDSers first heard about the Ira­nian student movement in summer 1961. A ­ fter learning about the impressive gains that the ISAUS made during the previous academic year, Al Haber of SDS became “hot for the program” of supporting Iran’s students.80 One year ­later, in June 1962, fifty-­nine members of SDS drafted the Port Huron Statement and hailed it as the “agenda for a generation.” With Hayden as the primary author, the Port Huron Statement called for participatory democracy at home and a re-

The Youth

83

treat from the militaristic application of containment abroad. SDS pointed to U.S. support for “­free world” dictators as evidence that their country’s relationship with countries like Iran amounted to “foreign domination.” American New Leftists considered the military and economic relationship between the United States and Iran an impediment to political reform and a telltale sign of American imperium, a connection that SDS routinely argued the 1953 coup exemplified.81 Like the coup against Mosaddeq, the Vietnam War figured into the collective imagination of the global New Left. A ­ fter Lyndon Johnson sent combat troops to Vietnam in 1965, the war “became a living issue” to students around the world.82 Iran was no exception. One observer determined that “Viet-­Nam is . . . ​the No. 1 foreign target for youthful anger” among Ira­ni­ans and, in 1965, the CISNU ­declared support for “the brave ­people of Vietnam who continue their uncompromising and heroic strug­gle against American imperialism.”83 The following year, the socialist Monthly Review printed a “Message from the Ira­nian Students Association in the United States to the American P ­ eople,” which argued that both Iran and Vietnam w ­ ere “pawns in the Cold War” and deserving of “emancipation from foreign domination.” The students suggested that if the United States continued to support the shah, Iran might become “another Vietnam.” Most fundamentally for a message directed to the American ­people in 1966, the ISAUS inserted discussion of the shah’s Iran into a bourgeoning culture of student protest.84 The New Left motivated student movements around the world as the liberal internationalist co­ali­tion of the early 1960s collapsed. The co­ali­tion’s fracturing was in large part a result of the USNSA’s attempt to use its financial clout to strengthen liberal Ira­ni­ans within the larger student diaspora, a move tantamount to an attempted coup in the world of student politics.85 Furthermore, the obsession of young American liberals with keeping the CISNU aligned with the International Student Conference, rather than the communist-­backed International Union of Students, fueled the distrust. By 1965 a witting USNSA representative in Eu­rope worried that the CISNU might “cause trou­ble” as it moved ­toward the militant Left. And it did at the following year’s meeting of the International Student Conference when the CISNU joined “the progressive minority,” a group of sixteen national u ­ nions of students from five continents that left the organ­ization ­after trying to dismantle it.86 While radicalization rendered liberal internationalism a ­thing of the past, the USNSA squandered the goodwill that its steadfast opposition to the shah had generated. T ­ here was a g­ reat deal of truth to the assessment that “NSA-­ers abroad seemed more like professional diplomats than students; ­there was something tough and secretive about them.”87 It was also apparent to the Ira­ni­ans that the USNSA and the ISC had suspiciously deep pockets.88 In 1965 several Ira­ni­ans inquired as to where the ISC received it funding, with one asking bluntly if it was financed by the CIA.89

84 CHAPTER 3

With the USNSA out of the picture, the ISAUS moved ­toward cooperation with SDS. In late 1966 the ISAUS described for SDS the “­human misery and injustice” that post-­Mosaddeq military rule inflicted on the Ira­nian ­people. The ISAUS also increased contacts with SDS and affirmed its mission “to give life to the outcry of our ­people which is silenced before it can be reached by the ­people of the world.”90 In 1967, u ­ nder the leadership of a San Francisco State University gradu­ate student, the ISAUS encouraged “Americans and non-­Americans” alike to join in the anti-­shah movement. “We have a common cause,” the ISAUS proclaimed. “We believe in democracy, freedom, and ­human dignity.”91 The age of New Left student politics had arrived. The single most impor­tant manifestation of New Left internationalism occurred in West Berlin in 1967. Bahman Nirumand provided the spark. He was a literary scholar and the shah’s “most violent critic” in West Germany. The German-­ language edition of his book, Iran: The New Imperialism in Action, was published in March 1967 and offered a Marxian analy­sis of Iran’s relationship with the West. Nirumand wrote at length about the artificial delineation of three “worlds” and the division between “industrial” and “developing” nations. Such distinctions did not exist geo­graph­i­cally or po­liti­cally, Nirumand noted, and they obscured the bifurcated world between the rich and poor, power­ful and oppressed, that cut across cold war blocs and contributed to economic and po­liti­cal injustices. Nirumand’s book appealed to West German New Leftists who argued that “Iran is a model of the big lie,” or what Nirumand described as a “welfare relationship” between the “­free world” and poorer countries that “exploits where it pretends to assist.” As Nirumand observed two years ­later, his book “found an immediate ready sale, especially in student circles.”92 Nirumand worked with West German radicals to or­ga­nize anti-­authoritarian students on the occasion of the shah’s visit to their country in early June 1967. One day before the shah’s arrival in West Berlin, Nirumand lectured on injustices in Iran to nearly three thousand students at the F ­ ree University of Berlin. Ulrike Meinhof, a cofounder of the militant Red Army Faction, wrote an “Open Letter to Farah Diba” and disseminated it through the audience. Meinhof ’s letter, the contents of which she acknowledged was informed by Nirumand’s book, was addressed to the empress of Iran. It contended that the shah did “not give a damn about the rest of the Constitution” and asserted that Iran’s military and security ser­v ices, which w ­ ere “well-­armed and well-­fed thanks to US funding,” ­were “holding the country for ransom.”93 Nirumand’s book, Meinhof ’s letter, and the June 1 rally at the F ­ ree University expanded the international consciousness of West German students and set the stage for confrontation during the shah’s visit. While students “waving a small forest of anti-­shah placards” followed the shah and his entourage throughout their nine-­day tour of West Germany, conflict be-

The Youth

85

tween students and authorities erupted in West Berlin on June 2.94 The most violent confrontation occurred as the shah’s party arrived at the Deutsche Opera House. CISNU leaders marched alongside members of the German Socialist Student League (German SDS), Fritz Teufel’s Kommune I, and other unaffiliated students. American diplomats in West Berlin reported that the students greeted the shah with “a barrage of eggs and other missiles.” The royal party’s car was quickly “plastered with eggs,” and some members of the shah’s entourage “­were also ­splattered.” As described by U.S. officials, “platoons of police” w ­ ere part of the “unusually tight security mea­sures” that resulted in bloodshed as the Ira­nian dignitaries sat inside the safety of the opera h ­ ouse and listened to Mozart’s Magic Flute. Fifteen ambulances rushed to the scene as police used ­water cannons to beat back the demonstrators.95 Tragically, the clash resulted in the death of Benno Ohnesorg, a German student at the ­Free University.96 U.S. diplomats fully grasped the significance of the events. Nicholas Thacher, the deputy chief of the U.S. mission in Tehran, noted that while protests in the United States historically “attracted the Monarch’s intense dis­plea­sure,” the B ­ erlin demonstrations “­were unpre­ce­dented in any foreign country.” More impor­tant, Thacher highlighted the internationalist dimension of the protest. Eu­ro­pe­ans “vastly outnumbered Ira­ni­ans,” which indicated that “the Shah’s visit became tied up with local ‘new left’ student ebullience.”97 The same forces ­were at work, but on a smaller scale, in the United States when SDS and the ISAUS or­ga­nized a high-­profile demonstration at Harvard University in 1968. Harvard officials found it difficult to hide the shah’s unpopularity on American campuses when he arrived in Cambridge on June 13 to receive an honorary law degree and deliver another commencement address. As one U.S. diplomat remembered, “the Shah was not exactly a popu­lar fellow in the student body in Cambridge.”98 The shah’s unpopularity compelled Asadollah Alam, the minister to the court of the shah, to fly to the United States nearly two weeks in advance to survey the situation. On the day of the ceremony, the ISAUS and the Harvard Chapter of SDS outmatched the small army of police officers. SAVAK’s Mansur Rafizadeh wrote in his memoir that the shah’s speech began amidst “a chorus of boos” and continued against “a continuous uproar.” A Boston Globe article reported that some gradu­ates “unfurled banners they had carried ­under their gowns and began to march down the center aisle to protest the shah” as a larger group demonstrated outside. The shah interpreted the debacle as an unacceptable blemish on his international reputation, shouting at Rafizadeh, “They lowered our esteem. It was very bad ­today.”99 By 1968—­a year in which students throughout the United States and Western Eu­rope, ­behind the “iron curtain,” and across the third world challenged the authority of their respective states—­the Ira­nian student movement abroad was

86 CHAPTER 3

integral to New Left activism. When SDS met for its annual convention on the heels of the Harvard protest and at a time that coincided with the anniversary of the anti-­shah demonstration that shook West Berlin the previous year, it sent the ISAUS the following message: “SDS expresses its solidarity with your continuing fight against the dictatorship which oppresses your homeland. . . . ​The fight for freedom is international ­because tyranny is international. Your fight against the Shah, the fight of German SDS against Kiesinger, of the French against de Gaulle, of the Japa­nese against SATO—­these are a few of the current fronts of a single war. We are your allies and b ­ rothers.”100

Technocrats and the Politics of Development Liberal and New Left student organ­izing was evidence of widespread youthful dissatisfaction with the shah, his development proj­ect, and U.S. foreign policy. The global protests of the de­cade demonstrated that youths in Iran and on both sides of the Atlantic who came of age amid the throes of the cold war w ­ ere discontented with the global order into which they ­were born, the nation-­states at its center, and the alliances that held it together. Nevertheless, the Johnson administration pressed ahead with unpop­u­lar policies in Iran. Security concerns, economic considerations, and personal relationships contributed to the pursuit of shortsighted and misguided policies, as did the realization in the United States that, ­after Vietnam, American power was limited.101 The argument ­here is that Iran’s economic “takeoff” and competing readings of “youth” informed ­those ­policies. Although student protest was the most vis­ib ­ le indicator of youthful dissent, Johnson administration officials and diplomats in Tehran looked to the U.S.-­educated technocrats for legitimation of their policies and the shah’s modernization program. Technocrats ­were central to modernization theories and the Johnson administration’s strategic calculus during the 1960s. Social scientists, particularly Samuel Huntington, placed high value on technocracy. The Iran of the mid-1960s faced the “classic dilemma” of early po­liti­cal modernization, what Huntington described as the moment when “traditional pluralism confronts modernizing despotism.” According to Huntington, the shah needed success in two areas to break the impasse. The White Revolution fulfilled the first set of criteria, as it demonstrated the shah’s willingness to promote state-­driven socioeconomic reform with “unflagging zest.” The second requirement was for the state to absorb “the social forces produced by modernization.”102 If the student protests of the 1960s showed U.S. policymakers one t­ hing, it was that the shah was not g­ oing to win

The Youth

87

over liberal reformists or radical revolutionaries. Instead, Johnson’s representatives in Tehran looked for signs of a small but impor­tant cadre of technocrats cooperating with the regime. By 1966, the Johnson administration came to see the “technocratic modern ­middle class,” which consisted primarily of Western-­ educated administrators, as the bedrock of the shah’s development proj­ect.103 Unlike the student movement, which spoke truth to power, Iran’s technocrats ­were “willing to participate in power without fundamentally challenging the system.”104 In Iran, the façade of po­liti­cal modernization was preserved as alumni of American universities entered government ser­v ice in unpre­ce­dented numbers. Between 1959 and 1963, the majority of the approximately four hundred affiliates of the “Progressive Circle” w ­ ere American-­educated. The Progressive Circle formed u ­ nder the leadership of Hasan Ali Mansur as a dowreh, or circle, of individuals that met privately and on a regular basis to discuss Iran’s socioeconomic and po­liti­cal prob­lems. In September 1963 thirty-­eight members of Mansur’s dowreh won seats in what the State Department described as “a carefully screened pro-­Shah Parliament” that made the shah’s power “more secure than it has been for years.” The twenty-­first majlis was the most educated to date, with 121 of the 196 new members holding college degrees, 57 from foreign universities. By the time Mansur became prime minister in March 1964, the Progressive Circle was a full-­fledged po­liti­cal party, known as Iran Novin, or New Iran.105 The Johnson administration and the shah considered the Iran Novin Party as an instrument to institutionalize the White Revolution and harness the energy of Iran’s technocrats to his modernization program.106 By the end of the de­cade, Iran Novin posters hailed the party as the “Guardian of the Revolution” that “Bars the Way to Reaction.”107 The party’s closeness to the shah was both a strength and a weakness. U.S. officials saw Mansur as a source of “pro­gress and enlightenment” and hoped that “a ‘new team’ of younger men” at the “nucleus” of his government could “bring new spirit into the administration.”108 Johnson’s team was u ­ nder no illusion that profound changes would occur immediately, but Iran Novin was “the Shah’s chosen po­liti­cal instrument,” and that was a prerequisite for any governmental initiative. However, ­because Iran Novin was “an elite organ­ization” whose fortunes ­were hitched to the shah, U.S. intelligence knew that it had “a long way to go to establish a genuine popu­lar po­liti­cal base for the regime.”109 The embassy concurred, reporting that Mansur’s clique did not enjoy popu­lar support and that Iran Novin’s “influence among young p ­ eople in par­tic­u­lar is very limited.”110 The ISAUS considered Mansur illegitimate and his party unequivocally subservient to the shah.111 American officials and educationalists offered two competing explanations for why some U.S.-­educated Ira­ni­ans opted to participate in the shah’s development

88 CHAPTER 3

program while many ­others contested it. One camp, which included the State Department’s Iran hands and the American Friends of the M ­ iddle East, placed the blame on the students themselves, ­either for focusing too heavi­ly on politics or for circumventing the established channels of student migration. State’s Iran desk officer took seriously Iran’s young technocrats, military officers, and “bona-­fide and high-­ranking students at our top universities,” but expressed disdain for the ISAUS, which he described as a “maverick group” that was “po­liti­cally meaningless.”112 John Whiteford Boyle, though in a very dif­fer­ent position, shared many of those assumptions. He was an educator and former director of AFME’s Tehran office. According to him, “­There are too many Ira­nian students of the wrong kind studying the wrong subjects and in second-­class American schools.” His ­solution was for AFME and consular officials in Tehran to raise “quality controls” in the exchange programs.113 This camp was too focused on the symptoms to diagnose the illness. A second camp placed the shah’s authoritarianism at the root of the prob­lem. T. Cuyler Young, an Iranologist at Prince­ton who was culturally fluent in all ­things Persian, argued in Foreign Affairs that the shah lost the support of Iran’s young, potential modernizers ­because he failed to address “the prob­lem of how to attain freedom with order.” The bottom line was that Iran’s educated elite thought “that ­there is room at the top only for ­those willing to betray the values of democracy and freedom.”114 The U.S. Information Agency offered concurring evidence. USIA employees ­were, to quote one scholar, “in touch with the younger generation of Iran’s opinion leaders” and had “serious contacts with the challenging intelligent­ sia.”115 In late 1964 the USIA interviewed three hundred urban, male Tehran University students and found that more than one-­third called for some type of po­liti­cal change. According to the USIA, “We are again treading on dangerous ground, for a student would prob­ably have to be fairly committed to a revolutionary pro­cess to admit his views to an unknown interviewer.”116 With two competing explanations for why nearly two de­cades of Ira­nian ­student migration to the United States served cross purposes, it was up to the U.S. embassy in Tehran to separate the wheat from the chaff. In contrast to the 1970s, embassy officials in the mid-1960s faced few restrictions when reporting to Washington. As one diplomat from the period recalled, “In the period from Kennedy through Johnson . . . ​the issue of governance was open and the American government was listening to nationalist expression.” The Foreign Ser­v ice officer most in tune with Iran’s po­liti­cal dynamics was William Green Miller. Miller received an introduction to Ira­nian politics from Hosein Mahdavi—­a Western-­educated member of the Plan Organ­ization who became one of the shah’s leading critics—­when the two young men attended Oxford together in the mid-1950s. ­After three years at the U.S. consulate in Isfahan, Miller relocated in

The Youth

89

1962 to the embassy in Tehran as a po­liti­cal officer ­under Martin Herz. Miller’s time at the embassy coincided with the heyday of the po­liti­cal section, whose size peaked at twenty-­one in 1963 before falling to a mere six a de­cade ­later. Miller’s reporting benefited from the insights of Hosein Mahdavi and such other members of the Second National Front as Darius Homayun, Fereydun Mahdavi, Hedayatollah Matin-­Daftari, and Cyrus Qani. “My beat,” Miller recalled about his time at the embassy, “was the opposition, which meant my friends.”117 Miller, whose views aligned with t­hose of Young and the USIA, first made a name for himself as the drafting officer of a lengthy examination of the Ira­nian intellectual community during Johnson’s first month as president. According to Miller, “One of the most exciting po­liti­cal prob­lems of Iran ­today is how to bring younger ele­ments of the intelligent­sia into closer harmony with the regime.” He found it “refreshing to find that idealism and especially a belief in civil liberties and demo­cratic government are sincerely held by so many young ­people.” But Miller cautioned that Iran’s “new intelligent­sia,” or t­ hose who came of age ­after 1953, condemned U.S. foreign policy ­because of “its support of a regime that denies ­these young ­people the role to which they think they are entitled.”118 Miller’s report caused an uproar in Foggy Bottom for betraying “an under­lying assumption that somewhere in Iran ­there are (­people) who provide a ­v iable alternative to the Shah.”119 In early 1965 Miller left Tehran for the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the State Department’s intelligence component, where he wrote one of the most prescient government reports on Iran of the cold war. In laying out the challenges that Iran’s “New Men” presented, Miller argued that the young technocrats—­not the monarch—­were responsible for modernizing Iran. Miller portrayed the young elite as a “pro-­Western center group,” but emphasized that they felt “hemmed in” and experienced “a deep feeling of ‘cramp.’ ” Contributing to their po­liti­cal frustrations was the fact that the United States “actively directed the growth of Ira­nian military and security forces” and “passively watched the successive inhibition and even destruction of such po­liti­cal institutions.” That was doubly unfortunate ­because “the most numerous, most talented and most pro-­American of the New Men are ­those who have had some education in the U.S.” One of the archetypical new men was Cyrus Qani. He was a former member of the ISAUS, a gradu­ate of New York University, and a well-­connected ­lawyer who was in and out of government during the 1960s and 1970s. Qani was, according to Miller, “a constitutionalist in the Ira­nian tradition of 1906” with “­great re­spect for and an understanding of civil rights.” Khodadad Farmanfarmaian, who worked with the Plan Organ­ization through the early 1970s, was the “technocrat-­administrator” and “the symbol of the New Men.” Miller reserved for his Oxford friend, Hosein Mahdavi, the title of “po­liti­cal leader” of the new men. Miller’s message was

90 CHAPTER 3

clear: “The po­liti­cal development of Iran is not incompatible with American interests,” but U.S. policy was, as the ISAUS argued years earlier, “administered by a bureaucratic conservatism not in keeping with the expressed liberalism of the recent presidents.”120 While Miller portrayed a generation of Ira­nian youth out of step with their government, developments in Iran ultimately presented U.S. officials with ­evidence that, in the divide between the activists, on the one hand, and the technocrats, on the other, it was that latter that deserved their attention. Shortly ­after Miller concluded his report, a small but impor­tant number of Iran’s new men muted their criticisms and began to cooperate with the shah’s government. Darius Homayun was one such example. In April 1965, during his time at Harvard on a Nieman Fellowship, the young journalist presented a critical paper on the “Prob­lems of Con­temporary Iran” at a conference that was jointly sponsored by Harvard’s Center for ­Middle Eastern Studies and the ISAUS. The shah was troubled that Homayun was on the program with T. Cuyler Young, ISAUS president Majid Tehranian, and the perennial dissenter Hosein Mahdavi. Notwithstanding the views he expressed in Cambridge, Homayun returned to Iran in fall 1965 and, ­after an effort to “seduce” him, began government work. The embassy took g­ reat interest in the talks that took place in Tehran at the time between other former oppositionists that “raised the basic moral question for them of how far they should go ­towards cooperating with the regime.”121 Monitoring events during the final years of Johnson’s presidency, the U.S. embassy in Tehran found that Homayun’s was not an isolated case. In 1966, Ambassador Armin Meyer’s embassy identified a group of National Front supporters who, ­after climbing the ranks of Iran’s Industrial and Mining Development Bank, conducted “a 180-­degree turn” away from their earlier opposition to Pahlavi rule. In fact, some ­were optimistic. One development economist told an embassy ­official in August 1966 that “we (the technocrats) have this country moving, progressing faster than it’s ever done. Give us 10 more years and w ­ e’ll ­really have Iran on her feet.” Meyer’s aide concluded that “it appears that many of the ex-­National Fronters who are technocrats have deci­ded not only to tolerate the pres­ent regime but also to work with it.”122 While many U.S.-­educated Ira­ni­ans wanted “to see a concomitant loosening of the po­liti­cal reins along with the economic development of Iran,” one well-­placed returnee told diplomats that many ­others ­were “putting their shoulders to the wheel” to embrace the White Revolution and the Iran Novin Party.123 Of the twenty-­three members of the shah’s cabinet in 1967, ten had studied in the United States and eleven possessed degrees from Eu­rope.124 The shah’s approach to modernization balanced material gains in the socioeconomic realm with a carefully crafted international image of a modernizing monarch. Materially, Lyndon Johnson declared Iran an officially “developed”

The Youth

91

country in 1967, a declaration that meant that the U.S. aid mission left the country.125 One year ­later, National Security Adviser and modernization theorist Walt Rostow put “Iran at that point on the development ladder where the ‘take off ’ is just about finished.”126 Iran developed, but it was not demo­cratic, and that development was as much the product of U.S.-­trained technocrats as what President Johnson described as the “enlightened and progressive leadership of His Majesty the Shah.”127 It was no coincidence that Iran reached that level of economic ­development during the final year of the Third Plan that Ebtehaj, Farmanfarmaian, and a small group of talented, Western-­educated economists helped to craft during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Regardless of who gets the credit, the question of Iran’s development, which ­shaped the foreign policy considerations of the Demo­cratic administrations of the 1960s, appeared to be resolved. Modernization was a language that both Americans and Ira­ni­ans could speak, and while it defined Kennedy’s approach to Iran, it subsequently became “a most useful dialectical weapon” for the shah and his supporters “to convey the image of a forward sweep of revolutionary changes on a wide front.”128

Jeremy Varon and his fellow editors of The Sixties noted in the introductory essay of the journal’s first issue that, during the de­cade, the world crossed “the threshold to a con­temporary experience of globalization.” To borrow from Varon, the 1960s was not so much a “historical rupture” as a de­cade whose myriad strug­gles and multiple levels of contestation produced a “rearranged world.”129 ­Those new arrangements and liberatory possibilities w ­ ere felt everywhere, including Iran. Indeed, the prolific writer Hamid Dabashi has identified the 1960s as the de­cade when “a fully blown cosmopolitan culture formed in Iran” amid “a world and a worldliness in which Ira­ni­ans actually lived and recognized themselves.”130 ­These observations about rearranged worlds and cosmopolitan cultures explain the trajectory of American-­Iranian relations during the 1960s. Student internationalism was made pos­si­ble by a globalized system of higher education that made the United States the primary destination for Ira­ni­ans who studied abroad and, in the pro­cess, they developed understandings of rights that ­were ­shaped both by national concerns and cosmopolitan awareness. As the Washington-­Tehran alliance grew stronger, the alternate alliance of Ira­ nian students and their American supporters was shut out of policy debates. By the mid-1960s it was clear to Iran’s student activists that their optimistic faith in the Demo­cratic Party to chart a new course for the United States in the cold war was misplaced. The documentary rec­ord supports this assessment. The most significant tele­grams that the ISAUS sent to the White House in 1964 and 1965 w ­ ere ten and eight pages, respectively, and full of thoughtful arguments that often

92 CHAPTER 3

referenced international media reports and quoted lofty presidential rhe­toric. By contrast, when the shah visited the United States in August 1967, the tele­gram that the ISAUS sent to the president contained one sentence.131 The paper trail in official U.S. archives of Ira­nian students writing to the White House—an act that demonstrates a belief in the potential influence of their voices on policy change—­dried up during Richard Nixon’s presidency.132 The terms of the conversation between the ISAUS and liberal and New Left student internationalists w ­ ere rooted in the concerns of college-­age individuals of par­tic­ul­ar nationalities, but their localities and ideas w ­ ere not restricted to one nation; neither w ­ ere the implications of their organ­izing. Their collective critique of authoritarian rule highlighted the fact that Iran was one of many nations included in the so-­called ­free world b ­ ecause of its government’s position in the cold war rather than the nature of its po­liti­cal system. A ­ fter a de­cade or organ­izing, the second rights-­based critique of the Pahlavi state moved off college campuses and ­toward global audiences. In 1968, at the height of New Left activism, the British phi­los­op ­ her Bertrand Russell wrote that “deteriorating conditions in Iran have brought me reports and appeals . . . ​from Ira­ni­ans in their own country and scattered throughout the world.” ­After reading ­those reports and hearing ­those appeals, Russell repackaged the argument of the liberal and New Left student internationalists when he placed Tehran “­after Saigon and Athens” as the world’s most notorious violators of h ­ uman rights.133 As Russell’s comments make clear, the evolving rights discourse made Iran accessible to Americans and West ­Eu­ro­pe­ans who may not have other­wise understood the intricacies of Ira­nian life. Although the long-­term effects of student internationalism on the strategic calculus of the U.S. government w ­ ere negligible, its impact on global conceptions of ­human rights was considerable. The ISAUS had the potential to influence U.S. policy ­toward Iran during the Kennedy era, but the two American-­Iranian alliances evolved along parallel tracks that diverged sharply during the mid-1960s and into the 1970s. The disconnect between the expectations of the U.S. and Ira­nian governments, on the one hand, and the Ira­nian student movement and its American allies, on the other, produced two outcomes during the final de­cade of Pahlavi rule. One was the heyday of ­state-­to-­state cooperation between Washington and Tehran; the other was the maturation of a transnational ­human rights network consisting of progressive Americans and Iranian students.

4 THE BOOM Amer­i­ca’s Iran in the 1970s Education is the key to the ­great civilization. —­Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi

Three de­cades of sustained military, economic, and educational cooperation with the United States crested at the height of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s power in the 1970s. During his last de­cade in power, the shah spoke of the White Revolution as merely a “shock program” that set the stage for a “­Great Civilization” at home and a re­orientation of Iran’s place among nations. The prob­lem was not that the shah dreamed too big, but that his vision for a modern Iran was flawed and exclusionary. It left no room for groups that he referred to as “stumbling blocks,” namely the old elites, communist radicals, liberal demo­crats, and especially the ulama. As was the case for the entire Pahlavi period, the last shah excluded Islam from public life as he collapsed a complex society into “one vast workshop in which all the ele­ments indispensable to modernization sprang up.”1 While much was new to the 1970s, the U.S. and Ira­nian governments continued to rely on international education to cement binational ties and build the shah’s ­Great Civilization. If Lyndon Johnson repaired the damage that John Kennedy’s push for reform inflicted on the U.S.-­Iran relationship, the shah saw eye to eye with President Richard Nixon.2 Nixon and the shah first met in December 1953, just months ­after the coup, when the vice president traveled to Tehran to reassure the r­ einstated monarch of U.S. support and to receive an honorary law degree from Tehran University.3 Fifteen years l­ater, the shah breathed a sigh of relief when Nixon, and not one of his Demo­cratic opponents (Robert Kennedy ran for the nomination before his assassination and Hubert Humphrey, the nominee, had also been critical of the shah in the early 1960s), won the 1968 presidential election. 93

94 CHAPTER 4

Reflecting on the shah’s relationship with the White House, a former SAVAK official wrote, “Never had I seen him so weak as when he met Kennedy, and never so mighty and arrogant as when with Nixon.”4 The relationship between Nixon and the shah produced results, in large part ­because of the shifting geopo­liti­cal landscape of the Persian Gulf region. For most of the twentieth ­century, ­Great Britain dominated the Gulf. On its northern shore, Britain profited from the oil that flowed out of the Abadan refinery and used Iran as a buffer to protect its colonial holdings in South Asia. On its southern shore, Britain established protectorates along the Arabian Peninsula to keep the Gulf open to British commerce and naval power. In 1968, in a rapid about-­face, a cash-­ strapped British government announced its intentions to withdraw from its posts “East of Suez” by the end of 1971. The shah filled the vacuum, an objective that Nixon supported as he scaled back U.S. military commitments overseas by extending the logic of Vietnamization around the world through the Nixon ­Doctrine. It called for regional “policemen” such as Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa, and, predictably, Iran to serve as “pillars” of U.S. interests in their respective ­regions.5 The realpolitik that informed the strategy of Nixon and his top foreign policy aide, Henry Kissinger, necessitated that the United States and Iran cooperate to accomplish shared objectives in a rapidly changing Persian Gulf. ­Because a militarily strong Iran was vital to the Nixon Doctrine, the shah, who was no longer subject to the limitations of the aid years, transformed his armed ser­vices through a program of unrestrained arms procurements. U.S. sales to Iran ­rose from $96 million in 1967–68 to $289 million in 1969–70.6 Then, in May 1972, Nixon and Kissinger visited Tehran, where the president asked the shah to use American-­made arms to “protect me.” Nixon tendered a blank check for the shah to purchase as much nonnuclear military hardware from the United States as he wanted, without reviews by the relevant U.S. government agencies.7 In the words of one scholar, ­after the Tehran summit of May 1972, “Ira­nian annual purchases went, virtually overnight, from being mea­sured in the tens of millions to being mea­sured in the multi-­billions.”8 During the next five years, the United States sold more than $16 billion in arms to Iran as the shah devoted 40 ­percent of his national bud­get to one of the largest military buildups of modern history.9 The Nixon Doctrine was not without its critics. As the ISAUS saw it, the shah’s “mission in life, within the context of the Kissinger [Nixon] doctrine, is to maintain the status quo for the imperialistic interests in the area.”10 Nevertheless, by the mid-1970s Iran enjoyed regional clout and influence in Washington that was unimaginable when Nixon and the shah first met in 1953. Central to the transformation of a timid monarch dependent on U.S. aid into the imperious Shahanshah (King of Kings) Aryamehr (Light of the Aryans) was the skyrocketing cost of oil. The shah was instrumental in driving up oil costs as

The Boom

95

a leading member of the Organ­ization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Unlike many OPEC member states, Iran needed high oil prices to finance the Plan Organ­ization’s expansive program of industrialization. At a 1971 OPEC summit in Tehran, the organ­ization set a new standard for the global economy whereby oil-­producing states, rather than Western oil companies, set the price of their most valuable natu­ral resource. The effects of that decision ­were most dramatically felt when, ­after the Arab-­Israeli War of 1973, OPEC imposed an embargo on Israel’s allies that resulted in a 380 ­percent spike in oil prices and sent Western petrodollars gushing into Iran. While Iran’s oil revenues r­ ose steadily from $900 million to $2.4 billion between 1969 and 1972, they exploded overnight from $4.4 billion to $17.8 billion between 1973 and 1974. During the next three years alone, Iran’s oil brought in $38 billion, a figure three times greater than that from the entire prior de­cade. With the sudden influx of cash and a genuine desire to develop Iran’s infrastructure, the shah demanded that his planners spend tens of millions of dollars in state funds to rapidly modernize Iran despite the best advice of economists who worried about “a social and po­liti­cal explosion.”11 The shah pressed forward, and he elevated monarchical power to new heights during the 1970s to promote what one Ira­nian state newspaper hailed as a “kaleidoscope vision” of “dizzying pro­gress.”12 The shah had the resources to direct such a large-­scale modernization program ­because of the new material realities of the 1970s, but t­ here ­were continuities between the shah’s earlier development efforts and the ­Great Civilization. The first point of continuity was in the ideas and institutions of modernizing monarchy—­ the ends of Pahlavi modernization. The shah argued that his leadership was the twentieth-­century manifestation of benevolent kingship, with the monarch giving to a nation e­ ager to receive the blessings that emanated down from the royal hand. Internationally, the shah maintained support for his undemo­cratic approach to development through the mid-1970s by exploiting his image as a modernizing monarch to position himself as a champion, rather than a violator, of ­human rights. Domestically, the shah continued to rely on an expanding cohort of U.S.-­educated “new men” to administer Ira­nian modernization and institutionalize royal initiatives in the state bureaucracy. The second point of continuity was in the means of Pahlavi modernization. Iran remained dependent on U.S. training and education despite its financial in­de­pen­dence, but oil wealth empowered the shah to dedicate an unrivaled amount of state funds to promoting and supporting international education. From Washington’s perspective, the formula for educational assistance that coalesced during the 1950s u ­ nder Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower continued to guide educational programming through the 1970s. When compared to the 1950s, the educational initiatives of the 1970s ­were larger in scope and had more sophisticated aims, but the

96 CHAPTER 4

focus remained fixed on military training, technical education, and cultural exchange. The military dimension was the most problematic aspect of the U.S.-­Iran relationship. During the 1970s, the shah was willing to buy, and the United States willing to sell virtually anything. The Ira­nian government’s annual military spending ­rose from $293 million during Kennedy’s last year as president to $7.3 billion during Jimmy Car­ter’s first year, during which time the size of Iran’s military more than doubled to 410,000 soldiers. The army and Gendarmerie that the United States began to advise and train during the Second World War w ­ ere formidable forces, and the air force and navy, two branches of Iran’s ser­vices that became priorities for the shah only during the 1970s, grew at exponential rates with heavy American assistance. On the brink of the shah’s collapse, Iran boasted the fifth largest military in the world.13 As the U.S. embassy in Tehran described it, “the latest supersonic jet fighters and most advanced military technology function as the mosques and monuments of past Persian dynasties” and “are the marvels that are intended to dazzle Iran’s neighbors with the power and prestige of the Pahlavi line.”14 The most consequential military training program of the 1970s targeted the Imperial Ira­nian Navy, which became the shah’s instrument for policing the Persian Gulf, and eventually the Indian Ocean basin, ­under the auspices of the Nixon Doctrine. Whereas the technical education of the 1950s improved the daily lives of Ira­ ni­ans, the technological dimension of the G ­ reat Civilization was grandiose and epitomized by the training program for Ira­nian nuclear engineers at the Mas­sa­ chu­setts Institute of Technology (MIT). That training program strengthened the regime’s prestige, enhanced Iran’s technological capacity, and represented the shah’s vision of modernity. As the journalist David Patrikarakos has written, nuclear power was “a means of transmutation by which Iran could become ‘Western.’ ” While not financially sensible, it was logical to the shah, who strove to blend Persia’s pre-­Islamic past with the Western model of modernity, to direct considerable resources into nuclear research and development as a means of gaining equal footing with the world’s ­great powers.15 Taken together, the naval and ­nuclear training programs indicate that the emphasis on military and technical assistance from the early 1950s survived through the entirety of the Pahlavi era. What changed was the scale of the programs and the fact that they ­were no longer aid-­based, but transactions between the Ira­nian government and American universities. Fi­nally, cultural exchange always supplemented military and economic cooperation to anchor Iran to the United States in the cold war. During the 1970s, the Ira­nian student population abroad grew exponentially to reach more than one hundred thousand worldwide by spring 1978. The number of Ira­nian students

The Boom

97

in the United States more than qua­dru­pled from approximately twelve thousand at the end of the 1960s to nearly fifty thousand by the 1978–79 academic year. That number, which represented only official students, made Iran the largest ­exporter of students to the United States.16 The educational initiatives that supported many of t­hose Ira­nian students abroad and the resulting transnational ­dialogue marked the best of what can happen when diplomatic relations are reinforced by international travel, study abroad, the cross-­fertilization of ideas, and other cultural ties. The prob­lem was that ­those ties, while constructive in their own right, aimed to strengthen the Pahlavi state rather than achieve the singularly altruistic goal of promoting intercultural dialogue. Collectively, the military, technological, and cultural dimensions of the G ­ reat Civilization demonstrate the considerable extent to which the shah used Iran’s resources to promote socioeconomic modernization while failing to pursue a comparable program of po­liti­cal liberalization. That failure produced what the historian Ervand Abrahamian has described as “uneven development,” and it contributed to revolution at the end of the de­cade.17 The lenses of education and development bring into focus all the promise and peril of Amer­i­ca’s Iran during the 1970s.

The Ideas and Institutions of a Modernizing Monarch One of the most striking features of American-­Iranian relations during the late 1960s and early 1970s is the extent to which both the shah and the opposition engaged with the international community to define what h ­ uman rights meant and to determine how to realize them in a par­tic­u­lar national context. The shah framed the reforms of the White Revolution as contributing to h ­ uman rights, but his rights ­were socioeconomic, rather than po­liti­cal in nature. He had a hierarchical understanding of ­human rights and told his citizens to wait ­until the country developed for a po­liti­cal opening. The opposition, by contrast, saw rights on a plane wherein all Ira­ni­ans would have access to the promises of their constitution and the Universal Declaration of ­Human Rights. Through the mid-1970s, the shah outmaneuvered his critics. He convinced the international community that socioeconomic rights ­were the most impor­tant rights for Ira­ni­ans and that his style of kingship was the most effective means of realizing them. At home, the shah exercised an increasingly centralized form of authoritarian rule to keep politics at bay as a team of U.S.-­educated technocrats oversaw an oil-­fueled development program. The shah was able to portray himself as a protector rather than a violator of ­human rights in part b ­ ecause of the tensions inherent in the very concept of

98 CHAPTER 4

“­human rights.” The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of ­Human Rights was a compromise between nations jockeying for global power in the wake of the Second World War, with the United States generally championing the rights of the individual and the Soviet Union supporting collective rights. In late 1966 the United Nations officially recognized two sets of rights when it produced two international covenants: one on economic, social, and cultural rights, and another on civil and po­liti­cal rights. Iran signed both in April 1968 and ratified the covenants in June 1975, nine months before they entered into force.18 While the shah’s take on ­human rights and his commitment to U.N. h ­ uman rights initiatives seems counterintuitive, ­there is ample evidence to suggest that he was not attempting to hoodwink the global community. He genuinely believed that his approach to governance and development would keep Iran “in the circle of dynamic, progressive and ­free nations of the world.”19 The United Nations lent support to the shah’s claim when it named Tehran the host of the International Conference on ­Human Rights in April 1968 to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of ­Human Rights. In hindsight, it is striking that the United Nations chose Tehran as a location suited for the world to commemorate that anniversary. But it did. The shah was the host, and even the U.N. secretary general showed deference as delegates from around the world assembled in Iran’s majlis building. Given the absence of parliamentary autonomy from the crown, the site was symbolic of the undemo­cratic interpretation of h ­ uman rights that dominated the proceedings. It is not as if the shah was the only autocrat at the conference, but he was among the most power­ful. As Roland Burke, the author of the most comprehensive study of the conference, has explained: “Iran positioned itself as both the model and the spokesperson for the new collective rights ideology,” and the conference devolved into “a forum for celebrating the virtues of the shah’s White Revolution,” with loyal aides referencing the monarch’s book-­length explanation of his reform program “as the exemplar of modern ­human rights policy.” The conference and the resulting Tehran Proclamation mark a regretful period in the history of the United Nations. At the time, however, the Tehran conference marked the apogee of the era when the international community linked notions of rights with modernization.20 While the shah’s reputation drew currency from international trends that favored development over democ­ratization, he also marshalled a set of images from Iran’s past to root his modern vision in Persian tradition. The shah looked to Iran’s pre-­Islamic history, particularly the Achaemenid Dynasty (559–330 BCE), in search of a usable past. He found it in Cyrus, the first Achaemenid king whose feats earned him the title “the ­great.” The historian Ali Ansari has noted that “Cyrus provided a perfect model for the Shah to emulate and identify with,” not the least ­because he was “familiar and to some extent popu­lar within the Western

The Boom

99

imagination.” The most impor­tant reference point in the Western imagination was the Cyrus Cylinder, a proclamation that the king issued after conquering Babylon in 539 BCE, which some, including the shah, considered the first declaration of h ­ uman rights. The height of the shah’s ability to portray himself as a modernizing monarch committed to protecting ­human rights coincided with a concerted effort to construct at home and abroad “The Cult of Cyrus the G ­ reat.”21 When the shah delivered the Tehran conference’s opening address in the majlis building, he mobilized the imagery of Cyrus and the discourse of development to outline his interpretation of h ­ uman rights. He asserted that the Cyrus Cylinder forever made Persia “a land of tolerance and understanding.” The shah also invoked Cyrus to fortify national bound­aries and to deter the blossoming ­network of ­human rights activists from interfering in the internal affairs of sovereign nations. “His [Cyrus’s] declaration was,” the shah asserted, “a kind of charter giving to the dif­fer­ent nations . . . ​freedom to enjoy and exercise their rights as nations.” His message was clear: it was the Ira­nian government’s sovereign right to exercise state power to pursue economic development regardless of the ­human costs. “­There was a time when h ­ uman rights meant only the equality of individuals in politics and before the law,” the shah declared. “But in our time po­liti­cal rights without social ones, ­legal justice without social justice, and po­liti­cal democracy without economic democracy no longer have any real meaning.”22 The shah’s twin ­sister, Princess Ashraf Pahlavi, was the face of Iran’s public relations campaign. Ashraf ’s opponents scorned her corruption, and her actions often provoked controversy.23 Yet she was extremely power­ful in Iran and a ubiquitous global figure, a self-­described “itinerant ambassador” who worked closely with the United Nations on ­women’s issues and ­human rights. By 1965 Ashraf was involved with the U.N. Commission on H ­ uman Rights, and in 1968 she was the president of the Tehran conference. By the end of the 1960s, she was just as impor­tant as her b ­ rother when it came to promoting the regime’s interpretation of ­human rights.24 Moreover, as the journalist William Shawcross has observed, “With a sense of timing and unintended irony that is perhaps pos­si­ble only in the United Nations, she [Ashraf] became the chairman of the H ­ uman Rights Commission in 1970.”25 Despite the vociferous objections of the student opposition abroad, Ashraf ’s celebrity remained intact, as she displayed a savoir faire that rivaled many heads of state. The shah’s self-­image of a modern-­day Cyrus was on fullest display in October 1971 when dignitaries from sixty-­eight countries arrived in Iran to celebrate twenty-­five hundred years of Persian kingship.26 The shah delivered a eulogy at the tomb of Cyrus the G ­ reat, in which he assured the king’s spirit that the Ira­nian ­people ­were “awake,” before the international spectacle culminated at Persepolis. Guests stayed in an elaborate “tent city” amid the ruins of the Achaemenid

100 CHAPTER 4

ceremonial capital where they ate fine food from Maxim’s Paris and witnessed a military parade featuring the weaponry and regalia of two-­and-­a-­half millennia of Persian armies. “What is happening in Persepolis ­today,” the state-­run Kayhan International explained, “represents a revival of the ­great Achaemenian tradition of annual ceremonies that brought together, in the heartland of Persia, kings and leaders from all over the then known world.”27 During the ceremony, the shah conveyed a similar message to the U.N. secretary general. Cyrus’s “words and his deeds,” the shah wrote in a letter that was accompanied by a replica of the Cyrus Cylinder, “constitute, in effect, man’s first declaration of ­human rights.” In his reply, U Thant praised the shah for being “so long involved in ­Human Rights activities of the United Nations.”28 Ira­nian officials abroad joined the shah, Iran’s state media, and the United Nations in promoting the idea that “if the Year of Cyrus the G ­ reat means anything, it is that H ­ uman Rights have been a cornerstone 29 of Persian life for 2,500 years.” The Persepolis gala and subsequent government initiatives indicate the extent to which the shah attempted to bury more than a millennium of Islamic civilization beneath the country’s pre-­Islamic heritage. In 1975, the National Ira­nian Radio and Tele­v i­sion Organ­ization paid Mohammad Ali Issari to produce a nine-­part educational documentary titled Ancient Persia at Michigan State University. This was not Issari’s first film. He previously produced films for the U.S. Information Agency and, according to the foremost expert of Ira­nian cinema, was a firm believer in film’s “power to spread the good word about the progressive Shah and a modernizing Iran.”30 The shah’s most controversial attempt to rewrite the narrative of Ira­nian history for his own purposes came in 1976 in the form of the Imperial Calendar. The shah’s calendar began not with the birth of Christ or Mohammad’s hijra to Medina, but with the start of Cyrus the ­Great’s reign. Overnight, a time machine transported Ira­ni­ans from 1976 to 2535, a new calendric real­ity that provided the chronological framework for the official Pahlavi chronicle that the shah commissioned to commemorate his dynasty’s fiftieth anniversary. The unpop­u­lar calendar lasted for only two years, but it revealed to an already disgruntled population how the shah thought about the relationship between citizens and their states in the late cold war era. As one scholar described that relationship, “The nation was everywhere, but it was not populated; it had no rights. This was the preserve of the King of Kings . . . ​to whom all rights accrued.”31 The autonomy that the shah established from his population was vis­i­ble to all Ira­ni­ans during the 1970s as he continued to rely on Western-­educated elites in the state bureaucracy to implement secular, modernizing policies. At the top of Iran’s bureaucracy was Jamshid Amuzegar, a Cornell PhD and former Point Four employee who, ­after years of government ser­vice, became prime minister in 1977. According to James Bill, Amuzegar was “the supreme technocrat,” but his gov-

The Boom

101

ernment was “not just any technocracy; it was clearly an American-­style program with the vari­ous cabinet members holding college degrees from such American universities as Colorado, Nebraska, Kentucky, Utah, Columbia, and California.”32 At the head of the foreign ministry from 1966 to 1971 was Ardeshir Zahedi, a gradu­ate of Utah State who returned to Washington during the 1970s for a second and more celebrated tour as Iran’s ambassador to the United States. Reza Ghotbi, Empress Farah’s cousin who studied with her in Paris, directed Iran’s State Radio and Tele­v i­sion during the years that coincided with the shah’s most concerted efforts to promote a modernizing image. The shah distrusted Ghotbi’s politics, but his relationship to the queen allowed him to hire many Western-­ educated individuals who would have other­wise found themselves at odds with SAVAK.33 Majid Tehranian, the ISAUS leader who or­ga­nized the overseas opposition during the mid-1960s, was one such individual. He took a position as head of a communications institute u ­ nder Ghotbi’s direction but never shed his criticism of Iran’s closed po­liti­cal system.34 In addition to communications, the educational expansion of the 1970s provided opportunities for Ira­nian returnees to have an impact on society. An example is Hamid Naficy, who earned his doctorate from the University of California at Los Angeles and returned to establish the short-­lived but innovative ­Free University of Iran.35 Amin Alimard oversaw the entire state bureaucracy. He studied public administration at the American University of Beirut and, with Point Four assistance, earned a doctorate in the subject from the University of Southern California. In 1975 his appointment as secretary general of the State Organ­ization for Administration and Employment made him “the man­ag­er of the government.” No won­der why many Americans estimated in the 1970s that “the investment in ­human capital that had begun in 1953 was beginning to pay off.”36 While the shah’s cult of personality was omnipresent, U.S.-­educated technocrats brought social scientific theories from abroad into the sinews of the Ira­nian state to institutionalize in Tehran a kind of “bureaucratic authoritarianism.” Scholars originally applied the term to the military governments of South Amer­i­ca that waged dirty wars against their populations during the 1970s but managed, for a time, to escape global criticism ­because of their economic growth. Like the shah’s Iran, states such as Argentina, Brazil, and Chile relied on the military to repress their populations and on technocrats to manage the affairs of state and their nations’ place in the global economy.37 While individuals such as Ghotbi, Tehranian, and Naficy ­were liberalizing influences in Iran, many of the nation’s most well-­placed technocrats w ­ ere versed in Samuel Huntington’s teachings about the need to institutionalize power within the framework of a single party to m ­ aintain “po­liti­cal order in changing socie­ties.”38 By enjoining modernization theories with the shah’s secular modernity, U.S.-­educated technocrats provided an answer

102 CHAPTER 4

to the question that plagued the shah for de­cades, namely, how to govern a highly educated society and maintain a closed po­liti­cal system. The answer, the shah thought, was to collapse the two existing po­liti­cal parties—­ the Iran Novin and Mardom (­People’s) Parties—­into one single party. The shah opted for the façade of a two-­party system a­ fter he lifted martial law in the late 1950s, and during the 1960s and early 1970s, he relied on the Iran Novin Party to ensure support for the White Revolution in the majlis. However, in March 1975 he ordered all po­liti­cal activity contained to the Rastakhiz (Resurgence) Party. The party’s philosophy was, according to the shah, “based on the dialectics of the princi­ples of the White Revolution.” Thus, while some Ira­ni­ans studied abroad and exposed ­human rights abuses in Iran, other “fresh returnees” from the United States used their talents, in the words of one historian, “to transform the somewhat old-­fashioned military dictatorship into a totalitarian-­style one-­party state.”39

Building the Imperial Ira­n ian Navy While the military aid and training programs of the 1950s strengthened the Ira­ nian army and security forces, Iran’s rise to regional supremacy during the 1970s rested on the expansion of its air force and navy. Reza Shah established the Imperial Ira­nian Navy in 1932, but Mohammad Reza Shah injected it with funds, equipment, and manpower from the mid-1960s onward. Sandwiched between the last years of ­Great Britain’s Persian Gulf residency and the subsequent arrival of a direct U.S. military presence in the region, the 1970s offered the shah a unique opportunity to be, in his words, “a regional pillar of stability.” In November 1972 the shah announced his intentions to extend Iran’s “security horizon” beyond the Persian Gulf, build a “blue w ­ ater navy,” and proj­ect naval power throughout the Gulf of Oman and Indian Ocean.40 A spate of American-­and European-­made equipment ultimately transformed the Ira­nian navy from a relatively marginalized branch of the armed ser­v ices into one of the most prestigious. When studying the larger military buildup, historians have pointed to the importance of defense contractors such as Boeing and McDonnell-­Douglas in facilitating the pro­cess.41 The focus ­here is on the ­human rather than the technological side of the shah’s military buildup, and the argument is that the American colleges and universities that trained members of the Imperial Ira­nian Navy offered their own sizable contribution. Without a rapid and exponential growth in manpower, which required overseas training, Iran would not have possessed the means to become a regional hegemon during the 1970s. When compared to the 1970s, the United States practiced a relative degree of restraint with its arms sales to Iran during the 1960s. During ­those years, Ameri-

The Boom

103

cans in Tehran operated ­under what was known as the “Twitchell Doctrine.” Named ­after General Hamilton Twitchell, the chief of the Military Assistance Advisory Group in Iran from 1962 to 1971, “The basis of the Twitchell Doctrine was that the Shah’s military procurement program should be completely coordinated with his training program.”42 Twitchell recalled that the essence of his doctrine was to withhold the most advanced weapons systems ­until “steps w ­ ere taken to have properly trained personnel on hand when the equipment arrived.”43 In the mid-1960s the balance between training and technology had yet to be reached.44 Nevertheless, the move from the Twitchell to Nixon Doctrine only widened the training gap that the military advisers of the 1960s hoped to close. Iran’s naval expansion coincided with the arms procurement program that Nixon and the Shah initiated at the Tehran summit of May 1972. In the navy, as with the other branches of Iran’s military establishment, training could not keep pace with the equipment the shah purchased in the 1970s. Iran had twelve hovercrafts, more than any country in the world, for use along the Persian Gulf ’s coastline. Iran’s was the only navy in the region with three destroyers and four frigates equipped with missiles. In addition to a naval aviation wing, Iran developed amphibious landing units to respond quickly to local insurgencies. ­Before the revolution, the shah concluded deals for even more sophisticated hardware, including three U.S.-­made diesel submarines and four American Spruance-­ class destroyers that would have given Iran the capability to proj­ect its power as far south as the Cape of Good Hope. In total, prerevolutionary Iran had thirty combat ships and a navy that was without peer in the ­Middle East. To operate all of this equipment, though, the Ira­nian navy needed to more than t­ riple its size from nine thousand to twenty-­eight thousand men.45 As one observer reported, “Iran is seeking naval supremacy in the strategic Persian Gulf, and its navy is growing so swiftly that many officers must be sent out of the country for training.”46 The primary reason why the Imperial Ira­nian Navy relied on American schools for training was ­because Iran had no naval acad­emy. Before the 1970s, Iran’s small officer corps was trained in ­Great Britain, France, Germany, and Italy. To admirals in the U.S. Navy, the Ira­ni­ans’ exposure to “a confusing variety of naval standards and traditions” meant that the navy “lacked a coherent educational foundation on which to build an effective and cohesive naval officer corps.” As in other areas of Ira­nian life during the cold war, American influence supplanted that of the Eu­ro­ pe­ans when the shah “turned to the United States for a solution.” At the same time, leading figures in the U.S. naval establishment became “deeply interested” in “helping to build the heart of their officer corps in our institutions.”47 Some administrators at U.S. schools understood how education supported the strategic objectives of Washington and Tehran. Officials at the ­Virginia Military Institute (VMI), for example, stated frankly that their willingness to participate in

104 CHAPTER 4

the training program “stems from American security policy” and the fact that a strengthened Ira­nian navy would help in “maintaining stability, countering radical insurgencies, and protecting the ­free flow of oil” out of the Persian Gulf.48 A select few Ira­ni­ans received their training at the U.S. Naval Acad­emy in Annapolis. Yet strict regulations governed the admission of foreign nationals to the Naval Acad­emy. Twenty students from countries in the Western Hemi­sphere (outside of the United States) and four from the Philippines could enter Annapolis each year. Congress had to pass a law to allow individuals from any other area of the world to study ­there. In 1973, at Iran’s request and with the understanding that “the ultimate success of this [naval] expansion program is dependent upon a firm foundation of professional knowledge,” Congress approved for two Ira­ni­ans to start at the Naval Acad­emy in July 1975. In a statement before the House Armed Ser­v ices Committee in support of their admission, an administrator with the U.S. Navy spoke to the difficulty of maintaining the Twitchell Doctrine at a time of “very large equipment sales” to the Ira­nian government. “Directly associated with t­hese sales,” he continued, “has been the need to train Ira­nian personnel in the use of this equipment.”49 The vast majority of Ira­nian trainees did not attend the U.S. Naval Acad­emy, but instead went to military schools and participated in Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps (NROTC) programs. In 1965, as the shah began to devote more resources to sea power, six midshipmen enrolled in an NROTC “pi­lot program” in the United States. The arrival of Ira­nian midshipmen in the United States “accelerated following Iran’s decision to expand its naval arm” as training programs evolved from case-­by-­case arrangements to en masse enrollments of Ira­nian cohorts in American institutions. The move ­toward en masse training began in 1972 when representatives of the State Department and U.S. Navy approached some American schools about accepting cohorts of Ira­ni­ans into their corps of cadets. The prospective cadets ­were typically solid students and believers in the shah’s modernization program who sought a ­career at sea. ­After beginning their ser­vice, the Ira­ni­ans chosen to go abroad studied En­glish in Tehran and continued their language training in the United States during the summer before classes started, in some cases at the Defense Language Institute En­glish Language Center at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. The Ira­nian embassy in Washington paid participating schools directly and in advance for all expenses incurred and provided a stipend to the students.50 The Ira­nian midshipmen who arrived in the United States during the 1970s ­were part of a complex educational network that evolved considerably throughout the de­cade. The naval attachés at the Ira­nian embassy stayed busy, and liaison officers went to contracted schools to ­handle disciplinary ­matters, make sure that the students stayed on campus, and monitor their academic pro­gress. Vice Admiral

The Boom

105

Darush Farzaneh was the most impor­tant facilitator of the Ira­nian government’s naval training program. In 1975 he was in charge of all ­matters relating to personnel, training, and education at the Ira­nian naval headquarters in Tehran. By 1978 he was chief of the Imperial Ira­nian Navy mission to the United States, which coordinated all U.S.-­related activities from its headquarters in Arlington, ­Virginia.51 One of the first cohorts of Ira­ni­ans to complete their training in the United States did so at the Maine Maritime Acad­emy. Located in the small town of ­Castine, the institution originally trained American officers in the Merchant ­Marine. In the 1970s it, like other American institutions of higher education, became globalized. In 1975, three years after the establishment of its NROTC program, the sixty-­three Ira­ni­ans at the acad­emy represented 12.5 ­percent of the student body. They studied marine engineering before they received commissions and returned to Iran for what was supposed to be an obligatory twelve years of ser­v ice in the navy. Speaking at the 1975 commencement ceremony in Maine, a top Ira­nian naval official was pleased to proclaim that it took the previous year’s gradu­ates “just a few days to adapt and go on active duty” aboard a destroyer that patrolled the Persian Gulf.52 Other military schools across the United States contributed to Iran’s naval training program. At the Military College of South Carolina, known as The Citadel, American cadets marched alongside twenty-­five Ira­nian “knobs.” In Charleston, they studied business administration, and in the summers they received Marine training in V ­ irginia, flight training in Texas, and applied their skills aboard the newest class of American frigates.53 The ­Virginia Military Institute had a similar program. The first four Ira­ni­ans enrolled in VMI in fall 1971, but many more of their countrymen joined them after the institute established its NROTC program in 1974.54 In fall 1975 thirty Ira­ni­ans started at VMI to study electrical and civil engineering. In addition to language training, the prospective Ira­nian “rats” participated in a summer program on the Lexington campus that included a class on American culture, a physical training regimen, and field trips to historic locations before they ­were “completely integrated into the VMI system.”55 Norwich University did not yet have an NROTC program but it closely followed the pattern that VMI established.56 Located in Northfield, Vermont, the private military college is the oldest of its kind in the United States, and its Ira­nian program was remarkable in many ways. For one, thirty Ira­nian ­women started in fall 1978. Norwich also had one of the largest programs, admitting an average of fifty Ira­ ni­ans each fall, beginning in 1976, for a three-­year period. Less than two years ­after signing the initial contract the school was holding 120 spots—­approximately 10 ­percent of the student body—­for Ira­nian students.57 The U.S. effort to bolster the strength of the Ira­nian military, particularly the Imperial Ira­nian Navy, was at once a success and a failure. On the one hand, it

106 CHAPTER 4

appeared that the training of Ira­nian cadets in American schools contributed to the strategic objectives of the Nixon Doctrine. By 1978 Iran possessed the most power­ful navy in the ­Middle East, which, along with its army and air force, entrenched the shah’s power, made Pahlavi Iran the guarantor of stability in the region, and contributed to the mystique of the ­Great Civilization. Iran’s military power was on clearest display during an intervention in Oman to help a conservative monarch withstand a challenge from a leftist insurgency. That intervention, which lasted from 1972 to 1975 and involved, among other t­ hings, the shelling of the Omani coastline from the sea, was one example of the Nixon Doctrine in action.58 On the other hand, the application of the Nixon Doctrine in Iran increased the gap between training and technology that was never closed before the revolution. Moreover, Amer­i­ca’s strategic objectives ­were shortsighted and discounted the fact that the shah’s obsession with expanding Iran’s military capabilities bred as much resentment among the Ira­nian population as it did accomplish meaningful foreign policy objectives. While the U.S. government and American universities did all they could to convince the shah that his “Napoleonic vision” for Iran was worth pursuing, they did not pause to consider the long-­term ramifications.59

Nuclear Iran and the Mas­s a­c hu­s etts Institute of Technology In March 1974, ­little more than one year ­after the shah announced Iran’s naval expansion, he started a nuclear program. As was the case with the naval program, the shah demanded immediate results from a nuclear program that he created from scratch in the 1970s. In a de­cade of big spending, the shah earmarked billions of dollars in Iran’s Fifth Development Plan (1973–77) for nuclear development.60 Despite its place in the plan, many of Iran’s planners did not support the proj­ect. Khodadad Farmanfarmaian, the U.S.-­educated former head of the Economic Bureau, directed the entire Plan Organ­ization from 1970 to 1973. Farmanfarmaian supported a small program to generate electricity and “to allow for development of skills within Iran and slowly,” but he remembered that he “never had sympathy” for the scale and cost of what the shah had in mind.61 Iran’s nuclear engineers grasped the intensity that drove the program’s expansion, with one remembering that, “All of a sudden, the [Ira­nian] government deci­ded to have nuclear power, so in order to operate ­things, they needed h ­ uman power and they started to send students for education outside. We w ­ ere told ‘You are responsible . . . ​to take the needle from zero to 100.’ ”62 While the means by which the shah forced a nuclear program on Iran ­were representative of his leadership

The Boom

107

style, the program was also representative of the technological dimension of the ­Great Civilization. Technology had always been at the heart of global understandings of modernity, and in the postwar years nuclear power was the hallmark of modern accomplishment and power.63 An Ira­nian nuclear scientist who was trained in the United States commented on the symbolic value of the program. “They just wanted to show that they ­were big,” he recalled, “that they ­were active in the area of nuclear research.”64 As was the case with the military dimension of the shah’s modern vision, Iran’s nuclear program was dependent on international education. The United States, along with ­Great Britain, France, and Germany, helped Iran harness the power of the atom during the shah’s reign. The nuclear program began in 1957 when Iran, like other developing countries, signed an “Atoms for Peace” agreement with the Eisenhower administration. That allowed an American com­pany to help build the Tehran Research Reactor, which went live in 1967. Soon thereafter, the Ira­nian government signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The course on which the shah embarked in 1974 when he established the Atomic Energy Organ­ization of Iran (AEOI) went far beyond his previous experiences with the atom.65 With the West Eu­ro­pe­ans ­eager for financial reasons to become Iran’s nuclear supplier during the 1970s, the shah purchased enriched uranium from a French com­pany that was part of a Eu­ro­pean consortium and secured the assistance of the West German firm Kraftwerk to build a light-­water reactor at Bushehr. The most impor­tant U.S. contribution to what one historian has termed the “nuclearization” of Iran was the training of nuclear scientists at the Mas­sa­chu­setts Institute of Technology.66 Iran’s first and second generations of nuclear scientists ­were by necessity trained in the West. The Swiss-­educated Akbar Etemad was the first director of the AEOI, and the shah’s ministers made sure that news of the organ­ization’s establishment reached Ira­ni­ans in the United States and Eu­rope, where most of the initial hires ­were studying and working. Reza Khazaneh was one of the first Ira­ni­ans that the AEOI hired. He was a doctoral student at the University of California at Berkeley before he helped Etemad found the Isfahan Nuclear Technology Center. Etemad and Khazaneh w ­ ere part of the Ira­nian program’s first generation that studied abroad during the immediate postwar years and became the core of the AEOI in the mid-1970s. Of the AEOI’s eleven “key personnel,” six had degrees from the United States, four from Eu­rope, and one from Canada. But the shah’s ambitions required the training of a second generation of highly specialized employees, a requirement that prompted the AEOI to establish its own educational division. In less than five years, the AEOI sent more than one thousand Ira­ni­ans to universities, institutes, and laboratories overseas to rectify its manpower deficiencies.67 Indeed, the AEOI went through a period of “stunning expansion” during the mid-1970s. Between

108 CHAPTER 4

1974 and 1977, the number of nuclear scientists working for the organ­ization expanded from 67 to 862.68 Iran’s nuclear scientists ­were trained throughout the world, including at the United Kingdom’s Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Harwell. But MIT’s program was the most high profile.69 MIT was one of the first U.S. institutions to offer gradu­ate training in nuclear engineering and was also the quintessentially global center of learning.70 On the one hand was the institute’s Center for International Studies that Max Millikan established in 1952 and staffed with modernization theorists such as Daniel Lerner, Lucian Pye, Paul Rosenstein-­Rodan, and Walt Rostow. By the early 1950s, MIT was an arm of the foreign policy establishment and an incubator of ideas applicable to the cold war strug­gle.71 On the other hand was MIT’s development work in regions of the world ranging from Latin Amer­i­ca to South Asia.72 As MIT officials described it, they had long been committed to the princi­ple of “helping a developing nation achieve industrialization through education of its nationals.”73 Ira­ni­ans studied a range of subjects at MIT during the immediate postwar years, and, by the 1970s, many alumni had reached positions of cultural power in Iran.74 ­There ­were ten Ira­ni­ans with degrees from MIT on the faculty of the Aryamehr University of Technology (now Sharif University of Technology) alone in 1975.75 The most prominent Ira­nian alumnus of MIT was Hosein Nasr, the president of Aryamehr as of 1972.76 Nasr was a former classmate of Jerome Wiesner, MIT’s president for the entirety of the 1970s. One of MIT’s multiple contracts with Iran was to work with Nasr to transform Aryamehr, a technical college founded in 1965, into an “Ira­nian MIT.”77 By the time that the Ira­nian government turned abroad in search of institutions to train its second-­generation nuclear scientists, ­these personal connections and de­cades of activity in Cambridge in support of U.S. foreign policy objectives made MIT a top candidate. The nature of the training program and the terms of the contract ­were established in a series of talks that took place between summer 1974 and spring 1975. In July 1974, only a few months ­after the founding of the AEOI, the Ira­nian minister for cultural affairs at the embassy in Washington asked MIT’s Nuclear Engineering Department if it could provide gradu­ate training for a talented pool of AEOI employees to “build and operate” Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.78 In an August meeting with Ira­nian diplomats, MIT professors suggested that they ­were willing to accept a “pi­lot group” of between four and six students, and if successful, “the program could be expanded if you desire.” MIT heard nothing from the Ira­ni­ans ­until December when they announced their intention to submit nearly fifty applications for admission. At the Ira­ni­ans’ initiative, the expected size of the program became much larger than the suggested pi­lot group. Despite some unease in Cambridge about accepting such a large number of students, MIT went ahead with the program anyway.79

The Boom

109

In March 1975, MIT’s Department of Engineering signed a contract with the Atomic Energy Organ­ization of Iran. U ­ nder the terms of the contract, MIT agreed to admit two classes of twenty-­seven Ira­nian students to a two-­year Master of ­Science degree program in nuclear engineering. That meant that as many as fifty-­four Ira­ni­ans could circumvent the standard admissions pro­cess to study in Cambridge between the summers of 1975 and 1978.80 MIT’s willingness to create the special program was matched only by the Ira­nian government’s readiness to pay top dollar. In addition to covering each student’s expenses, a “special tuition” rate allowed the Department of Nuclear Engineering to hire professors, upgrade facilities, and cover other costs.81 In total, the Ira­nian government gave MIT an endowment of $20 million to train a few dozen nuclear scientists.82 The contract—­which many considered “academic prostitution”—­was met by re­sis­tance from the MIT faculty.83 President Wiesner thought that MIT should, as schools across the United States ­were ­doing, form relationships with “developing countries rendered affluent suddenly by unexpected events,” namely, the oil price hike.84 But the faculty’s concerns went beyond financial m ­ atters. It ­bothered many professors that the decision to forge ties with the shah’s Iran was deci­ded only by a narrow group of administrators and the relevant departments. Another major concern was that the open quota system compromised the integrity of the admissions pro­cess.85 Still ­others worried that “the possibility of MIT training engineers to build bombs is not so remote.”86 MIT officials and the engineering faculty responded in a press release that they had “satisfied themselves that M.I.T. would not be contributing to some unannounced and covert plan of the Ira­ni­ans to use a nuclear power industry as the basis for developing nuclear weapons of war.”87 Then ­there was the po­liti­cal question. MIT’s Noam Chomsky was the most vocal critic of the institute’s willingness to use the power of education to strengthen the power of the shah’s “fascistic dictatorship.” Other professors urged their colleagues to consider the fact that “our citizenship in the M.I.T. community makes us responsible and accountable for the consequences of what­ever impor­tant po­ liti­cal or moral commitments the Institute makes.”88 A considerable amount of dissent also came from MIT’s student body, and the editors of the campus newspaper deemed nuclear cooperation with an “absolute dictator” a “moral abdication” of the university’s responsibilities to society and the world.89 The Co­ali­tion against Training Nuclear Engineers for the Shah teamed up with the Ira­nian Student Association at MIT to write “An Open Letter to the MIT Community” that highlighted “the brutal mistreatment of the Ira­nian ­people by their government.” The letter urged every­one on campus “to realize that MIT’s decision ­will have its consequences in the h ­ uman suffering of the Ira­nian ­people.”90 More than 80 ­percent of the 1,215 students who took part in a campus-­wide referendum on the subject voted for the college to rescind the contract, and another group of

110 CHAPTER 4

c­ oncerned students and faculty staged a sit-in at the Nuclear Engineering Department.91 The MIT professors responsible for coordinating and training the Ira­ni­ans ­were ­under no illusion that po­liti­cal life in Iran was ­free and open, with one remarking that the country was “somewhat rigid and ­under the direction of one man—­the Shah.”92 Nevertheless, the financial boon to the university, the desire to aid the shah in his development effort, and the recognition that “foreign students who come to M.I.T. rise to become very impor­tant ­people in their society” led the institute to brush aside concerns about po­liti­cal repression.93 The institute’s administrators ­were correct that many of the MIT-­trained Ira­ ni­ans developed valuable skills and made an impact in Iran. Between 1975 and 1977, dozens of Ira­ni­ans took courses in Cambridge on subjects such as uranium enrichment, nuclear fuel manufacturing, and repro­cessing spent fuel; they also worked with MIT’s research reactor. In total, thirty-­five Ira­ni­ans graduated from MIT before a series of financial disputes in 1977 left the program’s f­ uture uncertain. MIT’s Ira­nian alumni ­were obligated to work for the AEOI for no less than two years as repayment to the government for their training. ­Those few short years before the revolution marked “a hectic though enjoyable time for the AEOI.” The revolution brought an end to nuclear cooperation between Iran and the United States and, for a time, Iran’s nuclear program. But the revolution did not end the ­careers of MIT’s gradu­ates, many of whom became major figures in the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program. Two MIT gradu­ates served as deputy director of the AEOI and man­ag­er of the Tehran Research Reactor.94 Ali Akbar Salehi is the most high-­ranking MIT gradu­ate in the Islamic Republic’s government. While he was not part of the contract program, he earned his PhD in nuclear engineering in 1977 and returned to Iran the same year as the first MIT cohort. From the late 1990s through the 2010s, Salehi served as Iran’s representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency, foreign minister, and the head of the AEOI.95 The contract between the Ira­nian government and the Mas­sa­chu­setts Institute of Technology marked one of the most coordinated efforts to use education to promote elite modernization in Iran. Although the MIT program helped the shah extend the technological arm of his ­Great Civilization, nuclear advances rooted in the Pahlavi era contributed in the twenty-­first c­ entury to international tension over Iran’s program. As the MIT episode reveals, the United States applied a “double standard” on nuclear power to Imperial Iran and the Islamic Republic, even if American support for the shah’s program came with equivocation and consternation in some quarters.96 The episode also reveals that, while the French and the West Germans did the most to build the shah’s nuclear program, the American contribution, which came primarily in the form of training, should not be understated. One American physicist described the essence of the Islamic Repub-

The Boom

111

lic’s nuclear program in stating that Ira­nian scientists are “trying to continue what . . . ​they ­were encouraged to learn at MIT.”97

American Education, American Culture ­ here was ­little substance to the shah’s interpretation of ­human rights, no semT blance of democracy in his single-­party state, and truth to the charge that he mismanaged Iran’s finances by investing so heavi­ly in military and technological modernization. But his modernization program directly and indirectly extended the benefits of education—­the most impor­tant social right—to many Ira­ni­ans. The Literacy Corps that took the White Revolution into the countryside was the Ira­nian counterpoint to the American Peace Corps, and it improved literacy at an impressive rate.98 While the shah stunted the growth of Iran’s system of higher education during the 1960s for po­liti­cal reasons, he commissioned an order of tremendous campus construction during the 1970s. He also financed a robust scholarship program to send students overseas on public dollars. In all of t­hese endeavors the shah looked to the United States as a model. That he did so when he had the financial resources to turn to any country in the world for assistance reveals that the shah shared with one of his top educationalists the belief that “the magnitude of American contributions to the modern world is out of all proportion to the short span of her existence.”99 Iran took on a greater role in facilitating study abroad during the 1970s than in previous de­cades, but U.S. staples in Iran such as the Fulbright Program and the American Friends of the M ­ iddle East remained as relevant as ever. The aims of the Ira­nian and American architects of the educational bridge that connected their countries w ­ ere twofold: to continue educating Ira­nian modernizers and to promote an intercultural dialogue that, in the end, transcended state interests. ­Because of the po­liti­cal context, the cultural connections between the United States and Iran during the de­cade of the ­Great Civilization stimulated dialogue but also provoked reaction. The Ira­nian government’s need for more “new men,” along with the pressures of a growing population, compelled the shah to, in 1967, add educational reform as the twelfth point of his expanding White Revolution. Between 1967 and 1969, he created the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, held annual conferences on educational policy in Ramsar, and established the Institute for Research and Planning in Science and Education. The latter was a think tank staffed with Western-­educated specialists and tasked with devising an educational strategy to endure the increasing number of institutions, expanding size of the college-­age population, and infusion of funds that defined Iran’s “educational revolution.”

112 CHAPTER 4

Although Iran had only eight universities when the shah added point twelve to the White Revolution, nine new ones opened between 1974 and 1976. Significantly, in 1974 the monarch offered ­free tuition to any Ira­nian willing to do two years of “national ser­v ice” for each year spent studying on government aid. Despite t­ hese innovations, Ira­nian colleges and universities could not satisfy the demand for postsecondary learning. Enrollments in Ira­nian universities jumped from 5,781 in the 1961–62 academic year to 28,500 in 1978–79, but the number of high school gradu­ates increased from 15,924 to 235,000 during the same period. That means that only 12.1 ­percent of pos­si­ble first-­year students secured admissions to an Ira­nian university in the late 1970s compared to the 36.3 ­percent of the early 1960s.100 It was in part out of necessity, ­whether educational, po­liti­ cal, or both, that the Ira­nian student population in the United States qua­dru­pled in size during the 1970s. More government funding was also available for study abroad. In 1974, the same year that the shah made education f­ ree, he began to subsidize international education. Iran’s oil windfall allowed him to meaningfully respond to the limitations of Iran’s educational infrastructure and the demands of his modernization program. The Ira­nian government established five new scholarship programs, and the most prestigious was the Superior Student Program. In the 1973–74 academic year, 411 Ira­ni­ans received a comprehensive grant to go abroad as a reward for being the top student in their respective academic departments. Equally impor­ tant was the Faculty Development Program, u ­ nder which Ira­nian universities awarded scholarships to ju­nior faculty members to pursue doctoral degrees overseas.101 Another scholarship program aimed to reverse the “brain drain,” an impediment to development by which Ira­ni­ans secured employment abroad and opted not to return home a­ fter receiving their degrees. To turn the brain drain into a brain gain, the Ira­nian government offered assistance to high-­ performing and previously self-­financed students overseas, so long as they studied development-­related subjects.102 An array of royal foundations also took an interest in international education. In 1977 the Manhattan-­based Pahlavi Foundation was paying for the education of some seven hundred Ira­ni­ans in the United States. The Ashraf Pahlavi Foundation, chartered by the shah’s twin ­sister in 1976, put part of its $1.4 million of seed money t­ oward scholarships that sent “gifted students and gradu­ates to foreign countries for the continuation of their studies.” In addition to the royal foundations, the National Ira­nian Oil Com­pany, Central Bank, and government ministries aided their employees who sought to hone their skills abroad.103 The 1970s marked the first moment in the shah’s long reign when Iran could, in the words of one American educationalist, “afford to pay the full cost . . . ​in the education of its citizens to establish its own professional manpower base.”104

The Boom

113

The shah maximized the impact of U.S. government exchanges and the s­ er­v ices of nongovernmental organ­izations whose programs and networks had matured ­after de­cades of work in Iran. Fulbrights remained the most prestigious U.S. government exchanges. With the oil-­generated “financial revolution” occurring in Iran at the same time that the U.S. government slashed its public diplomacy bud­get, Ira­nian contributions to the Fulbright commission’s trea­sury surpassed ­those made by the Americans in 1976.105 Parirokh Rad, an alumna of the University of Southern California and a former AFME employee, was the commission’s executive director in Tehran during the 1970s.106 ­Under Rad’s directorship, the Fulbright Program transformed professional life in Iran, especially the field of education. Many officials in Iran’s Ministry of Science of Higher Education studied administration in the United States, and a multitude of university chancellors, college deans, and department heads ­were former Fulbrighters.107 The 1970s also marked a new chapter for the American Friends of the M ­ iddle East. Despite the 1967 revelation that AFME was a CIA front organ­ization, advisers to the U.S. Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs claimed in 1977 that “no CIA taint attaches to the organ­ization in Iran.”108 With its cover blown but its collective expertise still in high demand, the State Department and the Ford Foundation filled the financial void so AFME could h ­ andle the swelling volume of student visits to its Tehran office. In 1970 more than six hundred Ira­ni­ans visited per month to inquire about study abroad; by mid-­decade nearly two thousand prospective students inundated the office monthly. As a headline in one of the organ­ization’s newsletters that year read, “The Story of AFME-­Tehran is Students!”109 Beyond volume, AFME redefined its mission to work directly with the Ira­nian government. In 1974 the Ira­nian government tasked AFME with making all arrangements for the recipients of the prestigious Superior Student and Faculty Development Programs.110 That same year, AFME signed a contract with an Ira­nian teacher training college to provide “direct supervision” to the more than eighty students and faculty members who ­were slated to travel to the United States.111 AFME also took special care to place high-­ranking administrators with Iran’s Literacy Corps in American institutions.112 The most striking sign of the flourishing but unbalanced cultural relationship between the United States and Iran was the proliferation of university contracts. Before the 1970s, American universities received contracts to support Ira­nian ­development. Examples from the 1950s include the University of Southern ­California’s work in public administration and the Harvard Advisory Group’s mentoring of Iran’s planners. A notable example from the 1960s was the contract that the University of Pennsylvania received to build Pahlavi University (now Shiraz University), the shah’s flagship American-­style institution located a short drive away from the ruins of Persepolis.113 Unlike the 1970s, however, when

114 CHAPTER 4

Iran paid cash for ser­v ices from American universities, U.S. aid dollars or philanthropic funds supported ­these earlier endeavors. But the contracts of the 1950s and 1960s ­were similar to ­those of the 1970s in that they ­were collaborative efforts that eased the movement of ­people and ideas between the two countries. By 1977, a de­cade ­after American aid workers left Iran, approximately fifty American colleges and universities had some sort of institutional connection with Iran. The Ira­nian government’s need to contract work out to American institutions was a by-­product of the rapid educational, bureaucratic, and military ­expansion the shah underwrote during the 1970s. Some contracts ­were small, consisting of exchanges between specific departments, or deals that allowed for the exchange of individual faculty members whose research interests aligned or ­were mutually beneficial to both institutions. Other contracts ­were between American schools and Ira­nian government ministries. The most significant type of contract—­which received the most attention at the time—­created “interuniversity links” between schools in the United States and Iran.114 While the University of Illinois had the largest number of contracts with fourteen, Georgetown University claimed the most lucrative at $11 million.115 The opening of Reza Shah Kabir University (now Mazandaran University) was illustrative of how the shah marshalled his connections with American universities to realize the cultural dimension of the ­Great Civilization. The school, which bore the name of the first Pahlavi shah and was near his birthplace, was Iran’s first university devoted to gradu­ate research. The Ira­nian government reached out to Harvard “to combine the educational expertise and standards of Amer­i­ca’s oldest university with the ancient traditions of scholarship of the Ira­nian ­people.” Harvard advisers worked with a group of seven Ira­ni­ans, five of whom had ­advanced degrees from American universities, to lay the groundwork for the university (where instruction would be in En­glish), develop degree programs, and recruit faculty. Ultimately, the task proved too much for one school to ­handle, and other American institutions jumped on board to launch the university.116 George Washington University was one of the consortium members and a destination for “a sizeable number of Ira­nian students” who enrolled in gradu­ate programs in business and public administration and ­were supposed to form the nucleus of the research faculty.117 It was a historical accomplishment to have so many American universities contributing to an educational transformation in Iran that spawned countless ­opportunities for individuals to move between the two countries and establish relationships and dialogues that, despite the po­liti­cal context, transcended the interests of nation-­states. But, in the case of the contracts, the motivation b ­ ehind many of them was often less than noble. The American Council on Education, which the U.S. Department of State commissioned at the time to study educa-

The Boom

115

tional ties between the United States and Iran, criticized the contracts as evidence of “academic hustling” in an “atmosphere of salesmanship.”118 The critical press in the United States published stories about “petrogrants” with titles such as “Do Oil and Education Mix?” and “Schools for Sale.”119 Despite the criticisms, the contracts greased the gears of exchange that brought Americans and Ira­ni­ans closer than has been the case in any other era. However, the educational administrators who negotiated the contracts did not concern themselves with the ethical dilemma of lending at least tacit support to the authoritarian shah.

The influx of Americans to Iran, the movement of Ira­ni­ans to and from the United States, and the shah’s equation of modernization with “Westernization” at the height of Pahlavi power s­ haped the contours of the revolutionary discourse in Iran as it evolved throughout the 1970s. While that discourse evolved within a global context and included some progressive ideas from around the world, anti-­ Americanism was impor­tant to the Khomeini wing of the revolutionary co­ali­tion. That anti-­Americanism was s­haped by vari­ous ­factors, including longheld beliefs about religion and civilization, and longstanding grievances against the secular Pahlavi state. While Khomeini was in exile, his supporters back home bristled at the offensive be­hav­ior of many Americans who went to Iran to aid the shah’s development efforts. Beyond Khomeini and his most dedicated supporters, many Iranian nationalists came to believe that intercultural dialogue was not pos­si­ble when the imbalances of power between the participants w ­ ere too g­ reat. In the end, then, the construction of “Amer­i­ca’s Iran” during a decade of unprecedented militarization, corruption, and human rights abuses contributed in an unsettling way to the larger environment within which a revolutionary discourse developed. As record numbers of Iranian students went to the United States, the arrival of so many Americans to Iran in the 1970s served as a physical reminder to many Ira­ni­ans that, despite the country’s oil wealth, the United States maintained a hand in guiding their pro­cess of national development. The American population in Iran grew from eight thousand in 1970 to fifty thousand in 1978. The most respected and culturally fluent of ­those Americans worked for the Peace Corps, but that program had its maximum influence in Iran during the late 1960s. In 1976, the program’s final year in the country, t­here ­were only eighty volunteers working in Iran. It is unfortunate that as the Peace Corps phased out, the shah began to offer lucrative contracts to U.S. defense industries. ­Toward the end of the de­cade, the American population in Iran came to reflect more directly the demands of the state-­to-­state relationship. In 1978 approximately 80 ­percent of all Americans in Iran ­were ­there to advise an Ira­nian military that was bursting the seams and viewed with contempt by the Ira­nian ­people. American

116 CHAPTER 4

“blue-­suiters” faced the impossible task of helping the Ira­nian military absorb all of the sophisticated equipment and weaponry that the shah purchased. Not soon ­after their arrival, reports of the “lewd,” “drunken,” and “pleasure-­crazed” Americans began to circulate among the population. ­Those titles ­were often reserved for the opportunists who sought to capitalize on the de­cade’s oil-­propelled “gold rush.” Unfortunately, the distinction was often lost on an Ira­nian population that saw the inflow of Americans to their country as evidence that the shah was the most recent in a long line of leaders who, since the nineteenth c­ entury, refused to de­moc­ra­tize the po­liti­cal system and appeared to sacrifice the good of the ­people to foreign interests.120 The infusion of all ­things American, including returnees from Western institutions of higher education, led some Ira­nian intellectuals and revolutionaries to charge the United States with the “cultural colonization” of Iran. Jalal Al-­e Ahmad was the first among the postcoup generation to relate the twin forces of Westernization and domestic repression. A teacher, social critic, and secularist who nonetheless saw redemptive qualities in Shia Islam, Al-­e Ahmad spoke of Gharbzadegi (“Westoxofication” or “Occidentosis”), a sickness that he claimed afflicted Ira­ ni­ans who marveled at the West’s “pro­gress” and loathed their own cultural heritage. He harbored contempt for “the army of returnees from Eu­rope and Amer­ i­ca” who took posts in the shah’s government to implement undemo­cratic and secularizing policies that “betrayed” Iran to Western military and economic interests. He claimed that, as was the case during the era of Eu­ro­pean imperialism, the United States saw Iran and its p ­ eople as “raw material” for a “Western laboratory.” Despite its toxicity, the context of Al-­e Ahmad’s polemic is impor­tant. As the historian Nikki Keddie has written, “we must remember the concurrent intensification of a Westernizing despotism, closely tied to dependence on the West, and especially the United States” was what led many Ira­ni­ans “to associate Westernization with suffering and dictatorship.”121 The arrival of so many American advisers, the meteoric rise of U.S.-­trained technocrats to positions of power, and the highly vis­i­ble make­over of Ira­nian life gave the appearance that Iran’s cultural traditions ­were being plowed by an “American bulldozer” at a time when the shah’s secularizing authoritarianism resulted in unchecked abuses of power.122 Although international education allowed for the cross-­fertilization of ideas, the cultural elite’s embrace of the United States and the rejection of it by many o ­ thers created a “two cultures phenomenon” whereby the social realities of the “elite” and the “masses” diverged during the late Pahlavi era.123 Thus, the vast American presence in Iran coupled with exchange initiatives that brought Ira­ni­ans to the United States must be understood, not only on their own terms, but in the proper po­liti­cal context and in light of how they ­were perceived by a society on the cusp of revolution.

5 THE RECKONING ­Human Rights, Iran, and the World All the main points which the Ira­ni­ans deploy in their favour are . . . ​ repetitive if not hypocritical, and we have certainly had enough of Cyrus the ­Great’s declaration on ­human rights. —­British Embassy Tehran (1977)

Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi co-­opted the image of Cyrus the ­Great to consolidate his White Revolution in the 1960s and drape a veneer of tolerance around his ­Great Civilization in the 1970s. During most of the U.N.-­declared “development de­cades,” the shah successfully portrayed his modernization program as the culmination of the “right to development.”1 The right to development was a double-­edged sword that buttressed the economic interests of developing nations but allowed Americans to rationalize their support for right-­w ing dictators by claiming that “omelet construction requires egg sacrifice.”2 This problematic ­understanding of ­human rights allowed the shah to claim that economic development was a necessary precursor to civil and po­liti­cal rights. Critics of U.S. foreign policy and the shah’s method of modernization, by contrast, insisted that po­liti­cal freedoms and economic growth could coexist and evolve concurrently. By the mid-1970s, the opposition’s argument displaced the shah’s. ­Because of Ira­nian student organ­izing overseas, po­liti­cal issues such as physical and psychological torture, freedoms of speech and movement, and protection of individuals against excessive state power emerged as the defining characteristics of the third and most expansive manifestation of the rights-­based critique of the Pahlavi state: universal ­human rights. The ­human rights network of the 1970s had its roots in the student activism of the 1960s. The rights-­based critique of the Pahlavi regime gestated as the ­Kennedy administration debated the possibility of reform in Iran, and it coalesced into an alternate alliance of student internationalists as a result of liberal and New Left activism. In the early 1960s, the ISAUS engaged in two simultaneous 117

118 CHAPTER 5

conversations: one with Kennedy administration insiders about the ­future of U.S. policy t­oward Iran, and another with the liberal leadership of the U.S. National Student Association. The terms of the conversation with William Douglas and Robert Kennedy ­were restricted to par­tic­ul­ ar issues and one nation. The primary issue was the restoration of constitutional governance in Iran, and the means for achieving that end was to convince the most impor­tant policymakers in Washington to pressure the shah to reform. The relationship, then, was one between nations that nonstate actors attempted to influence. A ­ fter the win­dow for reform closed in 1962, critical students and their allies lost the ability to influence high-­level policy. Thereafter, the shah had friends in the White House and the United Nations, pursued an ambitious program of socioeconomic development, and successfully promoted his understanding of the right to development in the international community. The years 1965 to 1976 marked the most severe period of domestic repression of the Pahlavi era. The Ira­nian government banned international observers from attending military tribunals in 1972 following a courtroom debacle when a defendant revealed severe burns on his back from SAVAK’s “hot ­table,” a heated wire mesh on which prisoners ­were strapped.3 The hot ­table, extraction of fingernails, insertion of boiling ­water and broken glass into bodily orifices, electric shocks, flogging of the feet, and the “parrot perch” ­were some of the most severe forms of torture. In 1973 Amnesty International “concluded that enough prima facie evidence of torture exists to warrant a properly constituted inquiry.” The shah became increasingly guarded, and SAVAK exponentially more violent, in 1971 ­after guerrillas inspired by the revolutions in China, Cuba, and Algeria launched an armed insurrection against the Pahlavi state. Disputes over ­whether guerrillas should be classified as po­liti­cal prisoners like dissident writers and intellectuals, along with the lack of any previous systematic inquiry into the subject, made it difficult for con­temporary observers to agree on exactly how many po­liti­cal prisoners populated Ira­nian jails. Estimates ranged from the regime’s claim of three thousand to the London-­based Committee against Repression in Iran’s estimate of one hundred thousand. ­While the final tally was closer to the regime’s estimate, the perception at the time was that the human rights organizations were closer to the mark. By 1975 Amnesty International secretary general Martin Ennals claimed that “no country in the world has a worse rec­ord in ­human rights than Iran.”4 As repression in Iran reached its apex, the Ira­nian student movement abroad couched its criticism of the Pahlavi state within the context of h ­ uman rights. That was not always the case. In the early 1960s many students determined that appealing to ­human rights was less meaningful than invoking Iran’s own history of constitutionalism. The summation of the proceedings of the 1962 Aspen Institute conference that Robert Kennedy attended with ISAUS president Ali Fatemi

The Reckoning

119

reported that the latter “thinks ­human rights as a ­thing to be supported is too broad a term. He would prefer to concentrate on a single concrete idea like f­ ree elections and the existence of representative government.”5 But the CISNU and the ISAUS ­were dif­fer­ent organ­izations in the 1970s. In 1974, the CISNU formally called for the shah’s overthrow, only one year before internal pressures led to the student group’s dissolution. Despite the ultimate disbanding of the CISNU, the confederative nature of the organ­ization enabled its constituent parts to remain active and thrive.6 The ISAUS remained on the extreme po­liti­cal Left and continued to hold national conventions through the 1970s, all the while alerting more Americans to ­human rights violations in Iran. By the mid-1970s, tropes of humanity became so power­ful in the organ­ization that local ISAUS chapters began to proclaim that “the World Confederation of Ira­nian Students was founded for the purpose of exposing the brutality and inhumanity of the Ira­nian regime, and to defend the basic ­human rights of the Ira­nian p ­ eople and of po­liti­cal prisoners.”7 Although many Americans did not share their politics, anti-­shah activists nonetheless found that many Americans ­were open to a reinterpretation of ­human rights. By the mid-1970s, as historians such as Barbara Keys and Samuel Moyn have demonstrated, ­there was a volte-­face in the way that the international community thought about ­human rights. In contrast to the 1950s and 1960s, the “­human rights revolution” of the 1970s aimed to protect individual dignity and curtail coercive state power. ­There ­were vari­ous reasons why the rights-­based critique of the Pahlavi state found a receptive audience in the United States during the 1970s. As Keys argues, the language of h ­ uman rights was a means by which Americans could reestablish their moral authority a­ fter the Vietnam War and draw attention to other nations’ prob­lems. T ­ hose prob­lems ranged from the plight of Soviet Jews and other dissidents ­behind the “iron curtain” to the state-­sanctioned vio­lence of U.S. allies such as Augusto Pinochet’s Chile and the Shah’s Iran.8 As the United States rethought its responsibilities as a global power, developments related specifically to Iran made the shah susceptible to charges of h ­ uman rights abuse. By the mid-1970s, the shah had moved from being a seemingly docile monarch at the mercy of foreign powers to a self-­confident “emperor of oil.” It was not lost on an American public getting their wallets drained at the gas pumps that the shah was one of the architects of the oil price hike of the early 1970s. As Western economies suffered from high oil prices, inflation, and unemployment, opinion makers in the U.S. media tagged the shah as a “megalomaniac” with dreams of “grandeur.”9 In Congress, liberal Demo­crats seeking to reestablish checks and balances over the executive branch a­ fter the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal came to see Iran as a test case for rolling back Nixon-­era arms policies and replacing realpolitik with moralpolitik. While h ­ uman rights activists focused on the absence of democracy and SAVAK’s methods of detaining and torturing po­liti­cal

120 CHAPTER 5

prisoners, this larger set of grievances made it pos­si­ble for the alternate alliance of American and Ira­nian progressives to transform the image of the shah from a modernizing monarch to the head of a state-­directed reign of terror. Despite the significance of ­human rights to the shah’s claims to legitimacy and the opposition’s critique of the Pahlavi state, the subject remains peripheral to historical understandings of U.S.-­Iran relations and the Ira­nian Revolution. In contrast to the extant lit­er­at­ ure, this chapter argues that ­human rights became a critical component of American-­Iranian relations before the start of Jimmy Car­ ter’s presidency in 1977.10 Although Car­ter’s election as the first “­human rights president” increased the shah’s receptivity to reform for the first time since the Kennedy era, it was the alternate alliance of Ira­nian students and their Western supporters that used h ­ uman rights to delegitimize the shah’s contention that economic development must precede po­liti­cal liberalization and to challenge the monarch’s hold on the Peacock Throne for the first time since the early 1960s.

The Marble Palace “Plot” and the ­H uman Rights Network The h ­ uman rights network that matured in the 1970s was born during a 1965 defense campaign. It was then that Ira­nian students overseas incorporated the phrase “­human rights” into their lexicon to contest the manner in which the shah responded to the vio­lence that swept through Iran in early 1965. On April 10, less than three months ­after the assassination of Prime Minister Hasan Ali Mansur, a conscript in the Imperial Guard tried but failed to kill the shah in the Marble Palace.11 ­After narrowly escaping with his life, the shah ordered SAVAK to arrest a cadre of British-­educated Ira­ni­ans known as the “Nikkhah Group.” The group was named ­after Parviz Nikkhah, a Maoist gradu­ate of the University of Manchester who returned to Iran in 1964 to undercut the shah’s land reform by organ­ izing Iran’s rural laborers.12 ­Because five of the detained Ira­ni­ans ­were active in the CISNU during their student days in ­Great Britain, the confederation accused the shah of using the circumstances surrounding the assassination attempt to orchestrate a “conspiracy to silence the students.”13 The 1965 defense campaign marked the first time that h ­ uman rights was the center of gravity for the anti-­ shah movement, and it brought together a co­ali­tion of rights activists and organ­ izations that would eventually find a more responsive global audience as the 1960s gave way to the 1970s. Universalist language such as “­human rights” and “humanitarianism” filled the tele­grams that vari­ous ISAUS chapters wrote to Lyndon Johnson’s White House during the campaign against the Marble Palace “plot.” The ISAUS Execu-

The Reckoning

121

tive Committee stated unambiguously that the president’s response “would determine for us w ­ hether the United States government wishes to continue to be an accomplice in the suppression of basic ­human rights in Iran or it w ­ ill refuse to be completely associated with the pres­ent hated regime in our country.”14 The ISA in Minnesota pointed out that Johnson’s stance t­ oward Iran was “unlike the strong humanitarian we have seen on tele­vi­sion pleading for the rights of . . . ​ citizens in the South.”15 The ISA in Chicago solicited American support and called on progressives of all nationalities to pay heed to “the clamor of a nation which is struggling for its most basic ­human rights.”16 While 1965 was the last year that Ira­nian students petitioned the White House and expected results, the CISNU’s larger strategy was to “draw the attention of all democratic-­minded ­people” to the ­legal injustices in Tehran.17 The CISNU’s demands resonated with some prominent Britons and Americans in government but unaffiliated with the administrations of Harold Wilson and Lyndon Johnson. The CISNU’s demands w ­ ere not unreasonable; the group wanted its friends to receive a fair trial in a civilian court with l­awyers of their choice ­before a team of international ­legal observers.18 ­After communicating with anti-­ shah students, a group of L ­ abour Party parliamentarians wrote to the Ira­nian ambassador in London to make similar demands and express concern over allegations that SAVAK tortured Nikkhah to extract a confession of guilt. To coordinate the defense campaign, the L ­ abour group established the Committee for the Defense of Po­liti­cal Prisoners, the conduit through which all donations to the CISNU defense campaign in ­Great Britain passed.19 Across the Atlantic, the CISNU hoped that the United States would relieve the detainees by issuing a plea of clemency “in the name of humanity.”20 William Douglas conveyed this request, which came from his own convictions and his regular correspondences with student leaders.21 He suggested that Johnson “send a message to the Shah” ­because he was “convinced that ­these ­trials are ­really ­trials of the po­liti­cal opposition, not of criminals.” When Robert Komer replied on the president’s behalf and insisted that the accused w ­ ere culpable, it was clear to Douglas that the White House “has not delved very deeply into the Ira­nian law.”22 The U.S. embassy in Tehran knew that “from the strict point of civil liberties and fairness ­toward po­liti­cal accused the British protesters have a point.”23 To U.S. officials, however, geopolitics and alliance management mattered more than ­human rights. Without the potential support of governments, the Ira­nian student movement produced new leaders, established new allies, and engaged with the international community to circumvent unresponsive nation-­states and give meaning to ­human rights in Iran and the late twentieth-­century world (see Figure 7). Hosein Mahdavi did more than anyone to move the Ira­nian student movement ­toward an embrace of h ­ uman rights. During the late 1950s, Mahdavi worked

122 CHAPTER 5

FIGURE 7.  The London-­based committee for the defense of the “Nikkhah group” circulated informational material widely. This par­tic­u­lar image was included in a packet that the ISAUS sent to William Douglas. As early as 1965 the student movement used the imagery of mutilated bodies when appealing to international audiences, an artistic approach that became more pronounced during the 1970s. Note the transnational conception of h ­ uman rights organ­izing in the statement: “Their fight for freedom and justice is your fight.” PWOD, box 1719, folder 6. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

for Khodadad Farmanfarmaian in the Economic Bureau of the Plan Organ­ization. By the early 1960s, he was disenchanted with the po­liti­cal atmosphere in Iran, quit the Plan Organ­ization, and left the country to pursue a doctorate in economics at Harvard University. By the mid-1960s, ­after he was elected to the Central Committee of the National Front and wrote an article for Foreign Affairs in which he predicted a “coming crisis in Iran,” Mahdavi was persona non grata in Tehran. To make ­human rights a priority, he and the other delegates to the 1965 ISAUS convention in Chicago created a l­ egal defense fund modeled on the one in G ­ reat Britain.24 The ISAUS-­affiliated Committee for the Defense of Ira­nian Po­liti­cal Prisoners and Students was based in Cambridge, and Mahdavi was its director. The committee worked “to defend the ­human and constitutional rights of all po­liti­ cal prisoners in Iran irrespective of their po­liti­cal views or ideologies” and to en-

The Reckoning

123

courage “all U.S. citizens who believe in justice and rights of man” to stand up and be heard.25 On t­ hese two points, Mahdavi’s committee was consistent with the CISNU. As the trial convened, the confederation argued in a letter to the U.N. Commission on H ­ uman Rights that the Ira­nian Constitution mandated that ­po­liti­cal ­trials take place in civilian courts and predicted that “the Ira­nian Government cannot remain indifferent to the international opinion . . . ​in the face of the intervention of international organisations.”26 The military tribunal began in October 1965, and the stakes ­were high, with four of the young Ira­ni­ans facing the possibility of the death sentence. The chief prosecutor, a brigadier general in the Army, claimed that “dangerous and ill-­ directed po­liti­cal beliefs w ­ ere injected into their minds” in G ­ reat Britain by “anti-­nationalist” student organ­izations. Most of the defendants did not deny that they read communist lit­er­at­ ure. Yet as one young defendant asked, “Am I being tried h ­ ere for my deeds—or for my thoughts?” He continued, stating that he was unaware that possessing po­liti­cal pamphlets “was akin to keeping a decapitated body in my home.” The prosecutor saw ­things differently. He countered that ideas ­were power­ful and argued that it was dangerous to “forgive them and let them go home and start polluting society.” ­After staring down the prosecutors, one of the young men determined that, rather than debate the merits of intellectual freedom in a military court, he could make a stronger case by proclaiming that he was a “Shah-­loving man.”27 As arguments w ­ ere heard in Tehran, the Ira­nian student movement engaged in that classic tactic of 1960s activism: direct action. Throughout the trial, the ­ISAUS or­ga­nized a series of simultaneous protest vigils in front of the Ira­nian embassy in Washington and the consulates in San Francisco, New York, and ­Chicago.28 Most impor­tant was the hunger strike that the CISNU undertook in Karlsruhe, West Germany, as other Ira­ni­ans rallied in Austria, Switzerland, Italy, France, Belgium, ­Great Britain, and the United States. The most committed ­students called off the strike ­after nine days, but only ­after they received a supportive note from the U.N. secretary general. In addition to U Thant, the CISNU expressed its “heart-­felt thanks to ­great world personalities” such as the British phi­los­o­pher Bertrand Russell and French existentialist Jean-­Paul Sartre for supporting their “humanitarian enterprise.” As international pressure mounted, on November 1 the military tribunal issued its verdict that two of the four defendants whose crimes ­were punishable by death receive the maximum sentence. Four days l­ater, with the eyes of the world turned to Tehran, the defendants filed an appeal.29 The collective effort of Ira­nian students and their allies in the United States and Western Eu­rope produced results in Iran. While the Ira­nian government refused to try the former students in a civilian court or to allow them to choose

124 CHAPTER 5

their own counsel, the admission of an international ­legal team signaled a major victory. More importantly, in late December the shah commuted the two death sentences to life in prison. It is probable that the defense effort spared all of the young Ira­ni­ans from execution.30 Although the po­liti­cal situation in Iran got worse before it got better, it was clear to all involved in the defense campaign that the shah would “not long be able to contain” the rising opposition to his regime in a world that increasingly “regards justice as having no national bound­aries.”31 The 1965 trial and defense campaign had significant ramifications in Iran and the international community. In Iran, the trial coincided with the reluctant move of some of Iran’s leading technocrats from, to borrow from a con­temporary po­ liti­cal scientist, potential “uprooters” e­ ager to transform the system to “followers” who opted to “float in the safest and smoothest direction.”32 Indeed, Iran’s technocrats monitored the trial closely. Two nationalists who studied in Hamburg and New York before gaining employment with Iran’s Industrial and Mining Development Bank told U.S. diplomats that they “hope that we are dusting off our contingency plans for the Shah’s departure from the scene.”33 One Paris-­ educated statesman encouraged the U.S. embassy to use the trial to “buttonhole the Shah and advise him to ‘allow the creation of a popu­lar Government.’ ”34 The Johnson administration’s decision not to follow that advice may have convinced Iran’s technocrats that further re­sis­tance would be in vain. Internationally, the defense campaign ­shaped the par­ameters of the emerging network of Ira­nian students and American ­human rights workers. If the modern concept of ­human rights includes, in the words of one scholar, “the idea of universalism, deference to the UN and its Universal Declaration of H ­ uman Rights . . . ​, and the seeking of legitimacy and redress through international law and international opinion,” then one can identify 1965 as the year that marked the birth of transnational Ira­ nian ­human rights activism.35 Of the organ­izations that turned their attention to Iran for the first time in 1965, Amnesty International was the most impor­tant. While Amnesty won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977, it was a young and relatively obscure organ­ization in the 1960s. Established in 1961, its headquarters was in London and an American chapter opened in 1966. Amnesty’s tactics closely resembled t­hose of the Ira­nian student movement. In addition to writing letters to national leaders, both groups engaged in transnational direct action to create support among global publics for ­human rights.36 To ­those ends, the trial of the Nikkhah Group provided Amnesty International with one of its first opportunities to test its “prisoners of conscience” strategy, and a small team of Amnesty-­affiliated ­lawyers authored a report highly critical of Iran’s ­legal system a­ fter monitoring the trial.37 ­After 1965, accounts of torture from student activists inundated Amnesty offices around the world. With

The Reckoning

125

Ira­nian expatriates providing evidence of escalating h ­ uman rights violations in Iran, Amnesty proclaimed its “hope that the promise manifest in the Ira­nian Government’s programme of social and economic reform ­will be increasingly fulfilled in the equally crucial area of po­liti­cal freedom.”38 In October 1970, to pressure the shah to balance rights and development, the Austrian section of Amnesty International or­ga­nized, at the encouragement of the CISNU, a fact-­finding mission to investigate charges of arbitrary arrests and torture. Hans Heldmann, the Amnesty-­affiliated criminology professor at Frankfurt University who led the investigation, was no stranger to Iran. He traveled ­there twice during the 1960s, defended Ira­nian student rights in the Federal Republic of Germany, and spoke at the West Berlin teach-in just before the shah’s arrival in June 1967. Before his 1970 trip to Iran, the CISNU provided Heldmann with the names of po­liti­cal prisoners. Hosein Rezai, an Ira­nian student at the University of Mainz on the CISNU Secretariat, went as a guide and translator. The trip, though, was an exercise in futility. Ira­nian security forces arrested Rezai and confiscated Heldmann’s documents. On his return to Eu­rope, Heldmann reported that the regime’s “terrorizing of the population and the brutality of the oppression had taken on an unforeseen dimension” and he applauded Iran’s student activists. According to Heldmann, “the Confederation of Ira­nian Students has reliably reported on the use of torture and on . . . ​the par­tic­u­lar po­liti­cal prisoners.”39 Given the shah’s image as a modernizing monarch abroad and the repressive capacities of the Ira­nian state at home, his critics appeared to be tilting at windmills as attention turned t­ oward Persepolis in 1971. In February of that year, Ira­ nian security forces moved swiftly against the domestic opposition ­after young leftists with the Organ­ization of the Ira­nian P ­ eople’s Fedai Guerrillas fired the first shots of armed strug­gle in Iran.40 At the same time, the shah attempted to minimize Ira­nian student organ­izing overseas when he declared membership in the CISNU illegal and punishable by imprisonment, or possibly death. He gave the students ­until the Ira­nian new year to turn themselves in and denounce their affiliation with the confederation.41 The shah’s refusal to accept any opposition to his regime—at home or abroad—­became painfully clear in a series of nine public recantations that SAVAK extracted from former leaders of the CISNU during the lead-up to Persepolis. One of t­ hose former student leaders whose confession was broadcast on state tele­v i­sion was Parviz Nikkhah, the individual whose alleged association with the Marble Palace “plot” animated ­human rights activists six years earlier.42 Another of the former students was Bahram Daryani, a member of the ISAUS Executive Committee during the mid-1960s. His theatrical public confession was, according to U.S. diplomats, the result of “excess zeal by SAVAK.” It was, according to the shah’s minister of court, designed to “curb demonstrations and activities of radical Ira­nian students in U.S.”43

126 CHAPTER 5

During the first half of the 1970s, t­here ­were two arguments in the international community about the nature of h ­ uman rights in Iran. On the one hand ­were national governments and intergovernmental organ­izations. In 1975 the U.N. Commission on ­Human Rights “reviewed accusations of violations of ­human rights by Iran, based on material presented by Ira­nian students studying abroad,” but deci­ded that “no action was called for in the case of Iran.”44 On the other hand ­were the Ira­nian student movement and ­human rights activists and organ­izations. The same year that the United Nations dismissed charges of ­human rights violations in Iran, Martin Ennals wrote in Amnesty International’s annual report that “the Shah of Iran retains his benevolent image despite the highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture which is beyond belief.”45 While the shah was remarkably successful in maintaining that image for de­cades, the expansion of the network that coalesced during the 1965 defense campaign brought h ­ uman rights to the forefront of the flowering transnational dialogue on the relationship between state and society in Iran during the final years of Pahlavi rule.

Congressional Internationalists While Congress was the dominant force in American politics during the late nineteenth c­ entury, the “caretaker presidents” of that c­ entury gave way to the “imperial presidencies” of the twentieth.46 A combination of ­factors, foremost among them the Vietnam War and Watergate scandal, compelled Congress to reestablish influence over U.S. foreign policy during the 1970s. In addition to investigations that revealed the CIA’s de­cades of unchecked covert activity in Iran and other countries, the “new internationalists” in Congress embraced h ­ uman rights to reassert authority over the Executive Office, demilitarize U.S. national security strategy, and align American policies with national ideals. The goal was not to promote democracy but to roll back U.S. support for nations that ­v iolated the ­human rights of their citizens. The United States may not have had the solutions, but the Vietnam War showed Americans that they could no longer afford to be part of the world’s prob­lems. With a worldview much dif­fer­ent from the cold warriors of de­cades past, the group of young and relatively unknown public servants began to investigate the ­human rights abuses of anticommunist dictators such as the Shah of Iran.47 With the exception of concerns in the 1950s about Iran’s potential misuse of foreign aid, Capitol Hill was part of the consensus that created a broad base of support for the shah during the 1960s. An exception was J. William Fulbright, who worried during the reformist debates of the Kennedy era that the U.S. erred

The Reckoning

127

in supporting the shah.48 Then t­ here was “L’Affaire Fulbright” of 1967.49 Fulbright was the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and he stated that the United States pursued “a wrong course and very unwise one” in Iran. But he did not come to that conclusion on his own. Rather, his public criticism of the shah was informed by a “conversation with [a] ‘very intelligent young man from Iran’ who warned that further repression of freedom in Iran is bound to result in revolution.”50 In contrast to the 1960s, the Iran of the 1970s was no longer a distant nation whose prob­lems ­were undecipherable to America’s elected officials. Their constituents got detained t­here; nongovernmental organ­izations, whose numbers increased more than eight times over from the 1940s through the end of the 1970s, kept legislators informed about developments abroad; and the thousands of Ira­ ni­ans who came to the United States publicized the contradictions between the shah’s image and Ira­nian realities.51 As William ­Sullivan, the last U.S. ambassador to Iran, recognized, many of the public servants of the 1970s who followed the generation of Kennedy and ­Fulbright into Congress “­were more closely attuned to the younger generation, which reflected the dissidence of Ira­nian students and their American sympathizers.”52 Ira­nian students did not cooperate directly with U.S. officials as they did during the early 1960s, but young Ira­ni­ans and the new internationalists ­were, to borrow from ­Sullivan, “closely attuned.” They shared information, spoke to the same issues, participated in the same campaigns, and ­were other­wise part of a collective effort to redefine the Washington-­ Tehran alliance as it developed u ­ nder Richard Nixon’s presidency. Congressional interest in Iran culminated in 1976, before Jimmy Car­ter’s election as president, with an investigation into the ­human rights abuses of the Pahlavi state. ­There was a sequence of events that began in 1971 that brought congressional internationalists into the alternate alliance. In September 1971, one month ­before the Persepolis event, Ira­nian authorities apprehended and detained an American w ­ oman in Iran. Sharon La Bere was a nursing student from Oakland, California, engaged to an ISAUS member. The ­couple was active in the antiwar movement and the frequent demonstrations in front of the Ira­nian consulate in San Francisco. ­After being denied an Ira­nian visa, La Bere managed to enter the country, but Ira­nian authorities caught up with her. In detention, La Bere claimed that she was visiting her fiancé’s relatives, but Ira­nian officials claimed she was carry­ing subversive lit­er­a­ture and instigating revolution on behalf of students abroad.53 In San Francisco, the ISAUS or­ga­nized a demonstration for an American po­liti­cal prisoner in Iran.54 Two Demo­cratic congressmen from Northern California—­Ronald Dellums and William Donlon “Don” Edwards—­inquired about La Bere’s disappearance. Dellums was one of the most out­spoken new internationalists in Congress. He

128 CHAPTER 5

was “elected to Congress from the Oakland-­Berkeley flatlands on an antiwar, black power platform in 1970.” A ­ fter his election, Dellums was an avid proponent of a slashed defense bud­get, the first black member of the House Armed Ser­ vices Committee, and a leading advocate of divestment from Apartheid South Africa. Edwards was elected to Congress in 1963 and a trip to Iran sparked his interest in the country. Their inquiries revealed that La Bere’s po­liti­cal activity in the United States got her on a “lookout” list of foreign nationals the Ira­nian government deemed “undesirable.”55 La Bere stood trial in November 1971, shortly a­ fter dignitaries from around the world left the shah’s ceremony at Persepolis. A military tribunal acquitted her of espionage, but found her guilty for participating in “activities prejudicial to the security of Iran, specifically promulgation of Communist ideology.” She received a three-­year sentence in a w ­ omen’s prison in Tehran but was released in January 1972. La Bere returned to Oakland, but her time in an Ira­nian prison awakened the congressional internationalists to what the United States supported in Iran.56 Shortly ­after La Bere’s release, several members of the Congressional Black Caucus expressed concern over a series of show ­trials in Iran. SAVAK arrested sixty-­nine members of the Organ­ization of the Ira­nian P ­ eople’s Mojahedin in August 1971 during the planning stages of an offensive. The mass trial of thirty-­five guerrillas began in February 1972—­just weeks a­ fter La Bere’s release—­and it stirred outrage on Capitol Hill.57 Representative Parren Mitchell (D-­MD) and Shirley Chisholm (D-­NY) joined Dellums in writing to high-­ranking American and Ira­nian officials to challenge the ­legal procedures in Iran. The representatives did not condone guerrilla warfare, and in a letter to the Ira­nian ambassador to the United States, Mitchell offered no value judgment on “the methods of protest.” His concern was with the lack of due pro­cess in Iran and SAVAK’s methods of interrogation. Mitchell worried that the prevailing “ ‘mass trial’ aura” made it likely that the defendants would face trial as a group rather than individuals. “It is a most disturbing situation that the civil rights of Ira­nian citizens should be placed in jeopardy by its own government,” Chisholm wrote in her letter to Secretary of State William Rogers. Dellums not only echoed many of Mitchell’s and Chisholm’s concerns, but he told the Ira­nian prime minister that he was “concerned about the health of over one hundred Ira­nian students who have gone on unlimited hunger strikes in Washington and in Paris” to protest the t­ rials.58 Although members of Congress expressed ­legal concerns through private channels, Georgetown University’s decision in 1975 to award Empress Farah Pahlavi an honorary doctorate prompted a public outcry. Farah was the humane and liberalizing side of the royal ­family, but by the 1970s the shahbanou, like the shah, faced the constant prospect of protesters when she visited the United States. During the lead-up to her arrival, the ISAUS publicized the recent deaths in

The Reckoning

129

prison of nine guerrillas to make a larger point about torture and to garner support for its campaign against Georgetown.59 The po­liti­cal murders motivated the shah’s American critics to join the ISAUS in a letter-­writing campaign to American and Ira­nian officials and Georgetown’s president, Reverend Robert Henle. Don Edwards told Henle that it was “a contradiction in terms to bestow a degree of humanity to a voice for a government which grossly violates basic ­human rights.” Ronald Dellums wrote to President Gerald Ford and Henle to declare that supporting the shah was “contrary to the ideals” of the United States. As commencement approached, Representatives Michael Harrington (D-­MA) and Fortney “Pete” Stark (D-­CA) joined Edwards and Dellums in issuing a joint statement through Amnesty International. Donald Fraser (D-­MN), the chairperson of the House Subcommittee on International Organ­izations, joined the conversation about ­human rights in Iran and argued that the lack of civil liberties, plight of po­liti­cal prisoners, and reports of torture made Georgetown’s relationship with the Ira­nian government “regrettable.”60 Georgetown went ahead with its plans but in June 1975, one month ­after the letter-­writing campaign, Donald Fraser’s subcommittee launched a probe into Iran.61 Fraser oversaw hearings on h ­ uman rights in fifteen countries between 1973 and 1976, during which time his subcommittee was the primary mechanism in the legislative branch for promoting “international civil liberties.”62 The phrase indicates that the new internationalists in Congress focused on precisely the set of rights that the shah and Amer­i­ca’s other authoritarian allies sidelined in the name of development. While Fraser and his colleagues had humanitarian concerns, their mandate was to scale back the billions of dollars of arms that Iran was purchasing from the United States. ­Because of Iran’s position as a regional policeman ­under the aegis of the Nixon Doctrine, many in Congress, including Edward Kennedy (D-­MA), considered “the ‘arms sales’ prob­lem . . . ​to be very largely a ‘Persian Gulf ’ prob­lem.”63 And arms sales and ­human rights ­were connected. In states such as Iran, the security forces ­were supplied with the finest equipment and thus better able to respond forcefully to unrest. For that reason, Fraser inserted Section 502B into the Foreign Assistance Act of 1974 to prohibit the U.S. government, “except in extraordinary circumstances,” from offering security ­assistance to countries that exhibited “a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized h ­ uman rights.”64 When the House Subcommittee on International Organ­izations convened in August 1976 to discuss ­human rights in Iran, the most forceful statements came from the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), a former Ira­nian Fulbrighter who had been tortured in Iran, and the ISAUS. William Butler of the International Commission of Jurists was Congress’s lead witness in the Iran hearing. The ICJ was headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland,

130 CHAPTER 5

but as president of its American chapter, Butler began “to study Iran with a vengeance” during the months surrounding the Georgetown campaign.65 He did the field work that Fraser needed to document ­human rights abuses and devise a “­legal structure” to suspend or scale back U.S. support for undemo­cratic allies.66 Butler drew from a range of sources in Iran and abroad. The State Department helped Butler go to Iran by pushing a reluctant Ira­nian government to admit him on the premise that cooperating with the relatively moderate ICJ would counterbalance the reports of the more radical Amnesty International. Butler was also “drawing upon expatriate Ira­ni­ans and academic sources.”67 He perused newspaper articles on Ira­nian student protest and accumulated issues of the ISAUS publication Re­sis­tance.68 While left-­wing student lit­er­a­ture educated Butler on the breadth of the Ira­nian opposition, he learned about the depth of the commitment that many students-­turned-­activists had for the anti-­shah movement when he corresponded with Sadeq Qotbzadeh in Paris and Ebrahim Yazdi in Texas.69 Fraser was “deeply interested” in Butler’s undertaking and told him that he “would be most appreciative of receiving the Commission’s report just as soon as it becomes available.”70 When the ICJ published its seventy-­two page report in March 1976, Butler sent copies to ranking senators.71 Butler arrived on Capitol Hill to deliver his testimony in August 1976. His goal was to reconcile the “conflicting reports coming out of Iran.” While Butler testified that he was “very favorably impressed” with social reforms in the areas of education, health care, and w ­ omen’s rights, he told Congress that the Ira­nian government “has not implemented the basic and fundamental and civil and po­liti­cal rights of its citizens.” All citizens enjoyed equal rights u ­ nder the law, Butler wryly noted, “Except when the Shah determines other­wise.” Butler found that SAVAK was “a law unto itself” and that Ira­nian dissidents still had no right to select their own attorneys or receive an open civilian trial. More troubling was that po­liti­cal prisoners often went “missing” before they ever faced the military tribunal. Butler’s testimony was mea­sured, but it gave Congress the impression that the lack of po­liti­cal and civil rights outweighed the socioeconomic advances that came with the White Revolution.72 A month ­later, when Fraser’s subcommittee reconvened, Reza Baraheni and the ISAUS inserted their voices into the congressional debate. Baraheni, a writer and former professor at Tehran University, was a Fulbright Fellow in the United States during the 1972–73 academic year. On his return, the Ira­nian government detained him for the po­liti­cal nature of his writings and locked him away in solitary confinement for 102 days. ­After pressure from American literary groups secured his release, Baraheni returned to the United States and told ­Congress that he “came to this country with the intention of exposing the Shah’s repression.” Baraheni opened his testimony by claiming to “speak ­here for the Ira­nian

The Reckoning

131

­ eople who have been gagged by the Shah’s tyranny,” before describing Iran as a p “police state” and ­going into excruciating detail on how SAVAK tortured him and threatened his ­family.73 In addition to Baraheni’s testimony, the coterie of Ira­ nian students that attended the hearings submitted a fourteen-­page report on behalf of the ISAUS titled “On the Violation of H ­ uman Rights in Iran.” A ­ fter recounting the “glorious part of Ira­nian history” during the Mosaddeq era, the report dismissed the White Revolution as “a fake ‘reform’ program” and traced the ways in which their government had, over the years, kept civil and po­liti­cal rights out of Ira­nian life. The students cited a wide range of media sources and quoted Martin Ennals and Hans Heldmann of Amnesty International to make their case. They concluded with an appeal to a Congress reconsidering the wisdom of aiding the shah: “The American p ­ eople do not want to give their name, tax dollars or possibly their lives, to support the Shah’s dictatorship.”74 Despite the maturation of the ­human rights network, the Nixon Doctrine held in the Persian Gulf u ­ ntil the Ira­nian Revolution of 1979. In December 1976, three months ­after the initial hearing on Iran, a U.S. official explained to Congress why the State Department deemed it in the national interest to arm Iran and why the ­human rights situation was not “extraordinary” enough to warrant a change in policy.75 While U.S. foreign policy remained consistent, Ira­nian students and ­congressional internationalists inserted the question of rights back into the binational relationship for the first time since the Kennedy years. A former Iran country director at the State Department recalled receiving “letters by the scores” from ­human rights advocates inquiring about par­tic­u­lar po­liti­cal prisoners. Archie Bolster, the recently appointed ­human rights analyst at the U.S. embassy in Tehran, remembered receiving “a flow of very specific requests” through the State Department by the mid-1970s.76 The crosscurrent of perspectives on Iran that w ­ ere available in the United States b ­ ecause of the globalization of higher education transformed the discourse on h ­ uman rights into one that trumpeted individual over collective rights during the shah’s final years.

SAVAK In the mid-1970s images of torture chambers replaced ideas about modernizing monarchs in the international community’s collective imagination. The h ­ uman rights network that steered that perceptual shift was broad and consisted of a range of actors, but Ira­nian students ­were its pulsating heart. The sheer number of Ira­ nian students in the United States during the 1970s afforded them plenty of opportunities in individual interactions, on college campuses and city streets, and even in Congress to broaden the alternate alliance ­under the banner of universal

132 CHAPTER 5

­ uman rights. They found a ready audience in the United States once Americans h discovered, not only that SAVAK tortured po­liti­cal prisoners, but that the very ­existence of such a critical student diaspora compelled SAVAK to conduct extensive intelligence gathering operations in the United States and Western Eu­rope. That revelation reinforced the claims of ­human rights activists that, despite the rhe­toric of modernizing monarchy, the shah had no re­spect for po­liti­cal and civil rights. B ­ ecause of the student movement abroad, “SAVAK began to become an international byword for the cruel abuse of such rights.”77 SAVAK was established with American advising and training in the late 1950s and became one of the most notorious security ser­v ices in the world. According to one estimate, it had between seven thousand and ten thousand employees and somewhere between twenty thousand and thirty thousand in­for­mants in the late 1970s.78 Much of SAVAK’s growth occurred ­after 1965, ­after the wave of po­liti­cal vio­lence that year, when General Nematollah Nasiri began his thirteen years at its helm. Nasiri proved his loyalty to the shah in 1953 when he delivered the ­firmans (decrees) that called for Mosaddeq’s dismissal. ­Under Nasiri’s directorship, SAVAK began to “sow fear” in Iran as agents infiltrated oppositionist movements, monitored universities, censored books and films, and engaged in a variety of other activities.79 The manner in which SAVAK detained, interrogated, and tried dissidents generated the most fear. When it came to arresting opponents of the monarchy, SAVAK was, in the words of Ambassador William S­ ullivan, its own “po­liti­cal police force.”80 Its agents did not need a warrant for arrests, and prisoners often languished in jail for unlimited time with no access to families or ­lawyers. Although torture techniques w ­ ere initially “crude,” con­temporary scholars confirmed the findings of h ­ uman rights organ­izations that “torture of a sophisticated kind became . . . ​a normal part of SAVAK’s interrogation routine for po­liti­cal prisoners” from the late 1960s through 1976.81 The Ira­nian student movement abroad and former students who remained committed activists shined a light on SAVAK’s dark arts and shadowy methods. In a continuation of the print culture that thrived for de­cades among the student opposition, the ISAUS stepped up the publication of its English-­language defense organ, Re­sis­tance. Published in Chicago, the editors explained to readers that their student association “raises the voice of the Ira­nian ­people who are struggling against tyranny and oppression and echoes the cry of the mutilated po­liti­ cal prisoners who courageously withstand the torture of the Shah’s executioners.”82 The unambiguous emphasis on torture and mutilation stood in stark contrast to the constitutionalist focus of the ISAUS during the early 1960s. When describing “torture of the most vicious kind” to which Ira­nian po­liti­cal prisoners w ­ ere subjected, the students cited or included the full text of concurring reports from a wide range of media sources to make their claims credible to American readers.

The Reckoning

133

The students also linked individual suffering with national repression by placing drawings of po­liti­cal prisoners bound to chairs and tied to poles alongside images that conveyed the impression that the entire nation was, in a way, imprisoned. To humanize the suffering, the student editors ran the names of po­liti­cal prisoners who “perished ­under torture.”83 They also included portraits and ­biographical sketches of “martyrs” who died fighting the shah’s security forces.84 Issues of Re­sis­tance often concluded with a note to American readers that encouraged them to aid what was now a revolutionary movement by petitioning, demonstrating, contributing, or other­wise calling for the re­spect for ­human rights in Iran. Direct action was another legacy of the 1960s that contributed to the ­human rights organ­izing of the 1970s. Up to the revolution, Ira­nian students from the West Coast of the United States to Western Eu­rope staged highly publicized hunger strikes and protest vigils to raise awareness about SAVAK and torture.85 One of the most widely publicized and well-­coordinated series of demonstrations occurred in January 1976 a­ fter a military court handed down ten death sentences to a group of Ira­nian guerrillas. Similar to the 1965 defense campaign, the students’ goal was to bring international pressure to bear on the Ira­nian government to rescind the death sentences, hold a retrial, and admit international observers to the country. The thirty Ira­nian students who held a vigil in front of the United Nations ­were joined by hunger strikers in France, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and West Germany, along with the American cities of San Francisco, Houston, and Washington. While the students wanted change in Iran, they spoke to a global audience and called for “all progressive and demo­cratic minded ­people to join us in our just strug­gle” and petition the U.N. Commission on H ­ uman Rights.86 “We know we are not g­ oing to force any radical change in the government,” an Ira­nian student leader at the University of Mary­land told reporters, “but we are trying to apply the pressure of world opinion for some change, to isolate the shah’s cruel and brutal dictatorship.”87 As the student movement’s print culture flourished and direct-­action initiatives increased in size and intensity, former Ira­nian student organizers who stayed abroad reemerged as influential global actors and impor­tant links in the transnational co­ali­tion of rights activists. Sadeq Qotbzadeh spent most of the 1970s in Paris where he forged relationships with the city’s activists and revolutionaries. One of his friends was Nuri Albala, a French attorney and member of the International Association of Demo­cratic ­Lawyers who authored one of the most widely cited reports on h ­ uman rights abuses in Iran. According to one recollection, “It was Sadegh’s idea to recruit some reputable Western l­ awyers to go to Iran on a fact-­finding mission so they might publish a report of the sort published by Amnesty International.” It was Albala’s drawing of a po­liti­cal prisoner’s charred

134 CHAPTER 5

and disfigured back that was reproduced widely, including on the pages of the Sunday Times (London).88 Mansur Farhang arrived in the United States at the same time as Qotbzadeh but remained in the country for two de­cades, carefully advocating for h ­ uman rights in Iran. He was a member of the ISAUS as a student in California during the 1960s before he took a professorship in po­liti­cal science in the United States and got “deeply involved in h ­ uman rights activities” as a writer and speaker. Throughout the 1970s, he managed to travel regularly to Iran to meet intellectual activists while remaining involved with American nongovernmental organ­izations including Amnesty International, of which he was a member.89 During the 1970s, ­because of sustained student activism and the work of “graduated” students such as Qotbzadeh and Farhang, organ­izations such as Amnesty International ­were firmly anchored to the anti-­shah movement and Western ­human rights workers produced their own, detailed allegations of torture in Iran.90 Had SAVAK contained its activities to Iran, it is pos­si­ble that public opinion in the West would not have turned against the shah in the mid-1970s. A ­ fter all, Iran was but one of many undemo­cratic states whose rec­ord on po­liti­cal and civil rights was cause for concern. But SAVAK did not limit its efforts to suppress antiregime organ­izing to Iran. To borrow from William Butler’s congressional testimony, SAVAK was not only “operating in ­every nook and cranny of the Ira­nian system” but also overseas, “especially in places where Ira­nian students are congregating both in the United States and in West Germany, and in other parts of the world.”91 This revelation, which came to the American public in 1976, did as much as the widespread reports on torture to raise red flags about the nature of the shah’s government. The Ira­nian government had, since the dawn of the Pahlavi era, kept a close watch on students abroad. The first Pahlavi shah tasked government supervisors with preventing students from falling ­under “negative influences” during their time in Eu­rope.92 During the 1950s, the second Pahlavi shah established an Office of the Supervisor of Ira­nian Students within Iran’s embassies in Western Eu­ rope and the United States to “keep a fatherly eye upon Ira­nian students.” By the early 1960s the Ira­nian government had dispatched no less than four se­nior officials across Western Eu­rope to supervise students in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, ­Great Britain, Italy, and Switzerland. Iran also established an Office of the Supervisor of Ira­nian Students in the United States at its embassy in Washington. Supervisors assisted students with course se­lection, foreign travel arrangements, currency exchange, and visa renewal; they also monitored their politics.93 Agents with SAVAK’s Department Three, whose responsibility was to maintain internal security in Iran, soon joined the supervisors in Eu­rope and the United States.94 Mansur Rafizadeh was SAVAK’s chief operative in the United States and he oversaw a nation-­wide intelligence network. He arrived in New York in 1959, first

The Reckoning

135

­ nder the guise of a student and then as an attaché to Iran’s U.N. mission. Rafizau deh monitored oppositionists and recruited student in­for­mants for two de­cades before the revolution. “With the passage of time,” Rafizadeh recalled, “the regime exerted increasing pressure on SAVAK agents for firsthand reports on anti-­shah activists in the United States” and demanded that they “buy some of them and get rid of the rest.”95 To assist Rafizadeh, SAVAK dispatched other officers to the United States to preside over a larger network of in­for­mants.96 When the shah traveled to the United States in 1964, three agents went to Washington as attachés at the Ira­nian embassy but ­were “concerned with control of Ira­nian students.” ­Those officers possessed a two-­volume log—­which Iran’s students referred to as a “blacklist” and the State Department called a “Lookout Book”—­that contained personal information on leading dissidents.97 By 1967 the State Department Office of Security had “a list of persons . . . ​who maintain some degree of animosity ­towards the pres­ent regime in Iran” that included the names of slightly less than four hundred Ira­ni­ans, mostly students.98 At vari­ous points throughout the 1960s and 1970s, U.S. government officials acknowledged SAVAK’s co-­optation and coercion of Ira­nian students in the United States. According to the Los Angeles branch of the State Department’s Office of Security, a small group of royalist Ira­nian students in the area “cooperated with this office,” challenged the critical narrative of the ISAUS, and “­were rewarded for their ser­vices by the Shah.”99 During the final months of the shah’s reign, the Justice Department informed the White House that all available information “tends to support the view that significant police, security and non-­diplomatic po­liti­cal activity” by the shah’s agents took place on American soil.100 By the late 1960s the globalization of the shah’s security apparatus made it dangerous for Ira­ni­ans abroad to engage in student politics. Ira­nian student protesters in the United States and Western Eu­rope wore masks, often time in the form of brown paper bags, to conceal their identities and protect their families in Iran from retribution. ­Because of SAVAK’s network of in­for­mants, “It often happens that even the closest friends do not know each o ­ thers’ last names,” the ISAUS wrote, “not out of mistrust but more as a precaution.”101 It was equally as dangerous in ­Great Britain where the presence of in­for­mants created a climate of fear on some campuses. In one widely publicized case, SAVAK apprehended a ­doctoral student at the University of Bradford when he returned to Iran for ­holiday.102 SAVAK knew a lot about the student’s life at Bradford, and a British Foreign Office document that contained “the text of the notes dictated by [SAVAK chief] Nasseri” indicates that Ira­nian security forces arrested him b ­ ecause of his “links with the 103 illegal Ira­nian student groups” in ­Great Britain. In addition to protesting torture at home, the ISAUS also worked to reveal the extent to which the Ira­nian government attempted to “extend its dictatorship

136 CHAPTER 5

abroad” and flout the norms of international be­hav­ior.104 To that end, in June 1976 a group of fifteen Ira­nian students occupied the Ira­nian consulate in Geneva and obtained a cache of SAVAK documents. International observers that w ­ ere already inundated with vivid accounts of SAVAK’s prisons had no reason to think that the students could have forged the documents.105 At the time, “reliable sources . . . ​ verified their authenticity.” The documents focused on SAVAK’s overseas operations and included information on its tactics, including instructions to “all branches” of SAVAK to gather “information regarding demonstrations of dissident Ira­ni­ans, strikes, suspicious traffic, students’ calls to the imperical [sic] embassies and consulates, holding of meetings, publishing of publications, conventions and seminars.”106 The students passed the documents along to groups such as the Swiss ­Human Rights League to reveal that SAVAK’s Eu­ro­pean headquarters was located in Geneva and that an Ira­nian ­there was an undercover agent, a fact that Swiss diplomats confided to their American counter­parts.107 Rather than dismiss the charges, the shah confessed to them on the American news program “60 Minutes.” SAVAK was, the shah informed host Mike Wallace, “checking up on anybody who becomes affiliated with circles, organ­izations hostile to my country.”108 ­After the revelations of 1976, “Iran” and “SAVAK” became one and the same in the American imaginary. Thereafter, articles with titles such as “Enemies or Allies? It’s Hard to Tell” and “Torture, Terror in Iran” began to appear in the news media. ­These articles and o ­ thers linked torture in Iran with SAVAK’s overseas ­operations, producing a cumulative effect that challenged de­cades of received wisdom about the shah’s Iran.109 Ira­nian officials recognized that SAVAK did irreparable harm to Iran’s international image. Parviz Radji, the last of Imperial Iran’s ambassadors to ­Great Britain, recalled that the shah was aware of “the im­ mense damage inflicted on Iran’s name abroad as a result of the quite n ­ eedless excesses of Savak.” According to Radji, another regime insider acknowledged that “Iran is now inextricably associated in Eu­rope and Amer­i­ca with the words ‘Savak’ and ‘torture.’ ”110 It was so bad that, as 1976 drew to a close, the U.S. ambassador in Santiago warned Chilean officials that their own brutal security agency “was being cited in tandem with SAVAK and the Korean CIA as a modern variety of Gestapo.”111 Although individual Americans ­were active in the anti-­shah movement since the 1960s, the developments of the 1970s obliged Americans to establish their own organ­izations to challenge U.S. foreign policy and support the Ira­nian re­sis­tance by promoting h ­ uman rights. The earliest such organ­izations ­were “support ­committees” based in Berkeley and Philadelphia. In the Bay Area, the Stanford University physicist Pierre Noyes and other progressive academics established Americans for Defense of Ira­nian Po­liti­cal Prisoners. Printing in its pamphlets some of the same text and images that the ISAUS used in its own publications, the support group pleaded with Americans to act or ­else more po­liti­cal prisoners

The Reckoning

137

“­will quietly die ­under torture without the world knowing about it.” The members professed a profound belief that “past experience, especially the campaigns of the Confederation of Ira­nian Students . . . ​shows that mobilization of world public opinion can save the lives of Ira­nian po­liti­cal prisoners.”112 This group’s work was consequential—­Noyes became one of the first Americans in years to be granted access to military ­trials in Iran.113 As the revolution neared, other U.S. groups with some personal ties to Noyes’s committee and with similar missions began to or­ga­nize events with Ira­nian students on subjects such as “ ‘­Human Rights’ and New Wave of Strug­gle in Iran.”114 “I have im­mense re­spect for ­these ­people and consider them transnational citizens,” one former-­student-­turned-­ revolutionary said of the Americans who took up the cause of h ­ uman rights in Iran. “In the American tradition . . . ​­there is ­really a genuine commitment to the idea of ­human rights.”115

Although the alternate alliance first explic­itly invoked the language of ­human rights in 1965 during the defense campaign to spare a group of British-­educated Ira­ni­ans their lives, h ­ uman rights became the princi­ple around which Ira­nian students and their Western supporters cohered during the 1970s. The International Conference on ­Human Rights in 1968 and the twenty-­fifth centenary cele­brations at Persepolis in 1971 brought to the fore the competing visions of ­human rights that the Ira­nian state and the opposition put forth. For a time, the shah’s emphasis on the “right to development” was appealing to international audiences, but a new sensitivity to h ­ uman rights in the U.S. Congress and the extremes to which SAVAK went in the name of security transformed the global discourse on ­human rights. That transformation was a by-­product of the cir­cuits of migration that ­connected Iran with the world and created a transnational space wherein Ira­nian students raised support for the global anti-­shah movement. By fall 1976, before Car­ter’s presidency, the excesses of the shah’s security agency—­torture in Ira­nian prisons and its monitoring of the overseas opposition—­overshadowed Iran’s many socioeconomic accomplishments. It was the first moment of the cold war era when ideas about “development” and “­human rights” w ­ ere decoupled in the global imagination. In response to the ­human rights revolution of the late 1970s and in a move that set the stage for the Ira­nian Revolution, the shah instated a series of liberalizing mea­sures in late 1976 and early 1977. The shah restrained SAVAK’s excesses, curtailed torture, and made arbitrary executions a ­thing of the past. ­Under the personal tutelage of William Butler, the shah began to liberalize Iran’s po­liti­cal and ­legal systems in 1977 and 1978. In addition to cooperating with the ICJ, the Ira­nian government admitted the International Committee of the Red Cross and

138 CHAPTER 5

Amnesty International to observe l­egal proceedings. Iran was still far from a democracy, but the liberalization of the late 1970s marked the first time in de­cades that the shah loosened his grip on the wheel of Iran’s ship of state.116 The interplay of domestic and international forces compelled the shah to begin an incomplete liberalization of Iran’s po­liti­cal and ­legal systems. Foremost among the internal forces was that the shah was secretly suffering from terminal cancer. The shah wanted his dynasty to survive him. For that to happen, the regime needed enough domestic support that his young son, with Empress Farah Pahlavi as regent, could manage what would have inevitably been a rocky transition of leadership. The external ­factor that the scholarly lit­er­a­ture gives priority to above all ­others is Jimmy Car­ter’s election as president. Although Car­ter did ­little as president to push for ­human rights in Iran, his self-­proclaimed “commitment to ­human rights” that was “absolute” convinced the shah that he would. What the shah feared most was a repeat per­for­mance of the Kennedy years when a Demo­cratic administration made military support contingent on domestic reform.117 This chapter has argued that the push to liberalize came from the outside, but that the shah’s latent reforms ­were more a response to transnational ­human rights organ­izing than they w ­ ere the product of Car­ter’s h ­ uman rights policies or rhe­toric (see Figure 8). U.S. policies t­ oward Iran did not change once Jimmy Car­ter took the oath of office in January 1977.118 Car­ter’s campaign promise to shift the cold war dynamics from East-­West competition to North-­South cooperation did not affect his Iran policy, in large part b ­ ecause of the influence of National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski.119 The State Department noted in January 1978 that the effects of the administration’s ­human rights policy on ­Middle Eastern nations had been “modest” ­because of “other pressing interests.” According to the State Department, the administration’s approach to h ­ uman rights amounted to “punishing” strategically expendable nations and “glossing over” atrocities committed in Iran ­because it bore tremendous geopo­liti­cal and economic value.120 The United States and Iran concluded more than $5 billion in arms sales in 1977 alone.121 Tellingly, as President Car­ter toasted Iran as “an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world,” approximately four hundred Ira­nian students demonstrated in front of the White House against Car­ter’s decision to ring in 1978 as the shah’s guest in Tehran.122 The ISAUS was correct, then, when it wrote that “Car­ter’s ‘­human rights’ is nothing but a mirage, camouflaged to fool our ­people.”123 Although the argument that Car­ter’s rhe­toric precipitated an anxious shah to initiate reforms in the late 1970s has some truth, it ignores the longer chronology of American-­Iranian ­human rights organ­izing and places far too much explanatory power in the hands of one man at the expense of a transnational

The Reckoning

139

FIGURE 8.  Ira­nian students in the United States describe the November 1977 protests on the occasion of the shah’s last official visit as a “victory” abroad and link h ­ uman rights to the “just strug­gle of [the] Ira­nian ­people” at home. ISAUS, Re­sis­tance, December 1977, 16, ISAP. Courtesy of Swarthmore College Peace Collection.

movement that developed over two de­cades, stretched across three continents, and included a cornucopia of ideas, tactics, and nationalities. The perceptual shift of the shah from a modernizing monarch who benevolently promoted socioeconomic development to a dictator who trampled on the po­liti­cal and civil rights of his ­people predated Car­ter’s election and came from the global grassroots rather than an American president. Ira­nian students abroad—­young ­people whose education the U.S. and Ira­nian governments expected to harness to the shah’s modernization program—­were the most per­sis­ tent and influential critics of the shah. They w ­ ere the links between Iran and the West who provided the spark that international h ­ uman rights workers needed to cut through the smoke screen of competing claims about the merits of the White Revolution and the rights of the Ira­nian ­people. In fact, the Ira­nian student lobby contributed to both U.S. pushes for reform in Iran during the cold war era, directly during the Kennedy presidency and indirectly during Car­ter’s. The U.S. and British governments both recognized that the shah lost the ­argument in the international community about which rights mattered more.

140 CHAPTER 5

Car­ter’s secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, sounded a warning to the president that the “national consensus which has supported previous Administrations in dealing with Iran has been seriously eroded by . . . ​the widely held perceptions of the Shah as arrogant, imperial, and insensitive to personal freedom of his subjects.”124 The British embassy in Tehran produced reports that accounted for the timing and the cause of the shift that Vance’s State Department identified. As for the timing, in April 1977 Sir Anthony Parsons reported from Tehran that “in the past 12 months it has become evident that Iran’s reputation in the West is increasingly mea­sured not by her per­for­mance over social and economic development, not by the alignment of her foreign and strategic policies, not even by her policy on oil pricing, but by the yardstick of her rec­ord in certain areas of ­human rights.”125 As for the cause, British diplomats recognized that the Ira­nian government made it a priority “to recover the initiative from groups abroad critical of the regime . . . ​mainly Amnesty [International] and the Confederation of Ira­nian Students.”126 American newspapers offered similar observations, with the Washington Post reporting in late 1976 that “spearheading the attacks on the shah over the suppression of ­human rights in Iran are some of the Ira­nian students in the United States.”127 In Iran, the ­human rights revolution contributed to the overthrow of the shah. While incomplete, the reforms of the late 1970s emboldened Ira­nian liberals to make their voices heard and press for further openings. Especially notable w ­ ere the efforts of a group of ­lawyers, writers, artists, professors, and longtime National Front leaders that launched a letter-­writing campaign in 1977 that few would have dared to undertake years earlier.128 One letter from June 1977 is particularly telling and captures the entirety of the evolving rights-­based critique of the Pahlavi state. The authors insisted that the shah’s government “observe the princi­ples of the constitution and the Universal Declaration of H ­ uman Rights, forgo a ­one-­party system, allow freedom of the press and of association, release po­liti­cal prisoners, permit exiles to return and establish a government based on majority repre­sen­ta­tion.” The author, Mehdi Bazargan, founded the Ira­nian Committee for the Defense of Freedom and H ­ uman Rights in fall 1977.129 The formation of the committee in Iran strengthened the transnational ­human rights network, created “a new set of relationships,” and gave Ira­nian activists in the United States such as Mansur Farhang a meaningful “reference” when they stepped up to a lectern or sat down at a desk “to make a pre­sen­ta­tion or write something” on ­human rights conditions in late Imperial Iran.130 That Bazargan was the first prime minister and Farhang the first U.N. ambassador of the post-­Pahlavi era indicates the extent to which h ­ uman rights contributed to a shifting dynamic between ruler and ruled in Iran on the eve of revolution.

Conclusion

THE INTERNATIONALISMS OF THE IRA­N IAN REVOLUTION

Coming out of the Second World War, the United States and Iran worked to channel international education t­oward national means. ­After the 1953 coup that overthrew Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi entrenched his power and attempted to bring socioeconomic modernization and secular modernity to Iran. The shah could not have embarked on his White Revolution, let alone dream of a G ­ reat Civilization, without the many Ira­ni­ans who studied abroad and acquired skills applicable to their nation’s development. Nor could Iran have been transformed into a sturdy American ally or ascended to regional dominance in the Persian Gulf without U.S.-­trained security and military officials. In t­ hese re­spects, the United States helped build the Pahlavi state; education was the link between Ira­nian development and U.S. security objectives. It is not surprising that the U.S. embassy in Tehran declared that “our cultural exchange program is a cornerstone of our relations with Iran.”1 The educational networks between the United States and Iran also facilitated the emergence of a rights discourse that contested U.S. foreign policy and the shah’s authoritarian model of development. The evolving alliance of Ira­nian students and progressive Americans prodded the John F. Kennedy administration to pressure the shah to open the po­liti­cal system to a broad cross-­section of society. When the win­dow for reform ­under the aegis of a revitalized National Front slid shut and the shah institutionalized his White Revolution, the student internationalists of the 1960s moved past single issues such as f­ ree speech and academic freedom. Ira­nian and American students instead engaged with global publics to redefine the meaning of authoritarianism and redraw the map of the f­ree world. 141

142 CONCLUSION

By the 1970s, the ties between anti-­shah students, nongovernmental organ­izations, congressional internationalists, and a host of progressive Americans spawned a ­human rights discourse that was “neither East nor West.” The transnational connections between the United States and Iran contributed to the Ira­nian Revolution of 1978–79. New interpretations of ­human rights that gave priority to the po­liti­cal and civil over the socioeconomic delegitimized the shah’s claim to authority in Iran and his global image as a modernizing monarch. The history of American-­Iranian relations during the 1970s, then, supports the assertion that by “taking the history [of modernization] out of the 1950s and early 1960s,” historians can better explain “the demise—­and not just rise—of modernization.”2 The argument h ­ ere is that the demise of modernization was not merely the result of slashed bud­gets, new aid philosophies and social scientific theories, or disillusionment with globalism. It resulted from the decoupling of modernization and rights in the global imaginary. The ­human rights revolution may not have reached Iran, given the shah’s control of the state, absent the stream of Ira­nian student migration to the United States that began with a trickle in the 1950s but turned into a deluge when the dam broke in the 1970s. The many revolutionaries who ­were products of the educational connections between Iran and the West engaged with ideas from around the world. They used the language of rights to communicate their po­liti­cal grievances and temporarily transcend the fractious nature of the diverse revolutionary co­ali­tion that overthrew the shah. The internationalisms of the Ira­nian Revolution contributed to the cosmopolitanism of the early revolutionary period, before the clerical consolidation of power began in late 1979 and continued into the 1980s.3

Khomeini and the Movement Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was neither an internationalist nor a protector of individual rights. However, he benefited from the Ira­nian student diaspora and, incidentally, the transnational h ­ uman rights movement. A ­ fter opposing the White Revolution in 1963 and the status-­of-­forces agreement with the United States the following year, Khomeini spent fifteen years in exile before he returned to Iran in early 1979 as the leader of the revolution. He spent most of ­those fifteen years in Najaf, a city in Iraq known for its prestigious hawza (Shia seminary) and shrine to Ali, the fourth caliph and first Shia Imam. It was in Najaf that Khomeini developed his revolutionary theory of velayat-­e faqih, or “governance of the jurist.” Khomeini had for years urged the ulama to abandon their “quietism” for a more activist approach that combined theology and politics. This was a minority view, but as the shah’s regime grew

The Internationalisms of the Ira­nian Revolution

143

more repressive and the secular opposition less potent, Khomeini’s fusion of religion and politics won adherents. Velayat-­e faqih went beyond a s­ imple abandonment of quietism to argue that it was the responsibility of the supreme religious leader to guard the state ­until the Mahdi, or Twelfth Imam, returns for the end times. In sum, Khomeini rejected monarchy as a legitimate form of government and offered his own model of the “ideal ruler.”4 From Iraq, Khomeini maintained contact with Iran’s mosques and bazaars, but he also cautiously reached out to Ira­nian students in the United States and Western Eu­rope. While the CISNU had radically dif­fer­ent ideas about Iran’s ­future than did Khomeini, the ayatollah “managed to become a cause célèbre among young ­people  . . . ​­because he had dared to confront the Shah.”5 When the CISNU sent its international secretary to Najaf in 1966, Khomeini indicated that he was willing to cooperate with secular activists. The CISNU and Khomeini lived in dif­ fer­ent ideological worlds, but each side understood the other’s utility. In 1970 a pair of Ira­ni­ans from the United States and West Germany met with Khomeini and proclaimed “the solidarity of the Ira­nian students with the progressive clergy’s strug­gles against the shah’s regime.” Five years ­later, Khomeini praised “the honorable Ira­nian youths and students abroad who serve Islam and their Muslim ­brothers with their valuable strivings and expose the crimes of colonialism and its agents.”6 While Khomeini communicated with the CISNU, he was more interested in religiously oriented student groups. Western-­educated Ira­ni­ans had historically come from wealthy and relatively secular families. That changed in the 1970s as more young Ira­ni­ans gained access to government scholarships and families from dif­fer­ent social backgrounds acquired the means to send their sons and ­daughters overseas.7 As time went on, Ira­ni­ans abroad established student organ­izations whose dissent was couched in Islamic rather than liberal or Marxian terms. In 1964 ­future revolutionaries Mostafa Chamran and Ebrahim Yazdi split with the secular opposition and established a “Persian-­Speaking Group” of the Muslim Student Association in the United States and Canada. A de­cade ­later, the diaspora divided along secular and religious lines when student activists ­were forced to choose sides in the acrimonious break between the competing Maoist and Islamist factions in Iran’s guerrilla movement.8 In the United States, a by-­product of that break was the founding in 1976 of the Organ­ization of Ira­nian Muslim Students (OIMS). It was significantly smaller in size than the leftist student groups, but its very existence revealed the growing power of Islamic discourse among Ira­nian oppositionists. “In The Name Of God, The Annihilator Of All Oppressors” ran at the top of the defense publication of the OIMS, and its members called for “the establishment of Allah’s just Islamic government.”9 Given the Islamicization of the opposition, the Car­ter administration

144 CONCLUSION

was correct to note that, while smaller in numbers, the OIMS was the “ascendant” student group in the United States.10 In April 1979, at its fourth annual convention in Chicago, the OIMS dissolved. The OIMS urged its members “who have already returned to Iran, as well as ­those who ­will do so in the ­future” to “actively engage in the on-­going politico-­ideological strug­gle” and “fulfill their commitment to the cause of the revolution.”11 The revolution began in 1978, a year that saw the pillar of U.S. interests in the Persian Gulf crumble. In January, a state newspaper ran an ill-­informed article that charged Khomeini with being a British agent. When theological students in Qom protested the libelous piece, the shah’s security forces responded with a level of force unseen since June 1963. The pattern of rebellion and reaction continued throughout the winter and spring, but the shah seemed willing to compromise in the summer and fall. In June, during a period of relative calm, the shah ended General Nematollah Nasiri’s thirteen years as SAVAK chief. The shah also released some po­liti­cal prisoners, loosened censorship laws, and promised ­free elections for the following year. But repression continued to accompany liberalization. On September 8 (Black Friday), security forces mowed down demonstrators in Tehran’s Jaleh Square. Two months l­ater, on November 6, the shah declared martial law. When Gholam Reza Azhari, a U.S.-­trained general, assumed the premiership, the end was near. The revolution’s tipping point occurred in December, and ­later that month the shah lifted martial law and appointed the aging National Front leader Shahpour Bakhtiar as prime minister. The shah left Iran for the last time on January 16, 1979. Khomeini returned on February 1. Ten days l­ater the Bakhtiar government fell.12

The Revolution Cometh In 1978–79 the Ira­nian p ­ eople staged “the last g­ reat revolution.”13 The revolution that ended the Pahlavi Dynasty, and with it the monarchical tradition in Iran, was a world-­historic event on par with the revolutions in the United States and France in the late eigh­teenth ­century, or t­ hose in Rus­sia and China in the twentieth. It has become customary in the United States to explain the revolution as a visceral reaction from “traditional” ele­ments in society to Iran’s rapid pace of development ­under the shah. Henry Kissinger, one of the shah’s closest confidants in the United States and a supporter of the ancien régime, expressed this line of reasoning in his memoirs when he wrote that revolutionary sentiment “came not from ­those who wanted greater po­liti­cal participation in government but from traditional quarters who w ­ ere being forced to yield to the thrust of modernism.”14 A generation of historians made similar arguments, contending that Iran replaced

The Internationalisms of the Ira­nian Revolution

145

“the turban for the crown,” or moved “from autocracy to religious rule.”15 Although ­there is truth to ­these claims, especially when considering the ensuing po­ liti­cal vio­lence and the “cultural revolution” of the 1980s, such interpretations obscure more than they reveal about the diverse, transnational movement that mobilized against the shah in 1978 and forced him off the throne in early 1979. Such interpretations also fail to account for the fact that the most impor­tant officials who staffed the provisional government ­after the shah’s departure ­were products of the educational networks that connected Iran and the West. One of the most participatory moments of the Ira­nian Revolution occurred on the two highly symbolic and consequential days of December 10 and 11, 1978. ­Those days coincided with the two most impor­tant Shia holy days, Tasua and Ashura. In Tehran, more than one million Ira­ni­ans took to the streets and broke the back of the Pahlavi state. In Washington, religiously oriented students protested for two days carry­ing signs that read “Long live Khomeini.”16 But the twelve hundred Ira­nian students in the U.S. capital and the hundreds of o ­ thers who or­ ga­nized in major American cities would not have turned out in such large numbers to simply denounce the shah or hail Khomeini.17 While December 10 was Tasua, it was also International ­Human Rights Day, and 1978 was the thirtieth anniversary of the U.N. Declaration of H ­ uman Rights. On that day, “the streets and parks near the White House became a stage for groups from all over the world.” South Koreans and Filipinos demanded that the Car­ter administration reconsider its support for their repressive, U.S.-­backed regimes, while Amnesty International protested the lack of religious freedom in the Soviet Union. In the ­middle of it all ­were Ira­nian students “who went about their demonstrating with diligent, almost professional care.” Their demonstrations w ­ ere rooted in Ira­nian realities (Shiism), animated by transnational networks and ideas (­human rights), and connected to a revolutionary movement at home. As one Ira­nian student told reporters, the demonstrations in the United States ­were a “reflection of the demonstrations in Iran.”18 The mobilizations of December 1978 reveal the transnational nature of Iran’s revolution and its multiple meanings. The revolutionary years marked the climax of nearly three de­cades of Ira­nian student organ­izing in the United States. The active, increasingly fragmented, and predominantly communist ISAUS or­ga­nized approximately 90 ­percent of the student demonstrators who gathered in front of the White House during the shah’s visit in November 1977. ISAUS members also clashed with police officers in Southern California at a September 1978 protest against martial law in Iran and again in early January 1979 when the “­Battle of Beverly Hills” erupted in front of a home where some of the shah’s relatives resided.19 When the ISAUS held its Twenty-­ seventh Annual Convention in August 1980, the mood was much dif­fer­ent from what it was in 1953 when the AFME-­sponsored student organ­ization was founded

146 CONCLUSION

in Denver. In 1980, more than four hundred Ira­nian students from North Amer­i­ca and Eu­rope gathered in Berkeley to discuss the association’s relevance to post-­ Pahlavi Iran. The group acknowledged that ­there ­were many “difficulties arising” from “exclusionist Islamic forces,” but other­wise hailed “the victory of the revolution” and its aims of “in­de­pen­dence, freedom and social justice.” The delegates knew that the ISUAS “accomplished a lot” over the de­cades. Most impor­tant was the movement’s ability to “destroy the Shah’s image in many foreign countries . . . ​ educate Ira­nian students overseas to the importance of revolution, and the importance of defending the po­liti­cal prisoners in the strug­gle.”20 Many of Iran’s revolutionaries w ­ ere students who temporarily abandoned their studies abroad to participate in the revolution at home. One Ira­nian who ran afoul of both the Pahlavi and Khomeini governments recalled that “opponents of the former regime . . . ​returned to Iran en masse from the summer of 1978 . . . ​to swell the ranks of the revolutionaries.”21 That broad generalization rings true when compared with the many individual narratives that Ira­ni­ans and Ira­nian Americans constructed in the revolution’s aftermath. One Ira­nian scholar, who was in fall 1978 an undergraduate in Southern California, arrived in Tehran in December “­eager to smelt my book-­knowledge in the fire of an a­ ctual revolution.”22 The writer Neda Semnani’s parents spent the 1970s “protesting against every­thing from the Vietnam War to the secret bombings in Cambodia to Kent State” as members of the Ira­nian Student Association of Northern California, and they “raced back to Iran joyfully” aboard the many “planes out of California, New York, and Eu­rope [that] ­were filled with Ira­nian students, activists, and revolutionaries” in late 1978 and early 1979.23 Semnani’s parents, like so many other Ira­ni­ans who contributed to the shah’s ouster, soon confronted the new realities of death, imprisonment, and exile. Still, their story and t­ hose of so many o ­ thers reveal why an ­Ira­nian professor could tell reporters with Time magazine that “several of my radicalized colleagues are veterans of 1968 in the West and have been waiting ever since to repeat the experience at home.”24 While Ira­ni­ans returned to topple the Pahlavi government, many of the shah’s technocrats saw the writing on the wall and fled the country before revolutionary komitehs (committees) and tribunals had a chance to write the last chapter of their life stories.25

The “Viziers” The most impor­tant Western-­educated revolutionaries ­were the handful of committed activists who went abroad around 1960 as students, remained overseas ­after graduating, dedicated their lives to transnational organ­izing, and coalesced around Khomeini in his third home-­in-­exile: France. The revolutionary move-

The Internationalisms of the Ira­nian Revolution

147

ment, which only one year earlier was propelled by reformist liberals of a secular bent, now demanded the shah’s overthrow, with vio­lence if necessary. No longer welcome in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Khomeini ended up in Neauphle-­le-­Château, just outside of Paris, in October 1978.26 Contrary to the shah’s expectations, in Paris Khomeini gained access to media outlets and a cohort of Western-­educated Ira­ni­ans who translated his message for global audiences. The writer Baqer Moin notes that Khomeini’s home in France “was run like a royal court,” and Abolhasan Banisadr, Sadeq Qotbzadeh, and Ebrahim Yazdi “­were his viziers.”27 To understand Khomeini’s “viziers,” one must understand not only their biographies, but also the Liberation Movement. Houchang Chehabi, the foremost expert on the Liberation Movement, describes it as a group of “Islamic modernists” whose constitutionalism was rooted in Islamic teachings. It was established in 1961 by Mehdi Bazargan, Ayatollah Mahmud Taleqani, and other “religious Mosaddeqists.” Bazargan was the leader, and he had been a recipient of a state scholarship ­under the first Pahlavi shah to study engineering in France. He returned to teach in Tehran University’s Department of Engineering and, while not a politician per se, founded the National Re­sis­tance Movement ­after the coup to keep liberal nationalism alive during an era of military rule. The emergence of the Second National Front in 1960 left many nationalists wanting, and in May 1961, the same month that the suspension of the majlis ignited the constitutional crisis, the Liberation Movement was born. When its leaders in Iran ­were arrested in 1963, a new generation of sympathizers regrouped overseas. Ali Shariati, the French-­trained sociologist and revolutionary theorist, founded the Liberation Movement abroad. While Banisadr was loosely affiliated, Qotbzadeh and Yazdi ­were its primary organizers in France and the United States, respectively.28 Like Qotbzadeh and Yazdi, Banisadr was born in the early 1930s. His ­father was an ayatollah who made sure that his son received a modern education. Banisadr was a supporter of Mosaddeq, but he was too young in the early 1950s to have been active in the National Front. He became active in politics and spent some time in prison in the early 1960s as a student at Tehran University. His involvement in the Khomeini-­led revolt of June 1963 was followed by a flight to Paris, where he studied economics at the Sorbonne. He attended his first CISNU meeting in 1964 and the following year was elected to the secretariat. By the late 1960s, however, he was organ­izing Ira­nian students in Paris imbued with Islamic teachings. Banisadr, more than any of Khomeini’s other “viziers,” saw himself first and foremost as an intellectual whose primary ideological contribution to the revolution was the theory of “mono­the­istic economics.” Exemplary of a Marxian worldview but expressed through Quranic analy­sis, Banisadr contended that God owns all of the world’s resources and that the division of ­those resources and accumulation of wealth by the ­great powers prevented Iran from achieving

148 CONCLUSION

self-­determination. That did not mean that he wanted to terminate Iran’s relationship with the West. As described by one scholar, Banisadr believed that “Iran has to sever its relations with the superpowers, but only to the degree that such relations are domineering and subject the country to foreign rule.”29 Sadeq Qotbzadeh was “first among equals” in Khomeini’s circle in Paris.30 With the exception of a few years in the late 1960s, the former Georgetown student called Paris home between his departure from the United States in late 1963 and his return to Iran in early 1979. While he was a leader of the CISNU and ISAUS from 1960 to 1963, he did not get swept away in the radical drift of ­those organ­ izations. Although Qotbzadeh and Banisadr did not have a good relationship, they worked together intermittently in Paris to establish the Organ­ization for Muslim Students as a counterweight to the confederation. Like Banisadr, Qotbzadeh’s belief system was complex and constantly evolving as the free-­speech modernism of the early 1960s gave way in the 1970s to a universalism rooted in both ­human rights and Islam. As one of Qotbzadeh’s intimates explained, “He wanted balance, integrity, true responsible liberation for men and ­women, real suffrage for all, and he wanted it all guided by the finest princi­ples of Islam.” Qotbzadeh worked with ­human rights groups in the 1970s, and he informed the United Nations in late 1977 about the establishment of Bazargan’s Committee for the Defense of Freedom and ­Human Rights. But Qotbzadeh saw Khomeini as a towering religious authority. In 1970, as he had on other occasions, Qotbzadeh went to Iraq to meet with the ayatollah. In a discussion of the “governance of the jurist,” Qotbzadeh expressed his opinion that many of Khomeini’s teachings (such as ­those on ­women and Judaism) w ­ ere “too rigid, too orthodox and old-­fashioned.” Despite his misgivings, Qotbzadeh walked away from the exchange convinced that “if he [Khomeini] is surrounded by a group of intelligent and faithful ­people, he could be a ­great leader and run every­thing perfectly.”31 The third of Khomeini’s “viziers” in France was Ebrahim Yazdi. In the early 1950s he or­ga­nized pro-­Mosaddeq students at Tehran University before earning his doctorate in medicine. B ­ ecause of his po­liti­cal activities, the Ira­nian government made it difficult for Yazdi to leave, but he managed to get to the United States in 1961. Yazdi spent most of his time ­there working as a doctor and mentoring pious Ira­nian students. In Houston, he studied cancer at Baylor Medical College and took a job at the Veterans Administration Hospital. When it came to politics, his fortes w ­ ere in organ­izing and publications. In 1972, a­ fter many trips to Najaf, Yazdi was named Khomeini’s official representative in the United States. ­Under his watch, Houston became a hotbed of Ira­nian student activism. In 1974 Yazdi established a publishing com­pany that printed and translated a range of religious writings that ­were barred in Iran. He also edited a newspaper titled “The Warrior’s Message” that enjoyed wide readership among Muslim students in the

The Internationalisms of the Ira­nian Revolution

149

United States. Like Qotbzadeh, Yazdi was si­mul­ta­neously involved in h ­ uman rights work, and he presented a lengthy account of ­human rights violations in Iran at a conference in the United States in 1974. Yazdi’s primary responsibility, however, was “to concentrate on the ideological preparation of Ira­nian students abroad” for Iran’s revolutionary moment.32 By October 1978 ­these three activists, whose worldviews ­were informed by their Ira­nian backgrounds and two de­cades studying and organ­izing in the West, ­were with Khomeini in Paris. And each individual had a role to play. Banisadr was aloof, but he had connections with French intellectuals such as Michel Foucault who supported the anti-­shah movement. Moreover, his years of building bridges between vari­ous factions of the opposition in Eu­rope helped Khomeini pres­ent a unified front against the shah. Qotbzadeh also enjoyed a range of contacts in France but was unlike Banisadr in that he relished being in the limelight. ­Because of his time as a student or­ga­nizer in the United States, observers noted that “his credentials as an expert on the American po­liti­cal scene w ­ ere generally accepted by Ira­ni­ans.” Yazdi understood military affairs much better than the ­others ­because of the time he spent in the 1960s studying guerrilla war. In Paris, Yazdi was the ayatollah’s spokesperson and made sure that Ira­ni­ans, students or other­wise, who visited Neauphle-­le-­Château pledged their support.33 By October 1978, the Liberation Movement was in line ­behind Khomeini and, within one month, the National Front was, too.34

The Homafars The final transition from Imperial Iran to Islamic Republic rested on the military. The Car­ter administration expected the U.S.-­trained and armed military to forcefully and decisively respond to the demonstrators as it had so many times in the past. When Car­ter realized that 1978 was dif­fer­ent from previous instances of unrest, he sent General Robert “Dutch” Huyser to Iran to make sure that the armed forces w ­ ere prepared to stand ­behind the shah. But they ­were not. As one analyst explained it, “The Ira­nian armed forces virtually collapsed, unwilling to support their undependable monarch and loath to confront the Ira­nian ­people.” The shah’s vaunted military, in the words of another, “cracked like a crystal goblet.”35 One of the many ironies of the revolution was that a group of U.S.-­trained military men dealt the decisive blow to the shah’s military. That group was the Homafaran, a corps of twelve thousand homafars, or U.S.-­ trained aviation technicians, who maintained the sophisticated equipment that the shah purchased from the United States.36 The shah, himself a pi­lot, saw to it that his much-­prized air force expanded, like the navy, at an “explosive rate”

150 CONCLUSION

during the 1970s.37 General Huyser observed that Iran had “a miniature US Air Force” and that “most of the officers in the Ira­nian Air Force ­were trained by the US and their equipment was nearly all American.” Within the air force, the homafars “­were far better educated and more serious” than most.38 The prob­lem was that they ­were “treated as second-­class citizens in the shah’s military.”39 Particularly frustrating was that they could not become commissioned officers, despite their superior educational credentials.40 American diplomats in Tehran knew at the time that young U.S.-­trained Ira­ni­ans tended to “chafe u ­ nder the restraints 41 of the Ira­nian military structure.” Scholars have since demonstrated that the homafars in par­tic­u­lar “held a sense of deprivation relative to regular officers, who could rise much higher in rank, with less education.”42 During the revolution, their grievances escalated as American military personnel began to seize sensitive equipment. It appeared that, with the shah gone, the United States no longer trusted the homafars to have access to the very equipment that they had been trained to maintain.43 While Khomeini’s proclamation of February 4, 1979, established the provisional government in theory, it existed si­mul­ta­neously with Bakhtiar’s government ­until February 11. The revolt of the homafars ended the Ira­nian Revolution’s period of dual government. The first major sign of a potential mutiny from within the military came in late January, approximately one week a­ fter the shah left Iran, when eight hundred homafars defected from air bases around the country. Then, on January 27, when a commander at Khatami Air Base near Isfahan denied entrance to some four thousand homafars ­because revolutionaries ­were among them, a “real scrap” in the streets was followed by a tense “stand-­off” between vari­ous factions in the military. But the January 27 incident was only a prelude. The homafar revolts that rocked the country from February 9 and 11 marked the point when, from the perspective of General Huyser, “all hell started breaking loose.” The dissolution of the military was prompted by the mutiny of the homafars stationed at Doshan Tappeh Air Force Base who w ­ ere “staunch supporters of the revolution.” The Imperial Guard, which was still loyal to the royalists, briefly repelled them before the homafars, with the help of guerrillas, took the base. A similar series of events back at Khatami Air Base gave Isfahan to the revolution. Prime Minister Bakhtiar had no choice but to resign. Khomeini won what Huyser interpreted as “a b ­ attle for the hearts and minds of the armed forces.” Summing up ­these “three glorious days,” the sociologist Said Arjomand writes that the homafars “­were singly the most impor­tant unit in the armed forces won over by the revolutionaries and w ­ ere decisive in precipitating the final split in the 44 army that sealed its fate.”

The Internationalisms of the Ira­nian Revolution

151

A Lost Chance for Peace? The collapse of Pahlavi-­era institutions did not produce an immediate rupture in U.S.-­Iran relations. Despite the assumptions of first-­generation postrevolutionary scholarship, historians have since documented that the United States and the Islamic Republic maintained relatively cordial relations during the year that followed the shah’s ouster. Whereas scholars of U.S. policy ­toward other revolutions debate ­whether or not “lost chances” for peace actually existed, the emerging conversation about U.S.-­Iran relations centers more on the question of “why” than “if.”45 Christian Emery has explained the “engagement” of 1979 through a realist framework, arguing that the Car­ter administration feared a power vacuum in Iran more than an Islamic government.46 Geopolitics and ideology often go hand in hand, and another source of the interlude of 1979 was the internationalism of a small but impor­tant group of revolutionaries who knew how to facilitate dialogue with the United States. Before the Hostage Crisis marginalized them, Khomeini’s “viziers” ­were the cultural translators who helped binational relations survive the first stage of the revolution. The residual effects of the cold war–­era educational exchanges weathered the po­liti­cal transition in Iran, if only temporarily. When Khomeini established a provisional revolutionary government in February 1979, he named Mehdi Bazargan, the longtime leader of the Liberation Movement, the first prime minster of the post-­Pahlavi era. A ­ fter de­cades of Pahlavi-­style development, Bazargan wanted to reintroduce “Islam for Iran,” a princi­ple vastly dif­fer­ent from Khomeini’s desire to acquire “Iran for Islam.” Despite their divergent philosophies, Khomeini maintained a tenuous relationship during the revolution’s first year with Bazargan and his Ira­nian Girondists presiding over Iran’s “rule of the moderates.” Bazargan’s government was a mixed bag of personalities, but many ­were from the Liberation Movement and some had been part of Khomeini’s cadre in Paris. Yazdi received a cabinet-­level post as head of the foreign ministry. Two other members of the Liberation Movement and gradu­ates of the University of California at Berkeley—­Mostafa Chamran and Abbas Amir-­Entezam—­served as minister of defense and deputy prime minister. Throughout most of 1979, Banisadr was minister of finance and Qotbzadeh directed the state radio and tele­v i­sion.47 The Islamic Republic’s first ambassador to the United Nations in New York was the longtime Californian Mansur Farhang.48 Bazargan and his aides did not want to sever Iran’s relationship with the United States as much as they wanted to recalibrate it. Car­ter and his advisers understood that they could work with the moderates in the provisional government; they just did not understand that t­hose moderates had no real power. U.S. diplomats in Tehran established contacts with the Liberation Movement, and Yazdi met with U.S. officials in late 1978 and early

152 CONCLUSION

1979. The Americans learned in t­ hose meetings that Iran’s foreign policy u ­ nder the provisional government would be nonaligned but not hostile ­toward the United States.49 With the shah gone, Washington insiders began to reassess ­former students like Qotbzadeh who w ­ ere now officials in the Ira­nian government. A staffer with the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee who met with Qotbzadeh just before the revolution described him in ­these words: “Ghotbzadeh seemed to be a serious fellow who spoke in a moderate, sensible way. . . . ​He did not seem ideologically anti-­American.”50 Such a realization provides one explanation for why the U.S. government allowed the Ira­nian student population in the United States to continue to grow even with the shah no longer in power. In 1979 U.S. consular officials issued 15,000 visas to Ira­ni­ans, half of whom received F-1 student visas.51 Official estimates put the Ira­nian student population at 45,340 and 51,310 during the 1978–79 and 1979–80 academic years.52 The White House estimated in October 1979 that as many as 70,000 Ira­nian students with vari­ous types of visas resided in the United States.53 It was the inability to resolve the Hostage Crisis, not the inability of the shah to save his throne, that resulted in the severance of diplomatic and educational relations between the United States and Iran. Acting on suspicions that intrigue was brewing a­ fter the Jimmy Car­ter admitted the shah to the United States for cancer treatment, the “Students Following the Line of the Imam” stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran on the morning of November 4, 1979. It was a brazen act of protest that propelled the Ira­nian Revolution in a radical direction. Within hours, Iran’s Jacobins seized control of the building that many Ira­ni­ans referred to as a “nest of spies.” More importantly, the students took the 66 embassy workers hostage, 52 of whom remained in captivity for the final 444 days of Jimmy Car­ter’s presidency.54 Although this was not Amer­i­ca’s first encounter with Ira­nian students, the Iran Hostage Crisis introduced to the world the revolutionary potential of Ira­nian students and soured U.S.-­Iran relations for more than a generation. In an act of retribution, the Carter administration immediately ordered all Iranian students in the United States to confirm their status with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Assessing the situation in Tehran, the Car­ter White House estimated that fifty of the captors studied in cities such as Austin and Berkeley. They employed their knowledge of the En­glish language to translate the shredded U.S. government documents still in the embassy and to communicate with and interrogate their American captives.55 Massoumeh Ebtekar, who was raised in Philadelphia as her ­father worked ­toward his doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania, became the face of the hostage takers. Known as “Mary” to the international media, her fluent En­glish enabled the militants to communicate their demands to Western

The Internationalisms of the Ira­nian Revolution

153

audiences. Ebtekar and many other internationalized Ira­ni­ans like her came to believe that the shah’s relationship with the United States “profited the ­people who ­were trying to promote their own interests by fostering consumerist attitudes in our young generation.” T ­ hese ­developments ­were “leading us not in the direction of our own interest and benefit,” Ebtekar recalled, “but in the interest of the global power politics that run the world.” From that perspective, seizing the embassy was one way to challenge the “tyranny” that Ebtekar saw enveloping Iran in the form of Americanization during the 1970s.56 Despite the unpre­ce­dented events unfolding in Tehran, the Ira­nian embassy in Washington stayed open, and Ira­nian students and military trainees remained in the United States during the five tense months that followed the onset of the crisis. The Special Coordinating Committee, the crisis management arm of the Carter-­era National Security Council, realized that the United States had ­little to gain and much to lose from expelling Iran’s military trainees.57 “Our objective has been to maintain their good ­will ­toward the West,” the committee declared in January 1980. That objective could not have been achieved by forcing the students to choose between returning to their families or seeking asylum in a foreign land. Car­ter’s top foreign policy aides knew that “facing them with this choice forced them to burn their bridges and could make them return to Iran b ­ itter with the U.S.” It was the Car­ter administration’s “po­liti­cal judgment” that led to its unan­im ­ ous decision, despite congressional pressure, to allow the trainees to remain in the United States.58 The Car­ter administration tried to hammer out a deal with the remaining Western-­educated moderates to resolve the Hostage Crisis. The two most impor­ tant Ira­nian advocates of a deal w ­ ere Banisadr and Qotbzadeh. Banisadr had been elected as the Islamic Republic’s first president in February 1980; Qotb­ zadeh stepped in as foreign minister ­after Bazargan and Yazdi resigned ­because of the embassy takeover. By this point, however, Banisadr and Qotbzadeh w ­ ere po­ liti­cal rivals who w ­ ere increasingly marginalized by the religious leaders of the Revolutionary Council. As foreign minister, Qotbzadeh could not speak directly to the United States or challenge the students at the embassy for fear of losing his revolutionary credentials, or worse. He managed to reach the Car­ter administration through intermediaries, but even in conversations with them Qotbzadeh spoke in code.59 Circumspection and all, the Car­ter administration learned on April 1 that, a­ fter months of negotiations, the Ira­ni­ans planned to transfer the hostages from the students’ custody at the embassy to the Ira­nian government. The move would have weakened the influence of the student-­militants and empowered government officials such as Banisadr and Qotbzadeh to close the deal and bring some semblance of normalcy to Iran’s relationship with the United States. For a fleeting moment it seemed as if the diplomatic track had paid off

154 CONCLUSION

and the educational ties that developed ­under the shah would prove constructive at the height of the revolution. However, at the last minute Khomeini ruled against the transfer.60 While Yazdi had resigned with Bazargan in protest of the hostage taking, the scuttled deal of April 1980 marked the last gasp of the two remaining “viziers” from Paris. Banisadr fled the country in June 1981, and Qotbzadeh was executed in September 1982.61

End of an Era On April 7, 1980, with the fate of the hostages unresolved and the revolution on the verge of its bloodiest phase, President Car­ter terminated diplomatic relations with the Islamic Republic. All official personnel, including the military trainees and others who ­were in the United States on diplomatic visas, had to leave the country.62 On April 24 Car­ter authorized the military option, code-­named Operation Ea­gle Claw, to rescue the hostages. It ended in tragedy, with bad weather and malfunctioning technology causing a fatal crash in the Ira­nian desert.63 Back in the United States, the mandatory withdrawal of all official Ira­nian personnel and the new stringent visa restrictions ensured that cultural relations between the two countries did not survive the failed military intervention and the breakdown of the state-­to-­state relationship. The case of Norwich University is illustrative of how the policy shifts of April 1980 ended the educational relationship that the United States and Iran established during the early years of the cold war. On April 9, the Immigration and Naturalization Ser­v ice gave the eighty-­five naval students at Norwich forty-­eight hours to leave the country. Approximately 115 other Ira­ni­ans at VMI, the Citadel, and U.S. Air Force bases and Navy fields faced comparable situations. While some requested asylum, most returned to Iran.64 Norwich’s a­ dministration, faculty, and staff pleaded with the Car­ter administration for leniency for the Ira­ni­ans who wanted to remain in the United States. Norwich’s president, Lieutenant-­ General Loring Hart, enlisted Vermont’s senators to make the case in Washington. When they did, the highest authorities in the land rebuffed the senators and notified them that Car­ter’s order was “clear and unequivocal.”65 For their part, the expelled Ira­ni­ans felt that they had been “burned,” and their academic training and professional ­futures placed in limbo as a result of the escalating tensions between the United States and Iran.66 The threat of deportation soon spread beyond “official” Ira­ni­ans to the student population at large when Washington introduced new federal regulations

The Internationalisms of the Ira­nian Revolution

155

on April 16, 1980, that prevented Ira­ni­ans from obtaining U.S. visas. The new regulations did not affect the 42,000 Ira­ni­ans who already received “duration-­of-­ stay” visas. Two other groups of Ira­ni­ans w ­ ere not so lucky. Approximately one hundred students had duration-­of-­stay visas but happened to be outside of the United States when the new order, which prevented Ira­nian nationals from reentering the country, took effect. They w ­ ere, in essence, “trapped.” A larger group consisted of the seven thousand students who did not possess a duration-­of-­stay visa. ­These students’ visas limited their time in the United States, regardless of ­whether or not they had completed their degrees. The Car­ter administration noted that they ­were caught in a “technicality.”67 A larger prob­lem with the administration’s ­orders was that they prevented Ira­nian undergraduates, even ­those with duration-­of-­stay visas, from pursuing advanced training in the United States ­after they earned their bachelor’s degrees. Such policies, one group of educators argued, ­were “neither in the tradition of Amer­i­ca’s policy ­toward international exchanges nor in the interests of American security.”68 While the deportation of several hundred military trainees did not cause a stir beyond their host campuses, the situation that several thousand Ira­nian students now faced spurred American educators into action.69 On April 25, the heads of the National Association for Foreign Student Affairs, the American Council on Education, America-­Mideast Educational and Training Ser­v ices (AMIDEAST, formerly AFME), the Council on International Educational Exchange, the Institute of International Education, and the International Education College Entrance Examination Board petitioned President Car­ter. The educators argued that the treatment of Iran’s students—15 ­percent of the total international student population in the United States—­tested the nation on two levels. First, the signatories worried that mass deportations would diminish the global appeal of American universities. Keeping the doors open to the nation’s schools during ­these “unpre­ ce­dented circumstances” would demonstrate a commitment to the globalized ­system of higher education that matured during the cold war. Second, the petitioners argued that mass deportations would render rapprochement between the United States and Iran untenable for the foreseeable ­future. They foresaw a time when U.S.-­educated Ira­ni­ans “might eventually be an impor­tant force for reconciliation between our two nations.”70 The National Security Council took up the issue at a June 3 meeting. Car­ter’s advisers acknowledged that the petitioners made a strong case. Jody Powell, the White House press secretary, described the administration’s predicament as ­cutting to the heart of the central, yet still unresolved, questions about Ira­nian student migration: “Are our interests served by having more Ira­ni­ans in this country? Do we want them to get out or not?” The White House foreign policy

156 CONCLUSION

team unanimously recommended that the Ira­ni­ans be allowed to finish their studies and, in certain cases, attend gradu­ate school or receive professional training. President Car­ter approved the mea­sure.71 But the educational relationship that got its start during the Second World War, became institutionalized through sustained programs of exchange during the early cold war, continued down divergent paths through the 1960s, and reached its apex during the boom years of the 1970s was over.

Epilogue

Losing Hearts and Minds is the first book to investigate the multifaceted educational connections between the United States and Iran during the reign of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. It unearths the h ­ uman experiences, institutional commitments, national interests, ideologies of development, and networks of re­sis­tance that contributed to the fundamental tension in the American-­Iranian relationship. That tension—­the incompatibility between an authoritarian variety of “modernization” and a political interpretation of “rights”—­was inextricably intertwined with a binational educational proj­ect that paradoxically strengthened and subverted the official alliance between Washington and Tehran, in the pro­cess reshaping the acceptable bound­aries for the exercise of state power during the cold war era and beyond. While U.S. policymakers considered international education a form of soft power capable of furthering U.S. security interests and winning the hearts and minds of Ira­nian youths, many students claimed that the United States could not be the global flag ­bearer of democracy in the cold war if it supported the authoritarian shah. The influx of Ira­nian students to American campuses globalized U.S. institutions of higher education and, in the pro­cess, spawned debates outside of traditional foreign policymaking communities about modernization and rights that ­were much dif­fer­ent from ­those that took place among national leaders. The United States made many friends, but rather than win the hearts and minds of Ira­nian youths, international e­ ducation empowered dissident students and their American allies to challenge the consensus on modernization and the shah’s influence on eight successive presidential administrations. International education is not a zero-­sum game and, in the end, the world’s hearts and minds ­were never Amer­i­ca’s to win or lose. The cultural and educational connections between Iran and the United States did as much, if not more over a longer period of time, to shape the contours of the binational relationship as military cooperation and economic ties. The first American missionaries arrived in Qajar domains in the 1830s to charter schools and, despite the inherent paternalism of missionary work, they earned the re­spect of many Ira­ni­ans during the first half of the twentieth ­century. With the missionary schools closed, the Second World War over, and the nuclear age dawning, the United States replaced Eu­rope as the most popu­lar destination for Ira­nian students who sought an education abroad. Many went to the United States on their 157

158 Epilogue

own initiative or for po­liti­cal reasons, but the cold war saw national governments and a network of nongovernmental organ­izations promote international education in the name of superpower competition and national development. When considered amid the backdrop of a ­century and a half of sustained educational connections, the hypermilitarized relationship and the corruption that came with the oil boom of the 1970s are anomalous. The movement of ­people between Iran and the West for cultural and educational purposes has been the constant. While the focus on the pro­cess of educational migration offers an alternate reading of American-­Iranian relations, it addresses four questions that have preoccupied historians of the subject for de­cades. First: How did the U.S.-­Iran relationship compare to other binational relationships of the cold war era, and how did American strategies in allied states produce a wide range of results by the end of the superpower conflict? When considering the cultural cold war, the impetus b ­ ehind U.S. educational programming in Iran was similar to the “magnet strategy” that the Western alliance employed to attract students and scholars from ­behind the “iron curtain” to the ­Free University of Berlin. The United States and its allies had history on its side in West Berlin, especially ­after the Berlin Wall was constructed in 1961 to reduce the magnetic pull that attracted young professionals westward.1 West Germany, along with Japan, is a case from the cold war era where international education supported the official relationship and helped to transform t­ hose war­time adversaries to peacetime allies.2 The situation was dif­fer­ent in Iran, where the application of hard power in an allied state to support an undemo­cratic leader and authoritarian model of development undermined the appeal of American soft power and transformed a cold war ally into a late twentieth ­century foe. The po­liti­cal context is every­thing to public diplomacy. Second: Could events have turned out differently? The answer to this question is an unequivocal “yes.” ­There ­were vari­ous contingent points, or “win­dows,” between Mosaddeq’s premiership and the elimination of all meaningful dissent inside Iran by the mid-1960s. T ­ hose win­dows provided an opportunity to reassess the nature of U.S.-­Iran relations and coordinate the vari­ous tracks of American diplomacy by aligning the stated aims of international education with the state-­ to-­state alliance. In Tehran, the shah outmaneuvered power­ful politicians such as Mohammad Mosaddeq and Ali Amini, and he sacked Abolhasan Ebtehaj and other influential technocrats and military challengers who posed a potential threat to regime survival. In Washington, successive administrations missed opportunities to support Iran’s nationalists, the inheritors of the Constitutional Revolution and Mosaddeq’s National Front. James Bill, Richard Cottam, and James Goode have all demonstrated that t­ here was a meaningful nationalist opposition into the 1960s.3 The United States could have applied more pressure on the shah

Epilogue

159

during the early 1960s, not only by courting the nationalists, but by leveraging aid to affect steady po­liti­cal reform. A similar moment presented itself in 1977, but by Jimmy Car­ter’s presidency, the question was not a ­matter of reform or revolution, as it was during Kennedy’s, but a question of what kind of revolutionary change would remake Iran. Third: Why did the shah fall so quickly, and how did the United States so badly misread the revolution? The shah’s fall was indeed rapid, and U.S. policymakers had ­little time to formulate a coherent response. The Car­ter administration did not grasp the severity of the situation, nor did it understand Shia Islam. The administration rarely saw Iran on its own terms, only as part of the larger cold war rivalry or an emerging “arc of crisis” along the northwestern edge of the Indian Ocean basin. However, the revolution of 1979 should not have surprised U.S. officialdom, as Ira­nian calls for greater freedom had for de­cades reached U.S. presidents, policymakers, politicians, and diplomats. American cultural diplomats in AFME saw the rupture that the coup caused between nationalists and the regime at the first ISAUS meeting in Denver, weeks ­after Mosaddeq’s overthrow. Unrest in the technocracy was evident in the late 1950s, and the Kennedy and Johnson White Houses ­were aware of Iran’s po­liti­cal instability and the views of Ira­nian student activists in the early 1960s. The global unrest of the 1960s and the h ­ uman rights activism of the 1970s brought the demands of the Ira­nian opposition to a wider, global audience. The “miss,” then, was not the result of ignorance. While modernization theories fell out of f­ avor in the United States during the Vietnam era, the per­sis­tence of developmentalist thinking prevented U.S. officials from seeing Iran’s oppositionists as anything other than reactionaries or, in the case of leftist students abroad, “immature” subversives to be silenced. Their politics aside, they ­were all stakeholders in Ira­nian development. The benefit of hindsight led some U.S. officials to reach similar conclusions. Recalling an August 1967 conversation that he had in Washington with a group of anti-­shah Ira­nian students, Ambassador Armin Meyer wrote, “In retrospect, one wishes that more such frank seminars with students and other Ira­nian opposition ele­ments could have occurred.” Meyer contended, “By providing t­hose who have grievances with an opportunity to be heard at least by outsiders, the possibility of forestalling volcanic eruptions can be improved.”4 Fi­nally: If h ­ uman rights was so impor­tant to the early stages of the Ira­nian Revolution, why did Ayatollah Khomeini and his supporters capture the revolution ­after the interlude of 1979? Near universal hatred of the shah helps explain the participatory nature of the Ira­nian Revolution, but in his absence “freedom” was “the common denominator”—­“freedom for individual expression and thought, and freedom from despotism, exploitation, and imperialism.”5 The prob­lem was that concepts such as ­human rights and freedom are malleable. ­Under the

160 Epilogue

shah, the regime and the opposition offered competing understandings of ­human rights that broke down along socioeconomic and political-­civil lines. ­After the fall of the Pahlavis, Khomeini spoke about freedom, but not freedom of expression and thought, or freedom from despotism. Freedom from exploitation and imperialism became the dominant tropes in Iran’s revolutionary discourse. Beyond the realm of ideas, Khomeini established a network of revolutionaries able to consolidate clerical power and take the revolution to each city block. That the clerical consolidation of power and the Hostage Crisis of 1979–81 poisoned the Islamic Republic’s relationship with the world and made the revolution unidentifiable to many Ira­ni­ans who had once championed it should not expunge the nature of its origins. The conflict over competing interpretations of modernization and ­human rights that began during the Pahlavi era has carried into the postrevolutionary years. The Ira­nian government posits that only a small group of elites benefited from the shah’s White Revolution and that Khomeini introduced a revolutionary pop­u­lism that extended socioeconomic rights (including access to education) to a greater part of the citizenry. Ira­nian officials espouse an interpretation of rights that the nonaligned nations of the cold war would have recognized, namely, that self-­determination was the “first right,” with all other rights paling in comparison to freedom from exploitation and imperialism.6 Whereas the shah’s Iran was integrated into the world system, postrevolutionary Iran developed a statist economy in isolation based on the Import Substitution Industrialization model that reached the height of its popularity during the 1960s and 1970s.7 In contrast to the Islamic Republic’s approach to development, U.S. officials continue to insist on the superiority of the market-­driven American model. The Islamic Republic’s statist model helped it survive war and sanctions and is thus a point of pride for many Ira­ni­ans, but it is anathema to American policymakers and international financial institutions. While the two countries are, therefore, again at odds over developmental models, the United States and the Islamic Republic have dif­fer­ent positions on the relationship between citizens, their states, and the world. ­Every U.S. president since Jimmy Car­ter—­Democratic and Republican alike—­has criticized the Islamic Republic over its ­human rights rec­ord, particularly with regard to ­women and religious minorities and in response to episodes of heightened domestic unrest.8 The Islamic Republic has its contradictions to resolve, but in part ­because of U.S. support for the undemo­cratic shah and in response to what many see as a “double standard” when it comes to Washington’s selective promotion of h ­ uman rights, Iran’s leadership remains convinced that any international conversation on the subject “has to be two-­way” and “it cannot be that only Iran is questioned.” The

Epilogue

161

question of ­human rights should always be discussed, and the unconvincing argument about a hierarchy of rights rejected. However, American proponents of regime change in Tehran obstruct dialogue, have their own hierarchies, and make their interpretation of human rights a stumbling block to rapprochement.9 While rapprochement must go beyond single issues, the most significant diplomatic breakthrough between the two countries in de­cades came in July 2015 in the form of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Signed in Vienna by the United States, Iran, and five other major powers, the JCPOA was implemented in early 2016. The deal appeared to benefit both parties, as it secured Iran’s right to enrich low levels of uranium u ­ nder the terms of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and lessened the possibility that Iran would opt to “breakout” from a civilian nuclear program to a military one. In many ways, the nuclear deal was related to the perennial questions of development and rights. As was the case ­under the shah, the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program is as impor­tant for its symbolic value as its material benefits; it has as much to do with the current regime’s understanding of modernity and national development as centrifuges and bombs.10 Ira­ni­ans understood the significance of the JCPOA and its relationship to Ira­nian development, and when Iran’s foreign minister returned to Tehran a­ fter hammering out the final deal in Vienna, chants of “Mosaddeq”—­another prominent Ira­nian who attempted to secure Iran’s rights in the face of international pressure—­rang through the city.11 Despite the critiques of Ira­nian hardliners, President Hassan Rouhani’s negotiating team secured the sovereign rights ­guaranteed to Iran by the nonproliferation regime. And despite the critiques of American conservatives, the United States and its allies ensured that Iran’s right to enrich uranium did not endanger international peace. Most agree that t­here would have been no nuclear deal had it not been for Hassan Rouhani, who the Ira­nian p ­ eople elected in 2013 with a mandate to end Iran’s period of sanction-­driven isolation.12 Shortly ­after his election, Rouhani, with gradu­ate degrees from Glasgow Caledonian University in Scotland, became the first Ira­nian head of state to talk on the telephone with an American president since the Hostage Crisis.13 Although previous Ira­nian presidents, most notably Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, favored technocrats over “theocrats” when assigning cabinet posts, Rouhani filled his cabinet with “scholar-­diplomats” and made his government “one of the most technocratic in the world.”14 In fact, Rouhani’s cabinet had “more members with PhDs from American universities than the U.S. cabinet itself,” and “more American PhD holders than the cabinets of France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Rus­sia, and Spain combined.” Two of ­those cabinet members possessed degrees from the Mas­sa­chu­setts Institute of Technology, though neither w ­ ere part of the arranged nuclear training programs of the late

162 Epilogue

1970s. Two other members of Rouhani’s cabinet, including his 2013 campaign man­ag­er, spent the bulk of their college years in ­California. Rouhani rounded out his cabinet by naming as his chief of staff a technocrat with a PhD in economics from George Washington University.15 Most impor­tant for the nuclear deal was the composition of Iran’s foreign ministry. At its helm was Javad Zarif, a ­career diplomat with degrees from San Francisco State University and the University of Denver. He surrounded himself by the “New York gang” of U.S.-­educated Ira­ni­ans who worked with him at the United Nations in the early twenty-­first ­century before he took over the foreign ministry in 2013.16 While Rouhani, with the tentative blessing of Iran’s Supreme Leader, devised a cautious framework for Iran’s opening to the West, Ali Akbar Salehi and Javad Zarif ­were the tacticians that made the nuclear deal a real­ity. Salehi was foreign minister from 2011 to 2012 when the preparatory talks took place in Oman. As an alumnus of MIT and, a­ fter 2013, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organ­ ization, Salehi was the sensible choice to lead the “technical track” of the nuclear negotiations once they moved from Oman to Austria. His negotiating partner was Ernest Moniz, the U.S. secretary of energy and former professor of nuclear engineering at MIT. According to one individual who knew both men in Cambridge, “The fact that they had MIT in common was surely not unhelpful in the pro­gress of the negotiations.”17 Then t­ here was the relationship between John Kerry and Javad Zarif, the leaders of the “diplomatic track.” By mid-2014 the two men ­were on a first-­name basis. “That’s one of the first ­things you Americans do,” said Zarif. “Had I not been in the U.S. for such a long time, I would have been astonished for the Secretary of State of the adversary to start calling me by my first name.” The worldviews that each figure developed during their formative years mattered, too. Zarif wrote a dissertation in the United States during the Iran-­Iraq War (1980–88) on the princi­ple of nonintervention, and Kerry channeled his antiwar position from the Vietnam era into some of Foggy Bottom’s most impor­ tant files.18 The educations of Zarif and com­pany endowed them with a “worldly outlook” and “insight into how Iran is perceived in the West, and how the West is perceived in Iran.”19 But they have also worked their way through the bureaucracy of the Islamic Republic and attempted through public ser­v ice to bring efficient management to the Ira­nian state. Thus, while the Rouhani cabinet “knows East and West,” many of its members could be described as a “moderate, religious-­minded veteran technocrat, who, though educated abroad, is loyal to the aspirations of the Islamic Republic.”20 American diplomats understand that Zarif is “intelligent, courteous, disciplined,” but also “a respected adversary.”21 What Rouhani and his advisers have attempted to do is chart a “third way” between the poles of submission and confrontation that have so long defined Iran’s relationship with

Epilogue

163

the West.22 While the f­uture of the nuclear deal and the larger tentative opening are unclear, both contributed to a dialogue between the United States and Iran that had been elusive for de­cades. Far from a so-­called “clash of civilizations,” it was the clash between modernization and rights that made the American-­Iranian relationship at once the most intimate and volatile of the late twentieth c­ entury.23 Before the revolution, educational exchange fostered an unpre­ce­dented cultural dialogue and movement of ­people between the countries. U.S. policymakers and educationalists knew that de­cades of “extensive educational exchanges” directed by the public and private sectors had “built a base of understanding” and created a “wide range of relationships” that served to “unite impor­tant segments of the socie­ties of the two countries.”24 Proponents of the “clash” thesis should ask themselves how they would explain that cultural relationship, which flourished for de­cades, and how they would account for the internationalist dimensions of the Ira­nian Revolution. ­Those who argue that the United States has always been hostile t­oward Iran should take note of the fact that, even as Washington supported the shah, many Americans denounced their government’s policies and supported Ira­nian critics of Pahlavi misrule. ­Those who argue that Americans have always been hostile to Iran’s revolution would do well to consider the be­hav­ior of both states during the interlude of 1979, along with the trajectories of many of the revolution’s early leaders. That so many of them ­were hostile ­toward U.S. foreign policy but familiar with the West gives lie to the notion that the Islamic Republic was built solely on a foundation of “anti-­Americanism.” Khomeini’s views aside, it was not “Amer­i­ca” to which many early revolutionaries objected. Rather, it was a rejection of a cold war strategy that, as one U.S. diplomat knew, tended to “give the impression that our special relationship is not with Iran as a country, but rather exclusively with the Shah.”25 The revolution interrupted the fluid exchange of p ­ eople and ideas between the United States and Iran, but by the late 1990s Americans and Ira­ni­ans began once again to travel between the two countries, if in much smaller numbers. Reformist President Mohammad Khatami sent dozens of unofficial representatives, including academics, to the United States to meet with officials in Bill Clinton’s administration. While t­ hose meetings w ­ ere part of Khatami’s larger “dialogue of civilizations,” their impact on the binational level was negligible.26 More than a de­cade l­ ater, the administrations of Hassan Rouhani and Barack Obama made it slightly easier for American and Ira­nian scholars and students to move between their countries. In one high profile visit, Yale University’s Immanuel Wallerstein delivered some heavi­ly attended lectures in Iran to jumpstart a dialogue f­ree from the po­liti­cal divisiveness of previous de­cades. “I’m not ­going to change the internal politics of Iran just by coming ­there, I can assure you,” Wallerstein said. His focus was on culture rather than politics, hoping to establish “normal

164 Epilogue

collegial contact” with Ira­nian scholars. Rouhani described ­these academic contacts as a form of “scientific diplomacy” and expressed interest in educational cooperation and joint research in some fields. And while the Ira­nian student population stood at ten thousand in 2014—­a pebble in the ocean when compared to the student community before the revolution—­the dialogue continues despite popu­lar notions to the contrary.27 If the United States and the Islamic Republic iron out their competing interpretations of rights and development, it ­will be the consequence of mutually reinforcing international experiences. T ­ hose experiences make it pos­si­ble for Americans and Ira­ni­ans to empathize with each other, understand the rich assortment of perspectives that circulate around the globalized world, and generate a series of individual “reconciliations” between “self” and “other” with the potential to stimulate intercultural dialogue and even affect high-­level diplomacy.28 Any resuscitated relationship w ­ ill come not from the security cooperation that defined the shah’s relationship with the United States during the 1960s and 1970s, but instead on the softer ele­ments of international relations such as the cultural and educational exchange that have been the bedrock of American-­ Iranian relations since the nineteenth ­century.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1. Mayor’s Special Events Task Group, “Operations Memorandum for the Shah of Iran Visit,” November 11, 1977; Regional Director of National Capital Region to Director of National Park Ser­vice, “Demonstration Activity during the Visit of the Shah of Iran,” November 16, 1977. Both in Car­ter Presidential Papers (CPP), White House Central Files (WHCF), Subject File, Countries, box CO-31, folder: CO 71 Executive, November 1–20, 1977, Jimmy Car­ter Presidential Library (JCL). Jimmy Car­ter, Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President (New York, 1982), 433–34; Paul Valentine, “Shah of Iran’s Friends, Foes Mobilize for His Visit,” Washington Post (WP), November 13, 1977; Jonathan Steele, “Rent-­a-­Crowd for Shah,” Guardian (Manchester), November 15, 1977; “Shah, Shifting Stand, Pledges to Oppose Increase in Oil Price,” New York Times (NYT), November 17, 1977; Firoozeh Dumas, Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America (New York, 2003), 111–15; Ira­nian Students Association in the US (ISAUS), Re­sis­tance, December 1977, pp. 7, 16, Ira­nian Students Association of Philadelphia (ISAP), Swarthmore College Peace Collection. 2. Joseph S. Nye Jr., Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York, 2004), x; John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War (New York, 2005). 3. Philip Coombs, The Fourth Dimension of Foreign Policy: Educational and Cultural Affairs (New York, 1964). 4. On American educators in Iran, see Richard P. Garlitz, “Academic Ambassadors in the ­Middle East: The University Contract Program in Turkey and Iran, 1950–1970,” PhD diss., Ohio University, 2008. On international students in the United States, see Liping Bu, Making the World Like Us: Education, Cultural Expansion, and the American ­Century (Westport, 2003); Teresa Brawner Bevis and Christopher J. Lucas, International Students in American Colleges and Universities: A History (New York, 2007). On U.S. public diplomacy in Iran during the cold war, see Ramin Asgard, “U.S.-­Iran Cultural Diplomacy: A Historical Perspective,” al Nakhlah: The Fletcher School Online Journal for Issues Related to Southwest Asia and Islamic Civilization (Spring 2010): 1-12; Deborah Kisatsky, “Voice of Amer­ic­ a and Iran, 1949–1953: US Liberal Developmentalism, Propaganda and the Cold War,” Intelligence and National Security 14 (Autumn 1999): 160–85; Ali Pasha Saleh, Cultural Ties between Iran and the United States (Tehran, 1976). 5. Daniel L. Lykins, From Total War to Total Diplomacy: The Advertising Council and the Construction of the Cold War Consensus (Westport, CT, 2003); Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda B ­ attle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence, KS, 2006). On education’s place in the cultural cold war, see Joël Kotek, Students and the Cold War (New York 1996); Giles Scott-­Smith, Networks of Empire: The US State Department’s Foreign Leader Program in the Netherlands, France, and Britain 1950–70 (Brussels, 2008); Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played Amer­i­ca (Cambridge, MA, 2008). 6. James A. Bill, The Ea­gle and the Lion: The Tragedy of American-­Iranian Relations (New Haven, CT, 1988); Richard W. Cottam, Iran and the United States: A Cold War Case Study (Pittsburgh, 1988); Mark J. Gasiorowski, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Shah: Building a Client State in Iran (Ithaca, NY, 1991); James F. Goode, The United States and Iran, 1946–1951: 165

166 NOTES TO PAGES 3–7

The Diplomacy of Neglect (New York, 1989); Goode, The United States and Iran: In the Shadow of Musaddiq (New York, 1997). 7. Roham Alvandi, Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah: The United States and Iran in the Cold War (New York, 2014); Stephen McGlinchey, US Arms Policies ­towards the Shah’s Iran (New York, 2014). 8. Bill, The Ea­gle and the Lion, 349–55. 9. I borrow ­here from Martin Klimke’s The Other Alliance: Student Protest in West Germany and the United States in the Global Sixties (Prince­ton, NJ, 2010). On “diaspora diplomacy,” see Jason C. Parker, ­Brother’s Keeper: The United States, Race, and Empire in the British Ca­rib­bean, 1937–1962 (New York, 2008). Other examples include Christopher Endy, Cold War Holidays: American Tourism in France (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004); and Penny M. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, MA, 2004). 10. Carl K. Eicher, et al., An Analy­sis of US-­Iranian Cooperation in Higher Education (Washington, DC: Overseas Liaison Committee of the American Council on Education, November 1976), 10–11 (hereafter, ACE, US-­Iranian Cooperation in Higher Education). 11. Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945 (New York, 1982). 12. James L. Gelvin, The Modern M ­ iddle East: A History, 3rd ed. (New York, 2011), chap. 5. 13. William L. Cleveland and Martin Bunton, A History of the Modern M ­ iddle East, 5th ed. (Boulder, CO, 2013), xiii, 60–65, 71–78, 86–89. 14. The seminal study on the role of education, both domestic and international, to the Qajar Dynasty’s reform efforts is Monica M. Ringer, Education, Religion, and the Discourse of Cultural Reform in Qajar Iran (Costa Mesa, CA, 2001). On students abroad and their impact on Iran upon return during the Qajar era, see pp. 26–37, 88–94. 15. All data from previous two paragraphs from Reza Arasteh, “The Education of Ira­ nian Leaders in Eu­rope and Amer­i­ca,” International Review of Education 8, nos. 3–4 (1962): 444–47; Arateh, Education and Social Awakening in Iran, 1850–1960 (Leiden, 1969); Hafez Farman Farmayan, “The Forces of Modernization in Nineteenth ­Century Iran: A Historical Survey,” in Beginnings of Modernization in the ­Middle East: The Nineteenth ­Century, ed. William R. Polk and Richard L. Chambers (Chicago, 1968), 120–26; Nikki R. Keddie, Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution, rev. ed. (New Haven, CT, 2006), 40–41, 91; David Menashri, Education and the Making of Modern Iran (Ithaca, NY, 1992), 23–24, 46–58, 79–83, 125–34; Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran (Oxford, 2004), 65; Ringer, Education, Religion, and the Discourse of Cultural Reform in Qajar Iran; Steven R. Ward, Immortal: A Military History of Iran and Its Armed Forces (Washington, DC, 2009), 147. On the global context of self-­strengthening, see Charles A. Desnoyers, “Self-­Strengthening in the New World: A Chinese Envoy’s Travels in Amer­i­ca,” Pacific Historical Review 60 (May 1991): 195–219. 16. John Lorentz and John Wertime, “Ira­ni­ans,” in Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, ed. Stephan Thernstrom (Cambridge, MA, 1980), 521–24. 17. Betty S. Anderson, The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education (Austin, 2011); Arthur C. Boyce, “Alborz College of Teheran and Dr. Samuel Martin Jordan,” in Saleh, Cultural Ties between Iran and the United States, 155–234; Sattareh Farman Farmaian, ­Daughter of Persia: A ­Woman’s Journey from Her ­Father’s Harem through the Islamic Revolution (New York, 1992), 56–60, 73–75; Kamyar Ghaneabassiri, “U.S. Foreign Policy and Persia, 1856–1921,” Ira­nian Studies 35 (Winter–­ Summer 2002): 148–51; James F. Goode, “A Good Start: The First American Mission to Iran, 1883–1885,” Muslim World 74 (April 1984): 100. 18. The finest scholarship on international education deals with U.S.-­China relations during the first half of the twentieth ­century. Thomas LaFargue, China’s First Hundred

NOTES TO PAGES 7–8

167

(Pullman, WA, 1942); Hongshan Li, U.S.-­China Educational Exchange: State, Society, and Intercultural Relations, 1905–1950 (New Brunswick, NJ, 2008); Weili Ye, Seeking Modernity in China’s Name: Chinese Students in the United States, 1900–1927 (Stanford, CA, 2001). 19. Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006). 20. Bevis and Lucas, International Students in American Colleges and Universities, chap. 3; Bu, Making the World Like Us, chaps. 2, 3; Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore, 1997), chap. 2; Institute of Pacific Relations, “Ploughing the Field of International Educational Relationships: A Memorandum upon the Origin, Organ­ization and Activities of the Institute of International Education,” News Bulletin (April 1928): 3–8. 21. Akira Iriye, The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, vol. 3: The Globalizing of Amer­i­ca, 1913–1945 (New York, 1993), 155. 22. Frank A. Ninkovich, The Diplomacy of Ideas: U.S. Foreign Policy and Cultural ­Relations, 1938–1950 (New York, 1981); Justin Hart, Empire of Ideas: The Origins of Public Diplomacy and the Transformation of U.S. Foreign Policy (New York, 2013); J. Manuel Espinosa, Inter-­American Beginnings of U.S. Cultural Diplomacy, 1936–1948 (Washington, DC: Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, 1976). 23. Kennan’s British counterpart in Moscow, Frank Roberts, concurred. “The Kennan ‘Long Tele­gram,’ ” February 22, 1946, and “The Roberts Cables,” March 17, 1946, in Origins of the Cold War: The Novikov, Kennan, and Roberts ‘Long Tele­grams’ of 1946, ed. Kenneth M. Jensen, rev. ed. (Washington, DC, 1993), 26, 55–56. 24. Christopher P. Loss, Between Citizens and the State: The Politics of American Higher Education in the 20th C ­ entury (Prince­ton, NJ, 2012), 126; John Connelly, Captive University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech, and Polish Higher Education, 1945–1956 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000). 25. Harry Truman, “Address on Foreign Policy at a Luncheon of the American Society of Newspaper Editors,” April 20, 1950, American Presidency Proj­ect (APP). 26. Laura A. Belmonte, Selling the American Way: U.S. Propaganda and the Cold War (Philadelphia, 2008). 27. Bevis and Lucas, International Students in American Colleges and Universities, 103–7; Sam Lebovic, “From War Junk to Educational Exchange: The World War II Origins of the Fulbright Program and the Foundations of American Cultural Globalism, 1945–1950,” Diplomatic History 37 (April 2013): 280–312; Loss, Between Citizens and the State, 124–26, 128–31. 28. Saleh, Cultural Ties between Iran and the United States, 100; ACE, US-­Iranian Cooperation in Higher Education, 65. 29. Special Report, U.S. Advisory Commission on International Educational and Cultural Affairs, “Notes on Educational and Cultural Exchange between the United States and Countries in the ­Middle East,” March 1977, p. 50, Manuscript Collection 468: Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs Historical Collection (CU), group 3, series 1, box 105, file 13, University of Arkansas Libraries Special Collections. 30. Michael Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and ‘Nation Building’ in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000); Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York, 2005). 31. W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-­Communist Manifesto (New York, 1960); David Milne, Amer­i­ca’s Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War (New York, 2008). The seminal texts on modernization theory in the M ­ iddle East are Manfred Halpern, The Politics of Social Change in the M ­ iddle East and North Africa (Prince­ton, NJ, 1963); Samuel P. Huntington, Po­liti­cal Order in Changing Socie­ties (New Haven, CT, 1968); Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the ­Middle East (New York, 1958).

168 NOTES TO PAGES 8–11

32. Three case studies of authoritarian developmentalism are Gregg Brazinsky, Nation Building in South ­Korea: Koreans, Americans, and the Making of a Democracy (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007); Thomas C. Field Jr., From Development to Dictatorship: Bolivia and the Alliance for Pro­gress in the Kennedy Era (Ithaca, NY, 2014); Bradley R. Simpson, Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-­Indonesian Relations (Stanford, CA, 2010). 33. Menashri, Education and the Making of Modern Iran, 11. 34. In addition to Latham and Westad, the most widely read books include Nick ­Cullather, The Hungry World: Amer­i­ca’s Cold War B ­ attle against Poverty in Asia (Cambridge, MA, 2010); David Ekbladh, The G ­ reat American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order (Prince­ton, NJ, 2010); David C. Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Rus­sian Development (Cambridge, MA, 2003); Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the F ­ uture: Modernization Theory in Cold War Amer­i­ca (Baltimore, 2003). 35. Michael Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Pres­ent (Ithaca, NY, 2011), 143–52; Matthew F. Jacobs, Imagining the ­Middle East: The Building of an American Foreign Policy, 1918–1967 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2011), 180–85; Roland Popp, “An Application of Modernization Theory during the Cold War? The Case of Pahlavi Iran,” International History Review 30, no. 1 (2008): 76–98. 36. Fred Halliday, Iran: Dictatorship and Development (New York, 1979); Ali Mirsepassi, Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization: Negotiating Modernity in Iran (New York, 2000). A dif­fer­ent perspective is Cyrus Schayegh, “ ‘Seeing Like a State’: An Essay on the Historiography of Modern Iran,” International Journal of ­Middle East Studies 42 (February 2010): 37–61. The most thorough investigation from the U.S. perspective is Ben Offiler, US Foreign Policy and the Modernization of Iran: Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and the Shah (New York, 2015). With the exception of chap. 4, it focuses on high-­level policy. 37. ACE, US-­Iranian Cooperation in Higher Education, 14–15. 38. Overseas Con­sul­tants, Inc., Report on Seven Year Development Plan for the Plan Organ­ization of the Imperial Government of Iran, vols. 2–3 (New York, 1947), 2:127, 3:73. 39. U.S. Information Agency (USIA), “Ira­nian Education—­Target of Opportunity,” [1954], Rec­ords of the Agency for International Development and Pre­de­ces­sor Agencies, RG 469, Iran Subject Files 1951–61, box 10, folder: Iran—­Education 1954, National ­Archives and Rec­ords Administration (NARA). 40. Clarence Hendershot, Politics, Polemics, and Pedagogs (New York, 1975), chap. 9. 41. Leonard ­Binder, Iran: Po­liti­cal Development in a Changing Society (Berkeley, CA, 1962), 92. 42. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Mission for My Country (New York, 1961), 60, 137–38, 242, chaps. 7, 11. 43. Mottahedeh, The Mantle and the Prophet, 51. 44. Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Strug­gle for ­Human Rights, 1944–1955 (New York, 2003); Mark Philip Bradley, The World Re­imagined: Americans and ­Human Rights in the Twentieth C ­ entury (New York, 2016); ­Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: Amer­ic­ a’s Vision for ­Human Rights (Cambridge, MA, 2005); Barbara Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue: The ­Human Rights Revolution in the 1970s (Cambridge, MA, 2013); Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: ­Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA, 2010); William Michael Schmidli, The Fate of Freedom ­Elsewhere: ­Human Rights and U.S. Cold War Policy t­ oward Argentina (Ithaca, NY, 2013); Sarah B. Snyder, ­Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History of the Helsinki Network (New York, 2011). 45. Ervand Abrahamian, Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran (Berkeley, CA, 1999), chap. 2. On ­women’s rights ­after the Ira­nian Revolution,

NOTES TO PAGES 11–15

169

see Kelly J. Shannon, “Veiled Intentions: Islam, Global Feminism, and U.S. Foreign Policy since the Late 1970s,” PhD diss., ­Temple University, 2010. 46. Ofira Seliktar, Failing the Crystal Ball Test: The Car­ter Administration and the ­Fundamentalist Revolution in Iran (Westport, CT, 2000), chap. 3; Luca Trenta, “The Champion of H ­ uman Rights Meets the King of Kings: Jimmy Car­ter, the Shah, and Ira­ nian Illusions and Rage,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 24, no. 3 (2013): 476–98; Javier Gil Guerrero, The Car­ter Administration and the Fall of Iran’s Pahlavi Dynasty: US-­Iran Relations on the Brink of the 1979 Revolution (New York, 2016), chap. 3. 47. On circularity and cosmopolitanism, see Hamid Dabashi, Iran without Borders: ­Towards a Critique of the Postcolonial Nation (New York, 2016). 48. Houchang E. Chehabi and Vanessa Martin, eds., Iran’s Constitutional Revolution: Popu­lar Politics, Cultural Transformations and Transnational Connection (New York, 2010). 49. Ervand Abrahamian, Iran between Two Revolutions (Prince­ton, NJ, 1982), 75–80. 50. Farman Farmayan, “The Forces of Modernization in Nineteenth ­Century Iran,” 122–23; Nile Green, The Love of Strangers: What Six Muslim Students Learned in Jane Austen’s London (Prince­ton, NJ, 2016). 51. Mansour Bonakdarian, Britain and the Ira­nian Constitutional Revolution of 1906– 1911: Foreign Policy, Imperialism, and Dissent (Syracuse, NY, 2006). 52. The most comprehensive examinations of the relationship between democracy and authoritarianism in Iran during the twentieth c­ entury are Fakhreddin Azimi, The Quest for Democracy in Iran: A ­Century of Strug­gle Against Authoritarian Rule (Cambridge, MA, 2008); and David R. Collier, Democracy and the Nature of American Influence in Iran, 1941–1979 (Syracuse, NY, 2017). 53. Confederation of Ira­nian Students National Union (CISNU), Was It a Plot to Kill the Shah or Is It a Conspiracy to Silence the Students? (West Germany, 1965), 6–7. 54. Afshin Matin-­Asgari, Ira­nian Student Opposition to the Shah (Costa Mesa, CA, 2002). For context, see Maziar Behrooz, Rebels with a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran (New York, 1999); Mehrzad Boroujerdi, Ira­nian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism (Syracuse, NY, 1996); Houchang E. Chehabi, Ira­nian Politics and Religious Modernism: The Liberation Movement of Iran u ­ nder the Shah and Khomeini (Ithaca, NY, 1990); Behrooz Ghamari-­Tabrizi, “Between the Shah and the Imam: The Students of the Left in Iran, 1977– 81,” in Student Protest: The Sixties and ­After, ed. Gerard J. DeGroot (New York, 1998), 232–47. 55. Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge, MA, 2003). See also James N. Green, We Cannot Remain ­Silent: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in the United States (Durham, NC, 2010). 56. Paul A. Kramer, “Is the World Our Campus? International Students and U.S. Global Power in the Long Twentieth C ­ entury,” Diplomatic History 33 (November 2009): 776. 57. Ringer, Education, Religion, and the Discourse of Cultural Reform in Qajar Iran, 5–6; Hamid Dabashi, Persophilia: Persian Culture on the Global Scene (Cambridge, MA, 2015). 58. Matin-­Asgari, Ira­nian Student Opposition to the Shah. 59. Peyman Vahabzadeh, A Guerrilla Odyssey: Modernization, Secularism, Democracy, and the Fadai Period of National Liberation in Iran, 1971–1979 (Syracuse, NY, 2010), xviii. 60. Barry Rubin, Paved with Good Intentions: The American Experience and Iran (New York, 1980); Halliday, Iran. A more recent version of the “good intentions” thesis is Andrew Scott Cooper, The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran (New York, 2016). 61. Louise Diamond and John McDonald, Multi-­Track Diplomacy: A Systems Approach to Peace (West Hartford, CT, 1996). 62. Liping Bu, Making the World Like Us, chap. 6, esp. 186–89. 63. Gerd-­Rainer Horn, The Spirit of ’68: Rebellion in Western Eu­rope and North Amer­ i­ca. (New York, 2007); Klimke, The Other Alliance; Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth,

170 NOTES TO PAGES 15–19

eds., 1968 in Eu­rope: A History of Protest and Activism, 1956–1977 (New York, 2008); Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c.1958–­c.1974 (New York, 1998); Quinn Slobodian, Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany (Durham, NC, 2012); Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Vio­lence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley, CA, 2004). 64. Mohammad Khatami, “Dialogue among Civilizations,” Address at the United Nations, September 5, 2000. 65. Petra Goedde, William I. Hitchcock, and Akira Iriye, eds., The ­Human Rights Revolution: An International History (New York, 2012). 1. THE FOUNDATION

Epigraph: An “educated Ira­nian,” quoted in James Wallace, “A Talk in Iran,” Wall Street Journal, August 24, 1959. 1. Emily S. Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900–1930 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 183. 2. Thomas Hubbard Vail Motter, The Persian Corridor and Aid to Rus­sia (Washington, DC: Department of the Army, 1952); Bill, The Ea­gle and the Lion, 18–20, 47. 3. Louise Fawcett, Iran and the Cold War: The Azerbaijan Crisis of 1946 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Stephen L.McFarland, “A Peripheral View of the Origins of the Cold War: The Crises in Iran, 1941—47,” Diplomatic History 4 (October 1980): 333–52. 4. Mark Hamilton Lytle, The Origins of the Iranian-­American Alliance, 1941–1953 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1987), chap. 7, pp. 103–4. See also Halliday, Iran, 66, 77; Christopher O’­Sullivan, FDR and the End of Empire: The Origins of American Power in the ­Middle East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), chap. 4; Thomas M. Ricks, “U.S. Military Missions to Iran, 1943–1978: The Po­liti­cal Economy of Military Assistance,” Ira­nian Studies 12 (Summer–­Autumn, 1979): 163–93. 5. Daniel M. Green and Robert A. Denemark, “Cycles of Liberalism in the Twentieth ­Century,” Humboldt Journal of Social Relations 25, no. 1 (1999): 43–50; Robert Latham, The Liberal Moment: Modernity, Security, and the Making of Postwar International Order (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). See also Siavush Randjbar-­Daemi, “ ‘Down with the Monarchy’: Iran’s Republican Moment of August 1953,” Ira­nian Studies 50, no. 2 (2017): 293–313. 6. Abrahamian, Iran between Two Revolutions, 250–61; Christopher De Bellaigue, Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Tragic Anglo-­American Coup (New York: Harper Collins, 2012); Gasiorowski, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Shah, 58–62. 7. Ervand Abrahamian, The Coup: 1953, the CIA, and the Roots of Modern U.S.-Iranian Relations (New York: New Press, 2013), 9–14; Bill, The Ea­gle and the Lion, 57–67; Gasiorowski, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Shah, 63. 8. De Bellaigue, Patriot of Persia, 175–85; Gasiorowski, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Shah, 67–71; Kenneth M. Pollack, The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict between Iran and Amer­i­ca (New York: Random House, 2005), 57–63. 9. On the Mosaddeq era, see Malcolm Byrne and Mark J. Gasiorowski, eds., Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004); Mary Ann Heiss, Empire and Nationhood: The United States, ­Great Britain, and Ira­nian Oil, 1950–1954 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Stephen Kinzer, All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of ­Middle East Terror, 2nd ed. (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2008); Ali Rahnema, ­Behind the 1953 Coup in Iran: Thugs, Turncoats, Soldiers, and Spooks (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

NOTES TO PAGES 19–23

171

10. Bill, The Ea­gle and the Lion, 105–13; W. Taylor Fain, American Ascendance and British Retreat in the Persian Gulf Region (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 11. National Security Council (NSC) 5504, January 15, 1955, Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) 1955–1957, vol. 12, doc. 291. 12. Bill, The Ea­gle and the Lion, chap. 3; J. C. Hurewitz, ­Middle East Politics: The Military Dimension (New York: Praeger, 1969), 282–87; Pollack, The Persian Puzzle, 73–80; Rubin, Paved with Good Intentions, 91–105. 13. Yonah Alexander and Allan Nanes, eds., The United States and Iran: A Documentary History (Frederick, MD: University Press of Amer­i­ca, 1980), 303–7. 14. Salim Yaqub, Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 15. Gasiorowski, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Shah. 16. “National Advisory Council (NAC) Working Group Paper—­Iran,” General Rec­ ords of the Department of State (RG 59), lot 54D363, box 36, folder: 3.47, NARA; John Kenneth Galbraith, “A Positive Approach to Economic Aid,” Foreign Affairs 39 (April 1961): 444–46. 17. “Contributions to Industrial Development and the Utilization of Native Leadership,” Appendix A, Kenneth Heaton to Nasrollah Entezam, September 24, 1953, RG 59, lot 57D155, box 41, folder: Miscellaneous, NARA. 18. Ward, Immortal, 66–68, 115–19. 19. “United States Military Mission to Iran,” attachment to Burton Berry to H. Freeman Matthews, March 7, 1952, RG 59, Central Decimal Files (CDF) 1950–54, box 4120, 788.58/3-752, NARA; Chester J. Pach, Arming the ­Free World: The Origins of the United States Military Assistance Program, 1945–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), chap. 4. 20. U.S. Embassy Tehran (US/Tehran) to Department of State (State), “Functions of the US MAAG in Iran,” Enclosure 2 to Despatch 754, March 13, 1953, RG 59, CDF 1950– 54, box 4120, 788.58/3-1353, NARA. 21. Monthly Report, October 1, 1950, Rec­ords of Interser­v ice Agencies (RG 334), U.S. Military Mission with the Ira­nian Army and the Military Assistance Advisory Group to Iran (USMMIA/MAAG), Adjutant General Activity Report File, 1949–53, box 3, NARA. 22. Invitational Letter O ­ rders, RG 334, USMMIA/MAAG, Adjutant General Publications File, 1951–53, box 5, NARA. 23. “Final Report of Brigadier General Richard W. Whitney,” [1964] RG 59, Rec­ords Relating to Iran (RRI) 1964–66, box 5, folder: Iran 1964 DEF 19-2-­a, NARA. 24. Abbas Milani, Eminent Persians: The Men and ­Women Who Made Modern Iran, 1941—1979, 2 vols. (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008), 1:490–91. 25. Harry Truman, “Inaugural Address,” January 20, 1949, APP; Garlitz, “Academic Ambassadors in the ­Middle East,” 25–27; Jahangir Amuzegar, Technical Assistance in Theory and Practice: The Case of Iran (New York: Praeger, 1966). 26. William E. Warne, Mission for Peace: Point 4 in Iran (Bethesda: Ibex, 1999), 23. 27. Enclosure to US/Tehran 87 to State, “Department’s Policy on Economic Aid to Iran,” , February 25, 1950, RG 59, lot 54D363, box 37, folder: 3.01, NARA; Memorandum of Conversation (MemCon), “U.S. Aid for Iran,” February 27, 1950, RG 59, lot 54D363, box 37, folder: 3.441, NARA. 28. Haldore Hanson, “OCI and Point IV,” February 20, 1950, RG 59, lot 54D363, box 37, folder: 3.441, NARA. 29. Harry Truman, “Address at Brigham Young University,” October 6, 1952, APP. 30. State, “Technical Cooperation, Rural Improvement: Agreement between the United States of Amer­i­ca and Iran,” October 19, 1950, State Publication 4045, RG 469, Country

172 NOTES TO PAGES 23–25

Files 1950–53, box 5, folder: Point IV—­Iran, NARA; Alexander and Nanes, The United States and Iran, 211–12; Franklin S. Harris, “The Beginnings of Point IV Work in Iran,” ­Middle East Journal 7 (Spring 1953): 222–23; US/Tehran, “Point IV in Iran,” March 15, 1952, RG 469, Iran Subject Files (ISF) 1951–61, box 20, folder: Iran—­Point IV, NARA; Warne, Mission for Peace, esp. 273. 31. Richard P. Garlitz, “U.S. University Advisors and Education Modernization in Iran, 1951–1967,” in Teaching Amer­i­ca to the World and the World to Amer­i­ca, ed. Richard Garlitz and Lisa Jarvinen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 197–204; Iran and Utah State University: Half a C ­ entury of Friendship and a De­cade of Contracts (Logan: Utah State University, 1963). 32. Harris, “The Beginnings of Point IV Work in Iran,” 223–24. 33. Technical Cooperation Administration (TCA), “Point 4 Technical Cooperation ­Program for Fiscal Year 1953: Iran,” October 7, 1952, RG 469, ISF 1951–61, box 20, folder: Iran—­Point IV, NARA; “Training of Point IV Trainees in Non-­American Institutions,” draft, June 8, 1950, RG 59, lot 54D363, folder: 3.441, NARA; Gasiorowski, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Shah, 107–8; Menashri, Education and the Making of Modern Iran, 145. 34. US/Tehran, “Point IV in Iran,” March 15, 1952, RG 469, ISF 1951–61, box 20, folder: Iran—­Point IV, NARA. 35. US/Tehran to State, MemCon, Grady and Mosaddeq, May 4, 1951, RG 469, Country Files 1950–53, box 5, folder: Point IV—­Iran, NARA. 36. John Evans to E. Reeseman Fryer, October 13, 1951, RG 469, ISF 1951–61, box 1, folder: Iran—­Administration—­Joint Commission for Rural Development, NARA. 37. Albion Ross, “Foreign Exchange Short, Iran Bars Travel Abroad by Her Nationals,” NYT, December 31, 1951. 38. Alexander and Nanes, The United States and Iran, 243–45. 39. Ibid., 244–46; Warne, Mission for Peace, 177–78; “U.S. and Iran Sign 3 Point Four Pacts,” NYT, April 16, 1952; “Iran Students Due in U.S.,” NYT, September 13, 1952. “United States Technical Cooperation for Iran,” January 1, 1953; “The Point IV Program in Iran as of July 1, 1952,” both in RG 469, ISF 1951–61, box 20, folder: Iran—­Point IV, NARA. US/Tehran to State, March 30, 1952, RG 59, CDF 1950–54, box 4108, 788.00/33052, NARA; US/Tehran to State, “Bingham from Warne,” February 1, 1952, RG 469, Country Files 1950–53, box 5, folder: Point IV—­Iran, NARA; US/Tehran to State, “Remarks Expressing Admiration of the Accomplishments of Point IV in Iran during the Fiscal Year 1952,” July 3, 1952, RG 469, ISF 1951–61, box 20, folder: Iran—­Point IV, NARA; Parviz C. Radji, In the Ser­vice of the Peacock Throne: The Diaries of the Shah’s Last Ambassador to London (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1983), 1–2. 40. Monthly General Reports of February and March 1953, RG 334, USMMIA/MAAG, Adjutant General Activity Report File, 1949–53, box 3, NARA; US/Tehran to State, Enclosure 2 to Despatch 754; Gasiorowski, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Shah, 73–74. 41. Rahnema, ­Behind the 1953 Coup in Iran, 87–88. 42. U.S. House of Representatives (House), Committee on Foreign Affairs, Mutual Security Act of 1954, 83rd Cong., 2nd sess. 569–70 (1954). 43. Osgood, Total Cold War. 44. State Circular Airgram, “Foreign Student Prob­lems in Western Eu­rope,” February 19, 1953, RG 59, Bureau of Public Affairs, box 70, folder: Ira­nian Students, NARA. 45. USIA, “Ira­nian Education—­Target of Opportunity”; Nicholas J. Cull, The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945–1989 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), chap. 2. 46. ­Binder, Iran, ch. 3; Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Other Writings (New York: Penguin, 2002).

NOTES TO PAGES 26–28

173

47. US/Tehran to State, “Annual Report on the Educational Exchange Program in Iran,” August 9, 1958, Despatch 105, CU, group 16, box 318, file 5. 48. ­Binder, Iran, 144; Gasiorowski, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Shah, 151–58. 49. Pollack, The Persian Puzzle, 76–77; Hurewitz, ­Middle East Politics, 285, ­table 9. 50. NSC 5402, January 2, 1954, FRUS 1952–1954, vol. 10, doc. 403. 51. Halliday, Iran, 64–67. 52. Gasiorowski, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Shah, 111–13. 53. Hurewitz, ­Middle East Politics, 283–84. 54. Bill, The Ea­gle and the Lion, 20, 41. U.S. Operations Mission (USOM)/Iran to FOA/ Washington, “Training Grant,” March 27, 1954, A-1146; USOM/Iran to FOA/Washington, “Police Training for Gendarmerie Officers,” May 8, 1954 A-1395, both in RG 469, ISF 1951–61, box 32, folder: Iran—­Training, January–­June 1954, NARA. 55. Yahya Eftekhar (Tehran Police Department) to FOA, Final Training Report, June 30, 1954; A. Herry-­Tache (Ira­nian Police College) to FOA, Monthly Report, June 28, 1954, both in RG 469, ISF 1951–61, box 33, folder: Iran—­Training—­Public Administration, NARA. 56. Gasiorowski, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Shah, 115–16; State, Review of U.S. Technical Assistance and Economic Aid to Iran, 1951–1957 (Washington, DC: Department of State, 1957), 476, 474. 57. Hussein Fardust, The Rise and Fall of the Pahlavi Dynasty: Memoirs of Former General Hussein Fardust, trans. Ali Akbar Dareini (Delhi, IN: Motilal Banarsidass, 1999), 233–61; Halliday, Iran, 78–79; William Shawcross, The Shah’s Last Ride: The Fate of an Ally (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 198–200. 58. Jeremy Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation Building in the American ­Century (Amherst: University of Mas­sa­chu­setts Press, 2012), 193–200, esp. 195. 59. Gasiorowski, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Shah, 118; Hurewitz, ­Middle East Politics, 284. 60. Shawcross, The Shah’s Last Ride, 198. 61. Bill, The Ea­gle and the Lion, 167. 62. Shawcross, The Shah’s Last Ride, 200. 63. Burton I. Kaufman, Trade and Aid: Eisenhower’s Foreign Economic Policy, 1953–1961 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); Jeffrey Taffet, Foreign Aid as Foreign Policy: The Alliance for Pro­gress in Latin Amer­ic­ a (New York: Routledge, 2007), 13–19. 64. House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Mutual Security Program, Pt. 2 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1980), 433–35, 489–91. 65. House, Mutual Security Act of 1954, 497. 66. FOA Acting Director to Rep. Joseph Holt, March 27, 1954; Ebrahim Nuban [on behalf of Ira­nian students in Los Angeles] to Harold Stassen, March 3, 1954, both in RG 469, ISF 1951–61, box 32, folder: Iran—­Trainees, January–­April 1954, NARA. Ekbladh, The G ­ reat American Mission, 155–56. The FOA existed for two years before State regained responsibility for aid programs through its International Cooperation Agency in 1955. In 1961 the Agency for International Development superseded all previous aid agencies. 67. University of Southern California (USC), Seven Years in Iran: The Final Report of a Technical Assistance Proj­ect in Public Administration u ­ nder U.S. Contract No. ICAC-1299, School of Public Administration, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, June 1962; “SC Aids Iran in Re­sis­tance to Communism,” Los Angeles Times (LAT), February 21, 1955. 68. USC, Seven Years in Iran; “Ira­nian ­Here to Brief SC Group on Job Needs,” LAT, August 2, 1954. For context, see Ross Clayton, Elmer Kim Nelson, Chester Newland, and Cristy Jensen, eds., ­Futures of the Past: Collected Papers in Cele­bration of Its More than Eighty Years; University of Southern California’s School of Policy, Planning, and Development (New

174 NOTES TO PAGES 28–30

York: iUniverse, 2010); Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), chap. 6. 69. USC, Seven Years in Iran. 70. Liping Bu, Making the World Like Us, 187; Walter L. Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945–1961 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 8–9, 26–27; State, “Iran and United States Sign Agreement to Reactivate Educational Exchanges ­under Fulbright Act,” November 26, 1957, Press Release No. 643, CU, group 3, series 1, box 107, file 3. Between 1950 and 1979, a total of 732 Ira­ni­ans received Fulbrights to study in the United States. Annual Program Proposal, U.S. Commission for Cultural Exchange between Iran and the United States, Program Year 1978, p. 1, and Program Year 1979, p. 1, MS Collection 703: Council for International Exchange of Scholars (CIES), series 6, box 345, file 6, University of Arkansas Libraries Special Collections. 71. US/Tehran, “Semi-­Annual Report on the International Educational Exchange Program,” May 20, 1954, Despatch 774; U.S. Office of Education, “Survey of International Educational Exchange Program,” 1958, both in CU, group 16, box 318, file 5. 72. US/Tehran, “Educational Exchange,” November 27, 1956, Despatch 434, CU, group 16, box 318, file 5. 73. Scott-­Smith, Networks of Empire, 41. 74. US/Tehran, Despatch 434. 75. Gasiorowski, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Shah. 76. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the H ­ uman ­Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 87–89; Cyrus Schayegh, “ ‘Seeing Like a State,’: An Essay on the Historiography of Modern Iran,” International Journal of ­Middle East Studies 42 (February 2010): 42–43. 77. Liping Bu, Making the World Like Us, chap. 6; Ford Foundation, “Our Origins: Presidents,” and “Report of the Study for the Ford Foundation on Policy and Program,” Ford Foundation, Detroit, November 1949; Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 2000), 138–44; Inderjeet Parmar, Foundations of the American ­Century: The Ford, Car­ne­gie, and Rocke­fel­ler Foundations in the Rise of American Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 78. Simpson, Economists with Guns, 19; Juan Gabriel Valdés, Pinochet’s Economists: The Chicago School of Economics in Chile (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), chap. 8; Cullather, The Hungry World; Nicole Sackley, “Village Models : Etawah, India, and the Making and Remaking of Development in the Early Cold War,” Diplomatic History 37 (September 2013): 749–78; Victor V. Nemchenok, “ ‘That So Fair a T ­ hing Should Be So Frail’: The Ford Foundation and the Failure of Rural Development in Iran, 1953–1964,” ­Middle East Journal 63 (Spring 2009): 261–84. 79. Joseph McDaniel Jr. to Abolhasan Ebtehaj, July 13, 1955, Ford Foundation (FF) rec­ords, Grants, PA no. 55–173, microfilm reel R-0811, Rocke­fel­ler Archive Center (RAC). 80. Program Action Sheets, FF rec­ords, Grants, PA no. 58–158, microfilm reel R-0812, RAC. 81. Harald Mehner, “Development and Planning in Iran ­after World War II,” in Iran ­Under the Pahlavis, ed. George Lenczowski, (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1978), 167–69. 82. George B. Baldwin, Planning and Development in Iran (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), 22–23, 198. 83. Frances Bostock and Geoffrey Jones, Planning and Power in Iran: Ebtehaj and Economic Development ­under the Shah (London: Frank Cass, 1989), 27; Milani, Eminent Persians, 2:735–43.

NOTES TO PAGES 31–33

175

84. Mehner, “Development and Planning in Iran ­after World War II,” 169–70; Gasiorowski, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Shah, 131. 85. Baldwin, Planning and Development in Iran, 22–23, 45–46. 86. John Adler, “Report on Economic Staff Requirements of Ira­nian Authorities,” June 25, 1957, FF 55-173, microfilm reel R-0812. 87. Alfred Wolf to Kenneth Iverson, July 19, 1957, FF 55-173, microfilm reel R-0812; Ebtehaj to Rowland Egger, September 12, 1954, FF 55-173, microfilm reel R-0811. 88. Khodadad Farmanfarmaian, “Report on Formation and Development of Economic Bureau,” 1963, FF rec­ords, Unpublished Reports, Report Number 012037, box 19127, folder 1 of 2, pp. 15–16, RAC; Milani, Eminent Persians, 1:147–49. 89. Alfred Wolf to Kenneth Iverson, “Economic Bureau of the Plan Organ­ization,” December 6, 1957, FF 55-173, microfilm reel R-0812. 90. Farmanfarmaian, “Report,” 23–26; Milani, Eminent Persians, 1:148. 91. Thomas H. McLeod, “National Planning in Iran,” December 31, 1964, FF rec­ords, Unpublished Reports, Report Number 006417, box 18808, p. 70, RAC. 92. Morgan Sibbett to W. B. Gibson, “Periodic Report No. 5,” September 12, 1956, FF 55-173, microfilm reel R-0812. 93. Farmanfarmaian, “Report,” 16–18; Kenneth Hansen, “Supplementary Salaries for Economic Bureau Personnel” and attachments, April 4, 1959, FF 58-158, microfilm reel R-0812; Farmanfarmaian, in interviews by Habib Ladjevardi, November 10 and December 17, 1982, Ira­nian Oral History Collection, Harvard University (IOHC/HU); Milani, Eminent Persians, 2:754–55. 94. Communications between Farmanfarmaian, Abbas Ghezelbash, and Harvey Hall, December 1957, FF 55-173, microfilm reel R-0812; Hansen, “Supplementary Salaries for Economic Bureau Personnel” and attachments. 95. Request No. OD-152, July 26, 1957, FF 58-158, microfilm reel R-0812; Adler, “Report on Economic Staff Requirements of Ira­nian Authorities.” 96. Farmanfarmaian, “Report,” 19–22. 97. Hansen, “Supplementary Salaries for Economic Bureau Personnel” and attachments. 98. Farmanfarmaian, “Report,” 29–31, app. 1; “Program for Training of Members of Economic Affairs Division,” January 4, 1961, FF 58-158, microfilm reel R-0812. 99. F. Skowronski quoted in McLeod, “National Planning in Iran,” 48–49. 100. Farmanfarmaian, interview by Ladjevardi, IOHC/HU. 101. Kamran Mofid, Development Planning in Iran: From Monarchy to Islamic Republic (Wisbech, UK: M ­ iddle East and North African Studies Press, 1987), 47–59, quote on 58; Lyndon Johnson to Shah of Iran, November 28, 1967, FRUS 1964–1968, vol. 22, doc. 250. 102. Latham, Modernization as Ideology, 43–44; Paul Rosenstein-­Rodan, Notes on the Theory of the “Big Push” (Cambridge: Center for International Studies, Mas­sa­chu­setts Institute of Technology, 1957). 103. Kenneth Hansen to Edward Mason, and enclosures, February 15, 1959, FF 58-158, microfilm reel R-0812; Gasiorowski, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Shah, 168–69. 104. Abolhasan Ebtehaj, “A Program for Economic Growth,” International Industrial Conference, San Francisco, September 1961, box 2, folder 11, James A. Bill Papers, College of William and Mary Special Collections. 105. Milani, Eminent Persians, 2:741–43; Marvin Zonis, The Po­liti­cal Elite of Iran (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1971), 67–69. 106. MemCon, “Ebtehaj’s View of the Ira­nian Regime,” September 25, 1965, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy Files (CFPF) 1964–66, box 2333, POL 15-1 Iran, September 1, 1965, NARA.

176 NOTES TO PAGES 33–36

107. US/Tehran to State, “Comments on Report of the Embassy Youth Committee,” March 17, 1971, A-57, RG 59, Subject Numeric Files (SNF) 1970–73, box 2378, folder: POL 12 Iran, January 1, 1970, NARA. 108. Farmanfarmaian, interview by Ladjevardi, IOHC/HU; William G. Miller, “The ‘New Men’ and their Challenge to American Policy in Iran,” [1965], RG 59, RRI 1964–66, box 12, folder: POL 1 Iran 1965, NARA; Hansen, “Supplementary Salaries for Economic Bureau Personnel” and attachments; Farmanfarmaian, “Report,” app. 1. 109. The most comprehensive account of AFME is presented in chapter 9 of Hugh Wilford, Amer­i­ca’s ­Great Game: The CIA’s Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern ­Middle East (New York: Basic, 2013). 110. AFME Annual Report, 1954–55, 5, 8; Display Ad 91, NYT, June 27, 1951; Marion K. Sanders, Dorothy Thompson: A Legend in Her Time (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973). 111. John E. Whiteford Boyle, “The Welcome Ordeal: An Aspect of Iran’s Westernization Drive, 1957—62,” Science and Public Policy 10 (October 1983): 241. 112. “How the CIA Turns Foreign Students into Traitors,” Ramparts, April 1967; Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer, 236–37; Wilford, Amer­i­ca’s ­Great Game, 118–21; Jacobs, Imagining the M ­ iddle East, 216–17; Gasiorowski, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Shah, 128–29, n83–84. 113. Robert Witherspoon on Majid Tehranian, December 3, 1964, U.S. National ­Student Association (USNSA), International Commission Rec­ords, 1946–68, box 282, folder: Ira­nian, Hoover Institution Archives. The folder cited h ­ ere as “Ira­nian” was large and deteriorating. I brought this to the attention of the archivists and they thereafter moved the contents of this folder into multiple smaller folders labeled “Iran,” followed by a number. It is cited throughout as “Ira­nian” ­because it was one large folder during my research. 114. “Lafayette College—­In Creating Leaders for Persia,” [n.d.]; Walter Groves, “Ancient and Fabulous Iran as That Country Is T ­ oday,” Lafayette Alumnus, May 1945, 11, both from Lafayette College, Lafayette in Persia. 115. AFME Annual Report, 1952–1953, 19; “Lafayette Aide Named,” NYT, June 25, 1950. 116. NAFSA Secretary to Charles Hulac, February 4, 1952; Hulac, Report, March 1952, both in MS Collection 715: NAFSA,, group 3, box 22, file 19, University of Arkansas Libraries Special Collections. 117. AFME Annual Report, 1951–1952, 17; AFME Annual Report, 1952–1953, 19. 118. Charles Hulac to Allen Blaisdell, March 4, 1952, NAFSA, group 3, box 22, file 19. 119. Wilford’s research turned up a document written by Garland Hopkins, AFME’s executive vice president, to a CIA officer who went by the name “Stobart.” In this document, Hopkins describes Hulac to Stobart as being “related to you.” Wilford interpreted this statement as meaning that Hulac was undercover with the CIA while operating AFME’s Tehran post. Wilford, Amer­i­ca’s ­Great Game, 239. 120. State, Review of U.S. Technical Assistance and Economic Aid to Iran, 1951–1957, ­860–74. 121. AFME Annual Report, 1954–1955, 24; AFME Annual Report, 1958–1959, 12–14; Wilford, Amer­i­ca’s ­Great Game, 121–22, 240–41. 122. AFME’s Student Survey Program to Ford Foundation in “Grant Attachments,” FF 55-173, microfilm reel R-0812. 123. AFME Annual Report, 1954–1955, 20. AFME followed in the tradition of the Committee on Friendly Relations among Foreign Students by establishing nationality-­based student organ­izations in the United States. Liping Bu, Making the World Like Us, 17. 124. Avrea Ingram, “Clifford Gurney,” March 23, 1953; Ingram, “Ira­nian Student’s Association,” March 23, 1953, both located in USNSA box 220, folder: NUS Iran 1949–61.

NOTES TO PAGES 36–44

177

125. Feizollah Larudy to Ingram, December 21, 1952, USNSA box 220, folder: NUS Iran 1949–61; William McElwee Miller, My Persian Pilgrimage: An Autobiography, rev. ed. (Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 1995), 202–3. 126. AFME Annual Report, 1952–1953, 18; Meir Abdollah Tarighati to Ingram, June 6, 1953, USNSA box 220, folder: NUS Iran 1949–1961. 127. AFME Annual Report, 1953–1954, 20; Myrtle Williams to USNSA, August 14, 1953, USNSA box 220, folder: NUS Iran 1949–61. 128. “Foreign Student Organ­izations,” USNSA fact sheet on the ISAUS, 1958, USNSA box 282, folder: Ira­ni­an; Farmanfarmaian, “Report,” 18–19; McLeod, “National Planning in Iran,” 57. 129. “Reports of the Study Groups, First Ira­nian Students’ Convention,” Denver, CO, September 1953, USNSA box 282, folder: Ira­ni­an. 130. Ibid. 131. AFME Annual Report, 1953–1954, 20. AFME’s assessment ran c­ ounter to the real­ity of the conference and the recollections of the Ira­nian attendees. Manouchehr Ganji, Defying the Ira­nian Revolution: From a Minister to the Shah to a Leader of Re­sis­tance (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 20–21. 132. AFME Annual Report, 1954–1955, 21. 133. AFME Annual Report, 1958–1959, 16. 134. AFME Annual Report, 1959–1960, 16. 135. British Council Iran to National Ira­nian Oil Com­pany, draft, July 1957, CR 1342/3, Rec­ords of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and pre­de­ces­sors (FO, or alternately, FCO) 924/1183, National Archives of the United Kingdom (NAUK). The United States eroded the educational influence of ­Great Britain elsewhere. See, e.g., Sally Ninham, A Cohort of Pioneers: Australian Postgraduate Students and American Postgraduate Degrees, 1949–1964 (Ballan, AU: Connor Court, 2011). 136. British Embassy Tehran to Foreign Office, June 1, 1957, CR 1342/4, Dispatch 68, FO 924/1183, NAUK. 137. U.S. Office of Education, Report on Iran, December 30, 1957; Despatch 434, both in CU, group 16, box 318, file 5. 138. US/Moscow to State, “Ira­nian Students in the USSR,” December 22, 1967, A-852, RG 59, CFPF 1967–69, box 346, folder: EDU 6 Iran, January 1, 1967, NARA; US/Moscow to State, “Ira­nian Students at Moscow’s Friendship University,” August 26, A-1431, 1970, RG 59, SNF 1970–73, Culture and Information, box 403, folder: EDX I, January 1, 1970, NARA. 139. State, Review of U.S. Technical Assistance and Economic Aid to Iran, 1951–1957, 158. 140. Wallace, “A Talk in Iran.” 2. THE WIN­D OW

Epigraph: Ronald Story on Ali Fatemi, October 18, 1963, USNSA box 220, folder: Iran 1963–66. 1. Walter Lipp­mann, The Coming Tests with Rus­sia (Boston: L ­ ittle, Brown, 1961), 16; Lipp­mann, “We Must Consider Alternatives to Our Pres­ent Policy in Iran,” LAT, December 18, 1959; Bill, The Ea­gle and the Lion, 132–33; Pollack, The Persian Puzzle, 81. 2. Robert Komer to Carl Kaysen, January 19, 1962, National Security Files (NSF), ­Robert W. Komer (RWK), box 424, folder: Iran 1961–62, White House Memoranda, John F. Kennedy Library (JFKL). 3. Robert B. Rakove, Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), chaps. 1, 2; Goode, The United States and Iran; Latham, Modernization as Ideology. 4. Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution, 144–46; Pollack, The Persian Puzzle, 80.

178 NOTES TO PAGES 44–47

5. Bill, The Ea­gle and the Lion, 142; Baqer Moin, Khomeini: Life of the Ayatollah (New York: I. B. Tauris, 1999), 64–73. 6. Chehabi, Ira­nian Politics and Religious Modernism, 143–53; James F. Goode, “Reforming Iran during the Kennedy Years,” Diplomatic History 15 (January 1991): 17; Keddie, Modern Iran, 140–43. 7. Komer to President Kennedy, “The Deepening Crisis in Iran,” August 4, 1961, NSF, Countries, box 116, folder: Iran General, August 1–14, 1961, JFKL. 8. Editorial note, FRUS 1961–1963, vol. 17, doc. 41; NSC Rec­ord of Action 2427, May 19, 1961, FRUS 1961–1963, vol. 17, doc. 51; “A Review of Prob­lems in Iran and Recommendations for the National Security Council,” May 15, 1961, Iran Task Force Report, NSF, Countries, box 115A, folder: Iran, May 15, 1961, JFKL. 9. Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution, 146–47; Pollack, The Persian Puzzle, 84; Hurewitz, ­Middle East Politics, 285, ­table 9; Gasiorowski, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Shah, 117–18. 10. Milani, Eminent Persians, 1:63–71; Bill, The Ea­gle and the Lion, 142–47; Rubin, Paved with Good Intentions, 105–6; Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Answer to History, trans. Michael Joseph (New York: Stein and Day, 1980), 22; FRUS 1961–1963, vol. 17, doc. 51. 11. Bill, The Ea­gle and the Lion, chap. 4; Goode, “Reforming Iran during the Kennedy Years,” 25; Pollack, The Persian Puzzle, 82–92; Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution. See also Ali M. Ansari, “The Myth of the White Revolution: Mohammad Reza Shah, ‘Modernization’ and the Consolidation of Power,” ­Middle Eastern Studies 37 (July 2001): 1–24; Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, The White Revolution, 2nd ed. (Tehran: Kayhan Press, 1967). 12. The administration was divided over how to approach other parts of the developing world. Rakove, Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World, chap. 2; Simpson, Economists with Guns, 37–43; Richard D. Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). 13. Goode, “Reforming Iran during the Kennedy Years”; Roland Popp, “Benign Intervention? The Kennedy Administration’s Push for Reform in Iran,” in John F. Kennedy and the “Thousand Days”: New Perspectives on the Foreign and Domestic Policies of the Kennedy Administration, ed. Manfred Berg and Andreas Etges (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 2007), esp. 204. Other case studies of Kennedy’s Iran policy include Claudia Castiglioni, “ ‘I Can Start a Revolution, but You ­Won’t Like the Result’: The United States and Iran in the De­cade of Development,” in The ­Middle East and the Cold War: Between Security and Development, ed. Massimiliano Trentin and Matteo Gerlini (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2012), 105–27; Victor V. Nemchenok, “In Search of Stability amid Chaos: US Policy ­toward Iran, 1961–63,” Cold War History 10 (August 2010): 341–69; April R. Summitt, “For a White Revolution: John F. Kennedy and the Shah of Iran,” ­Middle East Journal 58 (Autumn 2004): 560–75. 14. Komer to Kaysen, January 19, 1962. 15. An exception is p. 133 in Bill, The Ea­gle and the Lion. 16. Robert R. Bowie and Richard H. Immerman, Waging Peace: How Eisenhower ­Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), chap. 5; John P. Burke, Honest Broker? The National Security Advisor and Presidential Decision Making (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2009), chap. 2; Andrew Preston, The War Council: McGeorge Bundy, the NSC, and Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Thomas G. Paterson, “John F. Kennedy’s Quest for Victory and Global Crisis,” in Kennedy’s Quest for Victory: American Foreign Policy, 1961–1963, ed. Paterson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 16–20. 17. Armin Meyer, Quiet Diplomacy: From Cairo to Tokyo in the Twilight of Imperialism (New York: iUniverse, 2003), 134.

NOTES TO PAGES 47–49

179

18. “The Current Internal Po­liti­cal Situation in Iran,” attachment to George Morgan to McGeorge Bundy, “Iran” March 27, 1961, NSF, Countries, box 115A, folder: Iran General, March 21–31, 1961, JFKL. 19. Pahlavi, Answer to History, 146. 20. Matthew Shannon, “William O. Douglas,” in The U.S. Justice System: An Encyclopedia, ed. Steven Harmon Wilson (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-­CLIO, 2012), 494–97; ­William O. Douglas, The Anatomy of Liberty: The Rights of Man without Force (New York: Trident, 1963), xxv; Douglas, ­Towards a Global Federalism (New York: New York University Press, 1968); Risa L. Goluboff, “Dispatch from the Supreme Court Archives: Vagrancy, Abortion, and What the Links between Them Reveal about the History of Fundamental Rights,” Stanford Law Review 62 (May 2010): 1361–94; Jules Lobel, “Justice Douglas the Internationalist: The Connection between Domestic Liberty and Foreign Policy,” in “He ­Shall Not Pass This Way Again”: The Legacy of Justice William O. Douglas, ed. Stephen L. Wasby (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990), 279–95; Bruce Allen Murphy, Wild Bill: The Life and Legend of William O. Douglas (New York: Random House, 2003). 21. William O. Douglas, The Douglas Letters: Se­lections from the Private Papers of Justice William O. Douglas, ed. Melvin I. Urofsky and Philip E. Urofsky (Bethesda: Adler and Adler, 1987), 285. 22. William O. Douglas, The Court Years, 1939–1975: The Autobiography of William O. Douglas (New York: Random House, 1980), 303. 23. M. Kazemi to Douglas, May 16, 1952, Papers of William O. Douglas (PWOD), box 1718, folder 4, Library of Congress. 24. William O. Douglas, Strange Lands and Friendly ­People (New York: Harper, 1951), 133–59. 25. Douglas to S. Honari, November 5, 1958, PWOD, box 1719, folder 2. See also William Storm to Douglas, April 21, 1959, PWOD, box 632, folder 3. 26. Ali Shayegan to Douglas, April 7, 1959, PWOD, box 1719, folder 1; Joseph Treaster, “Ali Shayegan,” NYT, May 16, 1981. 27. Douglas to Yousef Dejbord, February 11, 1952; Douglas, excerpts from speech at the National Conference on International Economic and Social Development, April 7, 1952, both in PWOD, box 1718, folder 2; Douglas, The Douglas Letters, 281–82. 28. Truman Library Photo­graphs, Accession nos. 66-8018, 66-8015, and 66-8017, Harry Truman Library and Museum. 29. Kinzer, All the Shah’s Men, 194–95. 30. Donald N. Wilber, “Overthrow of Premier Mossadeq of Iran,” CIA Clandestine Ser­v ice History, 8:66, Electronic Briefing Book No. 28, National Security Archive (NSA); Abrahamian, Tortured Confessions, 99; Muhammad Sahimi, “Courageous and Principled: Journalists Isa Saharkhiz and Ahmad Zeidabadi,” PBS Tehran Bureau, November 21, 2009. 31. Douglas to the Shah, November 9, 1954; Hussein Ala to Douglas, November 15, 1954, both in PWOD, box 1718, folder 4; Letter from the National Re­sis­tance Movement in Iran, December 1954, PWOD, box 1720, folder 3. 32. Nasrollah S. Fatemi, Faramarz S. Fatemi, and Fariborz S. Fatemi, Love, Beauty, and Harmony in Sufism (South Brunswick, NJ: A. S. Barnes, 1978), back cover; “Dr. N. S. Fatemi,” NYT, March 26, 1990; Fariborz Fatemi to Donald Emmerson, November 13, 1961, USNSA box 282, folder: Ira­ni­an. 33. “Council Petition Backs Ira­ni­ans,” Bulletin, Teaneck Edition, October 3, 1961; Ali Fatemi to Harvey Flad, August 2, 1961, both in USNSA box 220, folder: NUS ­Middle East, Iran 1961–63; Ronald Story on ISAUS convention, September 18, 1963, USNSA

180 NOTES TO PAGES 49–52

box 220, folder: Iran 1963–66; Karen M. Paget, Patriotic Betrayal: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Secret Campaign to Enroll American Students in the Crusade against Communism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 292. 34. Carole Jerome, The Man in the Mirror (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1987), chap. 6; Chehabi, Ira­nian Politics and Religious Modernism. 35. Douglas to Patricia Lawford, September 24, 1968, PWOD, box 348, folder 3. 36. Jerome, The Man in the Mirror, 60–61. 37. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), 569–70, 566; Paterson, “John F. Kennedy’s Quest for Victory and Global Crisis,” 17. 38. Chehabi, Ira­nian Politics and Religious Modernism, 141. 39. Douglas to President Kennedy, February 27, 1961, PWOD, box 348, folder 1. 40. Miller, “The ‘New Men’ ”; U.S. Cultural ­Affairs Officer Iran to Julius Holmes, attachment to John Bowling to Komer, November 9, 1962, NSF, RWK, box 424, folder: Iran 1961–62 [folder 1 of 2], JFKL; N. Nemazee to Douglas, March 8, 1962, PWOD, box 1719, folder 4; Lucius B ­ attle to John Rooney, February 20, 1964, RG 59, CFPF 1964–66, box 397, folder: EDX Iran, January 1, 1964, NARA. 41. Donald N. Wilber, Con­temporary Iran (New York: Praeger, 1963), 154. 42. Laleh Ardalan and Kayvan Tabari, “The Ypsilanti Convention,” Pendar (Autumn–­ Winter 1960–61); Matin-­Asgari, Ira­nian Student Opposition to the Shah, 38–39, 180– 81n62. 43. MemCon with Ali Fatemi, [late 1961/early 1962], USNSA box 220, folder: NUS ­Middle East, Iran 1961–63; Robert Witherspoon on Majid Tehranian, December 3, 1964, USNSA box 282, folder: Ira­ni­an. 44. Pahlavi, Mission for My Country, 264; Matin-­Asgari, Ira­nian Student Opposition to the Shah, 38–39. 45. Jerome, The Man in the Mirror, 53–55; Qotbzadeh to Harvey Flad, August 11, 1961, USNSA box 282, folder: Ira­ni­an; “Riotous Eve­ning at the Statler,” Washington Daily News, March 21, 1961; Rasa Gustaitis, “Ira­nian Student Demonstrations Spread in Row with Own Envoy,” WP, July 9, 1961; British Embassy Washington to Foreign Office, March 22, 1961, EP 1741/5, FO 371/157655, NAUK. 46. Ali Fatemi, “Protest to a Fraudulent Act,” February 24, 1961, USNSA box 282, folder: Ira­ni­an; Qotbzadeh to Harvey Flad, August 11, 1961; Jerome, The Man in the ­Mirror, 53. 47. Reza Valad, “Students of Iran,” WP, April 7, 1961. 48. Sadeq Qotbzadeh, “Why They Protested,” WP, April 17, 1961. 49. Ali Fatemi, “Iran’s Regime Denounced,” NYT, June 17, 1961. 50. Ira­nian Students Association (ISA) California, “Troubled Iran,” LAT, May 15, 1961. 51. MemCon, “Courtesy Call on the Ira­nian Foreign Minister,” April 28, 1961, FRUS 1961–1963 vol. 17, doc. 37. 52. Ali Fatemi to Harvey Flad, August 2, 1961, USNSA box 220, folder: NUS ­Middle East, Iran 1961–63; Qotbzadeh to Harvey Flad, August 11, 1961; British Embassy Washington to Foreign Office, July 6, 1961, EP 1741/10, FO 371/157655, NAUK; Jerome, The Man in the Mirror, 59–61. 53. Foreign Office to British Embassy Tehran, “Ira­nian Students Abroad,” September 22, 1961, EP 1741/22, FO 371/157655, NAUK. 54. Chehabi, Ira­nian Politics and Religious Modernism, 151–52, 164; Abrahamian, Iran between Two Revolutions, 423. 55. British Embassy Washington to Foreign Office, July 6, 1961. On the U.S. protests, see “Ira­nian Students Stage Protest Sit-­In at Consulate,” NYT, July 6, 1961; “Iran Reviewing Passports ­Here,” WP, July 6, 1961; “11 Ira­ni­ans Stage Sit-­In,” Baltimore Sun, July 6, 1961; Thomas Wolfe, “Ira­ni­ans Jailed, Freed in Row Over Passports,” WP, July 11, 1961. On the

NOTES TO PAGES 53–57

181

West Eu­ro­pean protests, see “Iran Diplomat to Britain Met by Protesters,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 2, 1961; “Students Demonstrate as Envoy Arrives,” Baltimore Sun, July 2, 1961; “Hold Students in Embassy Protest,” Chicago Daily Defender, July 12, 1961. 56. “40 Ira­ni­ans Picket White House,” WP, July 26, 1961. 57. Ira­nian Students to President Kennedy, July 25, 1961, attachment to Bromley Smith to Lucius ­Battle, July 26, 1961, NSF, Countries, box 115A, folder: Iran General, July 1961, JFKL. The letter was circulated internationally and is also in EP 1741/20, FO 371/157655, NAUK. 58. Lyndon Johnson to ISA Washington, August 7, 1961, USNSA box 282, folder: Ira­ni­an. 59. Fariborz Fatemi to Douglas, August 21, 1961, PWOD, box 1719, folder 4. 60. President Kennedy to Douglas, August 4, 1961, WHCF, Subject File, box 59, folder: CO 123 Iran, Executive, JFKL. 61. Matin-­Asgari, Ira­nian Student Opposition to the Shah, 50–55, 251–56. 62. Matthew Shannon, “ ‘One of Our Greatest Psychological Assets’: The New Frontier, Cold-­War Public Diplomacy, and Robert Kennedy’s 1962 Goodwill Tour,” International History Review 36, no. 4 (2014): 767–90. 63. Julius Holmes to Dean Rusk, November 21, 1961, NSF, Countries, box 116, folder: Iran General, November 10–­December 10, 1961, JFKL; President Kennedy to the Shah, February 7, 1962, NSF, Countries, box 116, folder: Iran General, January 19–­February 28, 1962, JFKL. 64. White Paper, December 1961, located in vari­ous archives, including the Robert F. Kennedy Papers (RFKP), Attorney General’s Trips, February 1962 Good W ­ ill Trip, Correspondence Personal, box 7, folder: Tehran, White Paper on Iran, JFKL, and in USNSA box 220, folder: NUS ­Middle East, Iran 1961–63. Hussein Dootsmohamedi, “How Stable Is Iran?” WP, February 6, 1961; A Bill for the Relief of Sadegh Ghotb Esfehani, S. 2597, 87th Cong., 1st sess., RG 59, Rec­ords of the Ira­nian Affairs Desk (RIAD) 1958–63, box 7, folder: Student Activities, NARA. 65. Iran Nameh, November 10, 1961, RFKP, Attorney General’s Trips, February 1962 Good ­Will Trip Briefing Books, box 2, folder: Ed Guthman Ring ­Binder no. 1, JFKL; “Student Critic of Iran Fears ‘Return’ T ­ here,” Boston Globe (BG), January 16, 1962; Frank Crump, “The Deportation Case of Mr. Shafi Alhosaini,” [1962], USNSA box 220, folder: NUS ­Middle East Iran 1961–63. 66. Bill, The Ea­gle and the Lion, 146–47; Anonymous Tehran University student, “Vio­lence and Bloodshed inside the University,” Student 6, no. 4 (1962): 2–3, in USNSA box 22. 67. “Ira­nian Students Picket U.N.,” NYT, January 22, 1962; Paul Schuette, “Iran Students Stage 3-­Hour ‘Sit-­In’ at their Country’s Embassy ­Here,” WP, January 24, 1962; “Vienna Police Halt Ira­nian Student March,” Chicago Daily Tribune, January 26, 1962. 68. Ali Fatemi to Robert Kennedy, January 19, 1962, USNSA box 282, folder: Ira­ni­an. 69. Jerome, The Man in the Mirror, 58–59; “Ira­ni­ans See R. Kennedy,” WP, January 27, 1962; Edwin O. Guthman and Jeffrey Shulman, eds., Robert Kennedy in His Own Words: The Unpublished Recollections of the Kennedy Years (New York: Bantam, 1988), 317. 70. “Ira­ni­ans See R. Kennedy”; Jerome, The Man in the Mirror, 59. 71. Douglas MacArthur II to State, “Charges by Former Ira­nian Student Daryani . . . ,” June 14, 1971, FRUS 1969–1976, vol. E-4, doc. 131. 72. “Zahedi’s Fiasco,” Iran Nameh, March–­April 1962, PWOD, box 1719, folder 3; Judith Martin and Winzola McLendon, “Iran Envoy Abruptly Recalled,” WP, February 24, 1962. 73. ISAUS/CISNU, “Ira­nian Students’ Letter to President Kennedy,” 1962, PWOD, box 1719, folder 3. 74. “An Open Letter to the President of the United States,” Iran Nameh, March–­ April 1962, PWOD, box 1719, folder 3.

182 NOTES TO PAGES 58–60

75. “Visit of the Shah of Iran: Background Paper; Special Prob­lems,” April 2, 1962, NSF, Countries, box 117, folder: Iran Subjects, Shah Briefing Book, April 11–14, 1962, Tab 4–­ Tab 6 (8), JFKL. 76. Mansur Rafizadeh, Witness: From the Shah to the Secret Arms Deal; An Insider’s ­Account of U.S. Involvement in Iran (New York: William Morrow and Com­pany, 1987), 121–23; State to US/Tehran, March 23, 1962, NSF, Countries, box 117, folder: Iran Subjects, Shah Visit, March 21–24, 1962, JFKL; ISAUS Press Release, April 16, 1962, USNSA box 220, folder: NUS ­Middle East, Iran 1961–63. 77. Farnsworth Fowle, “Shah Pays a Visit to C ­ hildren’s Zoo,” NYT, April 18, 1962. 78. “Shah of Iran Plays Jet Pi­lot, Tries Out Plane,” LAT, April 24, 1962. 79. “Pickets Chant ‘Mossadegh’ as Shah and Queen Leave,” Baltimore Sun, April 30, 1962; ISA Northern California, Shah of Iran, April 1962, USNSA box 220, folder: NUS ­Middle East, Iran 1961–63. 80. MemCon, April 13, 1962, FRUS 1961–1963, vol. 17, doc. 246; MemCon, April 12, 1962, FRUS 1961–1963, vol. 17, doc. 243; Douglas, The Court Years, 303. 81. Roham Alvandi, “The Shah’s Détente with Khrushchev: Iran’s 1962 Missile Base Pledge to the Soviet Union,” Cold War History 14, no. 3 (2014): 423–44. 82. CIA, “Comments of the Shah on His Recent Visit to the United States and on the Ira­nian Po­liti­cal Situation,” May 14, 1962, NSF, Countries, box 116, folder: Iran General, March 27–­May 21, 1962, JFKL. 83. Iran Nameh, November–­December 1962, RG 59, RIAD 1958–63, box 7, folder: 13-­ A, NARA. 84. Jerome, The Man in the Mirror, 60–61. When embassy officials asked Ali Amini about the students’ return, the prime minister “facetiously inquired w ­ hether State Department expected GOI [Government of Iran] to receive them with flowers.” Stuart Rockwell to State, May 22, 1962, NSF, Countries, box 116, folder: Iran General, May 22–­June 30, 1962, JFKL. 85. The ISAUS did not support Amini ­because he presided over a government with no sitting majlis and considered him “a new edition of the same old dictatorial rule.” Ali Fatemi to Harvey Flad, August 2, 1961, USNSA box 220, folder: NUS M ­ iddle East, Iran 1961–63. 86. Preston, The War Council. 87. George Ball to Robert Kennedy, draft, August 28, 1962, RG 59, RIAD 1958–63, box 7, folder: 13-­A, NARA. 88. Phillips Talbot to Ball, “Status of Ira­nian Student Leaders in the United States,” redraft, August 10, 1962, RG 59, RIAD 1958–63, box 7, folder: 13-­A, NARA. 89. John Bowling, “Local Student Reaction to Cancellation of Attorney-­General’s Visit to Tehran,” February 20, 1962, NSF, RWK, box 424, folder: Iran 1961–62 [folder 1 of 2], JFKL. 90. Talbot to Ball, “Status of Ira­nian Student Leaders in the United States,” redraft, August 10, NARA. 91. Gordon Christenson to John Bowling, draft, August 13, 1962, RG 59, RIAD 1958– 63, box 7, folder: 13-­A, NARA. 92. Raymond Farrell to Michel Cieplinski, June 27, 1962, RG 59, RIAD 1958–63, box 7, folder: 13-­A, NARA. 93. William O. Douglas, interview by Roberta Greene, November 13, 1969, pp. 7–8, Robert Kennedy Oral History Program, JFKL; Douglas, The Court Years, 307–8; Douglas to President Kennedy, February 22, 1962, PWOD, box 348, folder 1. 94. Talbot to Ball, “Status of Ira­nian Student Leaders in the United States,” redraft, August 10, 1962, NARA. 95. MemCon, “Anti-­Shah Demonstrations by Ira­nian Students in U.S.,” February 4, 1963, RG 59, CFPF 1963, box 3260, folder: EDX Iran, February 1, 1963, NARA.

NOTES TO PAGES 60–64

183

96. Martin McLaughlin and Robert Craig on the Aspen Institute Conference on “Foreign Youth and the American Image Abroad,” August 1962, RG 59, RIAD 1958–63, box 7, folder: 13-­A, NARA. 97. Robert Witherspoon on Ali Fatemi, December 11, 1964, USNSA box 282, folder: Ira­ni­an. 98. M. Gordon Tiger, interview by William Burr, April 10, 1985, pp. 54–55, Oral History of Iran Collection, Foundation of Ira­nian Studies (OHIC/FIS). 99. Frank Leith Jones, Blowtorch: Robert Komer, Vietnam, and American Cold War Strategy (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2013), chaps. 1–4; Rakove, Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World. 100. Komer to Walt Rostow, December 20, 1961; Komer to Bundy and Kaysen, December 20, 1961, both in NSF, RWK, box 424, folder: Iran 1961–62, White House Memoranda, JFKL; Goode, “Reforming Iran during the Kennedy Years,” 16. 101. Popp, “Benign Intervention?,” 205. 102. Komer to Bundy and Kaysen, “Talk with Justice William O. Douglas,” August 22, 1962, NSF, Countries, box 116, folder: Iran General, August 12–31, 1962, JFKL. 103. Komer, MemCon with Ali Fatemi, August 18, 1962, NSF, RWK, box 424, folder: Iran 1961–62, White House Memoranda, JFKL. 104. Komer to Bundy and Kaysen, “Talk with Justice William O. Douglas.” 105. Bundy to James Grant, October 5, 1962, RG 59, RIAD 1958–63, box 7, folder: 13-­ A, NARA. 106. M. Gordon Tiger, interview by William Burr, March 20, 1985, pp. 27–28, OHIC/FIS. 107. Komer, “Our Policy in Iran,” October 20, 1962; Komer to Bundy, October 20, 1962, both in NSF, Countries, box 116A, folder: Iran General, November 1962, JFKL. Komer to Bundy, November 5, 1962, NSF, RWK, box 424, folder: Iran 1961–62, White House Memoranda, JFKL. Emphasis in original. 108. Komer, December 15, 1962, NSF, RWK, box 424, folder: Iran 1961–62 [folder 1 of 2], JFKL; William O. Douglas, Democracy’s Manifesto (Garden City: Doubleday, 1962), introductory pages. 109. Zonis, The Po­liti­cal Elite of Iran, 75–76; Abrahamian, Iran between Two Revolutions, 424. 110. Organ­ization of Tehran University Students, statement, April 20, 1963, PWOD, box 1719, folder 3. See also Organ­ization of Tehran University Students, “Ira­nian Students and the Shah’s Land Reform”; CISNU, “An Appeal on Behalf of Arrested Students,” Student 7, no. 4 (1963): 5–8, both in USNSA box 22. 111. “Tanks Disperse Teheran Crowds,” NYT, June 9, 1963; Southern California Chapter of the National Committee for the Defence of Ira­nian Students, “­Don’t Let Familiarity Breed Indifference! Six More Students Have Been Jailed,” 1965, in Iran in Turmoil (Chicago: ISA Chicago, 1965), 48. 112. US/Hamburg to State, “Ira­nian Student Agitation in Federal Republic,” August 5, 1963; US/Vienna to State, “Ira­nian Students Protest,” February 6, 1963, both in RG 59, CFPF 1963, box 3942, folder: POL 22 Incidents, Disputes, Iran, NARA; Federation of ­Persian Students in Italy to Douglas, March 16, 1963, PWOD, box 1719, folder 3. 113. Tele­grams from Ira­nian students in Eu­rope to President Kennedy enclosed with William Brubeck to Bundy, “Tele­grams from Ira­nian Student Groups,” March 1, 1963, NSF, Countries, box 116A, folder: Iran General, March 1963, JFKL. 114. Richard W. Cottam, Nationalism in Iran (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1964), 307. 115. Tele­grams from Ira­nian students, William Brubeck to Bundy, March 1, 1963. 116. Komer to Kenneth O’Donnell, June 14, 1963, NSF, Countries, box 116A, folder: Iran General, June 1–­July 10, 1963, JFKL.

184 NOTES TO PAGES 64–67

117. Robert Backoff on Fariborz Fatemi, March 3, 1963, USNSA box 220, folder: Iran 1963–66. 118. Keddie, Modern Iran, 146–48; Moin, Khomeini, 92–117; Hamid Algar, ed. and trans., Islam and Revolution: Writings and Declarations of Imam Khomeini (Berkeley, CA: Mizan, 1981), 177–80. 119. Ervand Abrahamian, The Ira­nian Mojahedin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 84. 120. ISAUS, Ira­nian ­Peoples’ Movement, 1953–1973, Iran Report, no. 2 (Berkeley, June 1974), 21; ISAUS, U.S. Involvement in Iran: Imperialist Disguises and Liberal Illusions, 1900–1963 (Berkeley, December 1978), 75. 121. “Iran Students Object to Election Restrictions,” Student 7, no. 11 (1963), USNSA box 22; CIS Newsletter, September 16, 1963, USNSA box 220, folder: Iran 1963–66; Ali Fatemi, “The Shah’s ‘Democracy,’ ” Minority of One (November 1963). 122. “Ira­nian Students Picket U.N.,” NYT, August 20, 1963; Talbot to Dean Rusk, “Agitational Activities of Anti-­Shah Ira­nian Students in the United States,” October 5, 1963, FRUS 1961–1963, vol. 18, doc. 333. 123. ISA New York, press release, September 17, 1963, USNSA box 220, folder: Iran 1963–66. 124. Julius Holmes to State, September 28, 1963, RG 59, CFPF 1963, box 3260, folder: EDX Iran, Febrary 1, 1963, NARA. 125. MemCon (1 of 3), “U.S.-­Iran Relations: Ira­nian Students,” September 30, 1963, RG 59, CFPF 1963, box 3943, folder: POL Iran-­A, NARA. 126. MemCon, “Ira­nian Students in the U.S.,” October 6, 1963, RG 59, CFPF 1963, box 3260, folder: EDX Iran, February 1, 1963, NARA; MemCon (1 of 2), “U.S.-­Iran Relations: Ira­nian Students, October 7, 1963, RG 59, CFPF 1963, box 3943, folder: POL Iran-­A, NARA. 127. FRUS 1961–1963, vol. 18, doc. 333. 128. M. Gordon Tiger, interview by William Burr, March 20, 1985, p. 28. 129. MemCon, “Warning to Anti-­Regime Ira­nian Students in the United States,” December 24, 1963, RG 59, CFPF 1963, box 3942, folder: POL 22 Incidents, Disputes, Iran, NARA. 130. State to US/Tehran, December 24, 1963, RG 59, CFPF 1963, box 3260, folder: EDX Iran, February 1, 1963, NARA. 131. Jerome, The Man in the Mirror, 61–63. 132. INS Newark District Office to Lawrence Moore, September 10, 1964, USNSA box 282, folder: Ira­ni­an; M. Gordon Tiger to State Dept. Visa Office, “Re Adjustment of ­Status,” June 26, 1964, RG 59, RRI 1964–66, box 1, folder: Office Memoranda, NARA; MemCon, “Visa Status of Ali S. Fatemi,” September 23, 1964, RG 59, RRI 1964–66, box 1, folder: Memoranda of Conversation, NARA. 133. Ali M. S. Fatemi, “Development with Ample Capital and Foreign Exchange: A Study of Petroleum’s Contribution to the Economic Development of Selected Petroleum Exporting Countries,” PhD diss., New School for Social Research, 1967. 134. Gilman, Mandarins of the ­Future, 11–12; Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution, 4, 147; Komer to Bundy, November 5, 1962, NSF, RWK, box 424, folder: Iran 1961–62, White House Memoranda, JFKL. 135. Popp, “An Application of Modernization Theory during the Cold War?” 136. On the relationship between development, psy­chol­ogy, and race on the thinking of midcentury liberals and Kennedy’s Iran policy, see Christopher T. Fisher, “ ‘Moral Purpose Is the Impor­tant T ­ hing’: David Lilienthal, Iran, and the Meaning of Development in the US, 1956–63,” International History Review 33, no. 3 (2011): 431–51; Andrew Warne,

NOTES TO PAGES 67–70

185

“Psychoanalyzing Iran: Kennedy’s Iran Task Force and the Modernization of Orientalism, 1961–3,” International History Review 35, no. 2 (2013): 396–422. 137. Harold Saunders to Komer, “Near East Conference,” December 20, 1961, NSF, Countries, box 116, folder: Iran General, December 11–31, 1961, JFKL. 138. Halpern, The Politics of Social Change in the M ­ iddle East and North Africa, chap. 13, p. 253; Huntington, Po­liti­cal Order in Changing Socie­ties. An excellent account of the transition in developmentalist thinking is Simpson, Economists with Guns, 67–73. 139. Huntington, Po­liti­cal Order in Changing Socie­ties, chap. 3, quote on 154. Hurewitz placed Iran alongside Af­ghan­i­stan, Jordan, Morocco, and Kuwait as “modernizing monarchies” in ­Middle East Politics. 140. Jeff Shesol, Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud that Defined a De­cade (New York: Norton, 1997); Douglas, Points of Rebellion (New York: Random House, 1969); Douglas, International Dissent: Six Steps t­ oward World Peace (New York: Random House, 1971). 141. Ali Barzegar to Norman Uphoff, September 26, 1964, USNSA box 282, folder: Ira­ni­an. 142. Talbot to Averell Harriman, “Request That You Ask the Attorney General to Begin Deportation Proceedings . . . ,” May 13, 1964, FRUS 1964–1968, vol. 22, doc. 21. 143. Top administration officials respected Komer’s opinions. Bundy, Memorandum for the President, June 4, 1964, NSF, Country File, box 137, folder: Iran, Shah’s Visit, June 5, 1964, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library (LBJL). 144. Komer, Memorandum for the President, April 15, 1965, NSF, Country File, box 136 (1 of 2), folder: Iran Memos and Misc. vol. 1, January 1964–­December 1965, LBJL. 145. ISAUS, Ira­nian ­Peoples’ Movement, 12–14. 3. THE YOUTH

Epigraph: Qotbzadeh letter, quoted in Jerome, The Man in the Mirror, 61–62. 1. Klimke, The Other Alliance. 2. Komer to Bundy, November 27, 1963, NSF, Country File, box 137, folder: Iran, Shah’s Visit, June 5, 1964, LBJL. As vice president, Johnson traveled to Iran and met the shah. Mitchell Lerner, “ ‘A Big Tree of Peace and Justice: The Vice Presidential Travels of Lyndon Johnson,” Diplomatic History 34 (April 2010): 357–93. 3. Bill, The Ea­gle and the Lion, 154–56, 169–74. On U.S.-­Iran relations during the Johnson years, see Claudia Castiglioni, “No Longer a Client, Not Yet a Partner: The US-­Iranian Alliance in the Johnson Years,” Cold War History 15, no. 4 (2015): 491–509; Andrew L. Johns, “The Johnson Administration, the Shah of Iran, and the Changing Pattern of U.S.-­ Iranian Relations: ‘Tired of Being Treated like a Schoolboy,’ ” Journal of Cold War Studies 9 (Spring 2007): 64–94. 4. William J. Butler and Georges Levasseur, ­Human Rights and the L ­ egal System in Iran (Geneva: International Commission of Jurists, March 1976), 8–11; Chehabi, Ira­nian Politics and Religious Modernism, 182–83. 5. Lyndon Johnson, “Message to the President of the Iran-­America Society,” May 27, 1964, APP. 6. Bill, The Ea­gle and the Lion, 156–61. 7. “Resolutions of the Fourth Congress of the Confederation of Ira­nian Students,” PWOD, box 1719, folder 6; ISAUS, “Is Iran Potentially Another Vietnam?” Monthly Review 17, no. 8 (January 1966): 31–34. 8. Algar, ed., Islam and Revolution, 181–88; Moin, Khomeini, 119–28.

186 NOTES TO PAGES 70–73

9. US/Tehran to State, “Youth in Country Programming: Iran,” May 6, 1968, A-576, RG 59, CFPF 1967–69, box 364, folder: EDX Iran, January 1, 1967, NARA. 10. Menashri, Education and the Making of Modern Iran, 212–19. 11. US/Tehran to State, “Tehran University—­Agonizing Transition,” May 19, 1965, A-584, RG 59, CFPF 1964–66, box 365, folder: EDU Iran, January 1, 1964, NARA; US/ Tehran to State, “Resurgence of Student Unrest,” March 9, 1968, A-476, RG 59, CFPF 1967–69, box 2217, folder: POL 12 Iran, January 1, 1967, NARA. 12. James A. Bill, “The Politics of Student Alienation: The Case of Iran,” Ira­nian Studies 2 (Winter 1969): 10; Mohsen M. Milani, The Making of Iran’s Islamic Revolution: From Monarchy to Islamic Republic (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1988), 114, t­ able 4.3. 13. Zonis, Po­liti­cal Elite of Iran, 36–37. 14. James A. Bill, The Politics of Iran: Groups, Classes, and Modernization (Columbus: Merrill, 1972), 58; Matin-­Asgari, Ira­nian Student Opposition to the Shah, 91; CIA, “Restless Youth,” September 1968, NSF, Intelligence File, box 3, LBJL. UNESCO’s statistics indicate that most Ira­ni­ans abroad ­were men and, in 1966, nearly half studied engineering. UN, Statistics of Students Abroad, 76, 142, 340. 15. Bevis and Lucas, International Students in American Colleges and Universities, 156, 164–65. 16. Matin-­Asgari, Ira­nian Student Opposition to the Shah, 52, 63, 68–86, 92–93, 106–9, 113; Robert Backoff, “Report on the Fourth Congress of the Confederation of Ira­nian ­Students,” January 1965, USNSA box 282, folder: Ira­ni­an; William Miller to James Spain, “Communist Activity in Iran and among Ira­ni­ans Abroad,” RG 59, RRI 1964–66, box 12, folder: Iran 1965 POL 2, NARA. 17. Majid Tehranian to Civil Rights Conference, April 27, 1962, USNSA box 282, folder: Ira­ni­an; Southern California Chapter of the National Committee for the Defense of Ira­ nian Students, “­Don’t Let Familiarity Breed Indifference! Six More Students Have Been Jailed,” in ISA Chicago, Iran in Turmoil, 48. 18. ISAUS, Ira­nian ­Peoples’ Movement, 17. 19. Conclusions to CIA report, “Restless Youth.” 20. John Fousek, To Lead the F ­ ree World: American Nationalism and the Cultural Roots of the Cold War (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000). On Iran and the ­free world, see Ali Fatemi, “The Shah’s ‘Democracy,’ ” Minority of One (November 1963): 20–21; Bertrand Russell, “Freedom in Iran,” Minority of One (November 1964): 12–13. 21. Hasan Masali, “To All National Unions of Students,” May 1966, CISNU, USNSA box 282, folder: Iranian. 22. Matin-­Asgari, Ira­nian Student Opposition to the Shah, chap. 6; “Resolutions of the Fourth Congress of the Confederation of Ira­nian Students.” 23. Slobodian, Foreign Front; Suri, Power and Protest, chap. 3. 24. For a view of the Right, see John A. Andrew III, The Other Side of the Sixties: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997). For a view of the Left, see Varon, Bringing the War Home. 25. Suri, Power and Protest. 26. Charles Mace to Raymond Farrell, May 15, 1964, RG 59, CFPF 1964–66, box 2331, folder: POL 7 Iran, January 1, 1964, NARA; US/Tehran to State, “Activities of Ira­nian Students in the US,” October 14, 1965, A-265, RG 59, Formerly Top Secret Central Policy Files 1964–66, box 13/22, folder: POL-18, NARA. 27. The situation in the United States was similar to that of West Germany. Slobodian, Foreign Front, chap. 1. 28. Neil Sheehan, “A Student Group Concedes It Took Funds from C.I.A.,” NYT, February 14, 1967; Sol Stern, “A Short Account of International Student Politics with

NOTES TO PAGES 74–77

187

Par­tic­ul­ar Reference to the NSA, CIA, Etc.,” Ramparts, March 1967; S. Douglass Cater, Office Files of the White House Aids, box 62, folder: National Student Association, LBJL. 29. Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer, 9–10, 137, 140–41; Paget, Patriotic Betrayal. 30. Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer, 139–40. Many International Commission reports on the Ira­nian student movement (in USNSA boxes 220 and 282) went to the “Confidential Files” and required proper authorization to view. 31. Jim Hendrick on the Eleventh ISAUS Congress, August 1964, USNSA box 220, folder: Iran 1963–66. 32. Gregory Gallo and Alexander Korns to Franklin Murphy, May 14, 1964, letter 2, USNSA box 220, folder: Iran 1963–66. The USNSA sent two letters to Murphy on the same date. Letter 2 was the “official” document, and “letter 1” was “unauthorized.” The USNSA approved the “general position” of the first but not the “specific wording.” Both documents are critical of the shah and UCLA’s decision to honor him. 33. Paget, Patriotic Betrayal, chap. 13, esp. 119. 34. Gallo and Korns to Murphy, letter 2. 35. Donald Emmerson to Ali Fatemi, June 28, 1963, USNSA box 220, folder: Iran 1963– 66. Emphasis in original. 36. Paget, Patriotic Betrayal, 293–94; Philip G. Altbach and Norman T. Uphoff, The Student Internationals (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1973), 139–40. 37. Norman Uphoff on Qotbzadeh, June 29, 1965, USNSA box 282, folder: Ira­nian. See also Robert Witherspoon on Ali Fatemi, December 11, 1964, USNSA box 282, folder: Ira­ni­an. 38. Norman Uphoff letter, November 16, 1964, enclosed with Robert Witherspoon to Lawrence Moore, November 16, 1964, USNSA box 282, folder: Ira­ni­an. 39. Harvey Flad to Richard Rettig and James Scott, “Ira­nian Student Prob­lem,” February 1961, USNSA box 220, folder: NUS: Iran 1949–61; Hussein Dootsmohamedi, “How Stable Is Iran?” WP, February 6, 1961. 40. Qotbzadeh to Harvey Flad, August 11, 1961, USNSA box 282, folder: Ira­ni­an. 41. Frank Crump to David Barkin, October 27, 1961, USNSA box 282, folder: Ira­ni­an. 42. Harvey Flad to Ali Fatemi, June 20 and July 31, 1961, USNSA box 282, folder: Ira­ni­an. 43. USNSA, September 5, 1961, press release; USNSA ­Fourteenth Congress, Resolution on Iran, August 1961, both in USNSA box 220, folder: NUS ­Middle East, Iran 1961–63. 44. Donald Emmerson to Ali Fatemi, October 13, 1961, USNSA box 282, folder: Ira­ ni­an; “U.S. Students Deplore Suppression of Ira­nian Students Rights,” Iran Nameh, October–­November 1961, USNSA 220, folder: NUS ­Middle East, Iran 1961–63. 45. “Council Petition Backs Ira­ni­ans,” Bulletin, Teaneck Edition, October 3, 1961; “Help Petition for Ira­ni­ans Is Circulated,” Bulletin, Teaneck Edition, October 10, 1961, both in USNSA box 220, folder: NUS ­Middle East, Iran 1961–63. The petition is in USNSA box 282, folder: Ira­ni­an. 46. Kurt Kent, “Students Demand Rights for Ira­ni­ans,” Minnesota Daily, January 30, 1962; “Ira­nian Students Protest Iran’s Election Policies,” Minnesota Daily, February 14, 1961; “Rights of Ira­ni­ans Suppressed—­Panel,” Minnesota Daily, April 26, 1961; Ali ­Barzegar, “Students and the Revolution,” Persian Community Newsletter of Minneapolis, November 12, 1963, USNSA box 220, folder: Iran 1963–66. 47. Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer, 134–36; Altbach and Uphoff, Student Internationals, 30–35. 48. Student 6, nos. 7–8 (1962): 2–11, USNSA box 22. Backoff, “Report on the Fourth Congress of the Confederation of Ira­nian Students”; Ali Fatemi to Donald Emmerson, November 1, 1961, both in USNSA box 282, folder: Ira­ni­an. Iran: A Report of the Research

188 NOTES TO PAGES 77–80

and Information Commission of the International Student Conference (1961–62), 29, USNSA box 23; Altbach and Uphoff, Student Internationals, 59, 74; Matin-­Asgari, Ira­nian Student Opposition to the Shah, 27, 51–53, 85–86. 49. Student 6, no. 4 (1962): 20–25, USNSA box 22. 50. Iran: A Report of the Research and Information Commission, 17; Kenny Khaw to ISAUS, August 28, 1961, USNSA box 282, folder: Ira­ni­an. 51. Donald Emmerson to Ali Fatemi, June 13 and 28, 1963, USNSA box 220, folder: Iran 1963–66. 52. The USNSA gave the ISAUS $2,000 for the secretariat to travel to London for the CISNU’s 1964 meeting and $300 to translate, copy, and disseminate the USNSA’s many anti-­shah statements. Tehranian to Ronald Story, January 20, 1964, USNSA box 282, folder: Ira­ni­an; Story to Robert Backoff, December 22, 1963, box 220, folder: Iran 1963–66; Matin-­ Asgari, Ira­nian Student Opposition to the Shah, 71, 195n68. 53. Tiger to Lynch, “Ira­nian Student Activities during Shah’s Visit: III,” May 14, 1964, RG 59, RRI 1964–66, box 1, folder: Office Memoranda, NARA. 54. Tehranian to Ronald Story, January 20, 1964; Story to Hasan Lebaschi, March 4, 1964, USNSA box 220, folder: Iran 1963–66; Tehranian to Story, March 8, 1964, USNSA box 282, folder: Ira­ni­an. 55. Tehranian to Ronald Story, January 20, 1964; Story to Lebaschi, March 4, 1964; Tehranian to Story, March 8, 1964. 56. ISAUS, Daneshjoo, February and April–­May 1964, USNSA box 220, folder: Iran 1963–66. 57. USNSA Seventeenth Congress, Resolution on Iran, 1964, USNSA box 220, folder: Iran 1963–66. Robert Witherspoon of the International Commission met with the State Department’s William Miller in December 1964 to express his frustration with Washington’s pro-­shah policy. Witherspoon to Miller, December 30, 1964, USNSA box 220, folder: Iran 1963–66. 58. Hendrick on the Eleventh ISAUS Congress, August 1964. 59. ISAUS to USNSA, September 1964, USNSA box 282, folder: Ira­ni­an. 60. “Shah in U.S. for Visit,” NYT, June 5, 1964; John Jernegan to Julius Holmes, April 24, 1964, RG 59, RRI 1964–66, box 2, folder: Iran 1964 EDX 6-­a, NARA. 61. Ronald Story on ISAUS convention, September18, 1963, USNSA box 220, folder: Iran 1963–66; “Anti-­Shah Ira­nian Students in the U.S., and the Nasserite ‘Danger,’ ” April 27, 1964, MemCon, RG 59, CFPF 1964–66, box 2337, folder: POL Iran-­US, January 1, 1964, NARA. 62. Mansur Farhang, interview by Mahnaz Af khami, December 20, 1989, p. 61, OHIC/FIS. 63. Saba Soomekh, From the Shahs to Los Angeles: Three Generations of Ira­nian Jewish ­Women between Religion and Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), 2. 64. Lebaschi to Lyndon Johnson, April 13, 1964, WHCF, Countries, box 41, folder: CO 123 Iran, LBJL. 65. Bob Runde, “Shah of Iran to Visit,” Daily Californian (DC), April 22, 1964, USNSA box 220, folder: Iran 1963–66. 66. Robert Hamilton, “Shah Controversy,” DC, May 11, 1964; ISA Berkeley, “Ira­nian Reply,” DC, May 15, 1964; “Ira­nian Students at Illinois Protest Kerr’s Invitation,” DC, May 13, 1964, all in RFKP, Attorney General’s Files, Speeches 1961–64, box 3, folder: World Assembly of Youth—­Information on ­Human Rights Violations in Iran, August 7, 1964, JKFL. See also ISA Michigan State to Clark Kerr, April 21, 1964, USNSA box 282, folder: Ira­ni­an. 67. Jim Branson, “Senate Says No to Shah,” DC, May 13, 1964, RFKP, Attorney General’s Files, Speeches 1961–64, box 3, folder: World Assembly of Youth—­Information on ­Human Rights Violations in Iran, August 7, 1964, JKFL. 68. Gallo and Korns to Murphy, letters 1 and 2; Paget, Patriotic Betrayal, 291.

NOTES TO PAGES 80–83

189

69. ISA Southern California, leaflet, [March 1964] RG 59, RRI 1964–66, box 6, folder: Iran 1964 POL 13-2 and 13-2-­b, NARA. 70. ISAUS Executive Committee, May 25, 1964, in ISA Chicago, Iran in Turmoil, 43. 71. “Ira­nian Student Preparations to Demonstrate against Shah,” May 12, 1964, MemCon, RG 59, CFPF 1964–66, box 2331, folder: POL 7 Iran, January 1, 1964, NARA; US/Tehran to State, April 22, 1964, RG 59, CFPF 1964–66, box 397, folder EDX Iran, January 1, 1964, NARA; Tiger to Lynch, “Ira­nian Student Activities during Shah’s Visit: III.” 72. State to US/Tehran, May 12, 1964, RG 59, CFPF 1964–66, box 2331, folder: POL 7 Iran, January 1, 1964, NARA; US/Tehran to State, May 13, 1964, RG 59, CFPF 1964–66, box 2331, folder: POL 7 Iran, January 1, 1964, NARA. 73. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, “Speech to University of California, Los Angeles,” June 12, 1964, in Iran, Philosophy ­Behind the Revolution: A Se­lection of Writing and Speeches of the Shahanshah (London: Orient Commerce Establishment, 1971), 197–202; State to US/ Tehran, “Shah’s Visit,” June 16, 1964, NSF, Files of Robert Komer (FRK), box 27, folder: Visit of Shah of Iran—­June 1964, LBJL; “Shah Makes Plea at UCLA Exercise,” LAT, June 12, 1964; “Pickets at U.C.L.A. Jeer Shah of Iran,” Chicago Tribune, June 12, 1964; Matin-­Asgari, Ira­nian Student Opposition to the Shah, 75–76. 74. “Military Modernization Discussions with the Shah of Iran,” June 12, 1964, ­MemCon, FRUS 1964–1968, vol. 22, doc. 42; State to US/Tehran, Memorandum of Understanding, July 2, 1964, Digital National Security Archive (DNSA), IR00531; US/Tehran to State, Memorandum of Understanding Signed, July 4, 1964, DNSA, IR00532. 75. Tiger, “National Student Association Relations with Anti-­Regime Ira­nian Students,” June 16, 1964, MemCon, RG 59, Formerly Top Secret Central Policy Files 1964–66, box 13/22, folder: POL-18, NARA. 76. Abbas Milani, Tales of Two Cities: A Persian Memoir (Washington, DC: Mage, 2006), 98. 77. Azar Nafisi, ­Things I’ve Been ­Silent About: Memories of a Prodigal ­Daughter (New York: Random House, 2010), 203; Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (New York: Random House, 2004), 85. 78. Arthur Marwick periodizes the “high sixties” from 1964 to 1969 in The Sixties. 79. Andrew, The Other Side of the Sixties, 91–101, quote on 96; Tom Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1988), 50–51. 80. Harvey Flad on Ira­nian Students, July 7, 1961, USNSA box 282, folder: Ira­ni­an. 81. Tom Hayden, The Port Huron Statement: The Visionary Call of the 1960s Revolution (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005), 45, 98–99; Massimo Teodori, ed., The New Left: A Documentary History (New York: Bobbs-­Merrill, 1969), 184–85; Carl Davidson, ed., Revolutionary Youth and the New Working Class: The Praxis Papers, the Port Authority Statement, the RYM Documents and Other Lost Writings of SDS (Pittsburgh: Changemaker, 2011), 78; David Gilbert and David Loud, U.S. Imperialism (Chicago: Students for a Demo­cratic Society, February 1968). 82. Carl Oglesby, ed., The New Left Reader (New York: Grove Press, 1969), 245. 83. Denis Wright, “Ira­nian Youth in Turmoil,” March 23, 1971, Diplomatic Report no. 268/71, FCO 17/1514, NAUK; US/Tehran to State, “Youth in Iran,” February 22, 1971, A-56, FRUS 1969–1976, vol. E-4, doc. 116; John Howison to John Jernegan, “Your ­Appointment,” November 13, 1964, RG 59, RRI 1964–66, box 2, folder: Iran EDX 15, NARA; Nafisi, ­Things I’ve Been S­ ilent About, 201; “Resolutions of the Fourth Congress of the Confederation of Ira­nian Students.” 84. ISAUS, “Is Iran Potentially Another Vietnam?”; Statement, ISA New E ­ ngland, October 14, 1963, USNSA box 220, folder: Iran 1963–66. 85. Robert Witherspoon on Tehranian, December 3, 1964; Witherspoon on Ali Fatemi, December 26, 1964, both in USNSA box 282, folder: Ira­ni­an; Ronald Story on Lebaschi, January 7, 1964, USNSA box 220, folder: Iran 1963–66.

190 NOTES TO PAGES 83–87

86. Backoff, “Report on the Fourth Congress of the Confederation of Ira­nian Students”; Matin-­Asgari, Ira­nian Student Opposition to the Shah, 82–86, 91, 94; Altbach and Uphoff, Student Internationals, 76–77, 192–93n13. 87. Stern, “Short Account of International Student Politics,” 30. 88. Julius Glickman on Lebaschi, November 30, 1964, USNSA box 282, folder: Ira­ni­an. 89. Backoff, “Report on the Fourth Congress of the Confederation of Ira­nian Students.” 90. Material on ISAUS, Students for a Demo­cratic Society Rec­ords, 1958–70, series 3, National Office 1964–70, reel 30, Wisconsin Historical Society Archives. 91. ISAUS, August 13, 1967, bulletin, CIA Rec­ords Search Tool (CREST), NARA; ISAUS, “Shah of Iran, Puppet of the U.S. Imperialists H ­ ere to See Big Boss LBJ,” 1967, flyer, Virtual Vietnam Archive, Texas Tech University; James Yenckel, “Iran Students Picket CIA’s Headquarters,” WP, August 21, 1967; “CIA Picketed by Ira­ni­ans Against Shah,” Baltimore Sun, August 21, 1967. 92. Bahman Nirumand, Iran: The New Imperialism in Action, trans. Leonard Mins (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), 6–8, 11–16, 183–84; Slobodian, Foreign Front, 106–7; US/Zu­rich to State, “Talk by Bahman Nirumand at Zu­rich University,” December 18, 1967, A-44, RG 59, CFPF 1967–69, box 2214, folder: POL Iran, January 1, 1967, NARA. 93. Karin Bauer, ed. Every­body Talks about the Weather . . . ​We D ­ on’t: The Writings of Ulrike Meinhof (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008), 39–40, 171–77; Slobodian, Foreign Front, 108–10. 94. US/Munich to State, “The Visit of the Shah in Munich,” June 2, 1967, RG 59, CFPF 1967–69, box 2215, folder: POL 7 Iran, June 1, 1967, NARA; Slobodian, Foreign Front, chap. 4. 95. US/Berlin to State, “Anti-­Shah Demonstration in Berlin,” June 2, 1967; US/Bonn to State, “State Visit by Shah of Iran,” June 3, 1967, both in RG 59, CFPF 1967–69, box 2215, folder: POL 7 Iran, June 1, 1967, NARA. See also US/Berlin to State, “Senat Protocol Chief ’s Comments on Visit of the Shah,” June 13, 1967, A-587, RG 59, CFPF 1967–69, box 2215, folder: POL 7 Iran, June 1, 1967, NARA. 96. For years the police officer who shot and killed Ohnesorg claimed that he acted in self-­defense, but in 2009 investigators discovered that the officer was an in­for­mant for the East German Stasi. “New Probe into 1967 Killing,” Der Spiegel Online International, January 23, 2012. 97. US/Tehran to State, “Bi-­weekly Po­liti­cal Report,” June 10, 1967, A-676, RG 59, CFPF 1967–69, box 2214, folder: POL 2 Iran, January 1, 1967, NARA. 98. Theodore Eliot, interview by William Burr, July 30, 1986, pp. 66–67, OHIC/FIS. 99. Walt Rostow to Lyndon Johnson, “Appointment for the Shah of Iran,” March 6, 1968, FRUS 1964–1968, vol. 22, doc. 266; US/Tehran to State, “Shah’s Visit,” May 29, 1968, FRUS 1964–1968, vol. 22, doc. 289; Rafizadeh, Witness, 153–55; Nina McCain, “Just Not Enough Rain Checks,” BG, June 14, 1968; State to US/Tehran, June 14, 1968, RG 59, CFPF 1967–69, box 2215, folder: POL 7 Iran, June 1, 1968, NARA; Pahlavi, “Address to Harvard University,” June 13, 1968,” in Iran, Philosophy ­behind the Revolution, 221–29. 100. New Left Notes, June 24, 1968, 4. 101. Castiglioni, “No Longer a Client, Not Yet a Partner”; Offiler, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Modernization of Iran; Alvandi, Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah; Fain, American Ascendance and British Retreat in the Persian Gulf Region. 102. Huntington, Po­liti­cal Order in Changing Socie­ties, chap. 3, quotes on 160, 156, 140. 103. Gasiorowski, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Shah, 147. 104. Juan Linz, quoted in Chehabi, Ira­nian Politics and Religious Modernism, 33; Bill, The Ea­gle and the Lion, 166–67. 105. “Briefing Paper for Mr. Shriver’s Trip,” January 2, 1964, RG 59, RRI 1964–66, box 1, folder: Vari­ous Briefing Memoranda, NARA; US/Tehran to State, “The Ira­nian Intel-

NOTES TO PAGES 87–90

191

lectual Community,” December 21, 1963, A-351, box 1, folder 22, Martin F. Herz Papers, Georgetown University Special Collections; Abbas Milani, The Persian Sphinx: Amir Abbas Hoveyda and the Riddle of the Ira­nian Revolution (Washington, DC: Mage, 2004), 140–45, 153–69; Zonis, The Po­liti­cal Elite of Iran, 86–90; Bill, Politics of Iran, 44–49; Bill, The Ea­gle and the Lion, 163–65; William Green Miller, “Po­liti­cal Organ­ization in Iran: From Dowreh to Po­liti­cal Party: From Dowreh to Po­liti­cal Party, Part 1,” ­Middle East Journal 23 (Spring 1969): 159–67; Miller, “Political Organization in Iran: From Dowreh to Political Party, Part II,” Middle East Journal 23 (Summer 1969): 343–50. 106. Marvin G. Weinbaum, “Iran Finds a Party System: The Institutionalization of ‘Iran Novin,’ ” ­Middle East Journal 27 (Autumn 1973): 439–55; Huntington, Po­liti­cal Order in Changing Socie­ties, 12–24. 107. William Helseth, February 16, 1967, MemCon; Charles Rassias, April 20, 1967, MemCon; Stockwell Everts to Martin Herz, July 17, 1967; Herz to Eliot, July 20, 1967; Herz to Eliot, August 15, 1967, all in RG 59, RRI 1965–75, box 2, folder: POL 14 Elections Iran 1967, NARA. 108. State to US/Tehran, January 28, 1965; US/Tehran to State, March 8, 1964, both in NSF, Country File, box 136 (1 of 2), folder: Iran Cables vol. 1, January 1964–­December 1965, LBJL. 109. CIA Office of Current Intelligence, “Reform in Iran,” December 1964 special report, NSF, Country File, box 136 (1 of 2), folder: Iran Memos and Misc. vol. 1, January 1964–­December 1965, LBJL. 110. US/Tehran to State, “The Ira­nian Intellectual Community,” December 21, 1963, A-351. 111. Robert Witherspoon on Tehranian, December 3, 1964. 112. Tiger, “National Student Association Relations with Anti-­Regime Ira­nian Students.” 113. John Whiteford Boyle, “The Ira­nian Student Situation,” USNSA box 220, folder: NUS Iran 1949–61. 114. T. Cuyler Young, “Iran in Continuing Crisis,” Foreign Affairs 40 (January 1962): 275–92. 115. Bill, The Ea­gle and the Lion, 398. 116. USIA Research and Reference Ser­v ice, “Attitudes and Values of Ira­nian University Students,” December 1964, USIA Rec­ords, RG 306, entry no. P 142, box 23, R-22064, NARA. 117. William Green Miller, interview by Charles Stuart Kennedy, initial interview February 10, 2003, Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, Foreign Affairs Oral History Proj­ect; Gasiorowski, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Shah, 99; William Miller to Daniel Newberry, “Recent Activities of the National Front,” May 6, 1964, RG 59, RRI 1964–66, box 6, folder: Iran 1964 POL 12-­d, NARA. 118. US/Tehran to State, “The Ira­nian Intellectual Community,” December 21, 1963, A-351. 119. Herz to John Bowling, June 3, 1964, RG 59, RRI 1964–66, box 2, folder: EDX 1 Iran 1964, NARA. 120. Miller, “The ‘New Men.’ ” Miller’s superiors did not accept many of his findings and encouraged him to tone down his critical perspective. John Howison to Herz, May 3, 1965, RG 59, RRI 1964–66, box 11, folder: Iran 1965, POL 12-­d, NARA. 121. Homayun Sanati and Herz, October 10, 1965, MemCon; Cyrus Qani and Eliot, October 13, 1965, MemCon, both in RG 59, RRI 1964–66, box 12, folder: Iran 1965 POL 2, NARA; “Prob­lems of Con­temporary Iran,” April 16–17, 1965, program at Harvard University, PWOD, box 1720, folder 1; Miller, “The ‘New Men’ ”; Milani, Eminent Persians, 1:385–93. 122. Iraj Hedayat and J. Anthony Allitto, August 5, 1966, MemCon, RG 59, RRI 1964– 66, box 18, folder: Iran 1966 POL 2, General Reports, Statistics, NARA.

192 NOTES TO PAGES 90–95

123. William Helseth, October 21, 1967, MemCon, RG 59, RRI 1965–75, box 2, POL 14 Elections Iran 1967, NARA. 124. “Educational Background of Members of the Ira­nian Cabinet,” May 4, 1967, box 1, folder 22, Martin F. Herz Papers; Zonis, Po­liti­cal Elite of Iran, 167–74. 125. Lyndon Johnson to Shah of Iran, November 28, 1967, FRUS 1964–1968, vol. 22, doc. 250. 126. Mehdi Samii, Walt Rostow, and Harold Saunders, June 13, 1968, MemCon, NSF, Country File, box 136 (2 of 2), folder: Iran Memos and Misc. vol. 2 (1 of 2), January 1966–­January 1969, LBJL. 127. Lyndon Johnson, November 29, 1967, NSF, Country File, box 136 (2 of 2), folder: Iran Memos and Misc. vol. 2 (1 of 2), January 1966–­January 1969, LBJL. 128. US/Tehran to State, “Year-­End Report on the Po­liti­cal Situation in Iran,” December 31, 1963, A-361, NSF, FRK, box 27, folder: Iran, November 1963–­December 1964 ­(1 of 2), LBJL. 129. Jeremy Varon, Michael S. Foley, and John McMillian, “Time Is an Ocean: The Past and ­Future of the Sixties,” Sixties 1, no. 1 (2008): 1, 3. 130. Dabashi, Iran without Borders, 109. 131. Lebaschi to Lyndon Johnson, April 13, 1964, tele­gram; ISAUS Executive Committee to Lyndon Johnson, May 11, 1965, tele­gram; ISAUS Executive Committee to Lyndon Johnson, August 10, 1967, tele­gram, all in WHCF, Countries, box 41, folder: CO 123 Iran, LBJL. 132. Silences in archives can be quite telling. Richard M. Nixon Presidential Materials Proj­ect, WHCF, Subject Files, boxes 37 and 38, Richard M. Nixon Library (RMNL). 133. Bertrand Russell, “Inside the Shah’s Prisons,” unpublished report (London: Bertrand Russell Office, 1968; repr., Ira­nian Student Association of Southern California). 4. THE BOOM

Epigraph: Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, quoted in ACE, US-­Iranian Cooperation in Higher Education, 10. 1. Pahlavi, Answer to History, 175–76; Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and Ashraf Pahlavi, ­Toward the ­Great Civilization: A Dream Revisited (London: Satrap, 1994). 2. Alvandi, Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah. 3. Folders marked “Iran” in the Richard M. Nixon Pre-­Presidential Papers, 1953 Far East Trip, box 2, RMNL. 4. Rafizadeh, Witness, 247–48. 5. Fain, American Ascendance and British Retreat in the Persian Gulf Region; Jeffrey Kimball, “The Nixon Doctrine: A Saga of Misunderstanding,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 36 (March 2006): 59–74; Douglas L ­ ittle, American Orientalism: The United States and the ­Middle East since 1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), chap. 4. 6. Bill, The Ea­gle and the Lion, 173. 7. Tehran, May 31, 1972, MemCon, FRUS 1969–1976, vol. E-4, doc. 201; Rubin, Paved With Good Intentions, 134–35. 8. Stephen McGlinchey, “Richard Nixon’s Road to Tehran: The Making of the U.S.-­ Iran Arms Agreement of May 1972,” Diplomatic History 37 (September 2013): 843. Emphasis in original. 9. Bill, The Ea­gle and the Lion, 201–2. 10. Dhofar (Berkeley: ISA and Arab Students in Northern California, December 1974). 11. Bill, The Ea­gle and the Lion, 197; Abrahamian, Iran between Two Revolutions, 427– 31; Gelvin, The Modern ­Middle East, 259–60; Alvandi, Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah, 65, 131; Milani, Eminent Persians 2:757–58.

NOTES TO PAGES 95–101

193

12. Amir Taheri, “The Second Phase Begins,” Kayhan International (KI), May 11, 1974, box 3, folder 32, James Bill Papers. 13. Abrahamian, Iran between Two Revolutions, 435–36. 14. US/Tehran to State, January 9, 1973, airgram, FRUS 1969–1976, vol. 27, doc. 1. 15. David Patrikarakos, Nuclear Iran: The Birth of an Atomic State (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2012), 31. 16. Shirin Hakimzadeh, “Iran: A Vast Diaspora Abroad and Millions of Refugees at Home,” Migration Information Source, September 1, 2006. 17. Abrahamian, Iran between Two Revolutions, 427. 18. International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and International Covenant on Civil and Po­liti­cal Rights, December 16, 1966, U.N. Treaty Collection, chap. 4, docs 3 and 4. 19. Pahlavi, Answer to History, 101. 20. Roland Burke, “From Individual Rights to National Development: The First UN International Conference on ­Human Rights, Tehran, 1968,” Journal of World History 19 (September 2008): 275–77, 282–88, quotes on 286–87; Pahlavi, The White Revolution. 21. Ali M. Ansari, The Politics of Nationalism in Modern Iran (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 166–79, quotes on 166. 22. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, “Speech to the International Conference on H ­ uman Rights,” May 1968, in Iran, Philosophy b­ ehind the Revolution, 220; Moyn, The Last Utopia, 2–3. 23. The CIA reported that the princess “was for years the central figure in nearly all the scandal connected with the court.” Intelligence Report 2035–72, May 1972, FRUS 1969– 1976, vol. E-4, doc. 180. 24. Ashraf Pahlavi, ­Faces in a Mirror: Memoirs from Exile (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1980), chap. 7; Burke, “From Individual Rights to National Development,” 284– 85, 296. For more on Ashraf ’s understanding of ­human rights, see “­Human Rights,” Times (London), May 21, 1974. 25. Shawcross, The Shah’s Last Ride, 189. 26. “68 Nations’ Delegates Attend Shah’s Party,” Baltimore Sun, October 15, 1971; Charlotte Curtis, “Tent City Awaits Cele­bration: Shah’s ‘Greatest Show,’ ” NYT, October 12, 1971; Talinn Grigor, “Preserving the Antique Modern: Persepolis ’71,” ­Future Anterior 2 (Summer 2005): 22–29. 27. “Encomium upon Cyrus the ­Great,” October 12, 1971, Homer A. Jack Papers, series 8, box 2, folder: Trip to Iran/invitation, programs, Swarthmore College Peace Collection. See also “Anniversary Programme”; Amir Taheri, “World Heads Gather for Festivities,” KI, October 14, 1971, 1 and 16, both in Oversize Items Collection docs. 133–201, Homer Jack A. Papers, Swarthmore College Peace Collection. 28. “Items-­in-­Gift Pre­sen­ta­tion from Iran,” October 14, 1971, United Nations Archives and Rec­ords Management. 29. A. M. Shapurian, “Year of Cyrus the G ­ reat,” Guardian (Manchester), April 17, 1971. 30. “Shah Sends 33 Ira­ni­ans to Michigan State,” Journalism Educator, April 1975; Hamid Naficy, A Social History of Ira­nian Cinema, vol. 2: The Industrializing Years, 1941–1978 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 141–43; Milani, Eminent Persians, 1:165–69. Only three episodes of the documentary ­were completed and Michigan State’s contract was not renewed when it expired just before the revolution. 31. Ansari, Politics of Nationalism in Modern Iran, 182–84. 32. Bill, The Ea­gle and the Lion, 221–24. 33. Milani, Eminent Persians, 1:327–40, 165–69. 34. Joseph Kraft, “Letter from Iran,” New Yorker, December 18, 1978.

194 NOTES TO PAGES 101–105

35. Zohreh T. ­Sullivan, Exiled Memoires: Stories of Ira­nian Diaspora (Philadelphia: ­Temple University Press, 2001), 59–64. 36. Frank P. Sherwood, Uncommon ­People I Have Known: Sixteen Individuals Who Have Made a Difference (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2013), 1–27, quotes on 12, 13, 8. 37. Guillermo A. O’Donnell, Modernization and Bureaucratic-­Authoritarianism: Studies in South American Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). 38. Milani has analyzed this subject in many of his books. Milani, The Persian Sphinx, 275–87; Milani, The Shah (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 379–83; Milani, Eminent Persians, 1:72–78. See also Huntington, Po­liti­cal Order in Changing Socie­ties, chap. 1; Abrahamian, Iran between Two Revolutions, 441; Bill, The Ea­gle and the Lion, 222. 39. Abrahamian, Iran between Two Revolutions, 439–44. 40. Alvin Cottrell, “Iran’s Armed Forces u ­ nder the Pahlavi Dynasty,” in Lenczowski, Iran ­under the Pahlavis, 399–407, 422–25; Ward, Immortal, 144–45, 198–200; Hamilton Twitchell, interview by William Burr, April 1 and June 3, 1988, pp. 44–45, 48, 92, OHIC/ FIS. 41. Bill, The Ea­gle and the Lion, 209; McGlinchey, US Arms Policies ­towards the Shah’s Iran, chaps. 4–5. 42. Armin Meyer, interview by William Burr, March 29, 1985, pp. 22–23, OHIS/FIS. 43. Twitchell interview, p. 71. 44. Robert Macy to William Gaud, “Letter from the Shah to President Johnson,” January 22, 1964, RG 59, RRI 1964–66, box 4, POL 15-1 Iran 1964, NARA. 45. Cottrell, “Iran’s Armed Forces ­under the Pahlavi Dynasty,” 422–25; Ward, Immortal, 198–200. 46. Jerry Harkavy, “63 Ira­ni­ans Enrolled at Maine Maritime,” Lewiston Daily Sun, January 11, 1975. 47. U.S. House of Representatives, Armed Ser­v ices Committee, Hearings on H.R. 7582, H.R. 8187, and H.J. Res. 735, 93rd Cong. 23–24 (1973). ­There was talk of establishing “an Annapolis for Iran” in the United States that would admit 250 Ira­ni­ans for training each year for up to eight years while their government constructed a naval acad­emy, but the plan stalled. See the documents of May–­July 1975 in Access to Archival Databases (AAD), RG 59, CFPF 1973–76, NARA. 48. “Thirty Ira­nian Midshipmen Attend VMI,” [1975], Loring Edward Hart Rec­ords, box 12 (LEHR, all box 12), Norwich University Archives and Special Collections. 49. House, Hearings on H.R. 7582, H.R. 8187, and H.J. Res. 735, 2–3, 23–25; Charles Naas to Ardeshir Zahedi, September 12, 1974, RG 59, RRI 1965–75, box 10, Iran 1974, DEF 6–9, NARA. 50. House, Hearings on H.R. 7582, H.R. 8187, and H.J. Res. 735, 24; Robert Schott to Eliot, August 12, 1968, RG 59, RRI 1965–75, box 2, Iran 1968 DEF 19-2, NARA; Cottrell, “Iran’s Armed Forces ­under the Pahlavi Dynasty,” 401; US/Tehran to State, “Visas for Ira­ nian Military Students,” April 17, 1973, 1973Tehran02539, AAD; Harkavy, “63 Ira­ni­ans Enrolled at Maine Maritime”; Maureen Williams, “8 Ira­nian Midshipmen Gradu­ate from MMA,” Bangor Daily News, January 11–12, 1975. 51. Loring Hart to Commander Abghari, July 1, 1977; Darush Farzaneh to Hart, March 24, 1978, both in LEHR. See also Williams, “8 Ira­nian Midshipmen Gradu­ate from MMA.” 52. Harkavy, “63 Ira­ni­ans Enrolled at Maine Maritime”; “8 Ira­ni­ans to Gradu­ate from MMA on Jan. 10,” Bangor Daily News, January 10, 1975; Williams, “8 Ira­nian Midshipmen Gradu­ate from MMA.” 53. Saiid Rabiipour, Farewell to Islam (Longwood, FL: Xulon Press, 2009), 34–35, 39, 42–44, 55–72; “IIN Midshipmen Training Proj­ect,” March 2, 1978, LEHR.

NOTES TO PAGES 105–108

195

54. “New Rat Class Fifth Largest in History, Undergoes Cadre,” VMI Cadet, September 3, 1971. 55. “Ira­nian Cadets Establish Themselves at VMI,” VMI Cadet, September 12, 1975; “­Virginia Military Institute Weekday Schedule,” LEHR. 56. Documents in the LEHR indicate that Norwich followed VMI’s program and VMI shared with Norwich details on its summer program. 57. “Ira­nian Midshipmen to Enroll,” Norwich University Rec­ord, April 1976. See also Captain Hadjikarimi to Hart, June 29, 1978; Hart to Hadjikarimi, July 13, 1978; “Summary/ Statistics of Ira­nian Norwich University Corps of Cadets,” May 10, 1980; James Galloway to Captain Sotudeh, April 18, 1979; “Basic Points of Proposal for Development of the Ira­nian Program at Norwich University,” [n.d.], all in LEHR. 58. James F. Goode, “Assisting Our ­Brothers, Defending Ourselves: The Ira­nian Intervention in Oman, 1972–75,” Ira­nian Studies 47, no. 3 (2014): 441–62. 59. David Holden, “A Napoleonic Vision of Iran as a New Japan,” NYT, May 26, 1974. 60. Alvandi, Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah, 131–33; Ali Vaez and Karim Sadjadpour, Iran’s Nuclear Odyssey: Costs and Risks (Washington, DC: Car­ne­gie Endowment for International Peace, 2013), 5. 61. Farmanfarmaian, interview by Habib Ladjevardi, January 19, 1983, IOHC/HU. 62. Farah Stockman, “Iran’s Nuclear Vision First Glimpsed at MIT,” BG, March 12, 2007. 63. Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Ekbladh, The ­Great American Mission; Patrikarakos, Nuclear Iran. 64. Stockman, “Iran’s Nuclear Vision First Glimpsed at MIT.” 65. Patrikarakos, Nuclear Iran, chap. 3; National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 268, A-76, US/Tehran to State, April 15, 1976, and A-69, US/Tehran to State, May 11, 1977. 66. Jacob Darwin Hamblin, “The Nuclearization of Iran in the Seventies,” Diplomatic History 38, no. 5 (2014): 1115–16. See also Alvandi, Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah, chap. 4; Patrikarakos, Nuclear Iran, chaps. 1–5. 67. Patrikarakos, Nuclear Iran, 20–24, 45–47; US/Tehran to State, A-76 and A-69; “M.I.T. to Train Nuclear Engineers for Iran,” March 14, 1975, news release, Archival Collection 276: Mas­sa­chu­setts Institute of Technology Office of the President, Rec­ords of Vice President Constantine B. Simonides, International Exchange Programs Iran, box 14, folder 28, Mas­sa­chu­setts Institute of Technology Archives and Special Collections (AC 276, MIT; all from box 14, folder 28); John Kifner, “Ira­nian Program Debated at M.I.T.,” NYT, April 27, 1975. 68. Vaez and Sadjadpour, Iran’s Nuclear Odyssey, 4–5. 69. “Training of Ira­ni­ans,” AB 57/180; “Ira­ni­ans,” AB 57/185, both in Rec­ords of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, NAUK. 70. “M.I.T. to Launch New Nuclear Engineering Program,” April 4, 1975, news release, AC 276, MIT. 71. Gilman, Mandarins of the ­Future, chap. 5. 72. Stuart W. Leslie and Robert Kargon, “Exporting MIT: Science, Technology, and Nation-­Building in India and Iran,” Osiris 21 (January 2006): 110–30; Barb Moore, “Ira­ ni­ans May Double Nuc. Eng.,” Tech, March 7, 1975, AC 276, MIT. 73. “M.I.T. to Train Nuclear Engineers for Iran.” 74. Rec­ord of the Special Faculty Meeting, April 2, 1975, AC 276, MIT. 75. Minutes of the Executive Committee, January 3, 1975, AC 276, MIT. 76. Seyyed Hossein Nasr Foundation, “About Seyyed Hossein Nasr”; Milani, Eminent Persians, 1:31.

196 NOTES TO PAGES 108–112

77. Leslie and Kargon, “Exporting MIT,” 123, 125; Editorial, “Selling MIT: Bombs for the Shah,” Tech, March 7, 1975, AC 276, MIT. 78. “Chronology,” April 22, 1975, AC 276, MIT; “M.I.T. to Train Nuclear Engineers for Iran”; Kifner, “Ira­nian Program Debated at M.I.T.” 79. “Chronology.” 80. M.I.T. to Train Nuclear Engineers for Iran.” 81. Moore, “Ira­ni­ans May Double Nuc. Eng.”; Mike McNamee, “Ira­ni­ans Accept Program,” Tech, March 18, 1975; “M.I.T. to Train Nuclear Engineers for Iran,” all in AC 276, MIT. 82. Vaez and Sadjadpour, Iran’s Nuclear Odyssey, 4. 83. Mike McNamee, “Iran Reactor Deal Stalled,” Tech, March 11, 1975, AC 276, MIT. 84. Rec­ord of Faculty Meeting, March 19, 1975; Editorial, “Selling MIT,” both in AC 276, MIT. 85. Rec­ord of the Special Faculty Meetings, April 2 and 4, 1975, AC 276, MIT. 86. Editorial, “Selling MIT.” 87. “M.I.T. to Train Nuclear Engineers for Iran.” Scholars have found scant evidence to support the claim that the shah wanted a bomb. Patrikarakos, Nuclear Iran, 58–70; Alvandi, Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah, 133–34. 88. Rec­ord of the Special Faculty Meeting, April 4, 1975. 89. Editorial, “Selling MIT.” 90. Co­ali­tion against Training Nuclear Engineers for the Shah, Social Action Coordinating Committee, ISA, “An Open Letter to the MIT Community,” April 1975, AC 276, MIT. 91. Kifner, “Ira­nian Program Debated at M.I.T.”; Thomas Spisak and Michael Dortch, “Nuc-­Eng Sit-­In Held to Protest Iran Deal,” Tech, April 29, 1975. 92. Leslie and Kargon, “Exporting MIT,” 124. 93. Kifner, “Ira­nian Program Debated at M.I.T.” 94. Stockman, “Iran’s Nuclear Vision First Glimpsed at MIT”; Patrikarakos, Nuclear Iran, 38. 95. Mike McNamee, “Iran Reactor Deal Stalled,” Tech, March 11, 1975, AC 276, MIT. Salehi opposed the MIT contract ­because he thought that en masse training was inefficient and that ­there ­were more productive uses of the money. For more, see Mehrzad Boroujerdi, “Iran’s New Foreign Minister: Ali Akbar Salehi,” PBS Tehran Bureau, January 31, 2011. 96. Hamblin, “The Nuclearization of Iran in the Seventies,” 1115; Muhammad Sahimi, “Forced to Fuel: Iran’s Nuclear Energy Program,” Harvard International Review 26 (Winter 2005): 42–45. 97. Stockman, “Iran’s Nuclear Vision First Glimpsed at MIT.” 98. Farian Sabahi, The Literacy Corps in Pahlavi Iran, 1963–1979: Po­liti­cal, Social, and Literary Implications (Lugano: Editrice Sapiens, 2002). 99. Saleh, Cultural Ties between Iran and the United States, 3. 100. Menashri, Education and the Making of Modern Iran, 210–25, 249–54, 207, t­ able 12; ACE, An Analy­sis of US-­Iranian Cooperation in Higher Education, 19–23, 30–33; Saleh, Cultural Ties between Iran and the United States, 355–77. 101. “Ira­nian Government Scholarship Programs,” November 6, 1974, MemCon, CU, group 12, series 14, box 296, file 17. 102. Ibid.; U.S. Advisory Commission on International Educational and Cultural Affairs, “Notes on Educational and Cultural Exchange between the United States and Countries in the M ­ iddle East,” March 1977, special report, CU, group 3, series 1, box 105, file 13; Iranian-­American Joint Subcommission for Science and Education, Briefing Papers, February 10–11, 1975, sections C and F, CU, group 12, series 14, box 296, file 17; George

NOTES TO PAGES 112–115

197

Baldwin, “The Ira­nian Brain Drain,” in Iran F ­ aces the Seventies, ed. Ehsan Yar-­Shater and John S. Badeau (New York: Praeger, 1971). 103. US/Tehran to State, “Call on Senate President,” June 26, 1977, 1977Tehran05575, AAD; US/Tehran to State, “Ashraf Pahlavi Foundation Established,” April 14, 1976, 1976Tehran03780, AAD; US/Tehran to State, “Ashraf Pahlavi Foundation Board Announced,” April 15, 1976, 1976Tehran03824, AAD; “Ira­nian Government Scholarship Programs,” November 6, 1974, MemCon, CU, group 12, series 14, box 296, file 17. See also Abrahamian, Iran between Two Revolutions, 438; Bill, The Ea­gle and the Lion, 103. 104. Rec­ord of the Special Faculty Meeting, April 2, 1975. 105. U.S. Commission for Cultural Exchange between Iran and the US (Commission for Cultural Exchange), Annual Program Proposals, Program Years 1976 and 1977, CIES, series 6, box 345, file 5; Commission for Cultural Exchange, Annual Program Proposals, Program Year 1978, CIES, series 6, box 345, file 6; Commission for Cultural Exchange, Annual Program Report, 1976, CIES, series 6, box 345, file 11. 106. Resume of Parirokh Rad, CIES, series 6, box 345, file 7. 107. Commission for Cultural Exchange, Annual Program Report, 1972, CIES, series 6, box 345, file 9; Commission for Cultural Exchange, Annual Program Proposal, Program Year 1978. 108. U.S. Advisory Commission on International Educational and Cultural Affairs, “Notes on Educational and Cultural Exchange.” 109. ­Middle East Newsletter, February 1970, January 1971, and January 1972, AFME, Newsletters, Swarthmore College Peace Collection; Iranian-­American Joint Subcommission for Science and Education, Briefing Papers, section C. 110. “Ira­nian Government Scholarship Programs.” 111. Iranian-­American Joint Subcommission for Science and Education, Briefing Papers, section C. 112. ­Middle East Newsletter, February 1970, AFME, Newsletters, Swarthmore College Peace Collection; Iraj Ayman, Educational Innovation in Iran (Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organ­ization, 1974), 20–23. 113. Garlitz, “U.S. University Advisors and Education Modernization,” 204–7; Bill, The Politics of Iran, 81; Jalal Al-­i Ahmad, Occidentosis: A Plague from the West, trans. R. Campbell (Berkeley, CA: Mizan Press, 1984), 85–86. 114. ACE, An Analy­sis of US-­Iranian Cooperation in Higher Education, 2, 15–16, 71–76, 79–82; U.S. Advisory Commission on International Educational and Cultural Affairs, “Notes on Educational and Cultural Exchange.” 115. US/Tehran to State, “Educational Exchange Proj­ects,” February 3, 1975, 1 and 2 of 2, CU, group 12, series 14, box 296, file 17; ACE, An Analy­sis of US-­Iranian Cooperation in Higher Education, 160–70; Paul Clancy, “Out of the Cold,” WP, March 14, 1976. 116. Report of Iran-­Harvard Planning Commission for Reza Shah Kabir University, November 20, 1974, box 5, folder 13, James Bill Papers. 117. ACE, An Analy­sis of US-­Iranian Cooperation in Higher Education, 53, 169. See also US/Tehran to State, “Educational Exchange Proj­ects,” February 3, 1975, 1 and 2 of 2; Iranian-­American Joint Subcommission for Science and Education, Briefing Papers, section C, both in CU, group 12, series 14, box 296, file 17. 118. ACE, An Analy­sis of US-­Iranian Cooperation in Higher Education, 6–7. 119. Merrill Sheils, “Petrogrants,” Newsweek, July 4, 1977; Seth Foldy, “Schools for Sale,” Win Magazine, June 12, 1975; Ronald Henkoff, “Do Oil and Education Mix?” Change, June 1977. See also Margaret O’Mara, “The Uses of the Foreign Student,” Social Science History 36 (Winter 2012): 583–615.

198 NOTES TO PAGES 116–120

120. Bill, The Ea­gle and the Lion, 381–82; Saleh, Cultural Ties between Iran and the United States, 390; Ehsan Naraghi, From Palace to Prison: Inside the Ira­nian Revolution, trans. Nilou Mobasser (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1994), 95; Harold Saunders to Henry Kissinger, “ ‘Blue-­suiters’ for Iran,” January 26, 1973, FRUS 1969–1976, vol. 27, doc. 6. 121. Keddie, Modern Iran, chap. 8, esp. 212, 187–90; Al-­i Ahmad, Occidentosis, 33 and chap. 9, esp. 118–21. 122. Bill, The Ea­gle and the Lion, 27, 32. 123. Keddie, Modern Iran, 170. 5. THE RECKONING

Epigraph: British Embassy Tehran to FCO, “­Human Rights,” June 23, 1977, FCO 58/1164, NAUK. 1. Roger Normand and Sarah Zaidi, ­Human Rights at the UN: The Po­liti­cal History of Universal Justice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), chap. 9. 2. David M. Trubek, “When Is an Omelet? What Is an Egg? Some Thought on Economic Development and ­Human Rights in Latin Amer­ic­ a,” American Journal of International Law 67 (November 1973): 199. 3. Amnesty International (AI), Report on Torture (1973), 207–10; Albala, Report on Mission to Iran, 1972, Papers of William J. Butler (PWJB), box 20, folder 451, Robert S. Marx Law Library, Archives, Rare Books, and Manuscripts Collections, University of Cincinnati. 4. AI, Report on Torture (1973), 210; AI, Press Conference on Iran, May 16, 1975, ISAP. On torture and po­liti­cal prisoners, see Committee against Repression in Iran, Iran: The Shah’s Empire of Repression (London: Committee against Repression in Iran, November 1976), 23–27; AI, Briefing: Iran (1976): 6–9; House of Representatives, Subcommittee on International Organ­izations, ­Human Rights in Iran, 94th Cong., 2nd Sess. 36–61 (1976). On the guerrilla armies, see Abrahamian, The Ira­nian Mojahedin; Vahabzadeh, A Guerrilla Odyssey. 5. Martin McLaughlin and Robert Craig on the Aspen Institute Conference on Foreign Youth and the American Image Abroad, August 1962, RG 59, RIAD 1958–63, box 7, folder: 13-­A Students: Fatemi and Qotbzadeh 1962, NARA. 6. Matin-­Asgari, Ira­nian Student Opposition to the Shah, 140–47. 7. ISA Philadelphia, letter, 1976, ISAP. 8. Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue; Moyn, The Last Utopia; Goedde, Hitchcock, and Iriye, eds., The H ­ uman Rights Revolution; Bradley, The World Re­imagined, chs. 5–8. 9. “Oil, Grandeur and a Challenge to the West,” Time, November 4, 1974; David Holden, “A Napoleonic Vision of Iran as a New Japan,” NYT, May 26, 1974. See also Andrew Scott Cooper, The Oil Kings: How the U.S., Iran, and Saudi Arabia Changed the Balance of Power in the Middle East (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011), 155–57; William A. Dorman and Mansour Farhang, The U.S. Press and Iran: Foreign Policy and the Journalism of Deference (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 131–35. 10. Christian Emery, US Foreign Policy and the Ira­nian Revolution: The Cold War Dynamics of Engagement and Strategic Alliance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 36–39; Guerrero, The Car­ter Administration and the Fall of Iran’s Pahlavi Dynasty, chap. 3; Seliktar, Failing the Crystal Ball Test, chap. 3; Trenta, “The Champion of H ­ uman Rights Meets the King of Kings.” 11. Bill, The Ea­gle and the Lion, 161–63; Milani, The Shah, 311. 12. Milani, Eminent Persians, 1:254–57; Behrooz, Rebels with A Cause, 39–41. 13. CISNU, Was It a Plot . . . ? See also Lucien Rey, “Guilt by Association,” New Left Review 35 (January–­February 1966): 102–4.

NOTES TO PAGES 121–123

199

14. ISAUS Executive Committee to Lyndon Johnson, May 11, 1965, WHCF, Countries, box 41, folder: CO 123 Iran, LBJL. 15. ISA Minnesota to Lyndon Johnson, August 7, 1965, RG 59, RRI 1964–66, box 11, folder: Iran 1965 POL 13-2-­b, NARA. 16. ISA Chicago to Douglas, May 12, 1965, PWOD, box 1719, folder 3. This tele­gram was also sent to the White House and is alternately located in WHCF, Countries, box 41, folder: CO 123 Iran, LBJL. 17. CISNU, May 2, 1965, press release, PWOD, box 1719, folder 6. 18. ISAUS Executive Committee to Lyndon Johnson, May 11, 1965; Khosrow Shakeri to Johnson, July 7, 1965, both in WHCF, Countries, box 41, folder: CO 123 Iran, LBJL; Committee for the Defense of Ira­nian Po­liti­cal Prisoners and Students (Committee for the Defense), “Statement on the Trial of Fourteen Ira­nian Intellectuals,” October 16, 1965, PWOD, box 1719, folder 6. 19. “M.P.s’ Protest Over Iran Gradu­ates,” Times (London), May 7, 1965; CISNU, Documents on the Pahlavi Reign of Terror in Iran: Eyewitness Reports and Newspaper Articles (Frankfurt: CISNU, 1971), 81–85; Letters and correspondences of the British Committee for the Defence of Po­liti­cal Prisoners in Iran, [1965], PWJB, box 20, folder 451; CISNU, Was It a Plot . . . ?, 9. 20. Khosrow Shakeri to Lyndon Johnson, July 7, 1965, WHCF, Countries, box 41, folder: CO 123 Iran, LBJL. 21. Douglas received regular communiques from Ira­ni­ans around the world, including one that described the trial as a ­matter “of ­great urgency.” U.S. Supreme Court Memorandum, November 2, 1965, PWOD, box 1719, folder 6. 22. Douglas to Lyndon Johnson, November 8, 1965; Komer to Douglas, November 27, 1965; Douglas to Komer, December 2, 1965, all in PWOD, box 1719, folder 6. For more, see WHCF, Countries, box 41, folder: CO 123 Iran, November 23, 1963–­November 27, 1965, LBJL; RG 59, RRI 1964–66, box 11, folder: Iran 1965 POL 23-8, NARA. 23. US/Tehran to State, “British Protest against Po­liti­cal Arrests in Iran,” May 18, 1965, RG 59, CFPF 1964–66, box 2335, folder: POL 29 Iran, NARA. 24. Hossein Mahdavy, “The Coming Crisis in Iran,” Foreign Affairs 44 (October 1965): 134–46; US/Tehran to State, “Article by Dr. Hosein Mahdavy,” October 4, 1965, RG 59, CFPF 1964–66, box 2337, folder: POL Iran-­US, January 1, 1964, NARA; Miller, “The ‘New Men’ ”; Miller to Herz, “Organ­ization Activities of the National Front,” April 18, 1964, RG 59, RRI 1964–66, box 6, folder: Iran 1964 POL 12-­d, NARA; Robert Witherspoon on ISAUS Congress, August 31, 1965, USNSA box 282, folder: Ira­ni­an. 25. Committee for the Defense, “Statement on the Trial of Fourteen Ira­nian Intellectuals”; Committee for the Defense, “Statement Concerning the Trial of 55 Young Ira­ni­ ans,” April 24, 1966, PWOD, box 1720, folder 1. 26. Confederation of Ira­nian Students (CIS) to U.N. Commission on H ­ uman Rights, October 25, 1965, in CISNU, Documents on the Pahlavi Reign of Terror in Iran, 65–69. 27. “Students Led into False Beliefs,” KI, October 19, 1965; “Prosecutor Counsels Nation’s Youth,” KI, October 20, 1965; “Shamsabadi? We ­Didn’t Take Him Seriously,” KI, October 17, 1965, all in RG 59, RRI 1964–66, box 11, folder: Newspaper Clippings 1965 POL 23-8, NARA. 28. ISAUS, October 20, 1965, press release, USNSA box 220, folder: Iran 1963–66; ISAUS, November 25, 1965, press release, USNSA box 282, folder: Ira­ni­an. 29. CISNU, November 3, 1965, press release; “U Thant Acts on Iran Protest,” Observer, November 7, 1965, both in CISNU, Documents on the Pahlavi Reign of Terror in Iran, 108– 9, 114–15. Matin-­Asgari, Ira­nian Student Opposition to the Shah, 88–89; “Iran Court to Hear Appeals,” Times (London), November 4, 1965. “Two Sentenced to Death,” KI, No-

200 NOTES TO PAGES 124–126

vember 2, 1965; “Verdict on Marble Palace Case,” KI, November 4, 1965, both in RG 59, RRI 1964–66, box 11, folder: Newspaper Clippings 1965 POL 23-8, NARA. 30. “Iran Shah Commutes Two Death Sentences,” Chicago Tribune, December 27, 1965. In a conversation with a U.S. diplomat, an Ira­nian technocrat credited the British parliamentarians for the moderated verdict. Cyrus Qani and Eliot, October 13, 1965, MemCon, RG 59, RRI 1964–66, box 12, folder: Iran 1965 POL 2, NARA. 31. Louis Blom-­Cooper, “The Tehran Trial,” Guardian (Manchester), November 4, 1965. 32. Bill, The Politics of Iran, 71–72. 33. “Attempted Assassination of the Shah,” April 12, 1965, MemCon, RG 59 RRI 1964– 66, box 11, folder: Iran 1965, POL 23-8, NARA. 34. “The Po­liti­cal Situation,” May 6, 1965, MemCon, RG 59, RRI 1964–66, box 12, folder: Iran 1965 POL 1, NARA. 35. Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue, 5. 36. Moyn, The Last Utopia, 129–33; AI USA, “Biographical Note,” Columbia University; Tom Buchanan, “ ‘The Truth ­Will Set You ­Free’: The Making of Amnesty International,” Journal of Contemporary History 37 (October 2002): 575–97; Keys, “Anti-­Torture Politics,” in The ­Human Rights Revolution, ed. Goedde, Hitchcock, and Iriye, 201–22; Sarah B. Snyder, “Exporting Amnesty International to the United States: Transatlantic ­Human Rights Activism in the 1960s,” ­Human Rights Quarterly 34 (August 2012): 779—99. 37. US/Tehran to State, “Trial Begins for Conspirators in April Attempt on Shah’s Life,” October 12, 1965, RG 59, CFPF 1964–66, box 2332, folder: POL 15-1 Iran, January 1, 1964, NARA; AI, Annual Report, 1965–66, 15; CISNU, Documents on the Pahlavi Reign of T ­ error in Iran, 59–63. The November 15, 1965 Amnesty International report authored by international observers is in PWOD, box 1719, folder 6. 38. AI, Annual Report 1969–1970, 9–10. 39. Hans-­Heinz Heldmann, “Report on the Iran Trip,” October 1970,” PWJB, box 20, folder 451; AI, Annual Report 1970–1971, 68–69; “Amnesty Envoy Is Held by Iran Police,” Guardian (Manchester), October 24, 1970; Slobodian, Foreign Front, 42, 104–5; Matin-­Asgari, Ira­nian Student Opposition to the Shah, 119–20, 129. 40. Vahabzadeh, A Guerrilla Odyssey, 25–30. 41. “Ira­nian Student Group Is Banned,” Militant, February 12, 1971; Matin-­Asgari, Ira­ nian Student Opposition to the Shah, 112. 42. Abrahamian, Tortured Confessions, 113–16. 43. US/Tehran to State, June 14, 1971, tele­gram 3128, doc. 130; US/Tehran to State, June 14, 1971, tele­gram 3146, doc. 131; US/Tehran to Joseph Sisco, June 17, 1971, tele­ gram 3242, doc. 132, all in FRUS 1969–1976, vol. E-4. 44. House of Representatives, Committee on International Relations, ­Human Rights and U.S. Policy: Argentina, Haiti, Indonesia, Iran, Peru, and the Philippines, 94th Cong., 2nd Sess. 19 (1976). 45. AI, Annual Report, 1974–1975, 8. 46. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Imperial Presidency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004). 47. Robert David Johnson, Congress and the Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), chap. 6; Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue, chap. 7; Donald M. Fraser, “Freedom and Foreign Policy,” Foreign Policy 26 (Spring 1977): 140—56. See also Thomas M. Franck, ed., The Tethered Presidency: Congressional Restraints on Executive Power (New York: New York University Press, 1981); David P. Forsythe, “­Human Rights in U.S. Foreign Policy: Retrospect and Prospect,” Po­liti­cal Science Quarterly 105 (Autumn, 1990): 435—54; Sarah B. Snyder, “ ‘A Call for U.S. Leadership: Congressional Activism on ­Human Rights,” Diplomatic History 37 (April 2013): 372–97. 48. Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Executive Sessions of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (Historical Series), 87th Cong., 1st Sess. 13, pt. 2, 155–61 (1961); Sen-

NOTES TO PAGES 127–129

201

ate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Arms Sales to Near East and South Asian Countries, 90th Cong., 1st Sess. (1967). 49. Armin Meyer to Eliot, May 15, 1967, RG 59, RRI 1965–75, box 2, folder: POL 15-1 Iran 1967, NARA. 50. US/Tehran to State, “Shah’s Visit in Suspense,” May 10, 1967, FRUS 1964–1968, vol. 22, doc. 193; US/Tehran to State, “Shah and Fulbright,” May 12, 1967, FRUS 1964– 1968, vol. 22, doc. 195. 51. Jeremi Suri, “Non-­Governmental Organ­izations and Non-­State Actors,” in Palgrave Advances in International History, ed. Patrick Finney (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 239. 52. William H. ­Sullivan, Mission to Iran (New York: Morton, 1981), 32. 53. “Sharon La Bere,” October 5, 1971, MemCon; Douglas Heck to Jack Miklos, October 9, 1971, both in RG 59, RRI 1965–75, box 6, folder: PS 7, Assistance to Citizens, Iran 1971, NARA. The media covered La Bere’s arrest: “American ­Woman Arrested in Iran,” WP, September 20, 1971; “Iran Is Reported to Hold U.S. ­Woman without Charge,” NYT, October 8, 1971; “Iran Opens Military Trial of U.S. W ­ oman as a Spy,” NYT, November 10, 1971; “U.S. ­Woman Is Sentenced by Iran to 3-­Year Term,” NYT, November 17, 1971. Context for the Ira­nian government’s charges in Vahabzadeh, A Guerrilla Odyssey, 214–15. 54. ISA Northern California, October 4, 1971, protest flyer, Ira­nian Po­liti­cal Opposition Lit­er­a­ture Collection, box 48, folder 12, Hoover Institution Archives. 55. Ronald Dellums to Edward Springer, October 8, 1971; Don Edwards to Douglas MacArthur II, October 26, 1971; Douglas Heck to Edwards, November 4, 1971; Springer to Dellums, November 4, 1971, all in RG 59, RRI 1965–75, box 6, folder: PS 7, Assistance to Citizens, Iran 1971, NARA. Robert Self, “ ‘To Plan Our Liberation’: Black Power and the Politics of Place in Oakland, California, 1965–1977,” Journal of Urban History 26 (September 2000): 784. 56. Douglas Heck to Jack Miklos, October 9, 1971; Edward Springer to Joel La Bere, November 17, 1971, enclosure with Springer to Miklos, December 1, 1971, both in RG 59, RRI 1965–75, box 6, folder: PS 7, Assistance to Citizens, Iran 1971, NARA. “U.S. ­Woman Is Sentenced by Iran to 3-­Year Term,” NYT, November 17, 1971; “Sharon La Bere Is Freed,” Chicago Daily Defender, January 25, 1972. 57. Abrahamian, The Ira­nian Mojahedin, 128–35. 58. Parren Mitchell to Amir Aslan Afshar, February 24, 1972; Shirley Chisholm to William Rogers, February 25, 1972; Ronald Dellums to Amir Abbas Hoveyda, February 28, 1972, all in ISAUS, Corruption and Strug­gle in Iran (Berkeley, CA: ISAUS Defense Section, June 1972), 22–24. Chisholm letter in RG 59, SNF 1970–73, box 2378, folder: POL 12 Iran, January 1, 1970, NARA. See also “17 Ira­nian Students Protest Over Politics in Homeland,” WP, February 20, 1972. 59. Seven of the nine ­were arrested in early 1968 during the planning stages of a guerrilla offensive. They w ­ ere imprisoned for seven years u ­ ntil April 1975 when they and two ­others ­were shot and killed outside of Evin Prison. Vahabzadeh, A Guerrilla Odyssey, 17–21, 37–38. 60. ISA Washington-­Baltimore, Shah’s U.S. Visit, Nine Murdered u ­ nder Torture (Washington, DC: ISA Washington-­Baltimore, 1975), 26, 31–34, 46–47a; Kenneth Cmiel, “The Emergence of H ­ uman Rights Politics in the United States,” Journal of American History 86 (December 1999): 1238. 61. Donald Fraser to Robert McCloskey, June 26, 1975, RG 59, H ­ uman Rights Subject Files 1975, box 3, folder: ­Human Rights-­Iran, NARA. 62. Snyder, “ ‘A Call for U.S. Leadership,’ ” 372, 376. 63. Edward M. Kennedy, “The Persian Gulf: Arms Race or Arms Control?” Foreign Affairs 54 (October 1975): 14. Ira­nian students reached similar conclusions from a dif­fer­ent

202 NOTES TO PAGES 129–133

perspective, arguing that Iran “provided the main post-­Vietnam war market to the arms industries.” Dhofar (Berkeley: ISA and Arab Students in Northern California, December 1974). 64. U.S. Congress, Foreign Assistance Act of 1974, Public Law 93–559, 93rd Cong., 2nd Sess. (December 30, 1974); Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue, 160–65. 65. Bill, The Ea­gle and the Lion, 223. 66. Snyder, “ ‘A Call for U.S. Leadership,’ ” 376–77; House of Representatives, Subcommittees on Asian and Pacific Affairs and on International Organ­izations and Movements, ­Human Rights in South ­Korea: Implications for U.S. Policy, 93rd Cong., 2nd Sess. 28–50 (1974); David Weissbrodt, “The Role of International Nongovernmental Organ­ izations in the Implementation of H ­ uman Rights,” Texas International Law Journal 12 (1977): 299n37. 67. State to US/Tehran, “International Commission of Jurists’ Visit,” September 16, 1975, 1975State220650, AAD. 68. Refer to material in PWJB, box 20, folder 440. 69. Qotbzadeh to William Butler, December 21, 1977, PWJB, box 17, folder 402; Ebrahim Yazdi to Butler, July 20, 1978, PWJB, box 20, folder 446. 70. Donald Fraser to Eli Whitney Debevoise, September 17, 1975, PWJB, box 20, folder 437. 71. Hubert Humphrey to Butler, May 24, 1976; George McGovern to Butler, June 1, 1976; Clifford Case to Butler, June 4, 1976, all in PWJB, box 21, folder 458. The final product of the ICJ investigation was Butler and Levasseur, ­Human Rights and the L ­ egal System in Iran. Iran’s Liberation Movement abroad translated the ICJ report into Persian. Chehabi, Ira­nian Politics and Religious Modernism, 225n7. 72. Statement of Butler, House Subcommittee, ­Human Rights in Iran, 1–16. 73. Statement of Reza Baraheni, House Subcommittee, ­Human Rights in Iran, 36–61; Baraheni, The Crowned Cannibals: Writings on Repression in Iran (New York: Vintage, 1977), 3–18; Baraheni, God’s Shadow: Prison Poems (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976). 74. ISAUS, “On the Violation of H ­ uman Rights in Iran,” House Subcommittee, ­Human Rights in Iran, 70–83; State to USDEL Secretary, “HIRC Hearings on ­Human Rights in Iran,” August 5, 1976, 1976State193516, AAD. 75. House Committee, ­Human Rights and U.S. Policy, 22. 76. Charles Naas, interview by William Burr, May 31, 1988, p. 113, OHIC/FIS; Archie Bolster, interview by William Burr, May 3, 1988, p. 227, OHIC/FIS. 77. Shawcross, The Shah’s Last Ride, 189. 78. Gasiorowski, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Shah, 152–53. 79. Halliday, Iran, 78–84; Shawcross, The Shah’s Last Ride, 197–201. 80. ­Sullivan, Mission to Iran, 96. 81. Halliday, Iran, 78–90; Shawcross, The Shah’s Last Ride, 197–201; Statements of Butler and Reza Baraheni, House Subcommittee, ­Human Rights in Iran. 82. ISAUS, Re­sis­tance, December 1977, 2, ISAP. 83. ISAUS, Re­sis­tance, May 1975, 11–14, ISAP. 84. ISAUS, Re­sis­tance, July 1977, 27–28, ­Women Strike for Peace Rec­ords, series D1, box 5, subject file: Ira­nian Students Association 1977–78, Swarthmore College Peace Collection. 85. “Ira­nian Students’ Hunger Protest,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 25, 1975, ISAP; ISA Philadelphia, “Hunger Strike: Defend Ira­nian Po­liti­cal Prisoners,” July 1975, flyer, ISAP. 86. US/UN Mission to State, “Demonstration Re Iran,” January 8, 1976, 1976USUNN​ 00046, AAD; ISAUS, “Support Ira­nian Patriots Facing Death!” January 7, 1976, flyer, ISAP. 87. Robert Erlandson, “Protesters Opposing Shah of Iran March on District from Baltimore,” Baltimore Sun, January 8, 1976.

NOTES TO PAGES 134–136

203

88. Nuri Albala, Report on Mission to Iran, 1972, PWJB, box 20, folder 451; Jerome, The Man in the Mirror, 67; Matin-­Asgari, Ira­nian Student Opposition to the Shah, 133–34. 89. Farhang interview, pp. 73, 82–84. 90. AI, Report on Torture (1973), 207–10. 91. Statement of Butler, House Subcommittee, ­Human Rights in Iran, 7. 92. Menashri, Education and the Making of Modern Iran, 127–28. 93. British Embassy Tehran (Sir Geoffrey Harrison) to the Earl of Home, “Ira­nian Students in Politics,” March 8, 1961, EP 1741/3, FCO 371/157655, NAUK. 94. Gasiorowski, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Shah, 153; Fardust, The Rise and Fall of the Pahlavi Dynasty, 240–45. 95. Rafizadeh, Witness, chaps. 8 and 9, quotes on 108, 155; Franklin Crawford to US/ Tehran, “Conversation with Mansur Rafizadeh,” June 5, 1962, RG 59, RIAD, 1958–63, box 7, folder: Student Activities, NARA. 96. Jack Anderson, “FBI No Shield for Po­liti­cal Refugees,” WP, August 1, 1979. 97. US/Tehran to State, “Shah’s Visit,” May 23, 1964, RG 59, CFPF 1964–66, box 2331, folder: POL 7 Iran, January 1, 1964, NARA; “Controlled American Source” to US/ Tehran, “SAVAK Discussion with NF Leader,” August 1, 1964, memorandum, DNSA, IR00533; “Ira­nian Students Stage Protest Sit-­In at Consulate,” NYT, July 6, 1961; Katherine Bracken to Phillips Talbot, “Ira­nian Students,” April 27, 1964, RG 59, RRI 1964–66, box 6, folder: Iran 1964 POL 13-2 and 13-2-­b, NARA; Franklin Crawford to P. J. Balestrieri, “Reported Entry of Farajollah Ardalan into the United States,” February 16, 1966, RG 59, RRI 1964–66, box 11, folder: Iran 1966 POL 13-2-­b, NARA. 98. Keirn Brown to Eliot, “Official Visit to the United States of His Imperial Majesty,” August 9, 1967, RG 59, RRI 1965–75, box 1, folder: POL 13-2 Students, Youth Groups, Iran 1967 (Activities not in Iran), NARA. The list is attached to Brown’s memorandum. 99. State Department Office of Security Los Angeles Field Office, July 6, 1966, RG 59, RRI 1964–66, box 17, folder: Iran 1966 POL 13-2, NARA; De Villiers, The Imperial Shah, 255–58. 100. NSC for Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Activities in Your Absence,” July 18, 1978, memorandum, Remote Archives Capture (RAC) Proj­ect Number NLC-10-13-5-9-2, JCL. 101. House Subcommittee, ­Human Rights in Iran, 42, 74; ISAUS, Re­sis­tance, January 1977, 8, ISAP; AI, Report on Torture (1973), 207. 102. Rec­ords of the Prime Minister’s Office (PREM) 16/956, NAUK; Michael Parkin, “Ira­nian Students Complain of Spies on the Campus,” Guardian (Manchester), May 2, 1975; “Bradford Link Stirred PM to Press Shah to ­Free Academic Detainee,” Times Higher Education, January 5, 2007. 103. British Embassy Tehran to FCO, May 5, 1975, tele­gram 341, PREM 16/956, NAUK. 104. ISAUS, Defend the 41 (Berkeley, CA, January 1973), 3. 105. Abbas Milani, citing an interview with a CISNU leader, writes that some of the documents ­were forged in The Shah, 372, 476n12. Asadollah Alam writes that the students “carried off vari­ous classified documents” in The Shah and I, 491. 106. “Ira­nian Consulate Occupied by Students in Geneva,” NYT, June 2, 1976; Jack Anderson and Les Whitten, “Ira­nian Secret Police Dirty Tricks,” WP, October 29, 1976; Gregory Rose, “The Shah’s Secret Police Are ­Here,” New York Magazine, September 18, 1978; Matin-­Asgari, Ira­nian Student Opposition to the Shah, 153–56; ISAUS, Re­sis­tance, January 1977, ISAP. 107. US/Bern to State, “Swiss Expel Ira­nian Diplomat,” September 2, 1976, 1976Bern03978, AAD; “Swiss Claim Iran Spy in Geneva,” Guardian (Manchester), September 4, 1976; US/ Tehran to State, “Diplomats’ Recall,” September 2, 1976, 1976Tehran08922, AAD; US/Tehran to State, “More on Diplomats’ Recall,” September 8, 1976, 1976Tehran09087, AAD. 108. “The Shah, on Israel, Corruption, Torture and . . . ,” NYT, October 22, 1976. Jack Miklos ­later offered a qualified corroboration of the shah’s confession. Jack Miklos, interview

204 NOTES TO PAGES 136–138

by William Burr, June 21, 1988, pp. 146–47, OHIC/FIS. “60 Minutes” continued to run stories on SAVAK. “Sixty Minutes” Tele­vi­sion Program on SAVAK, March 6, 1977, incomplete transcript, DNSA, IR01153; “Report Chicago Spy Data Used by Ira­nian Secret Police,” Chicago Tribune, March 7, 1977; “60 Minutes” Tele­vi­sion Program on SAVAK, Final Cut, March 2, 1980, transcript, vol. 12, no. 25, CPP, Staff Offices (SO), Hedley Donovan, box 2, folder: Iran [CF, O/A 706], JCL. 109. Harry Kelly, “Enemies or Allies? It’s Hard to Tell,” Chicago Tribune, December 23, 1976; Jack Anderson and Les Whitten, “Torture, Terror in Iran,” WP, May 29, 1976; Dorman and Farhang, The U.S. Press and Iran, 144–51. 110. Radji, In the Ser­vice of the Peacock Throne, 85, 102, 147. 111. US/Santiago to State, “Chile: Dialogue on H ­ uman Rights ­Matters,” December 14, 1976, 1976Santia11822, AAD. 112. Americans for Defense of Ira­nian Po­liti­cal Prisoners, “Defend Ira­nian Po­liti­cal Prisoners,” [1975], ISAP. Emphasis in original. For a comparable student publication with the same title, see ISA Northern California, “Defend Ira­nian Po­liti­cal Prisoners” (ISA Northern California, 1975). 113. Robert Lempert, “Panel Details Amer­i­ca’s Oppressive Role in Iran,” Stanford Daily, February 13, 1978. 114. U.S. ­People’s Committee on Iran, “Statement of Purpose,” 1977, James F. Hitselberger Papers, box 1, folder: American Po­liti­cal Materials on Iran; U.S. P ­ eople’s Committee on Iran, “A Report from Iran: An American Perspective,” May 3, 1978, James F. Hitselberger Papers, box 2. The Hitselberger Papers are at the Hoover Institution Archives. 115. Mansur Farhang interview, 110, 108. 116. Bill, The Ea­gle and the Lion, 219–26; Halliday, Iran, 89–90; Shawcross, The Shah’s Last Ride, 201. Butler to Donald Fraser, October 6, 1977, PWJB, box 17, folder 404; Butler to Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, May 1, 1978, PWJB, box 17, folder 403. 117. For a succinct assessment of the internal and external forces that contributed to the liberalization of the late 1970s, see Keddie, Modern Iran, 214–15; Cooper, The Fall of Heaven, 214, 233–34. On ­human rights, Car­ter, and the shah, see Trenta, “The Champion of ­Human Rights Meets the King of Kings,” 478–79. 118. Trenta, “The Champion of ­Human Rights Meets the King of Kings”; Christos P. Ioannides, Amer­ic­ a’s Iran: Injury and Catharsis (Lanham, MD: University Press of Amer­i­ca, 1984), 27–36. Critiques of Car­ter’s ­human rights rec­ord in other countries include Kenton Clymer, “Jimmy Car­ ter, ­ Human Rights, and Cambodia,” Diplomatic History 27 (April 2003): 245–78; Bradley R. Simpson, “Denying the ‘First Right: The United States, Indonesia, and the Ranking of ­Human Rights by the Car­ter Administration, 1976–1980,” International History Review 31 (December 2009): 798–826. 119. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Power and Princi­ple: Memoirs of the National Security Advisor, 1977–1981 (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983), 357. 120. Anthony Lake to Cyrus Vance, “The ­Human Rights Policy,” January 16, 1978, CPP, WHCF, Subject File, ­Human Rights, box HU-1, folder: HU, January 20, 1977–­January 20, 1981, JCL. 121. House of Representatives, Committee on International Relations, United States Arms Policies in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea Areas: Past, Pres­ent, and ­Future, 95th Cong., 1st Sess. 135 (1977); Letters from Jimmy Car­ter to Tip O’Neill and Hubert Humphrey, July 28, 1977, CPP, WHCF, Subject File, Countries, box CO-31, folder: CO71 Executive, January 20, 1977–­August 31, 1977, JCL. 122. Jimmy Car­ter, “Tehran, Iran Toasts of the President and the Shah at a State Dinner,” December 31, 1977, APP; “Iran Students Hold Protest in Capital,” LAT, January 1, 1978. 123. ISAUS, U.S. Involvement in Iran, 77.

NOTES TO PAGES 140–145

205

124. Cyrus Vance to Jimmy Car­ter, “Visit of the Shah and Shahbanou,” November 10, 1977, CPP, SO, National Security Affairs, Brzezinski Material, VIP Visit File, box 5, folder: Iran, Shah, November 11–15, 1977, JCL. 125. Anthony Parsons, “­Human Rights in Iran,” April 12, 1977, Diplomatic Report No. 175/77, FCO 8/2998, NAUK. 126. British Embassy Tehran to FCO, “Iran’s Image Abroad,” February 2, 1977, FCO 58/1164, NAUK. 127. Lee Lescaze and Walter Pincus, “Iran Courts U.S. to Enhance Relations,” WP, ­November 28, 1976. 128. Keddie, Modern Iran, 215–16. 129. Chehabi, Ira­nian Politics and Religious Modernism, 226–34, quote on 228. 130. Mansur Farhang interview, 84. CONCLUSION

1. US/Tehran to State, “Youth in Iran,” February 22, 1971, airgram A-56, FRUS 1969– 1976, vol. E-4, doc. 116. 2. David C. Engerman and Corinna R. Unger, “­Towards a Global History of Modernization,” Diplomatic History 33 (June 2009): 382–83. 3. On the cosmopolitanism of the early revolutionary movement, see Dabashi, Iran without Borders. 4. Moin, Khomeini, 153–57; Algar, ed., Islam and Revolution, 200–208; Ruhollah Khomeini, Islamic Government: Governance of the Jurist, ed. and trans. Hamid Algar (Tehran: Institute for Compilation and Publication of Imam Khomeini’s Work, 2002). 5. Moin, Khomeini, 148–49. 6. Matin-­Asgari, Ira­nian Student Opposition to the Shah, 85, 110–11, 115–16, 132,  152. 7. Chehabi, Ira­nian Politics and Religious Modernism, 199; Moin, Khomeini, 149. 8. Matin-­Asgari, Ira­nian Student Opposition to the Shah, 72–73, 160; Abrahamian, The Ira­nian Mojahedin, chap. 6. 9. Organ­ization of Ira­nian Moslem Students (OIMS), The Rise, vol. 5: Compiled Documents of the Organ­ization of Ira­nian Moslem Students, September 1976–­April 1979 (Wilmette: Organ­ization of Ira­nian Moslem Students, April 1979), 7–10, 134. 10. Gary Sick to Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Ira­nian Demonstrations,” November 11, 1978, CPP, WHCF, Subject File, Countries, box CO-31, folder: CO 71 Executive, November 21, 1977–­December 31, 1978, JCL. 11. OIMS, The Rise, 7. 12. Keddie, Modern Iran, chap. 9; Charles Corddry, “U.S. Pondered Teaching Iran Riot-­ Control Tactics,” Baltimore Sun, November 7, 1978. 13. Robin Wright, The Last ­Great Revolution: Turmoil and Transformation in Iran (New York: Vintage), 2001 14. Henry Kissinger, White House Years (Boston: ­Little, Brown, 1979), 1260. 15. Said Amir Arjomand, The Turban for the Crown: The Islamic Revolution in Iran (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Amin Saikal, The Rise and Fall of the Shah: Iran from Autocracy to Religious Rule (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2009). 16. Joe Morris, “Iran Demonstrators Openly Urge Death of the Shah,” LAT, December 12, 1978; OIMS, The Rise, 48. 17. “1,200 Ira­ni­ans March ­Here to Protest Shah,” WP, December 12, 1978; “Ira­nian Students Rally on Common,” BG, December. 10, 1978. 18. Christopher Dickey, “Demonstrations Break Out H ­ ere Just Like Spring,” WP, December 11, 1978.

206 NOTES TO PAGES 145–150

19. Matin-­Asgari, Ira­nian Student Opposition to the Shah, 160–62. 20. “Report on the National Convention of Ira­nian Students Association,” August 1979, David ­Sullivan U.S. Maoism Collection, box 4, folder 13, Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner ­Labor Archives, New York University. 21. Naraghi, From Palace to Prison, 224. 22. Afshin Matin-­Asgari, “Tehran Memoirs and Diaries: Winter 1979 and Summer 1997,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the ­Middle East 20, nos. 1–2 (2000): 172; Ghamari-­Tabrizi, “Between the Shah and the Imam,” 240. 23. Neda Semnani, “Memoirs of a Revolutionary’s D ­ aughter,” Baffler 29 (2015). 24. “From the Campus to the Street,” Time, December 17, 1979. 25. See, for instance, Farman Farmaian, ­Daughter of Persia. 26. Milani, The Making of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, chap. 7. 27. Moin, Khomeini, chap. 10, quotes on 190. 28. Chehabi, Ira­nian Politics and Religious Modernism, chaps. 3–5; Hamid Dabashi, Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundation of the Islamic Revolution in Iran (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2006), chap. 6; Ali Rahnema, An Islamic Utopian: A Po­liti­cal Biography of Ali Shari‘ati (New York: I. B. Tauris, 1998). 29. Dabashi, Theology of Discontent, chap. 7, quote on 402; Matin-­Asgari, Ira­nian Student Opposition to the Shah, 71, 86, 92. 30. Hamilton Jordan to Jimmy Car­ter, “Telephone Conversation with Richard Cottam,” January 29, 1980, CPP, SO, Chief of Staff, Hamilton Jordan, box 34B, folder: Iran, January 1980, JCL. 31. Jerome, The Man in the Mirror, 67–76; Chehabi, Ira­nian Politics and Religious Modernism, 192–93; Qotbzadeh, December 21, 1977, PWJB, box 17, folder 402. 32. David ­Binder, “C.I.A. Sought to Put Wiretap on Aide to Ayatollah,” NYT, March 11, 1979; Nicholas Chriss, “­Family in Houston: Khomaini Aide a U.S. Citizen,” LAT, March 15, 1979; Chehabi, Ira­nian Politics and Religious Modernism, 99–100, 189–90, 198–202, 218– 20; White House, June 11, 1963, office route slip, WHCF, Subject File, box 59, folder: CO 123 Iran, General, JFKL; Ebrahim Yazdi, “A Look at ­Human Rights in Iran,” December 9, 1974, PWJB, box 20, folder 451. 33. Moin, Khomeini, 192–93; Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Ira­ nian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 70–71, 85–86; Jerome, The Man in the Mirror, 88–89; State, “Iran Update,” August 15, 1980, RAC Proj­ect Number NLC-128-2-5-11-0, JCL; Chehabi, Ira­nian Politics and Religious Modernism, 198, 200. 34. Milani, The Making of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, 119. 35. Ward, Immortal, 1–2, 218–21. 36. Arjomand, The Turban for the Crown, 123; Ioannides, Amer­i­ca’s Iran, 165–85; Nicholas Chriss, “Students from Mideast Suffer Culture Shock,” LAT, February 4, 1975. 37. Ward, Immortal, 197–98. 38. Robert E. Huyser, Mission to Tehran (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 26, 187; Twitchell interview, p. 57. 39. Pollack, The Persian Puzzle, 149. 40. Ward, Immortal, 198. 41. Airgram A-56, FRUS 1969–1976, vol. E-4, doc. 116; Milani, Eminent Persians, 1:457–61. 42. Arjomand, The Turban for the Crown, 123. 43. Huyser, Mission to Tehran, 188, 197, 218. 44. Arjomand, The Turban for the Crown, 123, 126–27; Huyser, Mission to Tehran, 217, 231, 281; Keddie, Modern Iran, 238; Pollack, The Persian Puzzle, 149. See also Misagh Parsa, Social Origins of the Ira­nian Revolution (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University

NOTES TO PAGES 151–154

207

Press, 1989), 241–47; James Buchan, Days of God: The Revolution in Iran and Its Consequences (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012), ch. 11. 45. On the debate over the U.S. response to the Chinese Revolution of 1949, see Jian Chen, Mao’s China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 378–79. 46. Emery, US Foreign Policy and the Ira­nian Revolution. 47. Chehabi, Ira­nian Politics and Religious Modernism, 40, 55, 190–91, 253–57; Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1965), chap. 5. 48. “Mansour Farhang, Top Khomeini Ally Who Fled Iran, Talks to Don Oberdorfer,” WP, November 28, 1982. 49. Emery, US Foreign Policy and the Ira­nian Revolution, 73–79. 50. Robert Mantel to Henry Precht, “Contact with Sadegh Ghotbzadeh,” January 17, 1979, DNSA, IR02120. 51. David Newsom and Harold Saunders to Cyrus Vance, November 9, 1979, RAC Proj­ ect Number NLC-128-8-9-1-1, JCL. 52. Hakimzadeh, “Iran: A Vast Diaspora Abroad and Millions of Refugees at Home.” 53. NSC for Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Eve­ning Report: ­Middle East/North Africa,” October 15, 1979, memorandum, RAC Proj­ect Number NLC-10-24-4-9-1, JCL. 54. Mark Bowden, Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America’s War with Militant Islam (New York: Grove Press, 2006); David Farber, Taken Hostage: The Iran Hostage Crisis and America’s First Encounter with Radical Islam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Gary Sick, All Fall Down: America’s Tragic Encounter with Iran (New York: Random House, 1985). 55. White House Situation Room Memorandum for Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Additional Information Items,” March 29, 1980, RAC Proj­ect Number NLC-1-14-6-26-1, JCL. 56. Massoumeh Ebtekar, Takeover in Tehran: The Inside Story of the 1979 U.S. Embassy Capture, in collaboration with Fred A. Reed (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2000), 40–42; Bowden, Guests of the Ayatollah, 68, 159–63. 57. NSC Special Coordinating Committee (SCC) Meeting, “Iran,” November 16, 1979, RAC Proj­ect Number NLC-17-17-21-2-0, JCL. 58. SCC Meetings: “Iran/Pakistan,” January 10, 1980, RAC Proj­ect Number NLC-12810-6-12-0, JCL; “Iran/Pakistan/Af­ghan­i­stan,” January 11, 1980, RAC Proj­ect Number NLC-17-18-27-1-4, JCL; “Iran and Af­ghan­i­stan,” March 25, 1980, RAC Proj­ect Number NLC-128-10-8-10-0, JCL. 59. Sick, All Fall Down, chap. 12. For more on the Cottam-­Qotbzadeh channel, see the documents in the folder titled “[Iran]—­Ghotbzadeh-­Cottam,” CPP, SO, Chief of Staff, Jordan, box 35, JCL; Russell Leigh Moses, Freeing the Hostages: Reexamining U.S.-­Iranian Negotiations and Soviet Policy, 1979–1981 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), 52–59, 124–32, 264–66, 335–36; Emery, US Foreign Policy and the Ira­nian Revolution, 156–58. 60. Harold Saunders, “Diplomacy and Pressure, November 1979–­May 1980,” in American Hostages in Iran: The Conduct of a Crisis, ed. Paul H. Kreisberg (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 132–36. 61. Abolhasan Banisadr, My Turn to Speak: Iran, the Revolution and Secret Deals with the U.S., trans. William Ford (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1991), chap. 16; Jerome, The Man in the Mirror, 204–96. 62. Saunders, “Diplomacy and Pressure,” 134–35, 140–41; SCC Meeting, “Iran/Af­ ghan­i­stan,” April 3, 1980, RAC Proj­ect Number NLC-128-10-8-17-3, JCL; House of Representatives, Committee on Foreign Affairs, The Iran Hostage Crisis: A Chronology of Daily Developments. 97th Cong., 1st Sess. 148–49 (1981).

208 NOTES TO PAGES 154–160

63. Paul B. Ryan, The Ira­nian Rescue Mission: Why It Failed (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1985). 64. “Teary Iran Military Cadets Pack Up, Go,” LAT, April 11, 1980; “Tearful Hostage Kin Sees Off Students,” LAT, April 12, 1980; Rod Clarke, “Ira­nian Naval Cadets Leave Vermont School,” BG, April 12, 1980. See also the many local newspaper clippings in LEHR. 65. Loring Hart, “Departure of the Ira­nian Naval Cadets,” April 1980; “To the President of the United States and to the Press,” April 11, 1980, enclosure C, both in LEHR. 66. Ira­nian Se­nior Students to Loring Hart, August 1980; “Resolution re degrees—1980,” [Spring 1980], both in LEHR. In September 2005 Norwich gave honorary degrees to ten of the Ira­ni­ans whose educations the hostage crisis cut short. “Norwich University Awards Honorary Diplomas to Former Ira­nian Students from the Class of 1980.” 67. SCC Meeting, “Iran and Af­ghan­is­ tan,” May 20, 1980, RAC Proj­ect Number NLC-1721-10-4-5, JCL; SCC Meeting, “Iran,” June 3, 1980, RAC Proj­ect Number NLC-33-14-48-17, JCL. A. Bartlett Giamatti to Lloyd Cutler, May 27, 1980; Michael Cardozo to Cutler, “Questions Posed by Senators Re Ira­nian Students,” November 9, 1979, both in CPP, SO, Counsel, Lloyd Cutler, box 95, folder: Iran—­Visas, November 1979–­June 1980, JCL. 68. Duane Spriestersbach and Michael Pelczar to Jimmy Car­ter, May 29, 1980, American Council on Education (ACE), box 1655, folder: Foreign Student / Iran Correspondence, Hoover Institution Archives. 69. Jack Reichard, “Proposed Letter to President Car­ter Concerning Status of Ira­nian Students in the U.S.,” April 15, 1980, ACE, box 1655, folder: Foreign Student / Iran Memorandums. 70. Letter to Jimmy Car­ter, April 25, 1980; A. Bartlett Giamatti to Lloyd Cutler, May 27, 1980, both in CPP, SO, Counsel, Lloyd Cutler, box 95, folder: Iran—­Visas, November 1979–­ June 1980, JCL. See also Derek Bok to Edmund Muskie, May 23, 1980; Jack Peltason to Edmund Muskie, June 4, 1980, both in ACE, box 1655, folder: Foreign Student / Iran Correspondence. 71. SCC Meeting, “Iran,” June 3, 1980, RAC Proj­ect Number NLC-33-14-48-1-7, JCL. EPILOGUE

1. Jeremi Suri, “The Cultural Contradictions of Cold War Education: West Berlin and the Youth Revolt of the 1960s,” in Local Consequences of the Global Cold War, ed. Jeffrey A. Engel (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2007), 60–62. 2. Henry J. Kellermann, Cultural Relations as an Instrument of U.S. Foreign Policy: The Educational Exchange Program between the United States and Germany, 1945–1954 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State, 1978); Kenichi Nakaya and Robert Schwantes, Ten Years of Cultural and Educational Interchange between Japan and Amer­i­ca, 1952–1961, Joint United States–­Japan Conference on Cultural and Educational Interchange, January 1962. 3. Bill, The Politics of Iran; Cottam, Nationalism in Iran; Goode, The United States and Iran. 4. Martin F. Herz, ed., Contacts with the Opposition: A Symposium (Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, School of Foreign Ser­v ice, Georgetown University, 1979), 27, 25. 5. Suroosh Irfani, quoted in Eric Selbin, “What Was Revolutionary about the Ira­nian Revolution? The Power of Possibility,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the ­Middle East 29, no. 1 (2009): 41. 6. Simpson, “Denying the ‘First Right.’ ” 7. Oliver August, “The Revolution Is Over,” The Economist, November 1, 2014. 8. See, for instance, Barack Obama, “Joint Statement by the United States of Amer­ic­ a and the Eu­ro­pean Union Calling on the Ira­nian Government to Fulfill Its ­Human Rights Obligations,” February 8, 2010, APP.

NOTES TO PAGES 161–164

209

9. Arash Karami, “Is Iran Judiciary Open to Negotiating on H ­ uman Rights?” Al-­ Monitor, August 4, 2016. 10. Patrikarakos, Nuclear Iran. 11. Arthur MacMillan, “Ira­ni­ans Celebrate Nuclear Deal, Hail Zarif as Hero,” Yahoo! News, July 14, 2015; “ ‘The World Has Changed’: Bold Statements from Ira­nian Newspapers in Reaction to Iran Deal,” Global Voices, July 15, 2015. 12. Hassan Rouhani, “Time to Engage,” WP, September 19, 2013. 13. Michael O’Brien and Elizabeth Chuck, “Obama and Rouhani Make History with Phone Call,” NBC News, September 27, 2013. 14. Moisés Naím, “The Case for Giving Iran’s Scholar-­Diplomats a Chance,” Atlantic, December 3, 2013. 15. “Rouhani’s US-­Educated Cabinet,” Iran Primer, November 13, 2014. 16. Laura Rozen, “Iran Nuclear Diplomat Known to U.S. as Tough, Professional,” Al-­ Monitor, April 11, 2014. 17. Mohammad Ali Shabani, “Salehi Reveals New Details of Secret US, Iran Back Channel,” Al-­Monitor, December 23, 2015; Fred Thys, “For 2 Key Iran Deal Negotiators, MIT Experiences Created a Helpful Connection,” WBUR News, July 27, 2015. 18. Robin Wright, “The Adversary,” New Yorker, May 26, 2014; Indira Lakshmanan, “As Iran Talks Ended, A Choked-­Up Kerry and Lots of Raw Emotions,” Bloomberg, July 15, 2015. 19. Alastair Jamieson, “New Iran President Expected to Tap US-­Educated Advisers,” NBC News, July 21, 2013. 20. Reza Akbari, “Rouhani’s US-­Educated Chief of Staff Knows East and West,” Al-­ Monitor, August 5, 2013. 21. Wright, “The Adversary.” 22. Sam Wilkin and Babak Dehghanpisheh, “Rouhani Says Nuclear Deal a ‘Third Way’ for Ira­nian Foreign Policy,” ­Reuters, August 2, 2015; Farideh Farhi, “The Nuclear Deal and Expunging Iran’s Historical Ghosts,” Lobe Log, July 15, 2015. 23. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). 24. Commission for Cultural Exchange, Annual Program Proposal, 1976. 25. US/Tehran to State, “Youth in Iran.” 26. Pollack, The Persian Puzzle, 312–19. 27. Aisha Labi, “Iran Eases Constraints on Academic Contacts with West,” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 15, 2014; Ian Wilhelm, “3 Ways a Thaw in U.S.-­Iran Relations Could Affect American Colleges,” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 15, 2015. 28. Monica Byrne, “Reconciliation,” Lobe Log, November 16, 2014.

Bibliography

OFFICIAL ARCHIVES

Jimmy Car­ter Library (JCL). Atlanta, GA. Car­ter Presidential Papers (CPP) Staff Offices (SO) Chief of Staff: Hamilton Jordan Counsel: Lloyd Cutler National Security Affairs: Brzezinski Material Se­nior Advisor to the President: Hedley Donovan White House Central Files (WHCF) Subject File: Countries Subject File: ­Human Rights Remote Archives Capture (RAC) Proj­ect Lyndon Baines Johnson Library (LBJL). Austin, TX. National Security File (NSF) Country File Files of Robert W. Komer (FRK) Intelligence File Office Files of the White House Aides S. Douglass Cater White House Central Files (WHCF) Subject File: Countries John F. Kennedy Presidential Library (JFKL). Boston, MA. National Security Files (NSF) Countries Robert W. Komer (RWK) Robert F. Kennedy Papers (RFKP) Attorney General’s Files Attorney General’s Trips Robert Kennedy Oral History Program William O. Douglas White House Central Files (WHCF) Subject File: Countries National Archives and Rec­ords Administration (NARA). College Park, MD. Central Intelligence Agency Rec­ords Search Tool (CREST) Rec­ord Group 59: General Rec­ords of the Department of State Bureau of Public Affairs Central Decimal Files (CDF) Central Foreign Policy Files (CFPF) ­Human Rights Subject Files Rec­ords of the Ira­nian Affairs Desk (RIAD) 211

212 Bibliography

Rec­ords of the Office of Greek, Turkish, and Ira­nian Affairs Rec­ords of the Officer-­in-­Charge of Ira­nian Affairs Rec­ords Relating to Iran (RRI) Subject Numeric Files (SNF) Rec­ord Group 306: Rec­ords of the United States Information Agency (USIA) Rec­ord Group 334: Rec­ords of Interser­v ice Agencies United States Military Mission with the Ira­nian Army and the Military Assistance Advisory Group to Iran (USMMIA/MAAG) Rec­ord Group 469: Rec­ords of the Agency for International Development and Pre­de­ces­sor Agencies Country Files Iran Subject Files (ISF) National Archives of the United Kingdom (NAUK). Kew, UK. Rec­ords of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Pre­de­ces­sors (FO / FCO) Rec­ords of the Prime Minister’s Office Rec­ords of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority and Its Pre­de­ces­sors Richard M. Nixon Library (RMNL). Yorba Linda, CA. Pre-­Presidential Papers Richard M. Nixon Presidential Materials Proj­ect White House Central Files (WHCF) Harry S. Truman Library and Museum. In­de­pen­dence, MO. Truman Library Photo­graphs. http://­www​.­trumanlibrary​.­org​/­photographs​/­index​.­php. PERSONAL PAPERS AND MANUSCRIPT COLLECTIONS

College of William and Mary Special Collections. Earl Gregg Swem Library. Williamsburg, VA. James A. Bill Papers Ford Foundation Rec­ords (FF). Rocke­fel­ler Archive Center (RAC). Sleepy Hollow, NY. Grants PA no. 55-173 PA no. 58-158 Unpublished Reports Report Number 012037: Khodadad Farmanfarmaian. “Report on Formation and Development of Economic Bureau, 1336–1342.” 1963. Report Number 006417: Thomas H. McLeod. “National Planning in Iran: A Report Based on the Experiences of the Harvard Advisory Group in Iran.” December 31, 1964. Georgetown University Special Collections. Lauinger Library. Washington, DC. Martin F. Herz Papers Hoover Institution Archives. Stanford University. Stanford, CA. American Council on Education Rec­ords (ACE) Ira­nian Po­liti­cal Opposition Lit­er­a­ture Collection James F. Hitselberger Papers. Unpro­cessed collection as of March 2012. U.S. National Student Association (USNSA), International Commission Rec­ords, 1946–68

Bibliography

213

Library of Congress (LOC). Washington, DC. Papers of William O. Douglas (PWOD) Mas­sa­chu­setts Institute of Technology (MIT) Archives and Special Collections. Cambridge, MA. Archival Collection 276: Mas­sa­chu­setts Institute of Technology Office of the President, Rec­ords of Vice President Constantine B. Simonides. Norwich University Archives and Special Collections. Kreitzberg Library. Northfield, VT. Loring Edward Hart Rec­ords (LEHR) Robert S. Marx Law Library. Archives, Rare Books, and Manuscripts Collections. University of Cincinnati. Cincinnati, OH. Papers of William J. Butler (PWJB) Swarthmore College Peace Collection. McCabe Library. Swarthmore, PA. American Friends of the ­Middle East (AFME) Homer A. Jack Papers Ira­nian Students Association of Philadelphia (ISAP) Oversized Items Collection ­Women Strike for Peace Rec­ords Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner L ­ abor Archives. New York University, New York, NY. David S­ ullivan U.S. Maoism Collection University of Arkansas Libraries Special Collections. Fayetteville, AR. Manuscript Collection 468: Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs Historical Collection (CU) Manuscript Collection 703: Council for International Exchange of Scholars (CIES) Manuscript Collection 715: NAFSA, Association of International Educators (NAFSA) Wisconsin Historical Society Archives. Madison, WI. Students for a Demo­cratic Society Rec­ords, 1958–70. Series 3: National Office 1964–70. PUBLISHED DOCUMENTS AND ONLINE COLLECTIONS

Alexander, Yonah, and Allan Nanes, eds. The United States and Iran: A Documentary History. Frederick, MD: University Press of Amer­i­ca, 1980. Algar, Hamid, ed. and trans. Islam and Revolution: Writings and Declarations of Imam Khomeini. Berkeley, CA: Mizan, 1981. American Friends of the M ­ iddle East. Annual Reports. New York, 1951–58; Washington, DC, 1959–60. Amnesty International (AI). Annual Report, 1965–66. London, 1966. —­—. Annual Report, 1969–1970. London: 1970. —­—. Annual Report, 1970–1971. London: July 1971. —­—. Annual Report, 1974–1975. London: September 1975. —­—. Briefing: Iran. London: November 1976.

214 Bibliography

—­—. Report on Torture. London: 1973. —­—. Report on Torture. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975. Amnesty International USA (AI USA). “Biographical Note.” Columbia University Libraries. http://­www​.­columbia​.­edu​/­cu​/­lweb​/­archival​/­collections​/­ldpd​_­6093730​/­index​ .­html. Ayman, Iraj. Educational Innovation in Iran. Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organ­ization, 1974. Butler, William J., and Georges Levasseur. ­Human Rights and the ­Legal System in Iran. Geneva: International Commission of Jurists, March 1976. Committee against Repression in Iran. Iran: The Shah’s Empire of Repression. London: Committee against Repression in Iran, November 1976. Davidson, Carl, ed. Revolutionary Youth and the New Working Class: The Praxis Papers, the Port Authority Statement, the RYM Documents and Other Lost Writings of SDS. Pittsburgh: Changemaker, 2011. Digital National Security Archive (DNSA). Iran Revolution collection, http://­nsarchive​.­gwu​ .­edu​/­publications​/­dnsa​.­html. Eicher, Carl K., Arthur J. Lewis, Alice L. Morton, and Marvin Zonis. An Analy­sis of US-­ Iranian Cooperation in Higher Education. Washington, DC: Overseas Liaison Committee of the American Council on Education, November 1976. Ford Foundation, “Report of the Study for the Ford Foundation on Policy and Program.” Ford Foundation, Detroit, November 1949. —­—. “Our Origins: Presidents,” https://­www​.­fordfoundation​.­org​/­about​-­us​/­our​-­origins​/­. Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS). http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments. —­—. FRUS 1952–1954, Vol. 10: Iran 1951–1954. —­—. FRUS 1955–1957, Vol. 12: Near East Region; Iran; Iraq. —­—. FRUS 1961–1963, Vol.17: Near East, 1961–1962. —­—. FRUS 1961–1963, Vol. 18: Near East, 1962–1963. —­—. FRUS 1964–1968, Vol. 22: Iran. —­—. FRUS 1969–1976, Vol. E-4: Documents on Iran and Iraq, 1969–1972. —­—. FRUS 1969–1976, Vol. 27: Iran; Iraq, 1973–1976. Gilbert, David, and David Loud. U.S. Imperialism. Chicago: Students for a Demo­cratic Society, February 1968. Hayden, Tom. The Port Huron Statement: The Visionary Call of the 1960s Revolution. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005. Iran and Utah State University: Half a ­Century of Friendship and a De­cade of Contracts. Logan: Utah State University, 1963. Jensen, Kenneth M., ed. Origins of the Cold War: The Novikov, Kennan, and Roberts ‘Long Tele­grams’ of 1946. Rev. ed. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace, 1993. Khatami, Mohammad “Dialogue among Civilizations.” Address at the United Nations, September 5, 2000. Khomeini, Ruhollah. Islamic Government: Governance of the Jurist. Edited and translated by Hamid Algar. Tehran: Institute for Compilation and Publication of Imam Khomeini’s Work, 2002. “Lafayette in Persia.” Lafayette College. http://­sites​.­lafayette​.­edu​/­lafayetteinpersia​/­sample​ -­page​.­ National Security Archive. George Washington University. Washington, DC. —­—. Electronic Briefing Book No. 28. http://­nsarchive​.­gwu​.­edu​/­NSAEBB​/­NSAEBB28​ /­index​.­html ——. Electronic Briefing Book No. 268. http://­nsarchive​.­gwu​.­edu​/­nukevault​/­ebb268​/­ Oglesby, Carl, ed. The New Left Reader. New York: Grove Press, 1969.

Bibliography

215

Overseas Con­sul­tants, Inc. Report on Seven Year Development Plan for the Plan Organ­ization of the Imperial Government of Iran. Vols. 2, 3. New York: Overseas Con­sul­tants, 1949. Russell, Bertrand. “Inside the Shah’s Prisons.” Unpublished report issued by the Bertrand Russell Office, London, 1968. Reprinted in 1968 by the Ira­nian Student Association of Southern California. Teodori, Massimo, ed. The New Left: A Documentary History. New York: Bobbs-­Merrill, 1969. United Nations. Archives and Rec­ord Management. http://­archives​.­un​.­org​/­ARMS. —­—. Statistics of Students Abroad 1962–1968: Where they Go, Where they Come From, What they Study. Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organ­ization, 1972. —­—. Treaty Collection. https://­treaties​.­un​.­org. University of Southern California (USC). Seven Years in Iran: The Final Report of a Technical Assistance Proj­ect in Public Administration u ­ nder U.S. Contract No. ICAC-1299. School of Public Administration, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, June 1962. U.S. Congress. Foreign Assistance Act of 1974. Public Law 93–559. 93rd Cong., 2nd Sess. (December 30, 1974). —­—. House of Representatives. Armed Ser­v ices Committee. Hearings on H.R. 7582, H.R. 8187, and H.J. Res. 735. 93rd Cong., 1st Sess. (September 26, 1973). —­—. House of Representatives. Committee on Foreign Affairs. The Iran Hostage Crisis: A Chronology of Daily Developments. 97th Cong., 1st Sess. (1981). —­—. House of Representatives. Committee on Foreign Affairs. Mutual Security Act of 1954. 83rd Cong., 2nd Sess. (1954). —­—. House of Representatives. Committee on International Relations. ­Human Rights and U.S. Policy: Argentina, Haiti, Indonesia, Iran, Peru, and the Philippines. 94th Cong., 2nd Sess. (1976). —­—. House of Representatives. Committee on International Relations. United States Arms Policies in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea Areas: Past, Pres­ent, and F ­ uture. 95th Cong., 1st Sess. (1977). —­—. House of Representatives. Committee on Foreign Affairs. Mutual Security Program. Part 2. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1980. —­—. House of Representatives. Subcommittee on International Organ­izations. ­Human Rights in Iran. 94th Cong., 2nd Sess. (1976). —­—. House of Representatives. Subcommittee on International Organ­izations. ­Human Rights in Iran. 95th Cong., 1st sess., (October 26, 1977). —­—. House of Representatives. Subcommittees on Asian and Pacific Affairs and on International Organ­izations and Movements. ­Human Rights in South K ­ orea: Implications for U.S. Policy. 93rd Cong., 2nd Sess. (1974). —­—. Senate. Committee on Foreign Relations. Arms Sales to Near East and South Asian Countries. 90th Cong., 1st Sess. (1967). —­—. Senate. Committee on Foreign Relations. Executive Sessions of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (Historical Series). 87th Cong., 1st Sess. 13, pt. 2 (1961). U.S. Department of State. Review of U.S. Technical Assistance and Economic Aid to Iran, 1951–1957. Washington, DC: Department of State, 1957. U.S. State Department. Central Foreign Policy Files, 1973–76. Access to Archival Databases (AAD) of the National Archives and Rec­ords Administration (NARA). http://­aad​ .­archives​.­gov​/­aad. Virtual Vietnam Archive. Texas Tech University. http://­www​.­v ietnam​.­ttu​.­edu​/­v irtual​ archive.

216 Bibliography

Woolley, John T., and Gerhard Peters. American Presidency Proj­ect (APP). Santa Barbara, CA. http://­www​.­presidency​.­ucsb​.­edu. MEMOIRS, EDITED PAPERS, AND ORAL HISTORIES

Alam, Asadollah. The Shah and I: The Confidential Diary of Iran’s Royal Court, 1969–1977. Translated by Alinaghi Alikhani and Nicholas Vincent. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Banisadr, Abolhasan. My Turn to Speak: Iran, the Revolution and Secret Deals with the U.S. Translated by William Ford. Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1991. Bauer, Karin, ed. Every­body Talks About the Weather . . . ​We ­Don’t: The Writings of Ulrike Meinhof. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008. Brzezinski, Zbigniew. Power and Princi­ple: Memoirs of the National Security Advisor, 1977– 1981. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983. Car­ter, Jimmy. Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President. New York: Bantam, 1982. Clayton, Ross, Elmer Kim Nelson, Chester Newland, and Cristy Jensen, eds. ­Futures of the Past: Collected Papers in Cele­bration of Its More than Eighty Years; University of Southern California’s School of Policy, Planning, and Development. New York: iUniverse, 2010. Douglas, William O. Strange Lands and Friendly ­People. New York: Harper, 1951. —­—. Democracy’s Manifesto. Garden City: Doubleday, 1962. —­—. The Anatomy of Liberty: The Rights of Man without Force. New York: Trident, 1963. —­—. ­Towards a Global Federalism. New York: New York University Press, 1968. —­—. Points of Rebellion. New York: Random House, 1969. —­—. International Dissent: Six Steps ­toward World Peace. New York: Random House, 1971. —­—­. The Court Years, 1939–1975: The Autobiography of William O. Douglas. New York: Random House, 1980. —­—. The Douglas Letters: Se­lections from the Private Papers of Justice William O. Douglas. Edited by Melvin I. Urofsky and Philip E. Urofsky. Bethesda: Adler and Adler, 1987. Dumas, Firoozeh. Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Ira­nian in Amer­i­ca. New York: Random House, 2003. Ebtekar, Massoumeh. Takeover in Tehran: The Inside Story of the 1979 U.S. Embassy Capture. In collaboration with Fred A. Reed. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2000. Fardust, Hussein. The Rise and Fall of the Pahlavi Dynasty: Memoirs of Former General Hussein Fardust. Translated by Ali Akbar Dareini. Delhi, IN: Motilal Banarsidass, 1999. Farmanfarmaian, Khodadad. Interview by Habib Ladjevardi. November 10 and December 17, 1982. Ira­nian Oral History Collection. Harvard University. Cambridge, Mas­ sa­chu­setts. http://­www​.­fas​.­harvard​.­edu​/­~iohp​/­farmanfarmaian​.­html. Farman Farmaian, Sattareh. ­Daughter of Persia: A ­Woman’s Journey from Her ­Father’s Harem through the Islamic Revolution. New York: Crown, 1992. Foundation of Ira­nian Studies. Recordings of interviews with Archie Bolster, Theodore Eliot, Mansur Farhang, Armin Meyer, Jack Miklos, Charles Naas, M. Gordon Tiger, Hamilton Twitchell. 1985–1990. Oral History of Iran Collection OHIC/FIS. http://­fis​-­iran​.­org​/­en​/­oralhistory​/­browse. Ganji, Manouchehr. Defying the Ira­nian Revolution: From a Minister to the Shah to a Leader of Re­sis­tance. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002. Guthman, Edwin O., and Jeffrey Shulman. Robert Kennedy in His Own Words: The Unpublished Recollections of the Kennedy Years. New York: Bantam, 1988. Hayden, Tom. Reunion: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 1988. Huyser, Robert E. Mission to Tehran. New York: Harper and Row, 1986. Kissinger, Henry. White House Years. Boston: ­Little, Brown, 1979.

Bibliography

217

Meyer, Armin. Quiet Diplomacy: From Cairo to Tokyo in the Twilight of Imperialism. New York: iUniverse, 2003. Milani, Abbas. Tales of Two Cities: A Persian Memoir. Washington, DC: Mage, 2006. Miller, William McElwee. My Persian Pilgrimage: An Autobiography. Rev. ed. Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 1995. Miller, William Green. Interview by Charles Stuart Kennedy. February 10, 2013. Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. Foreign Affairs Oral History Proj­ect. http://­adst​.­org​/­oral​-­history​/­ Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. New York: Random House, 2004. —­—. ­Things I’ve Been S­ ilent About: Memories of a Prodigal D ­ aughter. New York: Random House, 2010. Naraghi, Ehsan. From Palace to Prison: Inside the Ira­nian Revolution. Translated by Nilou Mobasser. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1994. Pahlavi, Ashraf. ­Faces in a Mirror: Memoirs from Exile. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1980. Pahlavi, Mohammad Reza. Mission for My Country. New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1961. —­—. The White Revolution. 2nd ed. Tehran: Kayhan Press, 1967. —­—. Iran, Philosophy ­behind the Revolution: A Se­lection of Writing and Speeches of the Shahanshah. London: Orient Commerce Establishment, 1971. —­—. Answer to History. Translated by Michael Joseph. New York: Stein and Day, 1980. Pahlavi, Mohammad Reza, and Ashraf Pahlavi. ­Toward the ­Great Civilization: A Dream Revisited. London: Satrap, 1994. Rabiipour, Saiid. Farewell to Islam. Longwood, FL: Xulon Press, 2009. Radji, Parviz C. In the Ser­vice of the Peacock Throne: The Diaries of the Shah’s Last Ambassador to London. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1983. Rafizadeh, Mansur. Witness: From the Shah to the Secret Arms Deal; An Insider’s Account of U.S. Involvement in Iran. New York: William Morrow, 1987. Sick, Gary. All Fall Down: Amer­i­ca’s Tragic Encounter with Iran. New York: Random House, 1985. ­Sullivan, William H. Mission to Iran. New York: Morton, 1981. Warne, William E. Mission for Peace: Point 4 in Iran. Bethesda: Ibex, 1999. IRA­N IAN STUDENT PUBLICATIONS

Ardalan, Laleh, and Kayvan Tabari. “The Ypsilanti Convention.” Pendar (Autumn–­Winter 1960–61). Confederation of Ira­nian Students National Union (CISNU). Documents on the Pahlavi Reign of Terror in Iran: Eyewitness Reports and Newspaper Articles. Frankfurt: CISNU, 1971. —­—­. Po­liti­cal Repression in Iran. Frankfurt: CISNU, March 1971. —­—. Was It a Plot to Kill the Shah or Is It a Conspiracy to Silence the Students? West Germany: CISNU, 1965. Ghani, Caroline, and Cyrus Ghani. The Alien and United States Laws with Par­tic­ul­ar Reference to the Foreign Students. ISA Special Publication, no. 2 (June 1958). Iran Nameh: A Publication of Ira­nian Students in the United States of Amer­i­ca. New York: 1961–63. ISA New York. Demonstration Flyer. September 1, 1970. New York: ISA New York, Students for a Demo­cratic Society and the Progressive L ­ abor Party. Ira­nian Student Association (ISA) Chicago. Iran, the ­Future Vietnam. Chicago: ISA Chicago, February 1971. —­—. Iran in Turmoil. Chicago: ISA Chicago, 1965.

218 Bibliography

ISA Northern California. Defend Ira­nian Po­liti­cal Prisoners. Berkeley: ISA Northern California, 1975. —­—­. Dhofar. Berkeley: ISA and Arab Students in Northern California, December 1974. —­—­. In Support of the Ira­nian P ­ eople’s Revolutionary Movement, Commemorating the June 6th, 1963 Uprising. Berkeley: ISA Northern California, June 1977. —­—­. Oman: Revolution and Politics of Oil in the Persian-­Arabian Gulf. Berkeley: ISA Northern California and the Organ­ization of Arab Students in the Bay Area, 1975. —­—­. The Regime of the Shah Steps Up Po­liti­cal Repression in Iran as It Prepares for the Cele­ bration of 2500 Year of Ira­nian Monarchy. Berkeley: ISA Northern California, October 1, 1971. —­—­. Shah of Iran: Amer­ic­ a’s Staunchest Ally in the M ­ iddle East. ISA Northern California, April 1962. ISA Sacramento. In Solidarity with the Ira­nian Revolutionary Movement. Sacramento, CA: ISA Sacramento, 1976. ISA Washington-­Baltimore. “No Honorary Degree to Ashraf: Down with the Shah.” College Park, MD: ISA Baltimore-­Washington, 1976. —­—­. On the Violation of ­Human Rights in Iran: Report to the Subcommittee on International Organ­izations, United States Congress. College Park, MD: ISA Washington-­Baltimore, September 1976. —­—­. Shah’s U.S. Visit: Nine Murdered ­under Torture. Washington, DC: ISA Washington-­ Baltimore, 1975. ISA Western United States. Condemn the Fascist Shah’s Visit to U.S. Berkeley, CA: ISA Western United States, 1975. Ira­nian Student Association in the United States (ISAUS). Condemn Shah’s U.S. Visit. Berkeley, CA: ISAUS, November 7, 1977. —­—­. Corruption and Strug­gle in Iran. Berkeley, CA: ISAUS Defense Section, June 1972. —­—­. Defend the 41. Berkeley: ISAUS Defense Section, January 1973. —­—­. In Solidarity with the Palestinian Revolution. Berkeley/Houston: ISAUS, May 1976. —­—. Ira­nian P ­ eoples’ Movement, 1953–1973. Iran Report, no. 2 (Berkeley, CA: ISAUS, June 1974). —­—. “Is Iran Potentially Another Vietnam?” Monthly Review 17, no. 8 (January 1966): 31–34. —­—­. U.S. Involvement in Iran: Imperialist Disguises and Liberal Illusions, 1900–1963. Berkeley, CA: ISAUS, December 1978. —­—­. Iran’s Kent State and Baton Rouge. Berkeley, CA: ISAUS, 1973. —­—­. Re­sis­tance: Quarterly En­glish Defense Publication of the ISAUS. Berkeley, Chicago, College Park: ISAUS, 1975–77. —­—­. The Solidarity of the Ira­nian ­People’s Movement with the Omani Revolution. College Park, MD: ISAUS, 1976. —­—­. Strug­gle. College Park, MD: ISAUS, September–­October 1978. —­—­. U.S. Government-­backed Dictatorial Regime of Iran Steps Up Repression: 13 Striking Ira­nian Workers Murdered by Shah’s Troops. Berkeley, CA: ISAUS, 1971. Organ­ization of Ira­nian Moslem Students (OIMS). The Rise. Vol. 5: Compiled Documents of the Organ­ization of Ira­nian Moslem Students, September 1976–­April 1979. Wilmette, IL: Organ­ization of Ira­nian Moslem Students, April 1979. Union of Ira­nian Students in the United States. The “Palestine Group” Defends Itself in Military Tribunal: Text of Defence Speech of S. Paknejad in Military Tribunal No. 3 of Teheran, December 1970. Translated and reprinted by the Union of Ira­nian Students in the United States, October 1977. —­—­. The Texts of Defence of Martyred Mujahid Mehdi Rezai in Military Tribunal. Translated and reprinted by the Organ­ization of Ira­nian Moslem Students. Wilmette, IL: OIMS, December 1978.

Bibliography

219

NEWSPAPERS AND PERIODICALS

Al-­Monitor Atlantic Baltimore Sun Bangor Daily News Bloomberg Boston Globe (BG) Bulletin, Teaneck Edition Change Chicago Daily Defender Chicago Daily Tribune / Chicago Tribune Chronicle of Higher Education Daily Californian (DC) The Economist Global Voices Guardian (Manchester) Journalism Educator Kayhan International (KI) The Lafayette Alumnus Lewiston Daily Sun Lobe Log Los Angeles Times (LAT) Militant Minnesota Daily Minority of One NBC News New Left Notes Newsweek New Yorker New York Magazine New York Times (NYT) Norwich University Rec­ord Ramparts ­Reuters San Francisco Chronicle Stanford Daily Student Tech Time Times (London) VMI Cadet Wall Street Journal Washington Daily News Washington Post (WP) WBUR News Win Magazine Yahoo! News SECONDARY SOURCES

Abrahamian, Ervand. Iran between Two Revolutions. Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1982.

220 Bibliography

—­—. The Ira­nian Mojahedin. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989. —­—. Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. —­—. The Coup: 1953, the CIA, and the Roots of Modern U.S.-­Iranian Relations. New York: New Press, 2013. Afary, Janet, and Kevin B. Anderson. Foucault and the Ira­nian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Al-­i Ahmad, Jalal. Occidentosis: A Plague from the West. Translated by R. Campbell. Berkeley, CA: Mizan Press, 1984. Altbach, Philip G., and Norman T. Uphoff. The Student Internationals. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1973. Alvandi, Roham. Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah: The United States and Iran in the Cold War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. —­—. “The Shah’s Détente with Khrushchev: Iran’s 1962 Missile Base Pledge to the Soviet Union.” Cold War History 14, no. 3 (2014): 423–44. Amuzegar, Jahangir. Technical Assistance in Theory and Practice: The Case of Iran. New York: Praeger, 1966. Anderson, Betty S. The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011. Anderson, Carol. Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Strug­gle for ­Human Rights, 1944–1955. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Andrew, John A., III. The Other Side of the Sixties: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997. Ansari, Ali M. “The Myth of the White Revolution: Mohammad Reza Shah, ‘Modernization’ and the Consolidation of Power.” ­Middle Eastern Studies 37 (July 2001): 1–24. —­—. The Politics of Nationalism in Modern Iran. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Arasteh, Reza. “The Education of Ira­nian Leaders in Eu­rope and Amer­i­ca.” International Review of Education 8, nos. 3–4 (1962): 444–50. —­—. Education and Social Awakening in Iran, 1850–1960. 2nd ed. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1969. Arjomand, Said Amir. The Turban for the Crown: The Islamic Revolution in Iran. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Asgard, Ramin. “U.S.-­Iran Cultural Diplomacy: A Historical Perspective.” al Nakhlah: The Fletcher School Online Journal for Issues Related to Southwest Asia and Islamic Civilization (Spring 2010): 1–12. Azimi, Fakhreddin. The Quest for Democracy in Iran: A C ­ entury of Strug­gle against Authoritarian Rule. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Baldwin, George B. Planning and Development in Iran. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967. Banani, Amin. The Modernization of Iran, 1921–1941. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1961. Baraheni, Reza. God’s Shadow: Prison Poems. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976. —­—. The Crowned Cannibals: Writings on Repression in Iran. New York: Vintage, 1977. Behrooz, Maziar. Rebels with a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran. New York: I. B. Tauris,1999. Belmonte, Laura A. Selling the American Way: U.S. Propaganda and the Cold War. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Bevis, Teresa Brawner, and Christopher J. Lucas. International Students in American Colleges and Universities: A History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Bill, James A. “The Politics of Student Alienation: The Case of Iran.” Ira­nian Studies 2 (Winter 1969): 8–26.

Bibliography

221

—­—. The Politics of Iran: Groups, Classes, and Modernization. Columbus: Merrill, 1972. —­—. The Ea­gle and the Lion: The Tragedy of American-­Iranian Relations. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988. ­Binder, Leonard. Iran: Po­liti­cal Development in a Changing Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962. Bonakdarian, Mansour. Britain and the Ira­nian Constitutional Revolution of 1906–1911: Foreign Policy, Imperialism, and Dissent. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006. Borgwardt, Elizabeth. A New Deal for the World: Amer­i­ca’s Vision for ­Human Rights. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005. Boroujerdi, Mehrzad. Ira­nian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996. —­—. “Iran’s New Foreign Minister: Ali Akbar Salehi.” PBS Tehran Bureau, January 31, 2011. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tehranbureau/2011/01/irans-newforeign​-­minister​-­ali​-­akbar​-­salehi​.­html. Bostock, Frances, and Geoffrey Jones. Planning and Power in Iran: Ebtehaj and Economic Development ­under the Shah. London: Frank Cass, 1989. Bowden, Mark. Guests of the Ayatollah: The First ­Battle in Amer­ic­ a’s War with Militant Islam. New York: Grove Press, 2006. Bowie, Robert R., and Richard H. Immerman. Waging Peace: How Eisenhower ­Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Boyle, John E. Whiteford. “The Welcome Ordeal: An Aspect of Iran’s Westernization Drive, 1957–62.” Science and Public Policy 10 (October 1983): 240–43. “Bradford Link Stirred PM to Press Shah to F ­ ree Academic Detainee.” Times Higher Education, January 5, 2007. Bradley, Mark Philip. The World Re­imagined: Americans and H ­ uman Rights in the Twentieth ­Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Brazinsky, Gregg. Nation Building in South K ­ orea: Koreans, Americans, and the Making of a Democracy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Brinton, Crane. The Anatomy of Revolution. New York: Vintage, 1965. Bu, Liping. Making the World Like Us: Education, Cultural Expansion, and the American ­Century. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003. Buchan, James. Days of God: The Revolution in Iran and its Consequences. New York: ­Simon and Schuster, 2012. Buchanan, Tom. “ ‘The Truth ­Will Set You ­Free’: The Making of Amnesty International.” Journal of Con­temporary History 37 (October 2002): 575–97. Burke, John P. Honest Broker? The National Security Advisor and Presidential Decision Making. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2009. Burke, Roland. Decolonization and the Evolution of International ­Human Rights. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. —­—. “From Individual Rights to National Development: The First UN International Conference on ­Human Rights, Tehran, 1968.” Journal of World History 19 (September 2008): 275–96. Byrne, Malcolm, and Mark J. Gasiorowski, eds. Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004. Castiglioni, Claudia. “ ‘I Can Start a Revolution, but You W ­ on’t Like the Result’: The United States and Iran in the De­cade of Development.” In The ­Middle East and the Cold War: Between Security and Development, edited by Massimiliano Trentin and Matteo Gerlini, 105–27. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2012. —­—. “No Longer a Client, Not Yet a Partner: The US-­Iranian Alliance in the Johnson Years.” Cold War History 15, no. 4 (2015): 491–509.

222 Bibliography

Chehabi, Houchang E. Ira­nian Politics and Religious Modernism: The Liberation Movement of Iran u ­ nder the Shah and Khomeini. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990. Chehabi, Houchang E., and Vanessa Martin, eds. Iran’s Constitutional Revolution: Popu­lar Politics, Cultural Transformations and Transnational Connections. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2010. Chen, Jian. Mao’s China and the Cold War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). Cleveland, William L., and Martin Bunton. A History of the Modern M ­ iddle East. 5th ed. Boulder, CO: Westview, 2013. Clymer, Kenton. “Jimmy Car­ter, ­Human Rights, and Cambodia.” Diplomatic History 27 (April 2003): 245–78. Cmiel, Kenneth. “The Emergence of H ­ uman Rights Politics in the United States.” Journal of American History 86 (December 1999): 1231–50. David R. Collier, Democracy and the Nature of American Influence in Iran, 1941–1979 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017). Connelly, John. Captive University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech, and Polish Higher Education, 1945–1956. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Coombs, Philip. The Fourth Dimension of Foreign Policy: Educational and Cultural Affairs. New York: Harper and Row, 1964. Cooper, Andrew Scott. The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran. New York: Holt, 2016. —­—. The Oil Kings: How the U.S., Iran, and Saudi Arabia Changed the Balance of Power in the ­Middle East. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011. Cottam, Richard W. Nationalism in Iran. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1964. —­—. Iran and the United States: A Cold War Case Study. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988. Cull, Nicholas J. The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945–1989. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Cullather, Nick. The Hungry World: Amer­i­ca’s Cold War ­Battle against Poverty in Asia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Dabashi, Hamid. Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundation of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2006. —­—. Persophilia: Persian Culture on the Global Scene. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. —­—. Iran without Borders: T ­ owards a Critique of the Postcolonial Nation. New York: Verso, 2016. De Bellaigue, Christopher. Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Tragic Anglo-­ American Coup. New York: Harper Collins, 2012. De Villiers, Gérard. The Imperial Shah: An Informal Biography. Translated by June P. Wilson and Walter B. Michaels. Boston: L ­ ittle, Brown, 1976. Denemark, Robert A., and Daniel M. Green. “Cycles of Liberalism in the Twentieth ­Century.” Humboldt Journal of Social Relations 25 (1999): 31–64. Desnoyers, Charles A. “Self-­Strengthening in the New World: A Chinese Envoy’s Travels in Amer­i­ca.” Pacific Historical Review 60 (May 1991): 195–219. Diamond, Louise, and John McDonald. Multi-­Track Diplomacy: A Systems Approach to Peace. West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press, 1996. Dorman, William A., and Mansour Farhang. The U.S. Press and Iran: Foreign Policy and the Journalism of Deference. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Ekbladh, David. The ­Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order. Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2010.

Bibliography

223

Emery, Christian. US Foreign Policy and the Ira­nian Revolution: The Cold War Dynamics of Engagement and Strategic Alliance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Endy, Christopher. Cold War Holidays: American Tourism in France. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Engerman, David C. Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Rus­sian Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Engerman, David C., and Corinna R. Unger. “­Towards a Global History of Modernization.” Diplomatic History 33 (June 2009): 375–85. Espinosa, J. Manuel. Inter-­American Beginnings of U.S. Cultural Diplomacy, 1936–1948. Washington, DC: Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, 1976. Fain, W. Taylor. American Ascendance and British Retreat in the Persian Gulf Region. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Farber, David. Taken Hostage: The Iran Hostage Crisis and Amer­i­ca’s First Encounter with Radical Islam. Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2005. Farman Farmayan, Hafez. “The Forces of Modernization in Nineteenth C ­ entury Iran: A Historical Survey.” In Beginnings of Modernization in the ­Middle East: The Nineteenth ­Century, edited by William R. Polk and Richard L. Chambers, 119–51. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968. Fatemi, Ali M. S. “Development with Ample Capital and Foreign Exchange: A Study of Petroleum’s Contribution to the Economic Development of Selected Petroleum Exporting Countries.” PhD diss., New School for Social Research, 1967. Fatemi, Nasrollah S., Faramarz S. Fatemi, and Fariborz S. Fatemi. Love, Beauty, and Harmony in Sufism. South Brunswick, NJ: A. S. Barnes, 1978. Fawcett, Louise. Iran and the Cold War: The Azerbaijan Crisis of 1946. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Field, Thomas C., Jr. From Development to Dictatorship: Bolivia and the Alliance for Pro­ gress in the Kennedy Era. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014. Fisher, Christopher T. “ ‘Moral Purpose Is the Impor­tant ­Thing’: David Lilienthal, Iran, and the Meaning of Development in the US, 1956–63.” International History Review 33, no. 3 (2011): 431–51. Forsythe, David P. “­Human Rights in U.S. Foreign Policy: Retrospect and Prospect.” Po­ liti­cal Science Quarterly 105 (Autumn, 1990): 435–54. Fousek, John. To Lead the ­Free World: American Nationalism and the Cultural Roots of the Cold War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Franck, Thomas M., ed. The Tethered Presidency: Congressional Restraints on Executive Power. New York: New York University Press, 1981. Fraser, Donald M. “Freedom and Foreign Policy.” Foreign Policy 26 (Spring 1977): 140– 56. Gaddis, John Lewis. Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Galbraith, John Kenneth. “A Positive Approach to Economic Aid.” Foreign Affairs 39 (April 1961): 444–57. Ganji, Manouchehr. International Protection of H ­ uman Rights. Geneva: Droz, 1962. Garlitz, Richard P. “Academic Ambassadors in the ­Middle East: The University Contract Program in Turkey and Iran, 1950–1970.” PhD diss., Ohio University, 2008. —­—. “U.S. University Advisors and Education Modernization in Iran, 1951–1967.” In Teaching Amer­i­ca to the World and the World to Amer­ic­ a, edited by Richard Garlitz and Lisa Jarvinen, 195–216. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Gasiorowski, Mark J. U.S. Foreign Policy and the Shah: Building a Client State in Iran. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991.

224 Bibliography

Gelvin, James L. The Modern M ­ iddle East: A History. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Ghamari-­Tabrizi, Behrooz. “Between the Shah and the Imam: The Students of the Left in Iran, 1977–81.” In Student Protest: The Sixties and A ­ fter, edited by Gerard J. DeGroot, 232–47. New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 1998. Ghaneabassiri, Kamyar. “U.S. Foreign Policy and Persia, 1856–1921.” Ira­nian Studies 35 (Winter–­Summer 2002): 145–75. Gilman, Nils. Mandarins of the F ­ uture: Modernization Theory in Cold War Amer­i­ca. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Goedde, Petra, William I. Hitchcock, and Akira Iriye, eds. The ­Human Rights Revolution: An International History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Goluboff, Risa L. “Dispatch from the Supreme Court Archives: Vagrancy, Abortion, and What the Links between Them Reveal about the History of Fundamental Rights.” Stanford Law Review 62 (May 2010): 1361–94. Goode, James F. “A Good Start: The First American Mission to Iran, 1883–1885.” Muslim World 74 (April 1984): 100–118. —­—. The United States and Iran, 1946–1951: The Diplomacy of Neglect. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. —­—. “Reforming Iran during the Kennedy Years.” Diplomatic History 15 (January 1991): 13–29. —­—. The United States and Iran: In the Shadow of Musaddiq. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. —­—. “Assisting Our B ­ rothers, Defending Ourselves: The Ira­nian Intervention in Oman, 1972–75.” Ira­nian Studies 47, no. 3 (2014): 441–62. Green, Daniel M., and Robert A. Denemark. “Cycles of Liberalism in the Twentieth ­Century.” Humboldt Journal of Social Relations 25, no. 1 (1999): 43–50. Green, James N. We Cannot Remain ­Silent: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in the United States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Green, Nile. The Love of Strangers: What Six Muslim Students Learned in Jane Austen’s London. Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2016. Grigor, Talinn. “Preserving the Antique Modern: Persepolis ’71.” ­Future Anterior 2 (Summer 2005): 22–29. Guerrero, Javier Gil. The Car­ter Administration and the Fall of Iran’s Pahlavi Dynasty: US-­ Iran Relations on the Brink of the 1979 Revolution. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Hakimzadeh, Shirin. “Iran: A Vast Diaspora Abroad and Millions of Refugees at Home.” Migration Information Source, September 1, 2006. http://www.migrationpolicy.org​ /article/iran-vast-diaspora-abroad-and-millions-refugees-home. Halliday, Fred. Iran: Dictatorship and Development. New York: Penguin, 1979. Halpern, Manfred. The Politics of Social Change in the ­Middle East and North Africa. Prince­ ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1963. Hamblin, Jacob Darwin. “The Nuclearization of Iran in the Seventies.” Diplomatic History 38, no. 5 (2014): 1114–35. Harris, Franklin S. “The Beginnings of Point IV Work in Iran.” ­Middle East Journal 7 (Spring 1953): 222–28. Hart, Justin. Empire of Ideas: The Origins of Public Diplomacy and the Transformation of U.S. Foreign Policy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Heiss, Mary Ann. Empire and Nationhood: The United States, ­Great Britain, and Ira­nian Oil, 1950–1954. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Hendershot, Clarence. Politics, Polemics, and Pedagogs. New York: Vantage, 1975.

Bibliography

225

Herz, Martin F., ed. Contacts with the Opposition: A Symposium. Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, School of Foreign Ser­vice, Georgetown University, 1979. Hilty, James W. Robert Kennedy: ­Brother Protector. Philadelphia: ­Temple University Press, 1997. Hixson, Walter L. Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945–1961. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Horn, Gerd-­Rainer. The Spirit of ’68: Rebellion in Western Eu­rope and North Amer­i­ca. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Huntington, Samuel P. Po­liti­cal Order in Changing Socie­ties. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968. —­—. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. Hurewitz, J. C. ­Middle East Politics: The Military Dimension. New York: Praeger, 1969. Institute of Pacific Relations. “Ploughing the Field of International Educational Relationships: A Memorandum upon the Origin, Organ­ization and Activities of the Institute of International Education.” News Bulletin (April 1928): 3–8. Ioannides, Christos P. Amer­i­ca’s Iran: Injury and Catharsis. Lanham, MD: University Press of Amer­i­ca, 1984. Iriye, Akira. The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations. Vol. 3: The Globalizing of Amer­i­ca, 1913–1945. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. —­—. Cultural Internationalism and World Order. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Jacobs, Matthew F. Imagining the ­Middle East: The Building of an American Foreign Policy, 1918–1967. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Jerome, Carole. The Man in the Mirror. Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1987. Johns, Andrew L. “The Johnson Administration, the Shah of Iran, and the Changing Pattern of U.S.-­Iranian Relations, 1965–1967: ‘Tired of Being Treated like a Schoolboy.’ ” Journal of Cold War Studies 9 (Spring 2007): 64–94. Johnson, Robert David. Congress and the Cold War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Jones, Frank Leith. Blowtorch: Robert Komer, Vietnam, and American Cold War Strategy. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2013. Kaufman, Burton I. Trade and Aid: Eisenhower’s Foreign Economic Policy, 1953–1961. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. Keddie, Nikki R. Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution. Rev. ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. Kellermann, Henry J. Cultural Relations as an Instrument of U.S. Foreign Policy: The Educational Exchange Program between the United States and Germany, 1945–1954. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State, 1978. Kennedy, Edward M. “The Persian Gulf: Arms Race or Arms Control?” Foreign Affairs 54 (October 1975): 14–35. Keys, Barbara. Reclaiming American Virtue: The ­Human Rights Revolution in the 1970s. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. Kimball, Jeffrey. “The Nixon Doctrine: A Saga of Misunderstanding.” Presidential Studies Quarterly 36 (March 2006): 59–74. Kinzer, Stephen. All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of ­Middle East Terror. 2nd ed. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2008. Kisatsky, Deborah. “Voice of Amer­i­ca and Iran, 1949–1953: US Liberal Developmentalism, Propaganda and the Cold War.” Intelligence and National Security 14 (Autumn 1999): 160–85.

226 Bibliography

Klimke, Martin. The Other Alliance: Student Protest in West Germany and the United States in the Global Sixties. Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 2010. Klimke, Martin, and Joachim Scharloth, eds. 1968 in Eu­rope: A History of Protest and Activism, 1956–1977. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Kotek, Joël. Students and the Cold War. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. Kramer, Paul A. The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. —­—. “Is the World Our Campus? International Students and U.S. Global Power in the Long Twentieth ­Century.” Diplomatic History 33 (November 2009): 775–806. Kreisberg, Paul H., ed. American Hostages in Iran: The Conduct of a Crisis. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985. Kurzman, Charles. The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. Kuzmarov, Jeremy. Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation Building in the American ­Century. Amherst: University of Mas­sa­chu­setts Press, 2012. LaFargue, Thomas. China’s First Hundred. Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1942. Latham, Michael. Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and ‘Nation Building’ in the Kennedy Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. —­—. The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Pres­ent. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. Latham, Robert. The Liberal Moment: Modernity, Security, and the Making of Postwar International Order. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Lebovic, Sam. “From War Junk to Educational Exchange: The World War II Origins of the Fulbright Program and the Foundations of American Cultural Globalism, 1945– 1950.” Diplomatic History 37 (April 2013): 280–312. Lenczowski, George, ed. Iran ­under the Pahlavis. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1978. Lerner, Daniel. The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the ­Middle East. New York: ­Free Press, 1958. Lerner, Mitchell. “ ‘A Big Tree of Peace and Justice’: The Vice Presidential Travels of Lyndon Johnson.” Diplomatic History 34 (April 2010): 357–93. Leslie, Stuart W., and Robert Kargon. “Exporting MIT: Science, Technology, and Nation-­ Building in India and Iran.” Osiris 21 (January 2006): 110–30. Li, Hongshan. U.S.-­China Educational Exchange: State, Society, and Intercultural Relations, 1905–1950. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008. Lipp­mann, Walter. The Coming Tests with Rus­sia. Boston: ­Little, Brown, 1961. ­Little, Douglas. American Orientalism: The United States and the M ­ iddle East since 1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Lobel, Jules. “Justice Douglas the Internationalist: The Connection between Domestic Liberty and Foreign Policy.” In “He ­Shall Not Pass This Way Again”: The Legacy of Justice William O. Douglas, edited by Stephen L. Wasby, 279–95. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990. Lorentz, John, and John Wertime. “Ira­ni­ans.” In Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, edited by Stephan Thernstrom, 521–24. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1980. Loss, Christopher P. Between Citizens and the State: The Politics of American Higher Education in the 20th ­Century. Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2012. Lykins, Daniel L. From Total War to Total Diplomacy: The Advertising Council and the Construction of the Cold War Consensus. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003. Lytle, Mark Hamilton. The Origins of the Iranian-­American Alliance, 1941–1953. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1987.

Bibliography

227

Mahdavy, Hossein. “The Coming Crisis in Iran.” Foreign Affairs 44 (October 1965): 134–46. Mahoney, Richard D. JFK: Ordeal in Africa. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. Marwick, Arthur. The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c.1958–­c.1974. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Matin-­Asgari, Afshin. Ira­nian Student Opposition to the Shah. Costa Mesa: Mazda, 2002. —­—. “Tehran Memoirs and Diaries: Winter 1979 and Summer 1997.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the ­Middle East 20, nos. 1–2 (2000): 171–79. McFarland, Stephen L. “A Peripheral View of the Origins of the Cold War: The Crises in Iran, 1941–47.” Diplomatic History 4 (October 1980): 333–52. McGlinchey, Stephen. “Lyndon B. Johnson and Arms Credit Sales to Iran 1964–1968.” ­Middle East Journal 67 (Spring 2013): 229–47. —­—. “Richard Nixon’s Road to Tehran: The Making of the U.S.-­Iran Arms Agreement of May 1972.” Diplomatic History 37 (September 2013): 841–60. —­—. US Arms Policies ­towards the Shah’s Iran. New York: Routledge, 2014. Menashri, David. Education and the Making of Modern Iran. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992. Milani, Abbas. The Persian Sphinx: Amir Abbas Hoveyda and the Riddle of the Ira­nian Revolution. Washington, DC: Mage, 2004. —­—. Eminent Persians: The Men and ­Women Who Made Modern Iran, 1941–1979. 2 vols. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008. —­—. The Shah. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Milani, Mohsen M. The Making of Iran’s Islamic Revolution: From Monarchy to Islamic Republic. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1988. Miller, William Green. “Po­liti­cal Organ­ization in Iran: From Dowreh to Po­liti­cal Party, Part I.” ­Middle East Journal 23 (Spring 1969): 159–67. —­—. “Po­liti­cal Organ­ization in Iran: From Dowreh to Po­liti­cal Party, Part II.” ­Middle East Journal 23 (Summer 1969): 343–50. Milne, David. Amer­i­ca’s Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War. New York: Hill and Wang, 2008. Mirsepassi, Ali. Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization: Negotiating Modernity in Iran. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Mofid, Kamran. Development Planning in Iran: From Monarchy to Islamic Republic. Wisbech, UK: ­Middle East and North African Studies Press, 1987. Moin, Baqer. Khomeini: Life of the Ayatollah. New York: I. B. Tauris, 1999. Moses, Russell Leigh. Freeing the Hostages: Reexamining U.S.-­Iranian Negotiations and Soviet Policy, 1979–1981. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996. Mottahedeh, Roy. The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran. Oxford: Oneworld, 2004. Motter, Thomas Hubbard Vail. The Persian Corridor and Aid to Rus­sia. Washington, DC: Department of the Army, 1952. Moyn, Samuel. The Last Utopia: H ­ uman Rights in History. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2010. Murphy, Bruce Allen. Wild Bill: The Life and Legend of William O. Douglas. New York: Random House, 2003. Naficy, Hamid. A Social History of Ira­nian Cinema. Vol. 2: The Industrializing Years, 1941– 1978. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Nakaya, Kenichi, and Robert S. Schwantes. Ten Years of Cultural and Educational Interchange between Japan and Amer­i­ca, 1952–1961. Joint United States–­Japan Conference on Cultural and Educational Interchange, January 1962. Nemchenok, Victor V. “ ‘That So Fair a T ­ hing Should Be So Frail’: The Ford Foundation and the Failure of Rural Development in Iran, 1953–1964.” ­Middle East Journal 63 (Spring 2009): 261–84.

228 Bibliography

—­—. “In Search of Stability amid Chaos: US Policy t­ oward Iran, 1961–63.” Cold War History 10 (August 2010): 341–69. “New Probe into 1967 Killing: Police Covered Up Truth B ­ ehind Infamous Student Shooting.” Der Spiegel Online International. http://www.spiegel.de/international/ger​ many/0,1518,810877,00.html. Ninham, Sally. A Cohort of Pioneers: Australian Postgraduate Students and American Postgraduate Degrees, 1949–1964. Ballan, AU: Connor Court, 2011. Ninkovich, Frank A. The Diplomacy of Ideas: U.S. Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations, 1938–1950. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Nirumand, Bahman. Iran: The New Imperialism in Action. Translated by Leonard Mins. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969. Nolan, Mary. Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Normand, Roger, and Sarah Zaidi. ­Human Rights at the UN: The Po­liti­cal History of Universal Justice. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. “Norwich University Awards Honorary Diplomas to Former Ira­nian Students from the Class of 1980.” http://www.norwich.edu/about/news/2005/iranianalumni.html. Nye, Joseph S., Jr. Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. New York: Public Affairs, 2004. O’Donnell, Guillermo A. Modernization and Bureaucratic-­Authoritarianism: Studies in South American Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. Offiler, Ben. US Foreign Policy and the Modernization of Iran: Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and the Shah. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. O’Mara, Margaret. “The Uses of the Foreign Student.” Social Science History 36 (Winter 2012): 583–615. Osgood, Kenneth. Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda ­Battle at Home and Abroad. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006. O’­Sullivan, Christopher. FDR and the End of Empire: The Origins of American Power in the ­Middle East. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Pach, Chester J. Arming the F ­ ree World: The Origins of the United States Military Assistance Program, 1945–1950. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Paget, Karen M. Patriotic Betrayal: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Secret Campaign to Enroll American Students in the Crusade against Communism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015. Parker, Jason C. ­Brother’s Keeper: The United States, Race, and Empire in the British Ca­rib­ bean, 1937–1962. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Parmar, Inderjeet. Foundations of the American C ­ entury: The Ford, Car­ne­gie, and Rocke­fel­ ler Foundations in the Rise of American Power. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Parsa, Misagh. Social Origins of the Ira­nian Revolution. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989. Paterson, Thomas G. Kennedy’s Quest for Victory: American Foreign Policy, 1961–1963. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Patrikarakos, David. Nuclear Iran: The Birth of an Atomic State. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2012. Pollack, Kenneth M. The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict between Iran and Amer­ic­ a. New York: Random House, 2005. Popp, Roland. “Benign Intervention? The Kennedy Administration’s Push for Reform in Iran.” In John F. Kennedy and the “Thousand Days”: New Perspectives on the Foreign and Domestic Policies of the Kennedy Administration, edited by Manfred Berg and Andreas Etges, 197–219. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 2007.

Bibliography

229

—­—. “An Application of Modernization Theory during the Cold War? The Case of Pahlavi Iran.” International History Review 30, no. 1 (2008): 76–98. Preston, Andrew. The War Council: McGeorge Bundy, the NSC, and Vietnam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Rahnema, Ali. An Islamic Utopian: A Po­liti­cal Biography of Ali Shari‘ati. New York: I. B. Tauris, 1998. —­—. ­Behind the 1953 Coup in Iran: Thugs, Turncoats, Soldiers, and Spooks. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Rakove, Robert B. Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Randjbar-­Daemi, Siavush. “ ‘Down with the Monarchy’: Iran’s Republican Moment of August 1953.” Ira­nian Studies 50, no. 2 (2017): 293–313. Rey, Lucien. “Guilt by Association.” New Left Review 35 (January–­February 1966): 102–4. Ricks, Thomas M. “U.S. Military Missions to Iran, 1943–1978: The Po­liti­cal Economy of Military Assistance.” Ira­nian Studies 12 (Summer-­Autumn, 1979): 163–93. Ringer, Monica M. Education, Religion, and the Discourse of Cultural Reform in Qajar Iran. Costa Mesa: Mazda, 2001. Rosenberg, Emily S. Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. —­—. Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900–1930. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Rosenstein-­Rodan, Paul. Notes on the Theory of the “Big Push.” Cambridge: Center for International Studies, Mas­sa­chu­setts Institute of Technology, 1957. Rostow, W. W. The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-­Communist Manifesto. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1960. Rubin, Barry. Paved with Good Intentions: The American Experience and Iran. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. Ryan, Paul B. The Ira­nian Rescue Mission: Why It Failed. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1985. Sabahi, Farian. The Literacy Corps in Pahlavi Iran, 1963–1979: Po­liti­cal, Social, and Literary Implications. Lugano, Switzerland: Editrice Sapiens, 2002. Sackley, Nicole. “Village Models: Etawah, India, and the Making and Remaking of ­Development in the Early Cold War.” Diplomatic History 37 (September 2013): 749–78. Sahimi, Muhammad. “Forced to Fuel: Iran’s Nuclear Energy Program.” Harvard International Review 26 (Winter 2005): 42–45. —­—. “Courageous and Principled: Journalists Isa Saharkhiz and Ahmad Zeidabadi.” PBS Tehran Bureau, November 21, 2009. Saikal, Amin. The Rise and Fall of the Shah: Iran from Autocracy to Religious Rule. Prince­ ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2009. Sale, Kirkpatrick. SDS. New York: Random House, 1973. Saleh, Ali Pasha. Cultural Ties between Iran and the United States. Tehran: Her Imperial Majesty’s National Committee for the American Revolution Bicentennial, 1976. Salehi, Ali Akbar. “Resonance Region Neutronics of Unit Cells in Fast and Thermal Reactors.” PhD diss., Mas­sa­chu­setts Institute of Technology, 1977. Sanders, Marion K. Dorothy Thompson: A Legend in Her Time. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973. Saunders, Frances Stonor. The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. New York: New Press, 2000. Schayegh, Cyrus. “ ‘Seeing Like a State’: An Essay on the Historiography of Modern Iran.” International Journal of ­Middle East Studies 42 (February 2010): 37–61.

230 Bibliography

Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. Robert Kennedy and His Times. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978. —­—. The Imperial Presidency. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. Schmidli, William Michael. The Fate of Freedom Elsewhere: H ­ uman Rights and U.S. Cold War Policy ­toward Argentina. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013. Schmitz, David F. The United States and Right-­Wing Dictatorships, 1965–1989. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the ­Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. Scott-­Smith, Giles. Networks of Empire: The US State Department’s Foreign Leader Program in the Netherlands, France, and Britain 1950–70. Brussels: P. I. E. Peter Lang, 2008. Selbin, Eric. “What Was Revolutionary about the Ira­nian Revolution? The Power of Possibility.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the ­Middle East 29, no. 1 (2009): 33–46. Self, Robert. “ ‘To Plan Our Liberation’: Black Power and the Politics of Place in Oakland, California, 1965–1977.” Journal of Urban History 26 (September 2000): 759–92. Seliktar, Ofira. Failing the Crystal Ball Test: The Car­ter Administration and the Fundamentalist Revolution in Iran. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000. Semnani, Neda. “Memoirs of a Revolutionary’s ­Daughter.” The Baffler 29 (2015). http://­ thebaffler​.­com​/­salvos​/­revolutionary​-­daughter​-­semnani. The Seyyed Hossein Nasr Foundation. “About Seyyed Hossein Nasr.” http://www.nasrfoun​ dation.org/bios.html. Shannon, Kelly J. “Veiled Intentions: Islam, Global Feminism, and U.S. Foreign Policy since the Late 1970s.” PhD diss., ­Temple University, 2010. Shannon, Matthew. “William O. Douglas.” In The U.S. Justice System: An Encyclopedia, edited by Steven Harmon Wilson, 494–97. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-­CLIO, 2012. —­—. “ ‘One of Our Greatest Psychological Assets’: The New Frontier, Cold-­War Public Diplomacy, and Robert Kennedy’s 1962 Goodwill Tour.” International History Review 36, no. 4 (2014): 767–90. Shawcross, William. The Shah’s Last Ride: The Fate of an Ally. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988. Sherwood, Frank P. Uncommon ­People I Have Known: Sixteen Individuals Who Have Made a Difference. Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2013. Shesol, Jeff. Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud that Defined a De­cade. New York: Norton, 1997. Simpson, Bradley R. Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-­Indonesian Relations. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. —­—. “Denying the ‘First Right’: The United States, Indonesia, and the Ranking of ­Human Rights by the Car­ter Administration, 1976–1980,” International History Review 31 (December 2009): 798–826. Skowronek, Stephen. Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Slobodian, Quinn. Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Snyder, Sarah B. ­Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History of the Helsinki Network. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. —­—. “Exporting Amnesty International to the United States: Transatlantic H ­ uman Rights Activism in the 1960s.” ­Human Rights Quarterly 34 (August 2012): 779–99. —­—. “ ‘A Call for U.S. Leadership’: Congressional Activism on H ­ uman Rights.” Diplomatic History 37 (April 2013): 372–97. Soomekh, Saba. From the Shahs to Los Angeles: Three Generations of Ira­nian Jewish ­Women between Religion and Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012.

Bibliography

231

­Sullivan, Zohreh T. Exiled Memories: Stories of Ira­nian Diaspora. Philadelphia: T ­ emple University Press, 2001. Summitt, April R. “For a White Revolution: John F. Kennedy and the Shah of Iran.” ­Middle East Journal 58 (Autumn 2004): 560–75. Suri, Jeremi. Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. —­—. “Non-­Governmental Organ­izations and Non-­State Actors.” In Palgrave Advances in International History, edited by Patrick Finney, 223–46. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. —­—. “The Cultural Contradictions of Cold War Education: West Berlin and the Youth Revolt of the 1960s.” In Local Consequences of the Global Cold War, edited by Jeffrey A. Engel, 57–76. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2007. Taffet, Jeffrey. Foreign Aid as Foreign Policy: The Alliance for Pro­gress in Latin Amer­i­ca. New York: Routledge, 2007. Trenta, Luca. “The Champion of H ­ uman Rights Meets the King of Kings: Jimmy Car­ter, the Shah, and Ira­nian Illusions and Rage.” Diplomacy and Statecraft 24, no. 3 (2013): 476–98. Trubek, David M. “When Is an Omelet? What Is an Egg? Some Thought on Economic Development and H ­ uman Rights in Latin Amer­i­ca.” American Journal of International Law 67 (November 1973): 198–205. Vaez, Ali, and Karim Sadjadpour. Iran’s Nuclear Odyssey: Costs and Risks. Washington, DC: Car­ne­gie Endowment for International Peace, 2013. Vahabzadeh, Peyman. A Guerrilla Odyssey: Modernization, Secularism, Democracy, and the Fadai Period of National Liberation in Iran, 1971–1979. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2010. Vahdat, Farzin. God and Juggernaut: Iran’s Intellectual Encounter with Modernity. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002. Valdés, Juan Gabriel. Pinochet’s Economists: The Chicago School of Economics in Chile. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Varon, Jeremy. Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Vio­lence in the Sixties and Seventies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Varon, Jeremy, Michael S. Foley, and John McMillian. “Time Is an Ocean: The Past and ­Future of the Sixties.” Sixties 1, no. 1 (2008): 1–7. Von Eschen, Penny M. Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. Ward, Steven R. Immortal: A Military History of Iran and Its Armed Forces. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2009. Warne, Andrew. “Psychoanalyzing Iran: Kennedy’s Iran Task Force and the Modernization of Orientalism, 1961–3.” International History Review 35, no. 2 (2013): 396– 422. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Other Writings. New York: Penguin, 2002. Weinbaum, Marvin G. “Iran Finds a Party System: The Institutionalization of ‘Iran Novin.’ ” ­Middle East Journal 27 (Autumn 1973): 439–55. Weissbrodt, David. “The Role of International Nongovernmental Organ­izations in the Implementation of ­Human Rights.” Texas International Law Journal 12 (1977): 293–320. Westad, Odd Arne. The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Wilber, Donald N. Con­temporary Iran. New York: Praeger, 1963.

232 Bibliography

Wilford, Hugh. The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played Amer­i­ca. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008. —­—. Amer­i­ca’s ­Great Game: The CIA’s Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern ­Middle East. New York: Basic, 2013. Wright, Robin. The Last ­Great Revolution: Turmoil and Transformation in Iran. New York: Vintage, 2001. Yaqub, Salim. Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the ­Middle East. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Yar-­Shater, Ehsan, and John S. Badeau, eds. Iran ­Faces the Seventies. New York: Praeger, 1971. Ye, Weili. Seeking Modernity in China’s Name: Chinese Students in the United States, 1900–1927. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. Young, T. Cuyler. “Iran in Continuing Crisis.” Foreign Affairs 40 (January 1962): 275–92. Zonis, Marvin. “Educational Ambivalence in Iran.” Ira­nian Studies 1 (Autumn 1968): 133–53. —­—. The Po­liti­cal Elite of Iran. Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1971.

Index

Abadan oil refinery, 18–19, 94 Abrahamian, Ervand, 11, 64, 97 Achaemenid Dynasty, 98–100 Af­ghan­i­stan, 36, 39 Alam, Asadollah, 85 Albala, Nuri, 133–34 Alborz College, 6–7 Al-­e Ahmad, Jalal, 116 Ali, Mohammad, 5 Alimard, Amin, 101 Alliance for Pro­gress, 29, 44 America-­Mideast Educational and Training Ser­v ices (AMIDEAST), 155 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 6 American Council on Education, 114–15, 155 American Friends of the ­Middle East (AFME), 14, 34–39, 51, 73, 88, 111, 113, 145, 159 American University of Beirut, 6, 24, 31, 101 Americans for Defense of Ira­nian Po­liti­cal Prisoners, 136–37 Amini, Ali, 45, 59, 158 Amir-­Entezam, Abbas, 151 Amnesty International, 15, 118, 124–26, 129–31, 133–34, 138, 140, 145 Amuzegar, Jamshid, 100–101 Ancient Persia, 100 Anglo-­Iranian Oil Com­pany, 18–19, 39 Ansari, Ali, 98 Aram, Abbas, 65 Ardalan, Farajallah, 53 Arjomand, Said, 150 Armored School, 21 Aryamehr University of Technology, 108 Ashraf Pahlavi Foundation, 112 Ashura, 64, 145 Asia Foundation, 73 Aspen Institute, 60, 62, 118 Atomic Energy Organ­ization of Iran (AEOI), 107–11, 162 Austria, 32, 56, 63, 70, 123, 125, 134, 162 Azhari, Gholam Reza, 144 Baghdad Pact, 19 Bakhtar, 48

Bakhtiar, Shahpour, 144, 150 Bakhtiar, Taimur, 26–27 Bandung Conference, 43 Banisadr, Abolhasan, 71, 147–49, 151, 153–54 Baraheni, Reza, 130–31 Barzegar, Ali, 76 Bazargan, Mehdi, 44, 49, 140, 147–48, 151, 154 Belgium, 123, 134 Bill, James, 100–101, 158 ­Binder, Leonard, 9 Board of Foreign Scholarships, 28 Boeing, 102 Bolster, Archie, 131 Bonakdarian, Mansour, 11 Borujerdi, Mohammad Hosein, 44 Bowling, John, 45, 60 Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program, 7 Boyle, John Whiteford, 88 Brazil, 94, 101 Brigham Young University, 23 British Secret Intelligence Ser­v ice (MI6), 19 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 138 Bull, John, 39 Bundy, McGeorge, 43, 62, 64 Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, 28, 113 Bureau of Intelligence and Research, 89 Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, 45, 67–68 Bureau of Public Affairs, 28 Bureau of the Bud­get, 32, 45–46 Burke, Roland, 98 Butler, William, 129–30, 134, 137 Canada, 50, 71, 107, 143 Car­ter, Jimmy campaign promises, 138 deportation decisions, 153–56 educators’ petitions, 155–56 hostage crisis, 151–54, 160 ­human rights policies, 11, 120, 137–38, 145, 160 Iran arms sales, 96, 138 military response, 149 Operation Ea­gle Claw, 154 provisional government interactions, 151 233

234 Index

Car­ter, Jimmy (continued) Shah, relations with, 1–2, 137, 152, 159 Shiism misunderstandings, 159 student dissent impact, 138–39, 143–44 Car­ter, Rosalynn, 1 Catherwood Foundation, 73 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 19, 24, 26–27, 34–35, 39, 48, 50, 58, 71–74, 83, 113, 126 Central Treaty Organ­ization (CENTO), 19–20, 61–62 Chamran, Mostafa, 143, 151 Chehabi, Houchang, 147 Chile, 29, 101, 119, 136 China, 7, 22, 72, 118, 144 Chisholm, Shirley, 128 Chomsky, Noam, 109 Church, Frank, 49 Churchill, Winston, 17, 19 Citadel, The, 105, 154 Clinton, Bill, 163 Columbia University, 36, 49, 101 Commission on ­Human Rights, 99, 123, 126, 133 Committee against Repression in Iran, 118 Committee for the Defense of Freedom and ­Human Rights, 148 Committee for the Defense of Ira­nian Po­liti­cal Prisoners and Students, 122–23 Committee for the Defense of Po­liti­cal Prisoners, 121 Committee on Friendly Relations among Foreign Students, 7 Confederation of Ira­nian Students National Union (CISNU), 12–13, 53, 56–57, 71–72, 76–77, 83, 119–25, 140, 143, 148 Constitutional Revolution, 11–13, 158 Cottam, Richard, 64, 158 Council on International Education Exchange, 155 Cuban Missile Crisis, 50, 62, 118 Cyrus the ­Great, 98–100, 117 Dabashi, Hamid, 91 Daneshjoo, 77 Dar al-­Fonun, 6 Daryani, Bahram, 125 Dearborn Foundation, 35 Dellums, Ronald, 127–29 Department of State. See State Department Dez Dam, 32 Division for Cultural Relations, 7 Douglas, William, 14, 46–50, 53, 58, 60–62, 67, 118, 121–22

Dulles, Allen, 34 Dulles, John Foster, 25 Eastern Michigan University, 51–53 Ebtehaj, Abolhasan, 30–33, 44–45, 91, 158 Ebtekar, Massoumeh, 152–53 Economic Bureau, 30–33, 36, 106, 122 Edwards, William Donlon “Don,” 127–29 Egypt, 5, 26 Eisenhower, Dwight, 14, 19–20, 25–29, 39–40, 43, 45, 67, 95, 107 Emergency Student Aid Program, 24 Emery, Christian, 151 Ennals, Martin, 118, 126, 131 Etemad, Akbar, 107 Faculty Development Program, 112–13 Faiziyeh, 64 Farhang, Mansur, 134, 140, 151 Farmanfarmaian, Khodadad, 30–34, 89, 91, 106, 122 Farzanegan, Abbas, 24 Farzaneh, Darush, 105 Fatemi, Ali, 49, 51–53, 56–57, 59–61, 65–66, 68, 73, 75–76, 79, 118 Fatemi, Fariborz, 49, 52–53, 56–57, 60 Fatemi, Hosein, 18, 48–49 Fatemi, Nasrollah Saifpour, 49, 76 Fifth Development Plan, 106 First Development Plan, 30 First World War, 5–6 Flad, Harvey, 75 Ford, Gerald, 129 Ford, Henry, 29 Ford Foundation, 14, 29–34, 39, 46, 113 Foreign Affairs, 88, 122 Foreign Assistance Act, 22, 129 Foreign Leader Program, 28–29 Foreign Operations Administration (FOA), 27–28 Fort Leavenworth, 21, 24 Fort Sill, 21 Foucault, Michel, 149 Foundation for Youth and Student Affairs, 73 Fowler, James, 80–82 France, 5–6, 18, 21, 23, 27, 40–41, 70, 86, 103, 107, 110, 123, 133–34, 144, 146–47, 161 Fraser, Donald, 129–30 ­free speech modernism, 14, 46–50, 59–63, 67, 148 ­Free University of Iran, 101

Index

Fulbright, J. William, 126–27 Fulbright Program, 8, 28, 111, 113, 129–30 Gallo, Gregory, 80–82 Gendarmerie, 18, 26, 96 George Washington University, 114, 162 Georgetown University, 49–50, 77, 114, 128–30, 148 Germany, 21–22, 27, 40, 63, 70–71, 84–85, 103, 107, 110, 123, 133–34, 158, 161 Ghotbi, Reza, 101 Goode, James, 45, 158 ­Great Britain, 5, 11, 17–19, 21, 23, 27, 39–41, 63, 70, 94, 102–3, 107, 120–23, 134–36 ­Great Civilization, 93, 95–97, 106–7, 110–11, 114, 141 Greece, 22, 72 guerrilla movements, 13, 118, 125, 128–29, 133, 143, 149 Guevara, Ernesto “Che,” 71, 82 Gurney, Clifford, 36 Guthman, Edwin, 56 Haber, Al, 82 Halliday, Fred, 9 Halpern, Manfred, 67 Hansen, Kenneth, 32, 46 Hanson, Haldore, 22 Harrington, Michael, 129 Hart, Loring, 154 Harvard Advisory Group, 30–32, 46, 113 Hayden, Tom, 82 Heald, Henry, 29 Heldmann, Hans, 125, 131 Henle, Robert, 129 Herz, Martin, 89 Hoffman, Paul, 29 Holmes, Julius, 54, 66 Homafaran, 149–50 Homayun, Darius, 89–90 Hosein, Imam, 64 hostage crisis, 151–54, 160 Hulac, Charles, 35–36 Hull, Cordell, 7 Humphrey, Hubert, 93 Huntington, Samuel, 67, 86, 101 Hussein, Saddam, 147 Huyser, Robert “Dutch,” 149–50 Immigration and Nationality Act, 59 Immigration and Naturalization Ser­v ice, 66, 154

235

Imperial Ira­nian Air Force, 21, 96, 102, 106, 149–50 Imperial Ira­nian Army, 21, 102, 106, 150 Imperial Ira­nian Navy, 15, 96, 102–6, 149 Imperial War College, 5 Import Substitution Industrialization model, 160 India, 29, 71 Indonesia, 29, 94 Industrial and Mining Development Bank, 90 Institute for Public and Business Administration, 28 Institute for Research and Planning in Science and Education, 111 Institute of International Education, 7, 28, 155 International Association of Demo­cratic ­Lawyers, 133 International Atomic Energy Agency, 110 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 30 International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), 15–16, 129–30, 137 International Committee of the Red Cross, 137–38 International Conference on H ­ uman Rights, 98, 137 international education America-­Mideast Educational and Training Ser­v ices (AMIDEAST), 155 American Friends of the ­Middle East (AFME), 14, 34–39, 51, 73, 88, 111, 113, 145, 159 Ashraf Pahlavi Foundation, 112 Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program, 7 Committee on Friendly Relations among Foreign Students, 7 Council on International Education Exchange, 155 Dwight Eisenhower, role of, 14, 20, 25–29, 39–40, 95 enrollment patterns, 3, 6, 24, 26, 40, 50, 70, 96–97, 105, 112, 152, 157–58 Faculty Development Program, 112–13 Ford Foundation, 14, 29–34, 39, 113 Fulbright Program, 8, 28, 111, 113, 129–30 Harry Truman, role of, 7–9, 14, 19–27, 39, 95 Institute for Research and Planning in Science and Education, 111 Institute of International Education, 7, 28, 155 International Education College Entrance Examination Board, 155

236 Index

international education (continued) International Education Exchange Program, 9, 14, 28, 39 International House Movement, 7 Ira­nian Student Association in the United States (ISAUS), 34–39, 47–53, 56–60, 64–68, 71, 73–74, 77, 79–86, 90–92, 117–23, 128–29, 135–36, 145, 148 Mas­sa­chu­setts Institute of Technology role, 15, 96, 107–11 military assistance programs, 3, 20–25, 95, 102–6, 115–16, 141, 157 National Association for Foreign Student Affairs (NAFSA), 35, 155 Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps (NROTC) programs, 104–5 nuclear technology training, 15, 96, 106–11 Pahlavi Foundation, 112 Point Four Program, 9, 14, 21–27, 100–101 Presbyterian influence, 5–6 public administration development, 27–28 Qajar Dynasty, 5–6 Superior Student Program, 112–13 technical assistance programs, 3, 9, 20–24, 27, 36, 39–40, 95 University of Southern California (USC) role, 27–28, 113 U.S. National Student Association (USNSA), 15, 72–84, 118 See also individual universities International House Movement, 7 International ­Human Rights Day, 145 International Monetary Fund, 30, 44 International Student Conference (ISC), 76–77, 83 International Union of Students, 76, 83 Iran Nameh, 56, 58, 76 Iran Novin Party, 87, 90, 102 Iran: The New Imperialism in Action, 84 Ira­nian Committee for the Defense of Freedom and ­Human Rights, 140 Ira­nian Constitution, 46, 53, 123 Ira­nian Revolution, 1–3, 9, 11, 120, 131, 137, 142, 144–47, 150–54, 159–60, 163 Ira­nian Student Association in the United States (ISAUS), 34–39, 47, 49–53, 56–60, 64–68, 71, 73–75, 77, 79–86, 90–92, 117–23, 128–29, 135–36, 145, 148. See also student dissent Iraq, 20, 26, 143, 147, 162 Iraqi Revolution, 20, 26 Isfahan Nuclear Technology Center, 107

Islamic Republic, 4, 11, 16, 71, 110–11, 149–51, 153–54, 160–64 Israel, 69, 95 Issari, Mohammad Ali, 100 Italy, 19, 103, 123, 133–34, 161 Jaleh Square, 144 Japan, 86, 158, 161 Jerome, Carole, 50 Johnson, Lyndon Iran development pro­gress, 90–91 military assistance, 69 Robert Kennedy, relations with, 67 Shah, relations with, 67–70, 77, 81, 91, 93, 124 status-­of-­forces agreement, 70 student dissent role, 53, 121–22 technocrat reliance, 86–87 Vietnam War involvement, 69, 83, 86 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), 161 Jordan, Samuel Martin, 6 Justice Department, 59–60, 65–67, 135 Keddie, Nikki, 116 Kennan, George, 7 Kennedy, Edward, 129 Kennedy, John F. assassination, 65 Bureau of the Bud­get, 32, 45–46 decentralized leadership style, 45–46 Iran Task Force, 44 modernization efforts, 9, 66–67, 91 New Frontier strategy, 43–45, 56, 67 Shah, relations with, 14, 43–47, 50, 57–58, 60, 66, 69, 93–94, 120, 138, 141, 159 student dissent, 52–53, 57–58, 66, 139 third world focus, 43–44, 67 Kennedy, Robert Ali Fatemi, relations with, 60–61 assassination, 93 ­free speech modernism, 14, 46, 49–50, 67 goodwill tour, 54, 56–58 Lyndon Johnson, relations with, 67 National Front support, 43 resignation, 66–67 State Department, relations with, 57, 59 student dissent role, 14, 49–50, 56–57, 118 Kerr, Clark, 80–81 Kerry, John, 162 Keys, Barbara, 119 Khatami, Mohammad, 163 Khatami Air Force Base, 150

Index

Khazaneh, Reza, 107 Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi accession, 4, 16, 144 anti-­Americanism, 115 arrest, 64, 70 Confederation of Ira­nian Students National Union (CISNU) communications, 143 exile, 142, 146–47 governance of the jurist theory, 142–43, 148 ­human rights movement impact, 142 National Front support, 149 Paris inner circle, 146–49, 151, 154 Shah, relations with, 64, 70, 115, 149 Shia ulama leadership, 64, 142 status-­of-­forces opposition, 70, 142 student support, 142–43, 145–47 transnational message, 147 White Revolution opposition, 44, 64, 77, 142 Khrushchev, Nikita, 43–44 Kissinger, Henry, 94, 144 Klimke, Martin, 69 Komer, Robert, 43–44, 46, 59, 61–62, 64, 67–68, 121 Kramer, Paul, 12 La Bare, Sharon, 127–28 ­Labour Party, 121 Lafayette College, 6–7, 35–36 Lebaschi, Hasan, 53, 79–80 Lenin, Vladimir, 8, 13, 82 Leonard, J. J., 26 Lerner, Daniel, 8, 108 Liberation Movement of Iran (LMI), 49, 71, 147–49, 151 Lipp­mann, Walter, 43 Literacy Corps, 45, 111, 113 Lytle, Mark, 18 Mahdavi, Fereydun, 89 Mahdavi, Hosein, 33–34, 88–90, 121–23 Mahmud II, 5 Maine Maritime Acad­emy, 105 majlis (Ira­nian parliament), 4, 11, 13, 19, 33, 44, 63, 87, 98–99, 102 Maleki, Khalil, 44 Mansur, Hasan Ali, 87, 120 Maoists, 13, 71, 82, 120, 143 Mardom (­People’s) Party, 19, 102 Marshall Plan, 8, 22, 29 Marxism, 8, 13, 82, 84, 143, 147 Mas­sa­chu­setts Institute of Technology (MIT), 15, 96, 107–11, 161–62 Matin-­Asgari, Afshin, 12–13, 71

237

Matin-­Daftari, Hedayatollah, 89 Mazandaran University, 114 McDonnell-­Douglas, 102 Meinhof, Ulrike, 84 Melliyun (Nationalist) Party, 19 Menashri, David, 8–9 Meyer, Armin, 90, 159 Milani, Abbas, 82 Military Assistance Advisory Group, 103 Military Mission to the Ira­nian Army (ARMISH), 21 Miller, William Green, 88–90 Millikan, Max, 108 Millspaugh, Arthur, 18 Mining Development Bank, 124 Ministry of Science and Higher Education, 111, 113 Mirsepassi, Ali, 9 Mirza, Abbas, 5 Mitchell, Parren, 128 Moghadam, Reza, 31 Moin, Baqer, 147 Moniz, Ernst, 162 Mosaddeq, Mohammad British oil interests, 18–19 coup, 12, 19–20, 24, 36–40, 44, 83, 141, 159 National Front leadership, 13, 18, 158 Point Four Program support, 23 po­liti­cal experience, 18 student support, 38, 52, 57–58, 77, 131, 149 United States, relations with, 19, 27, 38, 47–48 William Douglas, support from, 47–48 Mottahedeh, Roy, 10 Moyn, Samuel, 119 Murphy, Franklin, 80 Muslim Student Association, 143 Mutual Defense Assistance Program, 21 Naficy, Hamid, 101 Nafisi, Azar, 82 Nasar ad-­Din Shah, 6 Nasiri, Nematollah, 132, 135, 144 Nasr, Hosein, 108 National Association for Foreign Student Affairs (NAFSA), 35, 155 National Front Ali Amini, opposition to, 45 Ayatollah Khomeini support, 149 Bakhtar support, 48 Central Committee, 122 Confederation of Ira­nian Students National Union, relations with, 53

238 Index

National Front (continued) Harry Truman, role of, 19 leader imprisonments, 64–65 modernization efforts, 18, 90 Mohammad Mosaddeq leadership, 13, 18, 158 Robert Kennedy support, 43 Robert Komer criticisms, 62 Second National Front, 44, 49, 66, 89, 147 student connections, 13, 52, 56, 71, 74, 122, 141 United Nations pickets, 56 U.S. National Student Association, support from, 74 White Revolution opposition, 63 William Douglas support, 48 National Intelligence and Security Organ­ization (SAVAK), 25–27, 39, 44, 49, 57–58, 70, 85, 101, 118–21, 125, 127, 130–37, 144 National Ira­nian Oil Com­pany, 4, 112 National Ira­nian Radio and Tele­v i­sion Organ­ization, 100 National Security Council (NSC), 14, 25, 43, 59, 61, 68, 153, 155 Near East Foundation, 24 New Frontier, 43–45, 56. See also Kennedy, John F. New Left movement, 15, 34, 72, 74, 82–86, 92, 117 New York University, 26, 31, 89 Nikkhah Group, 120–25 Nirumand, Bahman, 84 Nixon, Richard, 43–44, 92–94, 96, 103, 106, 119, 127, 129, 131 North Atlantic Treaty Organ­ization, 8 Norwich University, 105, 154 Noyes, Pierre, 136–37 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, 107, 161 nuclear technology, 2, 15, 47, 96, 106–11, 157, 161–63 Obama, Barack, 163 Office of Inter-­American Relations, 7 Office of the Supervisor of Ira­nian Students, 134 oil Abadan refinery, 18–19, 94 Anglo-­Iranian Oil Com­pany, 18–19, 39 British interests, 18–19, 94 consortium agreement, 45 National Ira­nian Oil Com­pany, 4, 112 nationalization efforts, 23–24, 94–95 Organ­ization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), 95

Plan Organ­ization funding, 30, 32 revenues, 30, 32–33, 94–95, 109, 112–13, 158 United States interests, 3, 5, 13, 17, 19–20, 104, 116, 119 Oman, 102, 106, 162 Operation Ea­gle Claw, 154 Operation TP-­AJAX, 19, 34 Organ­ization for Muslim Students, 148 Organ­ization of Arab Students, 36 Organ­ization of Ira­nian Muslim Students (OIMS), 143–44 Organ­ization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), 95 Organ­ization of Tehran University Students, 53 Organ­ization of the Ira­nian ­People’s Fedai Guerrillas, 125 Organ­ization of the Ira­nian ­People’s ­Mojahedin, 128 Otis, Harrison Gray, 6 Ottoman Empire, 5, 21 Overseas Con­sul­tants, Inc., 9 Oxford University, 11, 33, 88–89 Paget, Karen, 73–74 Pahlavi, Empress Farah, 128, 138 Pahlavi, Princess Ashraf, 99, 112 Pahlavi, Shah Mohammad Reza Albolhasan Ebtehaj, relations with, 32–33 Ali Fatemi, relations with, 56 assassination attempt, 120–24 authoritarianism, 4, 11–13, 15, 38, 57, 72–73, 88, 97, 116, 141–42, 157–58 Ayatollah Khomeini, relations with, 64, 70, 115, 149 college campus re­sis­tance, 79–81, 85–86 Cyrus the ­Great emulations, 98–100, 117 educational connections, 6, 9–10, 70, 111–15 ­Great Civilization, 93, 95–97, 106–7, 110–11, 114, 141 Jimmy Car­ter, relations with, 1, 137, 152, 159 John F. Kennedy, relations with, 14, 43–47, 50, 57–58, 60, 66, 69, 93–94, 120, 138, 141, 159 Lyndon Johnson, relations with, 67–70, 77, 81, 91, 93, 124 majlis’ dissolution, 44, 147 martial law, 64–65, 102, 144–45 military ambitions, 14–15, 25, 33, 67, 81, 94–95, 101–6, 114, 149 nuclear program, 15, 96, 106–11 opposition intolerance, 4, 57 Richard Nixon, relations with, 93–94

Index

security establishment, 3, 25, 58, 70, 84, 89, 102, 135, 137, 144, 164 Soviet Union, relations with, 58 ulama conflicts, 18, 45, 64, 93 United States state visits, 1, 57–58, 69, 79, 92, 135 U.S. National Student Association, opposition from, 75–76 See also White Revolution Pahlavi Foundation, 112 Pahlavi University, 113 Pakistan, 36, 39 Parsons, Sir Anthony, 140 Patrikarakos, David, 96 Peace Corps, 44, 77, 111, 115 Pinochet, Augusto, 119 Piranazar, Hushang, 36 Plan Organ­ization, 4, 29–34, 36–37, 39, 46, 66, 88–89, 95, 106, 122 Point Four Program, 9, 14, 21–27, 100–101 Popp, Roland, 66 Port Huron Statement, 82–83 Powell, Jody, 155 Presbyterian Church, 5–6, 35–36 Prince­ton University, 31, 34, 75, 88 Progressive Circle, 87 Pye, Lucian, 108 Qajar Dynasty, 5–6, 10, 18, 45, 157 Qani, Cyrus, 89 Qavam, Ahmad, 17 Qotbzadeh, Sadeq, 49–53, 57, 59–60, 65–66, 68–69, 75, 79, 130, 133–34, 147–49, 151–54 Rad, Parirokh, 113 Radji, Parviz, 136 Rafizadeh, Mansur, 85, 134–35 Rafsanjani, Akbar Hashemi, 161 Ramparts, 34–35, 73 Rastakhiz (Resurgence) Party, 102 Re­sis­tance, 2, 130, 132–33 Reza Shah, 17–18, 30, 35, 102 Reza Shah Kabir University, 114 Rezai, Hosein, 125 Ridley, Clarence, 18, 21 Rogers, William, 128 Roo­se­velt, Franklin, 17–18, 47 Roo­se­velt, James, 49, 56 Roo­se­velt  Jr., Kermit, 34–35 Rosenstein-­Rodan, Paul, 108 Rostow, Walt, 8, 67, 91, 108 Rouhani, Hassan, 161–64

239

Royal Court, 13 Rusk, Dean, 65 Russell, Bertrand, 92, 123 Saleh, Allahyar, 44, 61 Salehi, Ali Akbar, 110, 162 Samii, Cyrus, 37 San Francisco State University, 84, 162 Sanjabi, Karim, 18, 44, 61 Sartre, Jean-­Paul, 123 SAVAK. See National Intelligence and Security Organization Schwarzkopf, Norman, 18 Schwarzkopf Sr., Norman, 26 Scott, James, 29 Second Development Plan, 30 Second National Front, 44, 49, 66, 89, 147 Second World War, 3–5, 17–18, 30, 35, 96, 98, 141, 156–57 Semnani, Neda, 146 Shah of Iran. See Pahlavi, Shah Mohammad Reza Shariati, Ali, 147 Sharif University of Technology, 108 Shawcross, William, 99 Shayegan, Ali, 18, 47, 61 Shiism, 64, 116, 142, 145, 159 Shiraz University, 113 Smith, Eli, 6 Smith-­Mundt Act, 8 South Africa, 94, 128 Soviet Union, 2–3, 7, 17–18, 20–22, 26, 30, 38–40, 58, 60–61, 73, 98, 119, 145 Spain, 72, 161 Stalin, Joseph, 17, 82 Stanford Research Institute, 29 Stanford University, 31, 136 Stark, Fortney “Pete,” 129 State Department American Council on Education study, 114–15 American Friends of the ­Middle East support, 113 blacklist of names, 135 Bureau of Intelligence and Research, 89 Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, 45, 67–68 Bureau of Public Affairs, 28 Division for Cultural Relations, 7 education emphasis, 14, 25, 28, 104, 114–15 Foreign Leader Program, 28–29 Immigration and Nationality Act interpretations, 59 International Education Exchange Program, 9, 14, 28, 39 Justice Department conflicts, 59–60, 65–66

240 Index

State Department (continued) Office of Security, 135 po­liti­cal prisoner enquiries, 131 Robert Kennedy, relations with, 57, 59 student dissent opposition, 59–60, 67, 135 Technical Cooperation Administration (TCA), 22–23 traditionalists vs. modernists, 45–46, 59–62, 67 student dissent Ali Fatemi leadership, 49, 51–53, 56–57, 59, 65–66, 73, 75, 79 Ayatollah Khomeini support, 142–43, 145–47 Confederation of Ira­nian Students National Union (CISNU), 12–13, 53, 56–57, 71–72, 76–77, 83, 119–25, 140, 143, 148 deportation threats, 59, 154–55 Eastern Michigan University convention, 51–53 hunger strikes, 123, 128, 133 International Student Conference (ISC), 76–77 Iran Nameh bulletin, 56, 58, 76 Ira­nian Revolution participation, 144–46 Ira­nian Student Association in the United States (ISAUS), 34–39, 47, 49–53, 56–60, 64–68, 71, 73–75, 77, 79–86, 90–92, 117–23, 128–29, 135–36, 145, 148 John F. Kennedy protests, 52–53, 57–58, 66, 139 Lyndon Johnson, role of, 53, 121–22 Mohammad Mosaddeq support, 38, 52, 57–58, 77, 131, 149 Muslim Student Association, 143 National Front connections, 13, 52, 56, 71, 74, 122, 141 New Left movement, 15, 34, 72, 74, 82–86, 92, 117 New York occupation, 52 nuclear technology programs, 109–10 Organ­ization of Ira­nian Muslim Students (OIMS), 143–44 Organ­ization of Tehran University Students, 53 po­liti­cal prisoner support, 120–24, 127, 129–37, 146 Re­sis­tance, 2, 130, 132–33 Robert Kennedy, role of, 14, 49–50, 56–57, 118 Sadeq Qotbzadeh leadership, 49–53, 57, 59, 65–66, 75, 79, 133–34, 148 sit-­ins, 52, 56, 65, 110

State Department opposition, 59–60, 67, 135 Students for a Demo­cratic Society (SDS), 82–86 transnational connections, 50–52, 72, 84–86, 123–24, 135–36 U.S. National Student Association (USNSA), 15, 72–84 Vietnam War, 72, 75, 83, 146 visa denials, 52, 59, 127, 154–55 West Germany conflict, 84–86 White Revolution opposition, 63–64, 68, 82, 131, 141 William Douglas, role of, 13, 46–47, 49–50, 118, 121–22 Students for a Demo­cratic Society (SDS), 82–86 Suez Crisis, 20, 26 ­Sullivan, William, 127, 132 Superior Student Program, 112–13 Suri, Jeremi, 12, 72 Surplus Arms Credit Agreement, 21 Switzerland, 10, 18, 123, 129, 134, 136 Talbot, Phillips, 44–45, 59–60, 65 Taleqani, Ayatollah Mahmud, 49, 147 Tasua, 145 Technical Cooperation Administration (TCA), 22–23 Tehran Proclamation, 98 Tehran Research Reactor, 107, 110 Tehran University, 6, 27–28, 53, 56–57, 65, 70, 75, 88, 130, 147, 149 Tehranian, Majid, 51, 53, 77, 79, 90, 101 Thacher, Nicholas, 85 Thant, U, 100, 123 Third Development Plan, 32, 91 Thompson, Dorothy, 34 Thornburg, Max, 22–23 Tiger, M. Gordon, 62, 65, 67, 81, 88 torture, 2, 11, 26–27, 56, 79, 117–19, 121, 124–25, 129, 131–37 Toufanian, Hassan, 21 Truman, Harry, 7–9, 14, 19–27, 39, 95 Tudeh Party, 19, 36, 66, 71, 76 Turkey, 22, 58 Twitchell Doctrine, 103–4 ulama (clergy), 6, 19, 44–45, 64, 66, 93, 142 United Nations, 17, 49, 56, 58, 65, 72, 97–100, 118, 123–24, 126, 133, 145, 148, 151 Universal Declaration of ­Human Rights, 97–98, 124, 140, 145 University of California at Berkeley, 38, 71, 79–80, 82, 107, 151

Index

University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), 78–81, 101 University of Colorado, 31, 101 University of Illinois, 79, 114 University of Minnesota, 31, 75–76 University of Pennsylvania, 113, 152 University of Southern California (USC), 27–28, 101, 113 Uphoff, Norman, 75 U.S. Agency for International Development, 9, 44 U.S. Information Agency (USIA), 25, 88–89, 100 U.S. National Student Association (USNSA), 15, 72–84, 118 U.S. Operations Mission, 27 Utah State University, 23, 51, 101 Vafa, Javad, 37 Vahabzadeh, Peyman, 13 Van Engert, Cornelius, 34 Vance, Cyrus, 140 Varon, Jeremy, 91 Vietnam War, 44, 67–69, 72, 75, 83, 86, 119, 126, 146, 159, 162 ­Virginia Military Institute (VMI), 103–5, 154 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 163–64 Warne, William, 23 Watergate scandal, 119, 126

241

White Revolution Ayatollah Khomeini opposition, 44, 64, 77, 142 Cyrus the ­Great emulations, 98–100, 117 educational reform goals, 111–13 elite benefits, 160 ­human rights framing, 45, 97–98, 160 Kennedy administration support, 66–68 Literacy Corps impact, 45, 111, 113 majlis’ support, 102 manpower training impact, 20 National Front opposition, 63 origins, 4, 15, 20 referendum results, 45 student opposition, 63–64, 68, 79–82, 131, 141 technocrat role, 73, 86–87 Third Development Plan foundation, 32 transnational protests, 63–64 university surveillance, 70 Wiesner, Jerome, 108–9 Wilford, Hugh, 35, 74 Wilson, Harold, 121 World Bank, 30–31 Yazdi, Ebrahim, 130, 143, 147–49, 151, 154 Young, T. Cuyler, 88–90 Zahedi, Ardeshir, 51, 57, 101 Zarif, Javad, 162