THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2025 57 wave of ignorance that has told thousands of devoted public servants that they and their decades of service no longer matter. FSOs on the Ground in Iran Anderson’s most important story is not about famous people who write memoirs that end up on the 50-cent remainder table after two weeks. His story is of Foreign Service colleagues who never sought fame: brave and honorable public servants, including Bruce Laingen, America’s last chief of mission in Tehran; Michael Metrinko, consul general in Tabriz and political officer at the embassy in Tehran; Henry Precht, country director for Iranian affairs; and William Sullivan, last U.S. ambassador to Iran. Despite threats to their careers and their lives, they insisted on providing the most accurate information and the best advice possible from the field to decision-makers in Washington without regard to partisan politics or the winds of political fashion. They were not always right. Who is? Both the clueless and the well-informed, including this essay writer, got many things wrong. In October 1979, for example, we all missed “the big one” and failed to evacuate our Tehran mission after President Carter, ignoring his own forebodings, admitted the shah to the U.S. Like almost everyone dealing with Iran in those days, we overestimated the strength of the monarchy, underestimated the power and depth of discontent in Iranian society, misread the goals of Ayatollah Khomeini and his allies, and relied on well-intentioned Iranian nationalists who in 1979 were (powerless) officials in Iran’s provisional government. We had neither read nor understood Khomeini’s writings, such as Revealing Secrets (1942) and Islamic Government (1971), in which he condemned pluralism and democracy and outlined his blueprint for a theocratic dictatorship modeled on the imagined system of the Prophet Muhammad in seventhcentury Medina. As a matter of fact, few middle-class Iranians, who marched (and voted) for an Islamic Republic in 19781979, had read Khomeini’s works or understood his obscurantist and reactionary program. In the words of the scholar Shaul Bakhash, “[These Iranians] loved the revolution not knowing it would not love them back.” Being right was never the point (in the Foreign Service if we’re always right, we’re being too cautious); the point was to avoid wishful thinking and self-delusion. For too long, Americans were tightly bound to the shah. The 1953 American- and British-backed coup that rescued the shah and toppled the nationalist Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq ensured that the shah saw that his remaining in power depended more on the goodwill of foreigners than on the goodwill of Iranians. The Americans, having once saved the shah, were now, for better or worse, stuck with him, his system, his relatives, and his sycophants. A few of our colleagues asked: “Is unconditional support for the shah the best policy for the U.S.?” And those who could sense the undercurrents of resentment among Iranians had the temerity to ask: “Is our unconditional support for this unpopular ruler going to haunt us eventually?” Their doubts, which few wanted to hear, did not make the questioners many friends. When Metrinko, who took his responsibilities seriously, reported a threatened mass resignation of Iranian Air Force pilots in Tabriz in October 1978, an outraged ambassador threatened to end the young officer’s career. As Anderson writes (page 321): “In short order Michael Metrinko was ordered to Tehran, where he was once again brought before a furious William Sullivan. ‘He told me that if I ever repeated a story like that again,’ Metrinko said, ‘causing panic and whatnot, he’d have me thrown out of the Foreign Service.’” To his credit, as the wave of opposition grew in the fall of 1978, Sullivan came to recognize that the Pahlavi monarchy was finished and that Washington should start (in his words) “thinking the unthinkable.” The message was not welcome, and reaction in Washington to Sullivan’s reporting was about the same as his own initial reaction to Metrinko’s bad news. Carter considered recalling Sullivan, and as the shah’s government collapsed in January-February 1979, national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, living in a fantasy world, ordered Sullivan to stage a coup. Knowing that the Iranian military no longer answered to the shah’s generals, Sullivan responded with an obscenity and set about protecting his people when the embassy came under armed attack three days after the revolution. Leaving Iran in April 1979, Sullivan found himself frozen out in Washington, where his colleagues sensed damaged goods. His Foreign Service career was over.
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