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🗓️ 15 March 2025
⏱️ 8 minutes
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0:00.0 | I'm John Batchew with my colleague, Brendan Wykert, whose book The Shadow War, Iran's Quest for Supremacy, |
0:05.9 | contains the history of the U.S. involvement in Iran's fate. |
0:10.9 | This is a land that was once called Persia, my mother's people, Persians. |
0:15.3 | It is very old, so old that in 1971, the Shah held a party at the ruins of Persepolis, 2,500th anniversary celebrating Iran. |
0:28.0 | That's old. |
0:29.5 | And there is reason to believe that the Shah was thinking about maintaining control over his country indefinitely. |
0:38.4 | Buddy, he became ill. |
0:40.7 | And the Shah's death triggered a cascade of events in late 79, |
0:46.8 | one of which was the taking of American hostages. |
0:49.9 | Your measure, Brandon, because that's when Iran crashed into American news cycle and stayed there for over 400 days, 444, I think. |
1:01.1 | At that point, Iran's grievances were many. |
1:05.6 | Did the American people understand, were they educated by what remained of the Carter administration? And was there |
1:14.4 | candor about why it was that the Iranian people were so angry? No, I don't think many Americans |
1:21.6 | understood. Remember, we're coming over at this point in American history. We're coming out of |
1:26.4 | Vietnam. We're coming out of Watergate, |
1:29.2 | a very tumultuous time. And so I really don't think most Americans had a full grasp of what was |
1:36.2 | going on. And furthermore, I don't really think the Carter administration fully understood |
1:39.8 | what was going on. Remember, they were looking at Iran and saying, well, the Shah's got to go, |
1:45.8 | and they were reaching out to people like Khomeini to be the replacement. And of course, |
1:50.7 | that was a poison pill to swallow. And so I don't think any of them fully understood what was |
1:56.5 | going on. They just knew the people of America just saw the hostages being taken, but they didn't understand the context. |
2:02.6 | Now events tumble. November 78, Sullivan writes the memo, thinking the unthinkable. |
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