The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2023

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2023 103 George Lambrakis is the author of the memoir So You Want to Be a Diplomat? An American Diplomat’s Progress from Vietnam to Iran, Fun, Warts and All , which contains the relevant chapter on Iran in his 31-year Foreign Service career. A s the last political counselor (and interim deputy chief of mission) at the American embassy in Tehran from 1976 through the 1979 revolution that drove out the shah, I am increasingly impressed by the many similarities to today’s Iran—despite the passage of four decades. Iran Then I went to Tehran in 1976 after a highly eventful half year as chargé d’affaires in Lebanon at the start of its civil war, serv- ing at times under four different ambas- sadors or special envoys, one of whom was assassinated. I assumed that Iran was an interesting but stable post at which people thought I needed to recuperate. The shah had put down several threats from the left and right and was a good and secure friend of the United States. The last months of 1976, under Ambassador Richard Helms, the former CIA director, were uneventful, as were the first six months of 1977 (when I was acting deputy chief of mission). Nevertheless, rumors of problems to come were circulating and were dis- cussed by us in the embassy with the three officers in one-man field posts in north, central, and south Iran. President Jimmy Carter had estab- Is Iran Back to 1979? BY GEORGE LAMBRAKIS lished the State Department Bureau of Human Rights in 1977, and our prodding reminded the shah of previous threats from President John F. Kennedy to cut aid to Iran if he did not rein in the brutality of SAVAK (Iran’s secret police at the time) in treating political opposition. The shah created the Rastakhiz (Resurgence) Party in the parliament and seemed to have told SAVAK to go easy on false arrest and torture of those incarcer- ated. In time, he permitted a small resur- gence of free speech and assembly by the old National Front intelligentsia who had survived the post-Mossadegh purges of 1953, with whom the embassy restored some contact. And there were a small number of clerics, such as Ayatollah Shariatmadari, who were rumored to be opposing the clerical anti-shah movement led from his exile by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. They favored compromise with the shah if he reformed. (But we were unable to establish direct contact with them. Their suspicions of the U.S. were too strong.) This trend came to be seen as a degree of liberalization, though it did not prevent demonstrations and abuse from Iranian students and their sympathizers toward the shah when he visited the U.S. Indeed, I was amazed that I never heard anyone in Iran openly defend the shah despite the many who had made money and otherwise benefited from his rule. The shah’s mood lightened when President Carter made a brief stop in Tehran on New Year’s Eve 1977-1978 and praised the shah for governing an island of stability in a disturbed Middle Eastern sea. However, the shah began complain- ing to Ambassador Bill Sullivan and others of the “red and the black” ganging up on him. While we in Tehran, and even more those in Washington, recognized the theoretical threat of a leftist opposition backed by the Soviet Union, there was much more doubt as to the importance of the “black” threat from the Muslim clergy. After all, the Muslim establishment had taken the shah’s side against the left- ists in 1953. And although they opposed the shah’s White Revolution in the 1960s (which took away a lot of their property and gave rights to women), the threat appeared to be contained by the impris- onment or exile of the leading clerics who had opposed him. Who could imagine direct government of a major country in the 20th century by religious clerics? (Khomeini later made REFLECTIONS You cannot negotiate with a movement that so far has no clear leader.