Failure to foresee fall of shah in 1979 was collective disaster for western diplomacy, but academic experts see little indication of mass defections now
When asked to predict whether fissures are appearing at the top of the Iranian state that may imply Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s days as supreme leader are numbered, western diplomats adopt a haunted demeanour, perhaps recalling one of western diplomacy’s greatest collective disasters.
Before the fall of the Shah of Iran in January 1979, insouciant diplomats based in Tehran were sending cables to their capitals offering total reassurance that Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s hold on power was utterly secure. In September 1978, the US Defence Intelligence Agency, for instance, reported that “the shah is expected to remain actively in power over the next 10 years”. A state department report suggested “the shah would not have to stand down until 1985 at the earliest”.
Sir Anthony Parsons, then the UK ambassador in Tehran, sent a message to the Foreign Office dated May 1978 saying: “I do not believe there is a serious risk of an overthrow of the regime while the shah is at the helm.”
Parsons later wrote an anguished book asking whether as British ambassador he could “have anticipated that the forces of opposition to the shah – the religious class, the bazaar, the students – would combine to destroy him”. He concluded that his inability to predict an event that he compared in import to the French Revolution was not due to a lack of information, but from a failure to interpret the information correctly.
